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Is Digger Tom Cruise’s biggest flop yet?
Tom Cruise must be the most divisive big star in Hollywood. For everyone who salutes him as the last old-school movie icon, who has brought joy to millions, even billions, worldwide over a 40-year career, there are others who sneer at his Scientology faith, his supposed weirdness and many of the pictures that he has made.
But his latest film Digger, directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, is something else altogether, and a rare example of where a picture’s obvious flop status does not mean that it is an uninteresting piece of cinema. Quite the reverse. Although it opened to a pitiful $20 million worldwide – against a rumored budget of as much as $180 million – and will go down in history as one of the biggest commercial failures there has ever been, it is neither an out-and-out failure nor a much-misunderstood future classic. Instead, it is that rare Hollywood thing, a film of ideas, but the execution of those ideas leaves a very great deal to be desired.
Expectations were high for the film when it was first announced. Iñárritu has specialized at taking big movie stars – Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Hardy, Brad Pitt et al – and subverting their images on screen, often to Oscar-winning effect. Anyone who marveled at the epic sweep of The Revenant would have been excited at the prospect of the Mexican filmmaker directing Cruise in a thriller about the most powerful man in the world seeking to prevent the apocalypse. Except, as has become painfully clear over the past few months, the film is not a thriller, but an (intentionally) unfunny black comedy in which Cruise, caked in latex prosthetics and sporting a Texan accent, plays an oil tycoon known as Digger Rockwell, whose cavalier disregard for environmental concerns will, in his parlance, come to bite him in the ass when his company’s reckless drilling causes a natural catastrophe that threatens to kill millions.
This is, at least, how the film presents itself for its first, unbearable half hour, before it pulls the rug from under the audience and reveals its meta-twist. It is not, in fact, the unspeakably crass and annoying farrago that has been wasting its viewers’ time, but a staging of a satirical play, Fossil Fools, in a post-disaster New York, where Cruise is in fact playing an actor named Curtis Markson who has been cast as Digger. The whole affair has been bankrolled by Digger’s nephew Kenny, who wishes to stage the show – which began as a satirical revue in London – in order to castigate his uncle’s memory, and to allow an audience to engage in some bleak merriment at the expense of the idiots who caused the mess they are now in, before they have to return to their grim, drone and robot-riddled lives.
There is the germ for a very fine film here, with shades of Iñárritu’s Birdman, that asks pertinent questions about the role of art and satire. But unfortunately – unfathomably – the vast majority of the film returns to the increasingly hysterical and unbearable antics on stage, which play out in turgid and tiresome fashion. By the time that the ever-excellent Jesse Plemons appears as Kenny in the “real” scenes, stealing the show with a memorable monologue in which he justifies his actions by suggesting that Fossil Fools will offer both him and the audience some much-needed catharsis, it is tempting to shout at the screen “Don’t you have any idea what story you want to tell?”
The answer, alas, is that Cruise and Iñárritu seem to have come up with the idea of making a film that will be as uncompromising and unlikeable as possible. And yet it also shows another side of its star (and producer) that has become increasingly clear over the past few years. He has failed to convert the world to Scientology, and so his pictures now deal with issues that set him up as an old-school preacher. The last two Mission: Impossible films, for instance, were clear attacks on AI, thanks to their villainous sentient computer program known as “The Entity” and Digger is an obvious lament for climate change, although at least, unlike the similarly themed Don’t Look Up, it doesn’t attempt to suggest that the world is about to be wiped out by an enormous, ham-fisted metaphorical comet.
Cruise has failed to convert the world to Scientology, and so his pictures now deal with issues that set him up as an old-school preacher
The film’s defenders suggest that it is a throwback to the Seventies and that decade’s often uncompromising, issue-led filmmaking, which is a fair argument. The obvious response, however, is that those films were good, and the bad ones have long since been forgotten. Digger will be remembered for being the last picture released by Warner Brothers, one of Hollywood’s oldest studios, before it is swallowed up by its merger with Paramount Pictures and rebranded as “Skydance.” It will undoubtedly end up being Cruise’s biggest flop and might even dent his crown as King of Hollywood, although Days of Thunder 2 is waiting in the wings to offer his fanbase a conventional share of thrills with the now pension-aged star.
I salute Digger for its originality, willingness to take risks and for the sparks within it that hint at what might have been. It has dug its own grave commercially, and, although many contrarians will continue to praise it, critically. I suspect that its long-term future, as far as it is regarded, will be that some mangy, flea-riddled animal, like Digger’s dying cat, comes to urinate on that grave, too. Unfair? Perhaps. But in a perverse way, it is what the filmmakers seem to have wanted. We get the flops we deserve, and Digger sums up our age with admirable perversity. So two cheers for Cruise and Iñárritu for that, at least.
Welcome to the age of centaurs
I’m watching my old friend Liam break the caramel on his crème brûlée, in a discreet restaurant in the hills above Nice. Liam is in his mid-fifties now: rugged and well-set, possessed of the affable, intellectual confidence of a man who once played chess at the very highest level. “Liam” is, of course, not his real name. He is a successful but highly private businessman, and he wants to stay that way.
‘Eventually we called it centaur chess, and nobody thought it was cheating. It was accepted’
Our surroundings are impossibly tranquil, yet the world beyond is in turmoil, not least because of AI. And my friend Liam knows all about AI, indeed he thinks his experiences with AI and chess have a lesson for the rest of us. And he has a story to illustrate his thesis.
“I encountered Garry Kasparov a few times,” he says. “Once I actually played him. He wiped me out. Then, a few years later, in 1995, I watched him defend his world title against Viswanathan Anand in the World Trade Center. It was a very close struggle, eight draws, then Anand won a game, and then, in game ten, Kasparov did this incredible sacrifice. Everyone in the crowd went: ah, brilliant! Kasparov swaggered out the room, he knew he’d won.” Liam takes a spoonful of the excellent crème brûlée. “But later the truth emerged. Kasparov’s computers had, with Kasparov’s help, prepared this way to win.”
I look at Liam. “Wasn’t Kasparov ashamed?”
Liam laughs. “Course not. Why would he be? This was the dawn of the era when man plus machine was better than either alone. They worked together. Eventually we called it ‘centaur chess,’ and nobody thought it was cheating. It was accepted.” He picks up his wine. “And this is my point. I think we are entering the age of centaur… everything. As it was with chess, AI and humans working alongside will be the best combination, for a while. We will have centaur accountants, centaur doctors, centaur lawyers, centaur architects.” Liam doesn’t say it, because he doesn’t need to. Centaur writers are also on the way, in truth they are surely here already.
These days when I read even the best newspapers, magazines and journals, I can often tell which pieces have been half or wholly written by AI: there is a certain cadence, a tendency to metaphor, an uncanny smoothness, and things come in threes. And yet, at the same time, the AI prose is getting steadily better, and very soon it will be invisible. After that, Liam believes, it will be superior.
“We had about 15 good years as centaurs,” says Liam. “Then the chess engines got so strong the human half was pointless, deadweight. A grandmaster advising a chess engine today would be like a 90-year-old back-seat driver in a Formula One car.”
For a sobering lesson in what comes after the centaur era, we need only look at mathematicians. Last month OpenAI announced that its machines had cracked Navier-Stokes, one of the seven Millennium Prize maths problems, each worth a million dollars.
How did the mathematicians respond? As academics often do: with entitlement and amour-propre. An advisory group of nine eminent mathematicians asked the labs “to stop testing advanced mathematical problems on proprietary models.” This in turn scandalised people on social media, who compared the maths boffins to whining Luddites, or worse. And with good reason. What would we think of oncologists who asked the machines to stop curing cancer, because it was depriving the medics of purpose?
Either way, the robots did not slow down. A few days ago OpenAI dumped more than 700 new maths papers onto the internet, written by an AI bot the public cannot use. The haul includes major work on three more Millennium problems, along with much else. The Swedish mathematician Olle Häggström suggested it might be “the most earth-shattering event in the entire history of mathematics.” Others have called it “ground zero” for the discipline.
Mathematicians now, arguably, stand in the smoking ruins of their profession, wondering what to do with their careers, their brains, their PhDs. To grasp why they are so unnerved, consider this: some of the problems solved by OpenAI have been puzzling mathematicians for many decades. Yet they were resolved in a few hours by AI, supposedly after one prompt.
Liam is sympathetic to the plight of the professors. “I paid my way through college by analysing chess games. People would post me the games they’d lost, and I’d write back telling them where they went wrong. Then suddenly that work dried up. That’s when I knew everyone now had a chess machine, and the machine was better than me.”
The coffees arrive. The evening has gone softly violet over the Baie des Anges. On behalf of humanity, I point out that despite all this, chess hasn’t actually died. Indeed, it has never been more popular. Magnus Carlsen is a rich man, and millions watch grandmasters online.
“That’s something of a fallacy,” Liam says. “Human chess survives not because it is the best, it isn’t any more, but because it is gladiatorial, a sport, we emotionally invest in the players. The nerves, the clock, the drama. Sport will always survive, and we will always watch it. A robot can kick a ball twice as hard as a human, yet we won’t watch robot football.” He leans forward to emphasize his point. “However, that emotional involvement doesn’t apply to purely cognitive work. Nobody cares if their accountant breaks into a sweat. A moviegoer just wants a great film with great lines. She won’t care if a robot wrote the screenplay.”
I get up to say goodbye; Liam sips the last of his Sauternes, and concludes, “Mine was just the first profession to be robotized. All this time I’ve been waiting for what happened to me, to happen to everyone else. And so it is. That’s why we should make the most of being centaurs, because after that, as I know, we will be superseded completely.”
Leaving the restaurant, I step out into the Mediterranean evening. Waiting for my Uber, it occurs to me that the centaurs of myth were not wise, noble creatures. They were violent, chaotic, anarchic. The Ancient Greeks would have seen an age of centaurs as something dangerous.
How Iran’s pay-as-you-go terror came to Britain
The whole thing was absurdly hilarious. At one point, someone suggested it could have been a stag party gone wrong, and that a farmer on her way home foiled the plot, which neatly sums it up. The government called for people not to speculate. Andy Burnham then said, before any trial, that strong indications suggested Iran had played a part. The men arrested at RAF Fairford, treated by the president of the United States as the work of a foreign actor and by our own government as likely Iranian terrorists, have all been let out on bail.
The recruit has now proved himself reliable and handed over compromising material that can never be taken back
So what happened at RAF Fairford? One possibility is that the Iranians, or the Russians, or someone else who has it in for us, are recruiting through online game chat rooms. Pay to slay. Pay-as-you-go terrorism. From our opponents’ point of view, the problem is that you might not get the best and the brightest. Some real comic-gold moments in the Fairford story point to an Ealing comedy, not an episode of 24. But the comedy hides a deeper, ongoing vulnerability, and a problem that has only been escalating.
The recent spate of arrests in connection with arson attacks across London, announced by counter-terrorist police, confirmed what many in Britain’s beleaguered Jewish community had known and feared for weeks. An insidious new form of anti-Semitic violence has arrived on British streets. This time it is not the work of lone fanatics or the supposedly spontaneous pro-Palestine protests that have repeatedly spiralled out of control. No, this could be something colder, more calculated, and, I fear, far harder to stop.
Detectives investigating a wave of arson attacks on Jewish targets across London have made a string of arrests since late March, some in connection with the firebombing of Hatzola ambulances in Golders Green on 23 March, others in connection with attacks on synagogues in Finchley and Harrow, a Persian-Iranian dissident media outlet, and another Jewish charity. A group calling itself Harakat Ashab al-Yamin al-Islamiyah (HAYI) has claimed responsibility for the campaign in videos that also show drones flying near and over the Israeli embassy in Kensington. Police are investigating possible links between the group and Iran.
This model is brutal, simple and vicious. They identify local criminals or disaffected youth who need cash quickly. They give them a small, relatively low-risk target. They pay them in bitcoin, or one of a dozen other untraceable cryptocurrencies. If they perform reliably, the sponsor escalates the jobs. The sponsor stays invisible, untouchable, and unknown. There is complete deniability. But the fear is real. This is asymmetrical warfare and grey-zone aggression at its most vicious.
The logistics of this pay-as-you-go Jew-hatred, in the model police are now examining, are as simple as they are sinister. Recruiters scour Telegram channels, online gaming sites and other social-media platforms for disaffected young men and petty criminals who are vulnerable and desperate for cash. These targets are essentially groomed and offered a couple of hundred pounds to commit an initial, relatively minor crime – for example, shoving a burning bin against a dissident Persian radio station or lobbing a petrol bomb at a synagogue. The real wickedness lies in requiring them to video the act on their phones and immediately upload the footage via secure messenger apps such as Telegram or Threema. Only once the handlers have this proof is trust – and leverage – established. The recruit has now proved himself reliable and handed over compromising material that can never be taken back. From that point, the proxies are moved up the ladder by their abusers to bigger, more serious crimes in return for substantially higher payments in untraceable cryptocurrency.
It’s cheap, effective, and almost impossible to trace back to the state ultimately pulling the strings. The Metropolitan Police assistant commissioner Vicki Evans, the senior national coordinator for counterterrorism, put it plainly: “I’ve spoken previously about the Iranian regime’s use of criminal proxies, and we’re considering whether this tactic is being used here in London.”
Evans has previously spoken about the Iranian regime’s routine use of criminal proxies. HAYI has also claimed identical attacks on Jewish sites in Belgium and the Netherlands. This is swiftly becoming a new operating method for hostile states seeking deniable operations on British soil. The New York Times has now given it a name – gig-economy warfare, fought with “disposable agents” – and treated the Fairford incident as the moment the same method was aimed at a base flying American bombers. One of the men called the police himself. That is not evidence the threat is small. It is evidence the people hired to carry it out are disposable, which is why the sponsor can afford them.
The anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement has spent years tirelessly mainstreaming the idea that Jews are legitimate targets for resistance. Over the past few years, we have seen everything in Britain from campus encampments that celebrated the October 7 massacre to local councils that fly the Palestinian flag. Meanwhile, Jewish schools are installing panic rooms.
The same week, as whatever exactly was happening at Fairford, the Green Party conference kicked off in Brighton. There, the party voted to class Zionism as a form of racism. Green Party MPs have been desperately scrambling, trying to somehow insist that there is no conflict between Jewish rights in Palestine or Israel and Palestinian rights in Israel or Palestine. As confusing as that sentence is, it barely shows the level of confusion of Green Party MPs. They are clearly out of step with their electorate.
Over the last couple of months, I’ve been lurking in about a dozen different Green party member WhatsApp groups. I’ve been singularly impressed by the discipline and the organisation. This group and others not only created that motion, but brought it forward despite real opposition and made it happen. It has been very worrying and impressive to see.
There were QR codes, with step-by-step guides on how to vote and when to vote. There was live coverage on the day for those who registered to vote online. The vote management was superb. They managed which amendments to support and which to vote against from start to finish.
In the weeks leading up to the conference, a brilliant campaign was run. One group even arranged transport to the conference for those who could not afford to get there. This is a machine; a well-disciplined, well-run party machine.
We are supposed to believe that this was the work of middle-class perennial students. Those who are there for the cause, as long as it is not before 9am. But this was no fringe losing its temper. Green party members succeeded in pushing through a motion explicitly attacking Zionism.
The guy who’s paid a couple of hundred pounds to put a bottle through a synagogue window in the early hours of a Sunday morning hardly needs to read the motion. He can be, and is, easily directed, and he is easily led, to vote or come to any conclusion.
An insidious new form of anti-Semitic violence has arrived on British streets
Rarely before has a global campaign had such a uniform purpose. Isolated anti-Semitic incidents have always existed, sadly. But what we are seeing is a return to the industrial-scale ideological preparation that is increasingly making large sections of the population receptive to the idea that attacking Jews is once again somehow justified.
The sheer randomness and low-level nature of these attacks make them particularly insidious. The ignorant, thuggish random idiot paid a couple of hundred pounds to commit arson has no idea of the seriousness of what he is doing. He is simply a disposable tool. Yet the cumulative effect will be devastating. Jewish schools, synagogues, charities, ambulances and community centres must now operate under ever more extreme security.
Hatzola north-west chairman Shloimie Richman called the Golders Green attack “the darkest day in the close to 50 years of our existence,” highlighting the bitter irony that vehicles used for life-saving work were deliberately targeted. Now parents worry about sending their children to youth clubs. Families will debate whether Britain is still a safe place to raise Jewish children.
This low-level terror will slowly make Jewish life in London and other major cities impossible. Some will respond by retreating behind ever higher gates and stronger security. But many others will eventually conclude that the only long-term answer is to leave for Israel.
Either way, Britain loses. It loses some of its best citizens and control of its streets. The government and police have been commendably quick to make arrests. That is the right response. But arrests alone are not enough.
We still await a clear public statement from a minister naming the suspected state sponsor behind the campaign. Burnham has gone further on Fairford than any minister managed in the spring, and still stopped short of saying who pays. This outsourced, deniable model is dangerous precisely because it works so well. It allows a hostile foreign state to wage war on British soil while maintaining plausible deniability. It will turn our own criminal underclass into unwitting proxies. And it exploits the very openness and rule of law that make Britain a civilised democratic country.
If we are serious about protecting our Jewish communities the dissidents we host from various brutal regimes, and national security on a broader scale, then we need to call this for what it is: state-sponsored anti-Semitic terrorism delivered on the cheap through bitcoin and local thugs.
Proscribe the group claiming responsibility, sanction the crypto wallets and publicly scrutinise the IRGC’s (Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps) role. Anything else will invite further escalation. The real test will be whether ministers have the courage of their convictions to name the suspected sponsor, dismantle the financial and ideological infrastructure that makes pay-as-you-go Jew-hate possible.
The British Muslim Trust’s mosque attack claims don’t add up
This week, The Spectator exposed how the British Muslim Trust (BMT), paid millions of pounds by the Government as its official monitor of anti-Muslim hatred, has made multiple claims about attacks on mosques which are not true, and others for which it refuses to provide evidence.
They were either not attacks, or were not directed against mosques, or both
On Thursday, the BMT chose to double down. Probably because of our piece on Tuesday, they finally, six weeks after promising it, published a report purporting to prove their claim that “one mosque [was] attacked every five days” between July 2025 and July 2026. That is indeed the title of the report. But what it actually proves is that the BMT is even shoddier and more dishonest than we feared.
An attack every five days equates to about 73 attacks on mosques over the year, and the BMT duly claims a figure of 78. But the report only lists about 40 or so supposed attacks – including when you count multiple supposed attacks on the same day against the same target. Even of those 40, we can now say that about a third are clearly false. They were either not attacks, or were not directed against mosques, or both.
The BMT’s tally of 78 “attacks” includes, for instance, a series of protests outside the Al-Mahdi Islamic Centre in Glasgow. The BMT describes these as “anti-Muslim targeting” while unfortunately neglecting to mention that many of the demonstrators were themselves Muslim, anti-regime Iranians protesting against the slaughter of protestors by the Tehran government outside a mosque described as Scotland’s unofficial base for the regime. (After Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was killed in American airstrikes this year, the mosque’s imam, Aoun Ali Jarvi, was filmed at his funeral, weeping and paying respects before his coffin.)
The 78 figure also includes a mostly peaceful protest in March 2026 against the building of a new mosque in Dalton, Cumbria, and a leafleting campaign by residents in Harefield, Middlesex, against a huge new Islamic complex, on a site of 6.3 acres, in their rural village. Is the BMT saying that nobody is allowed to object to this sort of project, and that to do so constitutes an attack? Nor is either of these sites yet in operation as a mosque, and worship will only be a small part of the Harefield project.
Three more of the 78 were when “a scholar affiliated with a local mosque was subjected to a sustained campaign of…abuse online,” an imam in High Wycombe “received an abusive letter” and a Facebook post wrongly claimed that an imam in Belfast was linked to Isis. None of these, of course, is an attack on a mosque. The most serious anti-Muslim attack of the period, the stabbings of five people in Edinburgh in June, is included as an attack on a mosque even though no mosque was targeted (the attacker started in Sighthill Park, which is about a quarter of a mile from the nearest mosque, then targeted shops, takeaways and a petrol station.)
As we said on Tuesday, another of the BMT’s claimed attacks on a “mosque” was actually an attack on a building clearly labelled as a synagogue. Another, in Worcester, was on an outbuilding of a community centre some distance from the mosque and is described by police as not racially or religiously-motivated. Another BMT-claimed attack, in Blackburn, was on a derelict building next to a mosque and yet another, in Batley, involved someone setting fire to some rubbish outside a building site near a mosque. Two more of the 78 were alleged “mass-casualty plots” against mosques. But a plot, of course, is not an attack. A plot is an attack that was foiled.
The BMT’s report certainly tells an appalling story, but in a quite different way to the one it thinks
The BMT report attempts to deal with these difficulties by saying that its definition of a mosque includes “people and communities connected to it.” On this basis, literally any attack on any Muslim can be claimed as an attack on a mosque. But even that’s not all – the BMT’s definition of an attack “includes alleged plots, incidents reported to BMT’s helpline, and incidents self-reported by victims who perceived them to be a hate incident.” On that basis, literally any “incident” self-perceived by any Muslim can be an attack on a mosque. The BMT sometimes talks of 78 “attacks and incidents” but also simply of “attacks,” making no distinction between the two.
I think we know what’s happening here. The British Muslim Trust has realised that the thing most likely to anger and frighten Muslims is the notion of attacks on their sacred places. So it has decided it needs as many of those as possible, even if some have to be heavily massaged. It is the sort of behaviour we have grown used to from delinquent organisations such as Muslim Engagement and Development (Mend). But in a publicly-funded body such as the British Muslim Trust, it is simply unacceptable.
The BMT’s report certainly tells an appalling story, but in a quite different way to the one it thinks.
Three tips for Newmarket and York
The Club Godolphin Cesarewitch Handicap at Newmarket tomorrow (3.40 p.m.) is a 29-runner race over two miles two furlongs in which any number of horses have a chance of landing the spoils.
The most likely winner, if he stays the distance, is the lightly-raced, four-year-old gelding Sea Lantern
Last year’s first and second, Beylerbeyi and Dawn Rising, are in the field once again and both will appreciate the fact that the worst of the forecast rain this week has missed the track because both horses like quick ground. At the revised weights, the Irish raider Dawn Rising should come out on top of the pair but Beylerbeyi is the younger, improver. Furthermore, the form of his second at Doncaster last month to Caballo De Mar was franked in spades at Longchamp last weekend.
The most likely winner, if he stays the distance, however, is the lightly-raced, four-year-old gelding Sea Lantern. His trainer, Brian Ellison, could hardly have been more bullish about his charge’s chances this week saying bluntly, “I just think he’ll win. He’s a good horse.” Odds of 5-1 are not for me, however, and there are other horses at single-figure odds, including Beylerbeyi and Dawn Rising, that I am happy to overlook as bets solely on the basis that they are poor value.
I have put up one horse already for this race: Gooloogong each way at 33-1 but he ran dismally in the Turners Cesarewitch Trial at Newmarket last month, without any obvious excuse, and my faith in him has therefore evaporated.
Instead, I will put up the winner of that trial PREMIERE LIGNE who hacked up by six and a half lengths thereby landing a 4 lbs penalty for today’s contest. It’s true that Premiere Ligne ran well in the trial two years ago (second) and he then bombed in the main event (16th of 24 runners) but I put that poor run down to the very soft ground.
Premiere Ligne will not be allowed the same soft lead that he got in the trial three weeks ago. However, with in-form Saffie Osborne in the saddle, I am happy to back Premiere Ligne 1 point each way at 25-1 with bet365, Unibet and Betfred, all paying six places. Others might prefer the 33-1 on offer elsewhere with two less places.
I am also going to put up MOUNTAIN ROAD in the same race even though his car park draw in stall 26 is far from ideal. I tipped him each way in his last race when he ran a cracker at odds of 20-1, only to be defeated by the heavily-backed Irish raider Small Fry at York.
Apprentice jockey Lauren Young did nothing wrong that day but Scottish trainer Jim Goldie has understandably opted to put veteran jockey Paul Mulrennan in the saddle tomorrow. I expect Mulrennan to give Mountain Road a patient ride from his outside berth and come into the race strongly in the final two furlongs. Back the horse 1 point each way at 11-1 with Unibet, paying six places.
In truth, DARK THIRTY has run more bad races than good ones this season but he has also shown some strong form, notably twice at the Curragh, when contesting hot sprint handicaps. On that basis, I will take a chance by tipping this six-year-old gelding at York tomorrow in the Sky Bet Sprint Trophy Handicap (3.17 p.m.).
The John and Sean Quinn trained gelding is a course and distance winner at York and, with his nice draw in stall four, I am happy to back him at a big price. The suggestion is 1 point each way at 22-1 with bet365, paying six places.
Top weight Pellitory could be the main danger after his unlucky-in-running fourth last Saturday behind Mezcala in the BetMGM Challenge Cup at Ascot. He drops a furlong in distance tomorrow but he has winning form over six furlongs, notably when landing the Ladbrokes Ayr Gold Cup last month on heavy ground.
Finally, even though there will be more places on offer in a week’s time, I want to back one of my favourite handicappers on British Champions Day when EBT’s GUARD is due to line up for the Balmoral Handicap in the last race on the card. Bought for just £5,000, this five-year-old gelding has been superbly placed by his handlers, William Muir and Chris Grassick, to win the best part of £300,000 in prize money.
The five-year-old gelding is, however, the victim of his own consistency in that he has not won in 13 starts since victory at Ascot in August 2025 but he has run well in almost all of those races. EBT’s Guard was second in the Balmoral a year ago off the same official rating of 102 that he will run off a week tomorrow. He’s the perfect ante-post bet in that he goes well on all ground conditions.
According to Muir, the horse is being aimed at the Balmoral and he is training as enthusiastically as ever. Back EBT’s Guard 1 point each way at 33-1 with bet365 or Unibet, both paying four places.Next week I will be previewing Champions Day with some superb racing on offer at Ascot.
Pending:
1 point each way Dark Thirty at 22-1 for the Sky Bet Sprint Trophy, paying 1/5th odds, 6 places.
1 point each way Premiere Ligne at 28-1 for the Godolphin Cesarewitch, paying 1/5th odds, 6 places.
1 point each way Mountain Road at 11-1 for the Godolphin Cesarewitch, paying 1/5th odds, 6 places.
1 point each way Gooloogong at 33-1 for the Godolphin Cesarewitch, paying ¼ odds, 4 places.
1 point each way EBT’s Guard at 33-1 for the Balmoral Handicap paying ¼ odds, 4 places.
Last weekend: – 3.5 points.
1 point each way Fluorescence at 15-2 for the BetMGM Rous Stakes, paying 1/5th odds, 4 places. 4th. + 0.5 points.
1 point each way River King at 10-1 for the BetMGM Challenge Cup, paying 1/5th odds, 5 places. Unplaced. – 2 points.
1 point each way Kalpana at 13-2 for the Arc, paying 1/5th odds, 3 places. Unplaced. – 2 points.
2026 flat season running total: + 26.384 points.
2025-26 jumps season: – 57.785 points on all tips.
2025 flat season: + 84.12 points on all tips.
2024-5 jumps season: – 47.61 points on all tips.
2024 flat season: + 41.4 points on all tips.
2023-4 jumps season: + 42.01 points on all tips.
2023 flat season: – 48.22 points on all tips.
2022-3 jumps season: + 54.3 points on all tips.
Total for seven full seasons of tipping: + 68.215 points on all tips.
For more racing news and tips, read The Turf by Charlie Brooks.
Zack Polanski is on the brink after his Holborn by-election defeat
Zack Polanski’s failure to win the Holborn and St Pancras by-election is not just a disappointment; it undermines the Green party leader’s entire strategy for his party and will inevitably bring his leadership into question. In a few months, Polanski has gone from being just about the most successful party leader of the moment to being the one who is surely now in greatest trouble.
The entire point of Polanski’s tilting away from environmental issues towards Palestine was to exploit anger at what left-wing and Muslim voters perceive to be Labour’s soft attitude towards Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu and his war on Gaza. It was always going to run the risk of offending the lentil and sandal vote, the party’s terribly nice middle class voters.
It’s true that the Green party’s share of the vote was up considerably on 2024: the Greens got 33 per cent of the votes, up 22 points on two years ago. But Polanski still fell more than 3,000 votes behind Labour’s winner Sagal Abdi-Wali.
Polanski has gone from being just about the most successful party leader of the moment to being the one who is surely now in greatest trouble
Holborn and St Pancras is exactly the sort of constituency where the Green party’s new strategy might have been expected to work. In the 2021 Census, 21 per cent of the constituency’s population were Muslim, more than three times the national average. In the 2024 general election, Keir Starmer had a strong challenge from left-wing independent Andrew Feinstein, a former supporter of Jeremy Corbyn, who campaigned heavily on Gaza. While Starmer was not in danger of losing, his share of the vote fell by 17 per cent, and Feinstein came second. Many Greens wanted Feinstein to be the party’s candidate in the by election, before Polanski pulled rank and decided to stand himself. Surely, the chance to get the Greens’ leader into Parliament would stir environmentally-conscious North Londoners.
Polanski couldn’t have got it more wrong. Even the Greens’ performative conference motion declaring that ‘Zionism is racism’ could not swing he seat in the party’s favour. The Greens’ surge in late 2025 and early 2026, which culminated in victory in the Gorton and Denton by-election, is now starting to look as if it was no more than a personal protest against Starmer on the part of dissident Labour voters. With Starmer now out of the picture there is little to drive people towards the Greens. The Burnham bounce, which at first looked as invigorating as an overweight Dad on a child’s trampoline, just got a whole lot bouncier.
While Polanski is, naturally, the biggest loser from the by-election, the result serves as a warning to Conservatives and Reform UK. Although British politics has atomised into a five party system, it has become increasingly evident in recent months that the Left has become rather more inclined to vote tactically than is the Right. That matters hugely, because in the next election we could end up with seat after seat falling to a left-wing candidate as the right-wing vote is split between the Conservatives and Reform UK.
Even more worrying for the latter two, it now looks as if we might, after all, be retreating to being a four party system, with the Greens’ efforts to become a nationwide party faltering. It is hard at the moment to see them advancing beyond the few strongholds which they currently hold. If you are a left-leaning tactical voter, all roads currently point towards the Labour party. Unlike Starmer, Burnham is looking capable of keeping the party in power after 2029. And the more he looks able to do just that, the more the left-wing vote will surely coalesce around him.
Things could change. A full-on fiscal crisis, leading the government to seek a bailout or supercharging inflation by trying to print its way of debt, could turn the whole political picture upside down. But for now, Holborn and St Pancras has made a Burnham general election victory look all too probable.
Labour’s by-election triumph is a sign of Burnham’s signal achievement
Labour has comfortably won the Holborn and St Pancras by-election with 45 per cent of the vote, leaving Zack Polanski a distant second on 32.7 per cent. In the contest caused by Sir Keir Starmer’s decision to quit the House of Commons, Sagal Abdi-Wali retained much of her party’s vote, down only four points from the party’s 2024 triumph. The result will further bolster Andy Burnham’s credentials, cheer Labour activists after his rousing conference speech and exacerbate the existing wounds within the Green party about the future of Polanski’s leadership.
It was just five weeks’ ago that Starmer resigned – but he has already been totally airbrushed out of history by his local party. Abdi-Wali ran a campaign focused on three issues: homelessness, water companies and opportunities for young people around the theme of ‘the Camden way’. The first two neatly dovetailed with Burnham’s own national priorities. Campaigners were cheered by the Prime Minister’s threats to take Thames Water into public ownership, with many local residents affected in August by one of the company’s burst water mains. Unsurprisingly, Starmer did not feature on any Labour literature, with the party preferring to talk about its record in local government – something that worked well in the May elections.
The Greens, by contrast, tried to make this campaign about the past. Much of their rhetoric was focused on the legacy of Starmer, with various Green outriders and sympathisers asking about Abdi-Wali’s links to the unpopular ex-PM. A ‘dyed in the wool Starmerite, who is one of Keir Starmer’s closest friends,’ is how journalist Paul Holden described her to the left-wing news site Novara. Over the course of the campaign, there was a subtle shift in party literature, as the Greens moved away from framing it as a two-horse race to keep out Labour to instead trying to positively influence the Burnham government. ‘Vote Green and watch Labour move’, was Polanski’s explicit pitch in his conference speech last week.
This result serves as a complete contrast to the Gorton and Denton contest at the beginning of the year. Back then, it was Labour losing their traditional votes in droves, the victims of tactical voting as the Greens stole their message of hope and change. Now, it is they who are resurgent as Polanski’s forces fight a backward looking campaign, centred on Starmer’s legacy. In February, it was Hannah Spencer, the plucky plumber, talking of how voters deserved a ‘nice life’: this morning it is Abdi-Wali, all smiles, speaking of how she wants to give ‘people something to believe in’. After a bruising twelve months for Labour, this cathartic result will bring great relief and joy: one senior aide confessed to feeling ‘very emotional’ after his party’s triumph.
Polanski now faces big questions about his own political future. As the polls were closing, his predecessor, Caroline Lucas appeared on Newsnight to quietly damn his record as leader. Polanski declined to vote on the Greens’ motion condemning ‘Zionism as racism’ at last week’s conference vote, something bitterly opposed by Lucas and most other long-standing Greens. Asked whether Polanski should now stand down, she paused before saying quietly, ‘let’s just see what happens in the coming days and weeks’. Amid reports that some of the Greens’ five MPs are considering quitting the party, Polanski’s failure to win here further damages his credibility among his troops. Having chosen to stand, he then made several gaffes, including a cringe-worthing video of him attempting to speak Urdu. Polanski has gambled big – and lost.
For the first time since the war, five different established parties have won Westminster by-elections this year. That statistic is a stark indication of the fragmented electoral landscape and a reminder of the fickle fortunes of political volatility. The same forces that built the Greens up have now left them halted in their tracks. This seat was always going to be a left-on-left scrap: urban, progressive, highly diverse and stuffed full of graduates. But it is worth noting that the Tories managed to beat Reform and keep their deposit – the first time they have been the leading right-of-centre party in a by-election in England this parliament.
Labour will be left cheered for parliament’s return on Monday, when Sagal Abdi-Wali will take her seat on the green benches. Her victory is a reminder of Burnham’s signal achievement since succeeding Starmer as Prime Minister: uniting much of the left of centre bloc behind him, as he bids to lay the ghosts of the past two years to rest.
Why Labour doesn’t want to talk about NHS waiting lists
Remember NHS waiting lists? They used to be a political priority for the Labour government, which would claim it was meeting its targets on getting the length of the lists and the amount of time patients were waiting down. Strangely, that chat has all but disappeared lately.
Today’s waiting list data from NHS England underlines why. The number of people waiting for elective treatment on the NHS has gone up for a second month running, this time to 7.37 million treatments at the end of August. It’s the highest since October 2025, and the health service’s national medical director Professor Frankie Swords has warned that there are ‘ominous signs of early pressure’ ahead of the traditional winter high demand that the health service experiences. It is also now looking nigh-on impossible for the health service to reach the Labour manifesto target of 92 per cent of patients getting treatment within 18 weeks by 2029.
Unsurprisingly, Labour’s frontbenchers have made sparing references to waiting lists recently. Yvette Cooper has shifted to talking about quality of care and patient safety, preferring to focus her party conference speech on maternity scandals, social care, domestic violence and public health. When she did mention waiting lists, it was in the context of the last Tory government taking ‘us from the shortest waiting lists in generations to the longest’. It’s almost as though she was preparing the ground for a missed target by suggesting that Labour could have met it had it not been for the Tory legacy – even though of course Labour knew full well what that legacy was when it was publishing its 2024 manifesto.
There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with shifting from targets and numbers to a focus on quality of care: in fact, the last Labour government became far too obsessed with targets at the expense of genuine improvements in care. The four-hour A&E waiting target, for instance, was so rigidly enforced that NHS trusts ended up gaming the system in a way that had nothing to do with patients and everything to do with avoiding the kind of shouty control freakery that would come their way from Whitehall if too many people ‘breached’ the four hours. The worst examples I came across when writing my book on the history of the NHS involved A&E departments where staff painted or taped a line on the floor over which they could wheel patients who were about to breach the four hours, and claim that they’d been moved to another part of the hospital. Even if that other part was just a few feet away from the previous part, and involved the same staff and a long wait for care, it satisfied the target. It had nothing to do with care, though.
The problem is that patients tend to consider timely treatment to be part of quality of care, rather than antithetical to it. And so for all the shift from targets to something more cultural, people will still interpret the quality of the NHS in part by looking at how long they had to wait for an operation or test. The one thing that might give Cooper some comfort is that the NHS isn’t top of voters’ concerns at the moment: it currently lags behind immigration, the economy and defence and security. So even if voters are really quite unimpressed with healthcare, they might be more motivated to base their vote on other issues.
What War gets wrong about divorce
Over 20 years ago, my life was painfully turned upside down as I began to navigate the ruthless and costly world of high-stakes divorce as depicted in Sky Atlantic/HBO’s new legal A-list divorce drama, War about the expensive split between a caddish tech billionaire, Morgan Henderson (Dominic West) and his high-maintenance and scheming actress-model wife, Carla Duval (Sienna Miller). After entrapping her husband with ‘selfie’ evidence (that would not, in fact, be admissible in court), her instructions to her lawyers are: ‘You take this photo, you take this case, and you take him for every f**ing penny he has – and he’s got quite a few’.
But having watched the first episode – the next airs today – I found the divorce-of the-century drama enjoyable but unrealistic. For a dash of realism, try finding yourself in the middle of a divorce storm when two rival family law firms go head-to-head, with all the ‘filthy’ tactics imaginable. I would regularly get what’s known as the ‘Friday email’ from my wife’s lawyers, sent around 5.30pm so that you had to stew and stress all weekend. Being served divorce papers at home during Sunday lunch is another favourite ploy.
The case puts an old-establishment law firm (not unlike Farrer & Co) up against an upstart boutique outfit (run by a husband and wife). The blue-chip firm with panelled walls is called ‘Cathcarts’, which feels odd as they are a distinguished Scottish military aristocratic family. In truth, few top firms today go for the mahogany club library look. Rather, they have reception areas that resemble a BA First-Class executive lounge, with fine wines, the FT,Tatler and shiny Italian coffee machines. But beyond aesthetics, there are flaws with the plot and the credibility of the legal procedure, not least that much of the first episode is taken up with the couple’s ‘prenup’, signed ten years previously when movie star Carla was richer than her social media tech start-up husband.
I, too, had a prenup. What the scriptwriters don’t mention is that prenups remain non-legally binding in the UK (although they are taken in to consideration). But that may have spoiled the drama. It is also a myth that dividing assets under UK divorce law is complicated. It’s not. Assets are divided 50/50, especially when there’s not a messy custody battle with multiple children (a teenage stepson of Henderson, we later learn, is involved).
What of the divorce lawyers themselves? At the time of my proceedings, which made for some titillating tabloid society fodder, London was the new divorce capital of the world. I soon found myself at the Holborn offices of Mischon de Reya seated opposite the formidable Sandra Davis, head of family law at the firm that had represented the Princess of Wales in her £17 million acrimonious divorce. When it came to high-profile UK divorces, few firms had a tougher reputation.
At the time of my proceedings, which made for some titillating tabloid society fodder, London was the new divorce capital of the world
But where War deviates badly from reality is that almost the first thing that Sandra (and her savvy junior, Melissa Lesson) said to me – after I found myself being followed 24 hours a day by a two-man team of private detectives – was that I needn’t worry since UK judges were moving towards a ‘no-fault’ divorce system (following California in 1969). This finally came into force in England and Wales in April 2022 under the Divorce, Dissolution and Separation Act 2020.
This landmark law removed the requirement to prove fault (such as unreasonable behaviour or adultery) or apportion any blame. Hence, the efforts of both sides in the TV drama to fling mud or prove cheating is irrelevant. That the UK has had a ‘no-blame’ divorce system for four years is not mentioned. This means that tech billionaire Henderson could have been a regular at Max Mosley’s orgies and behaved in a way that made Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor look like a candidate for Holy beatification, and it would have had zero impact on the divorce outcome.
But the strangest thing is that War, which some critics may argue sets out to glamourise divorce, has been released at a time when The Office of National Statistics (ONS) recently released figures showing that the average marriage ending in divorce in 2025 lasted for 13 years. This is the longest since records began in 1963 and up from a record low of 8.9 years in 1985. This improbable trend has led some legal commentators to claim that couples are not getting divorced as they can’t afford the legal fees.
But as somebody who has been a double divorcee client of Mischon (and now happily married for over 12 years) I’d refute this theory. The high-end private client legal world is going through an existential crisis as so much legal work can now be done by AI, at a fraction of the cost. The old £750 an hour ‘metre ticking’ model (my first divorce cost around £90,000) is on the way out. Fees have been coming down thanks to AI which is also driving the rise of high street quickie divorce firms like Amicable.
In the 1970s, when a divorce movie like Kramer V Kramer won a shelf of Oscars, divorce became almost fashionable – a symbol of feminism and female freedom. Today, divorce seems much less a ‘lifestyle’ choice. Maybe, it’s gone out of fashion.Indeed, there have been so many divorces in the last 30 years – the ONS estimates 7 to 8 million individuals – that many have probably learnt, the hard way, from the mistakes of their romantic vicissitudes. In short, this happy band may have simply got better at marriage and relationships the second time round – ok, third time in my case.
Who’s to say Simon Pegg doesn’t have ADHD?
Simon Pegg has announced his diagnosis of ADHD, a condition now so well known that its abbreviation is normally left unexpanded.
The BBC explains the good news. Before, Pegg had attributed certain of his qualities to ‘just character fault’. Now he sees them differently, and so does his wife. ‘She makes allowances for forgetfulness and and lack of concentration,’ says the Beeb’s article.
Human variation, like human suffering, can be defined in a host of ways
Perhaps Pegg repeated the word ‘and’ in that sentence because of his ADHD; perhaps the BBC editor let it stand because of theirs. Certainly, I didn’t spot the repetition the first time I read the piece, which might, for all I know, be because of mine. I can’t guarantee the BBC piece won’t be corrected by the time you read this, and trust to your good nature to believe that it was there this morning.
Simon Pegg’s work has given me great pleasure. I happen to believe the purpose of film is not heart-rending insight into the profundities of the soul but frothy entertainment. Shaun of the Dead is not Tolstoy, but neither does War and Peace offer what I look for in Mission Impossible. Many Spectator writers mention their proximity to the lives of the globally famous and I am no exception. I once met Elvis. That sounds like a non-sequitur, and it will sound even more like one when I add that Pegg’s Hot Fuzz, which is a fabulous film, funny and witty and charmingly intelligent, has a key scene involving a rampaging swan.
Elvis – that was the swan’s name – lived in Heythrop Zoo, near Chipping Norton, which trained animals for film and TV work, and which would open up one weekend a year for curious locals. We went along and my young kids, who were often restless and fretful when asked to sit down to do their homework, watched the animals with fascination and deep reserves of concentration.
There are people who have noted the rise of ADHD diagnoses and concluded that the condition does not exist. They are wrong. Yes, it has exploded in popularity with all the appearance of a craze. Yes, it shows a striking overlap with other fashionable conditions. None of this means ADHD is not real. If in many people it represents a constellation of symptoms that seem fundamental to human nature, and thoroughly normal, that still does not make it unreal. Depression is all in the mind – attempts to reduce it to a biochemical error have so far failed – but it is not a jot less real if it stays that way.
Human variation, like human suffering, can be defined in a host of ways. With psychiatric diagnoses, there is a question beyond one of accuracy. The question is what impact a diagnosis has and whether it is helpful. Does it help us live better lives? Does it help us see the world and ourselves more clearly? Do our days become richer and more interesting?
Pegg has spoken of his heavy drinking and his depression, and it seems he feels having a diagnosis of ADHD helps him deal with this. He has talked of reversing into a post and finding out that people with a label of ADHD have more car accidents; he seemed to feel the diagnosis helped here too. What isn’t clear is whether it made him more forgiving of his own mistakes or more watchful for them.
To the best of my knowledge, I don’t have ADHD. I recall wrestling with inattention as a child, I remember being hyperactive on many occasions, and I can certainly be impulsive, but I grew up as part of a generation taught to view these as features of character. I rather think I was helped to overcome them by being taught this view, and suspect – shallow adolescent that I was – that I would have found a disease label a too tempting excuse for not doing what I can to improve myself. But I am not Simon Pegg and I am not you, and if a different approach works for different people, then I can only applaud.
None of us can do very much to remake our characters and our minds, which should make us open to whatever really does help – and wary of what does not. Simon Pegg is of my generation, and though ADHD diagnoses are on the rise everywhere, his late-in-life acquisition of an ADHD label seems more typical of Hollywood stars like him than bourgeois rustics like me.
Probably my scepticism about what Pegg’s label offers him is obvious, but it would be a grave mistake for me to look down on him, or on anyone else, for finding it helpful. The fact that I fear the label may do harm does not mean I hope that I am right.
Elvis in Hot Fuzz is a running gag, outwitting the slow rural coppers. In the climax of the film, he ambushes the chief villain from the backseat of a getaway car. A hard animal to train for a movie appearance, I imagine. But there were people who knew how to help him become a film star. And if stardom alongside Timothy Dalton and Simon Pegg pleased Elvis then he got all any of us can hope for: a life that brought out the best in him.
The mudslinging midterms
This is not an edifying election. That’s putting it delicately. Any honest survey of the quality of the candidates and the arguments they are making will leave you deeply depressed.
All across the country, voters are being asked to choose among truly dreadful candidates, whose main argument is that “the other guy is much worse.” Both parties do it. They do it because it works.
Unfortunately, the candidates don’t have to exaggerate to underscore how bad their opponents are. That doesn’t stop them from making it their battle cry. “My opponent is more corrupt than Tony Soprano.” “My opponent believes transgenders should play in your kid’s sport. After he’s rammed that outrage down your throat, he’ll force your kid to marry one.”
Those quotes are fictional, of course, but the mudslinging is not. It’s pervasive, and it dominates this year’s election politics. Millions of dollars are being spent on negative ads and very little on positive ones. There’s a reason: negative emotions are powerful motivators, and political consultants know it.
This hostile rhetoric, plus the deep chasm between the parties, will have a predictable effect at the ballot box. It will lead to a tidal wave of negative voting. Instead of voters marking their ballots because they like Candidate A, they will mark them because they truly loathe Candidate B. That’s what they are telling pollsters, “I’m voting for my candidate because his opponent is so awful.” Worse yet, they are often right.
The second striking feature of the upcoming midterms is that they have been “nationalized,” at least for the House and Senate. Local issues still matter, of course, but for more and more voters, the overriding issue is not whether Candidate D or Candidate R is better for my state or my district. The overriding issue is which party they want to control the House and Senate.
That priority makes sense for House seats since that chamber is tightly controlled by the Speaker, who is chosen from the majority party. Individual members find it almost impossible to go their own way. Just look at how effective Nancy Pelosi was, corraling votes with a razor-thin margin for error. Mike Johnson, her successor from the other party, has been equally effective, dealing with the same problem.
Senators have more autonomy than House members, so there is less party unity. Still, voters place a high priority on which party controls the Upper Chamber. Political ads underscore that priority, mostly by tying candidates to President Trump (for or against).
Donald Trump is the most consequential American politician of the 21st century. His dominance can be felt, once again, in this election. Trump’s name is missing from the ballot, but his presence is not. The crucial question is how much his missing name matters for turnout – for and against Republican candidates.
In the Republican primaries, his endorsement was decisive. Just ask Senator John Cornyn. In the general election, however, Trump’s presence cuts both ways. It motivates both Republicans and Democrats. It’s not clear who will be motivated more, though normally the party out of power has the edge in off-year elections.
Trump certainly knows that. He is spending a lot of time and money on the campaign trail, hoping to turn out his voters.
He’s right, too, when he tells voters that this election will have enormous consequences for his final two years in office. If the Democrats win either chamber, they will spend all their time blocking everything he tries to do and investigating him and his family for corruption. If they have a positive agenda, it will be an afterthought, mostly serving up aspirational ideas for the 2028 presidential election.
If Democrats win the Senate, they will block his nominations in the executive branch and judiciary, an unprecedented escalation of inter-party warfare. Trump’s response will be a torrent of vitriol and an effort to govern by executive order. Democrats will turn to District Courts to stop those orders before losing at the Supreme Court.
If you find this kind of negative election disheartening, if you are repulsed by the non-stop mudslinging, don’t despair. It just means you are paying attention.
Mothin Ali’s by-election day blunder
Oh dear. It is polling day in Holborn and St Pancras and the Greens are staring down the face of defeat. Zack Polanski has put his leadership on the line by standing here but it looks as if Andy Burnham has rallied the Labour faithful back to his cause. With Polanski suffering a summer of bad headlines and embarrassing revelations, some whisper quietly whether defenestration might now be on the cards. Rattled!
The (self-identifying) man likely to replace Zack is his charming deputy Mothin Ali. As Steerpike’s colleague Noa Hoffman has noted, there is a fair bit of bad blood between allies of the Jewish leader and his Muslim number two. Ali is a backer of the ‘Global Majority Greens’ who have privately accused Polanski of instituting a ‘hierarchy of racism’, claiming allegations of anti-Semitism taken more seriously than other complaints. Some were involved in championing the ‘Zionism is racism’ motion which now has the party facing an investigation by the Equalities and Human Rights Commission. Talk about a brains trust.
Outwardly though, it is all smiles between Polanski and his deputy – at least until the ballots all come in tomorrow. In his bid to show his fealty, Ali has been retweeting Greens out campaigning for Polanski. Unfortunately, one of those he has shared to his 19,000 followers is a fairly obvious parody account called ‘Libby Tarde’ who claims to have travelled all the way from Bristol for the ‘bi erection’. Clearly, like his leader, Ali has trouble distinguishing fact from fiction…
If this is the best the Greens have got then Mr S suggests maybe the eco-warriors and Gaza nutters ought to stick with Fantasy Zack. Better a boob whisperer than a right arse, eh?
Andy Burnham looked ill at ease in Berlin
Andy Burnham has been in Berlin today – his first bilateral diplomatic visit since entering Downing Street nearly three months ago. The Prime Minister met his German counterpart, Friedrich Merz, face-to-face for the first time to ratify the bilateral Kensington Treaty – signed by the Chancellor and Burnham’s predecessor Keir Starmer last year.
Greeted by Merz with full military honours in the German capital, Burnham’s first appointment was at a local high school, before the two met to formally ratify the treaty. There has been a significant expectation for the two leaders to get along today: forming two of the three members of the E3 diplomatic coalition alongside France, Burnham will have to work closely with Merz on a number of sensitive issues over the coming months, including Ukraine, the Middle East, Russia, handling Donald Trump, as well as European security more broadly. With presidential elections likely to return an EU-hostile leader in France next year, there will be even more pressure on Burnham and Merz to deliver a united response to any challenges that arise.
Burnham looked distinctly stiff and less at ease than he has in recent diplomatic appearances
Unusually for these sorts of visits between close allies, then, there was no press conference after Merz and Burnham’s meeting today. This was supposedly at No. 10’s insistence, after the Prime Minister wanted to avoid any difficult questions. It was notable watching him during the short 7-minute joint statement to the press that the pair did give that Burnham looked distinctly stiff and less at ease than he has in recent diplomatic appearances.
The Kensington Treaty is a bilateral agreement focussed on cooperation in a number of areas, including security, the economy and freedom of movement, between the UK and Germany. Calling the day ‘historic’, Merz kicked off the pair’s statement to the press. Flanked by a group of high school students, the Chancellor chose to highlight the better access to both countries the treaty will give to school and university students.
After these very short remarks, he handed the floor to Burnham. Referencing ‘challenging times’, the Prime Minister lauded Germany as one of Britian’s ‘closest partners’. The Kensington Treaty would, he said, ‘improve our security here in Europe and grow our economies, improve the living standards of our citizens’.
Rattling through several security-related announcements, Burnham confirmed that the UK and Germany would be collaborating further on countering hybrid attacks. This feels particularly pertinent coming just weeks after both the Prime Minister announced the creation of a government unit to tackle Russian disinformation and Germany publicly attributed a failed attack on Leipzig airport in August to Russia. ‘It makes sense to face these threats together,’ Burnham added. The Prime Minister also confirmed that work would start to accommodate a role for Germany in GCAP, developing the next generation of fighter jet alongside Japan and Italy – as well as making a vague reference to collaboration in space.
Following Burnham’s speech at Labour conference last week where he said that Brexit had ‘done more harm than good’ and that he would like to lay out ‘options’ on the future of the UK’s relationship with the bloc, there was much intrigue as to what development, if any, there might be on this in Berlin today. It is, incidentally, my understanding that the German government was somewhat surprised to hear Burnham talk so frankly about Brexit and his apparent interest in exploring a return to the EU.
Speaking today, Burnham reiterated his intention to bring Britain ‘closer to Europe, particularly in the interests of economic growth and collaboration on irregular migration’. These are both points Downing Street clearly believes will be key to selling any thaw in EU relations to voters back home in Britain. On economic growth, at least, the Prime Minister would certainly already have some ammunition: Germany is the UK’s second largest trading partner, contributing roughly £155 billion to our economy each year.
Among the issues Downing Street is reportedly keen to secure favour with Brussels on is clinching an exemption to the ‘Made in Europe’ protection measures being drawn up by the EU to shield producers in the bloc from the behaviour of competitors in the US and China. Germany is said to be in favour of helping the UK secure this exemption but reportedly wants Burnham to raise tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles to match EU policy and show reciprocity. This is believed to have been on the agenda in closed-doors discussions between the Prime Minister and Merz today.
Burnham wouldn’t have put his personal stamp on today’s visit without also highlighting the first meeting of the ‘regional growth dialogue’ enabled by the treaty. Interestingly, while the Prime Minister is understood to be very keen on learning more about how Germany’s federal system, established following 1945, works, Berlin is also said to be open to picking up tips from the Prime Minister’s own devolution drive here in the UK.
With that, the pair’s statement was brought to a swift close. Turning to the school children behind him, Burnham attempted some awkward chitchat as the press packed down. Nevertheless, one microphone did still manage to catch him asking, ‘How is Harry Kane getting on?’ – prompting grimaces from the gathered teenagers about the England captain and Bayern Munich player. Joking to Merz, Burnahm added, ‘Harry Kane, the real ambassador to the UK.’
Perhaps Burnham was able to strike better rapport with the German chancellor than their cordial appearance in front of the press today suggested. But for a prime minister known to have little interest in foreign diplomacy, today’s visit to Berlin did little to dispel the notion that he has yet to warm to this element of his duties.
Rubio picked the wrong Athenian
The Pnyx is a scrubby hill west of the Acropolis where Athenian citizens once crammed together to argue, vote and, now and then, talk themselves into disaster. On Wednesday, as the sun went down behind the Parthenon, Marco Rubio stood there and told the West to rediscover its nerve.
It was the best speech a western statesman has given in years, and its diagnosis is right. Europe did spend decades outsourcing its defense and much of its self-respect, and Rubio’s hymn to thumos – “the fire of passion, strength, courage, pride” – revived an oft-neglected idea. But listen to the virtues he chose. The Greeks, he said, prized “relentless ambition,” “risk and glory” and “an impatience with the notion of impossibility, chafing at all boundaries and limits.” His roll call of heirs ran from Alexander to Caesar to Cortés, and ended with America as “a continental empire.”
That is not the creed of Pericles, the one Athenian statesman Rubio named. It is the creed of Alcibiades. Pericles led Athens into war with Sparta, but his strategy was famously cautious. He wanted the city to stay behind its walls, trust in its fleet and, as Thucydides records, not try to enlarge the empire while the war lasts. He died of plague in 429 BC, and his successors ignored him.
The most dazzling of them was Alcibiades – a handsome, rich, and glory-hungry adventurer. In 415 BC he talked the Assembly, meeting on that same hill, into invading Sicily, brushing aside the cautious Nicias, who warned that Athens had enemies enough closer to home. Two years later the expedition was destroyed, its survivors left to rot in the quarries of Syracuse.
Now listen to Rubio’s own warning that the West “will either choose to act now or lose the choice to act at all.” That is the Alcibiades pitch to the letter. A strategic doctrine that demands “dominance” in everything from drones to space at once, and treats every limit as a failure of nerve will eventually blow up in a Sicily-style debacle.
Athens’s fatal adventure was a long war of choice far from home, sold as quick and glorious, launched while its real rivals were still in the field. Seven months into a war with Iran that was meant to be swift, with Hormuz still shut, a third carrier group heading east and strikes promised for after the midterms, America has not yet met its Syracuse. But it has certainly found its Sicily.
Rubio told his audience that the Greeks “gave us history itself.” Thucydides wrote his History of the Peloponnesian War as a warning about what happens when a democracy mistakes bombast and ambition for a coherent strategy. Athens survived its defeat in 404 BC, and its democracy was restored within a year. But it did lose its empire. Rubio closed by quoting Daniel Webster: we are all Greece’s debtors. We should now acknowledge our particular debt to Thucydides, and his narrative of how democracies can go off the rails in a time of war. Rubio is the most serious mind in his party, and the man it should send into 2028. He already has Pericles’ gift for a speech. He should take Pericles’ strategy too.
A small victory for Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor
Whisper it, but the tide may be turning for one of Britain’s most unpopular, and unfortunate, men. The news that Thames Valley Police have admitted to using unlawful warrants to search Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s homes when he was arrested earlier this year is undeniably a victory for the beleaguered former Duke of York. It also might well be the beginning of the end for the police investigation into allegations of his misconduct in public office.
There was widespread skepticism when it was announced that Andrew would be taking the police to court, and Buckingham Palace sources were quick to stress that the King would not be funding any part of the legal process. But Andrew has now won the first round at the Royal Courts of Justice. Mr. Justice Hilliard said that “agreement was reached between the claimant and Thames Valley police that the search warrants were unlawful,” because of the wrong legislation being applied. Which, in turn, could potentially mean that any evidence gathered as a result of these warrants – at either Andrew’s former home of Royal Lodge or his present residence of Marsh Farm at the Sandringham Estate – is inadmissible. If so, there is a good chance that the entire police investigation, which has lasted for eight months and presumably cost a great deal of public money, will have been in vain.
There was one small crumb of consolation for Thames Valley Police. The judge made it clear that, “the fact that the search warrants were quashed does not bring an investigation to an end, or mean that the whole of the investigation was unlawful.” Had he not made such a statement, you could have imagined the case against Andrew collapsing immediately.
Yet now, Thames Valley Police are in a dangerous interim period. Whatever material they have gathered during their hunt could be challenged as a result of today’s judgment. The force’s bullish statement that “legal proceedings are currently ongoing to decide how material seized during the searches will be managed and whether we can lawfully retain it in support of our ongoing investigation… alleged misconduct in public office by a man in his sixties from Norfolk remains ongoing” feels like a holding pattern. Behind the scenes, senior officers will no doubt be scrabbling around, wondering what to do next.
I speculated a couple of days ago whether Andrew, who has been cast out of both Britain’s royal family and polite society more generally, is having what amounts to a miniature comeback, with invitations to kitchen suppers from well-heeled and sympathetic gentry. Certainly, his public popularity shows no sign of rising from its current nadir, and it is inconceivable that he will ever be received back into the bosom of “the Firm” – unless or until every single allegation against him is categorically disproven. Given the death of his chief accuser Virginia Giuffre, such an outcome is unlikely, if not wholly impossible.
Still, although it is largely a technical victory for Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, and one that could well be undone, it is still a victory. For a man who has had little good news in the past few years – many would argue justifiably – he could be forgiven for emitting a rare cheer.
Andrew’s search warrant victory over Thames Valley Police
Whisper it, but the tide may be turning for one of Britain’s most unpopular, and unfortunate, men. The news that Thames Valley Police have admitted to using unlawful warrants to search Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s homes when he was arrested earlier this year is undeniably a victory for the beleaguered former Duke of York. It also might well be the beginning of the end for the police investigation into allegations of his misconduct in public office.
There was widespread scepticism when it was announced that Andrew would be taking the police to court, and Buckingham Palace sources were quick to stress that the King would not be funding any part of the legal process. But Andrew has now won the first round at the Royal Courts of Justice. Mr Justice Hilliard said that ‘agreement was reached between the claimant and Thames Valley police that the search warrants were unlawful’, because of the wrong legislation being applied. Which, in turn, could potentially mean that any evidence gathered as a result of these warrants – at either Andrew’s former home of Royal Lodge or his present residence of Marsh Farm at the Sandringham Estate – is inadmissible. If so, there is a good chance that the entire police investigation, which has lasted for eight months and presumably cost a great deal of public money, will have been in vain.
There was one small crumb of consolation for Thames Valley Police. The judge made it clear that, ‘the fact that the search warrants were quashed does not bring an investigation to an end, or mean that the whole of the investigation was unlawful.’ Had he not made such a statement, you could have imagined the case against Andrew collapsing immediately.
Yet now, Thames Valley Police are in a dangerous interim period. Whatever material they have gathered during their hunt could be challenged as a result of today’s judgment. The force’s bullish statement that, ‘legal proceedings are currently ongoing to decide how material seized during the searches will be managed and whether we can lawfully retain it in support of our ongoing investigation… alleged misconduct in public office by a man in his 60s from Norfolk remains ongoing’ feels like a holding pattern. Behind the scenes, senior officers will no doubt be scrabbling around, wondering what to do next.
I speculated a couple of days ago whether Andrew, who has been cast out of both the Royal Family and polite society more generally, is having what amounts to a miniature comeback, with invitations to kitchen suppers from well-heeled and sympathetic gentry. Certainly, his public popularity shows no sign of rising from its current nadir, and it is inconceivable that he will ever be received back into the bosom of ‘the Firm’ – unless or until every single allegation against him is categorically disproven. Given the death of his chief accuser Virginia Giuffre, such an outcome is unlikely, if not wholly impossible.
Still, although it is largely a technical victory for Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, and one that could well be undone, it is still a victory. For a man who has had little good news in the past few years – many would argue justifiably – he could be forgiven for emitting a rare cheer.
The Islamification of Texas
As the UK’s contribution to worldwide carbon emissions is less than 1 percent and doesn’t affect global temperatures a jot, the worthies’ repeated justification for net zero is that Britain is obliged to set an example to the rest of the world. You may be pleased to hear, then, that in one respect the UK is indeed being held up as an example. See, say, the Nick Freitas (not Fuentes) YouTube video “Britain is gone, and America is next.” Alas, Britain serves as a cautionary tale, illustrative in conservative American circles of what happens to a western country that neglects to check wholesale Muslim immigration.
In another video, “The immigration crisis that will destroy the West,” Freitas strolls through Whitechapel. “Where am I?” he asks, panning a cityscape of hijabs and shopfront signs in Arabic. “I recognize this place… This looks very much like the markets in Dhaka or Chittagong. There’s only one problem. This is the United Kingdom.” Cue ominous music and a Union Jack flapping outside parliament.
Campaigning for the midterms, Republican senatorial candidate Ken Paxton has found the culturally compromised state of the UK and other European countries a useful rhetorical tool for fighting the “Islamification” of Texas. As state attorney general, Paxton was instrumental in designating the Muslim Brotherhood and the Council on American-Islamic Relations as terrorist groups under Texas law.
Paxton also helped stall permission for what was originally called EPIC City (more recently softened by its Islamic sponsors to the sweet, anodyne tag “The Meadows”), a proposed 400-acre housing development replete with 1,000 homes, a large mosque, a community center and a religious primary school. Scrapping the plan has become a cause célèbre for traditionally minded Texans. Although the development would not technically bar non-Muslim residents, early advertising clearly conveyed the intention to create an Islamic enclave (otherwise, why would Imran Chaudhary’s East Plano Islamic Center bother to build it?). For opponents, the proposal signifies absence of assimilation and the threat of a parallel legal system.
At fewer than 500,000 people among a population of 32 million, the number of Muslims in Texas is proportionately small at roughly 2 percent. Yet their numbers have more than tripled this century. The state now sports some 350 mosques and Islamic centers, about 50 mosques having opened in only the past two years. Brits know as well as anyone that Muslim immigrants tend to clump – which intensifies the impression of territory being claimed. Lone Star Muslims are heavily concentrated around Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth.
The Republican campaign to restrict further Islamic architectural and institutional inroads in Texas has focused on stopping the spread of “Sharia.” But in truth, you don’t have Sharia without Islam, and you don’t have Islam without Muslims. “Sharia” is a fig leaf. In the state legislature, the “Sharia Free” Texas Caucus really means “Muslim Free.” Let’s face it. Republicans don’t want any more Muslims in Texas.
The Islamification issue isn’t about any unconstitutional imposition of foreign jurisprudence. It’s about culture. While many American states have steadily lost their distinction, Texas persists in having an identifiable flavor. Even outside the US, most folks are familiar with the drawl, the hats, the boots and the barbecue. Despite having become 84 percent urban, Texans profess attachment to wide open prairies, cattle ranches and oil rigs – captured in the legacy series Dallas and, more recently, Landman (an even more corrupt version of modern-day Texas with Billy Bob Thornton that I recommend). In theory, the culture treasures freedom, self-reliance and ruthlessness. Texas remains a particular place, Texans a particular people.
In truth, you don’t have Sharia without Islam, and you don’t have Islam without Muslims
But only just. Lest Republicans such as Paxton seem intolerant, the state has absorbed so many Hispanic immigrants that Latinos constitute its largest ethnic group at 41 percent, while white Americans are down to 37 percent. So maybe it’s understandable that the minarets on those hundreds of mosques poke some Texans right up the bum.
Nationally, the question dominating multiple British podcasts – are Islam and the West compatible? – simply doesn’t feature in the US. Americans are behind. And we are not prepared for this issue. With our “nation of immigrants” propaganda, proud dedication to religious liberty and under-examined more-the-merrier vibe, most Americans are uncomfortable finding fault with what they perceive hazily as a race or ethnicity rather than a political ideology. Putting up barriers to folks of a certain faith seems un-American. Yanks conceive of foreign cultures mostly in terms of food – not as typified by female genital mutilation, cousin marriage, doctrinal contempt for outsiders, rape gangs, sexual abuse, real misogyny rather than the fake sort of the “down with the patriarchy” crowd, anti-Semitism, homophobia and a peculiar propensity for blowing things up.
The Senate race in Texas is tight. Currently a nose ahead, the Democratic candidate, James Talarico, is boastfully Christian, but he’s otherwise a standard progressive out to protect the rights of “our neighbors with a uterus” who notoriously declared that “God is nonbinary” and who’s been scoffing barbecue to beat the band, the better to live down the ugly heresy that he used to be a vegan. What besides cowboy hats makes Texas Texas? Since 1980, it’s been a solidly red state. Trump won it in 2024, even securing a majority of Hispanic votes. If the Dems pilfer this seat, they will never stop crowing about it. And if the Dems take back the presidency, the Islamification of Texas will be just the beginning.
When I was a kid, we worked puzzles called “What doesn’t belong in this picture?” You know, an image with a fork, a knife, a spoon and a shovel. Not sure I’d want to live there, but I’ve been to Texas and have a soft spot for the place. So I’m sorry, but watching a PBS video of hundreds of sexually segregated men in white kufis and veiled women praying in the East Plano Islamic Center on the outskirts of Dallas – so crowded that it’s resorted to overflow rooms – I can’t help but see a shovel.
The irony of Labour’s crackdown on fake gay asylum seekers
On Tuesday morning, three people were arrested by Home Office immigration enforcement because of their suspected links to a criminal network which is believed to help asylum seekers pretend to be gay, providing fake photographs and letters to Bangladeshi men to convince the courts that they are at risk of persecution back home. This followed an undercover BBC investigation from April which exposed a cottage industry of lawyers and advisers who help migrants fake homosexuality in order to remain in the country, and a Home Office whistleblower telling the Times that ‘hundreds’ of Pakistani asylum seekers have said they were in a gay relationship with the same man, who provided letters in support of their claims.
Of course the charge that some migrants are faking homosexuality in service of their asylum claims predates the recent reporting. In September 2023, then home secretary Suella Braverman gave a speech in Washington DC where she said:
‘Let me be clear, there are vast swathes of the world where it is extremely difficult to be gay, or to be a woman. Where individuals are being persecuted, it is right that we offer sanctuary. But we will not be able to sustain an asylum system if in effect, simply being gay, or a woman, and fearful of discrimination in your country of origin, is sufficient to qualify for protection.’
After she was criticised for these remarks she expanded on them in an interview with ITV:
‘They come to the UK, they purport to be homosexual in the effort to game our system, in the effort to get special treatment… I’m afraid we do see many instances where people purport to be gay when they’re not actually gay. But in order to get special treatment, it’s not the way our asylum system should work.’
The response was as vituperative as it was predictable. The current Northern Ireland Secretary Chris Bryant asked ‘How many? Where?’ (the government hasn’t published the statistics since August 2024) and said Braverman was ‘scurrying behind the apron strings of prejudice’. Health Secretary Yvette Cooper, then shadow home secretary, said it was ‘divisive’ and ‘shameful’ and that Braverman ‘demeans her office’. John Harris of the Guardian compared the remarks to Enoch Powell’s Rivers of Blood speech.
‘Around a dozen’ Tory MPs, including ministers, briefed the Times that they had complained to the chief whip about her ‘bigotry’, saying the ‘pink wall is outraged’. Stonewall wrote an open letter to the prime minister signed by over two hundred organisations – including Wolverhampton city council, LGBTQ+ Labour and several charities in receipt of government funding – condemning her comments. Barrister Dr S Chelvan, then of 33 Bedford Row Chambers, told ITV that he questioned whether migrants would pretend to be gay, as this ‘ignores the fact that even pretending to be gay – even with some of our own sub-sections of diaspora communities – can lead at best to social isolation in the UK or at worst risk to family members back home.’
A month later Braverman was sacked after she wrote a Times article alleging that the police were treating pro-Palestine mobs more leniently than right-wing extremists, ignoring No. 10’s demands that she tone down the article. But this was just the final straw, coming at the end of a series of ‘controversial remarks’ (talking about a migration ‘hurricane’, saying that grooming gangs were mostly British-Pakistani) which are now accepted across the mainstream of British politics.
For telling the truth, Braverman was publicly attacked, given little institutional support and, within weeks, sacked. Three years later, a government that includes some of her most vocal critics is cracking down on the abuse they had said it was bigoted to mention.
Reading is the ultimate life hack
The London Underground used to be a happy place for authors. We would get into a carriage and see rows of people, studiously ignoring their neighbors – unless their neighbor was a dog – and reading a newspaper or an actual, physical book. The same went for the New York subway and, to a lesser extent, all train networks.
Today you get into a carriage and everyone is staring into the same phone screens that they stare into most of the rest of the day.
Books give us some ability to see through, as well as put into perspective, the troubles of our time
I try not to be judgmental about this, since I always try to see the best in people, however disgusting they might look. So I tell myself that perhaps some portion of the passengers are reading Thucydides or the latest highbrow novel. But I doubt it. The phone today is such a distracting device that during a 30-minute train journey in which someone might once have got through a chapter of a novel, today they have seen 100 videos of cats being attacked by a boa constrictor or Piers Morgan being attacked by a fact. And it’s not just a problem for other people. It’s a problem for all of us. I suspect most people reading this will have noticed that we read fewer books than we used to and spend ever more time on our devices. People present this as a problem for the kids, but it’s a problem for the adults too.
A slew of recent books and articles have lamented the provable decline in book-reading. But it’s a slightly fruitless genre. After all, none of these works is ever going to be picked up by someone who doesn’t read books and wants a good spanking over the fact. It would be like a normal, well-adjusted person voluntarily attending a party conference.
The trouble is that not reading books is now not only lamented – it is celebrated. I read an article the other day about an online influencer called Alix Earle, 25, who is said to be worth $20 million. Asked to name the last book she had read she replied, without hesitation: “I’ve never read a book… maybe Dr. Seuss.” It reminded me of an evening in New York earlier this year when another online influencer called Clavicular came into a club I was having a drink in. The walls of said club were decorously furnished with someone’s library. Another guest asked the live-streamer whether he was into books at all. Young Clav explained that he didn’t really think reading books was worthwhile to him in a “time-maxxing” way. He explained that reading through a really long book didn’t seem likely to enhance his ascent in the way that various other activities might do. Such as hammering his jaw, taking meth or shooting dead alligators. But I digress.
The point is that whereas there was a time when confessing to being utterly incurious about the world of books was something to be embarrassed about, today there seems to be little shame in it. Those of us who do care about books and ideas are slightly stumped by how to respond to this. After all, at some point all authors and readers have to contend with one unassailable fact. Which is that we have all known very good people in our lives who do not read books: people who contribute a great deal to the people around them, who are loving and decent and everything else that is noble and good. Likewise we have all met people who seem to have read every book in the world and are total shits. In other words, reading does not make us good.
Yet there is something that books give us that is surely measurable to some extent. What is it? I would say it is among much else some greater sense of perspective on the world. I suspect that at some point even Alix Earle or Clavicular might ask themselves what their life is for and whether they are using their time on this Earth entirely well. It is hard to shrug off the thought that they would be better off in many ways if they could spend a few days with Marcus Aurelius or Dostoyevsky. Not least because it is unlikely that any of us in a normal year are going to meet someone with a comparable amount of insight into the world or people.
Books also give us some ability to see through, as well as put in perspective, the troubles of our own time. Of immediate practical use is the fact that they give us some clarity about how language can be used for good and ill. This week I saw a headline which read “Iranian small boat migrants charged over Yom Kippur terror plot.” My immediate thought was how sweet “small boat migrants” sounds. An image was conjured up of really quite diminutive people leaving their dinky little boat to do something naughty. That is a trick that language can play, and it is being played on us all the time. Remember the discussion of “family voting” after the Gorton and Denton by-election earlier this year? What a lovely, healthy activity that sounds: “Come on kids, get in the car, we’re off for a bit of family voting.”
If you know language you know how you can be manipulated by it. In the same way that if you know history you know how you can be either led or led astray by it. If you have a mind filled with real and fictional stories from the past you can better decide whether it is time to hide under a rock or weigh up the cries and alarms of our time and suffer through them.
I suppose that the main thing that reading gives us (apart from pleasure and some wisdom) is an ability not to be subject only to “present-ism.” It gives us a sense – like a painting on a French cave-wall – that someone has been here before, felt what we have felt and managed to navigate this mysterious thing called life. It is a sad person who gets to the end of their life no wiser or more informed than when they started it. To put it in terms that Gen Z might understand, reading is one of the best “hacks” we have. But then again, most readers don’t have $20 million in their pockets.
My best friend Jeffrey Archer
Jeffrey Archer was my closest and dearest friend for 40 years. I first met him in 1986 when we were invited to be judges for a Royal Watercolor Society Open Exhibition. We hit it off immediately. There was an ebullience and lightness in him that I warmed to. We met up later for dinner and carried on meeting once or twice a week ever since.
Yesterday, I went to the restaurant where we used to have breakfast and I almost ordered eggs benedict in his memory – he was always the one for the unhealthy option – but I just couldn’t bear to. He never talked about his own death, though he sometimes joked about what he’d say at my funeral; he was all about life and the immediate future.
He was, in fact, talking about the future up to the time he died, about his plans for writing. He had already written a novella. It’s all ready to go and a lovely read, about the history of a £5 note. There’s nothing to stop Harper Collins bringing that out.
I have never known Jeffrey happier than in the last few months
What I found so upsetting about his obituaries was the relentless vicious negativity. I don’t recognize the person in them. Jeffrey always excited longstanding affection and loyalty. He was a fundamentally life-enhancing man. He could sound off and be bombastic but he was also a very good listener. He was always interested in other people and their lives. Perhaps it was one of the reasons he was such a good novelist. And although people turned against him after his downfall he had no bitterness, no rancor at all. He joked that I did all the hating for him.
Perhaps that too is why he told stories about his own background – and the obituaries made much of that. He was a storyteller about his own life, not tied down by reality. Reality and fantasy diverged and merged. He was, I think, religious; he would always qualify his remarks with “if God spares me” or “thank God for the talents I have.”
During his fall from grace (after being found guilty of perjury) and time in prison, I saw a lot of his family and became his mouthpiece and apologist; I dealt with journalists on his behalf. He would use his one precious weekly phone call on me – he was always keen to know what was happening outside. And when he was in an open prison I would visit him regularly. So too did a number of friends – Billy Connolly, Barry Humphries and Tim Rice, for instance.
It’s hard to recognize his wife and his marriage from what you read about Mary Archer being so long-suffering and put-upon. In fact they were great together, with a very easy-going love and respect. Obviously there must have been occasional stresses in the marriage but who doesn’t have those?
As for his writing, it was enjoyable and readable. Some people say his editors wrote his books for him. This is just untrue. I was there and I saw his minute schedule. I would spend a week with him in Majorca, where he wrote, and I saw him in action: two hours on, two hours off; eight hours writing daily. He had a wonderful writing discipline. He would come out of his writing hut with sheets covered in longhand. It would then be typed up by his secretary and endlessly revised. He was always listening for ideas; a lot of life and experience informed his plots.
He was the most generous of men. He must have done between 700 and 800 charity auctions – if I were Jeffrey, I would embellish that and say 900 – and he really did raise millions of pounds for charity over 35 years. Name any major good charity and he helped raise money for it, especially for Magdi Yacoub’s Chain of Hope, which carries out heart surgery in places that don’t have specialists. He would joke that I was his very junior assistant. I would write a short appeal script for his speech at the end of the auctions… he was always very moving and effective. I dropped out from the charity auctions two or three years ago because it took so much of my time, though I continued to help with Magdi Yacoub. He kept going.
I have never known Jeffrey happier than in the last few months. It may have been because he had completed his last novel, Adam and Eve, and he felt it was the best thing he had done. It was meant to be his last because he wanted to stop while he still had strong writing power. I terrified him by talking about Iris Murdoch, who carried on writing even when she had dementia – and it was obvious in her work. He delighted in his family too. He used to complain that his sons didn’t have children but then he had five grandchildren come along, which gave him so much happiness.
What to say about Jeffrey? Everyone has two columns in their life, the bad and the good. When I read so much of the criticism of him, I think, let him who is without sin cast the first stone. As a force for good and happiness, Jeffrey’s positive column far surpasses the bad.