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I love Cheltenham… but there’s only so much chaos I can take
Flipping heck! Thank goodness the Cheltenham Festival only happens once a year. There’s only so much chaos and controversy my liver can take. But oh boy, did the 230,000 racegoers who turned up have some good craic. Although Willie Mullins swept the board in the big races, nine UK-based trainers got on the score sheet, winning 13 races, just two short of the Irish. A big improvement on recent years.
If Thursday night’s post-racing horse sale at Cheltenham is anything to go by, however, the dominance of Irish trainers in the big races is set to continue. The star of the sale this year was a stallion called Goliath Du Berlais, who stands at Normandy-based stud Haras D’Etreham. Three of his sons sold for £400,000 and the fourth made £530,000. They have all won a single point-to-point in Ireland, beating other unknown quantities. Mind-boggling.
Three of these recruits are now predictably heading back to top yards in Ireland; Palinca will be trained by Henry de Bromhead, Monster Truck by Gordon Elliott and Monzon Sport by Willie Mullins. All should be horses to look out for in the future, although it wouldn’t surprise me if Mullins gives his recruit a year hacking around to allow further development. Mullins is a man of huge patience. The fact these potential stars are all French-bred must blow a chill wind through top Irish stud Coolmore. It wouldn’t surprise me if Goliath Du Berlais finds a new home in Tipperary before long.
As successful as the festival was, there were two big issues that shook things up a bit. The first was the race starting procedures, which tend to work well at quieter meetings but can get a bit fraught here. The stewards are now going to have to decide whether the jockey Nico de Boinville was guilty of ‘repeated racial abuse’ towards Irish amateur Declan Queally, which he denies, while lining up for the Turners Novices’ Hurdle.
Quite frankly, someone in the weighing room should have told Queally either to thump de Boinville on the nose or grow up, before he went whingeing to the stewards. Verbally abusing each other as they line up for crowded starts at the festival is what jockeys have always done. More’s the pity the broadcasters won’t allow us to listen to these pre-race spats.
There are four reasons why the starts at the festival get spicy. Firstly, the raucous atmosphere winds up the horses and the jockeys. Secondly, too many starts have the horses approaching the tapes around a bend, so those on the outside have to go faster than those on the inside just to get a level start. Thirdly, the jockeys end up cantering into the start because they are made to line up too far back from the starting tape. And fourthly, the starters, who are under a lot of pressure to get the horses away at the first attempt, start to fudge their own rules, which emboldens the jockeys to call their bluff and try to nick an advantageous start.
Whatever… I love chaotic starts. One aspect of being a great jockey is to boss the jostling for position before a race, and it’s all part of the theatre of jump racing. But I suppose a combination of standing starts and Grand Prix-style lights might be the answer for those who don’t share my preference for a more Circus Maximus approach.
Much more disappointing was the withdrawal due to unsuitable ground of Six-milebridge, Uncle Bert and Fact To File on Thursday. All had a serious chance and frustrated punters will have been left looking forlornly at their accumulator bets. The trainers were no doubt doing the right thing to look after the future of their horses’ front leg flexor tendons. Some horses hit the ground harder than others, and while the patches of ground at the top of the hill were safe enough for the 111 horses that did run on Thursday, the ground was clearly too fast for the three not allowed to take part. Trust me, it only takes one stride to concuss a tendon. The normally horizontal Mullins was probably being polite when he said: ‘We were promised watering and I’m not sure that has been done.’
The fact these potential stars are all French-bred must blow a chill wind through top Irish stud Coolmore
The racecourse, I suspect, had an eye on a weather forecast that said rain would arrive at some point. There was also the memory of a couple of years ago when the racecourse did water overnight and then got slagged off by champion trainer Paul Nicholls after it rained as well. Unfortunately for everyone this year, the rain didn’t arrive in time on Thursday.
The biggest talking point going into the festival, however, was the sudden departure of Lord (Charles) Allen, the very short-lived chairman of the British Horseracing Authority. That made the appearance on Friday of former defence minister Ben Wallace all the more interesting. Wallace threw his hat into the ring for the role in 2024 but was overlooked. The idea was presumably that if the BHA went for a leftie like Allen, he’d be able to suck up to the government. What a disaster that plan has turned out to be: unable to bring racing’s many factions together, Allen felt he had no option but to step down.
Racing is going to be a much-diminished sport once this government, with their affordability checks, has continued to drive punters into the welcoming arms of the black market, and destroyed its grass roots with the absurd trail-hunting ban. So they might as well bite the bullet and go back to Wallace on bended knee, irrespective of his political history. There is absolutely no way he will reapply for the job, when he wasn’t even offered the courtesy of an interview last time, but I think he’d take it on if anyone had the humility to ask him now.
Nothing beats a posh hospital room
The private hospital room in Chelsea was so relaxing I would have stayed for a week if it was affordable. It was more luxurious than the all-inclusive in Tenerife I went to last year, but sadly not in the same price bracket. One night in a hospital with designer soaps, a menu in Arabic and a gorgeous view of the London skyline nearly broke the bank, so I had to let them discharge me as planned the morning after my operation.
There wasn’t really that much wrong with me, and certainly not enough to call it ‘a journey’, as all health crises are now termed. I could have posted a selfie from my hospital bed with some word salad about positive vibes to get some people I don’t know to send me hugs and prayer-hand emojis, as is the raging fashion, but it was so much more complicated than that.
Thirty years ago, I ended up with titanium plates in my face, and while they were the best the medical technology of that era could offer, I’ve repeatedly sat in front of consultants over the years telling them that I’m sure they need to come out. No, they’re inert, they’ve always insisted. They can’t be causing you discomfort.
One specialist told me I needed therapy for imagining things. Another told me he could try to remove them, but he’d have to smash them out with a hammer and chisel.
I went round in circles until a straight-talking South African said he couldn’t do anything but he knew a man who could. Once I was sitting in front of this man, a surgeon who corrects corrections, his opinion was to instantly believe what I was describing.
Lying in the posh hospital room waiting for this man to come round to visit me before he opened me up, I wound myself into a frenzy. What if taking the plates out somehow made things worse?
As the light fell outside, I thought about getting dressed and sneaking out.
‘You’re really panicking, aren’t you?’ said the surgeon, finally marching into the room at 6 p.m. with his files under his arm.
‘Don’t worry, it’s only like DIY,’ he laughed. And he started writing out what he was about to do on a consent form, reciting as he wrote, as though he were making a list of stuff to get from B&Q.
Good surgeons are like this, I think. They set about fiendishly complex operations as if it’s plumbing or building work, which I find reassuring.
The best ones find your bodily predicament interesting, thankfully, because that’s the only way it’s getting fixed.
He told me the only problem he anticipated was if the surgeon who put the plates into my jaw broke the heads off the screws.
His face lit up as he explained how if this was the case he would have to attach new screws to the old screws to make them turn. ‘Dear God,’ said the builder boyfriend when I texted him this. He wasn’t at all sure I should be going through with it.
The anaesthetist came in next. He was Italian. I felt like palming him a tip as, like the executioner, he sat and eyed my proportions. ‘Nine stone,’ he said, reading the admissions form I’d filled out while he perched on the window sill by my bed.
‘Or ten,’ I said.
‘What?’
‘Well I say nine just to flatter myself because I don’t really know. I haven’t any scales. Go for ten.’
‘Is 5ft 3in correct?’ he asked, raising an eyebrow.
‘Oh yes, I know my height. But the point I’m making is, I’d rather you erred on the side of caution. Give me a really good whack of anaesthetic.’
He nodded and said he would. He asked if I had any preferences, pain relief-wise. I told him I like a simple oldie. Codeine, Valium… He nodded. This is the beauty of the private sector. The customer is king.
Half an hour later I’d gone down in a lift and was lying in a too-big gown on an operating table in what felt like a basement, shivering.
‘It’s freezing in here,’ I told him as he sat beside me examining my arms for veins.
‘Infection control,’ he said. ‘Oh that’s a really good vein.’
‘Glad you like it.’
‘Tell me something you like to do.’
‘You’re really panicking, aren’t you?’ said the surgeon, finally marching into the room
‘Horses,’ I said, thinking, come on, let’s get this over with.
‘Tell me somewhere you like to travel.’
‘Italy,’ I said.
‘Ah Italy,’ he said. ‘Have a nice sleep.’
When I awoke I felt so nice I couldn’t be bothered to come round. ‘Take deeper breaths. I’m not happy with your breathing,’ the nurse beside me complained.
I was very happy with it. I suffer with insomnia so to have a deep sleep was a sublime treat. This place was more and more like a spa break.
The cheerful face of the surgeon loomed over me to tell me that the plates and screws were out.
Even though he’d numbed my lower face with local anaesthetic, I sensed, as I lay back upstairs with the numbness wearing off, that everything maybe felt in some way better.
The next morning I had to make a midday flight back to Ireland if I wasn’t going to cop for double the already eye-watering hospital bill, so I persuaded the nurses to discharge me into an Uber after proving I could eat by spooning into my mouth the only thing I could in there, which was my least favourite thing, porridge.
I got a train from Victoria. And that was fine until I got out at Gatwick and my stomach turned and I was sick into a bin.
A no-nonsense Jamaican platform worker descended like an angel. ‘I’m calling you a chair,’ she said, and a man came with a wheelchair and insisted on wheeling me not just inside the airport but all the way to ‘assistance’, where he somehow had me put on the list.
I got wheeled through fast-track security, then through departures in a golfing cart with the oldies and infirms, who, it turns out, have their own rather lovely lounge, and then I was put on the plane via a cabin on a lifting crane.
It’s absolutely the way to do air travel. I made a mental note to puke in a bin every time I fly from Gatwick. All in all, the perfect end to a nice break.
The glaring flaw in Keir Starmer’s ‘cohesion plan’
Mary Wakefield has narrated this article for you to listen to.
On the way back home down Mile End Road, I stopped for a cup of tea in a nice-looking café. It was vast, once I’d stepped inside, extending out into a sort of gazebo – but empty. On display under glass, a good four metres of immaculate cakes: red velvet cake, baklava cheesecake, dipped doughnuts, Dubai chocolate cronuts. ‘Fast now, Iftar after,’ said a sign on the counter. It was the fourth week of Ramadan in Stepney Green, Tower Hamlets; the sun was low in the sky and the whole place seemed to be waiting for the fast to end.
As I sat there with my tea, a woman of about my age entered and began to chat to the tidy young man at the counter. She was sick of life in London, she said, sick of this country. ‘You can’t even get a healthy lunch in Tesco.’ What, no carrots? I pricked up my ears. ‘It’s all bacon. There’s bacon in everything – everything. It didn’t used to be like this,’ she said with a knowing look, as if Islamophobes had taken charge of the Tesco lunch shelves.
‘Yes. I’m going back to Bangladesh,’ said the young man, ‘It’s the taxes too. How can I pay this much?’
‘Go! At least you will be healthy there.’
Last week details of Keir Starmer’s new plan to combat Islamophobia were revealed – a new definition of ‘anti-Muslim hostility’ which includes, as hostility, treating Muslims ‘as a collective group’ defined by ‘fixed and negative characteristics’. This is part of a broader ‘cohesion plan’, said the Prime Minister, for bringing the country together.
But how is it possible not to treat people as a group when they themselves insist on a group identity?
Some 40 per cent of the population of Tower Hamlets are Muslim, mostly ethnically Bangladeshi. And when the man behind the counter spoke of moving back, he probably meant very specifically to Sylhet in the north-east, on the banks of the Surma river, because 90 per cent of British Bangladeshis are from Sylhet. Sylhetis are conservative both in terms of their culture and their attitude to Islam. What the prophet said goes. Is it anti-Muslim hostility to point this out?
We need a two-way street, said Starmer – tolerance, compromise, integration. But integration becomes a touch tricky when very integral parts of British culture are haram. Bacon, dogs, ladies’ knees – even Jesus. A few days ago, Tom Holland (the historian, not the superhero) unearthed local government guidance which suggested that out of respect to the Muslim community, schools should avoid asking pupils to draw pictures of Jesus Christ. Jesus – Isa – is a prophet for Muslims, and prophets, as we all know, mustn’t be pictured.
It’s a terrible, craven piece of advice, but it points to the problem. It’s all very well to talk about mutual tolerance, but the Quran is a totalising text. There is no other perspective. What’s haram is haram. You don’t get much more integrated than Tesco: great Ramadan deals on flour and oil; crescent moon cards and banners; lanterns; an Eid advert with genuine spiritual feeling, unlike the bleak Christmas ads. None of that makes bacon clean.
There are some astonishing houses along Mile End Road. A beautiful late-17th-century house, once owned by the widow of the East India Company’s governor of Bombay; the Trinity Green Almshouses, for ‘decayed masters and commanders of ships’, with two intricately carved marble galleons perched on the gatehouse. From Whitechapel to Stepney Green station, there are now also imposing vertical banners hanging from the lampposts. ‘Trust in Allah, give Zakat.’
If the owner of that café is feeling skint, it’s not just because of income tax and the rising price of cake ingredients, but because observant Muslims like the Sylhetis are expected to pay, as a form of charity, 2.5 per cent of all their assets (though not their home). Zakat is compulsory for everyone who possibly can – one of the five pillars of Islam. What’s interesting to me is that it cannot and must not be used for any non-Muslim cause. The Quran forbids it.
How is it possible not to treat people as a group when they themselves insist on a group identity?
I thought about that as I sat waiting with the cakes. There’s a lot to admire about a community with commitment. All that fasting and almsgiving. Try imagining the C of E putting banners down Oxford Street: ‘Fast. Repent. Christ is King.’ They’re more likely to advertise Zakat.
How sustainable is it for a community that absorbs so much to give back only to its own? The Sylheti community depends heavily on benefits. Nearly half of the borough’s population lives in a household receiving at least one means-tested benefit. Around 30 per cent of all households receive housing benefit, and a little more than that a reduction on council tax. Nearly half of all pensioners claim the ‘guarantee credit’, the highest proportion in England and more than triple the national average. Is this Starmer’s two-way street? You can gift-aid Zakat, as it happens, another 25p from the taxpayer to the Ummah. The assumption with a diaspora is that it gradually integrates and intermarries over time, but Tower Hamlets has really bucked that trend. Sylhetis overwhelmingly marry Sylhetis. As I bike about I see buses advertising Muslim marriage: ‘Is it time?’ They jostle along the Essex Road past the buses with ads for ‘Amicable: Divorce is not a dirty word’.
If Tower Hamlets is struggling economically, well, then at least Sylhet is on the up. There’s no real way to calculate the exact remittance from the UK to Sylhet, but estimates vary between half a billion and £1 billion. Snooping around in Bangladeshi chat-rooms, there are worries that the money has not translated into the right sort of prosperity back home – children are still poorly educated, there’s not enough cash for hospitals and playgrounds. The money washing in from the UK has gone in recent years toward new mosques and madrasas, with the result that Sylhet, ironically, is becoming not less but more religious and conservative. But the building business is booming. Residents say the work is constant: shopping malls, hotels and elaborate second homes, often built in what’s known as ‘Londoni style’, several storeys high with Stepney Green-style pitched roofs. There’s even a fake Tesco, with the same distinctive blue and red, spelled Tescoo to avoid trouble – and with no bacon.
The Epstein Files, the naked communist, and me
Dante’s Beach, Ravenna
Nicholas Farrell has narrated this article for you to listen to.
I was parked up in the Land Rover Defender on the narrow road that runs alongside the strip of dense pine forest next to the sea. My three youngest children, Rita (16), Giovanni Maria (14) and Giuseppe (ten), had just been for the first swim of the year and were now inside the forest picking wild asparagus. I could not see the sea, which was about 200 yards away on the other side of the forest, but I could hear the sound of it like the low-level roar of a distant motorway.
Then I heard the honk of a car horn. I looked up from my phone, which I was using to help me contemplate the difference between Jeffrey ‘Lolita Express’ Epstein and Silvio ‘Bunga Bunga’ Berlusconi.
A small grey car had stopped next to me. The driver, his face transformed into a silhouette by the late afternoon sun, looked like E.T. He motioned me to roll down my passenger window as he rolled down his. ‘Ciao, Farrell, ciao!’ Oh God, it was Wini the naked communist!
‘What are you doing here?’ he said with a leer. The road – Cato Street – is less than a mile long and comes to a dead end at a single iron bar gate, beyond which there are fields and more forest. As Jim Morrison of the Doors warned in ‘The End’, his hymn to despair: ‘There’s danger on the edge of town/ Ride the King’s Highway, baby.’
Highly trained nudists, such as Wini the naked commie, have stolen the best stretch of the beautiful public beach in our little town from the silent majority. And Cato Street is a stage on which they and their various subspecies come to perform extra-curricular activities such as dogging.
On a Friday night in summer, cars patrol up and down in search of the show. I know this because I can see their tiny red tail lights from the windows of what is called my study, a mile or so across the fields. But this was only teatime on an out-of-season Sunday afternoon, so help me God.
‘Come on, confess! Confess!’ said comrade Wini.
‘Actually, my children are looking for asparagus,’ I replied.
‘They’d better be careful.’
‘What of? Wolves?’
‘Them too.’
The last time I had seen Wini, who I think is a retired lawyer or magistrate, was when he pounced on me last summer in the carpark outside the village bar to give me a book singing the praises of Arrigo Boldrini, a famous local partisan leader.
Some of Boldrini’s men were tried and acquitted for the slaughter near Padua of 136 unarmed members of the fascist military police and their civilian collaborators. The massacre was just one among hundreds at the end of the second world war in which Italy’s communist partisans killed up to 40,000 unarmed Italians in revenge reprisals. Boldrini used to make the absurd claim – and his followers still do – that his 600 men single-handedly liberated Ravenna.
‘It is you who must confess,’ I said.
‘But I’m an atheist.’
‘And a communist!’
Off he went in the direction of the one-bar gate.
I was contemplating Epstein and Berlusconi because I too am mentioned in the Epstein files. Steve Bannon, voice of the MAGA base, sent an interview I did with him for The Spectator to Epstein in December 2018. Bannon, a stridently traditional cultural Catholic who has been married three times, had told me Pope Francis was ‘beneath contempt’ because he had sided with ‘the global liberal elite against the citizens of the nations of the world’.
Via Bannon, I alighted on Berlusconi because in the US Department of Justice’s online Epstein archive, I came across a March 2011 letter from Epstein’s lawyer to the Telegraph demanding it stop calling him a paedophile.
Highly trained nudists have stolen the best stretch of the beautiful public beach from the silent majority
This was ‘in stark contrast to your coverage of the recent scandal involving Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi’, said the letter, ‘where we can find no reference in your reports to him being described as a paedophile in the face of similar charges’. Epstein was convicted in 2008 of ‘procuring a person under 18 for prostitution’, it explained, but ‘has not been convicted nor been accused of being a “paedophile”.’
At the time, Berlusconi was under investigation for – among much else – paid sex with a minor, a 17-year-old Moroccan belly dancer nicknamed Ruby Rubacuori (Ruby the Heart-Stealer), and the subject of global ridicule for his ‘elegant soirées’, as he called them, in the ‘Bunga Bunga’ room at his mansion near Milan.
When I interviewed him in 2003 for The Spectator at his summer palace in Sardinia, I was struck by the preponderance of statues and paintings of young naked women in the vast reception room. But I am convinced that Silvio Il Magnifico, although he had a dragon’s passion for young women, did not have an obsession for sex with underage girls. Unlike Epstein.
He genuinely believed that the Heart-Stealer was over 18 and although he had paid her loads of money was acquitted on appeal. None of the countless other women with whom he was sexually involved was under 18. Whereas dozens of women went to the police to accuse Epstein of sexual violence, none did in the case of Berlusconi. I know whose parties I’d have rather gone to in the days when I did that sort of thing.
As dusk was falling, the children came back safe and sound from the forest with a huge amount of asparagus, despite it being so early in the season.
Why does a burglar burgle?
When I hear surveil on the wireless I often imagine it is spelt surveille, since it is a back-formation from surveillance. But the spelling has settled down as surveil. The Telegraph had a report the other day about someone who found his iPhone had been infected with spyware ‘in order to surveil him’. The word sounds unhappy to my ear, as new back-formations often do, though it has been in use for 60 years.
Back-formation appeared in the OED before it had an entry there. Its entry came in the Supplement of 1933, but it was coined by Sir James Murray in 1888 and used by him in the dictionary’s entry for burgle. This was marked as originally colloquial or humorous (as burgling probably was in The Pirates of Penzance in 1879: ‘When the enterprising burglar’s not a-burgling.’) Burgle was in 1888 ‘a back-formation from burglar, of very recent appearance, though English law-Latin (1354) had a verb burgulare of the same meaning’.
The process is common in English. Buttle is to butler what burgle is to burglar. Is curate, as a verb, a back-formation from curator? Certainly curate, recorded from the end of the 19th century in the sense ‘look after the exhibits in a collection’, is a back-formation from curator. But curator as the person who selects items simply for one exhibition has been in use only since the end of the 1950s. The fashionable curate in the sense of ‘select items in a collection’ appeared in the 1990s and extends to menus. I still can’t take seriously escalate, as in ‘escalate your complaint’, meaning ‘take it to a higher authority’. Wars (mostly) escalate, as a figurative use of the verb, which we seldom use literally in the sense ‘travel on an escalator’. Escalator was originally a trade name for a moving stairway built in 1900 by the Otis Elevator Company for passengers of the Manhattan Elevated Railway. But the word came from escalade, borrowed from French and defined by John Florio in 1598 as a ‘scaling of a wall with ladders’, militarily. After an escalation, it’s hard to climb down.
In days of war, we need trifles: Mezzogiorno reviewed
Mezzogiorno is a very serious, golden Italian restaurant inside the Corinthia London Hotel on Northumberland Avenue. Restaurants are increasingly gold these days, as if for a crocodile of Scrooge McDucks trooping through the wreckage of liberalism looking for money, nuts and guns. It follows the trajectory of my beloved Raffles at the OWO [Old War Office] round the corner. What was once a Ministry of Defence building – though formerly a hotel – is now a (quite good) pizza joint. When the time comes, I hope the drones know.
Ignore the lie that gold restaurants serve tiny portions for tiny people. These are vast
Mezzogiorno is by the gifted Francesco Mazzei, previously of Sartoria in Savile Row. Here, because this is an age in denial about hierarchy– ha! – the front of Mezzogiorno is fitted out as an idealised Calabrianfarm kitchen, or shop. Inevitably I think of the Hampstead farmers’ market, which should be called They Saw You Coming. There is a long open kitchen, the inevitable chef’s table for those who want to sit in what is essentially a passageway and name themselves VIPs, and a cabinet containing pasta so pristine it looks like Lego.
Beyond this is the real Mezzogiorno: the dining room. I name it understated compared only to the neighbouring bar, which is, in the spirit of this age, a huge diamond selling mocktails; compared to anything else it is not. The room is huge, the walls are pale, the floors are wood; there are mirrors, of course, for the Instagram class, who are overrepresented here – as the Quakerati are underrepresented – and linen screens. It’s the Dunhill aesthetic at its tinny heart: a universe in a rich man’s pocket. The only odd note is the light fittings, which are blackened and obscure.
In a city increasingly given to Italian and American food – gangsterism is fashionable, though we call it oligarchy now – this is something special: dense, spiced cuisine leaning to seafood, which is, for the most part, perfect. Ignore the lie that gold restaurants serve tiny portions for tiny people. These are vast. The bread is served with Francesco’s mother’s olive oil, which is framed as a question by a waitress wearing rustic wear, though possibly by Gucci: do you want Francesco’s mother’s olive oil? Yes, we say, wondering if anyone says no.
Perhaps I should not have ordered antipasti – essentially a picnic – but I am a Jew, and I am increasingly drawn to food designed for running away. Passover matzah is the heavily caveated ideal of this genre but – and this is ever the scream of the Diaspora Jew – Francesco Mazzei’s antipasti is better. By the time we have eaten coarse salami from Naples (£9), capocollo (£6) and bruschetta al pomodoro (£6, so less than Pret) we are already full, but we had a Yorkshire pecorino (£12) on the side. Does anyone reach four courses here?
They can try. The pasta is glorious. Ricotta and burrata-filled tortelli with butter and sage (£19) is beautiful to look at, and touch. Some will think of pillows, others silk, but we are definitely in soft furnishings. Carbonara with short rigatoni and guanciale (£19) is fabulous, and as porky as I could dream.
We don’t have space for more. And yet when the waitress comes with a communal dish of tiramisu – they do this at Blacklock, and I love it – and hurls a vast portion on my plate (£12) in a motion that feels vaguely like a rugby try, I collapse to it. The philosophers are clear. In days of war, we need trifles.
How to make the perfect 15-minute chocolate mousse
There’s an inherent pleasure in having something by heart. Poetry at school. Lines in plays. Song lyrics. The things that stick tend to be those that we had by rote when we were young. We get out of the habit, and our gears don’t move as smoothly.
When I was at pâtisserie school, we were expected to memorise countless different base recipes – crème pâtissière, brioche, pâte brisée, pâte sablé, pâte sucrée – and our termly theory exams required us to regurgitate these formulae. I spent hours learning the ratios and the quantities, the steps and techniques, convinced I would have them down pat for evermore. But, like the Spanish GCSE I took in six months, the Shakespeare quotations I learnt for finals, or instructions to repressurise my boiler, once the critical moment was over, they flew from my head.
That doesn’t stop me trying – it just means that getting something to stick requires true effort now. When you do successfully get recipes by heart, it frees you; you can get on with the pleasurable bit of cooking without constant nervous reference to books. This is just one of the reasons I love chocolate mousse. It is the simplest and most scalable of puddings. For each person, use one egg, 30g of dark chocolate and a teaspoon of sugar. Even I can remember that.
This chocolate mousse has other virtues, too. Recipe writers often pitch their dishes as being speedy, luring you in with promises of meals on the table in 30 minutes, or a five-minute cake baked in a mug. Most take five times longer than advertised. Well, I timed myself making this pudding. Including melting the chocolate and digging about in a cupboard to find a suitable receptacle, it took nine minutes from the very beginning to it being in the fridge. Nine minutes! I can’t think of another pudding I can prepare as quickly – even the most bog-standard crumble is 15 before I shove it in the oven.
There is one potential hurdle – isn’t there always? – in the assembly. If you’re making a classic chocolate mousse which folds whisked egg white into an egg yolk and chocolate emulsion, as we are here, you need to walk the tightrope of thoroughly combining the two without knocking all the air out of the damn thing. Too cautious and you’ll end up with pale little streaks of unincorporated egg white. Too robust and the result is dense, ganache-like – delicious, but not a mousse as we know it.
There are, thankfully, two easy solutions here. First of all, do not whip the egg whites beyond soft peaks. This keeps them pliable, not stiff, and much easier to incorporate. Secondly, once you have melted the chocolate, stir through three tablespoons of very hot water; it might look like the whole thing’s going to seize, but keep stirring and you’ll get a water ganache that is significantly easier to stir into the egg yolks. These two tricks then make that final, crucial folding stage child’s play.
Like all the best puddings, there is no end of ways to tweak or customise the dish to your particular fancies. A scant teaspoon of ground cardamom or a couple of shots of espresso or bourbon or dark rum will transform it. Crumbled halva or shards of honey-comb, finely diced crystallised ginger or smashed amaretti biscuits all bring contrasts of texture as well as flavour. Sometimes it’s hard to see beyond salted caramel – hot, drizzled from the pan, or cold, in big dollops. Hot-pink forced rhubarb, poached for as short a time as possible, is possibly the prettiest accompaniment. If you’re more chic than I am, then the only real answer is a drizzle of really good olive oil and a scattering of flaky salt. I served this iteration with softly whipped cream (truly, always a winner with chocolate mousse) and a generous spoonful of boozy morello cherries.
Including melting the chocolate and digging about for a receptacle, this mousse took nine minutes to make
However you choose to flavour or adorn your mousse, I’m going to insist on one thing: serve it family-style. I used to make mine in little individual ramekins that bumped up against each other in the fridge. But now I find myself reaching for a trifle bowl or a big serving dish. Big puddings are more inviting, they’re more fun; they whisper second helpings, and create a slower end to a meal. Chocolate mousse is a pudding over which everyone should linger.
Serves: 6
Hands-on time: 10 minutes
Chilling time: 4 hours
- 6 medium eggs
- 180g chocolate (at least 70 per cent cocoa)
- 30g dark brown sugar
- ½ tsp salt
- Melt the chocolate in a bain marie or in the microwave. Add three tablespoons of very hot water to the melted chocolate, and stir until it is incorporated – if it looks like the chocolate is seizing, just keep stirring.
- Separate the eggs carefully, and stir the yolks into the chocolate along with the salt. Whisk the egg whites until they reach soft peaks, then swiftly whisk in the sugar.
- Take a third of the whisked egg whites, and stir thoroughly into the chocolate mixture. Then take a second third of the egg whites and fold that gently in too; a large metal spoon or a very large spatula makes this much easier. Fold in the final third in the same manner.
- Spoon the mousse into a large serving bowl, smoothing the surface lightly. Refrigerate for four hours.
Dear Mary: how can I get my snobby mother to accept a live-in carer?
Q. I have a meeting scheduled with a possible business associate who asked me to buy a certain book on financial management and read it beforehand. He made a voice call last week to check whether I had got the book and, because I was actually near a bookshop, I lied and said yes. I headed for the bookshop but then got distracted. I have now forgotten both the name of the author and the title. We have no crossover friends. Help, Mary!
– Name and address withheld
A. You can mitigate your inadequacy by buying a copy of Simple But Not Easy by Richard Oldfield, the supreme book on investment. Read this thoroughly and absorb. Immediately on entering the meeting bamboozle your potential associate by splurging out your key ‘takeaways’ from it. Since these are likely to be better than any contained in the book he has recommended, if he presses you for an answer as to whether you have read it or not, assert authority by staring him in the eye and replying: ‘Up to a point, Lord Copper.’ Leave him to draw his own conclusions. At least you will have shown that you have put effort in.
Q. My new 19-year-old assistant drove me in her car into our local market town where I was going to do various shopping chores. She parked in a side street with a 30-minute ‘free’ limit, but waved away my concerns about the fact that we would be longer than half an hour, saying confident words to the effect of: ‘The warden never does his rounds this early.’ However, when we returned to the car he was in the process of giving us a ticket for £60. To my surprise she just handed the ticket to me without apology. I feel it is her responsibility, not mine. Can you adjudicate? She is not a trustafarian so cannot really afford the £60.
– G.C.C., Northants
A. Your assistant must atone for her crimes – for her own sake – and she must pay the fine. However, you can make the punishment more manageable by finding a subtle way of over-paying her to the tune of £60 for some extra pop-up work she can do for you.
Q. My 96-year-old mother is the most terrific snob and will not allow me to arrange live-in carers to look after her. Money is not an issue. We are at our wits’ end. What should I do?
– J.B., Wells, Somerset
A. Why not take a tip from another Spectator reader who described the live-in carers he arranged for his snobbish mother as ‘live-in servants’. The mother is more than happy and loves telephoning friends to say: ‘Thank goodness I now have live-in servants.’
Arsenal’s boy wonder is the future of English football
It certainly never happened to me when I was a lad – even after a particularly insightful essay on the causes of the English Civil War – but there’s a remarkable TikTok film purportedly showing Max Dowman, the Arsenal boy wonder, arriving at school on Monday (don’t forget he’s still only 16), and being applauded to the rafters by pupils and staff. It might of course be AI nonsense, but if it’s not true, it should be. Dowman has long been talked about for his extraordinary ability, and he finally burst into the public’s mind on Saturday with 23 minutes as a substitute in Arsenal’s nervy 2-0 win over Everton. Nervy, that is, until Dowman came on.
His balance is sublime, he seems to glide over the pitch and he has a staggering footballing brain. His brilliant pass into the penalty area baffled Jordan Pickford and allowed Viktor Gyokeres to score Arsenal’s first goal. Then, with Pickford up in the Arsenal box for a 96th-minute corner, Dowman picked up the loose ball, put Vitaliy Mykolenko, a terrifying defender, on the floor, before beating the experienced Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall as if he wasn’t there.
Next, young Max – who still can’t change with his team-mates because of safeguarding requirements – set off through the wide open spaces of the Emirates to slot the second goal, untroubled, into an empty net. Arsenal will never be the most popular of teams, but Dowmania might go some way to shift the needle.
Needless to say, there’s a long list of young talents who’ve failed to fulfil their potential. Jadon Sancho, for example, was once the next big thing but now he warms the bench for Aston Villa, on loan from Manchester United. Clearly Mikel Arteta and Arsenal will be doing all they can to make sure that doesn’t happen to Dowman.
Meanwhile, might he even make England’s World Cup squad? It’s almost certainly too early, but he looked a damn sight more grown-up than almost anyone else on the pitch this weekend.
Aged 22, the English cricketer Jacob Bethell is another young star with seemingly limitless earning potential. He’s the real deal, who gives the impression of having just a bit more time than anyone else to play his shots.
T20 cricket can often be immeasurably tedious, with one side getting 160-180 and the other side either chasing it down or not. Yet everyone seems to love it and it’s where the big rupees are. Occasionally, though, it throws up a miracle and the India-England semi-final in the recent World Cup was one of the best games of cricket in any format that most of us can remember, thanks largely to Bethell’s flawless 105.
At 16, Arsenal’s boy wonder Max Dowman still can’t change with his team-mates because of safeguarding requirements
My anxiety about Bethell is that so many white ball franchises all over the world are willing to hurl huge amounts of money at him that he’ll burn out too young. Bethell’s coming IPL earnings with Bangalore are around a quarter of a million quid; his central Test contract with England is worth well over £200,000 plus match fees. The Hundred has now turned into a vast money-pit, and Bethell’s original £30,000 contract with Birmingham Phoenix has been upgraded to around £340,000 (quite a pay increase). Bethell also turns out in South Africa’s SA20 for Paarl Royals. You just hope that his family and advisers are making sure this luminescent talent doesn’t simply implode.
Who knows what Jim Laker would have thought of it as he drove quietly home after taking 19 Australian wickets in a Test match, but modern cricket has become a goldmine. And not only for men: the huge Hundred contract for Dani Gibson (£190,000) puts her among the highest-paid sportswomen in the country. So if your daughter shows promise, forget about university – take her down the nets.
The Iran war won’t help Russia defeat Ukraine
For Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump is the gift that keeps on giving. Just as Moscow was tiring of the American president’s assurances that he could strong-arm Volodymyr Zelensky into accepting Russia’s terms for peace in Ukraine, the US-Israeli intervention in Iran caused a spike in the oil price. This has given Russia the chance to supply more oil to the global market and boost its flagging budget revenues.
On balance, the war in the Middle East is set to bring significant benefits for Russia, but they will not be enough to bring about Putin’s most urgent desire: the defeat of Ukraine. Of course, the Russian president can bask in the glory of Russia being recognised by the United States as an indispensable energy superpower. He can also relish the spectacle of Washington’s ties with Europe fraying further as the European allies refuse to heed Trump’s call to join the US in sending naval forces to keep the Strait of Hormuz open.
Then there is the added bonus that, facing competition from the US’s Middle Eastern allies, Ukraine will struggle to receive further deliveries of Patriot interceptor missiles. These have been its best defence against Russia’s devastating ballistic missile attacks on its critical infrastructure over the winter. The Kremlin can also see that it will be even harder for Ukraine’s European allies to keep supporting the country economically when they need to shield the vulnerable parts of their own populations from high energy prices.
Ukraine has proved to be a much tougher nut to crack than Putin ever imagined
The benefits of the war in Iran for the Russian economy are also undeniable. Before Trump’s intervention, Russian oil was trading at a substantial discount to global prices because of sanctions. That discount has quickly disappeared, and Russian oil is now being sold at higher prices than Middle Eastern oil. An increase of $10 (£7.50) per barrel in the price of export oil will additionally bring the Russian budget between $1.1 billion (£830 million) and $1.2 billion (£900 billion) per month.
This is welcome news for the Kremlin. Falling revenues as a result of lower energy prices and an economic slowdown were becoming an increasing source of concern as the war in Ukraine dragged on and the long-term effects of western sanctions made themselves increasingly felt. Russia’s finance ministry had recently been preparing other government departments for a 10 per cent budget cut for what it called euphemistically ‘non-sensitive’ expenditure – in other words, excluding funding for the war in Ukraine and social spending.
Economic ties with China have played a vitally important role in stabilising the Russian economy and keeping the military industry functioning. Yet China shows no interest in investing in Russia and has not replaced European finance, Russia’s traditional source of investment capital.
The Kremlin does, however, have reason to hope that the spectre of prolonged instability in the Persian Gulf might encourage China to return to discussions with Russia on the Power of Siberia 2 pipeline project that have stalled. Exporting another 50 billion cubic metres of natural gas beyond the current annual volume of 38 billion cubic metres would partially compensate Russia’s lost sales to Europe as a result of its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Last year, only 18 billion cubic metres of Russian gas were delivered to Europe compared to more than 180 billion in 2019.
Despite these noteworthy gains, though, the Kremlin understands that caution is appropriate for several reasons. First, the war in Iran may be over quickly and oil prices may fall. They may not fall to February’s levels, but the budgetary boost to the Kremlin’s coffers might be far more modest than hoped.
Secondly, a long war leading to oil prices over $120 (£90) would trigger a global recession and destroy demand, effectively wiping out price gains and reducing Russia’s importance for the US and China. With Trump distracted, there is also less chance that Putin can use him as a lever to persuade Volodymyr Zelensky to sue for peace.
Lastly is the fact that Ukraine continues to demonstrate a remarkable determination to fight. This is despite the terrible destruction inflicted on its energy infrastructure over the winter and the resulting considerable hardship for the population at large.
For well over a year, Putin has been claiming that the Russian army holds the strategic advantage along the entire front in Ukraine and that its advance is unstoppable. This has set expectations of victory that remain far from fulfilled. Despite the greater size of its economy and its population, Russia has so far not been able to bring its superior resources to bear or sap Ukraine’s will to fight.
On the battlefield, the Ukrainians have recently gained an advantage in low-altitude drone operations. They have increased their medium-range drone and missile strikes which are destroying Russian air defences and preparations for the Russian army’s spring-summer offensive. The Ukrainians believe that disrupting the summer offensive can seriously damage the Russian army’s offensive capabilities and force Putin to stop the fighting.
The Ukrainian strategy is to thwart Moscow’s aggression by making the war futile. Strategists in Kyiv believe that the longer the relative stalemate continues, the more questions will be asked in Russia about the purpose of the war. At one level, the argument is convincing. In March 2022, Russia controlled 27 per cent of Ukraine’s territory. Four years later, they hold just 19.4 per cent. Last year, Putin’s army took 1.5 per cent of Ukrainian territory at a cost of one million casualties. Yet, in Russia’s increasingly repressive environment, there are for now no obvious signs of disagreement with the Kremlin’s line.
Having survived the winter and resisted Trump’s pressure, the Ukrainians have felt more confident than in recent months about their ability to fight Russia to a standstill. The Ukrainian army retook significant amounts of territory in February, more than cancelling out Moscow’s territorial gains the same month.
Kyiv knows that the Kremlin fears announcing another partial mobilisation because it is the main source of anxiety for Russian society. When last attempted in the autumn of 2022, it led to around one million Russians leaving the country, including many of its best and brightest.
Ukraine has proved to be a much tougher nut to crack than Putin ever imagined. True, he is now likely to profit from short-term budget relief and weakened Ukrainian air defences while Kyiv seeks alternative ways to protect its skies in the absence of munitions diverted to American allies in the Middle East. But this will not be enough to tip the balance and ensure the defeat of Ukraine.
Trump’s misadventure in the Middle East resembles Putin’s in Ukraine. Poor planning and faulty assessments of the opponent invariably lead to disastrous outcomes. In both cases, no deus ex machina beckons.
The Battle for Britain | 21 March 2026
The perils of London: a beginner’s guide
Angus Colwell has narrated this article for you to listen to.
An interesting new perspective on London is doing the rounds. Our capital city is being advertised as a paradise. London, it seems, is suddenly a place where every building is a Wren, where every sunset is a Turner, where every neighbourhood is Notting Hill. The sentiment has even got a name – ‘Londonmaxxing’. It’s been invented by tech accounts on X who got excited by the long queues at AI events run by Vercel earlier this month. There has also been speculation that a disgruntled-with-Trump Anthropic could move to London.
As much as I love London, like any true sceptical Londoner, I suspect bollocks. Look at the map by our resident artist J.G. Fox. Anyone considering the move should in fact be sniffer dog-aware of a multiplicity of perils. Those of us living here will already be familiar with them, but they might startle a novice.
In Camden market, you can hardly move for 15-year-olds scoring their first bag of weed
Let’s start in King’s Cross, where the tech bros would likely be working. The number of fentanyl-zonked gentlemen outside the station may make anyone from San Francisco feel at home, but it does make a trip home from the excellent local pubs a rather ‘interesting’ experience.
To the north, there’s Camden market, where you can hardly move for 15-year-olds scoring their first bag of weed. There’s a risk, too, of encountering Britain’s remaining goths. Refuge might be found further north-west on Hampstead Heath, but don’t expect to have a quiet walk. Instead, observe the Passchendaele-like mudbaths on some terrible dates. And any excitement about seeing Dua Lipa or Taylor Swift’s ex Joe Alwyn walking around is cancelled out by the prospect of spotting Alastair Campbell in the lido.
To the east, where the bros would probably set up home, there are other dangers. Finsbury Park may have some good pubs, but it also has Jeremy Corbyn. It’s home as well to hundreds of stolen phones, nicked from the centre of town, ferried up on the Victoria line, and hidden in the back of shops.
Heading east, there’s London Fields, where the rite of passage is to smile and pretend the £13 you spent on a Dusty Knuckle focaccia sandwich was worth it. The area also threatens you with Charli XCX. A fascinating prospect awaits further south in Tower Hamlets, where Lutfur Rahman’s borough testifies to the Olde English tradition of corruption with some aplomb. You could then go west into the City, where the hiccupping stockbrokers of the 1980s have been replaced by proteinmaxxers called Miles who sleep in their gilets.
To Bloomsbury, where a run through the gauntlet of SOAS students protesting against, well, only one thing really, will get you over to Oxford Street. There, rickshaws ferry fat families of tourists around to the sound of ‘Despacito’ played at 130 decibels. The money-laundering candy shops don’t even try to hide what they’re up to.
South of there, Mayfair is risky: steer clear of 5 Hertford Street, for fear of encountering Liz Truss. In South Kensington, the French are aggressively French. Beware, too, the school trip.
As you journey south, the areas get more duplicitous: Clapham Common may look nice, but it has a fourth-year-of-Durham energy, which means that anyone living there in their thirties must be treated with extreme suspicion. There are also a lot of Australians.
Barnes is London’s prettiest area – such a lovely pond – but watch out for Gary Lineker, or even worse, the smarmy Stanley Tucci whispering in your ear that ‘Italian cooking is the simple things, done well’.
Anything else south of the river can be rejected outright. It’s just roundabouts and people shouting at each other.
So there you go. To be fair, I must admit that this doubles up as a covert operation to keep the San Francisco drips away, and stop them from importing their matcha, their therapy-speak, their rocket emojis, their veganism, their cold plunges, their polycules, their ayahuasca and ketamine macrodosing, and their weird belief that having sex with your dog is all right.
But whether it’s Rolex pinchers or £8 coffees, tech bros should, to use their language, be bullish with caution.
Download a large-scale version of the map here. You can also purchase 1 of 50 limited edition prints of the map here, each signed and numbered by the artist.
Louis Theroux needs to make a positive case for masculinity
I’ve always had a soft spot for Louis Theroux. I wouldn’t call him a friend, exactly, but I’ve known him for about 40 years. We started our journalistic careers at the same time and would frequently bump into each other at parties. He’s intelligent and funny and, in person, doesn’t answer every question with a question or pretend to be puzzled when he’s evidently long made up his mind. The passive–aggressive ‘just asking questions’ routine is, thankfully, confined to his TV appearances. By this I mean he has no hesitation in telling me I’m being ‘unbelievably stupid’ – which, because we disagree about politics, is quite often. But he’s a QPR fan so I can forgive these outbursts.
His latest documentary, Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere, is an entertaining and at times disturbing watch. His diffident approach to drawing out these male social-media stars seems to throw them off balance. They sense he’s out to ‘rip’ them, not least because his reputation precedes him, but can’t work out how. They’re used to direct confrontation, expecting him to ‘come at them’, rather than to ask apparently innocent questions about their relationship with their mothers. They don’t realise he’s giving them an opportunity to condemn themselves out of their own mouths – so of course they happily oblige.
Turns out, they’re a pretty unsavoury lot. They brag about how much money they’ve made from unsuspecting fanboys who think that signing up to one of their online courses will lead to earning thousands and having multiple sexual partners. In reality, Louis discovers these fans are being fleeced. When he gently questions the ‘influencers’ about this, not to mention the young women they ‘manage’ on OnlyFans, they become defensive, claiming it’s a dog-eat-dog world where you’re either an ‘apex predator’ or a ‘loser’. This is the excuse for corruption down the ages: the game is rigged, so don’t blame us for breaking the rules.
When we first meet these self-described ‘alphas’, they appear more sad than sinister, desperately trying to create the illusion that they have billionaire lifestyles when the reality is more sofa beds and takeaways. If they’re making money, they don’t have time to spend it because they’re too busy recording every aspect of their lives on their phones in the hope of posting something that goes viral. They claim to have docile girlfriends who embrace ‘one-sided monogamy’, but their efforts to ‘drop game’ on female tourists in Marbella seem comically hopeless. Louis says in a voice-over that they’re trying to compensate for shortcomings in other areas of their lives, and they certainly give off small-dick energy.
Just when you think you’ve got a handle on these lowlifes, Louis peels away another layer and reveals their nasty core. In one scene, a ‘content creator’ and his hangers-on disappear to confront a suspected paedophile. We’re not told what evidence they’ve assembled, if any. They then set about him like wild dogs, although we don’t get to see this, just Louis’s appalled reaction as he watches it on his phone. It’s shocking to see how far they’ll go to create viral content, like something in a dystopian sci-fi movie.
When we first meet these self-described ‘alphas’ they appear more sad than sinister
As Louis probes his subjects about their worldview, they also turn out to be raging anti-Semites. One tells him the world is run by a cabal of Satanists with the Rothschilds at its heart. Louis got into trouble recently for a podcast in which he failed to criticise Bob Vylan about his ‘Death to the IDF’ chant. But here he drops his guileless façade and tells these basement-dwellers they’re talking bollocks.
Inside the Manosphere isn’t without its faults. Louis shows selfies these braggarts have taken with Donald Trump and laps up their stories of how close they are to the US President’s inner sanctum. For once, the credulousness isn’t an act. He wants to believe it – wants to depict Trump as a product of this toxic universe – so his critical faculties desert him. Louis can be un-believably stupid about politics too.
The film would also have benefited from a bit more self-reflection. Yes, these ‘influencers’ are exhibit A in the case for banning under-16s from social media. But they’re filling a vacuum created by the unwillingness of grown-up, well-adjusted men with big media platforms – men like Louis – to make a positive case for masculinity. Successive generations of influential men have allowed the feminist demonisation of half the human race to go unchallenged, so is it any wonder aggrieved adolescent boys are turning to the manosphere? If you want them to reject these false prophets, it’s not enough to expose them – and Louis does a superb job of that. You have to offer something better.
Which age group is most at risk of meningitis?
Churchill insurance
There was outrage that Winston Churchill is to be dumped from the £5 note in favour of wildlife. But was Churchill actually a good example with money? Shortly after he became prime minister in May 1940, he was faced with two crises: the capitulation of France to the invading German forces and the prospect of personal bankruptcy. He had an overdraft of £5,602 (£274,000 in today’s money), while his income from writing was to diminish as a result of his taking high office. The situation was only resolved when businessman Sir Henry Strakosch made an anonymous donation of £5,000, paid via his business partner – and Churchill’s friend – Brendan Bracken. It was one of several occasions when Churchill had to be bailed out by friends.
Crude calculation
The Strait of Hormuz is not alone in being a narrow waterway used as a vital route by oil tankers. How does it compare?
Malacca Strait (between Malaysia and Indonesia) 23m barrels per day
Straits of Hormuz 21m (in normal times)
Suez Canal 5m
Bab al Mandeb Strait 4m
Bosphorus 3.5m
Panama Canal 2.2m
Catching it
An outbreak of meningitis believed to have spread from inside a Canterbury nightclub killed a student and a school pupil. In 2024/25 there were 378 confirmed cases of the disease and 31 deaths – following a general downwards trend from a peak of 2,595 cases in 1999/2000. Which age group is most at risk? (Cases in 2024/25)
Under 1 39
1-4 30
5-9 26
10-14 19
15-19 65
20-24 30
25-44 59
45-64 57
65+ 53
About 55% of cases were among under-25s.
UK Health Security Agency
Let’s bounce
Who holds an SIA licence, permitting them to work as a security guard or nightclub bouncer in the UK?
– There are 457,393 active licences. Some 407,138 are currently held by men and 50,255 by women.
– 242,037, just over half, are UK citizens.
– The next most common nationalities are Pakistani (73,043), Nigerian (28,774) and Indian (22,788).
– The most common age is 26, although some are remarkably elderly. 272 are aged over 80, 9 over 90 and 1 is aged 100.
Security Industry Authority
The latest Guardian attack on Nigel Farage is desperate stuff
Some years ago I was approached by someone from a platform called ‘Cameo’. Not all Spectator readers will have heard of this platform, and I hadn’t either. As a result I listened to their pitch with the same amount of scepticism I might reserve for an email addressed to me as ‘Dear Beloved’, revealing that a distant relative had left me a share in a Nigerian diamond mine, and that if only I sent a quick cash deposit the diamonds would start flowing in my direction.
I was informed that Cameo was a platform where I could make ‘easy money’. Being part-Scottish, I do not believe that there is any such thing. In fact I find the whole idea of easy money a contradiction in terms. All money is hard to come by and once gained – if gained – it should be swiftly hidden in a pillowcase or mattress.
I was pretty sure that if anyone asked for a personalised video from me, it would turn out to be Rod Liddle
Anyway, the point with Cameo is that it turned out to be a platform through which celebrities (and this is where I also became suspicious) are paid to record tailor-made video messages for members of the public for around a hundred quid a pop. ‘Happy birthday Marjorie, from your favourite columnist’ type stuff. I was promised that if I agreed to the arrangement I could knock off a few such videos every morning without even leaving the house, then kick up my feet for the rest of the day, drinking daiquiris in bed or the like.
Absolutely nothing in this was appealing and so I declined. First of all, because I didn’t believe that anyone would want a personalised video from me, however badly their life might be going. Secondly, because something about the enterprise made me feel a bit icky. And thirdly because I felt sure that the whole thing would prove to be a hostage to fortune. I was pretty sure that if anyone did ask for a personalised video from me for their birthday, wedding night or bar mitzvah, then it would turn out to be Rod Liddle or another colleague, operating under a pseudonym, only in order to rip into me for the rest of time for being such a cheap tart.
I suppose that folded into this last concern was the possibility I would end up sending a birthday greeting to someone who would turn out to be a serial killer or well-known sex offender. Not that this is who I imagine my average reader to be, you understand, but because you just never know. Any benefits seemed to me to be outweighed by the considerable potential negatives.
In general, Nigel Farage seems to me to be a man of pretty sound judgment. But he obviously does not share my intensely suspicious, not to say gloomy, Celtic nature. And so it seems that when he was out of the front line of British politics, Farage did indeed sign up to do personalised videos for Cameo. He appears to have been rather good at it, as I would have expected him to be. And in fact I can imagine a certain type of person who would have been thrilled to get a personalised video of Nigel raising a pint for their friend’s birthday or something.
But now the Guardian newspaper has tried to use this interregnum in Farage’s career to do a number on him of the type I had feared for myself. Some fearless – and presumably bored – Guardian journalists have trawled through a remarkable 4,366 clips that the Reform UK leader has made for Cameo since joining the platform in 2021. The short videos he has sent fans and supporters have included personalised messages wishing people a happy birthday, happy Christmas or even (and I do think this a bit odd) a happy Valentine’s Day.
Of course, the Guardian being the Guardian, they trawled through all of these innocuous greetings in the hope that at least some of them would be videos celebrating Hitler’s birthday, mourning the German defeat at Stalingrad, or sending Valentine’s Day good wishes to David Irving.
Unfortunately for the journalists, they found no such thing. It has long been my belief that if Nigel Farage were some kind of closeted Hitler-ite, we really would have known about it by now. But that doesn’t mean that the Guardian types will ever stop trying to find something that is not there.
And so they have managed to find one video in which Farage makes a very slight and inoffensive reference to a woman’s breasts, another which turned out to have been used by a group in Canada whose activities Farage was clearly not aware of, and a third in which he makes a video for a man called ‘Ben’, whose family described their relative as a longtime Reform member. Ben turns out to have been among those people thrown in prison after the summer riots in 2024. The Guardian appears keen to suggest that by sending a message to ‘Ben’, Farage was somehow endorsing illegal rioting.
What were the incriminating words that Farage used in speaking to Ben? They included these: ‘All I can say is keep your head up, keep believing in the right things, keep acting in the right way.’ It’s not quite the Beer Hall Putsch is it? In other videos, Farage has made what academic consultants to the Guardian assure us are beyond-the-pale ‘far-right’ memes, such as statements that illegal migrants should not be allowed to stay in the UK. Because I am sure we can all agree that the only acceptable thing to say on the question of illegal migrants is that everybody should be allowed to stay.
Finally, there is also a clip where Farage appears to have become irritated with the technology he is using and swears. Or, as the article puts it, it shows ‘a side to him that contrasts with his amiable public persona’. I am sure that Guardian journalists only ever say sweet things when they have a problem with their iPhone.
In any case, it is all rather desperate stuff. Farage has done nothing wrong in any of these videos. Yet his critics will keep on digging. In the meantime I feel vindicated in my own intensely suspicious attitudes towards Cameo – and, indeed, towards strangers in general.
The hidden truth about our failing universities
Is it worth going to university? Since 1999, when Tony Blair declared higher education the answer to all society’s problems, it has been a question Britain prefers not to ask. Every September, hundreds of thousands of school leavers pack their bags, wait for their maintenance loan to arrive and head off to their chosen city to drink, go clubbing and occasionally hand in an essay.
Does this well-trodden path leave young people better off? It’s almost impossible to find out, not because the information isn’t available but because the government won’t let us see it. The Department for Education knows very well what graduates can expect when they start looking for work. The Longitudinal Education Outcomes (LEO) database, produced by the DfE, contains extensive data on labour market outcomes for students leaving university. It is described as ‘a unique source of information, with the potential to provide transformative insight and evidence on the long-term employment outcomes and educational pathways of around 39 million individuals’.
So you might think it would be quite helpful if the rest of us could see it. But access to LEO data is only granted to ‘approved third party researchers’. If you want to know what’s happening in our universities, you must be a ‘full credited UK statistics authority’ able to prove ‘clear public benefit’ for your work. So no chance for students hoping to avoid wasting 50 grand.
Lawrence Newport, whose campaign group Looking For Growth is calling for the release of LEO data, thinks that ‘the government is hiding behind easily resolved concerns about anonymity’ and allowing universities to sell a bad product. As a former academic at Royal Holloway, University of London, he adds that he has been ‘directly told by people in admissions at universities that entry requirements are a marketing scam’ used to foster an air of credibility for courses with no corresponding academic rigour. Sadly, as with data about education outcomes, there is almost no information on the A-level grades attained by successful university applicants.
Newport also fears that many universities hide behind the fact league tables count further study alongside employment, allowing them to funnel students through endless education (and debt) to avoid facing the real-world irrelevance of what they’ve learned.
Despite the government’s obstinance, there are ways of identifying universities and courses that are failing students. While it’s hard to get detailed data, some third-party sites such as Discover University, which uses LEO data, paint a grim picture.
Unsurprisingly, creative students have the worst post-university outcomes. The average graduate with a BA in professional acting at Drama Studio London isn’t even breaking minimum wage, with earnings of £18,500 three years on; only 30 per cent are using skills they learnt during their studies. Meanwhile, those who study film production at Southampton Solent University bring in just £24,000 on average 15 months after graduating.
Some universities seem to be actively harming students’ chances of success. An Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) and DfE report found that women graduating from the University of Bolton, now renamed the University of Greater Manchester, earn around 10 per cent less by the age of 29 than women who didn’t attend university at all. Further analysis from the IFS suggests that one in five students who go to university will earn less than their counterparts who didn’t.
Attending a Russell Group University provides no insurance against poor outcomes, either. Three years after completing a sociology degree at the University of Glasgow, the average graduate is earning just £23,000. Even the Oxbridge name won’t save you. Fine arts graduates from Oxford earn £26,000 15 months after leaving, while only 30 per cent of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic graduates from Cambridge are working 15 months after graduation.
These students are not paying a penny of their loan back each year because their income is below the threshold. In fact, only 32 per cent of the recent cohort who took out a loan will ever pay off the whole thing. The system was designed with the assumption that university would bring with it a ‘graduate premium’. In many cases, until a graduate earns £66,000 a year, the interest on their debt will outstrip payments made. Cumulatively, students owe a quarter of a trillion pounds to the Student Loan Company.
When a graduate’s media studies career leaves them pulling pints in the local pub, the debt they never pay off falls on the government’s books. It won’t be universities held financially liable, it will be the taxpayer.
Letters: Litter is a sign of Britain’s low self-esteem
State of the nations
Sir: My spirits were raised by your stirring defence of the forthcoming royal visit to America (‘Britain’s Trump card’, 14 March). Its contemporary importance can be viewed in the light of Charles Moore’s Note (same issue) that the remaining hereditary peers have just been removed from the House of Lords. The monarch has thereby become the only person with a part in our legislature by virtue of inheritance, a situation bound to encourage those with republican instincts. Their tired old question will be resurrected: why can we not elect our head of state? The answer will be evident in pictures from the White House. The hereditary principle has provided the United Kingdom with King Charles III; unrelieved democracy has given the United States President Donald J. Trump.
Francis Bown
London E3
Testing, testing
Sir: Elizabeth Howard’s letter raises important concerns about screen time in education (14 March). Unfortunately it also contains a factual error. Ofqual has not proposed that up to 50 per cent of assessments should be conducted on screens. Our recent consultation, ‘On-screen assessment: developing a regulatory approach’, sought views on how Ofqual should approach regulating on-screen assessment – not on any specific proposal to increase its use to a set proportion of exams.
Our approach is cautious and we are mindful of the concerns raised by your correspondent. Under the proposals, the four exam boards delivering GCSEs, AS- and A-levels in England would be allowed to introduce up to two new on-screen specifications each, subject to Ofqual accreditation. The most popular subjects – those with more than 100,000 entries nationally – would not be permitted as on-screen exams at this stage. The consultation is now closed and we will publish the outcome later this year.
Sir Ian Bauckham
Chief regulator at Ofqual
Coventry, CV1 2GN
On the nose
Sir: For many years, I have felt rather sorry for myself for never having a single sneeze. Repetitive sneezing – from a minimum of a dozen to over a score – seemed an embarrassingly extreme affliction until I read of poor Patrick Webster’s ‘several hundred outbursts per day’ lasting for 35 years (‘Notes on… sneezing’, 14 March). Our modern medicalising tendency has led Revd Morris to discover he suffers from ‘misophonia’, as I have learned I suffer from ‘sternutatory spasms’. Identifying this has proved to be strangely reassuring. Let us hope that my condition never occurs during one of his sermons, should I find myself among his congregation.
Ian Mycroft
Leamington Spa, Warks
Talking rubbish
Sir: Anthony Horowitz is right – the UK has a problem with litter that other developed countries don’t have (Diary, 14 March). Here in Oxford, with a visitor footfall of seven million per annum, the city is not coping. Commercial waste is left out overnight in the city centre, encouraging vermin. Oxford is one of the leading universities in the world, but the manicured college interiors contrast with the general shabbiness of the city centre. A tourist tax would help.
I visit my daughter in Argentina every year. Even with their crazy politics Argentines make the best of things. They do not eat in the street and drop litter heedlessly. Lorries do not lose tyres and sheets of plastic in the countryside, and their drivers do not throw beer cans out of the windows. The UK’s self-esteem seems to be low, reinforced by a drip feed of negativity. Our media does not help. If it stopped denigrating our beautiful country, that might encourage us to take more pride in it.
Rosanne Bostock
Oxford
Double fault
Sir: While not passing doubt on the good faith of Sarah Ditum in her review of Dr Zoe Strimpel’s book, Good Slut: How Money, Sex and Power Set Women Free (28 February), it would seem prudent not to accuse someone of ‘endemic sloppiness’ by providing an example that is itself a sign of sloppy research to support the claim. Contrary to what Ms Ditum claims, Dr Strimpel is right about the definition and timeline of no-fault divorce. The law passed in 1969, with introduction in 1971: divorce could then be granted after two years if there was agreement between the parties, and five if not, with no ‘fault’ needed. Ms Ditum also accuses Dr Strimpel of being ‘astonishingly unaware that female evolutionary biologists exist’. Yet Dr Strimpel’s MPhil in gender studies at Cambridge and PhD in gender history at Sussex (revealed by a quick google) would suggest that, however much Ms Ditum may disagree with Dr Strimpel’s argument, the latter was not likely writing out of ‘astonishing unawareness’. One suspects rather that, having surveyed this notoriously scientifically dubious field, Dr Strimpel simply came to different conclusions about it.
Harry Jenkins
Stratford-upon-Avon
Over Tyne
Sir: Allan Mallinson writes of the later neglect of Admiral Cuthbert Collingwood (Books, 7 March). He is far from forgotten in his birthplace, where a 100ft statue stands guarding the mouth of the Tyne. We Geordies remain grateful.
Professor Rachel Dwyer
By email
Counting crows
Sir: I was surprised to be called a ‘boastful’ leftie (‘Brag race’, 14 March). It would be unbecoming for an author of a column titled Silver Spoon to be so pompous.
Finn McRedmond
MA Cantab
London N3
Inside blockaded Cuba, life is getting odder by the day
Ruaridh Nicoll has narrated this article for you to listen to.
It’s nearly two months since Donald Trump signed an executive order imposing a total oil blockade on Cuba, and life is becoming odder. At the weekend, in a down-island town called Moron, teenage kids burnt down the local Communist party headquarters. Meanwhile, here in Havana, we’re awaiting the arrival of the Irish hip-hoppers Kneecap at the head of a humanitarian relief armada carrying solar panels.
I live in a rooftop apartment. At night, it’s a good spot from which to look out over a city that once sent up music and light but is now as dark as a desert. The oil blockade, designed to either force the bankrupt Communist government into major reform or the population to rise up against them, is worsening what were already terrible blackouts. At night, I hear the sound of banging pans drifting in on the wind, residents taking to the streets to express their misery in having no fans to keep the heat and mosquitos at bay, as their food rots in useless fridges.
My car sits empty on the street. An ex-pat friend has traded his Mercedes for a ‘moto-China’, a Chinese electric bike. Another has taken to a traditional bicycle and, with his office idle, now talks joyfully about the empty highways. He disappears for days, posting images of himself clocking 113 miles in 24 hours. Great for his fitness – but also, I think, a sign of the strain.
Miguel Diaz-Canel, Cuba’s President, has finally acknowledged that talks between his country and the US are taking place, something Washington has been leaking for weeks. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has apparently been talking to Raul Rodriguez Castro, the 41-year-old grandson of Cuba’s former president Raul Castro – news of which the US hoped would cause schisms in the Cuban leadership. There’s a rumour that Rubio got the grandson’s number from a Miami-based reggaeton star and just rang him. Sandro Castro, another grandson, this time of Fidel, has been mocking this in Instagram posts, mimicking himself shouting into the phone: ‘Marco, Marco, stop calling, you’re burning my phone up.’
Cubans call Raul’s grandson ‘Raulito’, little Raul, or ‘El Cangrejo’, the crab. People love the latter term’s suggestion of creepiness, but I try not to use it because it’s due to a deformity of his hand – he was born with six fingers. Cuba is old-fashioned this way. If you are overweight, they’ll call you ‘Gordita’ (little fatty); if you have faintly Asiatic eyes you’re ‘Chino’. They also invent names when they register newborns. My mother-in-law is Yohanka, which you don’t want to shout on an English street. My favourite, though, is the quite popular Yusnavy, which could be useful if the Americans decide to go ‘kinetic’ (to use their vile euphemism). It’s adapted from ‘US navy’.
Last week, I had to go to Palm Beach, the Florida town that’s home to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate. It was a shock going from a place where people are staggering around looking for food in the bins to somewhere the dogs are groomed at $1,000 a go. Needing supplies to bring home, I took an early walk across town to the supermarket. I was wearing my Hawaiian shirt (my wife doesn’t allow me to wear it at home) and the locals looked at me as if I might attack them. On Monday Trump said of Cuba: ‘I mean, whether I free it, take it. I think I could do anything I want with it.’ Tolkien got it wrong: Mordor won’t be all dark and sooty; it will be insanely neat and everyone will be wearing Gucci.
After acknowledging the talks, President Diaz-Canel gave a long press conference detailing the actions being taken to keep the country running. A friend said: ‘I wonder if they gave announcements like this on the Titanic. “We have to go down before we can go up.”’
The Nuestra America Convoy coming to save us this week is a ‘coordinated international mobilisation to deliver humanitarian aid’. Good-hearted people are booking flights to deliver 20 tons of aid. But we have solar panels and medicine here; the problem is that few can afford them. I can actually still import a car from the US – I just can’t get any petrol. So if Kneecap came over the horizon in an oil tanker to restart the economy, I would be cheering. But they’re not. Instead they’re spending money on flights and boats to make an anti-American point. I just hope they don’t hand their donations to people associated with the Cuban government at the very moment that it begins cracking down on the teenage protestors who set fire to that office in Moron.
Of course, everyone abroad has their ideology. There are those who think that revolutionary Cuba has been bullied and brutalised for 67 years by a wicked, imperialistic United States. And there are those who think that communism never works, and that Cuba’s woes are due to a moribund central state run by authoritarian old men. But both those ideas can be true, and the one thing I can tell you is most Cubans on the island don’t care who’s to blame any more. They just want everyone’s boots off their throats. They want to breathe.
Can the special relationship survive Trump?
Since this calamitous Iran war began, there’s been endless talk in Britain about our ‘special relationship’ (often capitalised) with the United States. People who declare this relationship to be important are almost always those who also believe that, come what may in the war, we British should stand shoulder to shoulder with Donald Trump. Those, on the other hand, who think we should distance ourselves from him, tend to disparage the special relationship as unimportant.
This column therefore breaks new ground. I think the special relationship is very important. But I don’t believe we should stand shoulder to shoulder with this president. Our special relationship is with America. Mr Trump is not America. There is an America with which we should stay very close and with which our relationship is longstanding and precious. Trump represents everything that’s inimical – and corrosive – to that America.
I love the United States. I spent two years there at Yale. It’s a great country with great people. I loved the energy, the openness, the spirit of liberty and opportunity that, to me, America seemed to represent. I responded to what I believed our two nations especially shared: an iron-clad respect for the rule of law, for constitutionality and for freedom under the law.
So I want us British, sometimes jaded, sometimes tired, sometimes flagging in our confidence in the future of the West, to be able to look up to that beacon of western (and European) values, and feel a special kinship with the country that has carried the flag for the Free World. And I want Americans to see us as a nation particularly attached to our English-speaking cousins, and for them to feel a reciprocal attachment. The old world and the new, bound together by kinship, language and shared values.
Trump is a world away from all this. In less than four years he will be gone from the White House. He will not be mourned. The majority of Americans will cheer his departure. At home and abroad his second presidency will be widely seen as a disaster for western democracy, his country’s good name and the American ideal. Trump will be judged for having taken the United States into an incomprehensible war, on a personal whim, without proper forward planning and without any clear idea of what could be called victory, having been suckered by a manipulative Israeli prime minister into an engagement that suits Israel well enough – to smash up a hostile country and leave chaos in its wake – but should have no place in America’s strategy in the region.
In retrospect almost everyone will see what many are already beginning to see: a nasty, grasping and narcissistic old man with the attention span of a gnat, whose mental powers are failing and who had no idea what he was doing.
They will see that, far from being ‘strong’, Trump was weak. Strength in a statesman does not reside in braggadocio, in randomly lashing out and in fickleness. Strength resides in consistency of purpose, generosity of spirit, and the moral and mental capacity to hold to a course. Bullies are rarely strong and are typically easily bullied themselves. Trump’s dancing attendance on monsters like Vladimir Putin and twisters like Benjamin Netanyahu bears witness to that truth.
People will see, too, that his fetishising of trade tariffs did not bring the boost to the pay-packets of working people, as he had promised, and his voodoo economics was just that. They will rue his vindictive attempts to shin-kick those who declined to cooperate with him, by abusing presidential powers. And by then, the stories of his personal greed, already current, will be widely acknowledged.
Trump will not be universally despised. There may remain a hardcore of the MAGA movement who will stick to the last with their imagined hero. But this President will go down, if not in flames, then in an upswelling of disappointment and disgust among the electorate.
This President will go down, if not in flames, then in an upswelling of disappointment and disgust
Is this what we British want a special relationship with? When this capering idiot departs at last from the Oval Office, will those who preferred to keep a polite distance from his idiocies be branded as having betrayed the special relationship?
I am not naive about the United States. As with every quasi-imperial power, there have been many blemishes to its record. I know very well that the State Department doctrine that the whole hemisphere is their backyard has led to some disgraceful interventions in Central and South America, and the Caribbean; that the Vietnam war was a well-intentioned blunder; and that the less said about Iraq the better. I know how long it took for the civil rights movement to prevail, and how in some corners racism lingers.
There is undoubtedly a cruel and careless streak in the American psyche, and Trump did not come to us out of a vacuum – he enjoyed enthusiastic support from a slice of the population who know exactly what he is, and approve. And perhaps he represents a corner, more generally, of the American mind. I recognise a sliver of truth (and so would most Americans) in the mid-20th–century columnist H.L. Mencken’s prescience: ‘As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents more and more closely the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.’
But not a crackpot.
I see another America. I think of Abraham Lincoln, Benjamin Franklin, the Roosevelts, Woodrow Wilson, JFK, Bobby Kennedy, even (for all his cynicism) LBJ. I think of the America that houses the United Nations; mourned the death of Martin Luther King; shouldered the Marshall Plan after the second world war; and has been an inspiration worldwide to those who yearn for freedom. The America of the City on the Hill.
It is with this America that we should value our special relationship, and this America that, when the ghastly spasm that is Donald Trump is ended, we will honour again.
Has Rachel Reeves secured a rare victory for growth?
There’s very little to celebrate in Downing Street these days but it must have been vodka shots all round in Chancellor Rachel Reeves’s office last week when Revolut, the City’s glossiest fintech start-up, finally secured the banking licence it has been pursuing for the past five years.
Founded as a currency payments app in 2015 by two tech entrepreneurs, Russian-born Nik Storonsky and Ukrainian Vlad Yatsenko, Revolut acquired customers at an explosive rate and first sought recognition as a UK bank – able to accept deposits under the umbrella of the Financial Services Protection Scheme – in 2021. But a delay in publishing accounts because auditors could not verify almost half a billion pounds of revenue was one reason why the Bank of England took its time scrutinising Revolut’s governance and systems. This provoked invective from Storonsky about ‘extreme bureaucracy’ holding back his brilliant business and how much better ‘tech champions’ like himself are treated in the US.
While Storonsky’s thousand-yard stare met Governor Andrew Bailey’s unblinking response, Reeves took up the Revolut cause. She attended the opening of its new Canary Wharf home and told a Mansion House audience that too much regulation had become ‘a boot on the neck [of] enterprise and innovation that is the lifeblood of growth’. When she went so far as to try to broker a meeting between Revolut, the Treasury and the Bank’s Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA), however, Bailey asserted his authority and blocked her.
Now at last, after a Bank-imposed ‘mobilisation period’ (equivalent to a provisional driving licence) that lasted 20 months rather than the standard 12, Revolut can offer a full range of loans and deposit accounts with a target of reaching up to 25 million UK customers. And the PRA, coincidentally, has a new boss – Katherine Braddick, ex-Barclays and ex-Treasury – whom Reeves pointedly describes as ‘pro-business’.
Revolut sources have even started whispering about flotation on the London stock exchange, having previously favoured New York. The official line is that a listing won’t happen until at least 2028; but when it does, Revolut could join the FTSE 100 at a valuation greater than Barclays or Lloyds, and its founders will be high in the ‘rich lists’.
Is Revolut’s advance a rare victory for the Reeves growth mission? Or a red flag in a time of rising financial uncertainty? Let’s just say that in this case, City sages tend to think Bailey was right to be so cautious.
Back to the future
The Chancellor’s Mais lecture on Tuesday was a chance to make up for the nullity of her recent Spring Statement. Without a howling opposition (I was tempted) or a tight time limit, she certainly put more meat on the bone of her essentially trad-Labour credo. Her ‘modern industrial strategy’ sounded a lot like a search for ‘national champions’ from the 1960s; her cash pledges to the regions (including ‘fiscal devolution’) will have pleased the shade of John Prescott. As for her hostility to ‘passive accumulation of wealth’ by providers of capital, it was straight from Thomas Piketty. The headline was her urge for regulatory realignment with the EU. But the key refrain – the tacit nod to reality on transport, housing, energy, infrastructure and skills – was ‘much more to do’. I’ll say there is.
Water under the bridge
Thames Water, the crippled utility that still somehow manages to serve 16 million customers, may be Britain’s most unloved company. But I salute the stamina of Thames executives, multiple regulators, busloads of creditors and mysterious men from the Treasury in the long-running rescue negotiation that culminated on Monday with a ‘best and final’ offer from the London & Valley Water creditors consortium. Headlines include £10 billion of new equity and debt, a write-off of £5 billion of existing ‘senior’ debt and promises to pay Thames’s outstanding fines for leaks and pollution but not to pay dividends to new shareholders during the turnaround. Former equity holders have already been wiped out and ‘junior’ creditors will suffer the same fate.
Though rapidly running out of cash, Thames is keen to claim there’s ‘no certainty’ this new plan will be accepted. Yet after a failed earlier trawl for viable bidders, the truth is that L&VW has been the only player across the table for many months. To maintain competitive tension, Thames didn’t discourage media speculation about other potential investors such as the Hong Kong-based CK Infrastructure – which never seriously stepped up and would have been hugely controversial if it had done so. In fact the only real alternative, longed for by Labour backbenchers, was renationalisation, imposing calls on taxpayers’ funds that the Chancellor and Treasury were dreading. Best for all that L&VW’s deal gets done at last – and Thames gets back to cleaning pipes.
City bacchanalia
The City’s solemn temples are almost all gone, not dissolved as Shakespeare foretold, but transformed into palaces of self-indulgence. Long ago I interviewed the last chiefs of the fading Midland Bank in their head office close by the Bank of England. Completed in 1929, the stately building was designed by Sir Edwin ‘Ned’ Lutyens for his friend Reginald McKenna, a former Chancellor of the Exchequer who was chairman of Midland in its interwar heyday as the largest bank in the world. Empty for decades, it was transformed in 2017 into the Ned hotel and restaurant complex.
And there I happened to find myself, late on Friday after a City dinner, amid a bacchanalian throng of big-ticket drinking, dancing and (so my taxi driver informed me) oldest-profession pick-up action. Who knows what that says as an omen for financial markets, never mind City morals; but above the rock-band din, I’m sure I could hear the rattle of Ned’s and Reggie’s skeletons.