Kevin McCarthy is making Biden work

Welcome to a later-than-usual debt-ceiling brinkmanship special edition of the DC Diary. The mood music was encouraging as Kevin McCarthy and Joe Biden sat down for talks in the Oval Office this evening. “We still have some disagreements, but I think we may be able to get where we have to go,” said Biden to pool reporters. “We both know we have a significant responsibility.” McCarthy was similarly positive.

Hours earlier, treasury secretary Janet Yellen wrote to lawmakers telling everyone what they already knew: that the US is “highly likely” to run out of money to pay all its bills if “Congress has not acted to raise or suspend the debt” as early as June 1. Not news, exactly, but an effort to focus minds. Earlier in the day next day, McCarthy told reporters on the Hill that “we could get a deal tonight, we could get a deal tomorrow, but you’ve got to get something done this week to be able to pass it and move it to the Senate.”   

Positive noises from both sides plus a clock ticking closer to midnight: the signs pointed to the possibility of a breakthrough meeting this evening. But no white smoke appeared above the White House when talks ended at around 7 p.m. Instead, more encouraging talk: “I think the tone tonight was better than at any other time we’ve had discussions, McCarthy told reporters immediately after the meeting, before singing the praises of the president’s negotiating team. “We both agree that we want to come to an agreement,” he added. “There’s nothing agreed to.” As for the major differences that remain, McCarthy ruled out any tax rises, something Biden had suggested in his remarks to reports just before the meeting. 

So far, McCarthy has maneuvered expertly in this debt fight. He united an unruly conference to pass legislation on the debt limit — something the White House was betting he would not manage. (As Reihan Salam wrote in the Atlantic recently, the Limit, Save, Grow Act offers a mild kind of fiscal conservatism; the tea party is very much over.) Democrats have been flat-footed ever since, with the president having to abandon his insistence that only a “clean” vote on the debt limit would do. McCarthy would then notch up another win, cutting out Democratic lawmakers and Senate Republicans to put himself center stage alongside Biden. 

The strategy is paying dividends for McCarthy personally — a recent poll put his net approval rating at +8 — while it is internal divisions among Democrats, not Republicans that have come to the fore in recent days. 

Over the last week, Biden has veered from echoing Republican and moderate Democrat messaging on the need to cut spending to flirting with the unconstitutional 14th Amendment option preferred by his party’s left wing. “I think we have the authority,” Biden said in Hiroshima Sunday before jetting back to Washington. In the past, administration officials have described the move as something that would trigger a “constitutional crisis” (Yellen) and that the White House would not entertain (Karine Jean-Pierre). 

The sudden change of tone was only the latest demonstration of Biden’s wobbly position in these negotiations. Biden’s attempt to characterize Republican calls for fiscal constraint as MAGA extremism has been rendered unconvincing by McCarthy’s legislative accomplishment and evidently willingness to reach a deal.

After this evening’s meeting, Patrick McHenry, the North Carolina lawmaker and McCarthy’s lead negotiator, said he sensed a “lack of urgency” from the White House. But the White House appears to realize that McCarthy has them right where he wants them: with a failure to reach a deal hitting the president and his party at least as hard as the Republicans. That political reality, brought about by McCarthy, is what got Biden to the negotiating table. And it is what means he has every reason to find a way to a deal in the coming hours and days.

On our radar

JEREMY CLARKE, 1957-2023 Jeremy Clarke, who wrote The Spectator’s Low Life column for twenty-three years, died on Sunday morning at his home in Provence. He was sixty-six. In his tribute to Jeremy, Fraser Nelson writes: “Our readers have lost not just a columnist but a friend — and he will be mourned as such. He was one of the greatest writers ever to appear in our pages. But he was also so much more.”

GORSUCH ON PANDEMIC RESTRICTIONS Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch called America’s Covid-era restrictions one of “the greatest intrusions on civil liberties in the peacetime history of this country.” The unsparing verdict came in a statement from the judge attached to an unsigned order in response to an appeal to the end of Title 42, the pandemic measure used to simplify and speed up border expulsions.

SCOTT ANNOUNCES, THUNE ENDORSES, TRUMP… ENCOURAGES? Tim Scott announced he is running for president today in a speech in North Charleston, South Carolina. (Ben Domenech offers his take on Scott’s candidacy here.) The senator’s bid got a launch-day boost from John Thune: the GOP number two in the Senate endorsed Scott. Trump welcomed Scott to the race, using the announcement as a chance to prod Ron DeSantis. “Tim is a big step up from Ron DeSanctimonious, who is totally unelectable,” said Trump in a post on Truth Social. “I got Opportunity Zones done with Tim, a big deal that has been highly successful. Good luck Tim!”

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Biden’s ‘thaw’ is all jaw-jaw

The G7 Summit in Hiroshima, Japan, which concluded on Sunday, put out a statement that took China to task for its hostile economic practices and destabilizing behavior. But President Biden struck a different tone. He ended his trip by suggesting that US-China ties would “begin to thaw very shortly.”

The comment follows meetings between national security advisor Jake Sullivan and China’s Wang Yi intended to bring about that very “thaw.” The administration has also floated the idea of lifting sanctions on Chinese minister of national defense Li Shangfu, who was hit with them in 2018 due to his directing the purchase of Russian defense articles. Supposedly, this is to entice the Chinese back into greater communication between both countries’ militaries, which Beijing has refused for months. 

Biden risks repeating a classic mistake of American foreign policy, particularly by progressives, whereby the US makes conciliatory gestures and offers significant concessions with little tangible or commensurate benefit. Military-to-military communication is critical, not least because it helps to minimize the chances of miscalculation. If connections can be re-established, then they should be. However, China is the one being reckless here: it is refusing to communicate — and hoping to use its refusal to goad Washington into giving Beijing what it wants. Communications were present until recently, but Li has been sanctioned for years, so the connection between the two issues is manufactured by China.

Biden can suggest thaws however much he wants, but because the CCP — not America — is the problem, there is not much the president can do unless Xi Jinping decides he wants better relations.

  –John Pietro

Does Jill Biden get to pick the next NATO chief?

British defense secretary Ben Wallace has confirmed the worst-kept secret in Westminster: he’s the likely UK candidate for the secretary-general of NATO. Speaking in Berlin on Wednesday he told reporters: “I’ve always said it would be a good job. That’s a job I’d like.” It’s a position that falls vacant in October and Wallace has a good claim, having been in his role for nearly four years, one of the few to emerge with credit from the Kabul evacuation, and has won plaudits for fighting the Whitehall machine to equip Ukraine before Putin’s invasion last year.  

Cockburn learns however that a surprising obstacle is standing in his way: the first lady of the United States. Jill Biden wants a woman in the role. And she thinks a senior female figure from one of the Baltic states, which believe that if Ukraine falls they will be at war next, would fit the bill.

The role of the first lady is something of an American oddity. But Cockburn can’t help wonder why Dr. Biden — an intellectually underwhelming academic with a PhD in educational leadership — might think she has insight into western security, especially at a time when NATO is doing almost everything possible to stop Russia in Ukraine. But “woke is woke” and there’s never been a woman NATO secretary-general. For Team Biden, the enemy is the patriarchy as much as Putin. 

So who, in Jill Biden’s identity politics worldview, is the right woman for the job? Word is that Dr. Biden may have her eye on Kaja Kallas, prime minister of Estonia since 2021. She’s at the hawkish end of the spectrum (arguably she marks the end of that spectrum) and comes as close as she dares to accusing Emmanuel Macron of being a Putin apologist. 

The Germans, already worried about public opinion in the East, would be deeply resistant to giving the outspoken Kallas such a platform — fearful that she’d give Moscow all the ammo they want to portray NATO as a hostile force on the brink of invading Russia. Wallace is robust but more circumspect and diplomatic. But he’s a he. 

Three of NATO’s thirteen bosses have been Brits and Wallace (whose parliamentary seat is being abolished) has long harbored dreams of following in the footsteps of Ismay, Carrington and Robertson by becoming the fourth. He could attract some support from surprising quarters: the French lack an obvious candidate and their defense minister Sébastien Lecornu is a fan of his British equivalent. 

It’s far from clear that Kallas would even take the job: she’d have to resign as Estonian PM in order to take the $340,000-a-year top NATO post, and she might prefer to stay the stick to the job she was elected to do. The post might then fall to another female candidate who happens to take the first lady’s fancy.  

There is no formal process for selecting the secretary-general. Given that America pretty much spends as much on defense as the rest of NATO put together it’s usually Washington’s call: but no one likes to say so formally. Norwegian Jens Stoltenberg has held the post since 2014. He is due to step down in October, meaning his successor could be chosen at the next NATO summit in Vilnius in July.

NATO’s chief military officer, the supreme Allied commander in Europe, is traditionally an American, serving alongside a European secretary-general. But if the White House wants someone as “Sec Gen,” then the White House usually gets its way. And with Joe Biden’s mind often, ahem, elsewhere these days, it’s understood that Jill Biden increasingly calls the shots. 

–Cockburn

From the site

Spectator Editorial: The campaign against the Supreme Court’s legitimacy
Ann Coulter: Why won’t conservatives ask Trump tough questions?
Alexander Larman: Martin Amis and the end of a great comic tradition

Poll watch

PRESIDENT BIDEN JOB APPROVAL

Approve 41.5% | Disapprove 53.7% | Net Approval -12.2
(RCP average)

WHAT DO AMERICANS THINK OF ESG?

Positive view 22% | Negative view 19% | Unsure 59%
(Gallup)

Best of the rest

Frances Stead Sellers, Thomas Simonetti and Maggi Penman, Washington Post: The short life of Baby Milo
Jesse Walker, Reason: The left-right spectrum is mostly meaningless
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Andrew X. Evans, Year Zero: Taught for America
Ross Douthat, New York Times: What the writers’ strike means for the future of Hollywood
Ally Mutnick and Holly Otterbein, Politico: Key Republican recruits hesitate to jump in if Trump is the nominee

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Bud Light remains for sale in virtually every Trump Organization business

As the Bud Light War enters what feels like its fifth year, Cockburn has further evidence that America’s “wokest” brew has an unlikely ally, giving it beachheads at some of the world’s swankiest properties. The Trump Organization, which boasts properties in several continents, offers Bud Light and/or Bud Heavy at its properties in locations ranging from Chicago to Los Angeles to Scotland.

A Cockburn review on Trump Organization menus show that the beer goes from £6.50 in Scotland, to $7 at his iconic Trump Tower in New York City, to $9 in Chicago, to $10 in Vegas.

Trump’s Bud Light offerings go beyond just his hotels. Want some suds while you’re golfing? Trump National Golf Club in Los Angeles, for example, has you covered at only $7 a beer, or a six-pack for $35.

The Trumps’ beer business bottom line may help explain why Donald Trump Jr. staked out the unusual position in the GOP of pushing back against the Dylan Mulvaney-inspired Bud Light boycott… because the company gives more donations to Republicans than to Democrats.

“We looked into the political giving and lobbying history of Anheuser-Busch, and guess what? They actually support Republicans,” the Trump scion said on his show. “In woke corporate America, Anheuser-Busch supports Republicans.” 

Likewise, Trump Sr. has been silent, by his own loquacious standards. British paper the Independent suggested this may be because he has up to $5 million of Anheuser-Busch InBev stock, which has plummeted since conservatives started boycotting it following its partnership with trans influencer Mulvaney.

Trump, a famous teetotaler, can’t singlehandedly bring Bud Light’s stock prices back, so the next best thing for his bottom line is soft-pedaling any criticism of it, while rivals like Governor Ron DeSantis press onwards with calls for full-scale boycotts.

“Why would you want to drink Bud Light? I mean like honestly, that’s like them rubbing our faces in it, and it’s like these companies that do this, if they never have any response, they are just gonna keep doing it,” DeSantis told Benny Johnson.

The contrast between Trump and the rest of the Republican Party is one that his intra-party allies are already seizing on to Cockburn. One Trump foe even pointed to how Trump spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt recently said that Trump would have made a deal with Disney instead of fighting the company like what DeSantis did as evidence of how woke capitalism may prove to be a bigger weakness than the former president is expecting. From Bud Light to Disney, they sense weakness.

To be clear, Cockburn doesn’t care what you drink, only that you do drink. Cheers!

What Suella Braverman needs to do to keep her job

As luck would have it, the Home Secretary was down to answer departmental questions in the chamber this afternoon, and a lot of those questions were on her speeding ticket. ‘I hope this isn’t going to be a repetitive session,’ said Suella Braverman in the Commons, before offering exactly that for an hour. 

Braverman had not come with a different answer to every question, regardless of the details each MP was asking for. Instead, she said the exact same thing, in the exact same tone, over and over again. She had been speeding in the summer. She regretted that. She paid the fine and took the penalty. ‘Mr Speaker, last summer I was speeding. I regret that. I paid the fine and took the points. In relation to the process, in my view I’m confident nothing untoward has happened.’ She also claimed that ‘at no point did I attempt to evade sanction’.

The thing is, this didn’t answer the central question, which is that while she didn’t attempt to evade a sanction, she is alleged to have sought a private speed awareness course and to have asked civil servants if they could help arrange this. That would be a breach of the ministerial code, which is why the matter is being pursued so vigorously by her opponents. 

Braverman also went on the attack against those opponents, arguing that the reason they were taking any interest in this at all was that they didn’t have their own policies and they didn’t like what she was doing to try to stop small boat crossings. ‘Let’s be honest about what this is about,’ she told the Commons. ‘The shadow minister would rather distract, really, from the abject failure by the Labour party to offer any serious proposal on crime or policing.’ She added that Labour ‘would rather the country does not notice their total abandonment of the British people’.

She had some noisy supporters behind her who cheered these comments. But within the Conservative party there is a split over Braverman. As I explained in the Observer at the weekend, a good number of MPs think the Home Secretary is embarrassing herself with her public interventions. But others do agree that the current campaign against her on speeding is because she is championing policies that are hugely popular with their constituents, if controversial in Westminster.  The problem for Rishi Sunak isn’t so much whether Braverman did break the ministerial code as it is whether she can fix the small boats problem in time for the election. He pledged to restore integrity in government, but voters are more likely to forgive breaches of that if they think ministers are doing their jobs properly and stopping illegal migration. 

Gary Lineker honoured for his activism by Amnesty

They say genius is never appreciated in its own time. So we can only be grateful that Gary Lineker’s activism is now getting the attention and recognition it deserves. The millionaire motormouth will be awarded a gong on Wednesday from – no joke – Amnesty International, the self-proclaimed ‘world’s leading human rights organisation.’ Ironic, given that UK taxpayers are forced to pay Lineker’s salary via the licence fee, on pain of imprisonment for non-payment of fines…

Like the good eco-warrior that he is, Lineker will jet into Rome to collect a ‘sport and human rights award’ by the organisation, which described him as a ‘staunch advocate for the rights of refugees and migrants’. Well, that’s one way of putting it. Others, including Lineker’s long-suffering colleagues in the BBC, might refer to him as a ‘rule-dodging, limelight-loving loudmouth’ given the way in which he humiliated the Corporation over his ‘1930s Germany’ tweet back in March. Amnesty cheered him on throughout the episode, demanding that Lineker be allowed to speak his mind on refugees, despite his histrionics persistently leading to the BBC being accused of bias.

Still, who needs team mates when you’re the one collecting the award, eh Gary?

New Democracy’s election success is a turning point for Greece

With early results showing a resounding victory for the centre-right New Democracy (ND) in the first round of elections in Greece, its beaming leader Kyriakos Mitsotakis addressed a cheering crowd outside the party’s headquarters with the words ‘All of Greece has turned blue! Thank you!’. He has every reason to be satisfied. ND not only managed to hold on to its share of the vote from 2019 but to expand it by around 150,000 votes, bringing them to a comfortable 41 per cent. They won every district across the country but one.

While just shy of a majority, due to the changes in electoral law introduced by Syriza while in government, they are poised to win comfortably in the second round which will follow in late June or early July. Fought under a different set of rules, this rerun could grant ND over 180 seats in the parliament of 300, giving it an indisputable mandate and the power to radically reshape the country’s institutions.

Last night’s results will almost definitely prove to be a seismic shift in the nation’s political landscape, in part because of what happened around ND’s victory. Syriza, the party that epitomised the European far-left’s surge across Europe in the past decade, managed only 20 per cent. If these results repeat themselves in the second round, the party’s leadership will most likely resign. With no clear successors, this is likely to be a death blow for the party that aspired to replace the socialist Pasok party as the main contender against ND in Greece’s two-party system.

This happened despite the dozens of scandals that have peppered ND’s tenure: The party’s handling of the pandemic was disastrous. Police violence is now rife. Freedom of the press is in the pits. The state’s emergency response has proven to be lacking again and again. Meanwhile, the lack of investment in the country’s infrastructure caused the greatest train tragedy the country has seen and for which the government was blamed directly. Despite all that, it’s Syriza – the once-reigning party of the left that sent shockwaves through the EU in 2014 – that is staring at an impending collapse.

ND on the other hand has demonstrated remarkable resilience. Attempting to unravel the factors that contributed to its triumph amidst controversy will be tricky. There are however hints that its voters are convinced by the party’s modest success in the economy, now one of the highest performing in Europe (at least on paper). And counter-intuitively, Syriza was punished for how ineffective it proved to be at holding them to account for the aforementioned scandals. While abstention is on a similar level as in 2014, when Syriza emerged as the winner, this time it seems they were hit the hardest.

Syriza’s decline from its ground-shifting position in 2014 to its current state of disarray marks the end of a major political cycle that began with the 2008 banking crisis. The party leadership’s looming resignation and the absence of clear successors raise critical questions about Syriza’s future, with potential consequences that extend beyond Greece, and into the broader European political landscape. Is there any future for the populist left-wing movements that challenged the status quo in the 2010s? It seems increasingly doubtful.

A further sign that we might be looking at a post-populist order is the failure of Yanis Varoufakis’ party MeRA25 to cross the minimum threshold for entry. The firebrand economist was the most popular candidate of the 2015 election, with almost 85,000 votes in Athens’s 2nd district where he stood. Yesterday, running in Athens’ 1st district, he received ten times less.

Is this the return of the old guard? It seems like it, looking at Pasok’s resurgence. With ‘Pasokification’ once a synonym for political decline, the party managed to increase its share of the vote by 40 per cent since the last elections. There is now talk that the second round might see them coming neck to neck with Syriza, or even overtaking them for the second place. A lot of this comes down to the party’s new leader, Nikos Androulakis.

Since taking over in late 2021, Androulakis has proven to be quietly effective, taking advantage of the scandal surrounding the surveillance of politicians’ and journalists’ phones by the Greek Intelligence Service (of which he was the primary victim) to boost his name recognition. He has also sidelined toxic elements inside Pasok that were associated with the worst excesses of the 90s and 00s, slowly cleaning up the party’s image. If the party manages to get to second place, Androulakis will definitely become a major player in the country’s politics for the next decade.

The implications of these results for the country’s electorate and political leaders are profound and far-reaching. How did ND manage to win the majority of the youth vote? How did they manage to flip every district, even ones traditionally held by the left for many decades? Syriza’s strategists will be poring over these questions in the coming weeks. The European right will be doing the same, looking for valuable lessons. While it’s too early to safely say what those will be, we’re definitely looking at a completely new political landscape and a major turn for Greek and European politics.

A tribute to my brother, Jeremy Clarke

My big brother Jeremy Clarke, or ‘Jum’ as he is affectionately known by me and my sister, was the most voracious reader of books you’ll probably ever meet. He will be known to most of you as a writer – The Spectator’s Low Life columnist – but to me he was a reader.  He had hundreds upon hundreds of books and had read them all at least twice. 

He read standing up, sitting cross-legged in a chair, lying on his bed through the night or throughout the day, with brief pauses for mundane physical necessities such as eating a meal or making a cup of tea or going to the toilet. I think he could even go a long time without those things if it was a good book. I suppose it’s what enabled him to write so well. 

He rarely referenced the books he had read but you knew they were packed into every carefully constructed sentence. Yep, he was a reader all right. His favourite writer was Thomas Hardy and his favourite poem, The Self-Unseeing. It suited his melancholy streak. 

Jeremy also wrote from experience. If he hadn’t been anywhere or done anything, he often found it difficult to write a column. He read people and places; expressions on faces. He wrote with brutal honesty; sometimes too much so. 

He lived for a time with our mother in a big old house that faced the sea in the South Hams of Devon. Despite all the large, bright rooms, he chose a cramped bedroom with a dirty, opaque skylight and a small window overlooking the walled back garden. It was dark and uninviting, but he liked it that way. Jeremy didn’t like anything ostentatious or showy – and perhaps he thought the sea view might have distracted him from reading. 

He used a separate room for writing. His writing desk was an old Ercol table that used to be the family dining table. He had three or four old typewriters and you could sometimes hear him bashing out his daily journal on one of them. He wrote every day – I don’t know what – then locked it away in a drawer. I just heard him write it. He would bash on that old typewriter, then pause, mutter something to himself, then let out one of those low hiccoughing laughs of his at something that had amused him, then carry on bashing it with two fingers. 

He was a complicated character, my brother, but I loved him. Given our age difference he had been more like a dad to me than my father, who was always away working. When I was young, we played intricate battles of soldiers on landscapes made of papier-mâché that we had built together and we fired matchsticks out of mini spring-loaded canons at one another’s armies. 

He once shot me in the knee with an air gun whilst aiming at a tin dog bowl I held over my head. I still have the scar. 

Another time he worked in a chemical factory and bought some of the chemicals home. I don’t know what he wanted them for but he spilled them in the garage and dad was really mad. The garage always smelled of rotten eggs after that. 

He didn’t get on with our father. I remember one time, Jum turned up on the doorstep after several months away wearing green and red feather earrings and had a fight with dad. I don’t know what made them both so mad but I had to break it up. They really didn’t get on. 

He was always kind to me though. As adults, whenever I visited mum’s house, mum would ask me to take him out for a walk with the dogs. He was sometimes depressed or in a funny mood and mum would whisper it quietly with a pained expression. He always seemed to enjoy a walk once I’d prised him out of his room and we would talk a lot. 

We both loved dogs and West Ham and we appreciated the local countryside and sea views. I provided the dogs; the coast path and beach near to mum’s house provided the views. Sometimes we would meet and walk on Dartmoor together too. 

I just read The Catcher in the Rye as I’d never read it before. I expect my brother had read it at least twice, though I don’t remember seeing it among his hundreds of books. Jeremy reminds me of the kid in the book: I think it’s the way that he doesn’t easily fit in with the usual conventions and thinks most people are in some way ‘phoney’.  He wouldn’t use that word but he would probably say he was phoney too if we had the chance to talk about it.  

He would just do things for the hell of it and went a bit mad when he had a drink. He had a good sense of humour though and we always had a laugh together. I think it was one of his heroes, Churchill who said ‘Never trust a man who has not a single redeeming vice’ and on that basis my brother was entirely trustworthy. You just had to be careful sometimes as he was extremely sensitive. 

Mum always said something about a girl breaking his heart when he was young but I’m not sure it’s that. Not only that, I mean. He had a dreadful memory and always forgot things: train tickets, passports, anything important. He forgot to get on trains and forgot to get off them. He left things on planes and on trains and in the back of taxis.

 ‘Awww I’m such an idiot!’ he would say. 

His mind was always somewhere other than where it was meant to be. But he remembered the funniest details and knew how to make you laugh. He remembered to laugh at himself; that’s the blessing and curse of the writer, I think.

We both have a Christian faith; Mum’s influence, I suppose. But we each came to it in our own way. You couldn’t say he was a Christian because he somehow inherited it. You couldn’t make him do anything he didn’t want to do – especially something he thought false or pretentious. He went up to the front of one of those Billy Graham concerts in the ‘70s and gave his heart to Jesus. 

We rarely talked about faith, but when we did it was funny. He once told me that when one of his grammar school teachers earnestly mentioned that he was a humanist, young Jeremy laughed right in his face.

I don’t know if he meant that he found the concept of humanism patently absurd or the word funny in itself; or that it was like a terrier that announced it had disavowed its nature and had given up chasing rabbits. And you just knew that dog was going to chase and kill a rabbit as soon as it saw one. I don’t know, maybe all of them, but we laughed like drains.

Then we both got prostate cancer – him first – then me. And now he’s gone. 

I can’t believe he managed to write his weekly column for The Spectator, even on his deathbed. He kept his mind and sense of humour to the very end. 

He died in the little cave house in France that he shared with his wife Catriona. If he could write another column, he’d probably write about how they rolled a big stone over the entrance of the cave and that was the end of that. 

In the words of another of our favourite writers, PG Wodehouse: ‘Memories are like mulligatawny soup in a cheap restaurant. It is best not to stir them.’

Our memories of my brother, Jeremy Clarke (Clarice, Jel, Jum) will be as different as the many soups we have all tasted in a thousand restaurants. On one thing I think we can agree: he wasn’t phoney at all.

INVITATION: Readers are invited to a memorial service for Jeremy at St Martin-in-the-Fields church in central London on the morning of Monday, 10 July. Details are yet to be confirmed but anyone who might like to attend can register their interest here.

Will junior doctors accept the Scottish government’s pay deal?

Junior doctors in Scotland have been offered a 6.5 per cent pay rise for this coming year after voting in favour of industrial action over a fortnight ago. Scotland’s health secretary Michael Matheson says he is ‘delighted’ to have reached an agreement with BMA Scotland, but doctors across the country are less enthusiastic. 

In Scotland, 97 per cent of the junior doctors who voted in the BMA’s ballot did so in favour of strike action, with a high turnout of 71 per cent. They are looking for full pay restoration, which amounts to a 23.5 per cent pay increase above inflation, or an uplift of just under 35 per cent on current levels. Today’s offer falls some way short of that. First Minister Humza Yousaf counted the prevention of healthcare worker strikes during his time as health secretary a key success – but if doctors vote down the deal, a walkout on his watch seems almost certain.

The SNP government describes the offer as a 14.5 per cent pay increase over two years: an extra 3 per cent will be put towards an already agreed 4.5 per cent for the 2022/23 period, alongside this 6.5 per cent for 2023/24. It represents a £61.3 million investment in junior doctor pay, according to the government.

The Scottish government has also suggested it will set up a ‘junior doctor pay bargaining review taskforce’ with BMA Scotland’s junior doctor committee. The aim of the taskforce will be to create a new pay bargaining system for medics in Scotland to help prevent pay erosion in the future. The doctors’ union says it is presenting this new deal to medics ‘neutrally’ so that members can decide themselves what they think of the offer. But many junior doctors have already made up their mind: a 6.5 per cent uplift this year is not enough.

Some doctors are directing their frustration at the Scottish government. Others have expressed confusion about why the BMA presented the deal to medics in the first place, saying that they ‘expected better’ from the first set of negotiations and want a ‘hard line minimum offer’ from the doctors’ union. Junior doctors believe that the Scottish government would benefit politically from being more generous than England with its pay offer and many hope the BMA will push for more still. 

Dr Chris Smith, chair of the Scottish junior doctor committee, said that, while the BMA had not accepted any offer at present, ‘the offer that has been made is without doubt an improvement on the 4.5 per cent awarded last year, and the improved offer for 2022/23 would represent a slowdown in doctors’ pay erosion. We feel this offer reflects the best that the Scottish government will offer after this series of negotiations.’

The BMA has urged members to consider the proposed deal carefully, and pointed to ‘two potentially viable paths towards full pay restoration from here’. To accept the offer would secure the 14.5 per cent pay increase from 2022 to 2024, while providing medics with the opportunity to engage with the new taskforce to ‘produce further measures tackling pay erosion in the coming years’. Discussions would be held with the knowledge that junior doctors have the ‘pressure of an industrial action mandate’. 

Alternatively, doctors could reject the current offer as it stands. Grounds for rejection include the fact that the current offer ‘does not provide assurances on pay restoration’ while being ‘sub-inflationary over the two-year period’ despite, as the BMA says, it being an ‘above inflation offer for this year if inflation falls as predicted’. Following this, dates for strike action would be chosen and announced.

So what will BMA members do? They now face an online vote on the offer which will determine their next steps. Matheson seems to believe that the government has taken the concerns of junior doctors ‘extremely seriously’, but the attitude among many medics is that the current pay offer, as it stands, is a joke.

Sunak can’t afford to lose Braverman

Back in the early days of the Blair governments, Alastair Campbell was reputed to have a rule for resignations: once a scandal had been in the news for ten consecutive days, a minister had to go. It was a stupid rule because it merely encouraged parliamentary lobby journalists to keep a story going until the limit was up in the expectation of claiming another ministerial scalp. Since then Alastair has claimed, possibly truthfully, that he cannot remember imposing this rule and had probably come up with it when the Tories were still in power as a means of further stoking up the atmosphere of crisis around John Major.

Rishi Sunak would therefore be extremely foolish to impose his own version of the Campbell rule: namely that any minister facing an onslaught from the likes of the BBC and activist civil servants gets thrown under the bus if it leads the news for too long. His former deputy and close supporter Dominic Raab has already fallen foul of this lack of the benefit of the doubt. Now it appears that the Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, is in danger of doing so too.

When initially quizzed about her manoeuvrings in the face of a speeding penalty, Sunak declined to offer full support to Mrs Braverman. She is alleged to have asked civil servants to investigate whether she might be allowed to take a speed awareness course privately rather than pay a fine and take points on her licence.

Those precious flowers asked to look into the matter on her behalf seem to have needed smelling salts to revive them, so scandalised were they by the thought of trying to ascertain what options were open to their boss. And the traumatic event became so etched into their memories that an account of it was trotted out to Sunday newspaper journalists this weekend. In the end, Mrs Braverman paid the fine and took the points.

This story has hit headlines at the mid-point between two highly sensitive events, the first being Mrs Braverman’s rather bold speech to the National Conservatism conference in London last week and the second the impending immigration figures, due out on Thursday. This timing has led to the suspicion that the story is either revenge for her speech, which severely annoyed allies of Sunak, or that her efforts to reduce immigration have seen the Whitehall ‘blob’ take out a contract on her, rather as they did with the unfortunate Raab.

But politically, Sunak simply cannot afford to ditch Braverman unless heinous wrongdoing is found to have occurred. On the face of it, there looks to have been no wrongdoing at all other than the commission of a sin of naivety. For any Brexiteer minister to trust civil servants with embarrassing personal information is clearly asking for trouble. Far better to follow the old saw that just because you are paranoid it doesn’t follow that they aren’t out to get you.

While Braverman may have been naive about the mandarin class, she has shown far more cunning as regards political positioning. In recent weeks she has become the chief keeper of the flame for immigration control in the eyes of the British public. If Sunak forces her out at a moment when official figures confirm an enormous rise in net immigration, then the risks to his own reputation will be severe.

Many Conservative-leaning voters will be inclined to believe that he is a man prepared to ‘lay down his friends for his life’, as Jeremy Thorpe once brilliantly chided Harold Macmillan, while others will see it as proof positive that he is simply not serious about controlling immigration. For a man who so has just overseen the poorest local election results in living memory and who has a very fragile mandate anyway, that would be asking for a whole heap of trouble.

Repeatedly serving up the heads of cabinet ministers at the behest of his party’s ideological opponents would be a very weak look for Sunak. Rather John Major-ish, in fact. Boris Johnson, for all his other failings, understood this when sticking by Priti Patel after she also became the target of a civil service briefing campaign.

If there is far more to the ‘speedgate’ furore than has yet come out then that could of course change the balance of risk for Sunak. But right now he appears in danger of emboldening the progressive establishment while simultaneously antagonising much of the Tory tribe. My advice is to tack right, secure the base and save Suella.

Tim Scott appeals to a GOP of the past

South Carolina senator Tim Scott represents the kind of candidate white Republicans like to vote for: a black conservative who directly undermines the left’s claims about the United States’ — and the GOP’s — innate racism. He can punctuate a pro-American litany of personal stories and generational improvement with “Can’t somebody say ‘Amen’?” without any qualms. And unlike Herman Cain or Ben Carson, he can do so as a successful politician who, as he says, went from cotton to Congress in his grandfather’s lifetime.

Cain and Carson overperformed significantly, particularly in the early months of their efforts. Yet Scott is likely to have a ceiling to his own try for the presidency. He is in many ways a throwback to the George W. Bush era of evangelistic conservative candidates, whose faith was front and center, coming off a period when the Republican Party embraced secularism in order to win. How high that ceiling is could be a test of how religious the GOP remains — and how much it wants a sunny, uplifting message instead of one animated by doomsaying. The number two Republican in the Senate, John Thune, is counting on that desire and endorsing Scott — but it may not represent the mood of the electorate.

If the critique of Florida governor Ron DeSantis is that he is too impersonal, cold and calculating in his quest for the White House, Scott is the opposite. Everything about him is based on his personal story, a tale of overcoming poverty and hardscrabble beginnings to achieve great things. His critique of the Joe Biden administration and the left in general comes from someone who has personally experienced the downsides of leftist policies on education, the economy and policing.

Scott’s problem is that he, like his fellow South Carolinian Nikki Haley, has built his reputation on an appeal out of step with the fire and brimstone talk of the current moment. Are Republican primary voters really interested in feel-good talk about the country, or are they more inclined toward messages in line with the constant toxicity of the culture wars? Do they want someone with a winning personality, or someone who promises to crush their political enemies? Unfortunately for the country, the latter seems a lot more popular these days.

Has Ukraine launched a ‘special military operation’ in Russia?

While the world is waiting for Ukraine’s spring offensive, something very different happened this morning: an incursion into Russian territory. The soldiers involved are not from the Ukrainian army, but two legions of exiled Russians (including soldiers who defected from Russian forces) allied with Ukraine but are not part of Kyiv’s official military command.

The ‘Russian Volunteer Corps’ and the ‘Free Russia Legion’, both expat legions based in Ukraine, are moving towards Russian towns in the Belgorod region (north of Kharkiv) and have so far claimed to have ‘liberated’ the village of Kozinka and captured the town hall in the village of Gora-Podol. As of 1.30 p.m. London time they reportedly entered the Grayvoronsky district. Vladimir Putin’s press secretary said he has informed the Russian President, and that Russia has enough forces to stop them. They carried out similar incursions in March but were forced back.

While Ukraine is not claiming responsibility, it’s hardly condemning the raid. Ukrainian intelligence today said that both legions have ‘conducted an operation on the territory of the Belgorod region to create a “security zone” to protect Ukrainian civilians’. The legions have asked residents of Russian border regions to stay at home and ‘not resist’. Social media purports to show a tank under the Ukrainian flag entering a Russian checkpoint. Another video, probably filmed inside the checkpoint building itself, showed the body of a slain Russian serviceman. These are just a few hours old so the authenticity of the videos has not been confirmed. The Russian governor of the Belgorod region has blamed a Ukrainian ‘sabotage-reconnaissance group’ and said Russian troops are trying to fight them.

The fact that the two legions were able to cross the border so easily via tanks underlines the dire state of Russia’s border defences. The fighters say their aim is to create a demilitarised buffer zone around Ukraine so Russian military cannot reach it: quite an ambition. They’re more likely to kicked out by Russian forces before too long. The exercise will, in effect, be a stunt: aimed at destabilising the Kremlin and highlighting Russian vulnerability.

So far there have been several Ukrainian drone attacks on targets in Russia, but no Ukrainian troops entering Russian soil. Technically, these legions are not Ukrainian (even though they fight under its flag) but it’s unlikely that Vladimir Putin will draw a distinction. This could be a distraction ahead of a counter-offensive in Ukraine, or something else: it’s hard to tell. But we’ll bring you more as it happens.

Keir Starmer’s plans for NHS reform are easier said than done

For the past few months, Keir Starmer has looked a little like Russel Crowe’s John Nash in the film A Beautiful Mind, wandering around looking everywhere for an original idea. He has baffled the public with promises to make the next Labour government ‘clause IV on steroids’ (there are people who’ve had the vote for a decade who had only just been born when Tony Blair changed the original clause IV, which called for public ownership of industry, and many voters who are still older than that who are a bit hazy on the details too). Today, the Labour leader is offering his best approximation of an original idea that people might find relevant to their own lives: big NHS reform. 

‘Big NHS reform’ is one of those phrases that strikes fear into the hearts of anyone working in the health service, given the number of hours that have been lost to reorganisations over the past few decades. The health service has ended up being a train set that politicians just can’t resist fiddling with to make their own mark on: a Matt Hancock branch line here, an Andrew Lansley pile-up there. 

Starmer’s proposals are a bit different in that they don’t so much deal with the way the commissioning of healthcare works, but where the healthcare is delivered. He is promising a ‘change and reform of the NHS and the provision of care’, telling the Today programme this morning that ‘one of the shifts is moving from hospitals to communities’. Even though this could mean closing hospitals (something Wes Streeting told me back in the autumn he was willing to contemplate), Starmer argued that hospitals at the moment were ‘overburdened’.

This is something that experts in the sector also agree with: there could feasibly be a shift to community and preventive medicine that means hospitals can operate at 80 per cent of capacity rather than 96 per cent. That sort of shift is easier than upsetting MPs with threats to a much-loved local hospital. But it isn’t one that can be done on the cheap, as it involves an expansion of one sector while the other is maintained. ‘Beyond that…there is the question of the overall budget, I understand that, and I do know that money is part of the answer here and we’ll set out in terms as we get to the election what that looks like. But I’m very very keen to emphasise that it’s change and reform as well, it’s not just money.’

Starmer also wants to pledge that a Labour government would meet NHS targets within its first term. Given, however, that he has already accepted (in his interview with me in the Spectator earlier this year) that social care reform will not be a first term issue, it’s difficult to see how he will do this.

Starmer is a keen student of the success of the Blair years, both in terms of the party winning power and the public service reforms it then effected. It’s not clear whether he has learned the lessons of some of the mistakes that were made then: the targets culture under Blair meant a lot of money and attention went to a beleaguered health service, but it also exacerbated what was already a pretty awful bullying problem within the NHS – one that has survived to the present day even though performance has declined.

How will ‘clause IV on steroids’ avoid creating bad public service management on steroids too? The detail of how Starmer actually aims to realise these plans is more important than the fact he’s got his original idea: it’s easy to fiddle with the NHS train set, less so to make it run properly.

Who is really to blame for Italy’s devastating floods?

Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni cut short her presence at the G7 summit in Hiroshima this weekend to visit the flood devastated Romagna in north east Italy. In Rome, at about the same time, climate change activists poured black vegetable dye into the Trevi Fountain in protest against government support for fossil fuels, which they say are ‘the cause’ of the floods.

One thing is certain: Italy will not stop the destruction wrought by such floods with electric cars, wind farms and heat pumps. Nor, in the short to medium term – and possibly never – will such things on their own prevent climate change either. What Italy needs is proper flood defences.

Me, my Italian wife and our six children, live in the countryside with our dog and donkey at the epicentre of the flood zone near Ravenna, in north east Italy, half a mile from a big river and a mile from the sea. Thanks to a simple quirk of fate, or a miracle, our house and the surrounding fields have not been flooded.

Not so lucky were my wife’s mother and brother in the city of Forlì, 20 miles away. Even though they live a mile from the nearest river, they had half a metre of water in the ground floor rooms of their house. In all, 36,000 people have been evacuated from their homes – most in an around Ravenna – of whom two thirds remain so.

Many of the coastal areas of the Romagna, especially around Ravenna, are reclaimed river deltas and salt marshes. The city was the last capital of the western Roman Empire and the remains of the port, which once housed the Roman fleet, are located in a place that is now six miles from the sea.

I have always feared that, one day, it will be the sea that reclaims the land and destroys our house. When the wind is in the right direction I can hear it roaring across the fields like a motorway. This time, however, it has been the rivers that have caused destruction, though they have spared us personally. For now.

The torrential rain – half a year’s worth in 36 hours – burst the banks of 21 rivers in the region, nearly all in the Romagna. It turned roads into rivers, and left cities, towns, and villages under up to two metres of water.

Incredibly, only 14 people have died. But vast areas of agricultural land have been turned into gigantic temporary lakes and, for the foreseeable future, rendered useless. In the Apennines, 30 miles from us, there have been hundreds of landslides that have cut off towns and villages. In the Emilia-Romagna region, whose capital is Bologna, more than 600 roads remain completely or partially closed.

Many on the left are blaming not just man-made climate change for the catastrophe but even Italy’s right-wing prime minister for what has unfolded on her watch. The guru of the Italian left, Roberto Saviano, author of the cult book about the Neapolitan Mafia Gomorrah, tweeted: ‘To deny climate change as this government does (…) is a deadly serious act thanks to which today thousands of Italian citizens (…) are paying a heavy price.’

Such a statement is frankly ridiculous. Meloni has been in power for only seven months – and the left were in power before her, more or less of continuously since 2011. But anyway, while she, like so many of us, might wonder if climate change really is man-made, or if green solutions will actually change the climate, she does not deny it is taking place.

It is hard to blame her when the UN’s IPCC itself – the climate change oracle – is far from clear about the nature of the beast, as a close reading of its much vaunted 2021 report reminds us. Even with ‘strong and sustained reductions’ in the global carbon footprint, it concludes, ‘it could take 20-30 years for global temperatures to stabilise.’

So even with net zero, we are probably stuck with extreme weather events, says the IPCC, as the temperature will merely stabilise and not come down. Or am I missing something? 

As for the damage done by these floods, if anyone is to blame it is the left, not Meloni. Why? Because since the Second World War, Emilia-Romagna has been the left’s stronghold where it has governed regionally and locally, first via the Partito Comunista Italiano (PCI) and now its heir the Partito Democratico (PD). Italy’s communists were so proud of how they ran the economy in the Emilia-Romagna that they even coined a phrase to describe it: Il Modello Emilio-Romagnolo (the Emilia-Romagna Model). Theirs was an early, albeit more hard left version of the public-private partnerships promoted by Bill Clinton and Tony Blair when they launched their Third Way.

Clearly, this model has failed to provide sound flood defences. And nor did it provide the much-needed reservoirs to receive flood water in case of emergencies. As a recent front page headline in the right-wing newspaper Libero proclaimed: ‘Sotto Acqua Il Modello PD!’ (‘PD Model Under Water!’).

There is a well known Italian proverb which is apposite – ‘Piove, governo Ladro!’ – whose literal meaning is: ‘It is raining, the government are thieves!’ Whatever happens, even when it rains, it is always the government’s fault. It was a favourite catch phrase of Italy’s most famous communist thinker Antonio Gramsci, whose major contribution to Marxist ideology was to argue that the aim should be to take over above all not the means of production but the means of thought. But blaming Meloni for these floods – rather than those who failed to build adequate flood defences – simply won’t cut it.

The fascinating obsession with Phillip Schofield’s downfall

The rift between Holly Willoughby and Phillip Schofield, long-standing sobbing/giggling presenters of This Morning, has been one of the big talking points of recent weeks. A torrent of Holly ‘n’ Phil headlines has covered every twist and turn: Holly’s shock This Morning departure! (She clocked off ten minutes early to attend a function.) Shock This Morning farewell from Holly and Phil! (They’re taking a summer holiday like they do every year.) These headlines were all false tempters, but I’m only slightly ashamed to say I found myself clicking on every single one.

Now, though Schofield really has gone for good: I was so used to these all-mouth-and-no-trousers false dawns that my first reaction to seeing the headline that Schofield was to leave This Morning with immediate effect was to think it would be qualified with something like ‘until Monday’s show’. But no: in a statement this weekend, Schofield confirmed the news. ‘I understand ITV has decided the current situation can’t go on,’ he wrote.

It’s still unclear exactly what has caused the dispute between the pair, as everything is implied, or put up from ‘TV insiders’ and nameless sources. But, whatever the truth, one thing is beyond doubt: our particular and prolonged obsession with Schofield. What might explain it? I think it’s because people resent saints. Nice people who turn out not to be all that nice, from Sister George to Mother Teresa, are a beguiling prospect. They get us salivating. We pretend we like nice people, but in reality they embarrass and unsettle us because we aren’t perfect and we see no reason why anybody else should be. There’s probably an evolutionary reason for this: a chance to test our social reflexes, to catch at a wonky halo. We love to catch a glimpse of clay around the foot.

In the case of Schofield, in particular, there have been micro-flashes of tetchiness on air, which don’t match the cuddly public image. In the arena of daytime TV and This Morning specifically, it’s hard to imagine there are any hidden facets to Richard Madeley, a huge part of whose appeal comes from vocalising whatever thought, however bizarre, is flashing across his synapses at any given moment. Eamonn Holmes, likewise, cannot conceal the slightest flicker of emotion from registering on his face.

But the amiable Schofe was revealed to be holding something back – and it was a biggie. In 2020, he came out as gay. The problem, of course, wasn’t his sexual orientation – it was that he’d had an oblivious wife, whom he had been married to for 30 years. There was something unsettling about Schofield’s televised coming out ceremony. There were questions about why it was suddenly necessary. The way in which it was covered in the newspapers was also curious. Schofield was rewarded for his honesty with Mandela-level tears and tributes. But these stuck in the craw; after all, what about his poor partner? What happened to Schofield’s family just didn’t fit with the TV presenter’s ‘mother’s pet’ image: plain shirts, big friendly smiles, and no ‘side’.

The press picked up a sceptical scent, like blood in the water, from the public. This perhaps explains the fallout from the Queen’s coffin ‘queue jumping’ scandal. If this had happened a few years before, this story wouldn’t have had legs. But people were now more sceptical about Schofield. As a result, the attempts to contain the story carried less weight.

All this created a rebound effect on Willoughby, whose own image – the perfect big sister – was now threatened. There are rumours that she was not informed until very late in the day about the trial of Schofield’s brother on child sex abuse charges, and that she was rapidly tiring of her co presenter. A strange public statement from Schofield last week, where he talked about her as his ‘rock’ – always a bad sign, this naff and slimy phrase – looked like the last straw.

The prospective replacements for Schofield on the This Morning sofa, Alison Hammond and Dermot O’Leary, both feel more like fully rounded human beings. They are agreeable and fallible, imperfect people who could be your mates, not twee, shining angels. We can live with people like that on TV, as we do in life. Saint Philip and the blessed Holly are like all sweet things: too much, and they make you feel a bit sick.

It’s time to ban young children from restaurants

When you have small children just getting them out of the door can be traumatic. Finding and applying each shoe can be enough to provoke a tantrum – and not just in the parent. And no, they can’t bring their Power Rangers swords, because we are going out to lunch and everyone knows that plastic swords and restaurants don’t mix. 

Eventually you will arrive at the restaurant, although it will 20 minutes later than the booking. As you push the buggy inside, the establishment falls quiet like the Slaughtered Lamb in An American Werewolf in London. There’s a scrape of chairs – a pause – then the chatter resumes. But in that moment everyone is thinking the same thing: please don’t sit next to us.

You are led to a table by a waitress who feels like a goddess – she has the power to make or break the mealtime of all she surveys. At the table, usually in the darkest, remotest and most joyless corner of the restaurant, the fun begins – coats are discarded; the buggy is folded away or pushed aside to be a tripping hazard; a high chair is wedged in against the back of a diner behind, performing an impromptu Heimlich manoeuvre on them and doubtlessly spilling a drink all over them, too.

If your fidgeting children haven’t already upset the water jug, then this is the moment. The next victim will be a glass of wine – smashed to smithereens as soon as it arrives by a flying menu card that the kids can’t read but can fight over. The waitress immediately disappears to get a dustpan and brush and large roll of blue paper to mop up the mess.

Once the destroying stops, the complaining begins. ‘I’m bored,’ one will yelp before administering a sadistic Chinese burn to the other. The youngest will then erupt in agony – tears springing from his eyes as you attempt to decide between the fillet steak or the leg of lamb and whether that should be dauphinoise potatoes or twice-cooked chips.

Then the waitress returns and begins cleaning away the wine and broken glass – only to cut herself. She races away clutching her arm as if she’s been set upon by dogs. You, meanwhile, still have no glass of wine, even though its nearly 2 p.m. on a Sunday and God alone knows you’ve earned it. Eventually, the table is cleared of hazardous shards, and you’ve all avoided having to take anyone – granny included – to A&E. Forty-five minutes after arriving you are finally presented with a glass of wine by the waitress whose hand is now swathed in blue plastic tape and supported by sling.

You order, a process that resembles a nutritional interrogation and requires several returns to the kitchen to establish the antecedents of certain ingredients, down to molecular level. All the while the children refuse to settle. One moment you snatch the cutlery away from Child A just before he impales himself with it; the next you are removing the salt cellar from Child B just as he draws a face on the table with its contents. By the time you’ve ordered everything on the table is piled in a heap at one end out of reach of Child B, who is bawling ‘Pepppppper!’ at the top of his voice.

When the whimpering fades, you make an attempt at conversation with your spouse – only to be interrupted by another Chinese burn. But it’s when you see your eldest prancing across the restaurant waving two napkins like a Morris dancer, with no shoes on, that you throw in the towel.

You hand your phones to the children and you become those people. It’s for the best, you remind yourself, as you offer your offspring up to the gods of Samsung and Apple in exchange for peace, digital Danegeld. As they sit their agog, their little brains melting quietly, the disapproving looks and sideways glances begin. But what do you care? Pah! You say ‘cheers’, clink glasses and remark about what a nice time everyone’s having.

The children’s food arrives – organic chicken nuggets, priced to the point of pain – and you butcher it into tiny non-choking pieces because even though the blighters can open jars with their teeth you constantly worry that a waffle or a cumbersome strawberry will be the end of them. Then, wonder upon wonder, your fillet steak arrives with pepper sauce and sides; the children are eating, too – albeit with their hands – and you take up your knife and fork. At last. It might not look like it, but right now, you are Napoleon after Borodino…

Suddenly there’s a tug at your arm: ‘Daddy. I need a poo.’ By the time you return your steak is cold, the pepper sauce is congealed and funnily enough – after padding about playing ‘I Spy’ in a poorly ventilated disabled loo, your appetite has been eviscerated.

You get through pudding, coffee, and then coats are fought back on. Once the staff have gratefully closed the door behind you, you remember that this is exactly what happened last time. And it’s a sign. You shouldn’t do it. You should stop trying to take your small children to restaurants. Small children and restaurants go together about as well as potassium and air. They hate each other. And everyone else in the room hates them too. The problem is that we forget this and we delude ourselves with a fantasy that it’s feasible. But it isn’t. It’s folly.

So we should save parents from themselves. Like denying cigarettes to the under-21s, we should ban all children – say, under the age of eight or nine – from restaurants (with exceptions for the likes of McDonald’s, or Nando’s). While this isn’t for the benefit of child-haters, they will be overjoyed, and – who knows – even the restaurants themselves might profit since having fewer tiny brutes ruining it for everyone else might allow others to enjoy themselves more.

Yes, a ban sounds a bit 1970s, but the truth is that young families have a better time at home: the toys are there, the environment is kid-proofed and you know what’s in the food you’re serving. Plus, for the amount of money you have to part with in a restaurant these days you can probably buy a rib of beef the size of a Mondeo – and what’s not to like about that?

Finally, you also have the television on at home. And as every parent knows, when it comes to pleasing young children, Peppa Pig is far more important than Michelin stars.

In defence of public displays of affection

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex had a rather awkward moment recently when they were caught on the ‘kiss-cam’ at a basketball game in Los Angeles. The couple, sitting in a private box (but in very public view), were faced with a decision: to kiss or not to kiss. 

Harry went in for the kill (his 26th?), leaning over to his wife for a kiss. But Meghan simply laughed and patted his arm. There, there, little prince – not today. The couple haven’t been shy about public displays of affection in the past, and this was somewhat of a departure from her days on camera frolicking in her role as Rachel Zane in Suits. But people change and, I suppose, that was acting. 

So what would you have done in a similar situation? It’s true, the public display of affection – or PDA – has a bad reputation. The mention of it may even send a prickle up your spine. It’s considered naff and cringey; a faux pas to be made in one’s youth, not to be repeated in later years. PDAs are something to be mocked, no? Remember so-and-so at the Christmas party? Ha.

But since the pandemic there has been, I believe, a shift. We spent months without human contact, without touch or connection. And we have been making up for it ever since. Next time you are out and about in a city – preferably on a warm, sunny day – look around. PDAs of all kinds are everywhere. It’s astonishing. There’s hand-holding, linked arms, kissing and my personal favourite, the hand-in-partner’s-back-pocket. Cute.

It’s not just a frivolous topic, either. The PDA was brought into the political realm last year at the Qatar World Cup when LGBTQ+ fans were warned against showing their lovers any affection at the tournament. Foreign secretary James Cleverly urged British fans to respect Qatari culture, with the Foreign Office actually advising against public displays of affection – although after some backlash Fifa assured fans that they could, in fact, behave as they wished at official World Cup venues.

I used to be firmly in the anti-PDA camp, but I admit that since finding love, I’ve changed my mind. Why not hug, kiss and be affectionate to your partner? Because of what other people might think? Bah, you must be joking – who cares about them?

As long as you are acting with decorum (in other words, nothing you’d be embarrassed for your grandma to see), by all means give your other half a kiss in public. Don’t hold back. Don’t think about beady-eyed onlookers. Chances are they want what you have. 

As I write this, I’m alone in Nice. I find myself people-watching and envying those small acts of intimacy without my partner with me. So go forth and show your affection – God knows that a bit more love is what the world needs. 

The campaign against the Supreme Court’s legitimacy

Ask anyone about politics these days and you’re likely to hear that our government institutions are in crisis. And not just government institutions, really, but American institutions: the nuclear family isn’t what it used to be; the local community group is drying up; the glazed donut bacon double cheeseburger is harder to find than in our glory days.

But in particular it’s our government institutions that are in crisis — which is why the Supreme Court is so important. As Congress buckles under the pressure of endless fundraising and cable news navel-gazing, as the presidency stagnates with its shambling commander in chief and massive bureaucracy, at least the Court still seems to work. In fact, it can seem like an oasis of deliberation in a political scene gone mad. All of this makes the recent attacks on the Court’s legitimacy that much more troubling.

This month marks the one-year anniversary of the Dobbs decision, in which the justices struck down Roe v. Wade and handed the abortion issue back to the states for the first time in half a century. And in fairness, the fallout has not been as bad as some predicted. There have been acts of vandalism and violence, yes, but no broader civil conflict, no Bleeding Kansas recast with pro-lifers and pro-choicers. For the most part, the states have stepped up, both through their legislatures and lawsuits before their judiciaries.

Yet the Supreme Court’s legitimacy has been called into question. It was only this spring that Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez argued that the Biden administration should “simply ignore” a court injunction that halted the availability of the abortion pill mifepristone. She wasn’t alone: several midwit journalists echoed her call, while Twitter egg Keith Olbermann called for the same on a ruling regarding guns.

All this has created a feedback loop whereby progressives demand indifference to the Court, then hold their conch shells to their ears and fret that the country is growing indifferent to its rulings. The Court is said to be suffering a “crisis of legitimacy,” though outside of the commentariat it’s hard to see where. Just under half of Americans still trust the judiciary, according to polling by Gallup, which is an all-time low but still leaps and bounds higher than just about anything else in the year 2023.

What we have isn’t a crisis of legitimacy so much as a campaign of delegitimization. It’s been waged for years, as Republican efforts to change the makeup of the Court have borne fruit. We saw it in the circus of the Brett Kavanaugh hearings back in 2019. We saw it in calls to pack the Court, an idea so radical that no less a meddler than FDR backed off it. And we saw it last year in the protests at Supreme Court justices’ homes, in the death threats sent to the Court, and, almost certainly, in the leak of an early draft of Samuel Alito’s Dobbs opinion. As this magazine goes to press, a flurry of mostly specious stories about the court’s conservative justices have been published in quick succession by left-wing outlets. This is very clearly journalism with an agenda: the goal is to chip away at the legitimacy of the court.

It’s important to remember that there’s a difference between critiquing the Court and delegitimizing it. Inspired by the left-leaning Warren Court and the Roe decision, conservatives once upon a time were deeply critical of the judiciary for assuming too much power, writing books with titles like Men in Black: How the Supreme Court is Destroying America. Yet despite this heat, it’s difficult to remember a single call by a credible rightwing figure to ignore the Court, let alone pack it. What conservatives did was much more practical if painfully slow: assemble a judicial farm team; get justices on the bench; change the Court from the inside rather than destroy it.

It worked, and it may be that some conservatives are now guilty of hypocrisy, given that they cried “judicial activism” only to go quiet once the Court agreed with them. Yet better that than what’s happening on the other side. When Andrew Jackson refused to acknowledge a Supreme Court ruling recognizing the sovereignty of the Cherokee Nation, it went down in history as a radical and racist usurpation of power. When Jackson’s fellow Democrats now pledge a similar cold shoulder, they get mostly shrugs. In this age of ends-justify-the-means politics, such tribalism is simply routine.

Which is a shame because, even as the Court has grown more political, it remains our most consensual branch of government. The 2021-22 term, which included the Dobbs decision, saw the justices decide almost thirty percent of their cases unanimously, about the same number as those that broke down 6-3 along “partisan” lines. The halcyon times of Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg giggling over cocktails after work might be over, but a certain comity can still be found. It’s certainly stronger at 1 First Street than across the road at the Capitol building or half a mile away at the cable news stations.

The real problem with our federal government isn’t that the Supreme Court is too strong; it’s that the presidency is much too strong and Congress much too weak. Which brings us back to AOC. Maybe instead of undermining our system of government, she should take some advice that applies just as well to plenty of her fellow legislators: get off Twitter and do your job.

This article is taken from The Spectator’s June 2023 World edition. 

Confessions of a media chronicler

We held the party for my new book, Traffic, at Umberto’s Clam House, by the office of our new news organization, Semafor. Umberto’s is best known as the site of a notorious 1972 mob hit — “they blew him down in a clam bar in New York,” Bob Dylan sang of Joey Gallo. I’d worried the space was too small, but it was perfectly packed and noisy, with blue oil paintings of crabs on the walls. I broke off a conversation with CNN president Chris Licht to take a call from a recently fired anchor from another network. When I came back our executive editor Gina Chua began the short program by spilling who I’d been talking to. I mumbled my way through the relevant thanks, finished, and realized I’d forgotten to thank my wife Liena, who half-wrote the book with me in conversations and edits. I asked my kids whether they thought this was a problem. They informed me that it was, and so I got back on a chair to issue a correction.

The room was full of my book’s subjects — the earliest editors at BuzzFeed and Gawker, and my colleagues at BuzzFeed News during its great run. About half of them now work for the New York Times. The great English investigative journalist Heidi Blake, a Pulitzer finalist there, happened to be in town to finish her first New Yorker piece. Arianna Huffington turned up late and closed the party out. The book, as I told her, begins with her looking like a clueless interloper on the downtown new-media scene, and ends with her looking like one of the few people who knew what they were doing.

Like everything my co-founder Steve Clemons touches, Semafor’s Friday night party kicking off the weekend of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner drew an iconic Washington crowd: members of the Senate and the House, the CEOs of Axel Springer and Vox Media, and some ambassadors. The Norwegian envoy assured me that the previous week’s Succession had, indeed, been filmed on location in Romsdalen. And like everything these days: everyone we invited showed up. On time. And stayed, listening to music that an old friend informed me was too good for this crowd. I was afraid the fire marshals would shut it down. I was perhaps most starstruck by Heather Cox Richardson, a liberal American historian who is the most successful writer on Substack, despite her lack of Twitter self-promotion. She spends most of her time in coastal Maine, so I was surprised to see her in the DC swirl. She told me she likes to observe, but doesn’t inhale. Most of the guests were gone by 10 p.m., but the afterparty was still going when I retreated upstairs at midnight. The location was my partner Justin Smith’s (no relation) home in Kalorama. It’s protected by Secret Service because he’s across the street from a former president. I stay there when I’m in town (saving money for our startup, of course).

Saturday’s main event, aside from the actual dinner, is something called the Garden Brunch, a thirty-year institution held at the vast home of the late Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham. It’s colder than I expected, so I borrow a sporty blue jacket from Justin, who is slightly taller and substantially more stylish than I am, and walk over looking like I’m wearing my father’s clothes. The brunch always reminds me of the Iraq era, when I first came to Washington: we were eating canapés, we learned, for the troops. During the Trump years, these events turned out also to be in honor of the free press — us! This year Maryland governor Wes Moore, a star of an extremely strong next generation of Democrats, spoke, and the actor Liev Schreiber shared his thoughts on patriotism.

Oh. Was this supposed to be about the black-tie dinner itself? I went regularly for a time — it’s an incredibly source-rich environment — and was there in 2011, when Obama, wired as he waited for news from the special forces raid on Osama’s Pakistan compound, took it out on Donald Trump in the audience. It was hilarious at the time. This year, like much of Biden’s presidency, blew low expectations out of the water. The president had good material which he delivered pretty well. The best were at his own expense, but he also cracked that the Fox News team was “here because they couldn’t say no to a free meal” after their massive payout to Dominion Voting Systems. But startups can’t just get tables at the dinner, and so I got to escape to Makan, a new Malaysian restaurant in Columbia Heights, with Dave Weigel.

But the best room I was in the whole week was probably the first car of the 2 p.m. Amtrak back to New York on Sunday. Amtrak’s First Class is impossible to explain — there is just no reason to pay extra for it, so you’re either there because first class travel is in your contract, you take the train a lot and got an upgrade (my case) or because your flight was canceled and there were no other seats. My car was like the inside of a television set: Licht, the CNN boss, was in 7F, not far from Fox News host Martha MacCallum. The liberal writer Molly Jong-Fast, 11A, tweeted bitterly about Fox News host Steve Doocy, across the way in 13D. CNBC’s Jim Cramer had 13A. CNN’s Dana Bash sat across from me in 14D. I’d never met Doocy, though many years ago I wrote some forgotten piece about Fox and he spent some time on air lambasting me, which I found delightful. In person, he was equally charming. I suggested he have me on Fox and Friends to talk about my book. He asked if it contained recipes, and when informed him it didn’t, demurred. On the way out, Cramer tipped the porter with a handful of twenties and we all headed out into the rain.

This article is taken from The Spectator’s June 2023 World edition. 

Inside RFK Jr.’s kooky White House quest

After Linda Como, a sixty-four-year-old administrative assistant from Quincy, Massachusetts, was fired from her hospital job for refusing to be vaccinated against Covid, she discovered Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s anti-vaccine activism, and it resonated with her. But that’s not the only reason Como came to the Boston Park Plaza hotel one morning in April to see Kennedy launch his long-shot 2024 presidential campaign.

“I grew up in Boston, went to Boston public schools, so you know the Kennedy family,” Como told me. “They’re like the royal family. So I’ve always been a fan of the Kennedys.”

Kennedy lore runs deep in Boston. This is where Robert Kennedy’s father Robert F. Kennedy and his uncles John F. Kennedy and Edward M. Kennedy launched their careers; where the family patriarch, Joseph P. Kennedy, made the fortune that financed the family’s political ambitions. And it’s where RFK’s third child became the first Kennedy to run for president since his uncle Ted in 1980.

I arrived at the Park Plaza two hours ahead of time and found a long line of people waiting to get in. Though the New York Post later reported the presence of a significant number of “hot MILFs,” I didn’t notice them. Instead, the crowd seemed to skew older and a bit crunchy — a lot of New England boomers in sensible shoes. The event’s staging, on the other hand, was modern and slick. Screens set up next to the stage and in the overflow room showed a series of family photos — tanned Kennedys in boat shoes on the water, etc. A brass ensemble played a version of the Dropkick Murphys’ “I’m Shipping Up to Boston.” The merch tables were laden with signs and bumper stickers saying, “I’m a Kennedy Democrat” and “Heal the Divide.”

Kennedy’s wife, the actress Cheryl Hines, gave a very brief introduction. Hines plays Larry David’s wife on Curb Your Enthusiasm; her husband’s views have sometimes put her in an awkward position — when he compared vaccine mandates last year to Anne Frank’s ordeal during World War Two, Hines criticized him publicly, calling his comment “reprehensible.” But on the day of the launch, Hines looked every inch the supportive political wife as she took the stage in a turquoise sheath dress, though she spoke briefly, saying merely that her husband would soon “come out and make a very important announcement.” She introduced former Ohio congressman and leftist stalwart Dennis Kucinich. Kucinich is running the campaign, and his wife Elizabeth is also involved.

The entrance of Kucinich brought the house down; this was the biggest political name present. He compared Kennedy to Revolutionary War hero Paul Revere, “moving from town to town, warning us if water is unsafe to drink, warning us if our air is unsafe to breathe, warning us when our food is unsafe to eat, and warning us when pharmaceuticals are unsafe to use.” The launch came the day after the anniversary of Revere’s midnight ride; in his speech Kennedy tied the American rebels’ cause to his own: “The spear-tip of that rebellion was a fury that the colonists had against the merger, the corrupt merger, of state and corporate power.”

The older generation of Kennedys, or their speechwriters, had a knack for language. John F. Kennedy: “Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.” Robert F. Kennedy: “Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.” Ted Kennedy: “For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.” This gift may have skipped a generation.

RFK Jr. spoke for nearly two hours, with no teleprompters, not appearing to read from notes, either. He segued from vaccines to lockdowns to the environment to the media to the war in Ukraine, croaking the words in his unusually strangled voice (the result of spasmodic dysphonia, a neurological disorder). He told the audience in great detail about lawsuits he worked on during his lawyer days, and shared his perception that no one his age has “full-blown” autism. After forty-eight minutes, he promised “I’m about halfway done with this speech. This is what happens when you censor somebody for eighteen years. I’ve got a lot to talk about.”

Kennedy had a successful career as an environmental lawyer, bringing high-profile suits against corporate polluters. But he is more widely known now as a critic of Big Pharma and, in particular, vaccination. He wrote in 2005 that he had been approached by parents who believed vaccines had caused their children’s autism, and began looking into it. At that time, the contemporary anti-vaccine movement was in its infancy. A British doctor, Andrew Wakefield, published a 1998 paper that posited a link between the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism in children. The study had significant flaws: a tiny sample size of twelve subjects, no control group, and the fact that Wakefield had been hired to do the research by a lawyer for parents of autistic children who were seeking to sue drug companies. No credible link between the MMR vaccine and autism has ever been established and the Lancet retracted Wakefield’s paper in 2010. At the time Kennedy says he was approached, the battle lines hadn’t been as sharply drawn as they are today; in 2005 both Rolling Stone and Salon published a multi-thousand word essay he wrote condemning a kind of mercury used in vaccines as a preservative. In 2011 Kennedy founded the nonprofit World Mercury Project (now Children’s Health Defense) that became an important node in the anti-vaccine movement.

But his anti-vaccine activism didn’t become the next great mainstream liberal cause in the vein of his environmental work. Instead, the tone and content of Kennedy’s activism marginalized him in mainstream circles, where he has for years been considered a conspiracy theorist, particularly in the wake of Covid.

“Some look for scapegoats, others look for conspiracies, but this much is clear; violence breeds violence, repression brings retaliation, and only a cleaning of our whole society can remove this sickness from our soul,” RFK Sr. said in a famous speech after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. “For there is another kind of violence, slower but just as deadly, destructive as the shot or the bomb in the night. This is the violence of institutions; indifference and inaction and slow decay.” RFK Jr. clearly believes he is carrying on his father’s legacy of opposing institutional wrongdoing. But there is a fundamental difference between him and the previous generation of Kennedys. Despite their individual scandals and tragedies, they were all about possibility and hope, or at least the appearance of it. This was the family of Camelot, the moonshot project, the dream that would never die. They channeled the hopes and fears of a confident, if turbulent, postwar America, that believed things were getting better.

RFK Jr.’s message is that things are getting worse. Where the previous Kennedys typified the go get ’em ethos of the television age, RFK Jr.’s message evinces the pessimism and paranoia of the digital one. Here is the Kennedy our era deserves. His vision is ultimately a negative one, of a society on the brink of total capture by nefarious actors. And it reflects the mood of an increasingly vocal number of Americans who have lost faith in institutions and hope for the future. RFK Jr. probably can’t win. But his campaign could show how much that loss of faith, especially since Covid, has changed the political landscape.

I spoke to Kennedy on the phone the week after the launch. First I had texted Kucinich, to see if he could help arrange the interview. Then I texted Kennedy, who responded almost immediately: “You can call now.” At that moment, Kucinich called me and explained that he would recommend I be given the interview. He would coordinate with the press team and make sure everyone was across this. He did not know that the candidate had already decided to grant it, but I appreciated his enthusiasm. (Then I saw that Kucinich had texted me a presumably accidental pocket-recorded audio clip of a woman saying to him “I don’t think she’s friendly.”) Kennedy was between obligations, heading to New Hampshire the next day to meet union leaders and give a talk about Covid vaccine mandates at Dartmouth, and was multitasking by eating lunch at the same time he spoke to me. His lunch was avocado salad, white bean soup and risotto with clams. I asked him about the process of writing his speech. “I never wrote it,” Kennedy said. “I just said it.” Did he sketch out the structure, at least? “I did the structure in my head,” he said. “And then I just started talking.”

It would be logical for Kennedy to base his rationale for running on the uptick in anti-vaccine sentiment during the Covid years, but he downplayed this aspect. “I think most Americans are more interested in pocketbook issues and in freedom issues, and in restoring our democracy,” he said. “People in this country are desperate. They feel this system is rigged against them. I think they’re thinking more about, you know, just how to feed their families and make ends meet than they are about vaccines.”

But he does acknowledge, and embrace, the golden ticket of his Kennedy name. “I think that my family name is certainly a huge advantage,” he said. “Name-recognition is an advantage in any kind of democratic contest. And my name is one of the most recognizable in modern political history.” According to a source who was on the call, a week before his launch Kennedy debated with his team whether to use his nickname “Bobby” for campaign purposes, fearing that it would look too much like he was riding his father’s coattails or that the name itself was too juvenile-sounding. “When someone showcased proposed campaign materials employing the name ‘Bobby,’ I explained that I’ve always asked people to introduce me as ‘Robert’ in formal or official settings — as did my father,” Kennedy said in a text message. “Otherwise, I don’t care what people call me — not even ‘antivax.’”

Either way, Kennedy nostalgia is a factor. “I loved his father. I’m old enough to have loved his father. I was fifteen years old when he was killed,” said Tricia Santi, who is sixty-nine, the same age as the candidate. Santi drove down from Maine for Kennedy’s Boston rally. “And just to see another Kennedy come forward at this time and do this is amazing to see.” Santi is a “holistic healer” and has followed Kennedy’s work for years.

“All these people were alive when John Kennedy was assassinated,” said Santi’s husband Aram Aslanian, seventy, gesturing around at the other attendees waiting to get in the hall. “I was fifteen years old when Bobby was killed. What happened was, the country stopped telling the truth. They started lying after they killed the president. The CIA, the FBI — they killed the president. But nobody wants to talk about what happened as a culture. Our culture began to keep secrets.” RFK Jr.’s campaign, he said, is “a chance for Americans to swing back and tell the truth.”

The Kennedy brand name is still strong enough to attract some voters who don’t share Kennedy’s views. Joseph Pereira, fifty-eight, a businessman from Fall River, Massachusetts, was at the rally wearing a Kennedy for President pin he made himself. He got the Covid vaccine and doesn’t agree with Kennedy’s position on vaccines. His family has always held the Kennedys “in high esteem,” he said, because JFK signed a bill that enabled them to immigrate to the US from Portugal. Pereira worked on Ted Kennedy’s campaigns. And he’s now a fan of Robert Jr. Biden and Trump are “too old,” he said. “Bobby’s sixty-nine. I think he’s going to bring a new approach to politics. And I think that’s what we need. We need people who are bold enough to question authority.”

“I think if you weigh everything, all of the issues, I think the vaccines are not going to make that much of a difference,” Pereira said.

Early polls have shown RFK Jr. attracting as much as 21 percent of Democratic primary voters. But it’s uncertain how much that support owes to his name ID and voters’ lukewarm feelings about Biden, and how much those voters know about Kennedy otherwise. Moderate Democrats with fond memories of his father and uncles might not appreciate his frequent outreach to the populist right, which has embraced him as a fellow traveler during the Covid era.

Just a few days before his launch, for example, Kennedy spoke at Hillsdale College, an epicenter of Trump-era conservative intellectualism. Former Trump strategist Steve Bannon has sung Kennedy’s praises on his War Room show, and floated the idea that Trump should choose him as his running mate. CBS reported recently that Bannon had encouraged Kennedy to run, a claim Kennedy denies. “I’ve never talked to him about running,” he said, saying that other than appearing on his show a couple of times, he has only met Bannon once in person. This was when Kennedy was invited to take part in a “vaccine safety” panel Trump convened at Trump Tower during the transition after the 2016 election. But Kennedy is perfectly comfortable with speaking to the right, and sees it as a bonus. He was good friends with Roger Ailes, who hired him to host a long-forgotten wildlife documentary the pair shot in Kenya in the 1970s. Kennedy appears on Fox News regularly, including on Tucker Carlson’s show the week before Carlson’s surprise firing. “Some people criticize me, but how are we going to convince people if we don’t talk to them?” he told me. “The most important people who you can talk to are people who you don’t agree with.”

In framing this as a reaching-across-the-aisle exercise, Kennedy was evoking the legacy of his family elders, particularly his uncle Ted. “He would bring Orrin Hatch and John Kasich to our homes on weekends as these were some of his closest friends, and they were people who were absolutely antithetical to him and all of their political ideologies,” Kennedy said. “And he was able to do that — he was able to be so effective as senator — because he was able to make that distinction between politics and ideology. He never compromised his values. But he recognized that you had a lot of common values with people who are in the other party.”

But Ted Kennedy wasn’t going on red-pilled MAGA livestreams; he was hammering out legislative deals. The younger Kennedy says there is no deeper meaning behind his frequent appearances in conservative media. It’s because “the liberal media won’t let me on to talk,” he said. “I’m censored in the liberal media.” Running for president, though, has changed this; he said he had hundreds of media requests since his announcement, and was planning to go on Good Morning America and CNN. Kennedy subscribes to a Chomskyan view of the media as a top-down machine controlled by powerful interests, and though he reads widely, he doesn’t trust a lot of what he reads. “I would trust the New York Times about not anything to do with war or with the intelligence agencies or with pharmaceutical drugs,” he said. (That takes out quite a bit of the paper’s coverage.)

He doesn’t trust a lot in general. Kennedy is often described in the press as an anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist, and of course he rejects this as a smear. “The term ‘misinformation’ is just a euphemism for any statement that departs from government orthodoxies,” he said. But he does literally believe in conspiracy explanations for important events, including the assassination of his father in 1968. Kennedy doesn’t believe that the man convicted of the crime, Sirhan Sirhan, actually did it, and has called for Sirhan’s release from prison. He told Tablet recently that he believes the culprit was a security guard assigned to RFK the day before the shooting, in a CIA plot triggered by his father’s desire to re-open the Warren Commission investigation of JFK’s assassination.

Robert Kennedy Jr. was fourteen years old when his father died. His father’s entrance into the campaign had helped push the incumbent, Lyndon B. Johnson, out of the race. RFK had built an antiwar, pro-civil rights coalition and won the crucial California primary the day of his death. In his kickoff speech, the younger Kennedy explicitly compared his situation to his father’s: an upstart candidate taking on a calcified sitting president and building a coalition.

Kennedy told me that when he was deciding whether to run, his children worried that it would threaten his safety. “There are things that are worse to me than death,” he said. “And principally to me that would be that they were going to grow up in a nation that was diminished, that didn’t have constitutional rights, a country that they didn’t feel as proud of as the country I grew up in.”

Other than three of Kennedy’s six children and Hines, the Kennedy quotient at the campaign launch was low. Some of his siblings have publicly distanced themselves from Kennedy’s activism, though he said this hasn’t affected their personal relationships. It’s unclear to what extent Hines will continue to be involved. “I hope” she will, Kennedy told me. “She’s a huge asset for me.”

This isn’t an ideal time to launch a Democratic primary campaign. President Biden announced his re-election campaign in April, and since he’s running for re-election the party probably won’t hold primary debates, a potentially crucial venue for dark horse candidates like Kennedy or Marianne Williamson to raise their profiles. It also limits the number of available staff willing to work on an outsider campaign.

Kennedy’s supporters are filling the gap in various ways. His campaign team is made up mostly of friends and allies from the anti-vaccine movement. Kennedy told me the campaign’s resources were being “crowdsourced,” but it may be difficult. A source with direct knowledge of the campaign told me that the campaign has had trouble renting email lists to use for fundraising, either from the right or the left, and is relying on its own list of 20,000 names. Contrast this with the legendary 2.5 million-strong Bernie Sanders email list. (Asked about the email fundraising, Kucinich said “our internal discussions have been the opposite” and called the lists I was referring to “stale.”) It complicates matters that the campaign’s natural demographic is “the crunchy crew in the antivax and medical-freedom movement that I think is hard to pigeonhole in political lines. I don’t think they’re motivated by partisanship,” this source said. “They’re trying to reach that demographic, but there’s not an obvious way to talk to them.”

There is already a super PAC promoting Kennedy’s candidacy. Called American Values 2024 after the title of Kennedy’s 2018 memoir, it took out a full-page ad in the Boston Globe to promote the Boston kickoff event. It’s being run by John Gilmore, who left his role leading the New York chapter of Children’s Health Defense to found the committee. Gilmore believes that the anti-vaccine movement (he prefers the term “vaccine safety”) has grown strong enough in the wake of Covid to power a political movement.

“Our movement as a result of Covid has become enormously larger than it used to be,” he said, estimating that it was “orders of magnitude bigger” now than it was twenty years ago when you could “sort of cram the whole movement into a van.” The growth of Children’s Health Defense is one example; the AP reported in 2021 that the charity doubled its revenue in 2020.

“It’s an issue that can and has decided elections and probably will be a major factor in the presidential election, and it hasn’t been up to this point,” Gilmore said.

Kennedy’s biggest opportunity is likely to be in free-thinking New Hampshire, traditionally the first primary state on the calendar and one that has energized anti-establishment campaigns like Ron Paul’s in 2012. Biden’s push to get South Carolina to hold the first primary next year could mean he’s not on the ballot in New Hampshire if it goes first anyway, which it will do unless its legislature changes a relevant law by June this year. This wouldn’t be enough to really interfere with Biden’s path to the nomination, but it would draw attention to Kennedy and thus to a messenger — and movement — that Democrats would rather not highlight. Kennedy insists, though, that his is no protest campaign. “I’m in it to win it,” he said. “I’m not thinking of Plan B.”

This article is taken from The Spectator’s June 2023 World edition. 

Blink and you’ll miss this libertarian moment

Political years are the opposite of dog years: they pass by in a blaze, with entire epochs elapsing in the course of a few news cycles. Ideas, even movements, fade abruptly, recalled only years later when you clean out your garage and stumble on that old tricorn hat from your Tea Party days.

If you want to know how jarring political change can be, consider that at this time in the 2016 election cycle — around the late spring of 2015 — the predicted frontrunner for the GOP nomination was Rand Paul. This was no coincidence. In those days, we were said to be in the middle of something called a libertarian moment. Voters were leery of Barack Obama’s deficit spending, Washington’s endless wars, the NSA surveillance that had been unveiled by Edward Snowden. And only Paul, a self-described “libertarian-ish” senator from Kentucky, had given eloquent voice to this skepticism of the state.

If you want to know how jarring political change can be, consider what happened next. Paul came under fierce fire during the GOP primary debates from a guy called Donald Trump, who took many of Paul’s libertarian issues — antiwar, anti-security state — and rolled them into a more visceral and smash-mouth populism. This populism was simultaneously comfortable with strong government on issues like entitlements and immigration. It was this formula, which we’d now call MAGA, that tapped the mood of the Republican base. Paul dropped out after the Iowa caucuses.

Thus did the libertarian moment end, with many wondering whether it had ever begun. Yet it wasn’t the first time a libertarian moment had been declared. Back in 2010, when the Tea Party erupted against Obama’s big-government meddling, the GOP was said to be moving in a more libertarian direction. And the shock debut of Ron Paul’s (Rand’s father) on a 2008 primary debate stage, where he denounced the Bush administration’s warmongering and attracted a wave of youth support, felt much the same.

Yet somehow the libertarian moment never seems to clock a full sixty seconds. It emerges in the media as a modish key to understanding a changing GOP, only for government to continue to grow bigger. So it is that once again we find ourselves in what might be called a libertarian moment. Yet is this actually the case?

Start with the fact that on so-called social issues, the country is trending in a libertarian direction. Support for marijuana legalization is high, and while at the state level this has resulted in a patchwork of legal frames, pot remains fully illegal in only four states. The gay marriage issue is largely settled, with 71 percent voicing support to Gallup in 2022. And while the public’s view of abortion remains more complicated — allowing the procedure on demand, as many on the left call for, has never been popular — there’s little question the recent Dobbs ruling helped pro-choice Democrats in last year’s midterms.

There’s also the fact that Republicans on Capitol Hill are behaving like the Tea Party never ended. The main points of contention in the fight over Kevin McCarthy’s speakership all had to do with government spending and reducing concentrated political power. McCarthy’s opponents demanded that the House: refuse to raise the debt ceiling without a spending cap; keep earmarks banned; and create a special committee to target “weaponized government.” The speeches from Republicans — pro-McCarthy and con — were all about reining in the state; “right-wing” in that moment seemed to mean “less Washington.”

Meanwhile, polls find that government spending remains unpopular at least in the abstract. Support for a muscular American response in Ukraine is waning. The middle class is stampeding into low-tax, low-regulation states such as Florida. So how about it? Has another libertarian moment begun?

Against any slide towards libertarianism has to be pitted another issue: crime. Five years ago, this was one of the libertarian movement’s greatest strengths. A falling crime rate, police brutality and America’s extraordinary level of incarceration had combined into broad support for criminal justice reform, which culminated in the First Step Act, signed into law by, of all people, Donald “Let’s Execute Drug Dealers” Trump. Yet as crime began to spike during Covid, the momentum changed. Nowadays, you can find Congress blocking local laws that ease penalties on criminals. Libertarian ideas such as decriminalization and harm reduction are blamed in many West Coast cities for crises of addiction and disorder.

Even beyond their purported issues, these libertarian moments have long seemed to me more like progressive moments. Yes, Americans are becoming more live-and-let-live on certain social matters, but then they aren’t especially wound up about the national debt or a bloated executive branch either. And any claim of a libertarian tilt has to take into account our elites’ shift in manners, away from liberality and tolerance, toward cancel culture and stifling speech. The average American is hardly woke. But it’s difficult to cast your eye across the country and see a groundswell for individual liberty either.

It’s become hip for a certain type of very-online trad to say that libertarianism is dead, dead, DEAD! — that what the public really wants is more blue laws and imported Hungarian nationalism. This is drivel, of course, and always has been. But as the so-called New Right hits some speed bumps, it’s not clear what libertarianism looks like in this weird national moment either. And as Kevin McCarthy strikes poses in yet another debt-ceiling fight, does anyone seriously think the state is going to get any smaller?

This article is taken from The Spectator’s June 2023 World edition.

How to stop the flow of guns south

Latavia McGee crossed the US border with three friends on March 3. The North Carolina resident was looking for the Mexican clinic for her tummy-tuck operation when she came under gunfire. Two of the group, McGee’s cousin Shaeed Woodard and friend Zindell Brown, jumped out of the back of their vehicle and tried to flee but were cut down by bullets. The third friend, Eric Williams, stepped out the driver’s side and was shot in the leg. The gunmen, who worked for the drug-trafficking mafia known as the Gulf Cartel, ran over, loaded the Americans onto a pickup truck and then held them in vehicles and stash houses for days. Woodard and Brown wouldn’t make it through the kidnapping; McGee watched them die from their wounds.

“I talked to him the whole time,” McGee said of Brown, weeping, on CNN. “I just told him I’m sorry because I asked him to come with me, and he’s like, ‘It’s OK, I’m your brother, I’m supposed to be there for you. I love you.'” Mexican police found McGee and Williams alive in a shack near the border on March 7.

While the vast majority of murders in Mexico are never solved, the suspects behind this atrocity were handed quickly over to the Mexican police — by the Gulf Cartel itself. The mob left the five men handcuffed by a car with a note that apologized and said the attack had been a mistake. “We ask the community to be calm because we are committed that these errors, caused by a lack of discipline, will not be repeated,” it said.

Mexican police also seized one of the guns used, a Diamondback AR-15, and gave the serial number to officials in the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. ATF traced the firearm to Texas, where Roberto Lugardo Moreno, a resident of Harlingen, had purchased it in 2019. Prosecutors allege that Lugardo was a “straw buyer,” someone with a clean record who gets guns for criminals and had been paid $100 by the Gulf Cartel to acquire it. He was arrested and held pending a trial.

The fact that a weapon wielded by cartel triggermen was traced over the Rio Grande is unsurprising. In the entire country of Mexico there is only one gun shop. Run by the army, the Mexico City store requires customers to hand in seven types of paperwork, including proof of a clean record and a letter from their employer, and wait months for the sale to be approved. But between 2007 and 2021, 192,000 weapons seized by Mexican security forces were traced to US gun shops and gun factories. The Mexican government believes this is only the tip of the iceberg and estimates that more than 200,000 firearms are trafficked over America’s southern border every year.

While gunrunning south has been a problem for decades, it has recently shot to the top of the US-Mexico agenda. In 2021, the Mexican government sued key US gun companies for negligence over the traffic. In 2022, a judge dismissed the case but the Mexican government appealed and filed a second suit against individual gun shops. When a team of top Mexican officials flew to Washington in April to discuss security issues, foreign secretary Marcelo Ebrard said, “Mexico’s priority is to stop the trafficking of guns from the US to reduce the firepower of criminal organizations” as well as fight the drug trafficking north. Following the meeting, the White House promised to “target southbound firearms flows.”

The issue is especially pertinent amid the severity of the fentanyl crisis and calls by some Republicans to classify Mexican cartels as terrorist groups and unleash the US military on them. In 2021, there were a record 107,000 overdose deaths in the United States and traces of fentanyl were found in 71,000 of the victims. US Customs and Border Patrol agents seized a record 6,600 pounds of fentanyl in the first quarter of this year, with the Sinaloa Cartel and Jalisco New Generation Cartel dominating the trade.

In January, Dan Crenshaw, a Republican from Texas, and Mike Waltz, a Republican from Florida, introduced a bill in the House to authorize military force against the cartels in retaliation for the overdose epidemic. “The cartels are at war with us — poisoning more than 80,000 Americans with fentanyl every year, creating a crisis at our border, and turning Mexico into a failed narco-state,” Crenshaw said. “It’s time we directly target them.”

While their military approach might raise eyebrows, these hawks are at least right that the fentanyl crisis and the violence of cartels are serious issues that need to be addressed. But following this logic, Washington more than ever needs to drain the “iron river” of guns that pours into Mexico. Any serious US effort to curb the cartels should start with the gun trafficking problem. The United States could significantly reduce the southward flow of guns without curtailing the Second Amendment or getting into thorny debates about assault rifle bans.

I have been covering the cartels in Mexico for more than two decades and spent four years reporting on a book on gun trafficking, Blood Gun Money. The research took me to a prison in the sprawling city of Ciudad Juárez, and the inmate Jorge whom Mexican soldiers had caught with a stash of weapons he had smuggled over the border. Many small groups such as the one Jorge ran traffic guns over the border, working with and supplying weapons for the cartels.

A soft-spoken, slim man with a goatee, Jorge began trafficking guns when he was just nineteen and struggled to look after his wife and baby with the money he made in construction in his town in Chihuahua state. He had a US visa and went to Dallas to buy clothes and boom boxes to sell for a markup back home. On one of these trips, a friend asked him to get an AR-15; when he delivered it the friend asked for many more.

Jorge became part of a three-man team, including a friend in Dallas who helped him get the weapons and the man in his hometown selling them. He would buy the rifles in Texas for approximately $500 to $700 apiece and sell them for over $2,000. He bought a dozen or so guns on each trip, stashing them in fridges and stoves as he drove into Mexico.

Jorge bought most of these rifles at gun shows, seeking out those that didn’t ask for identification in order to leave no paper trail. “There’s a black market right there at the gun show. You buy from the person who doesn’t ask for any paperwork,” he said. “If you go over to a person, ask for the price, and then they say, ‘I need your license,’ then you say, ‘I don’t want it,’ and go with someone else. The seller who tells you they don’t need anything, that’s where I used to buy.”

Jorge carried on trafficking for almost two years, selling hundreds of guns for triple their purchase price, buying a house in cash and enjoying an extravagant lifestyle. “At the beginning I felt bad, but I got used to it. In the end I didn’t care,” he said. “It’s the way you can have a good time. You sell weapons, you earn money and you have fun. I bought a brand-new truck, a motorbike, women, drugs. I had everything.” He only stopped when he got into an argument with his cousin, who promptly informed on him to soldiers. “If I hadn’t gotten snitched on, I would maybe still be working on the same thing.”

Following Jorge’s story, I traveled to a huge Dallas-area gun show with 700 stalls. Most sellers were licensed dealers who asked for identification. But I also found the private sellers who offered guns without requiring any paperwork at all. Under what is known as the “private sale loophole,” people who are collectors or just want to get rid of an old gun are allowed to sell weapons without asking for identification or doing a federal background check, which is the screening process used to stop convicted felons from acquiring weapons. However, I saw people who were not just hobbyists but were abusing the loophole to offer large numbers of brand-new weapons. “No tax, no paperwork, out the door,” a seller said. “That one’s unfired. We got one magazine with it.”

There are a number of documented cases of people abusing the loophole to knowingly sell large numbers of weapons to criminals. In Florida from 2009 to 2010, Vietnam veteran Hugh Crumpler purchased 529 guns from shops and resold them at shows without paperwork. Following their sale, federal agents traced them to a group of Honduran traffickers; they were implicated in five shootings from Colombia to Puerto Rico.

One way to shut down this dangerous enterprise would be to require universal background checks on all sales. Polls show there is strong support for them; in 2022 Morning Consult and Politico found 88 percent in favor of them and only 8 percent opposed. Yet even without these, the ATF could more aggressively pursue anyone “engaged in the business of selling without a license,” especially if a clampdown had broad political backing.

The second big way the cartels acquire weapons is through straw buyers — the accusation Lugardo faces in the recent attack on the Americans. Prosecutors say he was paid just $100 to get the gun, which matches amounts in many other cases I have seen. The reason that the fee is so low is that for a long time there have been few consequences, with those buying them often getting probation for simply lying on the form. “They’re not going to get any jail time. What’s the deterrent factor?” said Steve Barborini, a former ATF agent.

Such soft penalties for straw buyers could be changed following the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act approved in June 2022. While the media coverage fixated on the clauses regarding mass shooters, almost all missed section 12004, which focuses on firearms trafficking and establishes that straw buyers can be given up to fifteen years in prison. However, the challenge is to see the law enforced, which again could be helped with political pressure.

A further hurdle will be intercepting and preventing the sale of “ghost guns,” often made from kits sold on the internet; they have, of course, no serial numbers. I visited the ATF offices in Los Angeles right after they had busted a gang whose small factory churned out guns with black and red parts. A gang member was caught with red ink all over his hands — literally red-handed. “Right now, what we’re seeing is Southern California is approximately 30 percent of the firearms that we seize or buy off the street are non-serialized homemade guns,” said ATF spokesperson Ginger Colbrun. “These guys are making them hand over fist… It’s fine if you are a hobbyist and you want to make your gun, and that’s your thing but it’s prohibited people taking these.”

Mexican cartels also like ghosts. In 2014, police in the state of Jalisco raided a pair of workshops where criminals affiliated to the Jalisco Cartel had assembled a hundred rifles. For a long time, the gangsters have been able to buy gun kits off the internet with no ID or background checks because they’re only parts, not finished products. However, a new “Frame or Receiver” rule from the ATF went into effect in August, requiring the same procedure for gun kits as for regular guns. Yet again, the agents need to enforce it and political will could help this.

Firearms that use whopping .50 caliber bullets — ammunition for military machine guns — are coveted by the cartels. While these guns are a fairly niche product in the United States, costing upwards of $8,000, cartel gunmen want them to fire at security forces. They pierce the metal of police cars and can disable the engine on a large boat. Video of a 2019 firefight shows one blowing the leg off a Mexican soldier. In states such as Arizona straw buyers can get them with a simple identification. An extended background check, even of twenty-four hours, would deter many of the cartel affiliates from walking away with these weapons of war.

While the United States can do much to tackle the problem, Mexico also has a huge amount of work to do to stop gun trafficking. Immense corruption aids the vast proliferation of guns south of the border. In the infamous barrio of Tepito in Mexico City, I interviewed an army veteran-turned-gunseller who began selling firearms when he served, returning seized weapons to the street. His officers ran the racket.

“We had a saying,” he told me. “‘There is no general who can withstand a cannonball of a hundred million pesos.’” (I later found out this is a variation on a saying by Álvaro Obregón, a Mexican revolutionary general and president. He was assassinated in 1928.)

There are many such cases of seized guns being resold. In 2019, a man in Cuernavaca was caught on camera killing two labor leaders with a Glock .9 millimeter. It turned out the gun had previously been seized by police, but mysteriously disappeared from the vault.

Sometimes, the security forces sell their own guns. When federal troops took over the police base in Acapulco in 2018, they discovered that 342 guns, or 19 percent of their armory, were missing. Other towns have suffered the same fate. Between 2006 and 2018, there were officially 15,592 guns that went missing from Mexican police or soldiers, Mexico’s defense department reported.

Latin American security forces are also the source of many of the heavier weapons. In 2010, thieves sold twenty-two RPG-7s from a Honduran military armory, and the weapons began turning up among Mexican gangsters. Truckloads of M-67 grenades have been stolen from stockpiles in El Salvador and trafficked north. They actually originated in the United States, given to bolster the Salvadoran government in that country’s civil war back in the 1980s.

Still, if Latin American security forces were selling all their guns to criminals, they would be on the streets disarmed, but they still manage to have enough for their own personnel. Per year, Mexican police and soldiers are officially losing fewer than two thousand guns. Meanwhile, there are hundreds of thousands of cartel affiliates in Mexico. So while the theft from Mexican security forces provides a few of their weapons, trafficking from the United States provides far more.

The violence in Mexico often takes on the dimensions of an armed conflict. There were more than 30,000 murders last year in a country of 127 million; firearms were used in 70 percent of the deaths. The violence is not spread evenly — some cities, such as Mérida, can be relatively safe; others like Tijuana and Fresnillo are among the most homicidal on the planet.

Cartels use the guns to run full-on paramilitary forces and drive through towns in convoys of trucks with men in khaki showing off their firepower. In 2019, when police and soldiers arrested Ovidio Guzmán, the son of the drug lord El Chapo, an estimated 700 to 800 Sinaloa gunmen took to the streets until he was released. When a force of 3,500 soldiers rearrested him this year, cartel gunmen fired on a passenger plane trying to leave the airport.

It’s in the interest of the United States not to have such an unstable county on its doorstep. Americans crossing over become victims. Refugees flee the bloodshed and apply for asylum in the United States. And violent mafias run the human smuggling and drug trade. Mexico has to take the responsibility of restoring order. But that task would be massively helped if the gunmen did not have an unlimited supply of guns rushing south along the “iron river.” As the Mexican government wrote in its lawsuit: “This flood is not a natural phenomenon.”

This article is taken from The Spectator’s June 2023 World edition.