The trouble with Armando Iannucci

Armando Iannucci is a bit of a mystery to me. With shows like The Day Today and The Thick of It, he created some of the most astute political satire of the 1990s and 2000s. And yet put him in front of a microphone now and the man will display all the political insight of a draught excluder.

Iannucci regularly pops up in the media to promote his new projects and dispense milquetoast Guardianista opinions. Trump? He’s so mad he’s beyond satire! Brexit? What a mess, eh? Now, inevitably, he’s weighed in on wokeness – and spectacularly misunderstood what it actually is.

On Newsnight last night, Iannucci was asked about wokeness and whether it led comedy writers like him to self-censor. Naturally, he pretended that this wasn’t really a thing. ‘People aren’t self-censoring themselves because they’re afraid of offending people’, he said, before burbling something about everyone ‘retreating into our positions’.

Then he performed the half-cocked judo move beloved of centrist dads when asked about left-wing identity politics. ‘I think the people who most use that phrase “woke” are the ones who are themselves most censorious’, he said, pointing to the government’s legislative clampdown on protest. (A clampdown, it bears mentioning, that anti-Semitic Hamas supporters have proven remarkably immune to.)

‘I think the people who most use the phrase ‘woke’ are the ones that are the most censorious’

Armando Iannucci discusses writing satire and the need to challenge audiences with @vicderbyshire#Newsnight pic.twitter.com/RZekHywpvR

— BBC Newsnight (@BBCNewsnight) January 4, 2024

Look, I don’t like those Tory protest laws, either. The arrest of republicans purely for showing up to the coronation with anti-monarchy banners was an outrage. But to suggest that the Tories’ illiberal approach to ‘disruptive’ demos eclipses or cancels out the rampant woke authoritarianism of recent years is a lame deflection – a desperate attempt to change the subject and go back to bashing the ‘evil’ Conservatives.

Comedy writers aren’t self-censoring because of the speech codes of the identitarian left? It’s impossible to judge from the outside, I guess. Few creatives would openly admit to muzzling themselves. But what about the comedy writers who have been shut down, cancelled, for daring to defy those speech codes? Because there is no shortage of them.

What about Father Ted co-creator Graham Linehan, who has lost his career in the comedy industry, and even been visited by the police, after opposing misogynistic gender ideology – one of the sacred pillars of woke identity politics? As Linehan told me recently in a new documentary about his cancellation he lost one job after another as a result of his activism. It culminated in the plug being pulled on the Father Ted musical he had been working on – and which he had hoped would be his pension.

He has recently taken up stand-up, given the door to sitcom-making has been slammed so firmly in his face. But when Linehan tried to perform as part of a free-speech comedy line-up at the Edinburgh Fringe last summer, two venues cancelled on him, forcing the promoters to stage the show on the street outside the Scottish parliament. 

The year before that, Fringe legend Jerry Sadowitz – who hails from Armando Iannucci’s native Glasgow – had his show at the Pleasance pulled. Why? Did some dastardly minister intervene? Of course not. The venue folded after a handful of audience and staff members took offence to Sadowitz’s alleged ‘racism, sexism, homophobia and misogyny’ – even though being wilfully, obscenely offensive has been his stock in trade for decades.

I could go on. Another Scottish comic, Leo Kearse, had a show in Australia cancelled a few years back over his supposedly ‘transphobic’ material, even though he wrote said material with a trans woman he was dating at the time. In 2021, veteran working-class comic Chris McGlade had his critically acclaimed but thoroughly un-PC show Forgiveness pulled by the Soho Theatre, because some took offence to his language.

And that’s just comedy. What about all the books pulped, or the academics hounded off campus, because they refused to genuflect to woke orthodoxy? Was that all the Tories too, Armando? Yes, there are some censorious right-wingers who can, on their day, give the woke a run for the money. But their occasional tantrums are as nothing when compared to the stranglehold a new breed of identitarian leftism has over art, culture, academia and the media.

You’d think such a keen-eyed satirist would recognise that. But apparently not.

When will Rory Stewart’s time come?

Can a dose of moral earnestness revive Tory fortunes? This is the question raised by Rory Stewart’s recent memoir, Politics on the Edge: A Memoir From Within, which sits on top of the bestseller charts more than three months after it came out. Another question the book raises is this: is Stewart’s brand of moral earnestness the right one? His politics is rich in old-world honour, like that of a John Buchan hero. The reader half expects him to uncover a plot to sell Britain to China, and then be chased by soulless technocrats through moonlit moorland.

On one level, it didn’t work: when he stood for the leadership against Johnson and others, he seemed too intense, too eccentric. But maybe the party wasn’t ready for him. Maybe it had to consummate its relationship with Johnson, to drink the clownish cup to the lees, before it was ready for a rethink.

Stewart presents himself as the only serious moral foil to the Cameron-Johnson era. He protests too much, one feels at first. He sounds rather precious and preening, when he complains that Cameron failed to help him get elected – especially when this Old Etonian derides Cameron’s reliance on Old Etonian advisers. But gradually Stewart’s case is persuasive: Cameron and chums do indeed seem too enamoured of the game of politics, and to lack proper moral engagement.

As a minister, especially prisons minister, he gets stuck in with notable (perhaps ostentatious) energy. It’s not enough to be a smooth policy wonk, one must serve with almost priestly dedication, and share in the sufferings of the underprivileged. In a sense his most interesting stylistic rival is Gove, a policy wonk with a sort of priestly air. Ultimately, Stewart implies, Gove’s performance of high duty is a ruse, a screen for deep plotting.

Is Stewart’s moral earnestness rooted in religion? It’s strange that the reader is left unsure. In interviews he has quietly mentioned that he is an Anglican, but in the book there is no clear reference to this that I noticed. He mentions going to church at one point, but only to tell us that he’s accosted by an angry Brexiteer.

Why such religious reticence? Imagine a memoir by Rees-Mogg in which he didn’t mention his Catholicism, or one by Kate Forbes in which she didn’t mention her evangelicalism. Why shouldn’t an Anglican politician mention his form of faith? Maybe it would have helped him, by linking his moral earnestness to something wider, shifting the focus away from his personality, and his odd imperial hinterland. 

At one point he likens Johnson to a ‘libidinous pagan poet’ rather than a self-disciplined senator. Could he have gone further, and denounced the Tory party’s drift away from its moral and religious traditions? It would have seemed too preachy and priggish, you might say. But he already has that air, so it might, in fact, have given him substance. He should have said that the Tory party needs a strong conception of the common good, which is probably religious, if it is not to become the playground of slick show-offs, ironic clever-clogs, dodgy brainiacs, witty shallow bullies. He still should.

Oscar Pistorius should still be in prison

The murderer Oscar Pistorius was released from prison on parole today, more than a decade after shooting his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp. He killed her in an horrific act of femicide: the murder of females by males because they are female.

Because such crimes are so normalised and common, criminal justice systems around the world tend to excuse these particular men for committing the most serious crimes against women. In the UK, for example, one woman dies every three days at the hands of a current or former male partner. Some men even come in for preferential treatment: those that are famous, wealthy and conventionally attractive are often treated less harshly than other men. Conversely, the female victims – even dead ones – are judged for their previous sexual history, alcohol and drug use, and physical appearance.

Pistorius is more likely than most to be described as a hero, for the simple reason that he is a double-amputee who became a Paralympic and Olympic sprinter. Disabled men are sometimes handed a get-out-of-jail-free card for violent offences against women. Men that frequent brothels heaving with trafficked women and underage girls might, for instance, use the excuse that, because they ‘can’t get a real date’, we should make exceptions for them.

Let’s look at the facts of this particular case. Pistorius killed the 29-year-old Reeva by shooting her through a bathroom door after she had locked herself in to escape from him, following an argument on Valentine’s Day in 2013. Despite his repeated claims in court that he mistook her for an intruder, he was eventually found guilty of her murder. But at the initial trial he was convicted of the lesser charge of culpable homicide (the equivalent of manslaughter in England and Wales) and given just five years. Eventually South Africa’s supreme court overturned it and substituted the conviction with murder.

During the trial, a number of Reeva’s messages to Pistorius were read out by the prosecution in order to show that the relationship was an abusive one. Reeva had messaged that she constantly felt ‘attacked’ by Pistorius, from whom she felt she ‘deserved protection’.

She wrote to him in a text that she was, ‘scared of you sometimes and how u snap at me and of how you will react to me’. Her fears were well-founded: just weeks after this particular text he pumped her full of bullets as she cowered behind a door. Nevertheless, the judge described their relationship as ‘normal’. In my view, it was toxic and abusive.

The police officer turned media pundit, Mark Williams-Thomas, supported Oscar throughout the murder trial. He stood by Oscar’s side and claimed that the incident was not a ‘planned murder’ but an ‘accident’. To men like Williams-Thomas, Pistorius is just one of those decent blokes who took a wrong turn in life, or were dealt a bad hand by fate. But Reeva’s mother, June Steenkamp, knows what happened:

My dearest child screamed for her life; loud enough for the neighbours to hear her. I do not know what gave rise to his choice to shoot through a closed door at somebody with hollow-point ammunition when I believe he knew it was Reeva.

Reeva’s father Barry was so distraught at Pistorius’s refusal to tell the truth and admit that his daughter’s death was not as a result of a mistaken identity (Pistorius claimed he had believed she was an intruder, and that her death was therefore accidental), that he even visited the man in prison, hoping that the murderer would confess. He did not, though he did cry many tears of self-pity during the visit. Pistorius is clearly not a man who considers his own actions so heinous that he should do everything in his power to alleviate the pain and suffering of his victims’ loved ones.

I am fairly liberal when it comes to the prison system, and believe that the vast majority of the female prison population (and a sizeable proportion of the male one) should not be in there at all. I think prison should be only for the protection of others, and long sentences handed down only in the most extreme circumstances. I do not support whole life sentences, other than in the very rare case of a person so dangerous they could never be deemed safe to live amongst the public again.

But time and again, I have seen parole boards – in the UK and elsewhere – release men who have committed grave acts of violence against women and girls, including rape and murder, because they are seen to be safe. They are considered low-risk despite never having shown adequate remorse for their crimes. When they do display sympathy, they do so towards themselves more than they do their victims. Yet a number of these men go on to commit further acts of violence against women.

Pistorius is clearly judged by some not as a murderer, but as a handsome and wealthy elite athlete; to some South Africans, he remains a national hero. The way that the likes of Pistorius manage to garner public sympathy when they have a history of domestic abuse towards their partner prior to murdering them, is sickening. Meanwhile, the women that kill violent male partners as a response to extreme sexual and domestic abuse are often seen as straightforwardly evil, and locked up for life.

South Africa is facing a tsunami of domestic abuse, and this case will grant violent men even more permission to do their bidding, and instil fear in the women who are the victims of psychological and physical torture. Pistorius has never owned up to what happened that night. Until he does, he should be kept in prison.

XL bully ban comes back to bite the SNP

Oh dear. It seems that those strategic geniuses in the SNP have done it again. This week saw the ban on XL bully dogs come into force in England and Wales, following a string of violent attacks by the pugnacious breed. But up in the people’s paradise of Humza Yousaf’s Scotland, ministers there decided that they knew best.

In November, the SNP government formally rejected a request from Michael Gove, the levelling up secretary, to introduce similar measures ‘in light of the threat to public safety’, and to avoid the obvious risk of ‘creating a potential dumping ground for dangerous dogs’ in Scotland.

Two months on and – quelle surprise! – the Scottish press is now full of reports that an ‘alarming’ number of the breed are being moved north of the border to avoid the English ban. Underheugh Ark Rescue, an animal charity in the west of Scotland, wrote online that: ‘We have seen many “pop-up rescues” moving huge numbers of dogs to Scotland. Dogs are being dumped at police stations, sold on sites after being given away free in England and worst still they are being found dead.’

It means that those same Scottish ministers are being reduced to begging XL bully owners not to bring their dogs to Scotland to be rehomed. Siobhian Brown, the self-identifying ‘community safety minister’, yesterday told BBC Radio Scotland’s Drivetime programme that the onus should be on England and Wales to hold owners accountable for their actions. Talk about chutzpah!

Brown has even written to the UK government to urge that ‘people in England and Wales do not use any loopholes … in getting rid of their dogs’ – something that, er, she herself could have ensured by making it a mainland-wide ban. Talk about an XL-sized problem, all of the SNP’s own making…

Two bets for the Cheltenham Festival

At 8 a.m. this morning, my column was done, the ‘i’s were dotted, the ‘t’s crossed. I had even suggested a headline, ‘Three mudlarks for Sandown tomorrow’.  Within half an hour, I would be pressing the send button on my weekly email to my friends at Spectator Life.

Sadly, just 20 minutes later, the whole column was redundant. My three fancies that loved heavy ground would not have the chance to lark around in the mud: tomorrow’s Sandown card, the highlight of which was due to be the final of the Unibet Veterans’ Handicap Chase, was abandoned due to waterlogging.

Since a tipping column without a tip is about as useful as a constitutional monarchy without a king or queen at its head, there had to be a hasty rethink. This weekend’s fare at the other tracks had already offered nothing of interest to me on the betting front.

However, as of this week, William Hill became the first bookmaker to offer NRNB (that, for the irregular gamblers, means Non Runner No Bet) on all 28 races at the Cheltenham Festival. Normally, an ante-post post bet is lost if the horse fails to run in the race in which you have backed it, but NRNB is an insurance policy against this.

However, since no bookie I have ever come across can be likened to a charity, the NRNB concessions typically leads to reduced odds. A punter therefore has to ask himself or herself just one question: ‘If horse X runs in this festival race, is it likely to be bigger or shorter odds on the day?’

With that question in mind, my first tip with the NRNB concession is DJELO in the Grade 1 Turners Novices’ Chase. Venetia Williams’ six-year-old gelding has, like many of her horses, proved to be much better over chasers than hurdlers. Since switching to the larger obstacles, he has won all three of his races this season and he is now officially rated at 149. He’s on the small side for a chaser but he is a quick, neat jumper.

Do bear in mind that last year’s Turners Novices’ Chase attracted only seven runners and the winner, Stage Star, went into the race rated 152 and the runner-up, Notlongtillmay, went into it rated only 142.

In my mind, that makes Djelo a decent each way bet at 20-1 NRNB, three places for the Turners Novices’ Chase on 14 March. If he does not run, you get your money back. If he does run, he is very unlikely to go off at odds as big as 20-1.

My second bet with the NRNB concession is STUMPTOWN in the Ultima Handicap Chase on day one of the Festival (12 March). I put up Gavin Cromwell’s horse as one of my two tips for the Coral Gold Cup in November. However, he was hampered at the first fence and never got into any rhythm thereafter, eventually being pulled up before four out. I knew that run was too bad to be true and the horse returned from Ireland for another raid on British soil on New Year’s Day, this time winning a competitive little handicap chase at Cheltenham by five lengths.

The handicapper has yet to give him a new rating for that decent run but he is likely he will go up 5lbs or 6lbs to a mark of around 147 or 148. That would make him a strong candidate for the Ultima as connections know he likes the track and he has proved he can stay the distance.

I like the fact that Stumptown seems to handle all ground conditions from ‘good’ to ‘heavy’ and, once again, if he lines up for his most likely target, he is unlikely to be 12-1 or bigger. Back him each way with William Hill NRNB for the Ultima at those odds, especially as the bookie is already paying five places on the race.

I realise that for readers of this column to back these two tips they will either need to have, or to open, a William Hill account but that shouldn’t be too difficult to achieve. However, do not back either of these two horses without the NRNB concession as neither is certain to line up for the race that I have mentioned.

Incidentally, I have a very strong fancy for the Wigley Group-sponsored Classic Chase at Warwick a week tomorrow – he’s a well-handicapped horse who has been laid out for the race and I will definitely be putting my betting boots for this one. However, with no early declarations for the race and therefore no ante-post odds offered by bookmakers, it is a question of watch this space in seven days’ time.

2023-4 jumps season

Pending:

1 point each way Stumptown at 12-1 NRNB for the Ultima Handicap Chase, paying 1/5^th odds, 5 places.

1 point each way Giovinco at 20-1 for the Brown Advisory Novices’ Chase, paying 1/5^th odds, three places.

1 point each way Djelo at 20-1 NRNB for the Turners Novices’ Chase, paying 1/5^th odds, three places.

1 point each way Home By The Lee at 28-1 for the Paddy Power Stayers’ Hurdle, paying 1/5^th odds, three places.

1 point each way Mahler Mission at 20-1 for the Randox Grand National, paying 1/5^th odds, five places.

Settled bets from last week:

1 point each way Shakem Up’Arry at 7-1 for the New Year’s Day Handicap Chase, paying ¼ odds, each way. 1^st. + 8.75 points.

1 point each way Frero Banbou at 9-1 for the New Year’s Day Handicap Chase, paying ¼ odds, each way. 2^nd. +1.25 points.

2023-4 jump seasons to date: + 2.95 points.

2023 flat season: – 48.22 points on all tips.

2022-3 jumps season: + 54.3 points on all tips.

My gambling record for the past eight years: I have made a profit in 14 of the past 16 seasons to recommended bets. To a 1 point level stake over this period, the overall profit of has been 475 points. All bets are either 1 point each way or 2 points win (a ‘point’ is your chosen regular stake).

Biden’s bogus memorialisation of 6 January

It’s fright month in Joe Biden’s America, folks. Today, 5 January, the US President will travel to Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, to mark the third anniversary of the riot on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC on 6 January 2021. He would have done it on the day but the event had to be rescheduled due to an incoming storm. Biden also likes to rest on the weekends. 

Still, near the spot where George Washington and his continental army survived the brutal Revolutionary War winter of 1777-78, the increasingly ethereal 46th president will endeavour to summon the tough ghosts of America’s founding. He will deliver yet another warning about the petrifying threat which ‘MAGA extremists’ (i.e. Donald Trump supporters) pose to the soul of the nation.

On Monday, in case anybody is struggling to connect the dots, Biden will go on to Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, where in 2015 an armed Neo-Nazi lunatic called Dylann Roof killed nine African-American Christians. There, Biden will dwell more on the traumatic and ongoing struggle for American liberty and the petrifying threat that ‘MAGA extremists’ (i.e. Donald Trump supporters) pose to the soul of the nation.

Yesterday, Biden released his first campaign advertisement of 2024, which gives us a fair clue of what to expect at Valley Forge: ‘There’s an extremist movement that does not share the basics beliefs in our democracy,’ says Biden over a montage showing disturbing clips of 6 January rioting set against images of decent-looking Democrats queuing up to vote, footage of Martin Luther King and Biden and vice president Kamala Harris looking purposeful in Oval Office. The accompanying piano chords shift from sinister to rousing. 

‘History is watching,’ says Biden, who loves sprinkling America’s Manifest Destiny on to his lifestory. He may not say ‘MAGA’ or ‘Trump’ today – my bet is he will – but he’s been making the same point, over and over, in the same way for four years. Team Biden wants ‘Protecting Democracy’ to be the leitmotif of his presidency. But it often sounds like an old man repeating himself ad nauseam.

In 2019, announcing his campaign for the presidency, he released a video that began by saying that ‘Charlottesville Virginia is home to one of the great documents in human history,’ referring to the Declaration of Independence. ‘Charlottesville is also home to a defining moment for this nation in the last few years,’ he went on – key change – referring to the notorious clash between a far-right rally and anti-racism protestors in the city in 2015.

In 1 September 2022, Biden delivered that alarming speech on what he called the ‘sacred ground’ of Independence Hall in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Backed by bizarro scarlet lighting and two US marines, Biden issued an almost martial appeal to ‘Democrats, independents, mainstream Republicans’ to unite against Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans’ and ‘behind the single purpose of defending our democracy regardless of your ideology’. In other words: support me or you are a MAGA extremist. ‘You can be pro-America and pro-ex-pro-ex pro-insurrectionist,’ he said, stammering again, perhaps as his subconscious rebelled against the cant.  

‘Throughout our history, America has often made the greatest progress coming out of some of our darkest moments,’ said Biden. In the coming days we’ll hear more of that Manichean talk: truth and light (Biden) versus lies and darkness (Trump). Team Biden is desperate to fix 6 January in the collective memory as a day when the holy flame of American freedom was almost extinguished. According to the Democrats’ preferred narrative of recent history, the ugly scenes of 6 January mark the climax of tragedy that was the Trump years; Biden’s victory in 2024, they hope, will be the denouement. 

Biden has a strong sense of the tragic and pitches himself as the ‘Empathizer-in-Chief.’ His memoirs, speeches and off-the-cuff remarks are riddled with references or allusions to his understanding of suffering and healing. In the days following the 7 October terror attacks in Israel, when he flew to Tel Aviv and said: ‘To those who are grieving a child, a parent, a spouse, a sibling, a friend, I know you feel like there’s that black hole in the middle of your chest. You feel like you’re being sucked into it. The survivor’s remorse, the anger, the questions of faith in your soul.’ He knows of what he speaks. He lost his own wife and daughter to a car crash, he lost his son to brain cancer, his other son has struggled with drug addiction – yet the brave old man keeps fighting and winning for America. He won’t rest until the battle against tyrannical Trumpism is won. 

Yet Donald Trump and his supporters have their own compelling heroic narrative of three parts: the shock triumph in 2016, the deep-state strike back in 2020 and then the great reckoning of 2024, when patriotic defenders of the constitutional Republic will at last vanquish the enemies of freedom who pretend to be protecting democracy.

As evidence of their righteousness and the wickedness of their enemies, Trump supporters point towards the violent and Democrat-backed riots of the Black Lives Matter, the legal persecution of the Donald in the courts and the ‘rigged election’ election four years ago. Biden calls this all a ‘wild conspiracy theory’ and, yes, there’s plenty of that in right-wing circles. But then, if democracy is so sacrosanct, why is there such a broad, Democrat-led legal attempt to stop Trump running on just about any conceivable charge?  

6 January was appalling but it was not an ‘insurrection’ by any reasonable definition – the only person who was killed that day was a protestor, a woman called Ashli Babbitt. The vast majority of protestors clearly had no idea what they were doing. Biden’s attempt to memorialise 6 January as the terrifying day the American dream so nearly died is as cynical as it is bogus. If history is watching, how will it review his version of the last eight years? 

In praise of Israeli women

I’ve always admired Israeli women. Though I didn’t see any in the flesh before my first trip to the Promised Land 20 years ago, at Sunday School I far preferred the complex women of the Old Testament – Deborah the judge, Yael the assassin, Ruth the first philo-Semite – to the repenting hookers and grieving mothers of the New. The book of Exodus revolves around the actions of five women; the Talmud teaches that ‘the Jewish people were redeemed from Egypt because of the merit of the righteous women of that generation’.

Though the nation of Israel is first mentioned in an Egyptian artefact from 1200BC while ‘Palestine’ has only had its own flag since 1964 (during a 1981 exchange with the US Ambassador to Israel, Menachem Begin said ‘Jews have survived without a strategic cooperation memorandum with America for 3,700 years – and can live without it for another 3,700 years’) ceaseless invasion and persecution had driven the Hebrew diaspora to every corner of the world, where forced conversion and pogroms welcomed them.

In the early years of the 20th century when the level of murderousness against the Jews of Eastern Europe became too much for even this eternally persecuted people, Theodor Herzl’s audacious dream – that the Jews could return to their ancestral homeland – became a reality as many of the young generation of the diaspora retraced their forebears footsteps back to Judea. These were the decades when the kibbutz rebuilt the land, gone to rack and ruin in the absence of the Jews; though of necessity agrarian, the kibbutz project was steeped in modern ideas of socialism and to some extent feminism in that women were expected to work as hard as men – whether they liked it or not. A friend tells me: ‘My grandmother arrived the Soviet Union in 1922,  joined a kibbutz and helped clear agricultural land by picking up stones – she cried every day for the first year.’ In order to facilitate this, children were generally raised collectively, visiting with their parents for a few hours a day; this system ended because the majority of women, inexplicably, preferred being a slave to a toddler rather than spending their time with fellow sentient beings.

What hacking a homeland out of a desert began, military training established. The women of the IDF have in recent years become known as much for their good looks as their combat skills, but their fight has always been an existential one since the tiny Jewish state was declared war upon by five Arab nations when the British finally stepped aside. Women were active in the underground armies; with statehood came the Israel Defence Forces, in which Israeli Jewish, Druze, and Circassian (other groups are free to volunteer) women from the age of 18 are compelled to do national service for two years. As Israel’s first prime minister David Ben-Gurion said:

The army is the supreme symbol of duty and as long as women are not equal to men in performing this duty, they have not yet obtained true equality. If the daughters of Israel are absent from the army, then the character of the country will be distorted.

Despite this, after the war for statehood was won, women were generally pulled back from the frontline and expected to serve in support roles; ironically, in the light of 7 October, the reason for this was the likelihood of female soldiers being sexually assaulted by their enemies. But an all-female seven-strong tank crew of 20-year-olds fought for 17 hours straight against Hamas, killing 50 of them, whereas civilian women were raped and butchered in droves.

There are so many heroines in the Middle Eastern country the size of Wales; the grandmother seeing this evil for the second time, the mother seeing her children leave to fight, the widow left to bring up her children alone, the little girl freed from Gaza going back to school – most heartbreakingly, the bereaved mother of one of the Israeli hostages held by Hamas and accidentally killed by the IDF. Iris Haim, mother of Yotam, sent a message to the soldiers responsible for her son’s death:

I am Yotam’s mother. I wanted to tell you that I love you very much, and I hug you here from afar. I know that everything that happened is absolutely not your fault, and nobody’s fault except that of Hamas. We want to see you with our own eyes and and tell you that what you did – however hard it is to say this, and sad – it was apparently the right thing in that moment. And nobody’s going to judge you or be angry. We love you very much. And that is all.

All of them, the nameless heroines, as well as the very public, passionate and proficient Rimons, Noas, Ayelets, Assitas, Cochavs and Tzipis. I have particular admiration for 85-year-old Yaffa Adar, whose abduction was live-streamed by Hamas; calm and smiling, some mistook her assumed her stoicism for dementia, but she said later ‘They spat and cursed at me – it wasn’t nice. But when I sat there I said to myself “I won’t let them break me, I will behave in a way so that my children will be proud of me.” I wasn’t afraid… I wasn’t going to give them pleasure of seeing me afraid.’ At the other extreme, there was the raw grief of the young women involved in the Tel Aviv ‘fashion show’ last month where every model on the catwalk was either a survivor of the 7 October pogroms or had lost a loved one, including the ‘bride’ in the wedding dress, a ‘bullet hole’ exactly where her fiancé’s would have been after he was murdered by Hamas.

The seventh of October has changed everything – Israel, the Middle East, the world. Incidentally, it has even changed feminism; it will no longer be possible for whole swathes of women who considered themselves feminists to be seen now as anything but the groupies of violent men. Three months after that terrible day, Israeli women are still trying to make sense of the singular level of callousness extended to them by organisations and individuals who had been throwing around slogans like #METOO and #BELIEVEWOMEN for the best part of a decade. Now #METOOUNLESSYOU’REAJEW and #BELIEVEWOMENUNLESSTHEY’REJEWS have emerged as Israeli women attempt to comprehend how much the world hates them for inadvertently revealing the death-adoring heart of Islamism. Who would have thought that the women of the left would be the biggest handmaids around, the most surrendered of sister-wives, the most fawning of camp-followers? Many western feminists appear to subscribe to a neo-Marxist power dynamic theory in which the men of Gaza were being oppressed by Israeli women merely by being alive and free several miles away, leading to such unforgivable reactions as those from Rivkah Brown of Novara Media (‘a day of celebration’). When Islamists butchered Israeli women, they were attacking not just Israel, but female freedom, which made it all the weirder that western feminists did not stand with them. Still, all those copies of Fifty Shades didn’t buy themselves.

Israel is a land where women – Jewish, Christian and Muslim – may realise their talents and abilities; it is a beacon of freedom in a region steeped in misogyny,  viewed with murderous loathing by nations where only men matter. (‘Palestine’ – for all its radical shape-throwing – is no different from Saudi Arabia, in that women need a male guardian to travel and have been cautioned by the morality police for laughing in public.) But the freedom of Israeli women has been hewn out of horror, and no one will take it from them; the establishment of modern Israel has changed irrevocably the historic idea of what a Jew is – and what could be done to a Jew with impunity. The sexual pogroms committed against Israeli women, filmed as entertainment and used as pornography, sought to return Jewish women to the degraded status which Sartre described in his essay ‘Jew and Anti-Semite’:

There is in the phrase a ‘beautiful Jewess’ a very special sexual signification, one quite different from that contained in the words ‘beautiful Rumanian’, ‘beautiful Greek’, or ‘beautiful American’… this phrase carries an aura of rape and massacre. The ‘beautiful Jewess’ is she whom the Cossacks under the tzar dragged by her hair through the streets of the burning village… frequently violated or beaten, she sometimes succeeds in escaping dishonour by means of death, but that is a form of justice; and those who keep their virtue are docile servants or humiliated  women.

What happened on 7 October was without doubt the worst atrocity committed against the Jews since the Nazis almost 80 years ago. But we will see Israel emerge stronger from this terrible battle. I am not dismissing my own or any other ethnic group of females when I observe, with unqualified admiration, that with such extraordinary women as sisters and soldiers and mothers and leaders, this remarkable people will never be destroyed – however hard the fascist legions of both right and left, past and present, try.

The mystical power of Assisi

In the courtyard of the bishop’s palace, the young man who would become Saint Francis stripped naked in front of his parents and various town and church officials. He handed his clothes with a bag of money on top to his father, saying: ‘I give these back to you. From now on I have one father; the Father in Heaven’.

It was a turning point in his life (not to mention devastating for his parents). He would become known as Il Poverello – ’the little poor man’ in Italian’ – famous across the world for embracing a radical simplicity and humility in the pursuit of the divine Godhead, and for turning his back on ‘the economic system of calculated wealth’, as Donald Spoto describes in Reluctant Saint: The Life of Francis of Assisi. 

It was also a turning point for the town that Francis called home. The legend of the saint’s life became inextricably intertwined with Assisi’s reputation. It became Italy’s most significant pilgrimage site after Rome. Some argue Assisi is the true spiritual heart of Italy – Saint Francis, after all, composed the first poem in the Italian language.

Assisi is a walled enclave laid out along a spur of Mount Subasio that soars above the town as part of the Apennine Mountain chain running through the region of Umbria (as beautiful as Tuscany next door, just cheaper and with fewer tourists on the whole). A classic hilltop town, it has all the attractive and atmospheric elements you expect to find amid twisting narrow alleys, archways and endless vantage spots from which to gaze at the serene valley below stretching into the distance.

But there is something else that sets Assisi apart, in addition to all the nuns and friars walking around. ‘Certain places have a distinct feeling, presence, or energy of peace,’ says Martin Gray a cultural anthropologist and writer specialising in pilgrimage traditions and sacred sites. ‘Assisi is one of these places.’ Admittedly, this was not immediately obvious when I first arrived in Assisi after traipsing 67 miles across the Franciscan heartland of Umbria while leading a Catholic Herald pilgrimage.

It was bedlam when our group entered the Basilica di San Francesco’s lower chamber, having collected about 20 radios and headsets from the tourism office which tangled around our necks and torsos. Blanketed in pre-Renaissance frescos considered one of the most precious collections in all of Italy, the Irish friar acting as our guide around the church kept warning us to not block the aisles or we would get it in the neck from the ‘security’ personnel keeping an eye on the swarming crowds.

But when coach parties and ‘pilgrims’ who have not come on foot – the shame of it – are no longer rampaging, Assisi feels very different. Wandering the narrow empty streets that wind through the different levels of the town, you get a better sense of the solitude and spiritual calm that was so important to Francis, and which he famously sought out in his caves and reclusive hermitages.

As each day passed at Assisi, I felt myself better able to tune into this calmer frequency, ‘an atmosphere of serene mysticism and deep inner peace’, Derry Brabbs writes in Pilgrimage: The Great Pilgrimage Routes of Britain and Europe. This ‘holy resonance‘ is all the more striking in our age of rush, disturbance, distraction and propaganda from the media-advertising industrial complex.

Like that other great pilgrimage lodestar Santiago de Compostela, there is something about the solid stone walls of Assisi that is reassuring, even meaningful. After all, forged by geologic action over millions of years, those walls contain the ‘energy of the earth’, notes Russ Eanes in Pilgrim Paths to Assisi.

He ponders, as did I there, how that energy might be transferred to those of us surrounded by such ancient building blocks. For there is unquestionably a different (and preferable) sort of energy given off to that from the plate-glass offices and Tower of Babel-like apartment blocks that dominate our modern cities.  

Deep in the basilica is a striking painting depicting a six-winged Seraphim angel bestowing the stigmata with what looks like lasers hitting Francis, who is doing an impression of the actor William Dafoe succumbing to the Vietcong at the end of Platoon (the holes in his body even contained the nails too, the friar told us). Various scholars argue that while his hands and feet bore marks, they were the result of illness and his body shutting down after decades of fasting, penance and mortifying the flesh.

Stigmata-ed or not, though, Saint Francis, like all saints, undoubtedly broke through to a dimension of reality and consciousness that most of us will never know or will only ever encounter through the tiniest of glimpses after briefly lifting the corner of the universe to look underneath. We barely glimpse a thing in this life compared to those abstemious mystics.  

Assisi, Santiago de Compostela and other sacred sites are transcendent repositories of humanity’s mystical astronauts who, like Saint Francis, ventured beyond the deadened parameters of cold rationality, raw data and empirical evidence that the modern world suffocates people with. They saw.

In defence of ‘fat cat’ chief executives

Are chief executives overpaid? The High Pay Centre thinks so. Every January, it releases data showing the huge inequality between top UK CEOs and average workers. The results are startling: ‘Bosses of Britain’s biggest companies will have made more money in 2024 by lunchtime on Thursday than the typical worker will all year,’ according to the BBC, which wrote up the story showing that top bosses’ average reward amounts to £3.81 million a year. But is this disparity with the £34,963 annual median wage for full-time workers really a surprise?

The truth is that this pay gap is an obvious feature of a free market where top pay in business is associated with great responsibilities and considerable stress. Of course, some CEOs prove incompetent or betray the trust of their shareholders and last year provided the usual crop of examples. But the market generally punishes the duff and the crooked. Most CEOs work hard and deserve to be paid accordingly.

FTSE-100 CEOs are paid roughly in line with their counterparts in other similar European countries such as Germany and France, though considerably less than equivalents in the USA. Much high pay in all countries is now performance-linked in one way or another.

In relative terms, top executive pay in Britain has not increased significantly recently, so the HPC has no big reveal to hit the headlines. But they make a splash by presenting their findings in terms of the number of days it takes the median FTSE-100 CEO to earn the median average annual salary. This seems to amount to three working days on the HPC’s calculation. The TUC is suitably outraged; its general secretary Paul Nowak claims that this shows the need to impose worker representatives on company boards – a notion, incidentally, that Theresa May flirted with.

The figures published this week certainly make for a striking comparison, though this pay gap pales into insignificance compared with that for some other top earners. Footballer Jack Grealish has been in the news recently as a result of a break-in at his luxury home. The Manchester City midfielder is currently paid £300,000 a week, which means that he earns the average working person’s annual salary in one morning’s training session. Not bad for a player who spends most of his game time dribbling round in circles, hoofing the ball over the bar and pretending to be tripped up. Good luck to Jack though, and good luck to highly-paid CEOs. They pay stonking amounts in taxes: the top 1 per cent of all earners in this country pay almost 30 per cent of income tax. If we somehow stopped these people earning large amounts, many of them – footballers or CEOs – would leave the country; a high proportion of both are foreign nationals and are here for the money, not the weather and Saturday night TV. Even if they all stayed here and grumbled, we’d most likely end up paying higher taxes as a consequence.

The High Pay Centre has conducted research showing that three quarters of people think top earners should not be paid more than 20 times their low and middle earning colleagues. But quite how this policy should be achieved is unclear. Shareholders in companies operating in international markets are unlikely to vote for something which would tie their hands behind their back in competing for talent. More than a decade ago, the coalition government asked Will Hutton, a strong critic of high pay, to report on possible legal restrictions on public sector pay, where there is less international competition. But Hutton specifically ruled out a 20-times rule even for public servants, pointing to various likely unintended consequences.

If a law linked CEO pay to average pay within a firm, it would mean that CEOs in the financial sector, where average pay is high, could be paid more than CEOs in retailing, where the average is much lower. It would also incentivise businesses to outsource low-paid work to boost average pay and thus allowable CEO pay. More restrictions would be necessary to prevent this.

Any rule for CEOs would also have implications for pay below that level. In many big companies functional heads – accountants, lawyers and the like – are paid more than £700,000 a year. Presumably their pay, and that of all their subordinates, would have to come down too. The entire pay structure of private business would be affected, with unforeseeable consequences for the efficiency of the labour market and productivity.

So, though the High Pay Centre’s reports offer everybody an annual opportunity to whinge about undeserving ‘fat cats’, its analysis will never a useful guide to policy. If a new Labour government wants to push in the direction of greater equality, it is likely to stick to the familiar mix of increased taxes (which will hit footballers as well as CEOs) and welfare benefits.

Sunak plays it safe with election announcement

Rishi Sunak is – not unusually – playing it safe by saying his ‘working assumption’ is that the election will be in the second half of this year. The speculation that it would be on 2 May had been building to the point that the Prime Minister was at risk of looking afraid if he didn’t then go for a spring poll. He knows from watching what happened to Gordon Brown’s Election That Never Was the dangers of ramping up speculation without following through. That doesn’t mean he won’t change course and go for the May election in the end anyway, but dampening the chatter about it is a sensible tactic.

One of the reasons many Conservatives assumed there would be an election on 2 May is that the local elections are also due to be held on this day, which means councillors will be out knocking on doors to save their own bacon as well as that of the MP. As I explained in the Observer recently, an autumn election does mean that the Tory activist base may be demoralised after heavy local losses, and therefore new candidates replacing the hordes of Conservative MPs heading for the door will have even less support. 

But in recent days, an interesting theory had developed among some backbenchers and junior ministers. They think the local elections, due to take place on 2 May, could instead be shuffled back to June to take place at the same time as a general election. This would be in the first half of the year – just – and would mean the party could still harness local councillors to their maximum effect. It’s not clear, though, what the point of the extra month would be. By the autumn, there could be more green shoots for Sunak to point at and say ‘stick with me so I can finish the job’.

Labour’s response has been to borrow from the way the Tories treated Gordon Brown in 2010: they are calling Sunak a ‘squatter’ who is afraid of a general election. Together with the Liberal Democrats, they will continue to push for polling day to come as soon as possible, with Ed Davey threatening to table a return of the Fixed Term Parliaments Act so that MPs can set the election for 2 May after all. Sunak’s majority is pretty hollow on most things, but he can be confident that Davey’s plan is as much of a stunt as his removal van yesterday: no Tory MP is going to vote for their party to lose an election sooner rather than later.

It’s no surprise Humza Yousaf is courting Brian Souter

It seems that Humza Yousaf is taking diversity seriously – though not as we know it. Scotland’s First Minister has apparently welcomed the Christian fundamentalist former bus tycoon Brian Souter, regarded as a homophobe by the Scottish Greens, back into the SNP fold. Changed days. 

The SNP needs all the help it can get with the business community in Scotland and Souter has been helping out schmoozing them, according to Politico. A freedom of information request revealed that Yousaf’s aides have been actively courting Scotland’s richest man following his sale of Stagecoach two years ago. 

SNP donations have all but dried up in recent years and the party needs cash for the upcoming general election campaign. In the past five years, the party has only received one donation over £50,000 from a living person. Souter used to be the SNP’s biggest donor before Nicola Sturgeon took over. They, however, didn’t see eye to eye on issues of personal morality. 

Back in 2000, at the dawn of devolution, Souter bankrolled the infamous ‘Keep the Clause’ campaign to keep Clause 28 (Section 2A in Scotland) which banned the promotion of homosexuality in schools. It was an unholy alliance of tabloid newspapers, including the Daily Record, and the Roman Catholic Church in the august form of the late Cardinal Winning. Souter put up a reported £1 million to finance a referendum on keeping the clause, which is regarded as homophobic by LGBT campaigners. But he failed. The clause was abolished later that year by the Scottish parliament. 

However, Souter remained a close associate of Alex Salmond until 2014 and donated a total of £2.5 million to the cause. He was frozen out by Nicola Sturgeon who wanted to emphasise the SNP’s progressive image and promote the LGBT cause. Or perhaps Souter froze her out – it was never entirely clear. But the financial cost was considerable. Souter hasn’t given the SNP a penny since she became leader. 

Now change is in the air. Souter’s views are not far removed from those of Yousaf’s former leadership rival, Kate Forbes. He is pro-life and, like Forbes, is thought to oppose gay marriage, though he insists he is no homophobe. Indeed, he famously launched a libel action in 2002 against the Guardian cartoonist Steve Bell for depicting him as a ‘homophobic bus driver’. Souter eventually withdrew the suit. 

It is intriguing that Souter’s apparent return to the SNP coincided with Yousaf’s decision to abandon the legal fight to save the gender bill, currently stalled by the UK under Section 35 of the Scotland Act. The bill is widely assumed to be dead. Souter’s views on transgenderism are not known, but you can be pretty sure he’s against it. 

Souter’s second coming will inevitably be seen as another snub to the Scottish Green party. They loathe everything that Souter, who attends the evangelical Trinity Church of the Nazarene in Perth, stands for – almost as much as they loathe Kate Forbes for her membership of the fundamentalist ‘Wee Free’ Church of Scotland. Forbes also believes that children should not be born out of wedlock and says she would have opposed gay marriage has she been in parliament in 2014. 

But perhaps this should not be a surprise to anyone who has followed SNP politics. Salmond favoured the abolition of Clause 28/2A and, as first minister, promoted the legislation on same sex marriage, while still keeping Souter in the party orbit. The SNP has long been a broad church willing to welcome anyone who sincerely wanted Scotland to be independent. Indeed, Sturgeon’s promotion of ‘progressive’ ideologies was something of a departure for the SNP. 

Nor should we be particularly surprised that Yousaf is apparently prepared to tolerate Souter, at least as far as helping with the business community is concerned. They met last summer at a ‘national prayer breakfast’ organised by Souter. Yousaf is a practising Muslim and the average Imam’s views on homosexuality, abortion and same sex marriage is likely to be very much in line with Souter’s. Indeed, Yousaf famously sidestepped the 2014 vote on same sex marriage, though he said he supported it in principle. 

At any rate, the character of the SNP is changing in ways that could not have been envisaged only a year ago when Sturgeon was still in Bute House promoting gender reform and the alliance with the Scottish Green party. She brought the Green’s co-leaders, Patrick Harvie and Lorna Slater into the Scottish government – a move which has angered many SNP traditionalists who complain that the green tail is wagging the SNP dog. 

Indeed, the former finance secretary Kate Forbes has called for the Green-SNP alliance to be abandoned. She ran Yousaf close in the race to replace Sturgeon and now represents a significant challenge to the First Minister if he loses many seats at the coming general election. Perhaps with that in mind he is giving a clear message that the SNP is back to being a very broad church indeed. 

Kids with conservative parents are happier

Welcome back to Culture Shock! I hope everyone had a wonderful holiday season and is gearing up for the big winter storm that is supposed to hit the east coast this weekend. The latest models in the DMV suggest we’re mostly getting sleet, which is a bit disappointing after years of mild winters and very little snow.

This was my first Christmas since getting married, and it’s tough to figure out how to divide time between your family and your in-laws. We decided to spend Christmas Eve with my family and then flew to Florida on Christmas morning to see my husband’s family for a couple of days. I am very lucky in that pretty much all of my family members are conservative, so our political arguments are limited in scope.

Just before the holidays, I stumbled across a new Gallup study that had some fascinating findings on the impact of parents’ political ideology on their children. Specifically, children of very conservative parents have much better mental health outcomes than the children of liberals. I have been meaning to write about it for a while because it didn’t get much attention in the mainstream media, for reasons you can probably guess.

The study was conducted by Jonathan Rothwell, a principal economist at Gallup and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and published by the Institute for Family Studies. In June 2023, Gallup collected data from 6,643 parents and 1,580 adolescents on issues like adolescent mental health, parental demographics, parents’ political views, parenting practices, and more. 

The study chiefly found that there are specific parenting practices that lead to better mental health outcomes for adolescents. Children respond the best to parents who are warm and affectionate but also set boundaries and discipline their children when necessary. For example, requiring a child to complete priorities set by parents before allowing them to play or relax, setting a regular routine for school days, hugging or kissing the child every day and responding quickly to a child’s needs are all associated with an approximately seven-percentage-point-higher chance of the child having good mental health. Alternatively, practices like finding it difficult to discipline a child or letting the child get his or her way in a conflict are associated with decreased mental health outcomes for the child. 

Unsurprisingly (to me at least), the study also finds that conservative parents are more likely to adopt the warm, authoritative parenting style and thus have stronger relationships with their children. As a result, their children have much better mental health outcomes. Contrastingly, liberal parents are more likely to adopt a permissive parenting style, which is associated with a poor parent-child relationship and, consequently, poorer mental health outcomes for the child. 

Seventy-seven percent of adolescents with very conservative parents reported good or excellent mental health, compared to just 55 percent of adolescents with liberal parents. 

“As it happens, being raised by liberal parents is a much larger risk factor for mental health problems in adolescence than being raised in a low-income household with parents who did not attend college,” Rothwell writes.

Overall, Rothwell finds that parenting is one of the most important factors in adolescent mental health. This is key at a time when teen mental health is on the decline and no one seems to know exactly why.

Instead of getting to the core of this sad trend, many have explained it away, arguing that it’s simply the case that the stigma around mental health has declined and so more people are seeking therapy and treatment for their issues. Yet the more we seem to be talking about and “treating” mental health in this country, the worse our mental health seems to get. Reducing the “stigma” has had the unfortunate effect of glorifying mental illness, to the point that young people broadcast and brag about their increasingly bizarre self-diagnoses on social media as a way to seem unique or special. Labeling ourselves as mentally unwell can become a self-fulfilling prophecy; we pathologize normal emotions and view ourselves as helpless victims to diseases of the mind. Negative experiences or feelings quickly become the center of our world. Big Pharma pushes medication to “cure” us, even as the latest research debunks the idea that depression and anxiety are due to “chemical imbalances” in the brain, not to mention these medications have a litany of horrific side effects. 

Sigh. 

In summary, give your kids a hug every day and put them in timeout when they deserve it. You just might save their life. 

Starmer returns to old favourites in New Year’s speech

There was a distinctly familiar feel to Keir Starmer’s speech today. Preaching change in front of heavy machinery, it was a near-identical setting to the speech he gave this same week last January. For a New Year’s speech, it was devoid of new policy but there were plenty of old favourites: the Great British Energy and planning reform pledges that underpinned his last two conference addresses, Labour renewal, Tory cronyism and the obligatory reference to Liz Truss (but no named mention of Rishi Sunak).

There was enough in it to get decent write-ups, with the Telegraph focusing on his rejection (again) of Jeremy Corbyn’s politics while the Guardian stressing his plans for increased transparency. But it was, in truth, quite a boring speech – a charge that is not likely to bother Starmer much. Boring is his brand and while it’s not one that excites many voters, it certainly doesn’t alienate them either. He pledged to the audience: ‘A politics which treads a little lighter on all our lives. That’s the thing about populism or nationalism… It needs your full attention, needs you constantly focussing on this week’s common enemy. And that’s exhausting.’

In the aftermath of the Brexit, Covid and cost-of-living crises of 2016 to 2022, that’s a popular message with many voters. In 2019, the final advert of the Tory campaign lent heavily into this theme ‘Stop the chaos. Get Brexit done.’ Both parties know that there is an electoral prize on offer for whichever side can best demonstrate that – hence Starmer’s consistent messaging that he is the man to take politics out of most people’s lives. On current polls, he looks to be doing that fairly well.

When will Nigel Farage get off the fence?

Nigel Farage’s indecision continues. Despite being hyped in advance as a major unveiling of the rebel party’s programme, Reform UK’s press conference yesterday was something of a damp squib, not least because Farage failed to actually show up. Reform leader Richard Tice said the ex Brexit party leader is ‘still assessing’ the ‘extent of the role he wants to play in helping Reform UK’. It’s about time Farage decided whether he’s in or out.

Since Reform’s forerunner, the Brexit party, helped bring about Theresa May’s downfall and ultimately catapult Boris Johnson to power, Farage has been performing a political striptease: forever promising (or threatening) to get back on the road and again force the Tories to adopt his agenda, but never actually removing the last veil that would reveal him in full frontal attack mode.

Under Boris Johnson, this strategy seemed reasonable enough: Farage stood down the Brexit party during the 2019 election because he said it was time to put the country before his party. His thinking was that running candidates risked splitting the Tory vote and catapulting Labour – and Jeremy Corbyn – into power. But since Boris’s fall from grace, that logic no longer applies: Farage has said the Tories under Rishi Sunak are a ‘total shambles’ and heading for a wipeout. Few would doubt that he is right; but, if so, and Farage really does think, as he said in December, that the Tories are ‘directly to blame’ for falling living standards, have failed disastrously in tackling immigration and ‘never’ actually believed in Brexit, why won’t he put his money where his mouth is and take on the Tories?

Instead, the nearest we have come to seeing the full Farage was a brief glimpse of his bottom in the jungle during his ritual humiliation on ITV’s ‘I’m a Celebrity…Get me Out of Here!’. His well-remunerated stint Down Under was all part of Farage’s successful second career as a broadcaster since he quit active political campaigning. It’s an attractive gig: Farage had his own programme on LBC radio and is currently on GB News, where he is the TV channel’s most-watched host. But this success has created a problem for Farage: dare he sacrifice his blossoming career as a broadcaster to return to the campaign trail?

Farage’s critics like to joke about his seven failed attempts to become an MP. The mathematics of the first past the post system mean that another bid to become an MP is surely doomed. Perhaps, then, Farage might opt for a backseat role, in which he rallies Reform from behind the scenes as it attempts to damage the Tories’ hopes of winning the next election. Even that seems unattractive: if Labour really is heading for a big win in the election, it’s unlikely that Reform will play the role of kingmaker.

For now, then, Farage is sitting on the fence. Sunak said today that an election will most likely take place in the second half of the year. The Tories will be nervously watching Farage to see which way he jumps. If Farage takes over from the gentlemanly Tice and hits the road in the Red Wall Midlands and North with his familiar rip roaring, rabble rousing brand, he could turn what may be just a mere Tory defeat into a 1997-style rout. At the moment, however, Farage seems to prefer remaining a back seat driver.

Tice said yesterday of Farage that ‘a good poker player doesn’t show their hand too early.’ That may well be right but the clock is ticking. Farage’s bashful modesty is trying the patience of his supporters, who may well ask whether he is all talk and no trousers. Does he prefer his lucrative career shouting from the sidelines to leading the fight to offer British voters something different from technocrats like Keir Starmer and Sunak? It is time for Farage to end the waiting game and make up his mind.

The biggest 2023 regrets for Trump’s challengers

Welcome to the first Thunderdome of 2024! I hope you had a great time off and congratulations to all of you chipper Ned Flanders types who’ve already filed your taxes. And also to those of you who are still in full recovery mode, having “Stayed up so late, attempted — quite unsuccessfully — to love all of our relatives, and in general, grossly overestimated our powers.”

In any case, the year of 2023 is gone, and now our presidential election year is truly begun… and with it, a contest that is forcibly nonexistent on one side of the aisle, and on the other, one that has been drowned in its infancy. Why is that? The guys will discuss it next week when the Thunderdome podcast returns, but in the meantime, a few regrets come to mind for each of those who sought to challenge Donald Trump for the Republican nomination.

Ron DeSantis: hiring Jeff Roe. The choice of the seasoned consultant to be the top advisor for the Never Back Down super PAC was initially hailed in March of last year as a canny move by media observers for three reasons. First, it gave DeSantis a prominent Florida outsider to guide his notoriously close-knit operation; second, it sent the clear message that Glenn Youngkin, Roe’s former client, was not considering jumping into the race; and third, Roe’s tenure with the Ted Cruz campaign in 2016 was credited with leading to victory in Iowa with the kind of ruthless tactics DeSantis would need to deploy to have a chance of an early win.

Instead of delivering on these hopes, Roe resigned from the super PAC in December, less than a month ahead of the Iowa caucuses, leading to much gleeful chortling from his rivals in the Trump camp. It’s likely unfair to blame Roe for every misstep the DeSantis campaign made to this point — there was clearly enough dysfunction to go around in that organization. But his tenure was marked by massive internal squabbling over expenditures and choices that took the candidate who looked like the biggest threat to Donald Trump from being sixteen points behind the former president the month he was hired to being fifty-one points down today. No consultant wants that on his resume.

Nikki Haley: not making a better case for early money. How much different the Haley 2024 campaign would look today if she had successfully lobbied for the backing she’s now getting from top donors earlier in the cycle? At this late stage in the game, that cash flow can’t accomplish nearly as much as it could in building out her organization earlier in the contest. A big aspect of that would have to include lobbying to keep Tim Scott out of the race; his presence prompted hesitation from the Capitol Hill focused set, and a more capable politician would’ve found a way to remove that obstacle to her success before it slowed everything down. For Scott’s part, his own run didn’t help his stature at all, and might have hurt it — Haley needed to make that case earlier, and her situation now could be much stronger.

Vivek Ramaswamy: burning popularity to no particular end. In the summer, a series of pieces focused on the surprising success of Vivek touched on his broad-based appeal to multiple factions in the Republican Party. That was before the debates began, and he turned in performances that burned through his popularity as he needled other candidates and came across as a surrogate for Trump. For someone with murky political ambitions, Ramaswamy emerges from this cycle as someone who dramatically increased their negatives — and for what? He likely could’ve gotten whatever he wants without the pettiness and pussyfooting with radicalism. Did he really need to have Alex Jones on his podcast?

Mike Pence: Running. The former vice president had to see the writing on the wall: he was going nowhere this cycle, and the appetite for his old school form of polite socially conservative Republicanism is at its nadir. So why not take a breath and reset? Watching him on the debate stage, you get the feeling Pence just wanted to be there to debunk the claims of others about January 6 and the like. But he didn’t need to run for president to do that. Now, his path back to political relevance seems that much steeper.

Mike Pompeo: Not running. If there’s one potential candidate who has to regret not jumping into the 2024 contest seeing the way it played out, it’s not any of the donor-pushed governors — Youngkin, Brian Kemp or Chris Sununu. It’s Mike Pompeo. The issue priorities today in the Republican Party plays almost entirely to his benefit, he has the foreign policy chops on Israel and Ukraine to dwarf anyone else on the stage, and he became infamous during his tenure for advocating a far more aggressive stance toward the Mexican cartels. He has conservative bona fides without being caught in DeSantis’s culture war maelstrom, and Haley’s rise on foreign policy subjects has been almost by default as the only candidate with such work on her resume. It’s hard to see how Pompeo wouldn’t be in the top three candidates were he in the race today.

Chris Christie: I regret nothing. And not just because this would be his answer. He was never running to win, he was running to reestablish his position as a prominent critic of the GOP, and he’s done exactly that.

Doug Burgum: That pick-up basketball game. Self explanatory.

It’s always January 6 somewhere

Surprising no one, even after blowing millions on ads pushing “Bidenomics,” the Biden 2024 campaign’s plan is a re-do of 2022: January 6 as the new Charlottesville, white supremacy and democracy on the ballot, presumably with a smattering of abortion. Axios reports:

In a speech at Valley Forge, Pa., on Friday, Biden will make clear that reminders of the Capitol riot and Trump’s push to overturn the 2020 election will be constant themes in his 2024 campaign.

Senior campaign officials say that the venue is apt as it is where George Washington’s army endured a frigid winter in 1777-1778 before uniting his army and fighting for democracy and freedom against the British — Biden will try to rally his party for a fight against “MAGA extremism.”

Senior campaign officials also say Washington offers a contrast with Trump as he peacefully and voluntarily stepped down from power after his time in office.

Biden will speak again about the Jan. 6 riot on Monday at the Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, S.C. — a Black church where a white supremacist murdered nine people in 2015.

Biden will try to cast the November election as not just about large policy differences — but as an existential threat to the republic with Trump likely to be on the ballot.

In a call previewing the speeches, Biden campaign manager Julie Chávez Rodríguez told reporters: “We are running a campaign like the fate of our democracy depends on it. Because it does.”

The general impression is that Nikki Haley is sliding into second place. And with that comes more pressure for her to take on the guy in first, something she’s been reluctant to do to this point:

Haley has spent most of her campaign walking a fine line when it comes to Trump, alternating between opposing and praising him as she aims to appeal to both “Never Trump” Republicans and those who are open to the idea of voting for him again.

But with her latest broadsides against Trump, Haley is opening a new front in a primary long defined by lower-polling rivals’ reluctance to engage directly with the former president. And she’s doing so at a crucial moment in New Hampshire, where large numbers of more moderate Republicans and independents who can vote in the GOP primary are just starting to tune in…

Haley has a long history of switching positions on Trump. She opposed his 2016 bid for the Republican nomination and then went on to work in his administration as UN ambassador. She condemned Trump in the aftermath of the Jan. 6, 2021, US Capitol riot, but later declared that conservatives “need him” in the GOP. She vowed not to run against him in 2024, and then did.

And for much of her campaign, Haley has sought to have it both ways on Trump, calling him the “right president at the right time,” while also saying “chaos follows him” and the country “won’t survive” another four years of it.

But the stakes are changing for Haley, who, with the support of the state’s popular governor, Chris Sununu, has been rising in recent polls in New Hampshire. And Trump and his allies have taken notice. The pro-Trump super PAC MAGA Inc. launched an ad in the Granite State in mid-December accusing Haley of flip-flopping on her support for a gas tax as governor of South Carolina by splicing together clips from various speeches she gave. “New Hampshire can’t afford Nikki ‘High Tax’ Haley,” the narrator says in the spot that the PAC has put more than $2 million behind, according to the ad tracking firm AdImpact.

At first, Haley brushed the attack aside in a post on X as Trump “getting nervous.” But as the ad kept airing, Haley has started to address it, unprompted, on the stump — accusing Trump and his allies of spreading falsehoods about her stance on the tax in four separate appearances in New Hampshire over two days.

“I have seen the commercials you see. I’ve seen the little temper tantrums that he’s thrown,” Haley told a crowd of several hundred people packed into a sports bar in Londonderry on Wednesday. “And let me tell you this: There’s not one bit of it that’s truthful. I never once signed or would have signed a tax increase in South Carolina.”

One more thing

One candidate who got a late Christmas gift: RFK Jr., who is now officially on the ballot as an Independent candidate in the state of Utah. This may not seem that important on its surface — Utah has just six electoral votes — but in 2016, Donald Trump only got about 45 percent of the vote in the state with a third-party candidate on the ticket. In 2020, he prevailed with 58 percent without a third party candidate. In a race likely to be a down to the wire close contest, RFK’s presence on even a handful of ballots could be a factor that leads to significant disruption. Next stop, Arizona…

Sunak says his ‘working assumption’ is no spring election

Rishi Sunak has this afternoon given his strongest hint yet that the next general election will be held in the autumn rather than the spring. Speaking to broadcasters on a visit to a youth centre in Mansfield, the Prime Minister said: ‘My working assumption is we’ll have a general election in the second half of this year and in the meantime I’ve got lots that I want to get on with.’

The Conservative leader declined to categorically rule out a May election but repeated his intentions to pick a date later in the year. ‘I want to keep going, managing the economy well and cutting people’s taxes,’ Sunak said. ‘But I also want to keep tackling illegal migration.’ It comes after weeks of speculation that the next contest will be timed to coincide with the local elections, which look set to be extremely challenging for the Tories.

Sunak’s comments come ahead of his first ‘town hall’ event of the year – from which national media are excluded. His remarks are designed to dampen down speculation about a May election, without totally ruling it out. This is because No. 10 is conscious of Labour attempts to replicate the ‘bottler’ narrative which the Tories exploited, to great effect, in 2007.

As Katy Balls wrote last week, figures in No. 10 are split as to when the next election ought to be. Those in the spring camp argue that there is a real risk of things getting worse for Sunak politically after May – so going then is the least worst option. But those who prefer autumn retort that going to the country when Labour is so far ahead in the polls simply goes against the laws of political gravity.

Back in 2007, Gordon Brown allowed talk of an early election to spiral out of hand, meaning that when he decided against such a move, the Conservatives could depict him as weak and indecisive. Sunak’s comments are an attempt to avoid a repeat of that. They also have the added advantage of knocking Keir Starmer’s speech from being the lead item on this afternoon’s news bulletins. 

The Epstein files heap fresh embarrassment on Prince Andrew

Four days in, and 2024 shows every sign of being yet another annus horribilis for Prince Andrew. After – by his, admittedly reduced, standards – a triumphant Christmas, in which he processed to church at Sandringham with the rest of the Royal Family and, bizarrely, an apparently rehabilitated Fergie, the cold clear light of reality has intruded once again.

To kick things off, Andrew is facing the prospect of not one, but two docudramas raking over the humiliation of his Newsnight interview. (The potentially consolatory fact that he is to be played in them by Rufus Sewell and Michael Sheen respectively has been dampened by the fact the famously handsome Sewell is having to wear prosthetics to play the not-so-grand Duke of York). But much worse is that the metaphorical lump of coal in the stocking, his association with the paedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein, has turned up once again to make the eleventh day of Christmas a miserable one.

Granted, the revelations in the court documents, newly released in connection with the case against Ghislaine Maxwell, are not in themselves anything that has not already made it into the public domain. Yet the full testimony of the-then 20 year old Johanna Sjoberg makes for unpleasant reading. She describes how, after she met Prince Andrew and Maxwell at Epstein’s home in New York in 2001, Maxwell was very amused to find a Spitting Image puppet of the Duke. In Sjoberg’s grim description, ‘They decided to take a picture with it, in which Virginia [Giuffre] and Andrew sat on a couch. They put the puppet on Virginia’s lap and I sat on Andrew’s lap, and they put the puppet’s hand on Virginia’s breast, and Andrew put his hand on my breast, and they took a photo.’

Andrew’s involvement with Giuffre resulted in a court case in 2022 that was resolved with an out-of-court settlement rumoured to have been as high as £12 million. It was at least partially paid for by the Queen, who was always said (albeit on hearsay rather than any concrete authority) to regard her second son as her favourite amongst her children – despite his embarrassing and increasingly public actions. The Duke has consistently denied any wrongdoing, and there have been no criminal charges levelled against him either in this country or the United States. But his withdrawal as a working member of the Royal Family after the case was regarded as a tacit admission that his behaviour had become unacceptable to ‘the Firm’, and that he was required to keep a low profile from now on and not to cause any further embarrassment.

The difficulty remains that the damage has already been done. In the most generous of assessments, the whole affair shows a shockingly poor lack of judgement on the part of Andrew, if not considerably worse. And so the appearance of the Epstein documents is a reminder that this tawdry affair will hang over the wider Royal Family for a considerable time to come. On an existential level, it remains vastly embarrassing that a senior royal, one once believed to be the glamorous, gung-ho public face of the monarchy, has been embroiled in a scandal of this kind. Despite Epstein’s death by suicide in 2019, the association between the two will continue to haunt him until the end of Andrew’s life.

It is rumoured that there will be more unsealed court documents appearing over the coming days. Amidst the many people who are named in them – we also have the unappetising detail that the former president Bill Clinton ‘likes them young’ – there is every chance that more unpleasant and damaging stories will emerge into the public domain.

King Charles has been praised by many for keeping the monarchy afloat after the death of his mother; he is even showing signs of taking it in directions that she would not have considered, for which he should be commended. But his younger brother remains a damaging distraction to the good work that he is accomplishing. It seems right to suggest that his expulsion from the gilded halls of Buckingham Palace, and beyond, should remain permanent and irreversible, should the family not wish to be dragged down by the unseemly associations that he has been so tarred with.

Watch: Starmer grilled on Peter Mandelson and Jeffrey Epstein

Sir Keir Starmer was up this morning in Bristol, giving a big speech on the importance of transparency. The Tories, he gravely intoned, had wrecked Britain, with their relentless sleaze and cronyism. So it must have been, er, sub-optimal then for the Labour leader to have his big speech blown off course when Jim Pickard of the Financial Times threw him a curveball in the Q&A.

Back in June, the paper published the contents of an internal JP Morgan report which laid bare the extent of Jeffrey Epstein’s contact with Peter Mandelson that describes repeated meetings between the disgraced financier and the politician he knew as ‘Petie’. It suggests that in June 2009, when he was Gordon Brown’s Business Secretary, Mandelson stayed at Epstein’s lavish townhouse in Manhattan, while the financier was in prison for soliciting prostitution from a minor.

A spokesman for the Labour peer told the FT in June that: ‘He never had any kind of professional or business relationship with Epstein in any form.’ But Pickard asked Starmer whether Mandelson – described in the Guardian as a ‘core part’ of his ‘network’ – had questions to answer. The reply of the former Director of Public Prosecutions was one of the more succinct he gave this morning:

On Peter Mandelson, look, and I do try to give pretty full answers in these sessions, I don’t know any more than you do and therefore there’s not really much I can add to what you already know, I’m afraid, you know that’s simply the state of the affairs, thank you Jim.

You can watch his answer below:

Claudine Gay may be gone, but the issues on campus remain

Claudine, we hardly knew ye. Gay’s tenure atop Harvard was the shortest in that university’s history. Yet it was still too long. In mere months, she did enormous damage to one of the world’s great universities.

Gay is not the only one who should be held accountable for this fiasco. The university’s governing board, the Fellows of Harvard Corporation, should be out, too. They chose her, and their choice did enormous damage to the institution. They should pay for it. Their statement accepting her resignation shows just how feckless they are. Don’t read it if you are glucose intolerant.

“First and foremost, we thank President Gay for her deep and unwavering commitment to Harvard and to the pursuit of academic excellence . . . we are grateful for the extraordinary contributions she has made — and will continue to make — as a leader, a teacher, a scholar, a mentor, and an inspiration to many.”

Barack Obama bears some of the blame, too, at least for keeping her in the position for which she was unfit. Several weeks ago, after Gay’s disastrous Congressional testimony, Obama intervened behind the scenes to keep her as president, even as calls for her resignation were rising. As the former president and a graduate of the Harvard Law School, Obama was bound to have enormous influence. It was amplified because he was closely tied to the woman who headed the university board, Penny Pritzker. A member of the billionaire family, she was Obama’s fellow Chicagoan and his secretary of commerce. Her brother, J.B. Pritzker, is the governor of Illinois with presidential aspirations. Firing the first black president of Harvard and opposing Barack Obama to do it is not the royal road to upward mobility within the Democratic Party.

Gay’s supporters had hoped to keep her for two reasons. The first is standard operating procedure for any organization. Don’t let outsiders interfere. That was the chief reason over a thousand Harvard faculty members signed a petition to keep Gay. The second is the optics of American racial politics. As the first black president of America’s oldest and most prominent university, Claudine Gay was an inspiring role model. One sad consequence of her failure is that she has now become a negative role model.

This racial dimension could be made even worse, and likely will be, if demagogues claim she was ousted because she was black. She wasn’t, any more than the University of Pennsylvania’s president, Elizabeth Magill, was ousted because she was white. They were ousted for cause. (Technically, both of them resigned, but we all know that was a fig leaf.)

Gay was ousted because she had failed in a job to which she should never have been appointed. Her administrative failures and the ideological basis for them were painfully evident as virulent antisemitism rose on her campus. She did nothing to stop it, ensure student safety, or punish the miscreants who were violating Harvard’s stated rules and intimidating their fellow students. When she was forced to defend those indefensible policies publicly, she humiliated herself and the institution she led.

Gay’s public failure led to more intense scrutiny of her qualifications for the job. Those, as it turned out, weren’t too great. Her academic record was a mere wisp compared to her predecessors. Indeed, it was probably too thin for tenure at one of the most competitive universities in the world, where very few are promoted from junior faculty to a permanent position.

She would never have received tenure or appointment to administrative positions if her multiple instances of plagiarism had been detected at the time, as they should have been. None of the individual instances found so far are large, but there have been far too many of them to excuse as inadvertent errors. If students or faculty members had made them, they would have been suspended or expelled. That’s still a problem for Gay since she is apparently returning to her job as professor. Independent experts will have to reassure her full body of work for academic honesty.

University leaders are expected to exemplify that honesty. It’s one of the most important tasks for any university leader. When Stanford’s president, Marc Tessier-Lavigne, failed to meet it, he lost his position. He was “cleared of accusations of scientific fraud and misconduct,” as the New York Times reported, but an independent scholarly of his work, commissioned by the university, said his research had “multiple problems” and “fell below customary standards of scientific rigor.” So he was out.

The debate over Claudine Gay’s ouster goes beyond these immediate issues to raise four larger ones. Expect to hear more about each in coming days.

1. The role played by race in her appointment and departure. Did Gay receive tenure and subsequent administrative appointments for what are essentially “affirmative action” reasons? Did her race help or harm her in discussions about leaving the Harvard presidency? Some black leaders will surely say she was fired because she was black. There is overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
   
2. Will the episode further damage all universities’ efforts to promote “diversity, equity, and inclusion”? Gay was not only a poster symbol for those programs, she was a powerful advocate for them in her previous as dean, before becoming president. Indeed, her strong support for that progressive agenda was one reason she was named president. Those programs are already under enormous pressure, following the Supreme Court decision against affirmative action admissions at universities. (Harvard was one of the defendants.) The Claudine Gay episode adds to that pressure.
   
3. Will Harvard and other universities do more to protect Jewish students from harassment and intimidation? Will they punish students who intimidate fellow students (while still protected essential rights to speak freely)? Will they administer their own standards of conduct fairly and evenly? So far, administrators have sat on their hands instead of acting decisively to lessen the climate of fear that pervades all too many campuses. Gay’s inaction on these issues was one of her worst failures. Its exposure on national television precipitated her downfall, as it did for Liz Magill at Penn.
   
4. Can universities clean up their acts on their own or will it take pressure from unhappy donors and parents? Faculty and administrators hate, hate, hate the idea of outside pressure. Still, donors are asking themselves why they should give money to institutions that not only don’t share their values but actively oppose them. Parents are asking why they should send their children into hostile environments, where ideological fervor reigns.

Presidents Gay and Magill may be gone, but these big issues will not be forgotten. Nor should they be. They go to the heart of education for citizenship in a tolerant, liberal democracy. If, as Benjamin Franklin said, we can keep it.

Why the BMA is now at loggerheads with NHS leaders

Trust between the BMA and politicians has never been particularly strong. In the middle of the longest strike in NHS history, we are now seeing a breakdown in trust between the doctors’ union and leaders in the health service. Last night the union issued what was, even by its own standards, a bit of a stinker of a letter in which it accused NHS trust leaders of bowing to political pressure to undermine the junior doctors’ strike.

Addressed to NHS England chief executive Amanda Pritchard, the letter says ‘derogations’ – the ‘last resort’ call for striking medics to return to work as a result of safety concerns – are being misused and that trusts aren’t providing the evidence that patients really are at risk. The BMA says:

It is, therefore, astonishing that during this current round of industrial action, NHS England and some Trusts have refused to evidence any efforts to source alternative staffing or demonstrate rearrangements or cancellation of less urgent work. This refusal to provide the information necessary to take well informed decisions is fundamentally undermining the derogation process as we are being asked to take decisions about our members’ right to strike without the requisite information. NHS England, it feels, is wilfully placing the BMA in an impossible situation.

It lists the ways in which derogation is being misused, then adds the killer lines: ‘We are increasingly drawing the conclusion that NHS England’s change in attitude towards the process is not due to concerns around patient safety but due to political pressure to maintain a higher level of service, undermine our strike action and push the BMA into refusing an increasing number of requests; requests, we believe, would not have been put to us during previous rounds of strike action. The change in approach also appears to be politicisation and weaponisation of a safety critical process to justify the Minimum Service Level regulations. It is an operational matter for the NHS if hospitals choose to prioritise less urgent cases over life and limb care.’

In fairness to the BMA (a phrase that is not often justified), there is good reason for some doctors to be suspicious of the way trusts are using derogations. During a previous wave of strike action in April 2023, the Weston General Hospital and the BMA had a fundamental breakdown in relations when seven doctors were recalled from the picket line to work in A&E and acute medical departments after the hospital said staffing levels were dangerously low. The BMA then claimed the trust did in fact have enough staff and that either the management were ‘unaware they had sufficient senior cover, or they deliberately misled us’.

So there is already suspicion from this particular pay dispute, but it actually reaches back even further than that. As I revealed in my new book, Fighting for Life, during the last junior doctors’ strikes in 2015, there was a particularly ugly scrap behind the scenes over whether staff would return from the picket lines in the event of a terror attack. The then chief medical officer Sir Bruce Keogh horrified junior doctors by writing a letter to the BMA’s chair Dr Mark Porter in which he referenced the recent terror attacks in Paris and asked for clarification that doctors would return to work. What wasn’t known at the time was that the reason Keogh wrote that letter in the first place was that the BMA had suggested he do so.

Here’s what happened:

Keogh says he was initially instructed in a meeting with senior government ministers and members of the security forces – who were jumpy about the prospect of a copycat terror attack on London – to confirm his assurances with the BMA that junior doctors would be prepared to call off their strike in a civil contingency. He thought this would go without saying, but phoned Porter to discuss it:

I said, “Look, I’ve got to write you a letter to ask whether the junior doctors would call off their strike.” I said: “So there are two ways I can phrase the letter.” The first option was that I was going to say, “I have absolutely no doubt that in the event of a civil contingency or an emergency or something, that junior doctors would call off their strike.” I said: “The other way is just to ask you, quite bluntly, that if something happened…” and he said: “I think you should ask specifically, if there’s an emergency, would the junior doctors call off their strike? Because I think there are some very rabid people in the junior doctors’ committee who would not call off the strike.”

Dr Porter remembers the meeting a little differently. He says: ‘I do not recall saying and indeed did not say that there were very rabid people in the junior doctors’ committee who would not call off the strike. I knew from my regular attendance at the JDC, my many meetings with the committee officers and indeed from their presence at the meeting, that the junior doctor representatives in the BMA were responsive to the potential patient safety issues raised by industrial action and would respond appropriately in relation to their responsibilities as registered medical practitioners.’ It is Porter’s view – and that of many other doctors to this day – that ‘it was the actions of the government that had needlessly provoked, insulted, attacked and angered junior doctors’.

Porter isn’t wrong, either: ministers repeatedly make clumsy comments that only a fool wouldn’t notice are guaranteed to offend and enrage doctors. The latest is the comment from Health Secretary Victoria Atkins that junior doctors are ‘doctors in training’. While very technically correct in that these doctors are, until the very last stage of their registrar years, still going through examinations for royal college membership and continuous assessment within their trusts so that they can progress to consultant level, they are also very much not the work experience kids just making tea. Even from their first few weeks they are working as real doctors. The ‘doctors in training’ comment taps into a particular insecurity that some medics have about ‘not being real doctors’ because that is a comment sometimes thrown at them by patients who think they look too young or who question their authority to make decisions or stick large needles into them. Atkins is sharp and will have picked that up. Perhaps as a politician who has been called far worse, she thinks that doctors should get over themselves. But is a lesson in humility really best taught during industrial action when a union can quite easily tell exhausted doctors that they are being dissed by politicians who just don’t understand them? Probably not.

As for NHS leaders, they will of course be sensitive to the accusation that they are bending to political pressure. They are also privately concerned that while Rishi Sunak currently seems to be content to use the industrial action as the key excuse for his failure to meet his five priorities pledge on waiting lists falling by the next election, he might switch his fire onto the health service itself. There was, for a while, a level of paranoia that the Prime Minister could make overhauling the NHS a continuation of his theme about attacking the political consensus which he launched at the Tory party conference in the autumn. The main victim of that attack was HS2, a project without the levels of support, cultural adoration and emotional bonds that the health service has, and the PM has since realised that attacking the consensus wasn’t what voters wanted from him anyway. So the risk has somewhat receded. The lack of trust between all camps, though, remains acute.