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A migration U-turn would bury the Labour party
Immigration has come back to bite the government big time. Shabana Mahmood’s sage campaign to set up Labour as the party of effective immigration control by making it much more difficult to get indefinite leave to remain apparently got official approval and certainly showed signs of electoral promise. But the Home Secretary’s plan seems to have been carefully sabotaged.
Keir Starmer was tellingly noncommittal about it this week, suggesting that the proposal to require ten years of reasonably well-behaved residence would be ditched – at least in favour of those already here and approaching the current five-year deadline. Reports on Friday indicated that some Labour MPs are considering revolting against the government and could force a symbolic parliamentary vote on the reforms in the months to come.
All this, it is pretty clear, shows signs of Angela Rayner’s influence. There is little love lost between her and the Home Secretary (whom she has previously accused of a ‘breach of trust’ for would-be immigrants already here). More to the point, such an exercise in devilment directed at an ally of Keir Starmer is a useful support for an eventual run against him for the leadership.
However propitious for Angela, however, this is not good news for Labour. It is clear that a measure of the sort contemplated by Mahmood to crack down on indefinite leave to remain is actually necessary. Britain is a byword for lax immigration control: what would effectively guarantee anyone living here for five years the right to stay permanently would send precisely the wrong message.
Labour possesses an inability to display even the semblance of a united front
Furthermore, the earlier we give migrants indefinite leave to remain, the more difficult it is, both as a matter of domestic law and human rights, to remove those who abuse our hospitality once they’re here. This doesn’t even factor in the potential costs to the public purse in terms of social security payments to those now to be given the full benefits of residence.
The need to stiffen, rather than relax, migration controls is also increasingly recognised by voters who, at least in large measure, ditched the Tories at the last election. This was not because they disliked their stated immigration policies, but because they seemed too incompetent to carry them out and it was just possible that Labour’s performance might just be slightly less ineffectual.
There is also the issue that any move by Keir Starmer to distance himself on immigration from Shabana Mahmood amounts, in effect, to a move towards the Lib Dems and the Greens. The Lib Dems under Ed Davey are fairly free and easy on migration, while the Green party leader Zack Polanski is rapidly establishing himself as an open-borders enthusiast (except, doubtless, for any billionaire who sought to live here and actually invest in UK Plc).
It is not immediately apparent that this makes much electoral sense. Lib Dem voters are clannish and make a point of distancing themselves from Labour; they are unlikely to be attracted by antics of this sort. And the idea of Green supporters of open borders flocking to Labour because of a grudging relaxation of immigration rules when they could have the real thing under Zack Polanski is, one suspects, for the birds.
Indeed, in terms of the voters it needs to woo, the sensible move for Labour would be to become more, not less, hawkish on migration. As the Tories are discovering, the electorate might not be particularly right-wing on economics or free markets. But anxious and socially conservative it is, and it regards the growing threat from migration with great concern, both in terms of numbers and of the actions of some unassimilated groups who seemingly have little in common with the English except a desire to live here. There are plenty of clothes to steal from the Tories here and even more from Reform: this is where Labour ought to be seeking to pick up support.
What this episode also shows is two fundamental weaknesses of Labour. One is its inability to display even the semblance of a united front. On one side is a sensible group of MPs who realise that there is a great deal of mileage in Labour presenting itself as the Tories in different-coloured rosettes but, by contrast, decent and competent. On the other, a left-wing awkward squad, a minority it is true, but big enough to put a spanner in any works it dislikes. This group of wreckers has already stymied any attempt to corral the government’s runaway welfare bill; it also lies behind the latest devilment from Angela Rayner. It may yet get its way. Good luck to Captain Starmer in trying to keep these two crews in anything looking like the same ship.
The other problem faced by Labour is a disconcerting disconnect between its MPs, its membership and its potential voter base. Angela Rayner, one suspects, has every support from party members, who reject out of hand any move towards the policies of parties like Reform UK. To them, Nigel Farage’s party is unpleasant, uneducated and reactionary. Unfortunately for their feelings of righteousness, this isn’t the view of the voters Labour needs to gather in. The present crisis shows precisely this. Immigration came close to burying the Tory party in 2024. It now risks doing much the same to Labour.
Britain is experiencing a pilgrimage revival
When Sarah Mullally started her pilgrimage this week, travelling from London to Canterbury, she wasn’t just embracing a tradition in England that once stretched back thousands of years, but speaking to a wider trend: the resurgent popularity of pilgrimage. The Archbishop of Canterbury, due to be enthroned next week, joins an estimated 250,000 Britons who will take part in a pilgrimage this year.
British experiences with pilgrimage have tended to focus on trips abroad: to holy sites like Lourdes or on treks such as the Camino de Santiago – which stretches from southern France to Santiago de Compostela in Spain. Trips aren’t confined to Christians either – until the Covid pandemic, 25,000 British Muslims took part in the annual Hajj to Mecca. Yet many Britons are unaware that the country once had thriving domestic pilgrimage routes, the earliest of which include those to Lindisfarne, Walsingham and Bury St Edmunds. The most famous example is the pilgrimage to Canterbury, exemplified in Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, which began following the canonisation of the murdered Archbishop Thomas Becket. Known as the ‘Pilgrim’s Way’, most take the route travelling eastwards from Winchester in Hampshire.
Mullally’s 87-mile route has taken an alternate route, from Southwark, which is believed to be the same route Becket took to travel between London and Canterbury. Thousands were estimated to take part in the pilgrimage each year in medieval times. This changed with Henry VIII, with pilgrimage banned in 1538 by Thomas Cromwell as part of Britain’s reformation. Pilgrimage was associated with themes of purgatory – those embarking on trips often did so as penance or for religious favours – and also idolatry, as pilgrims would often be travelling to sites with religious relics. Plus, pilgrimage often raised large sums for the monasteries and churches that helped organise, or lay along the route of, the journeys. All ran counter to the themes behind the reformation and Henry VIII’s ire against the organised Church.
Pilgrimage is thriving in part because of the secular age, not in spite of it
With the demise of British pilgrimage, the country lost many of the shrines and infrastructure associated with the practice. The British Pilgrimage Trust, founded just over a decade ago, has sought to change that. Guy Hayward and his team have compiled over 250 routes and 400 sacred places, which can be accessed through their website. The trust points to a range of reasons why pilgrimage should be experiencing a resurgence in popularity: ‘As a tool for spiritual ecology, mental well-being, and even urban design’.
For Britons interested, the Trust lists the three most popular routes in England as the St James’s Way – the English start to the Camino de Santiago, the Pilgrim’s Way and St Michael’s Way in Cornwall. Archbishop Mullally’s pilgrimage has taken her six days. She has previously walked the last 100 kilometres of the Via Francigena, the route through France and Switzerland to the Vatican City. In fact, she was walking it at the time of Pope Francis’s death, so she became part of the official Anglican delegation on arrival. If she considers another challenge, she could walk the full route – the whole way from Canterbury to Rome.
It is perhaps unsurprising that pilgrimage should experience a resurgence in this increasingly secular age. Much has been made of the supposed ‘recovering of the sacred’ – the thousands of young people returning to Church. It is less clear, though, that young people are seeking institutional religion or expressing faith in a god; in the absence of faith and during a period of constant geopolitical crisis, young people seem to be pursuing meaning. Pilgrimage is thriving in part because of the secular age, not in spite of it. King Charles highlighted as much in his Christmas address when he said that pilgrimage is ‘of particular significance for our modern world’. Secular readers seeking a less religiously significant route might be interested to note that Mullally’s trip comes the same week that the King opened the world’s longest coastal walk, round the whole of the English coastline.
Mullally’s journey has proven a uniquely modern take on pilgrimage, as it began with her crossing the Millennium bridge and saw tourists stopping for selfies. Initially there was some criticism over its timing, which clashed with a vote in the House of Lords on decriminalising abortion. Some critics have labelled her trip a ‘gimmick’. The Rev’d Marcus Walker, Rector of St Bartholomew’s, has defended it though, declaring himself a ‘fan’ of the Archbishop’s decision and saying, ‘it’s quite good… to prepare for office by prayer and pilgrimage’. Andrew Atherstone, Mullally’s biographer, points to her personal connection to the practice, her love of long walks on ancient routes with her husband:
Beginning her Canterbury ministry in this manner is symbolically significant. Walking slowly by foot, in the spring sunshine, brings the chance to talk, think, observe and pray.
When does a long walk become a pilgrimage? Reflection when walking is perhaps reactive, whereas taking the step to take part in pilgrimage is an active attempt at contemplation. Historically pilgrimage was as much about the destination as the journey, yet nowadays most think of pilgrimage as being solely about the journey, the period of reflection.
For the Church of England, the decision to take part in a pilgrimage speaks volumes about the handover of power. Perhaps Archbishop Mullally’s pilgrimage is calculated to demonstrate a link with the Church’s past traditions, as well as a break from her predecessor’s leadership, while also showing she is prepared to take the time to reflect. As Atherstone says, Mullally’s predecessor, Justin Welby ‘was an archiepiscopal tornado, always moving at top speed – but Mullally’s chosen brand is quietness and calm’.
Trinidad is sick of Britain’s lax asylum system
As political speeches go, it struck familiar themes. An island nation was being overrun by dangerous criminals, taking advantage of its asylum system. Word was spreading that the country was a soft touch. And as ever, millions of ordinary folks were paying the price.
The violence is largely confined to the ghettoes, and many struggle to see why Britain’s asylum system classifies Trinidad as a warzone from which its citizens deserved sanctuary
Nigel Farage, on the stump in Clacton-on-Sea in 2024? Or Home Secretary Shabana Mahmoud, perhaps, unveiling her tough new Danish-style migration policy earlier this month? No, the speaker was Keith Rowley, the prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago, 3,000 miles away in the Caribbean. But the island he was talking about was indeed Britain.
The UK has seen a nine-fold spike in the number of asylum claimants from Trinidad in the last decade – many of them criminals fleeing gang feuds. Britain’s response, however, has not been to weed out the bad apples, but to slap a blanket visa requirement on Trinidad’s 1.5 million people.
It is a huge inconvenience for the country’s law-abiding majority, a lot of whom have relatives in Britain, and who could previously visit without prior paperwork. Now they must pay £115 for a visa application and wait three weeks for it to be processed. Small wonder, then, that when the new visa regime was imposed in March last year, the reaction was fury. In a speech denouncing it, Rowley demanded to know why Britain wasn’t simply tightening up its asylum laws instead.
‘Once you land in British territory, it doesn’t matter who you are or what you’ve done, all you do is say you are asking for refugee status, and that you have come to them for aid and succour,’ he said.
The imposition of the visa requirement was a blow to Rowley’s ruling People’s National Movement party, which lost elections the following month amid alarm over Trinidad’s crime problems. The nation of 1.5 million suffered a record 623 murders in 2024, nearly half of them gang related. Long regarded as one of the Caribbean’s quieter, more tourist-friendly islands, Trinidad now has a murder rate higher than Jamaica’s.
The violence, though, is largely confined to the ghettoes, and many struggle to see why Britain’s asylum system classifies Trinidad as a warzone from which its citizens deserved sanctuary. Especially when some of those applying for asylum are themselves involved in the gang wars. They see Britain both as a bolthole when things get too hot back home, and as a base to build new drug-dealing networks.
I first learned about this when reporting on the island’s gang war problems last summer. Just how many Trinidadian crooks have fled to Britain is not entirely clear, but it appears to be an upwards trend.
In 2024, some 429 Trinidadians claimed asylum in Britain – nearly ten times as many as in 2015. Announcing the decision to impose a visa requirement last March, the Foreign Office blamed, ‘a significant increase in the number of unjustified asylum applications’, but did not go into specifics.
However, Fitzgerald Hines, Trinidad’s national security minister, admitted that some of the claimants were seeking to avoid ‘accountability to the law’. And the island’s national newspaper, the Trinidad and Tobago Express, has set out the problems in detail. Last year, citing police sources, it said that a senior figure in Trinidad’s Seven Gang, who was already based in Britain, had set up a ‘covert pipeline’ for his associates to enter the UK.
‘He has been telling them exactly what to do as soon as they come off the plane from Trinidad and they arrive in the UK,’ a police source told the paper. ‘They put their hands up in the air as soon as they step off the plane and inform authorities that they are seeking asylum because of safety concerns of threats they face in Trinidad.’
The paper also cited an intelligence report sent by Trinidad’s police to their UK counterparts warning of a senior gang figure who ‘poses a serious and immediate threat to the safety and security of the United Kingdom.’ He had allegedly left Trinidad the year before, and planned to bring seven of his children whom he feared would be targets of violence.
Certainly, children are considered fair game in Trinidad’s gang wars. During my trip I met Anisa Rampersad, whose shack in a squatter camp outside Port-of-Spain was attacked by gunmen in 2023. They killed four of her five children. She admitted that a stepson had been ‘running with the wrong crowd’ but insisted the family had been the victims of mistaken identity. She told me that her surviving relatives were now trying to claim asylum themselves in the UK. It was not much comfort to know that her children’s killers might be doing the same.
‘There’s big drug lords in Trinidad who are killing people, and when it’s time to face the consequences they are claiming asylum in England, saying there’s people trying to kill them,’ she said. ‘Gang leaders who put themselves in harm’s way are running for asylum, while the people who really need it aren’t getting it.’
Some of those beating a path to the UK are suspected of serious crimes including kidnapping and murder. Alleged gangsters are said to have used safe houses in London, Milton Keynes and Reading, and even posted social media videos bragging about how they can now enjoy a life on benefits.
‘I living in England now, no way I coming back to Trinidad,’ says a man in one video, walking down a British high street. ‘I can do what I want, say what I want… Free money, free house, free hotel, free food, free security.’
Such videos have gone viral in Trinidad, and may account for why asylum claims have spiked in the last couple of years. Some Trinidadian officials suspect a few clued-up Trinidadian lawyers have advised local crooks of the loopholes.
Meanwhile, some have committed crimes in their new sanctuary in the UK. Last month, a Trinidadian asylum seeker, Akeem Lutchman-Singh was jailed for a masked raid on a Knightsbridge department store. He told the court he had been forced to carry out the raid by ‘people linked to my issues in Trinidad’.
So just how many Trinidadian criminals has Britain’s asylum system let in? Alas, the Foreign Office is somewhat coy on that. The guidance I was given was that most of the 439 asylum cases in 2024 were thought to be from ‘economic migrants’ rather than criminals. But when I asked, via a Freedom of Information request, for a more specific breakdown, I was told it would be too much work to provide. When I then asked to see the correspondence that had led to ministers making the decision, I was told that it was exempt from FOI rules because it could ‘prejudice relations’ with Trinidad.
Arguably, relations have been prejudiced already. Trinidadians now face extra expense, time and uncertainty to visit Britain, a country that many regard as a second home. A year in, what many had hoped might be just a stop-gap measure looks like it will be permanent.
‘At first they gave us the impression it might be temporary, but we get the sense now that this is done and dusted,’ one former Trinidadian minister told me, who took part in discussions with British officials on the island.
‘It complicates life for anyone who wants to visit Britain – students, sports teams, cultural groups, performers for Notting Hill Carnival. We did suggest to the Brits that the asylum system at their ends needs some attention. Why should ordinary Trinidadian travellers have to pay such a harsh price just because the system is being abused?’
The least Britain could do, Trinidadians feel, is to be candid about exactly who has been abusing the asylum system. After all, a few hundred economic migrants from Trinidad is a drop in the ocean compared to the tens of thousands coming in on small boats, so can that really be the reason?
Earlier this month, Shabana Mahmood set out new immigration rules – based on the tougher Danish model – that will scrap the right to permanent asylum and thwart those ‘who exploit the system and break our laws’. It’s meant to restore British confidence in the asylum system. She might consider trying to restore Trinidad’s confidence in it too.
The Hundred still has a problem with Pakistani cricketers
Throwing open the Hundred to foreign investment was intended to attract more elite players, boost attendances and position it as the baby brother of the gargantuan IPL. English cricket has succeeded in bringing in a lot of overseas cash: sales of stakes in the eight franchises raised more than £450 million. But it has also imported problematic foreign politics.
Prior to the revamped player auction, a BBC journalist, Tom Grundy, ran a story based on messages from a senior ECB official to an agent that confirmed only non-IPL-owned teams would consider signing Pakistani players. No Pakistani cricketers have been selected to play in the IPL since a Pakistani terrorist group, Lashkar-e-Taiba, attacked Mumbai in 2008. This unofficial policy has been extended to Indian-owned franchises in competitions in South Africa, the US and the UAE.
The lock-out has had serious consequences for Pakistani players. The IPL offers by far the largest contracts in the sport, while the intermingling of the world’s best players for ten weeks every year acts as a crucible for innovation in the Twenty20 format.
Prior to the privatisation of The Hundred franchises, there was no issue with the selection of Pakistani players. Six were chosen in 2023, four in 2024 and two in 2025. The ECB was forced to issue a pre-auction statement confirming that all eight teams were committed to buying players ‘based solely on cricketing performance, availability, and the needs of each team’.
The issue appeared to have been resolved when Sunrisers Leeds, who are owned by the Sun Media Group in India, bought Pakistani spin-bowler Abrar Ahmed for £190,000. This was by no means a pity purchase; his price-tag was the tenth largest at the auction. The BBC subsequently ran a piece titled ‘Abrar signing allays Hundred India-Pakistan concern’.
But on closer inspection, the evidence that the shadow ban has been lifted is flimsy. When the ECB released The Hundred’s longlist of available players after consulting with the franchises, only 14 of the 63 Pakistanis who had declared their interest made the cut. A law firm, Leigh Day, has noted that this rate of attrition was greater for Pakistanis than for cricketers from other countries. Among those jettisoned at this stage was Sahibzada Farhan, who made more runs than anyone else at the T20 World Cup earlier this year. And at the auction itself, not only did three of the four IPL-owned teams not buy a Pakistani player; they did not even make a single bid.
There is also a major difference between the Sun Media Group and the other three Indian-owners of Hundred franchises: its distance from the Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi, and his Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party. Its owners, the Maran family, also founded Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, a regional political party in Tamil Nadu. DMK has regularly allied with Congress, the BJP’s main rival in federal politics.
Compare that with the other three Indian owners. Mukesh Ambani, whose Reliance conglomerate owns 49 per cent of MI London, has regularly praised Modi. The new operator of Manchester Super Giants, Sanjiv Goenka, has lauded the Prime Minister’s ‘selfless devotion combined with awesome intellect and fantastic vision’. Goenka’s firm, RSPG, has also benefited from the Modi government’s willingness to bend the rules in its favour when awarding operating licences for major coal mines. The GMR group, which has a minority stake in Southern Brave, has donated large sums to an electoral trust that has subsequently financed the BJP.
No-one at the governing body wants an ugly distraction
The relationship between the BJP government and the Board of Control for Cricket in India is famously iron-clad. For years, the BCCI was run by the startlingly young Jay Shah, whose father, Amit, remains India’s home minister and Modi’s closest ally. And Modi has long co-opted India’s countrywide devotion to cricket as a political vehicle. During a visit to India in 2023, Modi drove the Australian prime minister, Anthony Albanese, around the edge of the pitch in Ahmedabad in a chariot in prior to a Test match between the two teams. For as long as the Indian government remains considers Pakistan an enemy, so too will Indian cricket.
It is likely that we have heard the last about the shadow ban, at least for this season. The ECB has issued its statement and the franchises have duly filled their rosters. No-one at the governing body wants an ugly distraction from the cricket ahead of a major relaunch of the competition. It would also be extremely difficult to prove that Pakistani players are the victims of discrimination. Although it is illegal to make employment decisions on the basis of nationality or ethnicity under the terms of the UK’s Equality Act, it would be simple to put forward sporting reasons to justify the franchises’ decisions. Instead, India’s domination of cricket means the great lock-out of Pakistani players from the sport’s most lucrative competitions will continue.
The vandalism of Banksy
The forces of taste, fashion and regard have long colluded in a disconcerting way around Banksy. He is an ‘artist’ that the great and the good of the auction world take as seriously and reverently as your more common or garden fan who gazes upon his grim graffiti and feels they really ought to like it. In a saner world, in which everyone had not colluded on the premise that Banksy is Important and Good, he would be seen mainly as a vandal and a nuisance.
His vandalism is lucrative in part because it is a parade of ‘subversive’ clichés, so saccharine and obvious they hurt. Thus, we have little black stencils depicting policemen kissing, the House of Commons filled with chimpanzees, or a girl reaching after a heart-shaped balloon. His art is bad in large part because it is so openly political. He is a robo-lefty; this was his response to the proscription of Palestine Action – grafitti of a judge beating a protester. Roger Scruton’s idea that beauty is art’s purpose is in permanent violation by Banksy.
Anyway, his main selling point is the secret of his identity. But his anonymity, long in question, has now slipped further thanks to some detective work published last week. The story is rather amusing in its mundanity, and a terribly common one, best summed up as: ‘Robin Hood figure, defender of the little people against the System and the Man, turns out to embrace the Man and the System, for they have made him stinking rich’.
The real name of Banksy – who went to fee-paying Bristol Cathedral School – has long been suspected to be Robin Gunningham. After being outed as Gunningham, he changed it to David Jones, the most common male name in the UK. The sleuthing that led to this proposition revolves around a company called NTS Services, incorporated in March 2020 to provide ‘management services’ and maintain the ‘client relationships’ leading to ‘high profitability’. This boring-sounding company also had a previous name: Nothing To See Limited, thought to be a riff on a phrase used by Banksy in his 2015 ‘Dismaland’ project, possibly the most horrible of them all. This was a dystopian ‘bemusement park’ curated by Banksy at a derelict lido in Weston-super-Mare. It was billed a ‘satirical, dark commentary on consumerism, surveillance, and entertainment.; one of this horror-exhibition’s displays was a coin-operated boat full of people wearing headscarves. Subtle, it wasn’t.
At any rate, one can certainly enjoy quite a lot of consumerism with £19 million in one’s pocket, which is the amount that is held by NTS Services, according to its most recent annual report.
Banksy is as administratively crafty as he is good at thinking up grotesque bits of stencil. Take the story of the two David Joneses. The director of NTS Services, a David Jones born in 1972, resigned last month and was replaced by another David Jones, only this one was born in 1973. Further sleuthing last week found that a David Jones with the same details is linked to another company: Outline Design and Services Limited. The director of this outfit is an accountant named Simon Durban. Simon Durban is the name of the person who spent 15 years as Banksy’s business manager.
The whole Banksy circle has been well-trained: certainly, behind every rich and famous man is a lot of other men, and women. A woman thought to be his mother, outside Bristol, called from her garden: ‘No comment to anything’. I was amused by the statement of a former neighbour of the artist: ‘I once gave him and his partner a lift from the station. They were very nice, but I don’t know more than that. We let him keep himself to himself, and I’m glad he didn’t graffiti my house.’
Banksy is as administratively crafty as he is good at thinking up grotesque bits of stencil
There is much satisfaction to be felt at the outing of this scourge of walls the world over, a satisfaction that is enhanced by the sizeable edifice of people around him who speak only in smug obfuscations and riddles. But the real satisfaction might be that if he is identified, he might get arrested and the assault on our senses might temporarily stop.
For Banksy is not a law-abiding man who respects private property. He and his team simply vandalise at night when they can’t be seen, deploy fake filming permits or, most commonly, don high-vis vests and pretend to be builders. Presumably the artist would not agree with the idea of one law from everyone else and a special leniency for him because he is powerful, celebrated and rich. But hey ho. Consistency and an avoidance of hypocrisy, especially where wealth and power are concerned, has never really been the way the protesting left operates.
Either way, Banksy ought to be arrested on a dual charge: vandalism of buildings, and vandalism of culture.
Will books soon become extinct?
I am glad that BBC Radio 4 is producing a series called How Reading Made Us, presented by the subtle, super-literate Times of London columnist James Marriott. I must declare an interest. Roughly 98 percent of my earnings over 45 years have depended on the fact that plenty of people like reading. Now we are thinking harder, however, about the fact that form affects substance. The idea of an encyclopedia, for example, as developed (from classical roots) in the 18th century, was that all needful knowledge on a particular subject could be assembled and consulted in a book or series of books. With AI, there is little need for this form. The form of a book, which often seemed so compendious, can now seem cumbersome. Fiction, too, is affected by form. Dickens’s novels were shaped by the fact they were part-works in magazines such as Household Words. Few would write or read a novel in that way now. Netflix achieves the desired effect more conveniently. That, in turn, means that people write different types of novels. Could the very word “book” become out of date, as is beginning to happen to the word “newspaper”? If it no longer requires physical form, does it need to be shaped and written in the same way at all?
What about the Bible? Its very name implies there is only one true book (or collection of books). The sacred duty to agree what it must contain and – for Protestants at least – to read it, shows that books benefited at one and the same time from universality and rarity value. Now that the Bible need no longer be a single object you can hold in your hand, but something you can pick up bits of online, its special power will surely reduce further. Interestingly, the word Quran does not contain the idea of a book. It means “recitation.” Muhammad, the prophet of Islam, was illiterate. He spoke the uncreated word of God, mediated by the Angel Gabriel (Jibril). This was later written down by the prophet’s companions, but Muslims would never say that either the companions or Muhammad himself were authors, in the sense that Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are authors of the Four Gospels. The Quran must stay, for believers, in its original, recited Arabic. The believer who can recite the whole thing by heart is especially esteemed, and called a hafiz, which means “guardian.” Thanks to such people, the Quran could survive a world which turned away from books. Maybe that is what extreme Muslims intend. Remember that Boko Haram (whose followers kill lots of Christians in Nigeria) means “Books forbidden.” Perhaps Islam is better prepared than Christianity for the long dark night of unreading.
I don’t know, but I am guessing that each member of the Guardian Council of clerics which sits atop what is left of Iran is a hafiz. Certainly each is supposed to be theologically learned. So it is a bit of a puzzle that Mojtaba Khamenei, the successor of his late father Ali, is now in charge, since he is reportedly not much of a scholar. Why have we not been allowed to see him yet? Might he be holed up in his luxurious property in Kensington, perhaps venturing out at night to dance in an unfashionable but expensive club such as Annabel’s? Or is he being cared for, wounded, in a cave (or in Harley Street)? Will he appear for the funeral of his father which, in contravention of Muslim custom, has still not taken place? It is an important belief of the “Twelvers” who dominate Shia Islam that the Twelfth Imam, the redeeming Mahdi, is around somewhere, undergoing an “occultation” and – not completely unlike the Christian idea of the Second Coming – will suddenly pop up and sort things out. Given current difficulties, it might be wise to arrange the occultation of Mojtaba for the time being. If so, with a bit of luck, we shall never clap eyes upon the wretched man. I am getting all this off my chest before the government’s new restrictions on what it calls “anti-Muslim hostility,” and others describe as free speech, come into force.
On the BBC, the Bishop of Manchester’s Thought for the Day turned to “the Jewish community who live in the streets surrounding my home in Salford.” He went on: “Alongside their heightened fears for loved ones in Israel, they know all too well, in the aftermath of the recent terrorist attack on Heaton Park Synagogue, that actions of the Israeli government can expose them to reprisals here at home.” That is an interesting way to put it: “the actions of the Israeli government” produce terrorism. The Right Revd Prelate decided not to mention who actually kills Jews in Manchester (and virtually anywhere else they can be found). Quite right: to do so would be to undermine Sir Keir Starmer’s “wider strategy on social cohesion,” which he says is a national “emergency.”
Why is the anti-Muslim hostility regulator to be a “czar?” Surely his role is that of a mufti.
The House of Lords has agreed, without a division, to accept the wish of the Commons and remove all remaining hereditary peers. A private deal between the parties had offered life peerages to some of the hereditaries who would otherwise have gone, but there will be hereditaries no more. This abolishes the basis on which the Lords evolved over more than 700 years. Before our short debate, I walked to the end of the Royal Gallery to inspect the memorial list of peers and their heirs killed in the two world wars. I counted nine (there may be more) whose families will be expelled at the end of this session. When I spoke in the Chamber, I read out their names – Ponsonby, Stonor, Vane, Wellington, Wedgwood Benn, Berry, Colville, Goschen and Trenchard. In my mind were T.S. Eliot’s words: “The communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.”
The art of aging
More than 30 contemporary artists have contributed to the Wellcome Collection’s latest exhibition, which asks what it’s like to age at a time of unparalleled longevity. But as so often happens at the Wellcome’s exhibitions, it’s the ephemera that draw the eye first.
“These 2 men are the same age,” says a leaflet advertising Kellogg’s All-Bran breakfast cereal. “One has driving power – energy – the will to succeed. The other is listless – tired all the time – it is an effort for him to plod through each day’s work.”
The point being that aging is, to a not inconsiderable degree, something we do to ourselves, and something we do to each other. It is a process, not an event. It is as much a matter of style, and manners and even morality, as it is a matter of medicine.
Aging leads to old age, and old age leads to death, and death leads to terror, and terror leads to meanness
In 1970, Simone de Beauvoir nailed this point beautifully in her still rather neglected book La Vieillesse (the American edition translated that as Coming of Age, a revealing cop-out). As she sets out to break the conspiracy of silence around old age – this “forbidden subject,” she calls it – she demands her readers use their imaginations and recognize themselves in the aged other.
“If we do not know what we are going to be,” she writes, “we cannot know what we are: let us recognize ourselves in this old man or in that old woman. It must be done if we are to take upon ourselves the entirety of our human state.”
Like those good fellows at Kellogg’s, curator Shamita Sharmacharja wants visitors to own their aging process, and value the prospect – if not indeed the present reality – of old age.
It’s a Quixotic enterprise because, as Philip Roth once said: “In every calm and reasonable person there is a hidden second person scared witless about death.” And there are few reminders of death more terrifying than the one that confronts us in the mirror each morning. “About a year ago,” wrote the late American food writer M.F.K. Fisher, in 1992, “I suddenly realized that I could not face walking toward myself again in the morning because here is this strange, uncouth, ugly, kind of toad-like woman… long thin legs, long thin arms, and a shapeless little toad-like torso and this head at the top with great staring eyes. And I thought, Jesus, why do I have to do this?”
Shock and outrage find their visible expression at the Wellcome in Paula Rego’s bruised and twisted self-portraits, made in 2017 after she fell and injured her face. (Awakened to our society’s ubiquitous ageism, I am absolutely not going to write “after she had a fall.”)
William Utermohlen’s visual record of dementia is only marginally more muted: an achingly articulate series recording his steadily disintegrating impression of his own face.
How do you weave a worthwhile life-stage from such gloomy material? The older I get, the more I am struck by the profound wisdom of Eric Idle’s song at the end of Monty Python’s Life of Brian. Looking on the bright side of life are Kimiko Nishimoto and Shiro Oguni. Oguni’s “Restaurant of Mistaken Orders” – represented here by a few knick-knacks, aprons, menus – is a pop-up dining experience employing servers with dementia. By accepting from the outset that orders might be incorrect, the restaurant fosters patience, empathy and joyful human connection over cold, technical perfection.
Nishimoto, meanwhile, began taking self-portraits in her seventies, using Photoshop to stage herself left out with the bins, or hanging from a washing line, or drifting serenely from a tree. The moral being, I suppose, that if life discards us at the end, we may as well have some fun with the idea.
Maija Tammi’s photographic print “Immortal’s Birthday Party” conjures up a space that’s part 18th-century Wunderkammer, part child’s bedroom, like the lair of a particularly naive Nosferatu. Age is real, and there really is a moment when we have to put away childish things – and even middle-aged things.
Why? Well, look to The Way Things Are – the world’s first (and not surprisingly last) verse-form book of popular science. In it the Epicurean philosopher Lucretius argued that it’s not just life that’s finite; life’s possibilities are finite, too. Yes, you can fall in love any number of times – but you can only fall in love for the first time once. By the time all gratifications have been experienced, living endlessly is futile. “Do you expect me to invent some new contrivance for your pleasure?” Nature sneers. Growing up and aging always incurs a loss, but refusing to grow up – remaining perfectly innocent and untouched by the world – is an even greater loss. As J.M. Barrie understood, Peter Pan ultimately represents Death.
Am I arguing that, for all Sharmacharja’s efforts, I came away thinking that aging is a uniformly bad idea?
Not at all. For women it’s much worse. (Or as that All-Bran leaflet has it: “These 2 women are the same age. One has the bloom of youth. The other is wrinkled, gray, careworn, far older than her years.”)
The depressing fact is that it takes more effort for women to camouflage their temporal nature. They’re the ones who bleed, who give birth, who feed infants, and who, at no great age, cease to be able to give birth at all.
The Wellcome’s approach to exhibition-making can get a bit modish. The desire to connect science to medicine, and medicine to society, and society to politics, and politics to technology, and back to science again, can induce – in this visitor, at any rate – the sort of dazed passivity I associate with getting dangerously drunk with anthropology graduates.
The world is getting older by the day; soon it will begetting emptier
In this show, however, I think medium and message come together superbly. Aging, in general, leads to old age, and old age leads to death, and death leads to terror, and terror leads to meanness, especially towards women, whose capacity for childbearing is so painfully and obviously truncated halfway through life. No wonder women, just as much as men, judge other women harshly if (by dropping a tampon out of their handbags, say) they reveal their animal nature.
Is this intimate connection between death-terror and misogyny in any way fair? Of course not. But as a fact of life it’s the very devil to get around. Serena Korda’s striking ceramic installation “Wild Apples” tries to reframe the menopause as a moment of transformation, but how does it do this? By reclaiming the archetype of the hag and the crone. So much for the escapist power of art.
The Coming of Age wants us to make that Beauvoir-esque imaginative leap and think our way into aged skin. We probably ought to give this a try. The world is getting older by the day; soon it will be getting emptier, as working-age adults find the costs of elder care so burdensome that they can’t afford to have children. I suppose we’d better make our peace with a rapidly aging world, and make the best of it.
But let’s be frank here: empathy is a bore. And other responses to aging are available.
The ancient Greeks (at least according to Hannah Arendt, in her 1958 book The Human Condition) developed a surprisingly hard-nosed view of aging and death. They believed that being remembered was the nearest they could realistically come to immortality. So they revered fame, and the moral and physical excellence that would inculcate fame. Needless to say, they were vain to a fault.
Remember this once it dawns on you that The Coming of Age is as much about sex, and fashion, and death, and our roles in society, as it is about its proper subject. People are like that when it comes to this subject, and have been for the longest time. Get them onto the subject of aging and they will end up covering everything else under the sun, in a frantic bid to evade thoughts of where aging is leading them – and dress it up how you like, it’s nowhere pretty.
Evasion is the point. And meanwhile, and as it says on the T-shirt (also part of the exhibition, and I desperately want one): “DON’T DIE.”
Has Giorgia Meloni really turned against Donald Trump?
I often think that the dissemination of news is like a game of Chinese Whispers. Giorgia Meloni, for instance, has not condemned the US-Israeli war on Iran. Yet such esteemed exponents of the noble craft of reportage as the Times of London and the Daily Beast are adamant that she has. Even Meloni – President Donald Trump’s favorite EU leader and closest European ally – has turned against the President, or so they are saying.
Proclaimed the Times: “Giorgia Meloni comes out against Trump’s ‘illegal’ war on Iran.”
Crowed the Daily Beast: “Trump humiliated as key right-wing ally slams his deadly war.”
There was only one aspect of the war that Meloni condemned in her speech: the killing of civilians
No, as a matter of fact, no she has not. The headlines refer to a speech Meloni gave in the Italian Senate ahead of this week’s summit of EU leaders in Brussels – where they have failed to come up with something relevant to say and do about Iran. But her words have undergone a transmutation worthy of the finest of alchemists.
Yes, she said attacks by America and Israel on Iran are “outside the scope of international law,” as are an increasing number of wars everywhere thanks to “the international system currently being in crisis.” But that is hardly the same as saying the attacks on Iran are illegal. The phrase “outside the scope of” means that the war is outside the law and so not subject to it.
Italy will not take part in “the intervention” – said Meloni – but she did not condemn it. Furthermore, Iran cannot be allowed, she insisted, to have nuclear weapons.
Nor has she called for a ceasefire or denied Trump use of America’s bases in Italy – although their use in offensive operations would require approval by Parliament. Italy, meanwhile, is taking part in defensive military operations against Iran, she said, such as the protection of Cyprus where she has dispatched a frigate.
In the 45-minute speech, Italy’s first female prime minister reminded senators that “the current conflict” in the Middle East began on October 7, 2023 when Hamas launched its “barbaric” attack on Israel “with the support” of Iran which has provided “the same support” to Hezbollah in Lebanon.
The world “often forces us to choose between bad options,” she also said in the speech. When it comes to Iran, a dramatic new war will cause us huge economic damage. But there will be even worse consequences “if we ignore the risk of a fundamentalist regime armed with long range missiles and nuclear weapons.”
She also said: “I hope it is clear to everyone in this chamber that we cannot afford a regime of the ayatollahs which has nuclear weapons, combined moreover with a missile capability that could soon be able to strike directly Italy and Europe.”
In fact, there was only one aspect of the war on Iran by the US and Israel that Meloni condemned in the speech: the killing of civilians.
She singled out “the massacre” of a reported 168 people, mainly girls, caused by the bombing of a girls’ school in Minab in southern Iran on February 28. She did not point the finger of blame at anyone but called for the “swift identification of those responsible for this tragedy.”
Put simply, her position – as she has spelled out elsewhere – is that she “neither condemns nor condones” the war on Iran. It’s a wishy-washy but nevertheless pragmatic stance. For a start, a clear majority of Italians – up to three quarters according to some polls – think Italy should not get involved. It is also more or less the same as French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen are saying as well. Given the disastrous outcomes of Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan, it is perfectly respectable to want to avoid any war in the Middle East.
Clearly, though, this does put her special relationship with Trump under pressure. But in truth it has been under pressure since the start, most notably on Ukraine, tariffs and Greenland.
Meloni was among the most devout supporters in Europe of president Joe Biden’s arms and aid program for Ukraine. Indeed, in March 2024 he invited her to the White House where he played “Georgia on My Mind” on the sound system as she arrived and kissed her on the head.
This, however, put her on a collision course with Trump – despite her being a national conservative like him – who was determined that Ukraine make concessions to Russia. So she watered down substantially her support for Biden’s “No Pasaran” policy.
When Trump launched his tariff war last year she became the de facto bridge between the President and the EU but despite this described his draconian tariff hikes as “profoundly mistaken” – though she insisted the EU should not retaliate with similar tariffs.
In January this year, she criticized Trump’s threat to increase tariffs on countries who had sent troops to Greenland as “wrong” and to take over Greenland by force as “an option I would clearly not support.” But she told the world she was confident Trump would not do so. “I agreed with Trump on Venezuela. I do not agree with him on Greenland,” she said.
Despite this, Trump has not once hit out at Meloni as he has done for example with Keir Starmer. She remains the leader he is said to call first when he wants to talk to Europe. At the Gaza summit in Egypt last October, Trump said: “Now, if you use the word ‘beautiful’ in the United States about a woman, that’s the end of your political career. But I’ll take my chances.” Turning to Meloni he said: “You won’t be offended if I say you’re beautiful, right? Because you are.” Just the other day – though before her Senate speech – he told the Corriere della Sera, that she is “a great leader” and “my friend.”
Donald Trump’s war against Iran has placed Giorgia Meloni in the same boat as many other close allies of Donald Trump such as Nigel Farage and even Vice President J.D. Vance. But as she said in January: “I disagree with Trump on many things… When I disagree I tell him.”
Iran tries to attack the Chagos islands
Shortly after midnight, Iran launched two long-range missiles towards the US base at Diego Garcia, the joint US-UK military base in the middle of the Indian Ocean, according to reports in the Wall Street Journal citing multiple US officials. This indicates a strike range of up to 4,000 kilometres.
Neither missile struck the base, but the attack marked Iran’s first operational use of intermediate-range ballistic missiles and a significant attempt to project force far beyond the Middle East against US interests. One missile failed in flight, while a US warship fired an SM-3 interceptor at the other, though it remains unclear whether the interception was successful.
This came amid sustained exchanges, with Iranian missiles continuing to be fired at Israel overnight, triggering repeated nationwide alerts. The night’s exchanges followed a day of intense confrontation. Iranian missiles had earlier set off sirens across central Israel, Jerusalem and the Negev, while alerts in the north, near the Lebanese border, were triggered by Hezbollah drone incursions.
President Donald Trump’s rhetoric remains uncompromising
Impact sites were reported in central Israel, where Home Front Command search and rescue forces were deployed. Meanwhile, in Jerusalem’s Old City, adjacent to the Temple Mount, debris fell, prompting emergency operations.
Israel confirmed a series of major airstrikes in Tehran and central Iran, targeting weapons production facilities, missile component sites, and storage locations for long-range ballistic launchers. Dozens of military installations were hit in two waves of strikes, as part of what officials described as a systematic effort to degrade Iran’s strategic capabilities.
Israeli forces also hit Hezbollah targets in Beirut overnight, following evacuation warnings in the city’s Dahiya district. Lebanese reports described heavy fighting between Israeli forces and Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, south of Maroun al-Ras.
The conflict continued to play out across multiple fronts. Explosions were reported in Kuwait, while pro-Iranian channels claimed attacks on targets in the Gulf, including a reported strike on a hotel in the United Arab Emirates said to house Americans. Iran also warned residents to evacuate Ras al-Khaimah in the United Arab Emirates ahead of potential strikes, publishing routes and citing alleged use of the area for attacks. Meanwhile, sirens sounded at the US airbase in Incirlik, Turkey, following a missile launch.
In Lebanon, the human toll has mounted significantly. The Lebanese Ministry of Health reported 1,021 killed and 2,641 wounded since the start of the current round of fighting. Israeli officials said more than 600 Hezbollah fighters were among the dead.
Inside Iran, Israeli sources reported the elimination of a key Iranian Ministry of Intelligence commander earlier in the week, while further assassination attempts were reported in Karaj and Tehran. Iranian messaging, including a written statement attributed to Mojtaba Khamenei, called for national unity and a ‘resistance economy’, while denying attacks on neighbouring states despite repeated alerts in Turkey.
The United Kingdom has approved the use of its bases for US strikes on Iranian targets linked to attacks in the Strait of Hormuz, marking a limited expansion of its role in the conflict. Ministers agreed the move at a meeting on Friday, allowing American forces to use British facilities for what Downing Street described as ‘defensive operations’ aimed at protecting shipping in the vital waterway. While the UK will not be directly involved in the strikes, the decision broadens earlier permissions, which had been restricted to preventing attacks threatening British interests. Officials stressed that the government’s overall approach remains unchanged, while calling for urgent de-escalation and a swift resolution to the war.
The United States, meanwhile, announced new rewards on the heads of five senior Iranian Revolutionary Guard figures, including General Ahmad Vahidi and other top commanders across intelligence, cyber, and drone units. Reports also indicate that America is considering seizing Kharg Island, the hub for over 90 per cent of Iran’s oil exports, alongside the deployment of thousands of Marines to the region.
President Donald Trump’s rhetoric remains uncompromising. He stated that the United States is very close to achieving its goals in Iran and rejected the idea of a ceasefire, arguing that ‘you don’t do a ceasefire when you are literally obliterating the other side’. He also suggested that Iran’s leadership structure has effectively collapsed: ‘Now no one wants to be a leader there anymore. We want to talk to them, but we have no one to talk to.’
Oil prices have surged to $113 (£84.60) per barrel, while J.P. Morgan has forecast a 9 per cent contraction in Qatar’s GDP for this year as a result of Iranian attacks. In the United States, emergency measures have already been taken, including suspending fuel taxes in Georgia and approving more than $23 billion (£17 billion) in accelerated arms sales to Middle Eastern allies.
A Politico/Public First survey of politically-engaged ‘opinion leaders’ found majority support for US action against Iran, with particularly strong backing among Maga respondents, exceeding 80 per cent. This points to very strong support within highly-engaged and Republican-aligned constituencies, even as wider US public opinion remains divided and does not show an overall majority in favour.
Reeves should tax expats to fund Britain’s defence spending
Open the first page of any British passport and you will be met by a request on behalf of the King to give its ‘bearer such assistance and protection as may be necessary’. These words are a great source of pride: they symbolise the privilege any Brit abroad has to approach a British embassy and ask the government for help, be that with a lost passport, trouble with foreign law or even being evacuated from a warzone.
At the moment, that privilege is essentially universal: whether or not you live in the UK permanently or pay taxes to the Treasury, as long as you remain a British citizen, you can demand that the government help you in your hour of need. But should this really remain the case?
The fallout across the Middle East from the sudden outbreak of war between the US, Israel and Iran at the start of the month saw thousands of Western holidaymakers and expats scrabble to return home. According to government figures, more than 176,000 British citizens located in the Middle East had registered their presence with the Foreign Office in the first half of March; over 100,000 have now returned to the UK.
Few people would feel sorry to see expat influencers finally forced to cough up for the Exchequer
Disappointingly, the government doesn’t track how many of those returning to the UK are tourists versus those who live in the Middle East permanently. There have already been reports of wealthy expats itching to leave the UK again so as to avoid being lumped with huge tax bills for overstaying their allotted number of tax-free days in the country.
Approximately 240,000 British citizens live in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) alone. Many will have been attracted to the country due to its essentially non-existent tax regime: residents of the UAE are not required to pay any income tax, national insurance-equivalent or inheritance tax; VAT in the country is just 5 per cent. This, combined with higher average salaries than the UK, has proved hugely attractive to a large number of Britons looking for an escape from the UK’s record-high tax burden and the soaring cost of living.
While the government expects passengers to pay for seats on chartered evacuation flights themselves, the majority of emergency consular services are provided by British embassies for free. So if even a fraction of these expats are leaning on their privilege as British citizens to request the help of the Foreign Office – or indeed the British armed forces – for protection from the Iranian Shahed drones haunting the Emirati skies, how reasonable is their demand for help funded by taxpayer pounds to which they have not contributed a single penny in however many years?
The Iran crisis – and Keir Starmer’s reluctance to provide America with military support for its campaign except in a ‘defensive’ capacity – has once again shone a spotlight on Britain’s military preparedness and defence spending, or rather lack thereof. It is increasingly clear that the British armed forces lack the resources to send enough troops and equipment to the Middle East at the same time as sustaining their commitments to Ukraine and Nato in eastern Europe and the Arctic.
As things stand, the Ministry of Defence believes it will need an extra £28 billion over the next four years to meet projected costs – an increasing source of panic for the country’s military chiefs. And that’s before Britain’s Nato commitment to raise defence spending to 5 per cent of GDP by 2035 is factored into the sums. Last year, our military expenditure was just over £70 billion – equivalent to just 2.4 per cent of GDP.
And yet at the same time, the public finances look distinctly unhealthy and inflation is likely to increase thanks to Iran. Meanwhile, Rachel Reeves has boxed herself into a corner with her self-imposed fiscal rules and refusal to raise taxes on as-yet poorly defined ‘working people’. The ‘guns versus butter’ debate over whether to take money away from public services to fund defence has always been one that politicians have been keen to avoid. But now, in particular, there are few palatable options available for Keir Starmer’s government to raise defence spending with the speed and urgency that is required.
Could taxing expats living in the Middle East and elsewhere on their income tax – similar to America – hold one potential answer, then, for how to fund the much-needed boost in Britain’s defence spending?
The US levies a worldwide income tax on its citizens, no matter where they live in the world. Taxpayers are able to offset what they owe to the Internal Revenue Service against income tax they have paid to their host countries to avoid double taxation. Nevertheless, the only way Americans living abroad can get out of paying any tax into US coffers entirely is to renounce their citizenship.
Figures suggest that there are approximately 5 million British citizens living abroad. The Office for National Statistics estimates that approximately 250,000 British citizens emigrate from the UK every year. Of these, three-quarters are believed to be under 35 – and therefore of working (and taxpaying) age.
The current average UK salary is currently £39,039 a year. Assuming that, as a baseline, every British person in the UAE earns at least this much – which, given the higher salaries in the Emirates, is very likely – this quite conservative estimate alone would bring in approximately £1.2 billion in income tax each year.
In reality, the revenue for the Treasury would quite probably be much higher than this: Britons are, for example, believed to make up the majority of Dubai’s 50,000-strong influencer community. The so-called ‘Green’ freelancer visas many of these content creators live on require applicants to prove earnings of approximately £73,000 per year for the previous two years. While no concrete statistics on the nationalities of influencers living in Dubai exist, if we were to assume that even half of the content creators living there were British, they alone would generate around £338 million for the Exchequer back in London.
These sums are just for the UAE. Roughly a further 55,000 British citizens live in other countries which also don’t collect income tax, such as Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Monaco. Then there are those Brits who live in tax havens with lower income tax thresholds than the UK, such as Singapore.
Of course, it’s unlikely that a British expat tax would fund the required increase in defence spending on its own. But raking in a few extra billions of consistent yearly income in this way is not something the Treasury should sniff at.
I’d also wager that would be a popular policy for Labour to implement. After all, few people would feel sorry to see influencers and wealth managers who escaped the taxman for sunnier climes finally forced to cough up for the Exchequer. Given it’s difficult to call such expats ‘ordinary working people’, Reeves wouldn’t be breaking her own rules by taxing them. Better yet, even fewer here in Britain could dispute such a tax being introduced in the name of patriotic national defence.
The bittersweet death of Lycra
There are a lot of things that Ozempic & Co. have killed business for. Weight Watchers. Diets from cabbage soup to the boiled egg. Fat-but-jolly female film stars. The latest victim is the Lycra Company, which has filed for bankruptcy after sinking into a whopping $1.2 billion (£897 billion) of debt. That’s a lot of leotards!
Invented in 1958 by the gloriously named Joseph Shivers, a chemist working for DuPont, Lycra is an elastic fibre intended as a replacement for rubber – which can get rather clammy – in clothing. But it didn’t come into its own until the go-getting 1980s, when the craze for ‘aerobics’ – ‘Feel the burn!’ – led by a ‘resting’ Jane Fonda, inspired a million women to don Lycra and leg warmers and make fools of themselves to her hectoring ‘work-out’ videos.
This was the era of the films Fame and Flashdance and the whole dancewear-as-streetwear trend. On lithe youngsters, Lycra looked lovely, and the streamlined workwear aspect spoke of a busy and vital life, a vision of femininity which was equally at home prancing around in front of mirrors or holding one’s own in a steelworks. On older and broader broads – many of whom continue to choose ‘leggings’ to this day – it could be a trifle unforgiving. They could even make one look a bit like a trifle that forgot to say ‘When!’. Briefly, I was one of those chubsters. A certain type of man – aggressive cyclists, often known as ‘Lycra Louts’ – would earn the material an even worse reputation than fat birds.
Today we are in hard times, and a pair of leg warmers won’t keep out the cold
Olivia Newton-John in her Physical music video was a gorgeous musical example of Lycra-chic. In the 1985 film Perfect, the entire cast seems to spend all their time in Lycra. John Travolta played a devious undercover Rolling Stone reporter who goes after a story suggesting that fitness clubs are glorified pick-up joints, incurring the attraction and wrath of Jamie Lee Curtis, who appears to have a Magimix stuffed down her leotard. The Washington Post decreed it ‘a trashy movie about women jumping up and down in leotards’ that ‘touts the First Amendment like a corny romance from the ’40s – stars and stripes in spandex’.
But Lycra didn’t have to be trashy. In 1985, the distinctly upmarket if low-key designer Donna Karan launched her ‘Seven Easy Pieces’ collection. It featured a Lycra bodysuit as the foundation of ‘the modern working woman’s wardrobe’, intended to take a woman from boardroom to bar, office to off-licence, without a lot of fuss and planning. It sounds like common sense, but to a generation of women who believed that they had to get gussied up in order to be taken seriously (think of Mrs Thatcher’s helmet of hair and pussy-cat bow blouses), it was quite the relief.
The prized mode of sexuality at the time was that of a woman in control at work and at play. These were Madonna’s great years, and she herself was no stranger to the stretchy stuff.
Today we are in hard times, though, and a pair of leg warmers won’t keep out the cold. As the Times wittily put it, ‘Lycra has been stretched thin for years since a 2019 acquisition by the Chinese textile company Ruyi Textile and Fashion International Group Limited.’ According to its bankruptcy filing, the company suffered from decreased demand, struggled to fend off lower-priced competitors, and was damaged by Donald Trump’s unpredictable tariffs and legal disputes with its former Chinese owners.
It’s daft to get apocalyptic about these little cultural glitches, but the fall of Lycra does seem like yet another tiny Lego brick in the wall of us in the West going to hell in a handcart. It fits in neatly alongside the creepy rise of ‘modesty dressing’ and the endless conquering of American manufacturing by the Chinese.
The last great cultural celebration of Lycra was probably in 2004, in the video for the hit record Call On Me, a dance number by the Swedish DJ Eric Prydz, which was so overtly sexy that Tony Blair said of it, ‘The first time it came on, I nearly fell off my rowing machine.’
Of course, people still wear ‘athleisure’ clothes, particularly Queen Bee mothers wanting to look busy and fit – in both senses of the word – on the school run. But now that the semaglutide weight jab is king, the desire to look as though one spends an indecent amount of time leaping about like a crazy thing has lost its lustre. ‘I have a fast metabolism!’ is the modern explanation for keeping one’s girlish figure into middle age, when everyone knows you’re banging up the Zempy like there’s no tomorrow.
Still, it’s bittersweet to remember a time when young, urban, liberal, Western women were harmlessly narcissistic rather than suicidally empathetic. Back when their only crime was loving themselves a little too much in their second-skin Lycra rather than hijabing up and wishing for the destruction of their own civilisation.
What Louis Theroux misses about the Manosphere
Louis Theroux, the Lib Dem Alan Whicker, has now had his turn at the manosphere. His new Netflix film Inside the Manosphere has gone down more or less as you would expect: clippable footage of insecure men, prompted along by Theroux’s trademark awkward questioning.
But none of this is especially difficult. The men he films are not master manipulators or especially complex abusers. For the most part, they are self-evidently ludicrous. Their appeal lies less in intellectual depth than in the escapism they offer: flash cars, rented glamour, semi-professional girlfriends, and the chance for losers to live vicariously through a fantasy of sexual and social dominance. It is a show-don’t-tell medium.
Like an ageing rockstar who can still hit some of the notes, there are moments when the old technique still pays off. He remains very good at catching the small collapse of male vanity. When one, Justin Waller, is asked how many children he has, there is a long and slightly painful hesitation, followed by an answer that sounds as though he has only just remembered it himself. There is something David Brentian about the moment: a faint suggestion that the number might have been quietly inflated for effect, before settling on the reality: two (daughters). It is funny hearing the hiss of a preening man’s ego slowly deflate.
It is also true that Theroux’s awkward silences work particularly well with this type of person and with extrovert Americans generally. Their entire persona depends on being the largest presence in the room, filling every gap with noise and assertion. His gift is to let the silence sit just long enough for the act to begin to wobble. But this is also a law of diminishing returns. We are no longer watching a hidden world being patiently uncovered, but a public performance faltering outside the safe confines of its own curated, short-form content.
This shows a deeper problem with Theroux’s method. It was developed in Weird Weekends, which belonged to a pre-internet world, when subcultures were genuinely difficult to access and required a real degree of commitment to enter. If you were, for example, a bodybuilder in the 1960s you had to invest financially and emotionally, organising your life around a relatively unusual set of beliefs and practices, offline, through word of mouth.
The internet has changed that. What Theroux now encounters are not ecosystems in the Weird Weekends oeuvre. The men he interviews are not gatekeepers but extroverts in a marketplace, optimising themselves for clicks, outrage and subsequent monetisation. To approach them with the same anthropological curiosity is to misread the nature of what they are doing. In Weird Weekends, Theroux uncovered subcultures. Here, he is mostly interviewing an algorithm.
There is also a familiar element of performance in Theroux himself. He presents as the mild, slightly awkward, urbane Englishman, the man with the false modest title (Louis Theroux from the BBC) and the raised eyebrow, quietly bamboozled by the imposingness of those he meets. Years ago, when cultural cross-pollination was limited and few people knew who he was, this encouraged subjects to let their guard down.
But the asymmetry is more obvious now. Theroux arrives backed by a Netflix crew interviewing men whose entire operation may consist of a ring light and a Go Pro. When one of them, HS Tikky Tokky, remarks on the size of the film crew’s cameras, the fiction briefly slips. This is not an encounter between equals, nor even between two subcultures. It is a performance of humility from a position of an enormously powerful media organisation.
There is also a slightly half-arsed feel to the documentary, as though it were commissioned less out of curiosity than from a desire to produce a kind of ‘behind the scenes of Adolescence’ for a concerned, establishment audience. Andrew Tate, the one figure who still gives the manosphere any real scale or coherence, is conspicuous by his absence (though he looms large in archive clips set to suitably menacing music – relations reportedly broke down when he wanted to be paid for his appearance).
For example: what one learns very little about, however, is the more esoteric ecology of the ‘sphere’ itself: the strange fixation on aesthetics, looksmaxxing, frame-mogging, jawline paranoia, the endless, faintly deranged self-analysis of bone structure, height and sexual market value. Theroux does touch on the language of ‘sexual market value,’ but mostly in its loudest, most vulgar for a kind of prefabricated talk of dominance and ‘bitches’ – rather than the quieter, more neurotic minutiae that make the phenomenon genuinely interesting. To be charitable, the film was shot in 2025, before figures like Clavicular pushed looksmaxxing and ‘frame mogging’ into the mainstream in 2026. But it is also easier to film a handful of grifters saying outrageous things on camera than to engage with the quieter, stranger, and more psychologically revealing culture from which they draw their audience.
The weakness of this approach is that it flatters both itself and its audience. It gives viewers the agreeable sense that they are watching something brave, probing and psychologically acute, when in reality they are watching weak and stupid men hang themselves with their own rope.
None of this is to say the phenomenon itself is unreal. Plenty of boys and young men plainly do consume this material, recognise its figures, and absorb parts of its vocabulary. But that is not the same thing as saying the men Theroux films represent the true inner life of ordinary masculinity. What many young men share is not the lifestyle or even the worldview of these figures, but the loneliness, confusion and status anxiety on which they trade.
In truth, the manosphere is not especially interesting as a body of ideas. There is no buried philosophy here, no dark doctrine of sex and power waiting to be unearthed by a sufficiently solemn broadcaster. It is something thinner and more contemporary than that: a digital market in loneliness, resentment, status panic and sexual opportunism, populated by men performing a dominance they do not possess.
And those men did not appear out of nowhere. A great many young men are plainly not flourishing, socially, economically, romantically, in ways that respectable Britain still finds awkward to discuss. That is the harder story.
How AI is reshaping the Iran war
The magnitude and speed of the US and Israeli airstrikes eliminating Iranian regime officials can be explained in part by their unprecedented use of advanced technology and AI systems.
The US military embraced AI earlier this year when Secretary of War Pete Hegseth ordered the Department of War to ‘accelerate America’s Military AI Dominance by becoming an “AI-first” warfighting force across all components, from front to back.’
Despite US President Donald Trump’s order for federal and military agencies to cease using AI tools developed by Anthropic, it was Anthropic’s Claude AI that was pivotal in making intelligence assessments and identifying targets in the opening salvos of the Iranian attack. Likewise, Palantir’s Maven Smart Systems (MSS) has been essential to the US Central Command’s (Centcom) operation in Iran for summarising raw intelligence and identifying people, vehicles and weapons to be targeted.
Israel has been developing AI in its war against Hamas in Gaza over the past two years. Its Habsora AI system cross-references satellite imagery, communications data and human intelligence from hundreds of sources to identify Hamas infrastructure and facilities in the dense urban landscape of the Gaza Strip. Its sister system, Lavender, uses similar databases to identify Hamas militants and leadership personnel.
The Israeli military used AI systems to analyse years of intel and reconnaissance on Khamenei to anticipate his movements
The precision strike that killed Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei occurred within the opening hours of Israel’s ‘Operation Roaring Lion’ on 28 February, but its planning and intelligence gathering efforts had been in the works for nearly two decades under the oversight of the covert Israeli intelligence unit 8200.
The Israeli military used AI systems to analyse years of intel and reconnaissance on Khamenei to anticipate his movements. Leading up to the February operation, Israeli cyber intelligence had hacked into nearly every traffic camera in Tehran, bugged communications systems, and directed transmissions to the IDF intelligence headquarters in Tel Aviv. Israeli intelligence specialists then employed AI-based algorithms to analyse details such as duty schedules, guard breaks and commuting routes, making it easier to predict Khamenei’s movements and schedules.
In the final hours, these systems provided the Israelis with the optimal time and place to strike Khamenei. It was as if they prompted a souped-up, militarised ChatGPT with the question: ‘When and where is the best time to kill Khamenei today?’
The unexpected daylight strike that killed the Iranian Supreme Leader included roughly 30 missiles, including Blue Sparrows, launched from a distance by Israeli F-15 fighter jets. These missiles briefly exit the Earth’s atmosphere before flying straight down at incredible speeds onto their target. As scores of aircraft appeared over Iranian skies in the early morning hours of 28 February, Tehran’s first line of defence was to jam global positioning satellite (GPS) systems to disrupt navigation and missile guidance systems. Widespread GPS jamming (that is, the disruption of position coordinates) and signal spoofing (giving false locations) were used on all sides to disrupt the travel paths of missiles and drones and confuse target coordinates.
To counter this, the Israeli Air Force (IAF) carried out most air strikes using Rocks (Rafael’s operational combat-proven kinetic stand-off) missiles. This air-to-surface missile is designed to strike stationary and relocatable targets in GPS-denied areas by using local imagery and target recognition technology. The F-15 pilots allocate a target and release the missile from a distance, while still outside heavily air-defended areas. The missile uses GPS systems for its initial and mid-course trajectory before switching to what Rafael calls ‘a unique scene-matching algorithm and anti-radiation technology’ to home in on the final target. The pilots monitor the missile’s progress and can make on-the-spot decisions to alter or abort the mission.
The Rocks missiles allowed Israel to achieve air superiority over Tehran in the early days of the war. With complete freedom of the skies, the US and Israeli forces have been able to pluck away unhindered at the regime leadership and IRGC military positions.
One successful mission occurred on March 11, when the IAF carried out a precision drone strike on a Basij militia checkpoint in Tehran. According to sources at Iran International, the operation was carried out using an unprecedented ‘mother launcher’ to deploy drones equipped with AI-databases. The drones cross-referenced facial recognition and behavioural patterns of the militants on the ground to check that they were the designated targets in the database before striking.
Effective AI systems have also protected the Israeli home front in the course of Iranian and Hezbollah aerial attacks. As multiple missile and rocket barrages descend on Israel from various locations, AI defence systems perform ‘sensor fusion’ operations. They process data from various radar and sensor inputs to determine and triage, within milliseconds, which interceptors to launch for optimal defence.
Other Israeli defence systems are capable of detecting and rapidly targeting Iranian missiles immediately after they are fired, roughly 1,000 miles away. This allows air defence systems to intercept the incoming missiles, often outside of Israeli airspace, and provides the Israeli Home Front Command with crucial real-time data for issuing early warnings to the civilian population. Complex algorithms, handled by the AI team at Israel’s reconnaissance satellite operation ‘Ofek’, allow the Home Front Command to make calculated estimates about where a missile is headed, the expected arrival time, and what regions to issue real-time warnings and alerts.
The use of AI marks a dramatic shift in modern warfare. If the Israeli systems in Gaza – like Ukraine’s pioneering AI-enabled defence technologies used against Russia – were the testing stages for a new generation of hi-tech combat, the current war in Iran marks a full-scale paradigm shift toward the irreversible path of AI-assisted warfare.
Asia is paying a very heavy price for the Iran war
This week, Sri Lankans took Wednesday off. They’ll be doing the same next week – and for as long as the Iran war continues to disrupt global oil supplies. The country’s president Anura Kumara Dissanayake announced a four-day week in order to preserve fuel. Around 90 per cent of all energy supplies that pass through the Strait of Hormuz are imported by Asian countries, which are bracing for the impact of the strait currently being choked by Tehran. Oil prices have crossed the $110 per barrel mark, surging by almost 40 per cent since the start of the conflict on 28 February.
Thailand has issued very specific guidelines asking that air conditioners are not set to less than 26 degrees
As well as closing down public institutions three days a week, Sri Lanka is also rationing fuel with motorists allotted 15 litres of petrol or diesel per week. Elsewhere in South Asia, India is facing its worst gas crisis in decades, despite being one of the few countries whose vessels were granted a safe passage from the Strait of Hormuz by Iran. The Indian government has increased the price of a standard 14.2 kg household LPG (Liquefied Petroleum Gas) cylinder by seven per cent, limiting LPG supplies for the industry to ensure continued supply at homes. Pakistan, which also had one of its tankers pass through Hormuz this week, announced a 20 per cent hike in petroleum prices. The country also imposed a four-day week and announced significant cuts in government officials’ fuel spending and salaries. Both Pakistan and Bangladesh have shut down educational institutes, allowing classes to be taken online. These Muslim-majority countries are preparing for a hike in fuel demand during this weekend’s Islamic holiday of Eid-ul-Fitr, which will see a spike in nationwide travel.
The timing of the policies suggest that they’re fearing a long-term fuel shortage owing to a potentially protracted war in Iran. Similar preparations have been undertaken in East and Southeast Asian countries.
Japan this week announced the release of 80 million barrels of oil, or 45 days of supply, out of its reserves. South Korea is releasing 22.46 million barrels of oil, after International Energy Agency (IEA) members decided to make 400 million barrels available from their reserves. These releases echo the austerity measures being undertaken elsewhere in the region.
The Philippines has introduced cash handouts for public transport drivers and mandated government staff to work from home at least once a week. Vietnam has discouraged the use of personal vehicles, encouraging public transportation or working from home.
Thailand has issued very specific guidelines asking that air conditioners are not set to less than 26 degrees; a dress-code of short-sleeved shirts also features in the the guidance aimed at limiting energy expenditure and saving fuel. Indonesia, meanwhile, is aiming to absorb the fuel shock by introducing subsidies, but rising crude prices, and the fluctuation of the Indonesian rupiah might make it difficult to sustain the allocations.
The uncertainty surrounding the war is compelling these countries to plan weeks and months in advance, fearing the worst. It also means that climate considerations are now firmly taking a backseat, as Asia seeks a return to coal amid soaring LNG prices.
Bangladesh and Pakistan have increased coal power generation to replace LNG. The Philippines, where coal was already responsible for over 60 per cent of the power supply prior to the war, is foreseeing an increase in that share. Last year, the IEA (International Energy Agency) had already forecast a 4.5 per cent rise in coal usage in Indonesia, Vietnam and the Philippines until 2030, with India also expected to see a 3.3 per cent hike this decade. The Iran war will further increase these numbers.
Despite the Ukraine war pushing US sanctions on Russian oil since 2022, Asian countries are now queueing up to purchase energy from Moscow, currently benefitting from a month-long waiver from Washington. Russia made £5 billion from fossil fuel sales in the first fortnight of the Iran war benefitting from both the escalating demand, and the mounting prices. From Bangladesh to Thailand, countries across Asia have opened talks to increase their imports from Russia in order to cope with the prolonged uncertainty surrounding the Strait of Hormuz supplies.
As the impact of fuel shortage snowballs, environmental concerns, or diplomatic rivalries, will play second fiddle to survivalist policies. The United States’ allies in Asia are already paying a heavy price for Donald Trump’s war.
Where would you put a blue plaque?
Beulah Hill in Norwood is an overwhelmingly uninteresting stretch of South London road; the kind of anonymous thoroughfare that can induce mild depression on a day of drizzle and delayed buses.
Yet, as is often the way with these tedious parts of suburbia, visual perseverance can reap rewards. It was only last week, on my hundredth trudge down the hill towards home, that my fiancée spotted a blue sign above the doorbell to a typically fusty looking mansion block.
Stalking up the driveway to look closer, I read that this was the spot where, 60 years ago, the Jules Rimet trophy (aka the World Cup) was found in a hedge by a mixed border collie dog named Pickles.
Stolen from an exhibition at Westminster Central Hall on March 20th 1966, less than four months before the tournament was scheduled to begin at Wembley, the nationwide hunt lasted weeks before Pickles, and his owner David Corbett, discovered it, wrapped in a brown paper bag, in this most innocuous of neighbourhoods.
The sign, lovingly rendered by someone with no connection to English Heritage or Lambeth council, acts as a bijou portal into one of the many narrow side alleys of modern English history; Pickles is commemorated by a plaque that was put up without consultation with statutory bodies and without any obligation to tick diversity boxes.
It turns out that there are a colossal number of unofficial blue plaques that have, presumably in the dead of night, been installed by enthusiasts with a minor talent for signage making. One that randomly appeared for a while in Soho a few years ago was dedicated to ‘Jacob von Hogflume- inventor of time travel’, which was, it transpired, a winningly bonkers tribute erected by fans of the late Monty Python member Graham Chapman.
In Walthamstow, two years ago, a blue plaque appeared, nailed to the wall of the local Tesco, stating, ‘A Lettuce purchased here in September 2022 lasted longer than Prime Minister Liz Truss (49 days)’; a tribute to the Daily Star ‘contest’ whereby a webcam was placed next to said lettuce (which came with its own blonde wig) to see who would last longest before being binned. We all know who won.
So yes, as you may have noticed by now, the majority of unofficial blue plaques play on sixth-form common room humour tropes; either being dedicated to imaginary people, inanimate objects or events that never happened. In fact, there have been numerous short-lived plaques installed (perhaps with the owner’s consent) on homes that state ‘on this spot nothing happened.’
In Walthamstow, two years ago, a blue plaque appeared, nailed to the wall of the local Tesco
Lovers of Magritte and Georges Perec might love this stuff, but the Pickles plaque is a far better advert for bootleg commemorations. Once I master the art of making a few plaques (surely there’s a one-day course somewhere?), I intend to travel the country to install them.
First up, the New Covent Garden Market Cafe where Ed Miliband showed the nation he couldn’t eat a bacon sandwich in 2014, thus saving us all from a tenure at Number Ten dominated by a plan to generate the national power grid through whale farts and hummus.
Second, The National Environment Research Council HQ in Swindon where, in 2016, it was announced that a new polar research vessel, after a public vote, would be called Boaty McBoatface, sadly ensuring that the huddled masses will never be put in a position to name anything again. And lastly, on to Sheffield Arena where, in 1992, Neil Kinnock gave the worst political speech in British history with his ‘we’re alright’ refrain. It helped lose him the election but remains only his second lowest public moment, losing out to his appearance as host on Have I Got News for You?
Getting these plaques installed shouldn’t take me too long, so I am very open to more suggestions. Because, while I am genuinely thankful to English Heritage for letting me know where Van Gogh lived during his time in Lambeth (87 Hackford Road) and where the site of where the first flying bomb on London fell on 13th June 1944 (Grove Road in Mile End), there is nothing about these bootleg plaques that diminishes or takes away from the real thing.
For many people, Pickles finding the World Cup so Bobby Moore could lift the thing a few months later is more important than the former homes of Harry Lauder or Algernon Charles Swinburne. Such are the joys of subjectivity and free choice – if you even remember those atavistic pleasures.
Let these bootleg plaques spring forth and multiply, whether we think they’re daft or not. We should consider them small marks of eccentricity, made by individuals who aren’t afraid to take some small culpability for doing something to the structures, quirks and ephemera that surround us.
If we’re willing to tolerate the spending of £191 million of public funding on refurbishing the Barbican (the architectural equivalent of giving John Merrick a baseball cap) then we can hardly begrudge an individual using his own cash to put up a small plaque in tribute to a dog from the 1960s with a knack for sniffing out gold can we?
El Mencho’s last stand
Jalisco, Mexico
No one seems to know exactly how El Mencho was killed. We are told the feared leader of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel was captured by the Mexican army during a firefight in late February, and subsequently died of his wounds. Beyond that, there is very little information. Why are the Mexican and US governments being so secretive about his death?
El Mencho – real name Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes – was 59 when he died. He was Mexico’s most-wanted man; US authorities had offered a $15 million reward for information leading to his arrest. I decided I had to go to Jalisco, where El Mencho made his last stand, to look for answers. Most of Mexico’s airspace had been closed after his death, such was the level of unrest. Cars and buses were torched, gunmen set up roadblocks on Mexico’s highways and more than 70 people were killed in widespread retaliatory fighting. Three days after his death, I disembarked at Guadalajara International Airport on one of the first flights into the region.
Many powerful people in Mexico would do anything to stop El Mencho stepping inside an American courtroom
“We heard and saw the helicopters the night before. If we saw them, so did he. But he stayed,” said the owner of a hotel in the tourist town of Tapalpa, famous for its colonial villas. He believed that El Mencho had actually died four years ago from a chronic kidney disease, which had made him reliant on dialysis. The cartel, he believed, struck a deal with the Mexican government to hand over his body to appease the Americans. It’s a fantastic story that stretches credulity, but stranger things have happened in cartel world. I jumped in my rented van to try to find the truth.
El Mencho’s compound is little more than a mile from Tapalpa Country Club. The forest between the main road and the cabins was still smoldering following a firefight and, as I parked, I was unsure if I would be stopped. There were a few local journalists poking around but no cartel gunmen as far as I could see. I walked past bedsheets, towels and food strewn across a parking lot where it looked like El Mencho’s security had been camping.
The spot provided an excellent vantage point of the main highway. On the ground were bullet casings and grenade fragments. In a small barbecue, I found two passport-sized photos of pretty young women that had somehow escaped the flames. Maybe they were the girlfriends of cartel men who wanted to make sure they couldn’t be identified. Or perhaps they were poor young women who had been kidnapped and brought here as sex slaves. As I went from cabin to cabin, I found spent bullet casings, statues of Jesus, a mounted head of a zebra as well as Viagra and lubricant. There were children’s toys in one bunk bed.
The network of cabins, I suspect, were safe houses for El Mencho and his men. When things heated up, they could escape here and lie low. The kids’ toys suggested that he would let his men bring their families to visit. One cabin stood out to me more than the others. It was littered with large .50 caliber shell casings from the entrance staircase all the way into the furthest back bedroom. Yet there no damage to the cabin; I couldn’t find any impact sites for the bullets.
A white Jeep, which had its keys on the dashboard, was parked next door in an open garage. It was surrounded by large shell casings – but again, the vehicle was completely unscathed. The cabin where it seemed some of the fiercest fighting had taken place bore no signs of damage. And its dusty curtains and bedsheets smelled as if it had been vacant for months. The scene didn’t add up.
I got the sense that someone had scattered .50 shell casings everywhere so the press wouldn’t ask too many questions. I photographed the casings and later discovered they were made exclusively for military use, predominantly in Turkey, the US, Canada and South Korea. As I got closer to the Tapalpa Country Club, I noticed two armed cartel spotters on motorbikes. They were wearing balaclavas and watching me.
El Mencho supposedly died in a helicopter as he was being airlifted out of the forest between the country club and his compound. Some men did die at this site. I spoke to the girlfriend of a National Guard soldier who was on this mission. He texted her: “Shit’s hitting the fan. I love you.” Then he was shot dead. Authorities say 24 soldiers and 12 of El Mencho’s men were killed in the fighting. But where was the blood? Where were the bullet impact sites? The complex felt like it had been abandoned some time ago. There was spoiled food in the cabins and everything was dusty.
I left the scene and worked my cartel sources. Eventually, someone cracked. Over encrypted messaging, my source outlined what he said had really happened. He told me that El Mencho had agreed to surrender to Mexican authorities to win a softer sentence for his 36-year-old son, Rubén Oseguera González, who is currently serving life in prison in the US on drug trafficking and weapons charges.
Instead, El Mencho and his men were ambushed by the Mexican Guard. The security forces didn’t want him to reveal to the Americans how far the cartel’s influence had spread through the government and military. Many of the Mexican Guard’s leaders are on its payroll. So are the politicians. El Mencho’s men were lightly armed and quickly overpowered, my source claimed. The drug lord was handed an M4 assault rifle and fell back through the woods, but he was shot and captured. It is interesting to note that while authorities say he died in transit to Mexico City, his death certificate states he died in Tapalpa, Jalisco.
Of course, my source might be wrong – or lying. But the Tapalpa compound certainly raises questions. America would undoubtedly want El Mencho alive and many powerful people in Mexico – including the CJNG – would do anything to stop him stepping inside an American courtroom. He knew too much. Since El Mencho’s death, the transition of power within CJNG has also been unusual. Instead of fighting with each other for control, the cartel declared war against the Mexican government. Typically when a kingpin dies there is chaos as the cartel fractures and those in the chain of command bid for power.
When El Mayo, one of the leaders of the Sinaloa cartel, was betrayed and taken to the US two years ago, there was a bloody power struggle. But this time El 03, El Mencho’s stepson, is thought to have taken over CJNG almost effortlessly. There has been no official announcement but all the cartel members I have spoken to say he is the new leader. CJNG is still a multinational enterprise fueled by billions of dollars in drug profits. Cartels rarely collapse when a leader dies. But the question of exactly how El Mencho died is still unanswered.
Lloyd Blankfein – guiding light of Goldman Sachs
Goldman Sachs inspires awe and envy in equal measure. Those who survive the Wall Street investment bank’s annual cull earn fortunes. Leavers join an alumni network that makes the Freemasons look like plodders. The “Government Sachs” roll call includes prime ministers (Mark Carney, Mario Draghi, Rishi Sunak and Australia’s Malcolm Turnbull); US Treasury secretaries (Robert Rubin and Hank Paulson); and central bank governors galore, not to mention two recent BBC chairmen (Gavyn Davies and Richard Sharp).
After the global financial crisis, which Goldman navigated more adroitly than rivals, Rolling Stone compared the bank to “a vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity.” New York magazine ran a cover story which asked: “IS GOLDMAN SACHS EVIL?” Lloyd Blankfein does his level best to make light of all this in Streetwise, a pacy, often wry account of his career at Goldman, where he served as CEO and chairman from 2006-18.
One top Goldman executive sold his Nantucket house for $55 million in the wake of Lehman collapsing
The story of Blankfein, the son of a postal clerk, is a tribute to social mobility and Goldman’s meritocratic culture. He grew up in the housing projects in Brooklyn, winning a place at Harvard. After a stint as a tax lawyer, he joined the commodity trader J. Aron, later acquired by Goldman. Thereafter he conquered impostor syndrome and outsmarted rivals for the top job.
As editor of the Financial Times, I had regular dealings with Blankfein, along with other Wall Street CEOs. He was a thoughtful co-chair of our annual business book award. In 2009, recognizing his leadership during the financial crisis, the FT named him Person of the Year. Our relationship was friendly, if occasionally spiky.
His pet moan was that newspapers ran more stories about Goldman than rivals because the name alone attracted more clicks. True, but then Goldman was one of the most powerful banks in the world. In his memoir, he offers some media advice to beleaguered CEOs: “If you want to hurt a reporter, ignore him. If you really want to hurt him, indicate that you’re unaware of his work.”
Wisecracks aside, Blankfein likens Goldman’s role to Adam Smith’s invisible hand directing capital and investment where it is most needed in the economy. His legacy as CEO was to steer the bank through the crisis but also to preserve its culture as an advisor, financier and investor.
Blankfein’s “triple play” required managing multiple inherent conflicts of interest. Critics argue that Goldman was never the same after it went public in 1999. Shareholders’ money was now at risk rather than the partnership’s. In fact, Goldman had little choice but to follow the herd. Rivals such as Salomon Brothers, Bear Stearns and Morgan Stanley had already floated their shares on the New York Stock Exchange. They all needed capital to finance deal-making and trading. London had gone full Big Bang. Ten years on, Wall Street consolidated, too. Goldman became a full-service merchant bank.
Yet something was lost. Disaffected employees, especially those who lost out in the IPO, claimed the client was sacrificed in the stampede to get rich. Others pointed to the rise of cut-throat traders at the expense of (supposedly) genteel investment bankers. Trader Blankfein punctures the hypocrisy. Some of the white-shoe types who openly wailed about the dangers of going public happily voted in private in favor of taking the money.
Post-IPO, Goldman grew from 10,000 to 45,000 employees. Risk management became an existential challenge. In the run-up to the crisis, Goldman took on extra risk and the bankers (including Blankfein with $67 million remuneration) took home sackfuls of cash in 2007. The following year, when the financial system came close to meltdown, Goldman survived – but only just.
Blankfein insists that Goldman was properly hedged. He minimizes the bank’s exposure to the insurance giant AIG, pointing to the purchase of credit insurance on the mortgage-backed securities which it was also selling to clients (and buying itself). Goldman’s trademark has always been deft footwork.
In his memoir, Blankfein has a pop or two at the Alpha Male colleagues who went missing in action during the crisis. One top Goldman executive sold his Nantucket house for $55 million in the wake of Lehman Brothers collapsing. When challenged, he said: “I have a fiduciary duty to my family.” But the boss does pull his punches. He skirts over the giant 1MdB fraud in Malaysia, where Goldman advised the country’s sovereign wealth fund. Nor is there mention of Goldman’s role in arranging swaps that effectively allowed Greece to borrow €1 billion without adding to its official debt, thus easing its path into the euro.
These are minor omissions by a man who survived the crisis and a bout of cancer. Unlike many of his peers, he kept his reputation intact. Anyone with corporate ambition and an interest in recent financial history should read this book.
Am I an extremist?
The Communities Secretary Steve Reed recently rose in the House of Commons to unveil “Protecting What Matters,” the British government’s new “action plan” to “strengthen social cohesion” and “tackle division.” According to the accompanying press release: “Millions of families, friends and neighbors will feel a stronger sense of community, unity and national pride thanks to renewed efforts to stamp out extremism, hate and division announced today.”
I was not among those millions. Conspicuous by omission in the announcement was any mention of Islamist extremism. The impression given by the minister was that “those who try to divide us” and “subvert our shared values” are not the Muslim students mourning the death of Iran’s supreme leader or people like Mothin Ali, the deputy leader of the Green party, who tweeted on the day Hamas slaughtered 1,200 Jews: “White supremacist European settler colonialism must end!” Instead, it is politicians like Nigel Farage and Katie Lam who draw attention to the small boats and the grooming gangs.
Labour sees right-wing politicians as the ‘extremists’ and not those chanting ‘globalize the Intifada’
Just in case you’re in any doubt that Labour sees right-wing politicians as “extremists” and not those chanting “globalize the Intifada” in our city centers every Saturday, Reed announced that the government will adopt an official definition of “anti-Muslim hostility” and appoint a “special representative” to enforce it.
But not to worry. This new definition won’t impinge on freedom of expression, apparently, because it’s “non-statutory.” Forgive me if I don’t find that very reassuring. The All Party Parliamentary Group on British Muslims produced a definition of “Islamophobia” in 2018 that was non-statutory, but it still had a chilling effect on free speech. It was taken up by Labour-controlled local authorities in places like Oldham, Rochdale and Bradford and almost certainly inhibited people from drawing attention to the rape gangs operating in those areas for fear of being branded “Islamophobes.” Indeed, Andrew Norfolk, the late Times journalist who fearlessly covered the scandal, was accused of “anti-Muslim reporting” in 2019.
The false premise underpinning this “action plan” is that stifling criticism of Muslims will promote social cohesion. Members of all faiths are already protected by the prohibition on stirring up religious hatred in the Public Order Act, as well as the anti-discrimination clauses in the Equality Act and the religious “aggravator” in the statutory hate-crime framework.
Providing members of just one faith with additional protections will hardly reduce community tensions. How does Reed think the official adoption of an “anti-Muslim hostility” definition will go down with Hindus in Leicester or Sikhs in Wolverhampton? I imagine they’ll start clamoring for “special representatives” of their own. Is that really how the government believes you promote a “shared sense of values, pride and belonging,” to quote from the press release? By arming different communities with “tsars” and giving them extrajudicial powers to police their neighbors for the slightest signs of “hostility?” That’s the Kashmiri approach to social cohesion.
When the Prevent program was rolled out by New Labour in 2003, Tony Blair was less squeamish than his successors about naming radical Islam as the problem. But to avoid accusations of bias the threat was identified as “extremism” in general rather than Islamist extremism in particular. The upshot is that twice as many people are now referred to Prevent because they’re supposedly more at risk of extreme right-wing radicalization than Islamist radicalization. Yet of those in custody for terrorism-connected offenses, 63 percent hold Islamic-extremist views and just 29 percent extreme right-wing views.
This time, there’s less pretense of even-handedness. Yes, there was a glancing reference in Reed’s speech to rising anti-Semitic hate crime and talk of stopping “hate preachers” entering the country. But the section on “anti-Muslim hostility” was the centerpiece. In the longform version, there’s even a section on expanding Ofcom’s “crisis powers” in the Online Safety Act to restrict “viral, harmful content” on social media. Instead, “trustworthy media” will be given more “prominence.” In other words, regime mouthpieces will be boosted and dissident voices suppressed.
This new counterextremism strategy might as well have been written by Hope Not Hate. For “social cohesion” read “social control.” We need to resist it with everything we’ve got or Britain will soon become the North Korea of the North Sea.
Britain’s Miliband supremacy
Labour MPs who want Wes Streeting to be their leader have, apparently, one great fear. If their man triggers a contest, they are terrified it will lead to Ed Miliband entering the race to stop the Health Secretary – and coming out on top. A Miliband premiership would, they worry, be the death of Labour. I’ve got news for them: we are already governed by Ed Miliband. This is now his administration. And they, and the rest of us, had better get used to it.
Keir Starmer is no longer really in charge of this government – if he ever really was. He is Prime Minister in name only. His foreign policy, at this time of war, is Ed Miliband’s. His economic policy, Ed Miliband’s. His Chancellor, his political positioning, his very quest for meaning. All. Ed. Miliband. The country may have thought we’d moved on from him in 2015. But, like war in the Middle East, he’s back after a decade and badder than ever.
It’s Miliband’s hand up Starmer’s back where a spine should be, controlling the ventriloquist’s dummy
Indeed, Miliband’s ascendancy has been secured by the war. As The Spectator’s political editor, Tim Shipman, revealed last month in his reporting on the inner workings of the National Security Council, it was Miliband who commanded the majority around the table dictating British policy. And Starmer who took direction. Miliband insisted on the UK keeping Donald Trump at arm’s length and denying the US access to UK bases. He was backed by Rachel Reeves, one of the most energetic supporters of his 2010 leadership run. Starmer and Defence Secretary John Healey, who initially favored closer alignment with the US, were overruled.
It was another reverse for a Prime Minister who had once set such store by his ability to maintain the integrity of our alliance with America. But it was yet another victory for Miliband. The Energy Secretary won the Labour leadership in 2010 on the back of his opposition to Tony Blair’s Iraq War stance. His most consequential act as Labour leader was thwarting UK support for US strikes against Assad’s Syria in 2013.
Labour’s most profound historic splits have always been over foreign and defense policy. Starmer’s aim in office was to re-establish Labour as the Bevinite party of NATO and forward action against dictators. But Miliband has out-maneuvered him and managed once more to unite the party behind the peacenik position. Starmer now mouths the anti-war lines. But it’s Miliband’s hand up his back where a spine should be, controlling the ventriloquist’s dummy.
The ramifications of the war should, ironically, only weaken Miliband’s position in government. As energy prices rise, further crippling industry and spreading to the forecourts, his insistence on running down our native oil and gas supplies looks more and more quixotic, to put it at its politest. Miliband has banned further exploitation of our North Sea resources. His actions are devastating the economy of the northeast of Scotland in advance of the Holyrood elections in May, derailing Labour’s principal aim of bringing the cost of living down and destroying the manufacturing firms in steel, ceramics, refining and other sectors which still provide high-paying jobs in the Midlands and north.
Miliband’s policies make us more reliant on imported fossil fuels at a time when their flow through the Strait of Hormuz has been choked. Other European nations with impeccable environmental credentials, such as Norway and Denmark, are now taking a much more permissive approach to the extraction of fossil fuels in their own sovereign waters.
And this week the chief executive of RenewableUK, hitherto one of the staunchest allies of the Miliband drive toward wind and solar, argued that it made no sense to leave domestic oil and gas in the ground. Real energy security, she argued, meant the utilization of all our available resources. But Miliband remains, literally, unmoved.
Starmer has been told repeatedly by those he once trusted that Miliband’s anti-fossil fuel fundamentalism is bad for growth, toxic for jobs and dangerous for our national security. That’s why he tried to move Miliband from the Energy Department at the last reshuffle. But Miliband point-blank refused to be shifted. And Starmer folded, conscious that Miliband’s popularity among party members, as the soft left’s champion, made it too risky to earn his enmity. And Miliband, having reminded Starmer then where real power lies, continues to determine the Prime Minister’s position. So in mid-March, when challenged on how to respond to rising energy costs, Starmer dutifully recited all Miliband’s talking points.
Starmer knows that Miliband’s energy policy, and the associated punitive costs, render Britain a black hole for investment, particularly in the data centers which are indispensable to the development of artificial intelligence. In her Mais lecture the same week, the Chancellor pinned her hopes for future growth on Britain’s edge in AI technology. Those who have worked for Starmer recognize this is, perhaps, the one area, apart from land-use planning, where this government can help resolve Britain’s chronic productivity problems.
But any chance of making progress in the technology which will define all our lives for the rest of this century is blocked by the insanely high cost of energy in the UK, which means the next generation of data centers will be built anywhere but here.
Those most responsible for Starmer’s victory in 2024 have now departed Downing Street. They knew that, for Labour to win, it had to be serious about national security and economic growth. It had to resist the temptation to be both soft and left. It was not about countering Reform; it was about vanquishing the persistent fear among moderate voters that Labour could not be counted on to put hard-headed defense and market concerns above the comforting embrace of pressure group politics and the desire to make Britain a “world leader” in some self-harming pursuit of utopian ideals.
The men who knew what Labour needed are gone. Directing the government now is the man who embodies the dangers they feared. And we are all paying the price for that surrender.
Harry Styles has a cute voice
Grade: B
In which the foppish Davy Jones figure from the manufactured band One Direction (Zayn Malik being Peter Tork; One Direction didn’t have a Mike Nesmith) sheds the soft-rock pop-lite that has served him so well and goes with what he fondly believes is challengingly funky EDM, a genre which I do not believe plays to his strengths. So what you get is lyrics as fabulously inane as on “Watermelon Sugar” but very little of the pleasant tunes which accompanied that and his many other hits. There are some interesting rhythmic textures for sure, and a surfeit of old-skool playground synths. There is also a surfeit of repetition, a necessity for the oeuvre and a polite nod toward rap. The Harries – the name for the many millions who worship the dude – may be a little discomfited, but not too much so. It is a toe in the water rather than full immersion.
He has a cute voice that can carry a tune – a shame, then, that there are few of them on this album. “Coming Up Roses” is a pretty ballad of the kind we might more usually associate with him, although the accompanying pedantic strings get on my nerves, and “The Waiting Game” has a sweet folkish lilt to it. Elsewhere, though, that voice is too often buried and blurred in the mix – on songs which only just about deserve that description. The exception, the one that works, is “American Girls,” which does drag you into its witless but catchy refrain.
The rest, based around slight melodic motifs, come and are gone without so much as grazing the memory. Hope it goes well for him – he seems a nice lad.