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Lamb is making a comeback on our barbecues
More and more Americans are turning to the barbecue pit when it’s time for holiday gatherings. Some eschew the oven and cook a pork shoulder or turkey on a backyard smoker or grill. Others outsource the work and bring home takeout trays from a local barbecue restaurant. A whole smoked brisket or pork shoulder makes for an impressive centerpiece, but this year I have a different suggestion. How about barbecued lamb?
Bear with me. Lamb was once among the most popular barbecue meats. But after World War Two it all but disappeared from American pits. Over the past two decades, as aspiring backyard chefs have acquired ever-fancier offset smokers and pellet cookers, they’ve set their sights on mastering brisket, ribs and Boston butts. Lamb almost never makes it onto the menu. It should, though. Smoked lamb is currently enjoying a renaissance among inventive American pitmasters and barbecue fans really should give it a try.
At huge, outdoor barbecues in the 19th century, lambs and sheep were routinely roasted in hand-dug pits alongside whole hogs and sides of beef. Smoked lamb and mutton were staples in early barbecue restaurants, too, as meat-smoking went commercial in the early 20th century. (Lamb is simply meat from a sheep that’s less than a year old. Anything older is mutton.)
The Carolinas are uniformly pork territory today, but that wasn’t the case when entrepreneurs first started selling smoked meats at makeshift stands on holidays. On July 4 in the 1920s, vendors across South Carolina advertised barbecue for sale in local newspapers and almost all featured both pork and lamb. As stands evolved into restaurants, lamb and mutton were among the featured items at places like Frank’s Barbecue in Fort Worth, Texas, which in 1931 touted its “Choicest of Beef – Mutton – Spare Ribs.”
Despite their affection for the barbecued version, Americans have never been big sheep-eaters, especially compared with the United Kingdom and Australia. The annual US consumption of lamb and mutton slipped from an annual peak of 7.7 pounds per capita in 1912 to 6.6 pounds by the end of the 1930s. By comparison, the English ate 25 pounds per person and Australians 72 pounds in 1928, while New Zealanders consumed a whopping 82.
Americans became even more sheepish after World War Two, when consumption slumped to five pounds per person while that of beef rose to 69. A 1949 report observed that American meat prices were soaring because of demand, but lamb and mutton had “reached the vanishing point in many city markets.”
When choosing between sheep or cattle, ranchers increasingly opted for higher-profit beef. American flocks declined from more than 50 million sheep just after World War Two to 30 million by 1950. At the same time, chicken was booming as poultry farming transformed into a large-scale industrial operation. Between 1950 and 1965, chicken prices plummeted from 60 cents a pound to around 30 cents, and per-capita poultry consumption in the US doubled.
Once an expensive treat reserved for Sunday dinner, chicken had become one of the cheapest meats on the market. Little wonder that restaurateurs started to put the lamb out to pasture and replace it with barbecued chicken.
At the turn of the 21st century, lamb was all but gone from the American barbecue scene. You could find lamb ribs at a few old-school Texas spots such as Davila’s in Seguin, which has served them since it opened in 1959. Johnny Harris Barbecue in Savannah, Georgia, had smoked leg of lamb on the menu right up until it closed in 2016.
The only place where barbecuing sheep never fell out of favor was Kentucky – or, more specifically, the handful of counties in western Kentucky surrounding Owensboro, the barbecued mutton capital of the world. You can still have your fill of chopped or sliced mutton from the all-you-can-eat buffet at Owensboro’s famed Moonlite Bar-B-Q Inn. Across town at Old Hickory Bar-B-Que, you can order mutton ribs and sliced mutton fresh off the pit and sauce it yourself with dark, tangy “dip.”
Now, though, lamb is making a return. When I made a barbecue tour through central Texas this summer, my favorite bites weren’t taken from the “Texas trinity” of smoked brisket, pork ribs and beef sausage links. They were all lamb.
At Barbs-B-Q in Lockhart, I was wowed by pitmaster Chuck Charnichart’s “lamb chopis” – thyme- and rosemary-rubbed racks smoked medium rare and sliced to order into savory individual chops. At Micklethwait Barbecue in Austin, I discovered beguiling spiced lamb sausages that, unlike Texas’s juice-squirting beef links, are fairly dry in texture but sing with rich lamb flavor.
Sheep takes center stage at Austin’s KG BBQ in the form of pulled lamb shoulder accented with sumac and cinnamon and “lamb bacon ribs” – bone-in lamb belly chopped into chunks and served with spicy mint chimichurri. At Burnt Bean Co. in Seguin, pitmaster Ernest Servantes frequently puts lamb on his specials board, including Moroccan-spiced lamb ribs layered with lemony chermoula sauce.
Texas cooks are leading the lamb revival, but the meat is popping up in other places, too. The Washington, DC, branch of 2fifty BBQ serves pulled lamb from smoked bone-in shoulder with fresh blue corn tortillas. In nearby Bethesda, Maryland, Silver and Sons, a self-described Jewish-Mediterranean barbecue joint, makes sandwiches with pulled lamb shoulder on soft challah rolls.
I’ll concede that lamb has a sharper, earthier bite than beef or pork, but that’s a feature, not a bug. Unlike chicken and turkey, its taste hasn’t been washed out by decades of industrial breeding, which has left us with highly engineered birds with unnaturally plump breasts and the flavor of cotton. As with good whiskey and aged cheese, an appreciation for lamb’s strong flavor can take time to acquire, but it’s the natural match for the smoke of a barbecue pit.
If you can’t find lamb at a nearby barbecue restaurant, you can always smoke your own. It won’t take all day, either, unlike a brisket or pork shoulder. A five-pound lamb shoulder, slow-smoked at 275°F, will be tender enough to pull after five or six hours. It’s even faster if you splurge for a few racks of lamb, which can be done in less than 45 minutes. (Use an instant-read thermometer and take them to 135 degrees internal temperature for a perfect medium rare.)
When you deliver a platter of herb-rubbed, eight-bone racks of lamb to the holiday table, you’re guaranteed to impress your guests. And if anyone complains that they don’t like the flavor, tell them ham and smoked turkey can be found over at the kids’ table.
This article was originally published in The Spectator’s December 22, 2025 World edition.
The joy of Jell-O
My grandmother lived on a Christmas tree farm in Indiana. December weekends meant hauling evergreens, pulling needles from our socks and pretending I was far more help than hindrance. But the real event – the thing the whole month orbited – was Christmas Day dinner: the good china, the stiff grace and the quiet family rule that no one under 20 offered up an opinion unless asked.
The table was a study in American aspiration: a ham glossy with cloves, wassail steaming on the hob, potatoes whipped into obedient fluff, canned cranberry sauce still bearing its aluminum-molded rings… and always, inevitably, the Jell-O. There were several, because my family believed in abundance, even when the abundance quivered.
Aunt Deb and Uncle Fritz arrived with their famed Jell-O eggs. My grandmother contributed her annual dish, torn from a vintage Betty Crocker paperback. It had rings of lime studded with mandarins, ruby molds freckled with maraschino cherries – each one layered in improbable translucence, streaked with Cool Whip like trapped fog. The Jell-O emerged from the mold with that soft, suctioned sigh – wobbling onto leaf-shaped glass trays on the Formica counter, with colors so bright they seemed lit from within.
Paintings by my mother hung around the table – one showed two kids in high waters clutching fishing poles, the oil thick and earnest. On a nearby shelf sat a small ceramic figurine: Norman Rockwell painting himself in a mirror. And the various Jell-O monuments sat at the center of it all, gleaming and absurd. They were the focal point of the holiday that prized pageantry. By the time the meal began, half of it had already vanished. It was the first thing touched, the only thing finished.
We laughed at the Jell-O, of course. By the time I was old enough to hold a fork without adult supervision, Jell-O had already crossed from modern miracle to party punchline. It still appeared, but its meaning had shifted. It had become nostalgia made edible. The shimmer dulled, replaced by the faint embarrassment of earnest domesticity.
Somewhere between the invention of the remote control and the arrival of Blockbuster, America lost its taste for anything that wobbled. As the century aged, so did our appetites. We traded the slow jiggle of dessert rings for the quick-cut dazzle of music videos; the molded ideal yielded to the microwave minute. Jell-O was once everywhere and then suddenly nowhere. Its earnestness made it uncool, its simplicity, gauche.
But what a thing it was, while it lasted. For half a century, Jell-O was a dream you could boil, pour and chill into submission. It caught the light like stained glass, refracting it like hope. On kitchen counters across the Midwest, it stood as proof that progress could be plated.
Before Jell-O arrived, gelatin was hard work. Cooks boiled calves’ feet or fish bladders for hours, clarified the liquid with egg whites, and chilled it overnight. Clear jellies appeared mainly on the tables of Europe’s wealthy, molded into animals, crests or miniature architectural scenes – signals of households with time and staff to spare.
Industrial production in the 19th century changed all that. Powdered gelatin made the once-elaborate process accessible to home cooks, and Victorian recipe books embraced molded jellies as marks of modernity. Copper molds became common wedding gifts – a well-set jelly signaled competence and care. In 1897, Pearle Wait of Le Roy, New York, combined industrial gelatin, sugar and fruit flavorings. His wife named the result “Jell-O.” The Waits sold the trademark to local entrepreneur Orator Woodward, whose recipe booklets, magazine ads and traveling demos carried it across the country.
Home refrigeration accelerated its rise. By the 1930s and 1940s, Jell-O had become a national staple, promoted for both sweet and savory uses. Alongside fruit molds came gelatin “salads”: vegetables, cottage cheese, canned tuna, tomatoes and shrimp suspended in translucent wobble. By the 1950s and 1960s, molded dishes were everywhere –church suppers, school events, company picnics, holiday meals. Jell-O’s appeal was its predictability: cheap, quick, adaptable and reliably impressive.
To make Jell-O was to participate in a national project: the elevation of convenience into virtue. This was science you could eat. Those bright domes anchoring every church basement and Christmas table said more about the era than any Eisenhower sermon. Jell-O was edible optimism.
But optimism curdles. By the late 1970s, the country had soured on the mid-century rituals of cheerful domestic theater. “Fresh” became the new virtue, even as food became faster and more packaged than ever. Jell-O, with its need for chilling and shaping, became a cultural ghost.
And yet, like all ghosts, it lingers. In avant-garde kitchens, shimmering domes of gelée have returned. On TikTok, pastel jelly cakes spin like edible vinyl. Cocktail bars charge $18 for Jell-O shots made with small-batch gin. The qualities that doomed it – artificiality, theatrical color, a refusal to take itself seriously – make it perfect for an age of performative nostalgia. Jell-O has come back as a meme.
Maybe that’s fitting. Jell-O has survived by becoming self-aware. It was never just dessert. It was a mirror. And like all mirrors, it reflects what we most want to believe: that something can hold its shape, however briefly, before it disappears.
Maybe that’s why the memory stays. Some of my mother’s paintings hang in my house now, and the little ceramic Rockwell sits on my shelf. The scene it once watched over could easily have been one Rockwell created. And in my own kitchen, the same wassail recipe still simmers – citrus and clove rising into the air just as they did in the farmhouse rafters. No irony. No commentary. Just something good we’ve always made without thinking. And this year, there will be Jell-O.
We’ve spent decades laughing at Jell-O. But perhaps the joke is on us. In its wobble lies something deeply American: a faith in form, a devotion to presentation, an optimism so bright it borders on delusion. Maybe that’s worth honoring – especially at Christmas, a time built on improbable belief.
So this year, skip the artisanal pavlova or the discourse around dry brining. Find a good ring mold – maybe even crown-shaped. Pour in your mandarins and cherries, your lime and whipped cream, your Jell-O – and let it set. When it releases with that soft sigh and quivers in the light, you’ll see what my grandmother saw: a sweet monument to who we were, and who, for better or worse, we still are.
Saffron, Mandarin, & Yogurt Jello
Serves 12-ish
Ingredients
- 2 boxes (3oz each) orange gelatin mix
- 2 cup boiling water
- 4 cups nonfat plain Greek yogurt
- 2 cans mandarin orange segments, well-drained
- pinch saffron
- finely chopped, toasted pistachios (for garnish to taste)
- drizzle of honey per person
- whipped cream (for garnish, to taste)
- Cooking spray (for the mold)
Instructions
- Prepare the gelatin: In a large bowl, dissolve the orange gelatin mix & pinch saffron completely in 2 cups of boiling water, stirring for at least 2 minutes.
- Cool slightly: Allow the gelatin mixture to cool slightly (around 15-20 minutes) so it doesn’t heat the yogurt too much.
- Whisk in yogurt: Whisk the Greek yogurt into the slightly cooled gelatin mixture until it is smooth, fully blended, and evenly colored. The mixture will become creamy and light.
- Add fruit: Gently fold in the well-drained mandarin orange segments.
- Prepare mold: Lightly spray your desired mould (e.g., a Bundt pan or individual ramekins) with cooking spray to ensure easy unmolding.
- Pour and chill: Pour the creamy yogurt and mandarin mixture into the prepared mould.
- Refrigerate: Chill in the refrigerator for at least 4 hours, but preferably overnight, until the mixture is completely set and firm.
- Unmold and serve: To unmold, gently run a knife around the edges to loosen. For a large mould, you can briefly dip the bottom of the mould in warm water for a few seconds. Place a serving plate on top of the mould and, in one swift motion, invert them together.
- Top with finely chopped pistachios, whipped cream, and a drizzle of honey!
Lucian Prellwitz is a Southern Lake Michigan based Chef with 20 years of West Coast (California/Oregon) training. He focuses on foods based (but not bound) by tradition and seasonally driven menus.
This article was originally published in The Spectator’s December 22, 2025 World edition.
Flirting with Passetoutgrain, Burgundy Pinot Noir’s fun sister
In his History of the Franks, Gregory of Tours (c. 539-594) wrote one of my favorite opening sentences: “A great many things keep happening, some of them good, some of them bad.” Who can disagree? Gregory’s works are full of interesting morsels. Writing about the miracles of St. Julian, for example, he notes that a cask of wine that was left half empty was found “overflowing and forming a rivulet of wine across the floor. Although drawn from repeatedly, the cask remained full until the next day.” A good fellow to have around, that Julian.
Gregory seems to have taken a keen interest in wine. He was one of the first people to opine about the wines of Burgundy. which he compared to storied Roman Falernian in 591. What do you suppose that wine was like? Was it made from pinot noir? Possibly. The grape was present in the area at least from the first century AD. But pinot noir, while very ancient, is also a notoriously fussy grape, susceptible to chills, drought and whatever the fruity version of flu is.
Perhaps the wine Gregory praised was made from gamay, a natural crossing of pinot noir and other local varieties. We know and love gamay from Beaujolais. Once upon a time, though, it was planted throughout Burgundy. It is more forgiving and higher-yielding than pinot noir. But Duke Philip the Bold, head of the house of Valois, decreed in 1395 that the “vile and disloyal gamay” be uprooted and replaced with pinot noir. If only he could have stuck around for the advent of La Tâche, Domaine de la Romanée-Conti and their immediate neighbors.
The name pinot noir comes from the French words for “pine” and “black,” so named because its tight, dark clusters form a shape that is reminiscent of pine cones. Today, most of the red wine in Burgundy must be made exclusively from pinot noir. One exception is an appellation called Passetoutgrain (sometimes spelled “Passe-tout-grain”), which is a blend of pinot noir (minimum 30 percent) and gamay (minimum 15 percent).
Some translate the name as “toss it all in.” But I prefer the Cole Porterish “anything goes,” not least because the wines (there are rosés as well as red) make a jaunty, almost jazzy impression. They do not achieve the depth and power of the great Burgundies. But they are bright, aromatic, luscious potations, full of red fruit, elegant spiciness and long silky finishes. They also cost a small fraction of the price of the more serious Burgundies.
Passetoutgrain is made by several producers. Among the best is Domaine Michel Lafarge, a stalwart in Volnay since the 19th century. The vineyard is now in the hands of Frédéric and Chantal Lafarge, who have brought the appellation to new heights with their careful deployment of traditional viticultural techniques (indigenous yeasts, aging in neutral oak barrels). Their 2022 “L’Exception Anthologie” is very much worth pausing for. A special cuvée harvested from the oldest vines on the property (90 years or more), it is a blend of 50 percent pinot noir and 50 percent gamay. As one commentator noted, “This is Burgundy heritage in a glass – a cuvée that transforms the humble Passetoutgrain into something profound. It offers the Lafarge family’s hallmark elegance, minerality and depth at remarkable value.”
A magnum can be yours for just under $100. A standard bottle of the 2022 Lafarge Passetoutgrain “L’Exception” is about $40.
Other excellent producers of Passetoutgrain include Domaine Robert Chevillon (founded in the 19th century by the delightfully named Symphorien Chevillon). They make some delightful prémier cru pinot noir and also some excellent passetoutgrain. The 2022 vintage, a blend of one-third pinot noir and two-thirds gamay, is about $50. Slightly more expensive is the 2023 Passetoutgrain from Domaine Marquis a’Angerville, another excellent producer. Its 2023 Passetoutgrain from Volnay, again about 50/50 pinot noir and gamay, is around $65.
Passetoutgrain is not (yet) well known in this country. I predict that it soon will be. You will have gotten a head start with these three excellent producers.
This article was originally published in The Spectator’s December 22, 2025 World edition.
A chef’s twist on the Feast of the Seven Fishes
My Italian-American family gathers every Christmas Eve to cook a Feast of the Seven Fishes. And every year, it’s always just a little disappointing. Sorry, Mom.
While the Feast must include seven distinct seafood dishes, there’s no correct way to prepare it. It’s entirely open to personal preference or family tradition and typically relies on whatever fish is readily available in the American northeast. Still, a touch of gourmet precision can help refine some of Nonna’s age-old recipes. The Feast is a quintessentially Italian-American tradition – one rooted ostensibly in Old World Catholicism and the abstention from meat until Christmas Day. Yet there’s very little record of it ever taking place in Italy. Instead, it evolved from the Italian diaspora in New York City in the 1800s, and includes many dishes that could fit anywhere in the melting pot of American cuisine.
Disappointment – or at least diner’s regret – can set in because the Feast is typically a heavy, carb-loaded meal. The lightest fare starts at the top, a cold seafood salad, shrimp cocktail or clams casino. Then, at least a few fried dishes: calamari, shrimp, eel or smelt. Linguine with clams or anchovies comes out later in the evening. And the meal isn’t complete without a final entrée of cioppino (a San Francisco fish stew) or baccalà (salt-cured cod in tomato sauce). While it’s meant to be paced over several hours before midnight mass, the food coma can set in early, and last well into Christmas Day.
Preparation can be daunting for the home cook. Preventing rubbery calamari is tricky for even seasoned chefs, to say nothing of the difficulty of multiple rounds of stove-top frying. Diversity in flavor and texture can easily be lost with an overreliance on tomato–based acidity. Thick, center-cut cod loins are hard to snag at a supermarket, and the baccalà is often unbearably salty.
Yet suggesting any tweaks to the traditional menu is dangerous. Fusion flavors, all the rage today, can modernize the Feast, but often at the expense of leaving it unrecognizable. Although there’s endless opportunity to elevate delicate seafood, the Feast must remain accessible. It still needs a cohesive seven courses – and to feel festive.
Seeking advice on what best to do, I asked some of New York’s top seafood chefs to weigh in on what they would do to improve the Seven Fishes.
P.J. Calapa has fond memories of preparing the classic Feast with the Italian side of his family. He keeps the tradition alive today with an elevated twist at Marea, his high-end Italian seafood restaurant on the corner of Central Park. “I want it to feel somewhat authentic,” Calapa explained, “but I also want it to feel Marea. You start with a little crudo, then we go into pasta and then maybe a main course. We don’t do it as a tasting.”
Calapa avoids frying altogether, instead leaning on raw fish in the early courses and pasta as the primary carbohydrate. Caviar bruschetta, lobster burrata and Branzino tartare with chives and pistachio make up the first three courses. “Pistachio always kind of makes me feel a little bit holiday-ish,” he says, and of course it’s very Italian.
He then resets the palate with a “deconstructed Caesar salad” packed with anchovies, before two pasta dishes: a “hearty and robust” braised octopus fusilli paired with a “very delicate” lemony crab pappardelle. He’s torn on whether to serve the pasta family style. For the final course, he goes back to his roots, reconstructing the baccalà he used to make with his aunt. The most important thing is getting “beautiful loins of Atlantic cod and lightly curing it.”
Eric Ripert, whose three-Michelin-starred Le Bernardin serves as a global authority on seafood, leans more traditional in some ways, but less so in others. “I have been invited to a Seven Fishes once or twice,” the chef says, “and I have to say, it was pretty good when it was very traditional. The family came together, and the grandma was in charge of the kitchen.”
Unlike Calapa, Ripert is on board with keeping the fried staples, suggesting a lighter tempura rather than breadcrumbs or a more unconventional fried octopus. “Carpaccio makes sense,” he says, while admitting his preference for scallop ceviche might fall too far outside Italian tradition. “I love the idea of doing a whole fish, roasted,” he says. “Either in a salt crust or covered with tomatoes and onions and white wine. You can bring it as a centerpiece for the table, and then it’s very convivial because you cut it and share with everyone… If I was doing this, I would go after the model of Le Bernardin, which is a tasting menu with seven different preparations of fish going from very light to slightly richer and with recipes that go with red wine at the end.”
You don’t have to be a Michelin-starred chef to fold in some of these lessons for an elevated yet festive Feast. Keep the fried fish but lighten up the pasta. Serve portioned courses but do something immersive, like carving a whole fish at the end. Rely on lighter Italian flavors, such as pistachio and lemon, instead of a tomato-garlic overload. Less can be more: lean on raw fish, or use flavorful fishes as an auxiliary ingredient to lighter finger food or salads. That doesn’t have to be inaccessible: opt for flying-fish roe instead of caviar, and instead shell out on the best cod loins you can find.
Then again, if chefs like Calapa and Ripert are on board with tradition, maybe the Seven Fishes Feast doesn’t need changing after all.
This article was originally published in The Spectator’s December 22, 2025 World edition.
I met Jesus – and he’s an old Spanish gardener
As the old Jewish proverb goes, “Man plans and God laughs.” But nothing, in my experience, makes Him clutch His sides quite like hearing about my Mediterranean gardening ambitions.
Every winter, my horticultural memory performs a factory reset. I somehow forget the summer mornings when the thermometer climbs past 90°F by 8 a.m. and the plants wilt by noon. The brutal, arid wind that strips moisture from the leaves faster than I can water? Erased from my mind. What blight? And the way perfect fruit splits overnight after a thunderstorm? Never happened.
Come spring, I’m suddenly possessed, clicking “add to cart” on tomato varieties with names like 1980s cocktail bars: Pink Jazz, Green Zebra, Cosmic Eclipse. I picture multicolored bumper crops, fresh salsa, gazpacho by the gallon. Then summer comes – and I realize I’ve done it again.
This year, though, has been mercilessly humbling. My main crop tomatoes have staged a full-scale revolt: alternaria stem canker, fusarium wilt, early blight, sunscald – a textbook of tomato pathology. The black cherry plants have done well but, as I amply demonstrate, any fool can grow those. The others – those majestic beefsteak slicers I’d fantasized about serving with burrata and basil – stand just two or three feet tall, brown and half-dead. My wife, noting the paltry output, recently returned from the market with perfect, professionally grown beefsteaks. “Sorry,” she murmured, eyes averted, as she discreetly slid them into the fridge.
Enter Lolo, my Cavalier King Charles spaniel. One morning she fetched her harness and dropped it at my feet. The message was clear: “Forget about your tomatoes. Let’s walk.” Normally we stick to village alleys, a 15-minute loop at most. But on this morning, Lolo pulled with unusual determination, ignoring her standard diversions. She led us toward the river, through the gauntlet of dried spear grass, past some grumpy van-dwellers and deeper into the hinterland between villages.
After nearly a mile – just as I was about to protest – she stopped abruptly. Before us stood a garden from another epoch. The fence was low, decorative almost, as if the specimens inside were above both common theft and disease. A dozen or so tomato plants stood like Old Testament prophets: gnarled, magnificent, heavy with fruit that seemed to glow in the morning light. Marmande, Pantano Romanesco, St. Pierre, Oxheart – a living heirloom seed catalog, their stems thick as broom handles, leaves lush enough to mock my withered pride. The fruit-to-foliage ratio was nothing short of masterful.
Then I saw God, stooped among the rows, moving with the measured pace of someone who’s done this since before I was born. He wore espadrilles that had probably walked these rows since the Fourth Republic, and a straw hat. I waved awkwardly, but he just looked through me. I tried French; I think he spoke Catalan. After some faltering back and forth, he gestured vaguely at his tomatoes, then at a faded sack of something, and returned to his work – pinching suckers with 70 seasons of muscle memory.
Three days of casual village interrogation later, I learned that Pep was known locally as “the tomato specialist.” I returned to his garden for a second look and noted only simple inputs: chicken manure, horse manure, perhaps some bonemeal. And everywhere, the telltale, blue-green tinge of Bordeaux mixture – that copper spray I’d snobbishly avoided after reading too many organic gardening blogs warning about heavy metal accumulation. Not a weed in sight.
I reflected on my efforts – my soil, likely over-amended with bat guano, blood meal and desperation. These highly soluble nutrients, combined with our brutal heat and desiccating wind, had probably concentrated in the leaves through over-transpiration. My sporadic weeding had also allowed humidity to conspire with fungal invaders at the base. The old man’s soil, by contrast, was clean as a monastery floor, save for a few companion marigolds.
It’s too late for salvation this year. But next season I’ll follow his liturgy. Turns out God really does use Bordeaux mixture. And horse manure aged until it’s actually pleasant to handle. And decades of doing the same thing, correctly, without a YouTube tutorial in sight.
As for Lolo – well, I’ll resist trying to figure out how she knew the way to Pep’s garden, let alone how she timed her intervention so precisely. Perhaps, as in my occasional gardening triumphs, I’m simply mistaking luck for design.
This winter, horticultural humility will be my muse. Next year, I’ll focus on fewer, tried-and-tested varieties, mix up the Bordeaux mixture and avoid blowing half a month’s income on seeds just to preempt the January blues. The lesson, at least, is clear. Man plans and God gardens. And sometimes He speaks Catalan.
This article was originally published in The Spectator’s December 22, 2025 World edition.
A West Coast World Cup road trip
I am standing inside perhaps the most sophisticated stadium ever built: a magnificent, latticed half-dome of white steel and trillion-pixel megascreens, bent over a football pitch so green it looks iced. And I am watching my least favorite sport on Earth: American football. As I guzzle citrus beer, the players take their 683rd strategic break in the ninth quarter to bring on the seventh specialist kicker for the XY-red-zone-whatever, while the crowd, unconcerned, shovels $18 hot dogs into their faces because no one has yet told them when, precisely, to cheer.
So why am I here? Because next year this same stadium will throb with a very different crowd. Real football fans. Tens of thousands of tribal, chanting, painted, slightly dangerous lunatics roaring the world’s greatest tournament into being: the 2026 World Cup. And the US is hosting it in, among other places, three West Coast cities: LA, San Francisco and Seattle. The question is, therefore, obvious. Can you stitch these venues into one long, classic American road trip – the whole Pacific coast, palm to pine, desert to drizzle? I’m going to give it a good go, and I aim to do it via some unexpected byways. No Big Sur, no Hearst Castle, no Malibu.
My base in Los Angeles fits the brief: old-school, quirky, slightly hidden. The Culver Hotel, 20 minutes from SoFi stadium, is a restored 1924 Art Deco dream, originally built beside Hollywood’s big studios. Charlie Chaplin once owned it; supposedly he lost it in a poker game to John Wayne. Greta Garbo and Clark Gable both kept suites here. When The Wizard of Oz was being filmed down the road, the moguls put all the munchkins here and allegedly saved money by making them sleep three to a bed, sideways. The munchkins retaliated by trashing the place like 120 half-pint Ozzy Osbornes, swinging from chandeliers.
Today, the Culver is beautifully restored. The buzzy bar supplies a stylish but ruinously expensive dirty martini. The whole movie-biz neighborhood is improbably walkable: a few blocks away, a restaurant called Margot serves unctuous saffron seafood risotto with crisp Falanghina wine.
After a couple of days in town, taking in much agreeable music and art – at one concert I get to hear Bruce Dickinson interrupt his Tolkien-metal songs with some homilies about Donald Trump with all the earnestness of a man who believes Gandalf voted to stay in the EU – it is time to head north.
The landscape changes quickly. Within hours I’m in burnt-gold hills that feel like Tuscany, if Tuscany had ranchers instead of parish priests and tech bros instead of cardinals. This is Santa Ynez, the wineland of Sideways. But don’t come expecting just the obvious pinot noir. The terroirs and microclimates pile on top of each other like college freshmen shoving themselves into a phone kiosk. I spend the day antiquing in Los Olivos, boozing with chatty bar staff, then hiking in the high coastal hills before sinking into a glass of garnet-dark grenache beside the firepit at the Genevieve Hotel.
Next stop, Monterey: one of America’s great coastal palimpsests. The US flag was first raised here in 1846 after California was pried from Mexico. Since then this lovable town has boomed, busted, brawled and rebirthed, multiple times. It has been a state capital, a pirate port, a sardine-cannery empire chronicled by John Steinbeck, a near-ghost town after overfishing. Now it is mainly a tourist idyll with marine wildlife so vivid it feels AI-enhanced.
The best way to see Monterey is by kayak. Launch from any beach and paddle among hundreds of sea lions pungently barking and belching from the rocks. These are mostly bachelors; the females stay in Baja California. You’ll likewise spy starfish, pelicans, cormorants, sometimes humpback whales – but the real glamour-pusses, in these parts, are the abundant sea otters. They recline on mats of kelp, like fur-wrapped pashas cracking shellfish on their bellies.
Happily, my hotel room is a beachside job at the swish Monterey Plaza. This means I can sip espresso and watch the otters disport, at dusk, as the distant California mountains blush red and purple and the littoral city lights sparkle. When night deepens, I wander into town and dine at Stokes Adobe, an 1840s house haunted by a British sailor turned deviant doctor. The liver mousse is impossibly good.
From Monterey it’s a swift freeway descent into San Francisco through the billionaire green-burbs of Silicon Valley. And it’s at this point I find myself bracing. Because, like everyone else, I’ve seen social media. I’ve watched the many videos of fentanyl addicts expiring on every SF street corner. And what do I find?
Maybe I missed all the bad stuff (the city does have a very popular, new, energetic mayor, after years of stasis) but to me SF seems as nice, if not nicer, than the city I remember from my last visit 20 years ago. It is eccentric, handsome, youthful, optimistic, pricey, vivid, and decidedly hi-tech (my hotel has robot staff). And it is fun.
Two neighborhoods – SoMa and the Tenderloin – do indeed feature spectral addicts shuffling about, but the cold truth is you can simply glide past them in your Waymo robotaxi to your next excellent restaurant. And this you should, because the food almost everywhere is fabulous. Downtown, John’s Grill, founded in 1908 and patronized by Sam Spade and Dashiell Hammett, welcomes me like a lost son. I stuff myself with superb lobster ravioli.
The next day the city gives me one of the great travel moments of my life. I am scheduled to cycle across the Golden Gate Bridge to pretty Sausalito, but I am waylaid by revelry: it is Fleet Week. This means US Navy fighter jets are scoring acrobatic spirals above Alcatraz, while jazz quartets play Cole Porter by the glittery waters and half the city languidly sunbathes with pomegranate sorbets. It is joyous, surreal and profoundly cinematic.
Now I must light out for the trees. Slowly the crowds and traffic vanish and Northern California becomes older, cooler, moodier. One morning I wake in Mendocino surrounded by magnificent redwoods and I feel like I have woken in prehistory. A few miles away I find myself pedaling a tiny skunk-themed rail-bike along a 150-year-old timber line into the same stunning coastal redwood groves.
As I cross the state line, the mood shifts once more. Oregon is gentler, greener, humbler. But beneath the mellow, fertile surface lie deep wounds. At Grave Creek, just off Interstate 5, I confront one of the saddest yet least-known episodes in American history.
When settlers first arrived on the Oregon Trail, around here, they found empty meadows and forests, perfect for farming. But the emptiness was an illusion. Earlier epidemics – measles, smallpox and especially a hyper-virulent malaria brought by Hudson Bay Company sailors – had already wiped out up to 97 percent of the tribes. It was probably the worst per-capita plague in all of human history.
The settlers moved in. The remaining tribes fought back. The army massacred the natives. A poetically minded traveler might look at modern Oregon’s opioid crisis, which you can spy in some smaller, woebegone towns, and imagine it as a kind of belated, chemical revenge by old tribal gods.
And yet, this is the West Coast, and so the road uncaringly sweeps on, like American history itself, into the widening Willamette Valley, which opens like the mighty nave of a long green cathedral. Here, vineyards flourish under soft blue skies. Orchards rustle with the first of their autumn golds. The land feels fecund, generous, kindly. Then I arrive in Portland – which, again, is far from the dystopia I imagined. It’s rather stately, Victorian and grand. The Willamette River steers serenely through the centre, and teems with kayaks and life; my hotel (the Sentinel, luxe and lofty) is two blocks from one of the world’s biggest bookshops (the wonderful Powell’s City of Books). Portland, it turns out, is decidedly liveable, even delectable. I only have one complaint: I wish the restaurants opened after 8 p.m. Americans go to bed too early.
My last leg steers me into Seattle, past brooding volcanoes, chilly rainforests and brawny gray urban sprawl. The first skyscrapers crest the horizon. And then I hit the opulent downtown of a city grown fat on Microsoft, Boeing and big government.
After valeting my car I stride downhill to Pike Place Market and a noisy, vibrant world of absurd abundance, of flowers and fish and leatherware, of musicians and skateboarders and antique experts, of Kumamoto oysters from Hama Hama, Shigokus from Willapa Bay, fat Yakima Valley cherries, huge Skagit Valley strawberries, sweet Marionberry chili jam and Dungeness crab from the Salish Sea. After 2,000 miles of coastline, forest, ghosts, AI, Roederer fizz, Google, Facebook, pro basketball games, and weird tourist bike-trains with free popcorn, the Pacific Northwest’s beating heart welcomes me with grand and edible splendor.
This, I realized, is why the World Cup will work here. America can host anything, because it contains everything. Beauty, tragedy, rebirth, mania, ruin and redemption. And if you time it right, you can see all this and watch, if schedules permit, Argentina play Spain in LA, Portugal defeat Brazil in San Francisco and England crash out spectacularly in Seattle – all in one long, mad, unforgettable road trip.
Rooms at LUMA Hotel San Francisco from $180 per night; rooms at the Culver Hotel in Los Angeles from $340 per night; rooms at The Sentinel Hotel in Portland from $155 per night; rooms at Hotel Ändra in Seattle from $180 per night. This article was originally published in The Spectator’s December 22, 2025 World edition.
Inside the Inca ritual of child sacrifice
The children of Llullaillaco don’t look too different from the living children I’ve seen around Salta. They’ve got the same diamond-shaped faces, pecan-colored skin and straight, pitch-dark hair. Of course, the children of Llullaillaco are smaller, as people five centuries ago were wont to be – and dead.
I’m talking about three Incan child-sacrifice mummies, estimated ages five, six and 15. As of about 25 years ago, they’re permanent residents of Salta, Argentina, the capital of a province of the same name in the country’s northwest. As the crow flies, the city isn’t that much closer to Buenos Aires than to Lima.
Due west of Salta, in the Andes, is the peak of the volcano Llullaillaco. It’s the second-highest active volcano peak on the planet, though in the last couple of centuries no eruptions have been confirmed. In 1999, however, it made other news when a team of archaeologists turned up three bodies near its peak – bodies that happened to be 500 years old. They were perfectly preserved. But these weren’t mummies in the intentional sense. Their preservation was an accident of the climate: they were buried at an altitude of over 22,000ft on the edge of the Atacama, the driest nonpolar desert in the world.
Since being disinterred, the so-called children of Llullaillaco reside just off of Salta’s main square, where, since 2004, a museum has been dedicated to conserving and exhibiting them. It’s called Museo de Arqueología de Alta Montaña, MAAM for short. In English, that’s the amusingly euphemistic Museum of High-Altitude Archaeology.
As for the children’s new home, Salta is the capital of an Argentine province famous for its folk music, tourism and tobacco. The city’s population is 600,000. We’re only a couple of hours’ drive south of the Tropic of Capricorn. Even in winter, pink flowers are in bloom and the sky overhead is a rich, clear blue.
When I mentioned back in Buenos Aires that I was on my way here, without fail I was met with a wistful “Ah, Salta la linda!” That’s the province’s epithet: “Salta the Beautiful.” And, it’s true, the landscape promises to be striking. I’ve booked seats on tour buses that will cart me around to multi-colored rock formations, white salt flats and eerie stretches of cactuses that, at a distance, look like blackheads on a Bioré nose strip.
On my off days, I wander the capital. MAAM is close to my hostel, and when I visit, its stairwell smells like cigarettes. Only one of the three children is on view at any given time, stored in a stout, climate-controlled glass tube in a dark room, lit at waist height in dim pink. To get a good view of the mummy, I’ve got to press a button for lights that are timed to shut off again in a few minutes. Light causes decay: think of yellowing newsprint. Flesh, hair and nails happen to last a little longer.
When I’m in town, “El Niño” (“The Boy”) is on display. He’s been four or five years old for the last 500 years. (There’s also “La Doncella” (“The Maiden”), who was maybe 15 when she died, and “La Niña del Rayo” (“The Lightning Girl”), a six-year-old whose corpse was scarred by lightning in the intervening centuries.) “The Boy” slumps over himself in the shape of a cone, draped in red fabric, his face meeting his knees. His head is also conical, though I can’t tell by looking. Apparently it was purposely deformed to augment his physical beauty: MAAM informs me this was not uncommon. “The Boy” was of noble origin, signaled by the feather on his forehead, tied in place by a tiara-like llama-wool rope.
From the side, “The Boy’s” features are easier to discern: a shuttered eye, lips resting against the rough cloth over his legs. An earlobe peeks from under shaggy black hair and tiny feet in sack-like slippers emerge from the bottom of his cape. The flesh of one bare forearm looks like potato skin: rough, dry, hard and pocked. I can see little fingernails and cuticles clear as day.
When the Spanish first came into contact with the Incas around 1528, in what is now Peru, the empire splayed along the South American coast from present-day Colombia all the way down to Chile and Argentina. It was divided into four administrative regions called suyus, with the capital of the whole empire, Tawantinsuyu, seated in Cusco. Here, I’m in what used to be the southernmost province, Collasuyu.
These children were sacrificed in a ritual called capacocha that was performed on various occasions: to fend off natural disasters, for instance, or to commemorate the death of an emperor. From each of the four suyus, a child would be picked for his or her surpassing physical beauty – not a freckle was permitted – and sent to Cusco. There, the group would be dressed up like little royals, paraded around an altar in a central plaza (one conquistador reported that “the children who could went by foot, and the ones who couldn’t were carried by their mothers”), and paired off for ceremonial marriages. Then the children and their entourages would make a pilgrimage back to their towns of origin, traveling, according to the ritual, in a perfectly straight line. After being received with great joy and fanfare at home, the parties set off to their respective offering sites, including but not limited to Llullaillaco. The museum suggests that many aspects of these rituals were intended to represent an ideal life on a miniature scale. That’s why these kids were married off to one another, as well as why they were buried alive – sorry, sent off to join the gods – with tiny objects representing the traditional activities of Incan adults. For instance, “The Boy”was found with shepherd figurines as well as little llamas no more than an inch high, some carved from vibrant orange shell and some made of silver.
The children were also sedated with chicha, a candy-sweet maize drink, and coca leaves, a baggie of which today would get you kicked out of any music hall in Salta.
This cocktail of substances explains why the three bodies found on Llullaillaco conveyed no sign of struggle. They died of hypothermia, or maybe from lack of oxygen, in relative peace.
On my tour days, I wake up before six to get on a bus with 11 or 12 other tourists, mostly city-slicker Argentines save for me and, one day, a Brazilian taking three months of vacation. I’ve traveled from my hemisphere’s summer to this one’s winter, and I have to be prepared for it to get even chillier as we increase in altitude. “Up here,” our guide Ignacio tells us as we drive, “the people are pura colla” – pure Inca.
Ignacio and the Salta bus drop us off in the town of Humahuaca, where, for lack of oxygen, you’re warned not to talk too quickly, move too fast, or eat too much. We’re here to get a good look at the Serranía de Hornocal, a rock face so beautiful I’d seen it as a default PC home screen before I knew its name.
So we board another bus, this one suited to unpaved terrain, which takes us up a hill, switchback after switchback, for at least an hour. As I’m looking through the windshield, I fleetingly catch sight of our driver’s profile. It’s uncanny: there’s the same high nose bump, prominent philtrum and stout, flat forehead I saw on “The Boy.”
My companions pass slime-green coca-leaf candies around the bus: they’re supposed to assuage altitude sickness. I’ve opted for the leaves themselves, like Ignacio and my mummy friends. The leathery stack is poking into my gums, and a bad green-tea taste is leaching across my tongue. I can’t actually tell what the coca’s effects are, since by the time we reach the lookout point I feel lobotomized anyway.
We’re more than 15,000ft above sea level, which is still 7,000 short of where the children were unearthed. The pictures I’ll later develop from my camera will show a dazzling ridge with jagged stripes of pink, red, green, brown and ocher. Thinking back to it now, though, it’s hard to recall much else besides the half-brained feeling of oxygen deprivation. At the peak of Llullaillaco, so close to the heavens, the usual barrier between life and death must have been only a gauzy, fluttering curtain.
This article was originally published in The Spectator’s December 22, 2025 World edition.
Can Rachel Reeves take credit for falling inflation?
For the second month in a row, inflation has fallen. Figures released by the Office for National Statistics show that last month the Consumer Price Index fell to 3.2 per cent from 3.6 per cent in October. November’s reduction is the largest since September 2024.
For the government, this is very good news. High inflation over the past six months has intensified pressure on Labour to tackle the cost-of-living crisis. This was clearly reflected in last month's Autumn Budget, with Rachel Reeves announcing freezes to rail fares and fuel duty, as well as measures to lower household energy bills.
If inflation continues to decline at this rate, the Chancellor will claim victory. Whether or not this is credible is debatable. UK inflation is largely dictated by external factors outside of the government's immediate control. The UK is not a large bloc, like the US or the EU, capable of influencing food prices. Energy prices are determined by the price of natural gas, which the UK cannot change. Even the domestic policy tool most effective in controlling inflation – the interest rate– is controlled by the Bank of England.
Still, there could be more reasons for the government to celebrate. Consecutive and large reductions in inflation back up the Bank of England's prediction that inflation is past its peak and will return to its 2 per cent target in 2027. This is almost certain to ease any final concerns about inflation and allow the Bank to lower its interest rate tomorrow to tackle weak growth and rising unemployment. If a cut is made, the government's borrowing costs will be lowered, giving it some much needed financial relief.
However, the inflation statistics released by the Office for National Statistics each month do not show the real impact on the cost-of-living crisis. The prices that matter most to consumers – food, energy, and transport – have been consistently rising for too long.
These relentless price hikes have become unbearable for many. Simon Hawking, CEO of Acts Trust, a charity tackling food poverty in Lincoln, noted that ‘we expected a return to normal after the pandemic, but we keep seeing demand for our services increase… prices that were painful two years ago are still painful today.’ Anita Rao, CEO of Wesley Hall Community Centre, a charity in Leicester, added that ‘high energy prices mean many of our clients are forced to wash their clothes by hand and for some we provide their only decent hot meal of the week.’
Unfortunately, there does not appear to be much light at the end of the tunnel. Last month, the Office for Budget Responsibility downgraded its prediction for real growth in household disposable income to near zero, meaning it is unlikely that family spending will return to normal any time soon. Slowing inflation may soften the blow, but it won’t mend many wounds.
Queen Camilla’s recommended reading list
As Christmas approaches and we wrack our brains to find something that suits everyone, there is no present quite like a book. Whether it’s an unputdownable novel, a heart-stopping crime series, a thought-provoking biography or a collection of beautiful poetry, a book provides an escape, the perfect antidote to the hurly-burly of everyday life and, above all, hours and hours of pleasure. Here are half a dozen of my favorites, previously recommended on my Queen’s Reading Room, which you might like to add to your Christmas present list… or (if preferred) keep for yourself!
The Cazalet Chronicles by Elizabeth Jane Howard
This is a series of books that I return to again and again, to reacquaint myself with the irresistibly charming Cazalet family. Elizabeth Jane Howard’s saga continues over five volumes and as the extended family grows, they are forced to conduct their relationships against a background of war, separation and loss. Despite these horrors, the Cazalets manage to greet all of life’s trials with such wit and courageous spirit that the reader cannot wait to get back to them.
The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng
Set in the 1920s British protectorate of the Federated Malay States, this incredible work of fiction is based upon the origins of the short story “The Letter” by William Somerset Maugham, which fictionalized the famous murder trial of Ethel Proudlock. Although this sounds like a complicated idea for a book, the immensely skilled writing of Tan Twan Eng leaves no room for confusion.
Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead
This accomplished and ambitious novel tells the story of Marian Graves, a female pilot who in 1949 was determined to fly a loop around the globe that encompassed both the North and the South Pole. Great Circle is a story of freedom, danger and female independence, often told from a cockpit and set to a backdrop of extraordinary scale. This scale, both physical and metaphorical, examines how a life can be both huge and tiny, slotted into a vast span of time.
Miss Austen by Gill Hornby
Gill Hornby’s careful research into Jane Austen discovered that not only was her sister Cassandra not the humorless curmudgeon her nieces and nephews had portrayed, but actually the emotional crutch that Jane leaned on in order to survive life. Miss Austen is a funny, warm and engaging novel, but crucially it also defends Jane’s much-loved sister, and explains both why she might have burned all of those precious letters – and why it was imperative that she did.
A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth
This wonderfully rich family saga tells the story of four families who are trying to find their way through the thorny complications of post-partition India. A Suitable Boy is one of the longest novels ever published in a single volume, but this has only delighted its fans. When reading this epic tale of love and friendship, the reader not only falls in love with the characters, but with India, too.
The Predicament by William Boyd
My favorite reluctant spy, Gabriel Dax, has returned this year for the second installment of William Boyd’s brilliant spy trilogy. Boyd’s addictive storytelling is at its very best as he navigates a collision of chance, ambition and human frailty while Dax tries to intercept a plot to assassinate John F. Kennedy. Shining a light on the intricate dance between fate and free will, The Predicament is a witty and insightful exploration of life’s unpredictable twists.
This article was originally published in The Spectator’s December 22, 2025 World edition.
We don’t need a stealth tax on rotisserie chicken
It depends on whether you re-heat it when you get home, apparently. Or whether it is sold in a bag labelled hot food. The supermarket chain Morrisons has lost a fiendishly complex court battle over whether its rotisserie chickens should be subject to VAT or not. It will have to stump up an extra £17 million to the Treasury. But hold on. This is crazy. The last thing the UK needs right now is what amounts to a stealth tax on spit-roasted poultry.
This is crazy. The last thing the UK needs right now is what amounts to a stealth tax on spit-roasted poultry
The tax lawyers will no doubt study the small print of the judgment for months. The ‘chicken case’ revolved around whether a ‘rotisserie chicken’ was a hot food, and so subject to VAT, or whether it was food that you eat at home, and so exempt from the 20 per cent levy.
Apparently, a lot depends on whether the product is sold above ‘ambient’ temperature, and whether it is sold on a hot rack or on general display. It is a complex issue, with the barristers on both sides probably racking up hundreds of thousands of pounds making the arguments on both sides. Although, as the court noted, selling the chickens in bags labelled ‘Caution: Hot Food’ may have proved an expensive mistake by Morrisons, even if it was just doing its best to stop people burning their fingers.
There is, however, a bigger issue here than whether a few rotisserie birds are hot or cold. Why are we imposing what is, in effect, a stealth tax on chicken? Sure, we all understand that the Treasury is desperate for money, and the extra £17 million a year it hopes to collect from those of us who pick up a pre-cooked meal on the way home from work will come in handy. It might even cover welfare spending for several whole minutes.
The catch is, it is hardly worth it. A rotisserie chicken is a relatively healthy food, there is a cost of living crisis, living standards are already stagnant, and inflation is already dangerously above target. At the same time, the supermarket chains are already suffering from higher National Insurance charges, big increases in the living wage, and, from next year, higher business rates as well. A few Treasury officials may think they are being clever by pushing the boundaries of what they can impose VAT on, and might even be celebrating today’s small victory. But they would surely be better off trying to control state spending that has run out of control. Yet another stealth tax is not going to help anyone – and it would have been far more sensible to leave Morrisons’ chickens in peace.
Only the US is taking peace seriously in Ukraine
What exactly is the ‘platinum security guarantee’ that Donald Trump is pushing Volodimir Zelensky to accept? While the full details remain confidential, the deal is described as an ‘Article 5 style’ guarantee after the clause in Nato’s charter that states that ‘an armed attack against one Nato member shall be considered an attack against all members’ and triggers ‘an obligation for each member to come to its assistance.’
Sounds reassuring. Except that little weasel word ‘style’ covers an abyss of real-world back-pedalling and caveats. For a start, Nato’s charter does not oblige members to actually take military action if one is attacked but instead leaves that decision to individual states. The ‘assistance’ required by Article Five ‘may or may not involve the use of armed force’ and can include instead ‘any action that Allies deem necessary to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.’ Whatever Trump’s ‘platinum’ guarantee may be, it will be less binding even than that.
The Europeans are arguing for a world as they would like it to be, while their US counterparts are dealing with the world as it is
At base, a credible security guarantee – formerly known as an alliance – means a promise to go to war to protect an ally. The Anglo-Polish Treaty of March 1939 that committed Great Britain to go to war to defend Poland from Nazi aggression was such a guarantee. So was the 1839 Treaty of London, which obliged us to defend plucky little Belgium when Germany violated its borders in 1914 – a national word of honour redeemed by the deaths of 880,000 Britons. By contrast the 1994 Budapest Memorandum in which the US, Britain, France and Russia guaranteed the borders of Ukraine turned out to be a dead letter when one of its original signatories – Vladimir Putin – blithely ignored it by annexing Crimea in 2014.
Understandably, Zelensky is wary of trusting his country’s future security to another useless piece of paper. The ‘platinum’ guarantee now under discussion has been hashed out over two days of meetings in Berlin this week between Zelensky, US peace envoy Steve Witkoff, and Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law. ‘We have now heard from the US side that they are ready to give us security guarantees that correspond to Article 5,’ Zelensky announced. But the Ukrainians have also insisted that any US guarantee be passed by Congress, giving it the force of an international treaty.
In recent weeks top European military leaders have taken to warning that Western society must prepare for war. France must prepare to ‘lose its children’ in a potential conflict with Russia, warned Army chief of staff General Fabien Mandon in November, while this week Chief of Britain’s Defence Staff Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Knighton said that the UK’s ‘sons and daughters’ need to be ready to fight a growing Russian threat. Germany’s Chancellor Friedrich Merz declared this week that Putin was intent on ‘restoring the Soviet Union’ and compared him to Hitler.
But for all that heady rhetoric we can be sure of one thing – the security guarantees offered to Zelensky will not commit the West to go to war over Ukraine. Indeed ‘platinum’, in this case, seems to be a term drawn from the world of the real estate hustle rather than diplomacy and means, in translation, ‘kinda’.
Stlil, there is strong evidence that the US vision of security guarantees is more robust than anything envisioned by Europe. Take, for example, a ten-point document circulated this week by the German government. This German blueprint for a ‘security guarantee’ for Kyiv starts with establishing ‘regular high-level consultations between the defence ministries on armaments policy,’ creating a liaison office in Berlin for the Ukrainian arms industry, and ‘strengthening the staff of the military attache at the German Embassy in Kyiv.’ It also proposes to ‘expand the joint development and production of defence equipment’ and introduce ‘investment guarantees to promote the involvement of German arms companies in Ukraine.’ The one clause in Berlin’s ten point plan that touches on military operations is a proposal to use Ukraine’s ‘digital battlefield data and insights’ to improve German weapons ‘in the defensive battle against Russia.’
Otto von Bismark, founder of modern Germany, remarked that ‘the great questions of the day will not be settled by means of speeches and majority decisions but by iron and blood.’ Add ‘money’ for a modern update of that formula. In practice, though, the Europeans are not willing or able to provide Ukraine with sufficient equipment, cash or manpower to achieve a military victory over Russia.
That hard reality leads to three fundamental weaknesses in Europe’s current position. First, both Zelensky and his European allies seem to believe that they are negotiating final peace terms with Trump – whereas the final word rests with Putin, who will likely reject any Article Five style security guarantee out of hand, let alone the kind of ‘assurance force’ that the Europeans still insist on talking about. Second, Europe seems simultaneously to believe that Russia is on the edge of military and economic collapse if only Ukraine fights on a little longer – but is also somehow also so powerful that Europe should fear a literal invasion in the near future. Both those things cannot be true at the same time. Third, the Europeans seem to have no conception that time may not be on Ukraine’s side. On the ground, Russian missile and drone attacks this week have successfully knocked out power to the cities of Odesa and Sumy for days, while corruption scandals are steadily weakening Zelensky’s credibility and the army faces a serious crisis in recruitment.
At base, the Europeans are arguing for a world as they would like it to be, while their US counterparts are dealing with the world as it is. ‘Now is the time for peace,’ Chancellor Merz said this week. But of Ukraine’s allies it’s the Americans who are actually talking about ending the war by Christmas while Europe continues to look for ways to fund Ukraine’s war effort for at least another two years. As Bismark observed, ‘politics is the art of the possible, the attainable, the art of the next best.’ And when it comes to security guarantees, the best possible is going to be a formula acceptable not just to Ukraine, Europe and the US but ultimately to the Kremlin too. Anyone who disagrees can go to war with Russia, defeat Putin, and impose terms. Any takers?
It’s no surprise that the Bondi Beach attackers are related
The sun had barely set over Sydney’s Bondi Beach, when horror unfolded at the Hanukkah celebration. A father and son, armed with licensed firearms, opened fire on a crowd of hundreds gathered for the Jewish holiday, killing at least 15 people and injuring more than 40 others. The perpetrators have been identified as Sajid Akram, 50, who was killed by police at the scene, and his 24-year-old son Naveed Akram, who remains in a critical condition in hospital after being shot by police.
The father-son dynamic here is no coincidence; it speaks to how hatred is often inherited
The attack is Australia’s deadliest mass shooting in nearly three decades, a stark anomaly in a nation with stringent gun laws. Yet beyond the immediate calls for tighter controls –worthy as they are – the Bondi tragedy exposes a deeper, more insidious threat: the familial roots of extremism. The father-son dynamic here is no coincidence; it speaks to how hatred is often inherited, nurtured in the quiet corners of home life, and passed down like a poisoned heirloom.
As someone whose own father, Seán O’Callaghan, plunged fully into the abyss of extremism before clawing his way out, I find this aspect profoundly unsettling.
Seán grew up in a staunch republican household in Tralee, County Kerry, where his father – my grandfather – was interned at the Curragh Camp during World War II for IRA activities. From an early age, Seán was steeped in a culture of resentment; his grandmother once told him, at around the age of ten, that if he ever shot a policeman, ‘Be sure and dig him up and shoot him again…you can never trust a policeman.’ Such sayings weren’t just mere quips; they were the bedrock of a worldview that normalised violence.
Seán didn’t skirt the edge; he crossed it entirely. Embedded in the Provisional IRA, he planted bombs, robbed banks, and even took lives in a world of clandestine operations and ideological fervour.
But ultimately, he rejected it, becoming an informer who helped avert bombings and saved untold lives. His decision broke a toxic cycle that could have ensnared me. What if he hadn’t? What if the ‘banter’ around the dinner table had normalised violence, turning resentment into action?
In families like the Akrams’, extremism doesn’t erupt from nowhere. It simmers in subtle influences: everyday conversations laced with grievance, cultural narratives that glorify past ‘struggles,’ or ideological grooming that warps young minds.
In Irish homes during the Troubles, rebel songs like ‘Four Green Fields’ or tales of ‘the old Brigade’ weren’t just folklore; they were seeds of radicalisation, romanticising bloodshed and fostering a mindset impervious to reason.
As Conor Cruise O’Brien observed, such myths create spectral ghosts – figures like Padraig Pearse or Bobby Sands – who haunt the present, demanding violent homage at the expense of innocents.
Sean O’Casey captured it poignantly in The Shadow of a Gunman: ‘It’s not the gunmen who are dying for Ireland; it’s the people. Isn’t it time the gunmen lived for Ireland?’
My father chose to live for Ireland, and in doing so he modelled the courage to defy inherited hatred. But in too many households, the opposite occurs. Recruiters – often parents or elders – shape the next generation, exploiting vulnerabilities like boredom, frustration, or a young person’s search for identity.
In Bondi, as in pub bombings or sectarian clashes, killers aren’t born; they’re bred
This generational transmission isn’t limited to one ideology; it spans ethno-nationalism, sectarianism, or extreme interpretations of religion. In Northern Ireland, lingering obsessions with historical grievances have led to tragic outcomes, including elevated youth suicide rates among those burdened by intergenerational trauma.
Young people, bombarded with tales of ‘the cause,’ internalise a toxic legacy that can manifest in self-destruction or outward violence.
The Bondi attack, amid a tripling of antisemitic incidents in Australia over the past year, underscores this peril. Hatred toward Jewish communities didn’t materialise overnight; it was likely cultivated in private, perhaps through online echo chambers amplified by family discussions – or even exposure to mass globalised ‘intifada’ rallies, often criticised as platforms for antisemitic rhetoric.
In the Akrams’ case, one must question the part played by such events, where chants like ‘Globalise the Intifada’ may have been translated by the father into literal bullets, striking Jewish bodies –including those of a ten-year-old and an actual Holocaust survivor.
This is where policy must evolve. Programmes like the UK’s Prevent initiative, which aims to stop radicalisation before it takes hold, are a start. But they often overlook the home as ground zero. We need a sharper focus on identifying familial recruiters: those who, through ‘small talk’ or cultural indoctrination, groom vulnerable youth.
Early intervention – community education, anonymous reporting lines, and support for at-risk families – could disrupt these cycles. Breaking the silence isn’t just a moral imperative; it’s a practical one.
As my father’s life showed, one person’s defiance can avert catastrophe. We are plagued by the curse of ‘history according to my da’. It’s a mindset that fosters dangerous myths and demands bloody retribution.
In Bondi, as in pub bombings or sectarian clashes, killers aren’t born; they’re bred. To honour the victims – not by dwelling on the horror, but by preventing its recurrence – we must confront these domestic origins. Tighten gun laws, yes, but also dismantle the ideological inheritances that arm minds before hands. Only then can we hope to spare future generations from such senseless loss.
The Brompton bicycle has had its day
Anyone who has had the misfortune to be in central London at rush hour will be familiar with an unlovely spectacle: that of a middle-aged man solemnly making a fool out of himself on an ungainly-looking bicycle that seems slightly too small for him. This mode of transportation is none other than the Brompton bicycle, once a status symbol for any upwardly mobile professional but now, increasingly and unsurprisingly, regarded as an object of ridicule. The recent news that the company’s sales are declining, for the third year in a row, will come as a surprise to few; it is more of a shock to realise that this strange, overpriced contraption has lasted for fifty years.
Cycling has always been a Marmite pursuit: for everyone who swears by it, there is someone else who swears at its practitioners
If the absolute apotheosis of the Brompton bicycle user was Hugh Bonneville’s well-meaning but hapless character Ian Fletcher in the BBC comedy W1A, trying and forever failing to fold up his infernal machine, then it did not necessarily do the brand a disservice to be associated with a certain kind of type. Ever since it was invented in South Kensington in 1975 by Andrew Ritchie – the name refers to the Old Brompton Road which ran near the flat in which the bicycle’s notoriously fiddly folding mechanism was devised – it has been a shorthand for earnest liberal metropolitan do-gooders, who really care about values and the environment and darting around town on their undersized vehicles.
Cycling has always been a Marmite pursuit – for everyone who swears by it, there is someone else who swears at its practitioners – but the Brompton bicycle presented itself as the middle-class alternative to Lycra-clad torment. At the company’s peak, it could rely on free advertising from the starry likes of Gemma Arterton and Owen Wilson, who were photographed riding their products; and when lockdown and pandemic woes made it fashionable, even commendable, to avoid public transport in favour of the good old-fashioned bike, Brompton was swift to capitalise.
Its products have never been cheap: you can expect to pay between £1,400 and £2,500 for one of its bicycles. But the opportunity for you, too, to virtue signal your way through the traffic before grappling with the mercurial folding mechanism was once surprisingly seductive.
Now, however, the company seems to be in a period of existential decline. With many turning to the easier, cheaper Lime bikes to get them around town, the Brompton bicycle is beginning to seem like an anachronism. Not even a recent collaboration with professional adventurer Bear Grylls could bring the company the kudos that it so desperately longed for. In the last business year, a comparatively trifling 78,530 bikes were sold: not bad if this was a purely niche concern, but a small number for a brand that once seemed to encapsulate a certain kind of cheery, mustn’t-grumble Britishness. It would have come as little surprise to find Bonneville’s Paddington character Mr Brown riding one – or, for that matter, Paddington himself. Although no doubt folding it up would have meant that the loveable Peruvian bear would have got into some hilarious scrape or other.
Criticising Brompton bikes, then, is to criticise a whole way of life that has little, if anything, to do with the product itself. It is to criticise a particular spirit of good-natured striving and self-deprecating silliness: a tacit admission that, yes, the bike looks a bit ridiculous and, yes dismantling it can be a pain, but it’s all for a good cause and the end justifies the means. Once, this might have worked, but now, as people become increasingly weary of the fin de siècle of twee, it is inevitable that the Brompton bicycle may have met its Waterloo. Ian Fletcher may mourn its demise, but it is doubtful that too many others will.
Is Britain depressed?
Something very strange is happening in Britain at the moment. Look at the economy. Things aren’t really too bad: for a start it’s actually growing, if only a little. At the same time, inflation is falling. Real incomes are on the rise too – with earnings going up 4.4 per cent in the year to October, while inflation was 3.6 per cent.
Meanwhile unemployment is at 5.1 per cent, which isn’t terrible. The government is raking in the sorts of taxes that would make the Sheriff of Nottingham weep with joy; and yet our taxes as a percentage of GDP are still only a hair above the OECD average – so, in other words, we are plainly a pretty well-off country with plenty of money left to splash on railways and hospitals and frigates.
Our national debt is lower as a percentage of GDP than that of the US, Japan, France, Italy or Canada. The FTSE 100, meanwhile, is soaring – at 9,700 it’s near record levels, with the astonishing benchmark of 10,000 hoving into view after a decade in the doldrums (consider that it was at 6,500 in 2021).
Similarly, our banks – one of the business sectors where we still have global heft – are in buoyant health after years of recovery from the global financial crisis, with big profits and five of them in the world’s top 50 judged by assets. The share values of the likes of NatWest and HSBC and co. are also soaring – HSBC alone is worth £190 billion.
But despite the economic indicators and ample evidence of our continued international and diplomatic reach, our cultural import and even our individual material prosperity, we are miserable. Worse than that, many Britons really think the country has had it. Yet plainly we’re in a much better position than the French or the Italians or dozens of other countries around the world. So it seems we’re stuck in a psychological funk – a funk which is sinking the Labour government, despite its best efforts, and a funk that goes way beyond the usual levels of phlegmatic British pessimism.
Of course, in a very real sense we have Labour is to thank for the funk in the first place. What we needed from Sir Keir Starmer was something approaching Cool Britannia Mark 2; what we got was ‘Gruel Britannia’ – a doubtful species of national welfarism with Rachel Reeves as a latter-day Mr Bumble with the ladle.
Yet look at the evidence – and ignore if you can the impact of two Budgets which arguably do for supply-side economics what Imodium does for the alimentary canal. Despite it all, Labour is trying: whether it’s with those trade deals, the European reset, the apprenticeships and youth stuff or the big decisions on infrastructure – from Heathrow to mini nuclear reactors – there’s a body of good work that’s being done. And they are building some ships, too, for the Royal Navy. At last.
But Britain remains gloomy. Granted, it might be because it takes a while to build morale back up – it’ll certainly take a few years for Labour’s policies and investments to come good. But I fear that it goes deeper than that. In fact I worry: is something is up with Britain?
Britain has got so much to be thankful for that it’s a mystery to me to hear people complaining so much and repeatedly insisting that it’s over
Look at the latest migration figures. Lost amid the headlines about net migration falling to its lowest level since Brexit was the fact that 109,000 more Britons chose to leave than arrived at our shores. Our citizens are voting with their feet. And it’s not the just the rich. Business people are leaving, and not only because of the taxes. They’re leaving because Britain has somehow lost its mojo. It’s become a place where even the roses smell bad. The good news isn’t as good as it used to be.
Why are we so down in the dumps? Is Britain depressed? Can a country be ‘depressed’? I fear the answer is yes. Somehow we have lost perspective and forgotten what we need to be proud. We have similarly forgotten what we have to be grateful for – everything from the rule of law to the classic pub, arguably one of our greatest contributions to civilisation. We’ve forgotten to be grateful not just for our health, but also our National Health Service.
We also seem to take for granted the fact that we have arguably the strongest and firmest and most vigorous democratic system in the world. We’ve got the English language. In fact, Britain has got so much to be thankful for that it’s a mystery to me to hear people complaining so much and repeatedly insisting that it’s over. Since clearly it’s not. OK, we aren’t America or China, but nor are we Ecuador or Iceland. Yet we are stuck in a national rut of misery.
What’s the answer? Can a nation be prescribed Prozac, or start doing a few brisk walks daily with the dog to cheer itself up? Perhaps Britain would benefit from taking some time off and going on Incapacity Benefit? Maybe Britain needs to register for Pip?
Whatever it is, we need to do something to get ourselves out of this funk. We need to rediscover our self-respect as a country and get back out there. Because if we don’t, the gloom will become self-reinforcing. We’ll become the national equivalent of one of those houses where they never draw the curtains or go out, and where the rubbish lives in the front garden.
The question is: how we achieve this? Boosterism doesn’t work, as we saw from the Boris Johnson years. But we do need a new vision for Britain, one that goes beyond lifting benefits by certain percentage points or other forms of bureaucratic incrementalism.
I suspect that like any deep-seated problem, the first step is to acknowledge the existence of the problem in the first place. Britain is depressed. It needs to rediscover its joy and make a life for itself in the world. It needs a reason to get out of bed in the morning, and I’m not quite sure – collectively at least – if it’s got that at the moment. Help is needed.
How to cater for the dreaded Ozempic Christmas guest
A close relation of mine is taking Ozempic. I shan’t name them or give anything else away other than to say this: they are set to ruin our Christmas lunch. They know it, and we know it. Welcome to British Yuletide 2025 – a country where more than 1.5 million people are estimated to be using GLP-1 agonists such as Ozempic, Mounjaro and Wegovy, with the vast majority (90 per cent) obtaining the drugs privately. NHS analysis of Ozempic hotspots reveals Leicester, Thurrock in Essex and the Wirral to be where users congregate. Clearly, they haven’t done an analysis of private users in Oxfordshire where I live.
This being so, we are locked in a curiously modern etiquette conundrum. Should we serve them up the full plate of bird, spuds, bread sauce, pigs in blankets and sprouts? Or should we just gingerly offer some smoked salmon on rye by the tree and bypass the main event altogether?
Opinions are divided. I, personally, believe that the plate should be offered nonetheless. Let the Ozempicist negotiate the choppy waters of public shame and surprise themselves; give ample space for them to make their own excuses as to why the potatoes remain untouched as the bread sauce congeals. Others in my household are of the opinion that offering a loaded plate would amount to a) acute embarrassment on all sides and b) gross waste. I know which predicament I find more objectionable. For my poor husband, the problem is even more acute: not only will there be medically assisted abstinence on the food front but, to add insult to injury, several members of our party (including myself) don’t drink. Have a holly jolly Christmas, darling.
The Royal Society for Public Health says that the average Briton consumes 6,000 calories on Christmas Day, around three times the recommended daily intake for women and more than twice the recommended amount for men. We hardly need a public health quango to tell us what we already know – namely that Christmas Day is the most almighty binge. But unlike the year-round enterprise of secret late-night solo scoffing, the festive iteration works because it is nationwide. In short, indulgence on this scale needs company.
As such, I like to start my Christmas Day diabetes-inducing pig-out when the children open their stockings at 5 a.m. At this point, my pancreas is unaware of what I am about to inflict on it and hardly registers the ten or so Quality Street I get through. By the time we are all dressed for the day, I have moved on to the mince pies with my husband, and sail to mass on a wave of sugar that could power the National Grid several times over. And so the day goes on: indulgence after indulgence but with a neverending stream of jolly allies. If one person – and it only takes one – ruins the communal binge, then I am quite sure it would ruin my celebration of Christ’s birth. You know who you are.
Should we serve them the full plate of bird, spuds, bread sauce, pigs in blankets and sprouts? Or should we just gingerly offer some smoked salmon by the tree and bypass the main event altogether?
Google ‘Ozempic Christmas’ and you will find a slew of Daily Mail articles advising Ozempic users what to eat when ‘on the pen’ and tips to deal with what they term the ‘eating period’ ahead. The London Obesity Clinic advises its clientele to ‘enjoy the holiday season safely’ before going on to state that Christmas lunch ‘may be triggering’ for GLP-1 users. But what none of these articles mentions is just how irritating it might be for the people tasked with tolerating Ozempic users, namely their families.
Time was, everyone knew the drill. Anyone on the Boomer diet of old – Ryvita, cottage cheese, fags and Diet Coke – took Christmas Day off before starving themselves until New Year’s Eve to get into the party dress. Deprived of potatoes, crisps and pudding for most of the year, the low-fat dieters embarked on Christmas lunch with initial restraint before going crackers and eating Christmas pudding in the kitchen out of a trough with an apron on. As a spectacle, it was jolly and anarchic, as all the best gatherings are.
But that was another time; we will not see its like again. This year, as the popularity of weight loss jabs continues to rocket (with promises of even more widespread use thanks to a forthcoming pill version next year), we had better get used to the Ozempic Christmas guest. Like the drunken uncle and the stressed-out mother, the Christmas Ozempic user will become a stock figure.
My advice? By all means allow them to come, but banish them from the dining room table altogether. Let them sit in the drawing room and eat a solitary nut where they will be happiest. I may be close to pancreatic breakdown in the other room, but I’ll be in good company at least.
Susie spills the tea
Wilin’ out
President Trump has an “alcoholic’s personality,” White House budget director Russell Vought is a “right-wing zealot” and Elon Musk microdoses ketamine, according to White House chief of staff Susie Wiles. Musk is “an odd, odd duck,” Wiles told Vanity Fair during an series of 11 – count ’em, eleven – interviews, “as I think geniuses are. You know, it’s not helpful, but he is his own person.” Also, Attorney General Pam Bondi “completely whiffed” in her handling of the Epstein Files.
This is all good stuff from Chris Whipple’s two-part profile of Trump’s inner circle that confirms two things that Cockburn has long deduced:
1) The second Trump presidency is a bit unusual personality- and policy-wise
2) At the end of the day, Trump 2.0 is still “White House people doing White House things,” not some sort of unprecedented authoritarian takeover of our institutions
Just as importantly, Vanity Fair is back, baby! After being the source of righteous mockery for hiring disgraced journo and Central Park bear-hiding accomplice Olivia Nuzzi and publishing a weird excerpt from her memoir American Canto, VF has returned to its prime function: political zeitgeist ass-kissing, accompanied by photos of its subjects that “go hard.” There’s only so hard that you can go, admittedly, with Marco Rubio and J.D. Vance, but if you squint, it’s 1997 again, the lunches are long and the articles are even longer. Not Wiles, though. She’s all business.
“Significant context was disregarded and much of what I, and others, said about the team and the President was left out of the story,” Wiles tweeted today about what she called a “disingenuously framed hit piece.” No invite to the VF Oscar party for her!
Kash decisions
Following a bloody rampage at Brown University on Saturday, law enforcement has yet to identify or capture the shooter. Yet FBI Director Kash Patel seems unperturbed. His girlfriend, 27-year-old country singer Alexis Wilkins, posted a photo this morning of the pair attending White House Christmas parties. And Patel, 45, came across rather gooey on Stephen Miller’s wife Katie’s podcast. In the episode – out today! – Patel fields questions such as “When is the engagement?” and “How do you make long distance work?”
Haters might say that today is an unfortunate time for a softball interview on matters of the heart to drop, given that Patel is supposed to be mid-manhunt. Yet if you’re a Trump appointee, the preferred gambit for answering difficult questions is… go on one of your colleague’s wives’ podcasts. This way they can avoid more probing lines of inquiry, such as, “Why are you using FBI planes to visit your girlfriend in Nashville?” (Hey, it’s smarter than speaking to Vanity Fair.)
As with the murder of Charlie Kirk, the order of events following the Brown shooting included detaining the wrong person, announcing his capture, releasing him and giving the assailant more time to hide. Cockburn hopes Patel finds the time to tidy up this debacle – perhaps Lara Trump is available this weekend?
Don Jr. and MTG engaged (not to each other)
Love is in the air in Washington, DC. It’s a Hallmark Christmas movie and a Halloween horror-fest rolled into one. Last night came the news that Donald Trump Jr. is engaged to Palm Beach socialite Bettina Anderson, which the President, taking a break from his regularly scheduled program of tweeting mean things about murdered celebrities, announced at a White House Christmas party.
This follows Real America’s Voice reporter Brian Glenn choosing love over access, announcing “she said yes” while posting an engagement photo with soon-to-be-ex Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene at Joe’s on 15th St NW.
According to Kara Voght’s excellent Washington Post piece last week, Glenn and Greene bonded over their mutual loves of shooting and working out. “He felt a thrill to discover they had the same Gen X rock bands on their respective playlists: Nickelback, Papa Roach, Shinedown, Bush.” This is how she reminds him of who he really is. Congratulations to the happy couples. Cockburn requests a seat on the bride’s side.
Kash Patel chooses love over hunt for killer
“We are so excited to be joined by Kash and his beautiful girlfriend Alexis,” said Katie Miller, wife of Homeland Security Advisor Stephen Miller, on this week’s podcast. And there, on the couch next to her, sits FBI Director Kash Patel and Alexis Wilkins, his significant other, a country-music singer and conservative political commentator, a female twenty-something Bob Roberts for our modern age.
“So I just want to clarify,” Miller says. “You’re not Jewish.”
“I’m not,” Wilkins says, while Patel laughs beside her.
“You are not from Israel.”
“No.”
“So how did we get to are you a Mossad agent?”
Well, we got there because in August former FBI agent Kyle Seraphin, who has a podcast of his own, accused Wilkins of running a “honeypot” scheme on behalf of the Israeli government to entrap Patel. “But I’m sure that’s totally because, like, she’s really looking for like a cross-eyed, you know, kind of thickish built, super cool bro who’s almost 50 years old who’s Indian in America,” Seraphin said. “Anyway, I’m sure that’s totally just, like, love,” he said. “That’s what real love looks like.” Maybe it is. The heart what it wants. Wilkins has sued Seraphin, as she should, for defamation, asking for a $5 million reward.
But back to the Katie Miller show. “Where is her ring?” Miller asked Patel, holding up a hand. Wilkins has been hinting on social media that she longs for Patel to pop the question, despite their 20-year age difference. They both laugh awkwardly at that question, and then Patel looks nervous when she asks, “has there been one moment where you’re both like, you can’t make this up?” As Meatloaf once sang: I want to know right now! Do you love me? Will you love me forever?
Patel has gotten quite a bit of heat for using federal planes to travel to see Wilkins in Nashville, because the FBI Director is apparently too busy to fly commercial. And the heat has intensified this week because this podcast came out as the FBI is searching for the Brown University shooter, even though it was obviously pre-taped. “Just to clarify,” Miller asked Wilkins. “How often has he traveled to see you since January 20?”
The answer is either too often, or not often enough. Or just maybe we really shouldn’t know this much about the private life of the FBI Director. It’s like the exact opposite of, say, the private life of J. Edgar Hoover, who was long-rumored to have a secret love affair with his chief deputy, Clyde Tolson, according to one biographer, a relationship “so close, so enduring, and so affectionate that it took the place of marriage for both bachelors.” If anyone said anything about that relationship, they got a little visit. The FBI director’s personal life was on a need-to-know basis. And Americans did not need to know.
Instead, we have Kash Patel, acting like a secondary character on The Real Housewives of Pennsylvania Avenue, hemming and hawing about when he’s going to put a ring on it. This is the FBI Director we’re talking about here. He doesn’t “date”. We don’t need to know whether or not he got to second base last night. Find the killer. Indict the bad guys. Save speculations about your “special relationship” with a non-Mossad agent for the biographers.
The new Tom Hanks play is a drag
In This World of Tomorrow – the new play starring and cowritten by Tom Hanks, currently on at The Shed in Manhattan – Tom Hanks plays a classic, well, Tom Hanks character.
Bert Allenberry (Hanks) is the nicest guy in the room: he’s the kind of great guy who will escort a lady home in a taxicab, even if it will make him late. And in This World of Tomorrow being late matters a lot. Bert, you see, is a successful but dissatisfied scientist from the future who travels back in time to the 1939 New York World’s Fair in Queens. Once there he has complete free rein, except for one thing. He must return to his hotel at a certain hour to be whisked back to the future – or risk mortal bodily damage.
Love, of course, gets in the way. At the World’s Fair, Bert meets Carmen (played by the iconic stage actress Kelli O’Hara) and her young niece Virginia (a plucky Kayli Carter) and finds himself utterly charmed. He returns over and again to the same day in 1939 to spend more time with Carmen, neglecting his friends, business and safety. Based on a short story written by Hanks, who cowrote the play with James Glossman, This World of Tomorrow is a sort of Groundhog Day (many of the jokes rely on repetition) meets Back to the Future meets About Time.
Yet, despite a stream of talent and funds, including Tony Award-winning director Kenny Leon and Hanks himself (the latest celebrity to take to the New York stage), This World of Tomorrow is a flop.
On the upside, the central love plot is sweet and old-fashioned. It’s refreshing to see a play about love that is so chaste, with just one kiss (lifted straight from the silent movies). I also liked the slow pace with which Bert and Carmen’s love unfurls, so unlike the “more is more” dating culture of today, and the grace and respect with which they treat each other.
On the downside is the script. A versatile set by Derek McLane, consisting of a forest of LED columns which make up both the future and the stately pillars of the World Fair, plus stellar performances from the central trio, can’t rescue a story with this many plot holes.
In fact, the entire future world could have been cut: made-up jargon is used as filler, with whole scenes dedicated to science which makes no sense – better to leave the physics a mystery and let the audience use their imagination. Not helping are costumes that dress the cast like Star Trek (except, inexplicably, Hanks, who wears an elegant suit throughout). And don’t even get me started on the side characters: they are walking talking cliches of their eras (chirpy 1930s cabbies, ultramodern futuristic girl bosses, an artificial-intelligence bot and the like).
Hidden somewhere in this overly long play (it could have been cut by half without losing any substance) are some interesting ideas. In the world of tomorrow, will animal products be a thing of the distant past and will we view raising animals to eat as its own holocaust? (This is touched on but only as a joke: Bert is horrified, and a little titillated, to drink cream with his coffee in his sojourns back in time). Can – and should we – change the past and if so, what will that mean for the future? Can we undo horrors already committed?
More pertinently and pressing for our own time, in a future where AI looms over us and we are all glued to our phones, will we long for the magic of analogue? Carmen is an utterly ordinary woman, living an utterly ordinary life, in a world that is, to her, utterly ordinary. Yet to Bert she is extraordinary. He delights in watching her and Virginia’s excitement at fireworks, or their pleasure in a simple piece of pie at the World Fair café, or their amazement at the technology of television.
Such ideas are grasped at before they fall away. The premise would have more purchase if This World of Tomorrow did not read like an assignment in a first-year script writing class. A convenient – an utterly silly – deus ex machina suddenly solves Bert’s dilemma of death verses love, although he never really felt in danger anyway. Nothing is at stake here: his travels lead to no adverse effects to his business, his relationships, his life. There are no children he’ll leave behind; his friendships, while professed as deep, feel fickle.
The result is bleh. Tom Hanks is Tom Hanks. But even his star quality can’t save This World of Tomorrow: a story about time travel that drags.
Pete Hegseth is a polarizing figure who doesn’t quit
Pete Hegseth’s Saturday begins with personal training. The Secretary of War, @SecWar on your socials, is very fond of working out with the troops – something most defense secretaries have done without someone dutifully filming the experience for Instagram. Then he heads off to the Reagan National Defense Forum, the annual gathering of war hawks, policy nerds and defense contractors in Simi Valley, California. Hegseth, the veteran of the Global War on Terror, is there to fulfill his mission of denouncing the neocons. “Out with idealistic utopianism, in with hard-nosed realism,” he declares, insisting the United States will no longer be “distracted by democracy-building, interventionism, undefined wars, regime change, climate change, woke moralizing and feckless nation-building.”
By the evening, Hegseth is being lampooned on the opening of Saturday Night Live by Colin Jost, rocking out with the iconic flag pocket square, crushing a can of seltzer and calling out the “beta cucks” of the media while bragging about the Caribbean strike success of “Operation Kill Everybody.” “I was so jacked up after the first strike,” Jost says, in one of the repeated jokes about Hegseth’s boozy reputation, “I had to make an emergency call to my sponsor… sorry, a guy I met at an anonymous meeting.”
This is just another day in the life of Hegseth, the himbo hound of war who sits near the very top of Donald Trump’s Influencer Cabinet, a collection of people named to their roles to be the face of policy but not necessarily the makers of it. Hegseth has, in his first year in the role, become one of the most parodied and criticized members of the brigade, but he has also earned a following among service members who appreciate a secretary closer to their generation in experience and thought. Sure, he shows off for the ’gram with his workouts and do-it-for-the-bros attitude, but at least, unlike other secretaries, he can actually do pull-ups.
His myriad announcements attacking wokeism and ableism are targeted at people outside the services – what members of the armed forces appreciate is Hegseth’s good-riddance rejection of mandatory cybersecurity training and other elements of time-consuming drudgery. Though his rules on haircuts and beards are not so popular among the troops. “No more beardos,” Hegseth announced in his typical parlance in September. “If you want a beard, join Special Forces. If not, then shave.” “What does he think we are, the Derek Jeter Yankees?” one officer tells me, comparing it to the Simpsons episode when Mr. Burns demands while managing the company softball team, “Mattingly! Get rid of those sideburns!”
But the same officer quickly adds: “But I did like that he called out the bloat.”
Typically, “bloat” in Washington refers to bureaucracy and spending, not the waistlines of generals Hegseth hauled together to be berated at a meeting in September. But unlike facial hair, hacking back the bureaucratic side doesn’t appear to be high on Hegseth’s priority list. Cutbacks announced in the spring to the number of senior leaders have “lagged in implementation,” a phrase that crops up frequently when it comes to his announcements of bold reforms.
The President’s signature missile defense policy, the “Golden Dome for America,” a multitrillion dollar, two-decade gambit to protect the United States from attack, has also yet to start sending out the money budgeted by Congress.
Hegseth’s socials may be full of running workouts, but there are many in Washington who question whether the actual work of running the Department of Defense is necessarily part of its renamed secretary’s agenda.
At another meeting, Hegseth was called upon to defend himself against the latest round of assaults from the “fake news” media against the numerous strikes conducted under his watch on specific boat-sized areas of the Gulf of America. The controversy over the Caribbean program has become the flashpoint of the Hegseth era, thanks to a confluence of events that seem (at least from the outside) to be an orchestrated effort by the long-lived Washington foreign policy blob to take out the SecWar.
If you were going to war in an “America First” way, this would be how you’d do it. First, an announcement of stepped-up aggression against Venezuelan narcoterrorists carrying drugs in international waters – a drone-centered campaign designed to blow unsympathetic criminals into smithereens in the spirit of the aggressive-in-your-own-neighborhood doctrine that Trump’s Jacksonian foreign policy encourages. Overlay the grainy footage of exploding speedboats with Van Halen’s “Panama” for that ideal Reagan-Bush early-1990s post-Cold War exuberance. While Democrat partisans and the more principled pro-MAGA members of the Republican party raised eyebrows at the strikes and warned against getting sucked into a regime-change war in Venezuela (despite all indications that is the one area where Trump himself might consider getting a bit neocon), these are among the President’s most popular policies, with a Harvard-Harris poll finding support from 58 percent of Americans.
The next phase of Hegseth’s war involved a political video from multiple veterans of the CIA and armed forces, chief among them Arizona Senator Mark Kelly, warning officers against following “illegal orders” being handed down from senior officials. The video riled up even some of the more sedate members of the defense community, because it read as a warning against the officers themselves. Hegseth threatened to recall the senator to active duty to face a court-martial for a video that “intentionally undercut good order and discipline.” He announced this, as usual, on X.
Then came a Washington Post article that blared an astonishing story, claiming that after an initial strike on a drug boat in September, a second strike had been conducted – a so-called “double tap” – to eliminate two survivors dramatically clinging to the side of the wreckage, allegedly carried out following a verbal order from Hegseth to “kill them all.” Survivors of such strikes would obviously be a legal problem for the United States, particularly given the already debatable legality of this military action, most of which relies on Obama-era drone-strike rationalization.
The story the Washington Post told showed Hegseth as some kind of hyped-up teenager flinging around green army men willy-nilly, or someone who has opted for one too many nukes on a Call of Duty stream. Senator Rand Paul, already a GOP-skeptic, demanded Hegseth come to Congress to testify about the strike. Questioned about the story, Trump himself said that a second strike is not something he would have approved in that situation. Being undermined by the boss is usually a preface to getting fired, and quickly.
A year in, the cabinet seems overdue for a reshuffle. As a narrative, the Post’s story could have proved devastating – perhaps even career-ending. Perhaps an old hand at defense is needed instead of a young buck? Someone who gets along better with the Hill? The murmurs were loud – but only for a few days. Unfortunately for the legacy press, as the longtime Fox News observer Brit Hume said, the Washington Post exclusive remained an exclusive. The New York Times, ABC News and the Wall Street Journal all ran stories in the following days casting serious doubt on the Post’s reporting, with major details changed and the decision process apparently not involving any additional kill order from Hegseth. “He dodged a bullet there,” one Senate staffer told me. “When the Post goes after you and misses, it buys you time and earns you cred with the boss.”
On the more traditional platform of Meet the Press, Mark Kelly declared that officers should be able to judge in the moment. “If orders are illegal, not only do they not have to follow them, they are legally required not to follow them.” But he failed on the follow-up: “You’re asking officers in the field to make really tough calls about the legality of what they are being asked to do,” host Kristen Welker asked. “If you were still in uniform, if you received an order to strike suspected drug boats overseas and kill everybody onboard, would you refuse that order in real time?”
In response to this surely obvious follow-up, Kelly hemmed and hawed, unable to answer the very question he would put to every member of the military. Nor could he answer what specific orders the President made that could be considered unlawful. The defiant inability to explain why this was terrible was not a great narrative for Democrats to adopt, especially when it led to a parade of commentators across cable networks boldly announcing their support for the narcoterrorists. “People on a boat, carrying cocaine, are not a direct threat to the lives of our service members or Americans,” Democratic Representative Adam Smith said. Not exactly an applause line.
The challenge of the current situation is that Hegseth is viewed on Capitol Hill as a conduit, not a policymaker. In his initial Senate hearing for the job, Democrat Richard Blumenthal said he would support Hegseth as a spokesman for the department, but not its head – and most of the time, to much of Congress, it seems as if that is his approach to the job.
This plays better with some corners of the GOP than others. Arkansas’s Tom Cotton, one of the more neoconservative members of the Senate, can’t get enough of the pump-up influencer activity – apparently viewing it as a much-needed morale booster for lackluster armed forces (recruitment levels are indeed up).
Ohio Representative Mike Turner – a true blue neocon with an early-2000s viewpoint on the outs with many in his party – is a constant behind-the-scenes critic. More in the middle is Mississippi’s Roger Wicker, chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee and one of the most serious and faith-minded Republican senators in the defense space, who has openly vocalized his frustrations with the Hegseth Department of Defense. For Wicker and the majority of Republicans on Capitol Hill, the irritation is that they just don’t know enough about what’s happening. They don’t want to learn about things from Instagram and X. They want to know ahead of time. But as any good influencer knows, that’s not the way to make things trend.
Hegseth’s tenure has been surrounded by critics, old-school Washington hands who look down on his Fox News past, distrust his Barstool Sports attitude, and view him as the last type they would want with the responsibility of running something as important as the Department of Defense. But his detractors have failed to recognize the reason he endures. He is doing what his Commander-in-Chief wants. He is doing it loudly and boldly, calling out his foes instead of letting them gain footing. He is broadcasting his tenure and his views in a way that appeals to a generation that saw the likes of Lloyd Austin lumbering around spouting platitudes and disappearing entirely for weeks at a time.
And for all the Capitol Hill critics, there remains an awareness that if Hegseth were to get the boot, whatever came after might actually be much worse. His denunciation of the former Reaganites who dabbled in neoconservatism notwithstanding, if Hegseth were to go, many on the Hill believe his potential replacements might be more akin to the MAGA ranks who think blasting narco-boats is a bridge too far. All this makes @SecWar the man for the moment, and for the foreseeable future. It’s about time for another gym run, so like and subscribe for more.
This article was originally published in The Spectator’s December 22, 2025 World edition.
What England’s old folk songs can teach us
Mary Wakefield has narrated this article for you to listen to.
I grew up in the 1980s but in many ways it was more like the 1880s. We lived with my grandmother on the Northumbrian coast and the routine of our days echoed the routines of her youth, perhaps her mother’s and grandmother’s, too. We were like an elephant family in an African game park, following our matriarch around ancient migratory routes, oblivious to the rise and fall of regimes outside.
Lunch (no elbows on the table), a walk to the sea, sherry time (Amontillado dry); then my grandmother and my clever younger brother would play Piquet while the children of lesser focus played with the open fire. And we sang around the piano, my grandmother playing, folk songs and ballads from the northeast: “Barbara Allen”; “The Raggle-Taggle Gypsy,” “The North Country Maid,” “The Golden Vanity.”
Suddenly everyone’s come over all screen-sick and they want their kids fossicking around in fires
Recently, this sort of Victorian style of childhood has become almost fashionable again. Suddenly everyone’s come over all screen-sick, and they want their kids playing card games and fossicking around in fires. But what no one’s thought of yet is how bracing it would be for our children if we brought back the old songs. I don’t mean just that singing releases endorphins or that Von Trapp-style singalongs make for family harmony. I mean that endlessly repeating those strange, brutal, mournful stories is actually handy for children. If we could just find a way of tipping the old songs into the minds of future generations, they might turn out more robust.
It’s been at least 45 years now that I’ve been thinking about “Barbara Allen.” Just the first four notes of her tune (1, 3, 4, 5, on any major scale) summons her like a spell. The ballad of “Barbara Allen” has been around since Tudor times. It’s ballad number 84 in the collection made by the great 19th-century American folklorist Francis “Stubby” Child. And the basic story goes like this: a young man in a place usually called Scarlet town falls in love with a local woman, Barbara. In the version we sang, the young man was Jimmy Grey but that’s probably because every man within a 50-mile radius seemed to be called Jimmy Grey. Barbara spurns Jimmy who falls deathly ill as a result. Barbara goes to see Jimmy on his deathbed. “And slowly, slowly she came up,/ And slowly she stood by him” (Jimmy feels a pang of hope) “but all she said when she drew nigh:/ ‘Young man, I think you’re dying.’”
In my memory, I’m sitting on the piano stool beside my wonderful grandmother. She has a sort of silk kerchief around her neck, fixed with a brooch, and she delivers Barbara’s killer line with style: “Young man, I think you’re dying.” After Jimmy dies, Barbara takes to her own bed and then dies too, and I wasn’t sorry to see her go. It was only years later that I understood Barbara was to be pitied too. She knew she’d screwed up. She’d passed up a good man who loved her and that’s a hard thing to find, as the saying goes.
“Barbara Allen” is considered the world’s most-collected English language folk ballad. It’s spread throughout the English-speaking world, perhaps because what “Barbara Allen” teaches is cold, useful truths: some men just go for psycho women, for instance, but also, more generally, that you can screw up. Some decisions can’t be undone.
Isn’t this the exact opposite of all the soothing goop children today inhale and have done since Disney turned to the dark side? Everything is possible, kids! All mistakes are reversible. All you need is a little help from your friends. Just dare to dream, and that dream will happen. True love never dies.
It sure does in the old songs. “Clementine” fell into the foaming brine. That noble lord’s wife scarpers for good with “The Raggle Taggle Gypsy” (Child, number 200):
What do I care for a goose-feather bed,
With blankets drawn so comely, O?
Tonight I’ll lie in a wide open field,
In the arms of me raggle-taggle gypsy, O.
It was an education. As was another family favorite, “Oh No, John!,” versions of which appear in the early 1600s. A woman, whose father has bid her always reply “no” to suitors, is pursued by a persistent lover. “Oh no, John, no,” she tells him at the end of every verse.
Eventually he asks:
Oh Madam since you are so cruel,
And that you do scorn me so,
If I may not be your husband?
Madam will you let me go?
She replies: “Oh no, John! No, John! No!” No meaning yes, rejection as a come-on. I think of that song every time I see one of those posters reminding boys they need written approval before they make a move. Enthusiastic, informed consent? Oh no, John, no!
After a quick diversion via a song about a couple of alcoholics who enjoy drinking gin and rum from a little brown jug, my grandmother, my mother and perhaps a few aunts liked to round things off with a ballad we called “The Golden Vanity,” but which is known in some regions as “The Sweet Trinity,” “The Golden Willow Tree” or “The Turkish Revelry.” I’ve tried to sing this to my son, to pass on the traditions I grew up immersed in, but the story runs so counter to Paw Patrol that he can’t even stand to listen. It goes like this: a desperate captain, under attack from the Spanish, promises his daughter’s hand in marriage to anyone who can sink the Spanish boat. A cabin boy leaps overboard with his auger and sticks a hole in the enemy ship’s hull, but the captain reneges on his promise and the boy’s only reward is drowning. “I’m drifting with the tide,” cries the boy, and dies. All this not in a minor key but in G major, with the jaunty ring of a shanty.
Bad things happen at sea. Greedy, rich men will revert to type once the danger’s passed. You need to know, girls and boys.
This article was originally published in The Spectator’s December 22, 2025 World edition.