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Ed Davey’s Andrew stunt backfires
Oh dear. It seems that Ed Davey – the most righteous man in all of parliament – has got it wrong again. He and his party must have thought it a terrific wheeze when they announced that they would today be pushing for documents on Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s appointment as a UK trade envoy to be released, following his arrest last week. But poor old Sir Ed had a torrid time on the morning media round, given his historic support for Andrew’s position when he was a business minister in the Coalition government. Whoops!
Invited on to the Today programme, host Nick Robinson pressed Sir Ed on his 2011 comments that Andrew was doing an ‘excellent job’ as trade envoy and dismissed concerns around him at the time as ‘innuendo’. The Lib Dem leader duly grovelled, saying: ‘First of all can I apologise to all those victims of Epstein who may have read those words and been upset by them. I really regret them.’ He then admitted that he ‘wasn’t really over the brief’ adding ‘no MP mentioned Epstein in that debate and I think that tells a tale about how Parliament and MPs don’t hold the Royal Family, didn’t hold [the former] Prince Andrew in that really privileged position, properly to account’. Even sainted Sir Ed?
Sadly for the Lib Dem leader, his media round did not get any better from that moment. On Good Morning Britain, it was left to Ed Balls – host and husband of Yvette Cooper – to take the moral high ground, declaring:
I just wonder whether you’ve got the tone right… in your motion today, you say the Liberal Democrats are moving a binding motion to force the government to come clean, as though this government hasn’t come clean about things which were happening while you and I were both ministers. I mean, isn’t it right just to say that the whole of politics, the whole of government, in retrospect, got him wrong and playing party politics on behalf of Liberal Democrats.
Sir Ed was duly left spluttering. Much to the joy of many Labour and Tory politicians tired of Lib Dem lectures on ethics…
Reform has stepped up its donations game
One intriguing element of the battle on the right is the arms race for donations. Twelve months ago, Kemi Badenoch’s supporters could point to her prowess in this field; the Tory leader managed to raise £3.3 million in the first three months of 2025. By contrast Reform UK, the pop-up party, were struggling to keep the lights on for much of 2024. They received just £280,000 large donations in the final quarter that year – less than the moribund Communist Party of Great Britain registered.
Indeed, when I interviewed Nigel Farage last May, he wondered aloud just how the Tories were still able to raise so much money, given their diminished political fortunes. Fast forward to the beginning of 2026 and Reform can boast a different story. Speaking backstage at the Newark rally to mark Jenrick’s defection, Farage said he was expecting a ‘very, very, very good quarter’ for the first three months of this year. That reflects both Reform’s polling strength and a beefed-up fundraising team, led by Nick Candy, the Honorary Treasurer, and Charlton Edwards.
There are, broadly, three types of donors. The first are those who once gave generously to the Tories but who have now switched parties such as Bassim Haidar. The second are those who prefer to keep riding both horses: Lord Bamford being one such example, having given £200,000 to both the Tories and Reform in November. Then the final group are perhaps the most intriguing: new donors who are now getting involved in British politics. Some are drawn to Farage’s personality; others to his stance on issues like cryptocurrencies. The profile which he began to build on YouTube in the late 2000s has garnered him international contacts beyond the reach of normal UK politicians too.
The profile which Farage began to build on YouTube in the late 2000s has garnered him international contacts beyond the reach of normal UK politicians.
One donor to the Reform leader is Sasan Ghandehari, an Iranian-born British investor who covered the £50,000 cost of Farage’s trip to Davos. Separately, Interior Architecture Landscape (IAL) – which counts Ghandehari and his family as a major client – has given £200,000 to Reform in donations. IAL shares a director with Orico General Trading, which has pushed to update Iran’s internet backbone infrastructure as part of the Europe-Persia Express Gateway; Ghandehari is a supporter of improving information access in politically-persecuted communities in the Middle East. Farage is a long-time critic of the current regime in Tehran, where the internet has been a major factor in the recent popular uprisings.
Reform are prudent to try and register these donations as soon as possible. Labour MPs are growing increasingly vocal in their demands that the government act to update the law on political donations. Matt Western, the chair of the national security committee, has tonight demanded that a temporary ban be enforced on crypto donations. Labour’s long-awaited Elections Bill was given its First Reading a fortnight ago. We can expect to see a big push from the backbenches to try and close various perceived ‘loopholes’ when the legislation returns to the House at Second and Third Reading.
Of course, money in politics does not guarantee success. Just look at Laurence Fox’s Reclaim party, which received £4 million from Jeremy Hosking for little impact. But given Farage’s ‘double or quits’ strategy of May, with Reform pouring money into seats and taking over a second floor of Milbank Tower, having it sure does help.
Release the Gonzales files
We know the terrible details of how congressional staffer Regina Santos-Aviles, 35, died. She poured gasoline on herself and then flicked the flame on a lighter – a mad decision she instantly regretted. “Please send help. It hurts so bad,” she screamed at the 911 dispatcher. “Oh my God, I don’t want to die.” She tried to smother the flames by rolling on the ground of her backyard in Texas and crawling to a faucet to extinguish them with water.
But it was too late. A medical examiner found that the only part of her body not scorched by flames were the soles of her feet.
Thanks to a police report we know these terrible details of her death last year.
But we don’t know precisely why she was driven to such extreme action – and how much of a role in her death her boss Republican Congressman Tony Gonzales played. He has denied an affair but recently leaked texts reveal that he asked her to “send me a sexy pic,” and asked her “favorite position” before mentioning multiple sexual acts. Santos-Aviles replied “this is too far, Tony.”
It’s not that Congress doesn’t know if he exploited her – it’s that it won’t tell the American public. The Office of Congressional Conduct has completed a report into the matter but House rules bar it from handing its report to the House Ethics Committee so close to March 3 primaries in Texas in which Gonzales faces a serious challenge.
So while one branch of the government releases virtually every email Jeffrey Epstein ever sent – no matter the collateral damage to innocent people tangentially mentioned – another branch is knowingly keeping the darkest secrets of one of its members under lock and key ahead of an important election.
Relationships between members of Congress and their staff are prohibited.
If the House Oversight Committee can force the DoJ to release the Epstein files then surely Congress can force the release of the Gonzales files? How can voters in the Texas primary be expected to make an informed decision otherwise? But that’s precisely the point – Congress wants voters kept in the dark.
Elected representatives can’t honestly say they want transparency for victims of abuse if they are not prepared to turn the same level of scrutiny toward their own ranks.
On Monday, Lauren Boebert became the first congressional Republican to call on Gonzales to resign. Others soon followed including Nancy Mace who, as well as demanding that Gonzales resign, called out the system: “Inherently, the reason no one is ever held accountable in Congress, is because both parties protect the other.”
She added: “Tony Gonzales is just the tip of the iceberg. We won’t let the Washington establishment keep protecting its own. Congressional staff serve their country. They should never have to endure predatory behavior from the people they work for.”
Republican Anna Paulina Luna added her name to the calls. “Congressional ethics is a joke. They have so much dirt on members of Congress, and they do nothing. There is even a slush fund they use to pay people off with your tax dollars. This is part of why the system is so broken. They’re sitting on reports, and if someone steps out of line, isn’t it ironic how they leak them, threaten to leak them, or time it for right after Election Day?”
But Speaker Mike Johnson is in a bind. He can only afford to lose one vote in the House on party-line measures, and his margin would become even slimmer if Gonzales were to step down. Johnson has said the allegations are “very serious,” but that it is “too early for anybody to prejudge,” and argued lawmakers should allow the investigative process to play out.
It looks as if Johnson has backed the wrong horse. A recent survey found that Gonzales’s support had cratered: now he has just 21 percent support from likely voters in the March 3 Republican primary while his rival, YouTuber and firearms enthusiast Brandon Herrera, has 45 percent support. Herrera, who refers to himself as “the AK Guy,” narrowly lost to Gonzales by roughly 400 votes in a 2024 runoff. A recent ad from Herrera’s campaign warns the alleged affair “puts Republicans at risk of losing this seat and handing control of Congress to the Democrats.”
Without the Oversight and Government Reform Committee’s report, it has fallen to anonymous staffers, Santos-Aviles’s husband Adrian Aviles and the police to inform the public of the events leading up to her death.
A former staffer in Gonzales’s district office said Santos-Aviles had told him she had an affair with their boss and that she spiraled into a depression after her husband discovered the relationship and Gonzales cut her off. He also shared a screenshot of a text message from Santos-Aviles in which she acknowledged having an “affair with our boss.”
In the weeks after her death, Gonzales, a 45-year-old married father of six, denied the affair. But last week Santos-Aviles’s widower Adrian said that statement was false. Gonzales in return claimed that he was being “blackmailed” by Adrian. He posted an image on social media of a message purportedly from the family’s lawyer discussing a $300,000 settlement in exchange for his client signing a non-disclosure agreement. Gonzales wrote: “Disgusting to see people profit politically and financially off a tragic death.” Adrian responded: “We have never blackmailed anyone.”
The police report released this week details how Santos-Aviles told first responders that she set herself on fire because she had discovered that her estranged husband was romantically involved with her best friend.
Family and friends told police that Santos-Aviles had previously made self-harm threats and had been taking antidepressants. One friend said she had suffered from mental health issues since she was young.
The death of Regina Santos-Aviles shows exactly why rules exist banning members of Congress from having relationships with their staff. In reality, to protect them both. And it demonstrates why, when those rules are broken, the public has an absolute right to know.
Republicans on the House Oversight Committee played starring roles in fearlessly hunting down and publishing the Epstein files. Now it’s time they showed just as much gumption in forcing the release of the Gonzales files before the primary on March 3.
Why ministers want to talk about Andrew
This afternoon’s Commons debate on Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor was unusual for all kinds of reasons. It was not just that the Speaker had decided that MPs could directly criticise the former Duke of York even though parliamentary convention normally prevents them from discussing the monarchy in the Chamber. It was not even that the government accepted the humble Address motion tabled by the Liberal Democrats calling for the release of the documents relating to Andrew’s appointment as trade envoy. It was also that the minister responding to the debate was able to spend most of his speech criticising someone else, rather than being on the defensive the whole time. There was, though, some confusion running through the entire debate about what precisely MPs wanted to criticise Mountbatten-Windsor for: was it his unsuitability as trade envoy because of his links to Jeffrey Epstein, or was it other aspects of his character?
Andrew would hardly be the first or last trade envoy who was rather arrogant and not very good at the business of being persuasive
Trade Minister Chris Bryant took some obvious pleasure in describing the former Prince as ‘a man on a constant self-aggrandising and self-enriching hustle, a rude, arrogant and entitled man who could not distinguish between the public interest which he said he served, and his own private interest’. He also told a story of Andrew visiting Tonypandy, saying ‘he insisted on coming by helicopter, unlike his mother, who came twice to the Rhondda and always came by car. He left early and he showed next to no interest in the young people’. He did add that it was not a crime to behave this way, ‘nor is arrogance, fortunately, I suppose’, but it was very much the tenor of the debate that anyone who had any dealings with Andrew wanted to share their stories of what a rude man he is. Lib Dem Monica Harding complained that when Mountbatten-Windsor had come to an exhibition she had staged for the British Council on Dolly the sheep, he ‘stood up in front of Japanese dignitaries and business people and said: “This is rubbish. This is Frankenstein’s sheep.”’ She suggested that this was ‘a very poor example of promoting British trade interests’. It was presumably an attempt to suggest that Andrew had been unsuitable in many ways to be a trade envoy, but it also muddied the focus on the more serious allegations. After all, he would hardly be the first or last trade envoy who was rather arrogant and not very good at the business of being persuasive.
Perhaps more important than a royal being arrogant enough to want a helicopter trip was the system that enabled the abuse perpetrated by Jeffrey Epstein, and Bryant told MPs that ‘the abuse that was enabled, aided and abetted by a very extensive group of arrogant, entitled, and often very wealthy individuals in this country and elsewhere’. That enabling was something Ed Davey, whose party had tabled the motion, also wanted to underline. The Liberal Democrat leader spoke about the emails between Andrew and Epstein where the pair had discussed ‘a chance to make some money’ from the crisis in Libya. He said: ‘This shows clearly what these relationships were all about for Epstein: increasing his own wealth and power. The idea that the role of special trade envoy for our United Kingdom may have been used to help him do that – to help keep a vile paedophile sex trafficker enrich himself – is truly sickening.’ Bryant also later got on to the culture that helped Andrew, saying: ‘What this whole sorry saga shows is that deference can be a toxic presence in the body politic.’ He added that ‘when deference tips over into subservience it can be terribly dangerous, because the victims are not heard, respected or understood in the same way as those with grand titles, and that… has implications for this House.’ He was in part talking about the convention of not discussing the monarchy, arguing that it meant there was too little scrutiny.
The debate itself was about releasing the files around his appointment as trade envoy following the revelations about his extensive links with Jeffrey Epstein and his recent arrest on suspicion of misconduct in public office. MPs agreed the motion without a vote, and Bryant made clear that the government supported the motion. He added that the government would not be putting ‘into the public domain anything that is required by the police for them to conduct their inquiries unless and until the police are satisfied’. He wanted to suggest that this government was doing everything possible to ensure transparency around the appointment, but the Conservatives argued that ministers were only agreeing to the publication because they were being ‘pushed every step of the way’. Perhaps, but the strange thing about this whole row is that Downing Street finds it much easier to deal with than pretty much anything else going on for the government at the moment – which is perhaps a sign more of how badly everything else is going than it is of how easy the question of the former Duke of York really is.
Donald Trump is the original Kick streamer
President Trump will deliver the first State of the Union address of his second term tonight – and the White House social media team want to whet your appetite. “The White House digital team will transform all its social channels into ‘Trump TV’ – a 12-hour retrospective of the year since President Trump’s last address to Congress,” Axios reports.
Your correspondent can’t help but feel Team Trump is missing a trick. The most transfixing thing to show the American people before the address isn’t “Trump of the last 12 months,” it’s “Trump live.”
Cockburn has observed with intrigue how his younger relatives watch streamers’ content, from IShowSpeed traipsing across Africa to the likes of Clavicular and the ASU Frat Leader “framemogging” each other (no idea). The appeal was lost on him, until he saw the similarities with how his boomer contemporaries follow the President. The Trump administration is compelling for the same reasons as a Twitch stream: the dramatic tension of watching an absurd central character live, in the moment, when anything could happen. You’re hypnotized by his interactions with the supporting cast: oh look, there’s Kid Rock. Wait, what’s he going to say to Tucker Carlson this time? Is that Gianni Infantino again? He was on yesterday’s stream too.
This is why the State of the Union is such essential viewing. The content of the speech is tertiary to Trump’s interactions with the figures in the room. Which Democratic members will take a leaf out of Al Green’s book and jestermaxx? Will seeing the tariffmogging Supreme Court spike Trump’s cortisol? Cockburn would be watching now if he could.
On our radar
PETER FILES Peter Attia is stepping down as a CBS News contributor after the revelation of his correspondence with Jeffrey Epstein.
SIGN PLEASE Fedex is suing the Trump administration for a tariff refund, following Friday’s Supreme Court decision.
PULITZER INBOUND Candace Owens is set to release Bride of Charlie, an investigative series looking into Erika Kirk, on YouTube tomorrow.
How good is Kash Patel at hockey, actually?
The controversy over Kash Patel, the Trump administration’s top puck bunny, is rolling on. His former FBI colleague Dan Bongino leapt to defend Patel’s locker-room antics on Fox News, telling critics of his bro to “keep crying.”
Patel is a long-standing fan of the sport he’s played since he was a child. As well as his convenient trip to Milan, the Director guest-starred in the Congressional Hockey Game last year and was present when Washington Nationals star Alexander Ovechkin broke Wayne Gretzky’s NHL scoring record, posing for photos with both players.
But how good is Patel as a player? “He plays in the AA league which is the best league in DC. Relative to DC players writ large, he’s well above average. But as far as the AA league, he’s among the slower players,” Richie McGinniss, who has crossed sticks with Patel, told Cockburn.
McGinniss, who wears shirt #420 on a team called the “Narcs,” described Patel as “definitely a lower-tier defenseman in that league. With that being said, his team is at the top of the league heading into the playoffs with a 13-5 record.”
“Everyone on Kash’s team likes him personally even though many don’t share his politics,” said McGinniss. “From what I gathered from multiple sources, Kash is a glue guy who is a highly valued member of the squad regardless of skill level. He’s just one of the boys. He plays clean: pinches a lot at the blue line and is well known for taking head-high slap shots. He blocks shots and plays hard.”
McGinniss did concede that Patel is “definitely the slowest” of the players in his league. Think he’s sluggish on the ice? You should see him run a manhunt…
Someone read this aloud to Governor Newsom
Gavin Newsom’s not-quite-yet presidential campaign is going great so far. On Sunday night in Atlanta, promoting his new memoir Young Man In A Hurry, Newsom had a chat with Mayor Andre Dickens, saying, “I’m like you… I’m a 960 SAT guy.” Online pundits, along with conservative figures including Sean Hannity, went bonkers, accusing Newsom of being racist, saying that he was addressing the mostly black audience.
But though Dickens is black, a quick scan of the crowd shows that most of the people in the auditorium were, in fact, white. In Atlanta! There are a thousand ways to criticize Gavin Newsom, but this one seemed misplaced.
Nevertheless, SAT-gate clearly has Newsom and his people on the defensive. RealClear journalist Susan Crabtree, a Newsom gadfly, touched a sore spot when she sent an email to Newsom’s people asking for proof of his dyslexia diagnosis from 1972, which he’s claiming is the reason for his low SAT score. Newsom spokesman Izzy Gardon wrote back, “Hey Susan – thanks for reaching out. Respectfully, fuck off.”
This same attitude manifested in Newsom’s X account going absolutely ham on Sean Hannity on Monday, tweeting: “You didn’t give a shit about the President of the United States of America posting an ape video of President Obama or calling African nations shitholes – but you’re going to call me racist for talking about my lifelong struggle with dyslexia? Spare me your fake fucking outrage, Sean.”
Talk about toxic whiteness!
The NHS myth is cracking
Despite soaking up more than £200 billion of taxpayers’ money per year, the NHS and health policy more widely are two areas which have gone ignored. Since the coalition government’s half-baked reforms, Britain’s approach to health policy can be summarised as: give the NHS money and hope for the best.
This approach is running out of road. Over the last few years, the NHS has faced unprecedented pressure. A combination of bad winters and the shocks of the pandemic have left it in a poor state, with high waiting lists and demoralised staff. Clearly something isn’t working. The current government has continued where the Tories left off, papering over the cracks. Something has to change. But what? The NHS is spoken about like a national religion, and reforming it is believed to be a third rail of British politics.
The public are disillusioned with the NHS, its funding model, the quality of its services and its priorities
In the pandemic, the public were implored to ‘protect the NHS’, rather than expect the health service to protect the public. The establishment of the NHS was treated like one of Britain’s founding myths, akin to Alfred the Great or the Battle of Hastings, in the opening ceremony to the 2012 Olympic Games. This sentiment also manifested itself in public opinion, such as the Clap for Carers initiative in 2020 and 2023 polling which found more than half of British citizens believed the NHS made them proud to be British.
But if both taxes and NHS spending are at record highs, and yet the health service refuses to improve, then something has to give. That is why Prosperity Institute conducted a 5,000-person poll with Merlin Strategy this winter. We wanted to find out whether the public still do treat the NHS like some kind of sacred cow, whether they believe it is working and what should be done.
The findings reveal a country finally in the mood to try something different. The public are disillusioned with the NHS, its funding model, the quality of its services and its priorities. Anyone who wishes to grasp the nettle of NHS reform should take heart in the results, as they suggest the British people are far more willing to roll the dice and try something new.
Naturally, the NHS is one of the public’s highest priority issues. Forty-nine per cent of voters said the NHS was in one of their top three concerns, behind only the economy, chosen by 66 per cent, and immigration, listed by 50 per cent of the population. Though it may seem obvious, these three issues remain the central concerns of the voting public, and they overlap in many ways.
While our polling found that the public believed funding is one of the biggest challenges the NHS faces, 59 per cent of voters believed that NHS reform should be prioritised over increased funding. Private healthcare has become remarkably popular, with 60 per cent of voters reporting that they would use it if they could afford it and, if recent figures are anything to go by, a large and growing proportion of the population is doing just that: more than 8.4 million people had private health insurance as of 2024.
Of course, it is worth examining if people are turning to private healthcare as a last resort, using the market where the NHS has failed, which is what many have claimed regarding the high levels of out-of-pocket expenditure on private healthcare these days. But our polling revealed high levels of trust in private practitioners as well.
Similarly, when asked about the public’s preferred healthcare systems from around the world, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Germany and Australia came out on top. All are countries with a mixed model of provision, where the state, the private sector and charities deliver healthcare in a more competitive system with better results than the NHS.
While it is worth bearing in mind that the public’s awareness of the details of these countries’ health policies may vary – Switzerland is generally assumed to be a well-run, efficient country – thousands of British doctors have moved to practise in Australia recently, and it is highly likely that many British people will have heard about the better state of their health service from friends or family. Unsurprisingly, the public remain hostile to an American-style model, which is still associated with expensive treatments and insurance costs.
These findings are a useful reminder that the public understand that the health policy dichotomy of ‘the NHS or America’ often posed in British politics is false, and there is a whole world of functioning, accessible healthcare out there, much of it on our doorstep.
In a sense, it is hardly surprising that the public are ready for reforming the health service. Taxes and immigration are at record highs, two policies which the government claims were chosen to support the NHS, but without the public seeing a notable improvement in care as a consequence. Indeed, our polling reveals that the public believe that immigration is a burden on the health service rather than a net benefit by a significant margin – 49 per cent versus just 22 per cent respectively.
This is a view shared by Reform, Conservative, Liberal Democrat, SNP and Plaid Cymru voters. Whether this reflects public dissatisfaction with immigration because it increases demand on the health service or because of poor-quality care deserves further research; however, our survey revealed a strong public preference for training more British doctors and nurses, and around 42 per cent of voters believe that the quality of care provided by foreign staff in the NHS is worse than that offered by British doctors.
The public have a far greater appetite for reforming the delivery and funding of the health service than ever before. Britain’s politicians should have the courage to re-establish a new social contract with the public when it comes to public services, one which respects British taxpayers and strives to create the finest public services for British people in the world, taking inspiration from best practice in other countries. The public, evidently, are running out of patience, and won’t forgive the political class if it passes the buck to the next generation once more.
‘He never drew a peaceful breath’: the tormented life of Henry VII
Have we ever had a more successful yet somehow forgettable king than Henry VII? A century ago, the Dictionary of National Biography could still hail him as the ‘Solomon of England’. But if he is remembered now it is almost solely for the dynasty he founded, with the domestic and international achievements of his own long and prudent reign largely ignored in the country’s bizarre obsession with the later Tudors.
There must have been an unusual mix of calculation and audacity to Henry’s character, because calculation alone could never have brought him to the throne. Over the first 30 years of his life, regime change had become the violent norm of English life; so when, in 1485, a minor Welsh earl with few supporters and no experience of either war or government returned from exile to seize Richard III’s crown, there can have been no reason to think that he would last any longer than his predecessor.
It was not, either, as though his royal claims on either side of his lineage were anything but tenuous. He had been born at Pembroke Castle in 1457, the only child of the 13-year-old Margaret Beaufort, the recently widowed great-granddaughter of the Lancastrian John of Gaunt and his mistress Katherine Swynford.
If that all sounds a little ‘sketchy’, as Sean Cunningham puts it, the story on the paternal side was a good deal less reputable. In 1455, Henry’s 12-year-old mother had been married off to Edmund Tudor, one of three sons of the impoverished Owen Tudor who had scandalously married Henry V’s widow – making Edmund, serendipitous and dangerous by turn, a half-brother of the ‘saintly, but mentally unstable’ Henry VI.
While they might not have been the strongest credentials for a claimant to the throne, by the 1480s the Lancastrian party was in no position to pick or choose. As a young child, Henry had been made a royal ward of the Yorkist Edward IV. But at the age of 14 he managed to escape to Brittany, where he might well have remained had the death of Edward and the murder of the young princes not split the Yorkist camp and given him his chance.
It was a chance that, against all the odds, he seized, though if the Battle of Bosworth – notoriously a battle decided as much by those who did not fight as those who did – taught Henry anything it was that beyond his immediate circle there was no one he could trust. ‘If the Stanleys, his relatives by marriage, were slow to show their hand until certain of winning,’ writes Cunningham, ‘then, Henry realised, no allegiance could be relied upon. Despite needing their support, he knew that he could only be secure on the throne if he could deny England’s powerful families the ability to directly influence his fate.’
The Battle of Bosworth taught Henry that there was no one beyond his immediate circle he could trust
It is this wearing struggle to bring the aristocracy to heel that lies at the heart of Cunningham’s lucid and always readable biography. Over the long, bloody years of civil war, the symbiotic bond of throne and land had been ruptured beyond repair, and not even Henry’s marriage to Margaret of York or the birth of an heir could stem the threats and rebellions that defined the early years of his reign.
If he could not woo over his enemies, however, he could muzzle them, and it is characteristic of Henry’s temperament and talents that he should turn to the law rather than the sword to cement his dynasty. He was ready to fight when a Perkin Warbeck or Lambert Simnel gave him no option, but from the earliest days of his reign he was exploiting every legal and financial resource open to him, binding dissidents by suspended fines, drawing in their supporters as guarantors, extending the scope and use of royal prerogatives, and – with increasing harshness as the friends of his exile gave way to a new breed of lawyer-henchmen – operating on and beyond the fringes of the law in a climate of greed, extortion, forfeitures, paid informers, bribes and arbitrary justice.
It is a story that Cunningham tells succinctly and well. We learn everything we need to know and nothing we don’t. There are almost none of the favourite stocking-fillers of Tudor biography – no sumptuary laws, no set-piece executions on Tower Hill – just the clear outlines of a crucial period of English history. ‘Justified Harshness?’ he calls his final chapter, and the question is answered with characteristic balance. ‘By all metrics of late medieval kingship, Henry had proved an exceptionally successful king,’ winning his battles, seeing off his challengers, controlling the state, securing his dynasty, providing England with a voice in European politics and – no given for medieval kings – finally dying in his bed.
Success, though, as Cunningham makes equally clear, had come at a heavy personal and national cost ‘Throughout his life,’ the Italian scholar Polydore Vergil wrote, ‘Henry was destined never to draw a peaceful breath’ – and that seems scarcely an exaggeration. By 1509, his health was shattered, his grip on affairs weakened and the trust of his subjects irredeemably lost. His wife was dead, as was his oldest son, Arthur.
It was a hard end to a hard life; and it would have been harder still if he could have seen what was to come. Within days of his death the chief architects of his financial oppression had been arrested for treason and the new king, the ‘dazzling’ 17-year old Henry VIII, had proclaimed a general pardon, with the promise of a new start, a new kind of reign and respect for the country’s laws. Whatever else lay obscurely hidden in the future, one thing was already certain: the popular image of the Tudors’ dynasty would not be forged in the likeness of the complex, pious man who had worn out his life and imperilled his soul to found it.
Nights at the Lutetia – the dark history of a luxury hotel
The saga of the rise and fall of the Third Reich could be traced by following events in any one of the countries occupied by the Nazis. Jane Rogoyska has refined this approach by focusing on what happened in a single building, a fashionable ‘grand hotel’ in central Paris, between 1933 and 1945.
The Lutetia is the only luxury hotel in Paris on the Left Bank, where it has always looked out of place – its bulbous, domed grandeur dominating less pretentious neighbours in a district that is still better known for its cultural and academic traditions. Rogoyska tells the story of the building’s wartime adventures in three parts – before, during and after the German occupation of France. The lives recounted fall into three groups, only one of which is French.
Part One describes the destruction of German and Austrian culture that took place after the Nazis seized power in 1933. The writers forced into exile in France included many of the literary stars of Habsburg Vienna and the Weimar Republic: Berthold Brecht, Heinrich Mann and his brother Thomas, Walter Benjamin, Alfred Kerr, Hannah Arendt, Joseph Roth, Franz Werfel and Stefan Zweig.
They escaped with their lives but in many cases lost their livelihoods. In Paris they were ‘condemned to live each day in growing solitude, anonymity and humiliation’, lining up at ‘counters to obtain food coupons, cash handouts and advice’, living in penury in cheap hotels. They also had to face the hostility of French bureaucracy and of the population in general towards anything ‘German’, and were often reluctant to be heard speaking German in public. Arthur Koestler, who was both Jewish and a communist, took the extreme step of joining the Foreign Legion to escape the attention of the bureaucrats bent on interning him.
The Lutetia, briefly the home of James Joyce, plays an incidental role in the prewar story, being well beyond the means of the impoverished refugees. But eventually some of the exiles, inspired by Heinrich Mann, decided to fight back by forming a provisional committee to launch a ‘German Popular Front against Fascism’. They chose to meet in the elegant salons of the Lutetia, the only venue on the Left Bank whose splendour would be appropriate for their ambitions. (The fee for hiring the hotel’s largest meeting room was paid by the Comintern.)
In 1935, the committee acquired a new name, the Lutetia Committee, and a powerful recruit, Willi Münzenberg, the ‘Red Millionaire’ and organising genius of international communism. But despite his leadership (and the initial support of E.M. Forster and Aldous Huxley), no German Popular Front emerged, and the tentative alliance between communists and social democrats died on 23 August 1939 with news of the Nazi-Soviet pact. The leader of the French communists, Maurice Thorez, with his customary lucidity, welcomed Der Pakt as ‘a stroke of genius’ on Stalin’s part that would avert another European war. The second world war broke out two weeks later. By then many of the exiles had managed to escape for a second time, to Switzerland, England or the United States. Joseph Roth did not make it, having drunk himself to a solitary death in the gloomy bars of the Latin Quarter. And in due course Ernst Toller, Walter Benjamin, Stefan Zweig and Alfred Kerr all committed suicide.
The German army occupied Paris ten months after the outbreak of war, and the Lutetia was requisitioned and allotted to the Abwehr, roughly the German equivalent of MI6. The story of the hotel’s use as a reception centre for deportees is quite well known, so Part Two, where Rogoyska draws on less familiar German sources to reconstruct the life of the Lutetia during the Abwehr’s occupation, is the most impressive and original section in the book.
The military intelligence service was, she writes, ‘an organisation that stood uncomfortably on the fringes of the Nazi regime’. The senior officer, a rather civilised gourmet named Colonel Friedrich Rudolph, decided to requisition the French staff as well as the hotel. The concierge remained at his post, the cooks and waiters and chambermaids continued to serve their new guests with their habitual courtesy, and the manager, Marcel Chappaz, ensured that everyone was comfortable, having first removed the most valuable bottles from his wine cellar and hidden them. The commanders of the Abwehr remained in these quarters until the very last minute, enjoying a final bottle of champagne a few hours before the arrival in Paris of Allied forces. They regrouped in Berlin, where Colonel Rudolph was promptly imprisoned as a suspect in the July plot to assassinate Hitler.
Meanwhile, back at the Lutetia, the political deportees were being registered, squirted with DDT and helped into reception, where the staff were assisted by boy scouts. Many of their patients were the true heroes of France’s war, all that remained of that small minority who had found the courage to fight back after the military debacle of 1940. The survivors returned in a terrible state, here described in vivid detail. They were wasted, in rags, crawling with lice and often contagious with typhus or tuberculosis. Two of the Lutetia’s staff died following contact with the first postwar guests. The deportees gave no sense of happiness. Their expressions were vacant, in the words of one 14-year-old boy scout volunteer, Michel Rocard, later prime minister of France: ‘The landscape of the faces of these men had been destroyed by other men. It was frightening.’ And they said nothing; their silence imposed silence on everybody else in return.
Rogoyska’s vivid and thoroughly researched account, a masterclass in the creative use of secondary sources, is a little less convincing when she generalises about events beyond the hotel’s revolving doors. The Abwehr’s effectiveness in Occupied France was not notably hindered by the dominant role given to the rival SS-SD. In fact fear of being handed over to the Gestapo gave the interrogators of the Abwehr a very persuasive argument. Nor, oddly enough, did the Gestapo’s brutality lead to an increase in volunteering for the French Resistance. Abwehr incompetence was self-generated. All the agents it sent to England were either executed or ‘turned’ by MI5, and the misinformation they passed to Rudolph’s colleagues in Berlin played an important part in the success of D-Day.
Rogoyska suggests that the care given to the deportees in some way ‘absolved’ the Lutetia from guilt over its wartime role. I am not convinced. In 1955, Rudolph paid a return visit to Paris, a place of happy memories, and hesitantly entered the Lutetia, where Monsieur Chappaz happened to be on duty in the hall. The manager greeted ‘the Colonel’ warmly and offered him lunch at his favourite table, as a guest of the hotel.
The woke wars intensify
Nigel Biggar was not an obvious target for cancellation. A New Labourite, a Remainer and a public supporter of gay marriage and abortion up to 18 weeks, he might have seemed almost right-on – for an Oxford Professor of Divinity, at any rate. Nonetheless, when in 2017 he had the temerity to suggest that the British Empire had done some good as well as bad, 170-plus academics signed a letter urging Oxford University to withdraw support for his work. This was one of the first stirrings of ‘cancel culture’, the tactic of quashing wrongthink not by argument or persuasion but by sheer force of numbers.
Unfortunately for themselves, Biggar’s detractors had picked on the proverbial ‘wrong guy’. Biggar bounced back to lead the fight against woke, helping to set up the Free Speech Union and lobbying for the (still only partially implemented) Freedom of Speech Act. His latest book displays many of the qualities that have made him so effective a campaigner. Its writing is plain and vigorous. It presses its claims doggedly but without a hint of malice. Its prejudices, which are many, are all on its sleeve.
I should at this point declare an interest. Biggar was my theology tutor in the 1990s and has remained a friend and mentor ever since. His distinctive virtues were evident from the outset. When I once mentioned depression as an excuse for not handing in an essay on time, he replied immediately: ‘How dare you try that one on me. I know very well that you have been partying.’ He was right: I had been partying. I recall that episode with shame every time I acquiesce in silence to my own students’ mumblings about ‘mental health issues’.
The New Dark Age is an overview of the UK culture wars, with a focus on Biggar’s own field of colonial history. Its main target is the impulse – Marxist in origin, but now all-pervasive – to see the cloven hoof of ‘racism’ in every achievement of western thought and culture. Why bother grappling with J.S. Mill when we know in advance that he was a paid servant of imperialism? Why bother indeed with arguments at all, when ‘truth’ is whatever serves the cause? This way of thinking is like woodworm, insidious and invasive. Any field of enquiry infected by it will soon be rotten to the core, though it may still exhibit outward signs of life.
But our civilisational self-hatred is not just an offspring of Marxism, suggests Biggar. Its deeper source lies in the Christian idea of repentance, which it parodies and perverts. It is right and sometimes noble to acknowledge your own nation’s wrong-doings, but it should also be difficult – just as personal confession is difficult. (‘It is all within me, I have been through it all,’ said Thomas Mann in 1945, referring to the spiritual forces that drove Germany into the arms of Hitler.) The woke, however, find it all too easy to condemn their own nation’s past because for them that past is something ‘over there’ – a swamp of sin from which they, the righteous ones, have once and for all been liberated. This is the sectarian attitude, now secularised. It is a powerful inducement to pride and licence. Get on the right side of history and what wrong can you do? Are not all things pure to the pure?
True believers in the woke gospel have always been few in number. Their influence depends upon the surrounding many who are not true believers but merely anxious to stay out of trouble. During the 2017 campaign against him, Biggar was bewildered by the ‘almost total silence’ of his university colleagues. Only four, three of them strangers, reached out with messages of support. The vast majority, including many he counted as friends, carried on as though nothing had happened. ‘It was as if I had become diseased and they were terrified of contagion.’ Biggar reminds us of the behaviour of German scholars under the Nazis, but the comparison is all in their favour, not ours. Dachau and Buchenwald awaited those few German academics who dared step out of line. What is our excuse? The real revelation of the past decade was not the fanaticism of the few but the unforced acquiescence of the otherwise decent many.
The New Dark Age makes the case for a robust classical liberalism rooted in an enlightened Christian faith. But the past few years have made clear that wokism’s real enemy is not liberalism but another ideology, still inchoate but giving signs of being every bit as fanatical and vindictive as wokism itself. In this situation, Biggar’s liberalism looks increasingly like a holding operation – a temporary keeping at bay of mighty forces of destruction. Can liberalism ever be more than a holding operation? I’m not so sure.
Learning from history requires sophistication and skill
If you reckon you have an understanding of international politics today, you probably haven’t been listening properly. Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump are making history too fast for most of us to keep up. Odd Arne Westad’s The Coming Storm seeks to make sense of the current geopolitical chaos by drawing parallels between now and the years before 1914. If you don’t find those comparisons reassuring, you aren’t supposed to. The point being stressed is that, unless we are careful, we risk sleepwalking into a Great Power conflict as terrible as, or worse than, the first world war.
Westad is a leading Cold War historian from Yale and his comparisons are always thought-provoking and often accurate. Two weary titans, staggering under the too-vast orbs of their fate (the UK then, the USA now), mourn their fading hegemony in societies beset by popular nationalism and xenophobia, while impulsive and irresponsible leaders exploit fear and resentment for their own political gain. Revolutions in technology and armaments promise deterrence but risk only massive destruction. Sound familiar?
Inevitably, perhaps, the analogies sometimes feel forced. Yes, there are similarities between the economic rise of China since 1989 and Germany’s after 1871, but China, crucially, does not sit surrounded by rivals at the heart of a fragmented continent. Further, Germany’s conversion of economic strength into military might, and ultimately its decision to employ force, were not inevitable. They depended on a series of deliberate choices made by the Kaiser and his chancellors. President Xi may well have made some similar decisions already, but there remain others yet to make. Just because something happened before does not mean it must happen again.
There are broader divergences, too. One hidden assumption underpinning this book is that international politics is akin to a grown-up game of Risk, with a handful of players of approximately equal strength all reaching for the same ring: global power and prestige. If that were ever the case, today the picture is surely more complex. Putin and Xi seem motivated more by a desire to consolidate and expand their control at home than anything else. For Trump, the metric is column inches. Also, we define power differently these days. The European Union and Japan are economic leviathans, yet global military tiddlers. Soft power, in the form of cultural diplomacy and shared values, has an influence all its own. It is weird that a fan of Coca-Cola like Trump should have so completely forgotten its value to the American brand.
Accuracy is not really the main point with comparisons like this, though. No 200-plus-page book can hope to capture every nuance of one of the most debated questions in all history. More importantly, none of us really thinks that history repeats itself exactly. When politicians invoked ‘Munich’ to explain why they needed to stand up to President Nasser, Arthur Scargill or Saddam Hussein, the point they were making was more rhetorical than historical. If we go to the past expecting to find how-to guides that spell out, step by step, how to navigate the problems we face, we will be disappointed. Worse, we risk bending the present to fit into the shape of the past and misunderstanding the real problem. The analogies we choose to help answer our questions determine the answers we get.
President John F. Kennedy knew that when, during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, he quoted 1914 as an example of how not to make decisions. The outbreak of the Great War was fresh in his mind because he had recently read Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August – still one of the most evocative accounts we have. Also, he had studied at Harvard under Sidney B. Fay, a leading expert on the July Crisis. Kennedy’s point was that his administration must avoid being hustled into hasty and faulty decisions by generals citing mobilisation timetables, as the statesmen of 1914 had been. At a time when the military was pressing hard for pre-emptive strikes on Cuba, this was a useful point to make. JFK was employing history with great sophistication and skill. He identified patterns in human behaviour that, despite vastly different circumstances between 1914 and 1962, were nonetheless relevant to solving the problems he faced. That is the way to do it.
Westad, similarly, is trying to identify how and why people make the bad decisions that lead to conflict. There are plenty of examples from 1914, of course. These suit his central message that war is dreadful and we need to work hard to avoid it. That may not be a terribly original thing to say, but it bears repetition. The Coming Storm is an easy read and if it helps people in Washington and Whitehall think about applying history to help navigate the squalls bearing down on us, it will have made a useful contribution.
The Venice Ghetto was a landmark in the history of Jewish persecution
The word ‘ghetto’ is said to derive from the Venetian dialect term for ‘foundry’: ghèto. In the early 16th century, on the orders of the Doge, Jews were herded en masse from the centre of Venice to the Ghetto Nuovo, or New Foundry district, where metal workers had long cast cannon for the Venetian fleet. The Ghetto – the first of its kind on the Italian peninsula and anywhere in the world – became a model for segregated Jewish quarters throughout Europe. It was soon blighted by poverty, malnutrition and disease. The Ghetto Nuovo was a landmark in the history of Jewish persecution.
In this fascinating history of the New Foundry and its inhabitants, Alexander Lee conjures the Adriatic seaport in all its strange glory. Beyond the scenery of gondolas and tulip-shaped chimneys was a hidden, gated world of sorrow and derision. The Holy Inquisition, which operated in Venice with papal blessing from the 1560s onwards, gleefully indicted the Jews as slayers of Christ and Christian children. Worse, the ‘infidel Israelite’ was a moneylender. The charge of usury had the usual anti-Judaic connotation in Inquisition-era Venice, yet, as Lee points out, the city was reliant on the Ghetto merchants for its glittering prosperity. At best, Jews were grudgingly tolerated.
In densely researched pages, Lee chronicles the Ghetto’s polyglot intermingling of communities from Germany, Spain, Portugal and the Ottoman empire. Expelled from anti-Semitic Castile and Aragon in the 1490s, Iberian migrants or Sephardim (after Sefarad, Hebrew for Spain) found a welcoming refuge in Venice. By the mid-17th century the Ghetto had become the most thriving outpost of diaspora Jewry in the Adriatic, with infusions also of Ashkenazi Jews from northern Europe. At different times, Sephardim and Ashkenazim alike were vulnerable to the rack and burning tongs of the Inquisition.
In a stirring chapter, ‘The Burning of the Gates’, Lee chronicles the Ghetto’s liberation by Napoleon Bonaparte when the armies of the new French Republic invaded from across the Alps and extended the Rights of Man to Italian Jews. After the gates of the Ghetto Nuovo were torn down in 1797 by Napoleon, a tree of liberty was planted in the main square and a number of the 1,600-odd inhabitants chose to name their newborn sons Bonaparte in honour of the emancipator.
As it turned out, Jewish civil liberty lasted scarcely two decades until the end of the revolutionary era when, in 1815, the Austrian empire in Italy revoked many of the equalities granted by Napoleon. Venetian Jewry was reconsigned to a bureaucratic segregation, if not physically to the Ghetto, which had been dismantled for good.
In 1848, while much of Italy was convulsed by revolution, Venice rose up against the Austrian occupier and declared an independent Venetian republic. Venetian Jews joined forces with the thousands of volunteers who supported the anti-Austrian revolt led by the patriotic lawyer Daniel Manin, who was himself of Jewish descent. Morale collapsed in the besieged city after food and water shortages combined with outbreaks of cholera. The unequal combat lasted more than a year while Venice was pulverised by Austrian howitzer. Venice capitulated on 24 August, to become once again a fiefdom of the abhorred Austro-Habsburgs. Manin fled into exile in Paris, where he taught Italian to, among others, Charles Dickens.
A surprising number of Venetian Jews supported Mussolini in the early days of fascism. Among them was the journalist Margherita Sarfatti, one of the Duce’s many mistresses, who exerted a stronger influence on fascist Italy than is generally realised. She was one of the masterminds behind the regime’s pompous celebration of classical Rome. Her bestselling 1926 biography, Dux, exalted Mussolini as a godlike manifestation of romanità (‘Romanness’). Yet Sarfatti’s name was dirt once Mussolini had committed Italy to Nazi Germany’s anti-Semitic cause. As Lee reminds us, a latent tension had always existed between fascism and Italian Jews. Zionists in particular were seen by Mussolini as a self-regarding, supranational ‘sect’ inimical to the Blackshirt bond of blood and belonging. (‘They are carrion,’ he said of Jews in private.) Sarfatti managed to escape German-occupied Lombardy, but her sister Nella died on a transport bound for Auschwitz from the Italian transfer camp of Fossoli near Modena.
Life for the Jews of Venice deteriorated under Hitler when they were subjected to constant surveillance and humiliated in their homes; between November 1943 and August 1944, with fascist police collusion, up to 289 Venetian Jews were deported to the German death camps. Few if any lived to tell the tale. Today, the ‘most woe-begotten corner of Venice’ (as Lee calls the Ghetto district) has a wealth of tourist bars and kosher restaurants; its five ancient synagogues are still standing. This admirable book offers a poignant testimony to a people who have approached annihilation many times. Venetian Jewry has come a long way from its days in the foundry.
From enfant terrible to dame: Tracey Emin in her own words
On the eve of a major retrospective at Tate Modern comes this portrait of Tracey Emin as a painter, told largely in her own words. It traces a remarkable trajectory, from gobby Margate teenager to one of the UK’s most respected and celebrated artists, and a Dame of the British Empire. At its heart is a series of conversations with Martin Gayford, a critic with a deep engagement with the nature of painting and insights gleaned from close friendships with 20th-century giants, Lucian Freud and David Hockney among them.
It is a book full of heart – frank and confessional – and presents Emin at the zenith of her powers, having survived near-fatal cancer and found new purpose and conviction. She’s back home in Margate, she’s teaching, ‘reinvesting my knowledge back into art’, and she’s ‘painting like a banshee’, as she puts it.
Gayford claims Emin as a Romantic, one for whom art is a kind of salvation
It is an account full of surprises, too. One senses that Emin’s celebrity obscured the real artist behind the headlines and the seriousness of her aims. Yes, she wasted a lot of time goofing around – she would be the first to admit to that – but behind the enfant terrible with questionable domestic habits (cf. ‘My Bed’) and all the public mayhem was a focused and driven student, passionate about the art of Edvard Munch, Egon Schiele and the German Expressionists, and eager to learn everything she could from them. Though often linked together, she was never a YBA; she studied at Maidstone and the Royal College of Art, not Goldsmiths; she was not part of Damien Hirst’s defining exhibition Freeze in 1988.
Instead, she was learning to draw, the very core of her practice and the starting point for many of her most painterly paintings. She drew Margate and friends and cats and birds and nudes; she learned to make monoprints, woodcuts, etchings and lithographs: ‘I chose printmaking because I loved the alchemy of it. I loved the machinery, the old-fashionedness of it, the smell of the ink.’ Expressionism was her model, and allowed her full expressivity at a time when painting meant little to her: she had not yet discovered its possibilities.
This discovery was made on her first trip to the Tate at the age of 22. She chanced upon a mid-period Mark Rothko, sat down and wept. She had never heard of Rothko, but the emotional depth-charge opened her eyes to the vast potential of painting as a medium in all its mystery and grandeur. It was to be a rocky road, however, peppered with stops and starts – years of break-ups, breakdowns, pregnancies, abortions, celebrity, notoriety, more celebrity – before she found her stride as a painter in the early 2000s, using thin veils of acrylics that trail like blood or tears down the canvas, adding extra jeopardy to the emotional psycho-drama portrayed.
The Venice Biennale of 2007 was a watershed. Emin was the UK’s chosen artist for the British Pavilion, a challenge she found immensely daunting. It was her first venture into paintings of scale, and she never underestimated the task: painting then was ‘something I was scared of. It would intimidate me. Now it doesn’t… I just go in there, and the painting doesn’t know what’s going to happen to it. And it’s tchooow! Battle it out!’ Another turning point was her mother’s death in 2016. After that, she embraced pure spontaneity, ‘like a seance’:
I want a painting to tell me something I didn’t know before, not something I already knew. My mind goes on a kind of journey. It isn’t technical. It’s not an exercise. It’s just me, moving through the canvas and moving through the ideas.
Emin’s voice is refreshingly direct, both serious and humorous, and in addressing various themes close to her heart – the sea, the sunset, even the importance of beds – we come to a better understanding of her hard-won success and her position in the painterly canon. Gayford claims her as a Romantic, one steeped in the townscape (and seascape) of her childhood, one for whom dreams and the psyche are a vivid source of inspiration and for whom art is a kind of salvation. ‘I Need Art Like I Need God’ was the title of one show. It is hardly surprising that Margate’s Dreamland Cinema, such a feature of her youth, should still glow in her mental landscape, inspiring her neon strips, and now restored to Margate with her help: ‘I Never Stopped Loving You’ beams out from one of the town’s most prominent facades.
This concise, elegant and beautifully illustrated study, with Gayford’s skilful and always apposite narrative, is as thought-provoking as it is readable, and I closed it with a greatly enriched understanding of the mysterious process by which life is transmuted into art.
Women have never had it so good as now
Unfortunately, Zoe Strimpel has a great point in Good Slut. Why unfortunately? Because as much as I sympathise with her basic argument, I cannot see many people being persuaded by this scattershot polemic with its myriad errors and alarming glibness. Team slut deserves a better advocate.
Whether I want to count myself as one of team slut is a sensitive point. I’m 44: it feels embarrassing. I had my ‘reclaiming sexist slurs’ phase in the late 1990s when I was an aspiring Riot Grrrl and I realised pretty soon that wearing fishnets and calling myself names was not having the disruptive effect on misogyny that I’d hoped for.
Strimpel is 43 and, like me, she’s noted the recent turn to conservatism in sexual politics with some alarm. On the right, you have the rise of ‘reactionary feminists’ such as Louise Perry and Mary Harrington. These thinkers preach that casual sex is bad for women, contraception deadening and marriage and children a higher goal for most women than professional or public works.
Strimpel aligns them with what she nicknames the ‘chastity belt right’ and posits them as the intellectual wing of online ‘trad femme’ culture – a loose network of influencers who glamorise female subordination and domestic life, often via appeals to the ‘innate capacities’ of male and female. The paradox is that many of these women have built successful careers propagandising for other women to stick to the kitchen.
On the other side, you have the left-wing repugnance of the ‘girl boss’, and of entrepreneurialism more generally. Progressives often treat sexual inequality as a consequence of capitalism (absurdly, as Strimpel points out, given the treatment of women within planned economies). And from all quarters, writes Strimpel, women are ‘constantly being invited to feel afraid and angry, to see only the negatives in being a woman in the West today’.
Inasmuch as Good Slut is a rallying call for the benefits to women of the sexual revolution, I’m with Strimpel. ‘The sexual revolution did not shackle us; it bequeathed us, and it is up to us how we use that bequest.’ (What exactly the sexual revolution is supposed to have bequeathed in this sentence is one of the many mysteries thrown up by Strimpel’s prose style, but you get the gist.) She invites her readers to ‘grab life by the ovaries’. Women shouldn’t live in fear of male violence. We shouldn’t perceive our bodies only as sources of pain. And we should absolutely not fall prey to just-so stories about women’s ‘natural capacity’ which would push women into care and reproduction while men hoover up the fun and prestigious roles.
Again, I could get behind much of this – but in making the arguments, Strimpel resorts to outright denialism. For example, she struggles to believe that schoolgirls today suffer more sexual harassment than she did at Bedales in the 1990s, and decides that modern girls’ experiences must reflect
a fevered awareness, drummed into children now through sex education and other resources, of danger lurking in all sexual advances, especially the unexpected or unwanted.
Really? At a minimum, the existence of mobile phones has given rise to two whole new forms of harassment that Strimpel and I (at my non-Bedales school) never had to face: revenge porn, and boys watching actual porn in the classroom (material which will give some of them inspiration for abusing girls in real life). Girls’ anxieties cannot be waved away.
Strimpel can’t acknowledge that porn entails harm because a large part of her identity resides in being sex-positive. She’s not like those meanie feminists who’d get between a man and his orgasm. Her idea of a Thatcherite sexual heroine is the notorious porn performer Bonnie Blue: ‘She shows what a truly robust liberal society looks like.’ Regarding the men who queue up to abuse this paragon of the free market, Strimpel is silent.
There’s an endemic sloppiness to this book. Strimpel writes that no-fault divorce was introduced in 1969. Not exactly: until 2022, the law required one party to blame the other, or wait a minimum of two years. A section debunking the sexism of pop evolutionary biology seems astonishingly unaware that female evolutionary biologists exist, and have extensively challenged masculinist assumptions in the field. Several pages consist, lazily, of undiluted quotes from the sex advice columnist Dan Savage.
The worst comes last, with a chapter claiming that warnings of a fertility crisis are ‘overwrought’. Strimpel simply denies that falling birth rates have any ill effects. This is fatuous: population decline has drastic economic and social consequences. To pretend otherwise because you fear conceding a point to the natalists is both intellectually dishonest and politically unserious. If this is the best defence that the sexual revolution can muster, the future looks dry indeed.
Streamlined chic or lacy froth: royal style wars of the 1930s
The semiotics of clothes, especially royal ones, can be fascinating, sending out powerful messages. Think of the jewel-studded, pearl-strewn portraits of Queen Elizabeth I or Princess Diana’s revenge-chic black dress. As a fashion queen herself (Justine Picardie was editor-in-chief of Harper’s Bazaar for more than seven years and has an acclaimed book on Chanel under her belt), no one is better placed to unpick the subtleties of royal public couture. So, judging by this book’s title, I was expecting a shrewd analysis of diplomacy dressing, with perhaps some behind-the-scenes vignettes. What happens if a royal lady unexpectedly gets a ladder in her tights at a crucial moment? Is there a colour code if three of them are out together? How do hats stay on in a gale? And what happens to all the numerous garments that each wears in her lifetime? In fact, everything a fashion insider might know.
But most of these pages are devoted to a résumé of the events of the first half of the 20th century, covering everything from the late Queen’s childhood to her coronation, where the book ends. There is the wedding of her parents, the Abdication, the rise of Hitler, Kristallnacht, George VI’s speech therapy and so on, with copious quotes from Cecil Beaton and the memoirs of various royal couturiers. Everything is impeccably researched, with sources given – but haven’t we read much of it before?
The book starts promisingly: a history of the House of Windsor is threaded through with accounts of Picardie’s own meetings with royalty, at Balmoral and Windsor Castle (her husband, Philip Astor, was a godson of Prince Philip). Of one sojourn she writes:
The sartorial requirements were stricter than any I had encountered at the Paris couture shows as the editor of Harper’s Bazaar, and despite my long experience of the demanding formalities of French fashion houses, a visit to Windsor Castle was infinitely more nerve-racking.
The late Queen’s clothes are archived in a building near the Castle, which Picardie visited to see the Hardy Amies dresses from the earlier part of her reign, all carefully stored in grey boxes. The first dress shown is a strapless red velvet evening gown with a waist of only 23 inches, worn by the then Princess Elizabeth in the late 1940s.
It is not until page 147 that we really get into couture, with descriptions of Wallis Simpson’s wardrobe, much of it from Schiaparelli, and the reactions of Beaton, who photographed her (in black and white) in the designer’s notorious lobster dress, designed in collaboration with Salvador Dali, just before her wedding to the Duke of Windsor in June 1937:
Given that Wallis approached fashion and photography with the utmost dedication, her choice to wear such a provocative dress is significant… Even without being able to see that the lobster is bright red, it is hard to ignore Dali’s insistence on the creature’s sexual connotations, given its suggestive position between Wallis’s thighs.
In July the following year the King and Queen paid the first state visit of their reign to Paris. With war clouds gathering, it was vital to reinforce the alliance between Britain and France. So when, three weeks before their departure, the Queen’s mother, Lady Strathmore, died, there could be no question of cancelling the visit. Fortunately, Norman Hartnell realised that wearing white for mourning rather than the customary black was a royal prerogative; and in three feverish weeks, complicated by intelligence reports of possible assassination attempts (four years earlier, King Alexander of Yugoslavia had been murdered in France) he designed an all-white wardrobe. ‘Thirty grand dresses to be worn from morning to midnight under the most critical eyes in the world,’ wrote Hartnell later. Leaving London in black, the Queen changed in the train, arriving in Paris in a floor-length column of milk-white crepe. The visit was a huge success, its climax a garden party in the Bois de Boulogne, where the Queen wore a frothy, diaphanous dress of cobweb lace and tulle. When she raised her white lace parasol to protect her famous complexion, ‘at a stroke,’ said Hartnell, ‘she resuscitated the art of the parasol-makers of Paris and London’.
Six months later the King and Queen embarked for America, their ship navigating icebergs through a heavy fog for part of the voyage. Here the choice of outfit could be even more demanding: what, for instance, should the Queen wear to greet people when the Royal Train stopped at 4 a.m. at a station in the Rockies? (A simple but flowing negligée dress in nectarine velvet was the answer.)
The Duke of Windsor dashed to Paris in 1940 to collect the Cartier brooch he had commissioned for his wife
Although the context is often in danger of overwhelming the subject, there are fascinating titbits, such as the Duke of Windsor’s dash to Paris to collect Wallis’s 44th birthday present. Just before France surrendered in June 1940, panic-stricken Parisians fled the city in cars, carts, on bicycles or on foot in what became known as l’exode. The Windsors, too, decamped to Biarritz where, once Wallis was installed in a luxury hotel, the Duke, for whom nothing was too much trouble if it pleased his beloved, returned through the throng to Paris. Here he collected the 4in-high brooch in the shape of a flamingo that he had commissioned from Cartier. This jewel, composed of emeralds, rubies, sapphires and diamonds, turned out to depict a national symbol of the Bahamas, to where the Duke and Duchess would soon be despatched.
My favourite story is of the dolls, Marianne and France, given to the two little princesses, Elizabeth and Margaret, during the French state visit. Each doll could have been an advertisement for French haute couture, with a trousseau designed by all the leading Paris houses – Lelong, Lanvin, Maggy Rouff, Paquin, Patou and so on, the only exceptions being Chanel and Schiaparelli – which took more than 20 packing cases to transport to London. There were even tiny matching Hermès handbags.
Revelling in reading: The Enchanting Lives of Others, by Can Xue, reviewed
Andrew Rule has narrated this article for you to listen to.
Can Xue is an oddity in the landscape of world literature. Greeted mostly with bewilderment or indifference in her native China, her novels have gained a following among a certain type of erudite western reader over the past few decades, leading to an annual flurry of Nobel speculation and more works in English translation than nearly any other living Chinese author.
The writing can be hard to enjoy. It often takes the form of avant-garde fairy tales populated by nameless characters who genially accept unsettling, inexplicable occurrences around them. When this works, as in last year’s gloriously strange Mother River, you get the disorientating feeling that you are the one who has gone insane, not the characters.
Reading The Enchanting Lives of Others is a more befuddling experience than usual. The novel follows the Pigeon Book Club, a group of young fiction enthusiasts and intellectuals living in the imaginary city of Meng (the word in Chinese refers to ignorance or deception). Every day these characters read books with titles such as XXXX5 and XX XX XX and marvel over how enlightened they feel as a result. They strip away everything from their daily routines apart from reading novels, and their parents and bosses look on appreciatively. ‘You are literature for me,’ they tell each other when they fall in love, with the curious (and intentional) flatness of Annelise Finegan’s English translation.
There’s something immediately cloying and uncanny about their fervour. (The literal translation of the novel’s Chinese title is ‘Impassioned World’, which gives a better sense of the characters’ weirdly saturated emotional state.) The slightest compliment is enough to send these intellectuals into paroxysms of delight; but it’s all conveyed through mechanical, exhaustingly repetitive language –like Gertrude Stein passed through a high-contrast filter.
You can see the outlines of satire here. The middle-class fantasy of building a meaningful life through cultural consumption is a relatively recent phenomenon in China. Can Xue prods at that impulse, exaggerating her characters’ pursuit of aesthetic fulfilment until it appears almost grotesque.
To enjoy this novel you may have to throw yourself into reading it with the same fervour as the Pigeon Book Club members manage. Everyone is happy, everyone is grateful, everyone is in love. It’s an oddly terrifying vision.
Reform’s plan for mass deportations
After Zia Yusuf’s announcement that Reform would create a ‘UK Deportation Command’ (UKDC), much of the media leapt to make comparisons with ICE in America. The Guardian described it as an ‘ICE-style deportation plan’, the Independent an ‘ICE-style UK border agency’, and even the Mail stated that ‘Reform is planning to create a British version of Trump’s ICE unit’. I spoke to Yusuf this morning, who was quick to dismiss these comparisons, telling me that ‘I have never wanted to create a British ICE’, and that ‘the reason why the media want to immediate call it a British ICE is that they want to take advantage of the very negative headlines around the excesses of ICE in America’. The Reform shadow home secretary argued that, ‘UK Deportation Command won’t carry weapons’, and that the party’s vision is to ‘properly’ fund and expand the existing Home Office deportation team, such that ‘for the first time the funding will be proportionate to the problem’.
Making this a reality will mean leaving the ECHR, repealing the Human Rights Act and, in music to my ears, ‘derogating from the 1951 Refugee Convention on a five-year emergency basis’
Zia sees UKDC as just one part of an effort to respond to the ‘frustration and anger the British people have’ about migration by ensuring they ‘point every instrument of state’ at solving the migration emergency, and it is clear from his explanations that Reform are thinking very seriously about how to change the system. To this end primary legislation ‘will create a legal obligation on the Home Secretary to deport anyone in the country who is here illegally’, and will mean that anyone who has ‘chosen to come to this country illegally… will not be allowed to stay’. Making this a reality will also mean leaving the ECHR, repealing the Human Rights Act and, in music to my ears, ‘derogate from the 1951 Refugee Convention on a five-year emergency basis’.
Reform have tasked those drafting their legislation with ensuring ‘that no judge in Britain should be able to prevent a legitimate deportation flight from leaving’, meaning that under Reform deportation cases will be non-justiciable. Deportation lists would be drawn up by civil servants and signed off by ministers. This would mean an end to the immigration tribunals preventing deportations. When I asked Zia if Reform would consider making immigration matters more generally matters for the Home Secretary rather than the courts he said ‘yes, absolutely…the principle is that we cannot allow the industrial complex of so-called human rights lawyers who have allowed for the accumulation of well over a million illegal migrants in this country and prevented the British people having a border to continue’.
Speaking about the proposed Reform red list of countries, (Pakistan, Afghanistan, Eritrea and Iraq), Zia told me that Reform ‘estimate well north of 200,000 illegal migrants from those countries’ are in Britain at the moment, and that their homelands will be compelled to accept their returns by the government refusing to issue new visas.
All of that being said, Zia believes that once deportations are functioning properly, Indefinite Leave to Remain has been replaced with five-year worker visas, and benefits which ‘turn Britain into a foodbank for the world’ are no longer available to foreign nationals, the natural human tendency to ‘respond to incentives’ will mean that voluntary departures increase. He mentioned the example of Obama, ‘dubbed the deporter in chief’ who ‘deported millions of people’ and under whom ‘voluntary removals increased dramatically as enforced removals increased dramatically… because once people realise that the law is being upheld… they choose to leave’.
Ultimately, Zia is clear that ‘of course this is going to be hard’ but that Reform are ‘very, very serious about doing this’ and that ‘if we get elected as… the government and Nigel’s Prime Minister, and I’m the Home Secretary this will be the most important thing that we’re judged on’.
It’s hard to argue with him. The dividing lines in our politics seem clearer than ever. More of the same that we’ve had in recent decades, with ministers unable to order deportations or control our borders, or Reform’s promise of a Britain where no illegal migrant is ever allowed to stay here, and no judges can prevent ministers from deporting them.
The German army’s drones disaster
German politicians like to talk about Zeitenwende – the country’s great turning point in its defense policy since the invasion of Ukraine. And it has certainly turned: toward spending billions of taxpayer euros on drones that cannot fly in frontline situations, seemingly cannot hit their targets, and whose largest investors sit not in Berlin or Brussels, but in Silicon Valley boardrooms with direct lines to the White House and CIA. If this is European defense sovereignty, one could wonder what this dependency actually looks like. And if Europe really is serious about this change.
Last week, Reuters confirmed that the German government plans to award contracts worth €536 million ($631 million) to two drone startups – Stark Defense and Helsing – for loitering munitions destined for Germany’s 45th Tank Brigade in Lithuania. The contracts are part of a framework deal potentially worth €4.3 billion ($5 billion). It seems a good deal: homegrown European technology, built by European entrepreneurs, defending NATO’s eastern flank against Russia. The reality is rather less inspiring.
Let’s start with the technology. In October 2025, Stark’s flagship Virtus drone was put through its paces in trials with British and German armed forces. It missed every single target across four attempts. One drone lost control before crashing into nearby woodland. Another’s battery caught fire on impact. Stark’s official response was bracing: “We did not crash once or twice, we have crashed a hundred times. That is how we test, develop, and ultimately continue to deliver defense technology like Virtus to the front lines in Ukraine.” Reassuring words, no doubt, for the German taxpayer about to underwrite a contract worth up to €2.86 billion ($3.37 billion).
Helsing’s record is scarcely better. Its HX-2 strike drone – billed as Europe’s answer to the Russian Lancet – managed a 36 percent hit rate during combat deployment in Ukraine. Only a quarter of its drones successfully launched in frontline tests. AI features that were supposed to enable autonomous navigation were missing, while the electronic warfare resilience was limited (Helsing rejected these findings and denied that only a quarter of the HX-2s successfully launched in tests.) Ukraine, the intended customer, has now suspended further orders. Germany will not place a follow-up order until Kyiv expresses renewed interest. One imagines the wait may be long.
None of this seems to have dampened Berlin’s enthusiasm. The contracts – €260 million ($306 million) apiece for Helsing and Stark, with potential expansion into the billions – will equip Germany’s 45th Tank Brigade, currently deployed in Lithuania. Both contain “innovation clauses” requiring the companies to deliver continuously upgraded technology, which is a polite way of saying the Bundeswehr knows it is buying products that do not yet work and it hopes will improve with time and taxpayer money.
What makes this more than a standard procurement scandal is the question of who is actually paying for, and profiting from, Europe’s supposed march towards defense autonomy. Stark’s principal backers include Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, Sequoia Capital, and In-Q-Tel – the venture capital arm of the CIA. The company crossed a €1 billion ($1.18 billion) valuation just last week, with Thiel’s fund contributing another “double-digit million” amount. Helsing counts several American venture firms among its investors.
European politicians have spent three years insisting that the continent must build its own defense industrial base, independent of Washington. They are now handing billions to companies bankrolled by American intelligence-adjacent capital. You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to wonder whose strategic interests a Thiel-funded drone company ultimately serves – particularly when Thiel’s relationship with the current occupant of the White House is a matter of public record.
And then there is what one might delicately call the testing methodology. Both Stark and Helsing are using the Ukrainian battlefield as their laboratory. Stark openly describes its Ukraine operations as “testing and evaluating systems under real operational conditions.” Helsing shipped thousands of HF-1 drones to the front – built partly from plywood, criticized by Ukrainian forces as overpriced and ineffective – before pivoting to the HX-2, which has failed to launch. The Ukrainian soldiers operating these systems are not so much customers as unwitting test subjects – trying to fight a war with equipment that has not finished being developed, while the companies work out the kinks at their expense.
Meanwhile, Rheinmetall – Germany’s largest defense contractor, the company that actually builds the anti-aircraft systems and ammunition that Ukraine depends on – has been passed over for these contracts entirely. Its CEO, Armin Papperger, warned last September that military drones risked becoming the industry’s “biggest bubble.” He has a commercial interest in saying so, of course. But he also has a point when a company valued at a billion euros cannot hit a stationary target, and another’s drones launch successfully only a quarter of the time.
The Zeitenwende was supposed to be the moment Germany – and by extension Europe – got serious about defense. Three years on, Berlin is channeling historic sums into startups with American investors and catastrophic trial results, while the companies that have spent decades learning how to make weapons that actually work watch from the sidelines. So much for strategic autonomy. Someone in the Bundestag might want to check who is signing the checks before they clear the next billion euros that won’t go into German technology.
Why Australia wants Andrew out of the line of succession
‘Australians don’t want a bar of this bloke, frankly.’ That’s what Australia’s prime minister, Anthony Albanese, said today after calling for Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor to be banished from the line of succession to the throne.
It’s not just in Britain that there’s public and media pressure for parliamentary action to remove Andrew’s succession rights
It’s no exaggeration to say that Australians are revolted by the abundant evidence of Mountbatten-Windsor’s relationship with the disgraced financier and paedophile, Jeffrey Epstein. Their picture of him is an unpleasant and unsavoury man, undeserving of public sympathy. The latest revelations from the Epstein files, which led to last week’s arrest of the disgraced former prince, have not made Mountbatten-Windsor any more sympathetic, in spite of his continued denials of any wrongdoing.
Last week the arrested Mountbatten-Windsor was released under investigation but is as yet uncharged. He has already had lost his princely status, titles and honours – King Charles made sure of that. But only Parliament can remove that last trapping of Mountbatten-Windsor’s royal status: his place in the line of succession.
As the eighth in line, only an unimaginable catastrophe would lead to Andrew becoming king. Theoretically, however, it remains possible, and it’s not just in Britain that there’s public and media pressure for parliamentary action to remove his succession rights.
Keir Starmer, former Director of Public Prosecutions that he is, is clearly sympathetic to the clamour, but says he won’t proceed, at the earliest, until the police investigations into Mountbatten-Windsor’s alleged misconduct are finalised. Albanese, it seems, has no such scruples.
As far as Australia’s prime minister is concerned, removing Mountbatten-Windsor from Australia’s monarchy can’t happen soon enough. Despite it being a highly sensitive constitutional issue, Albanese wrote to Starmer late last night (Australian time), without first consulting with new opposition leader, conservative Angus Taylor. He didn’t alert Australia’s state premiers either. Today, Taylor said, sensibly, ‘The law must take its course, including a full and fair process. If the United Kingdom determines to pursue this course of action through its Parliament, we would support that action.’
Albanese hasn’t been as measured. He sniffed a media and political opportunity, and wenthard. Asked on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation equivalent of the Today programme, he insisted his approach to Starmer wasn’t solicited or coordinated. ‘We initiated it’, he boasted. ‘Australia likes being first and we have made sure that everyone knows what our position is and we’ll be writing today to the other realm countries as well, informing them of our position’.
In another radio interview among many he’s done today, Albanese made it clear his push related to the whole sordid Esptein relationship. ‘I think it is appropriate to send a signal that this guy’s actions across a range of issues, he’s been – the allegations of course, go to handing over of documents, but also go to the seedy parts of the Epstein issues that are raised and the extraordinary linkages which are there, that I think just disgust people.’
Yesterday, Albanese was still on the fence over the succession question, but that suddenly changed late last night. Domestically, Andrew became what Conservative campaign guru Lynton Crosby called a political ‘dead cat’: an issue tossed to the media to distract from something highly embarrassing. In Albanese’s case, he is desperate not to talk about his government’s badly mishandled repatriation from Syria of a group of Isis brides and their children, who have Australian residency rights. He insists they are radicalised terrorists who won’t be allowed back; yet his government has issued them passports and is preparing for their return. Being self-righteous about Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor is not only popular with the Australian public; it is a deliberate decoy to get Albanese and his responsible ministers out of a political dung heap of their own making.
Nevertheless, now Albanese has come out on the succession issue, the snowball is rolling. Following suit, conservative New Zealand prime minister Christopher Luxon today said that he wanted Mountbatten-Windsor out of the line of succession ‘when the law has taken its course’. As more leaders of the Commonwealth realms similarly call for a quick resolution, the pressure increases on Starmer to act sooner rather than later.
How Starmer manages that external pressure as he wrestles with the Epstein legacy of not only Mountbatten-Windsor, but the equally-disgraced Peter Mandelson, is a diabolically-difficult political test of his weakened leadership and authority. Albanese’s supposedly helpful intervention reminds Starmer that, well beyond Britain, the eyes of the world are watching his every move.
What will Trump say in the State of the Union address?
When President Trump speaks to Congress and the nation Tuesday night he will follow several familiar tropes. Like a long line of presidents before him, Trump will say the state of the union is great and take full credit for it. They all say that, unless we are in a recession or at war. They typically add that everything is getting better, too, thanks to their wise policies. In a nod to the next election, they warn voters that the only thing stopping our country from reaching even greater heights is the mule-headed opposition of the opposing party and a few Supreme Court Justices.
What differs each year are the specifics. This time, Trump is likely to focus on three topics that will move voters this November: the economy, including jobs, taxes, and inflation; illegal immigration; and Iran.
The economy dominates voters’ choices in every election. Recent polls show voters feel uncomfortable despite slowing inflation and GDP growth of well over 3 percent. Good as those macro numbers are, average Americans just aren’t feeling it. Unless that gloomy mood lifts by summer, Republicans will face a fate worse than the normal mid-term losses for the party in power.
Why the gloom? Three reasons stand out. First, consumer budgets are pinched. Trump would be wise to drop his previous efforts to tell people they aren’t feeling it. They know what they feel.
A far better approach is to emphasize that his policies are working, that voters will see their positive effects clearly in coming months, and that these policies are digging our country out of problems created by Democrats, who will only repeat their failures if they return to power. He will undoubtedly point to President Biden’s record of high inflation and slow income growth.
But voters are far less interested in that backward-looking blame game than in forward-looking policies that will lift them out of those troubles. Trump could tag Biden with those problems during his first year back in office but that “sell-by” date has now expired. It’s time to move on.
Voters want solutions they can feel. What Trump can say, without his usual hyperbole, is that he has already brought down inflation and raised incomes in real terms. That means real incomes are rising, though not dramatically, and it means prices are becoming more affordable. Some, like gasoline, have dropped significantly. The lingering problem, the one many voters feel, is that their budgets are stretched thin, their credit cards are maxed out, and their jobs are insecure in a rapidly-changing economy.
The second, major economic problem is that younger voters face high hurdles buying their first homes. That’s a crucial step in family formation, and their frustration readily turns into anger at the ballot box. Trump needs to say how his policies will help.
There are several dimensions to the “housing affordability problem.” None have simple solutions. One is that potential buyers are already saddled with lots of debt, some from old student loans and some from high-interest credit cards. Trump’s idea of capping credit card interest rates is dreadful, and he seems to have dropped it. Good. Government price fixing never works. In this case, it would effectively cut off credit to all but a sliver of consumers with high credit ratings. Others, with lower scores, aren’t worth the risk because the payoff is lower.
There are a myriad of other housing problems, too: restrictive zoning, slow-moving local regulations, and high construction costs, compounded in some cases by tariffs. Sales by older homeowners, who want to downsize, are limited because they want to avoid capital gains on what is essentially monetary inflation. That is, the real, inflation-adjusted price of the house hasn’t changed, but they have to pay taxes on the nominal increase. Other homeowners would move if they could carry their old, low-interest mortgages to another property instead of paying much higher rates after moving.
Trump could tag Biden with various problems during his first year but that
‘sell-by’ date has now expired
That brings us to the biggest problem in the current housing market: high mortgage rates, mostly a lingering consequence of Biden-era inflation. Those rates are starting to come down, along with inflation, but they are still a major obstacle for homebuyers.
Trump’s best sales pitch here is to stress his proven success in curbing inflation, which should lead to lower mortgage rates. He will undoubtedly couple that positive story with his familiar attack on Jerome Powell, the outgoing chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, whom Trump blames for keeping interest rates too high, too long.
The third reason for economic gloom – and the least tractable – is rapid technological changes. The good news is that they are increasing productivity and incomes, making the country much richer. The bad news is that they are creating troubling uncertainty among workers at every level in every occupation. Many workers worry, with good reason, that the swift growth of artificial intelligence and highly-mechanized production could swallow their jobs. It’s hard for them, or for anyone, to know what kinds of jobs will be created by AI and automation, where they will be located, what they will pay, and what skills are needed to fill them.
Trump’s likely response will be to stress the good macro news: his track record of strong economic growth, the surge of foreign investment coming into America, thanks (he will say) to his tariffs and trade deals, his deregulatory agenda, lower energy prices, and, of course, the tax cuts and refunds voters will soon see from the “One Big Beautiful Bill.” Democrats will respond by emphasizing income inequality and “affordability.” Neither party will talk about the mammoth national debt, which keeps piling up with no end or solution in sight.
Turning to illegal immigration, Trump will stress the border he closed, contrast it with the Democrats’ failure, and point out that Democrats consistently lied to the country by saying the border was closed when they knew it wasn’t. Trump can add some new policies to crack down on illegal immigrants driving big-rig trucks. And he will undoubtedly note that a closed border has made drug- and sex trafficking much harder and lowered national crime rates.
Alongside that positive news, he needs to address the policy that has tanked his popularity on immigration issues. The public is deeply concerned about violent street clashes like those in Minneapolis, and they are torn about deporting non-violent aliens, despite their illegal entry. Trump was smart to reduce the tension in Minneapolis by sending in Tom Homan. He can also highlight the administration’s success working with cooperative cities like Memphis, a sharp contrast to “sanctuary cities.” In short, he needs to underscore the policies the public likes (closing borders, deporting violent criminals, and reducing cross-border drug trafficking) and downplay the unpopular ones, which have cratered his popularity.
On the international front, Trump will undoubtedly emphasize the administration’s extraordinary success in capturing Nicolás Maduro and gradually moving Venezuela from an enemy to a friend. He might point to his efforts to make similar inroads in Cuba, where we are using economic pressure to effect change, or so we hope.
The most pressing foreign issue is, of course, Iran. The President has prepared the US military for war. A vast armada has moved into theater and is ready to attack. But he hasn’t prepared the public. He must do that in the State of the Union. President Trump needs to lay out his aims and explain why they are in America’s interests, despite the costs and risks associated with any military action. He needs to stress that he tried to achieve those aims by negotiation but that Iran refused to make essential concessions. That explanation would be important before any military undertaking. It is especially important for Trump because he ran on a platform of avoiding foreign wars and managed to do so in his first term.
Trump surely knows that his administration could sink under the weight of an unsuccessful military action, particularly one in which American troops were killed. By now, he knows Iran’s Islamic regime has no interest in giving up its crown jewels: its nuclear weapons program and the missiles to deliver them and conventional explosives. If negotiations fail, or achieve little more than a pause in Iran’s malign activities while leaving the regime in place, as seems likely, Trump will face the most difficult foreign-policy decision of his presidency. Before he makes it, he needs to bring the public along with him. That is his most important task on Tuesday night, when he speaks to the nation and the world.
The killing that has divided Washington and Paris
Washington’s warning last week about the spread of far-left violence in France did not go down well in Paris. In an interview on Sunday, France’s Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot accused America of wading into a matter that “concerns only our national community”.
This doesn’t surprise conservative commentators in France who have coined the phrase “Red Privilege”
The diplomatic spat began at the end of last week when Sarah Rogers, the US State Department under-secretary for public diplomacy, posted on X. Referring to the murder of a young nationalist student, Quentin Deranque, allegedly kicked to death by members of a far-left organization called the Young Guard, Rogers said his death demonstrated why in America “we treat political violence – terrorism – so harshly.” She continued: “Once you decide to kill people for their opinions instead of persuade them, you’ve opted out of civilization. We will continue to watch this case.”
To underline their anger, Paris summoned US ambassador Charles Kushner for a meeting on Monday evening. But Kusher didn’t show because of “personal commitments.” He sent a lacky in his place. A furious French foreign ministry has said that Kushner will no longer have direct access to government ministers, although he will be allowed to perform some diplomatic duties.
The State Department’s bureau of counter-terrorism also commented on the murder that occurred close to a university in the southern city of Lyon: “Violent radical leftism is on the rise and its role in Quentin Deranque’s death demonstrates the threat it poses to public safety,” posted the Department. Barrot accused Washington of trying to make political capital out of Deranque’s death and he said France has “no lessons to receive” from outsiders on political violence.
This may also be construed as a swipe at Giorgia Meloni. Last week the Italian Prime Minister expressed her grief at the death of Deranque, which she said was a “wound for the whole of Europe.” An angry Emmanuel Macron retorted that people “should stay in their lane.”
It is not the first time that Meloni and Macron’s government have clashed over the issue of far-left violence. In 2023 France’s top court refused the extradition of ten member of Italy’s Red Brigade. They had been convicted in absentia of kidnappings and murder in the 1970s, but for decades they had been living in France, protected by what is known as the Mitterrand Doctrine.
This was a policy introduced in 1985 by Francois Mitterrand, the first socialist president of the Fifth Republic. He said that acts of terrorism committed in the 1970s – which included the murder of former Prime Minister Aldo Moro in 1978 – would be forgiven and the perpetrators allowed a “second phase of their lives…integrated into French society.”
In her social media post Sarah Rogers said that political violence in America is treated “harshly.” The same cannot be said in France. Eric Zemmour is a frequent target of far-left thugs, as are members of Marine Le Pen’s National Rally. During campaigning for the 2024 parliamentary elections, one of Le Pen’s candidates was assaulted by four Antifa activists. The candidate, Nicolas Conquer, said: “It’s as if political violence has been normalized by the far left, which is seeking to dehumanize its opponents and refuses to engage in genuine debate.”
Last year Jordan Bardella, Le Pen’s deputy, was attacked twice during a promotional tour for his recently published book. On the surface they were minor incidents: doused in flour and then hit with an egg. Earlier this month an effigy of Bardella was burned during a village carnival in the south-west of France. Many on the left snigger and says it’s just harmless fun, like the comedian who recently cracked a joke about the death of Bardella on public service radio.
They have drawn no lessons from the murder of Charlie Kirk in America, vilified and insulted by many on the left before being assassinated. After the death of Kirk, Trump designated Antifa a “major terrorist organisation” and Bardella has said if his party comes to power they will do likewise.
The Young Guard was proscribed by the government last summer at the behest of the interior minister Bruno Retailleau. But it continues to operate openly with the support of Jean-Luc Melenchon’s La France Insoumise.
This doesn’t surprise conservative commentators in France who have coined the phrase “Red Privilege” to describe what they regard as the political bias of the Establishment. The public share this scepticism; a poll last week found that 77 percent of respondents believe the far-left extremists charged with murdering Quentin Deranque will be treated leniently because of their political ideology.
The demonisation of Deranque is already well underway by some on the left; not just by radicals but also figures from the centre-left. Last Friday Ségolène Royal, who reached the second round of the 2007 presidential election, described the dead student as a “suspected neo-Nazi and anti-Semitic activist.” There is no evidence he was either. She also warned against banning any left-wing organisation because that’s what Hitler did in 1933, “accelerating the rise of Nazism.”
The “Nazism” that one sees today in France – such as kicking to death political adversaries, assaulting Jews and burning synagogues – comes overwhelmingly from the far-left and Islamists. It is this “Islamo-Gauchism” that is the greatest threat facing France. America, Italy and all those who care about the future of France are right to call it out.