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The tragicomedy of Rachel Reeves talking about the Middle East
Rachel Reeves was in the House today, responding to the war in the Middle East. That as a statement alone has an air of innate tragicomic potential to it: like Igglepiggle responding to Spanish Flu.
Despite the gravity of the situation, it was more of what we’ve come to expect from Reeves. She did her standard park and bark in the Commons, delivering everything by means of a permanent earnest glottal stop. Like a monoglot tourist in a foreign bar, she makes the mistake of thinking that saying things loudly and slowly will somehow make them effective.
Like a monoglot tourist in a foreign bar, Reeves makes the mistake of thinking that saying things loudly and slowly will somehow make them effective
Of course, what she was saying was even worse than the way that she was saying it. She claimed to be ‘agile in responding appropriately at each moment’, which she probably thinks makes her sound like an economic Catwoman when she actually gives off the vibe of Catweazle. ‘We will be responsive and responsible’, she boasted.
Of course, for Reeves – as reality-phobic a cabinet minister as we have – the war was evidence that she had been right all along: ‘It makes our economic plan even more important’ she crowed. Yet despite graphs showing oil prices now resembling the north face of the Eiger and the atmosphere of blind panic obvious across western economies, Reeves still claimed to be the voice of prudence; all these efforts would be ‘delivered through our ironclad fiscal rules’. Given the state of defence spending that’s the closest we’re going to get to an actual ironclad I suspect.
Listening to Reeves is like playing an exceptionally disheartening game of bingo. All the old canards which the government uses to deflect discussion about their efforts were there: breakfast clubs, benefits, Liz Truss. She genuinely mentioned the phrase ‘under the last government’ than she did ‘strait of Hormuz’.
Everything adds up to Reeves being a pitiable figure, yet she always manages to snatch contempt from the jaws of empathy. Partly that’s because she is driving Britain into a miserable penury and partly because she does so whilst acting as if we’re lucky to have her as Chancellor. In a classic display of Reevesian arrogance she accused Mel Stride of being ‘out of his depth’. She fumbled over figures, she mispronounced things she’s bellowed a thousand times before. The self-appointed voice of prudence has never been so grating.
Tales of quiet intensity: The News from Dublin, by Colm Toibin, reviewed
Colm Toibin is a master of understatement, his work characterised by great emotional intelligence coupled with redoubtable restraint. This is his third anthology of stories, following Mothers and Sons (2006) and The Empty Family (2010). He fills the gaps between words – what he doesn’t say – with as much meaning as the prose.
Familiar themes emerge. There is the Irish diaspora in the US (as in Brooklyn and Long Island); the Catalan Pyrenees (the setting for ‘The Long Winter’ in Mothers and Sons); and Argentina (as in the novel The Story of the Night). Feelings of exile and being an outsider are aroused, while Catholicism still taps on the shoulders of those long lapsed.
In ‘The Journey to Galway’, a woman receives news that her son has been killed fighting for the British in the first world war. On a casual read, it is a study of the mind in the first throes of grief, as the woman searches fruitlessly for actions that might have prevented the bereavement, or mulls uselessly on the contrast between life before and after the shattering news. With some light investigation, it becomes apparent that the narrator is Lady Augusta Gregory of Coole Park, whose nephew, Sir Hugh Lane, established Dublin’s – and possibly the world’s – first public gallery of modern art.
A few of the stories are set in the past like this, but the focus is on the human interest. In ‘Summer of ’38’, a woman is faced with a figure from her earlier life whom she would rather forget. In the title story, a man whose brother is dying from tuberculosis is asked to plead with a politician for access to the first antibiotic active against the bacterium, streptomycin, isolated in 1943.
Relationships of all sorts are explored. In ‘Sleep’, a man can’t cope with the repercussions of repressed grief in his older lover. The latter’s acceptance of the bereavement brings realisation about their compatibility.
Lack of remorse is touched on in two stories. ‘A Free Man’ follows a seminarian who drops out and later serves time, but remains in denial about his vile crimes. ‘A Sum of Money’ raises unspoken questions about whether neglect, hardship and poor role models can drive a boy to theft, or whether he is inherently untrustworthy.
The quiet intensity brings deep satisfaction. As always, Toibin conjures up turbulent microcosms beneath the still, calm surface of the lake of life.
Two Tokyo misfits: Hooked, by Asako Yuzuki, reviewed
Following the enormous success of Butter’s English translation in 2024, it seemed inevitable that another of Asako Yuzuki’s novels would surface in the UK. Nairu pachi no joshikai (The Nile Perch Women’s Club), published in 2014, has now become Hooked. Billed as a literary thriller about female friendship, loneliness and obsession, it is a deeply strange, unsettling read.
The novel follows Eriko, a high-flying project manager, and Shoko, a slacker housewife blogger, who both struggle with life – or, rather, with the behaviour expected of Japanese women. Both have achieved a level of acceptance socially (Eriko in her career, Shoko in her relationship), but they find the pursuit of ‘gal pals’ a major stumbling block in their quest for the appearance of normality.
The story centres around the Japanese fish import markets, with the focus on Eriko and her task of re-establishing the Nile perch on the country’s menu. But the fish has a controversial history. Commercial breeding in Lake Victoria has forced it into the role of an invasive species, destroying much of the biomatter and leaving the lake so barren that even its own existence is threatened. The concept is rich in allegory when it comes to the perils of modern womanhood. Nile perch, like women, have been placed in unnatural conditions, leaving them no other choice but to become ‘ferocious’ – even if leads to their undoing.
Social media, too, is skewered by Yuzuki, as the ‘perfect’ exteriors presented by housewife influencers are contrasted with altogether darker female experiences. The levels of perfection required are at odds with humanity, and especially the collaborative nature of friendship. Perfection can only be achieved alone; friendships entail compromises and messiness. The quandary is that having friends is another inextricable aspect of achieving female perfection: ‘Women who weren’t relatable made people feel lonely.’
Friendship is painted as essentially inefficient (‘What was the point of scrabbling around in the gravel for the odd shining fragment?’), and trying to pursue it puts Eriko in a ‘transplanted’ environment, just like the Nile perch. She sees herself and Shoko as having fallen through the ‘intricate net of rules ensnaring Japanese women’ and having to ‘take each other’s hands here in this dark, quiet haven at the bottom of the lake’.
Female friends, then, are another invasive species. Eriko, Shoko and women more generally are unsuited to their artificially enforced environments. To use a metaphor far too crude for Yuzuki’s quiet, thoughtful, creepy prose, they are fish out of water.
James Baldwin – dogged by painful uncertainties throughout life
James Baldwin, like many American novelists before him, F. Scott Fitzgerald and John Dos Passos included, spent his formative years flitting restlessly between New York and Europe – New York being a source of fascination but also of creative burnout.
He completed his first novel, Go Tell It On the Mountain (1953), not in Harlem, where he grew up and set the book, but in a Swiss chalet owned by the family of his then boyfriend, Lucien Happersberger. As he lived and worked in Loèche-les-Bains, Baldwin reasoned that the village children who shouted ‘neger’ at him did not mean to be unkind. They were simply curious and could never have known ‘the echoes this sound raises in me’.
In Paris, when Go Tell It On the Mountain was published, Baldwin was astonished to find a parcel of inspection copies from his publisher when he dropped by the American Express office hoping to receive a cash handout sent by his family. Now he was published, but he remained penniless.
It would be a decade, and then some, before he became the public intellectual who regularly held forth about civil rights on chat shows, whose prodigious output as a journalist would have been an exceptional legacy in its own right but who kept a steady stream of novels bubbling alongside. Nicholas Boggs’s virtuosic biography charts with fine-grained detail Baldwin’s journey from Harlem, where he was born in 1924, to that hard-fought fame and subsequent emergence as a moral touchstone for continuing discussions on race.
A theme constantly returned to is how precariously balanced Baldwin’s achievements were. The distance between his completing a project and not knowing how then to proceed was slight, and he was often dogged by painful uncertainty. He never knew the identity of his biological father; and his mother Emma’s later husband, David, was emotionally abusive and coercive, always in a fury over young Jimmy’s absorption in books and his insistence on bringing his Jewish friends home. But even at this early stage the precarious balance tipped in Baldwin’s favour, as his teachers recognised an innate brilliance, took him to his first Shakespeare play and ensured that he was never short of reading matter.
He soon realised that he was attracted to boys of his age, not girls, and his first sexual encounter, aged 14 – lured into an alleyway by an older man – proved traumatic. Boggs’s subtitle, ‘A Love Story’, might seem incongruously glib to express such a tumultuous and hard-lived life, but by the end we realise how well chosen it is. Baldwin’s habit of falling for men who, while open to exploring same-sex relationships were essentially straight and ended up marrying women, snared him in cycles of emotional turmoil. Giovanni’s Room, the novel he wrote after Go Tell It On the Mountain, exploring gay love in Paris, leant heavily on his experiences. The gestation of his third novel, Another Country, was agonisingly protracted (writing began in 1948, but it wasn’t published until 1962) and Boggs presses the point that progress stalled on his fiction until he’d unravelled difficult realisations in his personal life.
Mountain mined Baldwin’s childhood experiences in Harlem; Giovanni wrestled with his sexuality; then Another Country proved a hurdle because Baldwin was now determined to deal explicitly with race. One of the most haunting images we are left with is of Baldwin on a research trip to the south locking eyes with an older black man on a segregated bus in Atlanta. No words were exchanged during an encounter that perhaps lasted only seconds, but the two communicated their mutual pain, although the older man had clearly suffered ‘all his life’, Baldwin said, to a degree he could only imagine.
As a journalist, Baldwin interviewed both Elijah Muhammad, the leader of the Nation of Islam, and Martin Luther King. His meeting with the ardently separatist Muhammad was distinctly uncomfortable and, although he shared many points of view with King, his own thoughts on race, about blame and responsibility, cannot be easily pigeonholed. His accusation of ‘white innocence’ – the stubborn refusal of many white Americans to acknowledge culpability for their country’s race problem – was hardly controversial. But his sense that racism was a moral failing that disfigured all Americans, white and black, was not what the likes of Muhammad or Malcolm X wanted to hear. Baldwin acted as a bridge, in favour of King’s message of integration, while also acknowledging the fury Malcolm X felt over white supremacy.
Baldwin’s habit of falling for men who were essentially straight snared him in cycles of emotional turmoil
Baldwin’s essay ‘Stranger in the Village’ (1953), later included in the landmark collection Notes of a Native Son, contained one of those striking statements – ‘We are trapped in history, and history is trapped in us’ – designed to upend received opinion and make people think. Boggs’s summaries of Baldwin’s positions on race are expressed with admirable clarity and wind back to his subtitle. Baldwin considered racism to be rooted in fear. Love, he proclaimed, was the necessary antidote, although not in any sentimental sense of the word. To be a truly transformational force, love had to be worked at. It involved seeking truth and seeing the best in people. Hatred destroys, whereas love ‘takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without’.
We know – because Boggs plots it so carefully – about Baldwin’s own struggles to find genuine love with someone around whom he didn’t have to wear a mask. The pain he felt towards the end of his life at finding himself dismissed as old school and out of step leads Boggs to reassess the later novels, especially If Beale Street Could Talk, the only one narrated by a female voice.
This first Baldwin biography for 30 years supersedes the previous go-to text by David Leeming, Baldwin’s friend and assistant. It is also worth reading Ed Pavlic’s excellent 2015 book Who Can Afford to Improvise? James Baldwin and Black Music, the Lyric and the Listeners, which takes a deeper dive into the roots of Baldwin’s rhythms in jazz and blues than Boggs has space for. Baldwin turned up in Loèche-les-Bains carrying a portable typewriter and two Bessie Smith records – and it was Smith, Baldwin said, ‘through her tone and cadence who helped me… remember the things I had heard and seen and felt. I had buried them very deep’.
Stop talking nonsense about rejoining the EU customs union
I saw in the Financial Times last week that the UK wants to align to EU law on animal and plant health while also opting out of rules to suit ourselves. Labour wants to keep rules that: allow stronger hemp-derived cannabidiol (CBD) products of up to 10mg versus the EU’s 2 mg limit; maintain bans on live animal exports and foie gras; and protect domestic innovation in areas such as lab‑grown meat, algae and insect products, gene‑edited crops and a bovine TB vaccine.
‘The UK government is being lobbied by multiple sectors for exceptions, including foodmakers, farmers and the chemical industry,’ we learn. The CBD industry fears losing this benefit of Brexit and rightly says, ‘The industry should not find itself being ruled by regulatory decisions where the UK has no vote and no voice.’ The National Farmers’ Union wants to protect gene editing and a new TB vaccine.
The Cabinet Office says, ‘We are making a sovereign choice in the national interest to align in some areas where it makes sense to do so.’ It is fatuous to call this a sovereign choice while knowingly accepting indefinite subordination without a voice: this rubbish was said about membership itself.
This is not merely a row about the impact of leaving the EU
Sovereignty is not merely the technical possibility of making a one‑off decision. It is the continuing ability to govern yourself: to set and revise your own rules in the light of your own needs. When you adopt the regulatory framework of a foreign power, when commercial realities make reversal prohibitively costly and when you have no seat at the table where the rules are made, you may have exercised a choice at the outset but you have chosen powerless subordination thereafter.
It is extraordinary that anyone prefers this submission to the arbitrary power of others. Yet in her recent lecture, the Chancellor made the case for accepting EU law, saying, ‘a decision to align should mean higher growth and investment, more jobs and consumer benefits for the long term.’ So let’s get into the options and why we would be better off as an independent country.
Yes that’s right: it’s back to the old Brexit arguments thanks to this Labour government. And if you think this is bad, wait until Nigel Farage takes power and reverses the lot…Here we go.
The economist Julian Jessop has written about the claim that Brexit has cost us 8 per cent of GDP since 2016. The claim has often been repeated and it is one of the foundation stones in the case for alignment to EU rules.
But have a look at the change in GDP of the UK, comparable EU countries and the US since 2016. If you thought the UK was the obvious under-performer, you would be wrong. That is Germany.
The UK is mid-pack. That’s not impressive and it is a sign of a few things. One is that we did not deregulate sufficiently to make a difference. Another is, as Lord Lawson used to tell me, that leaving the EU did not make much difference to GDP. And if you can disentangle the impact of Covid, well done but I don’t believe you.
But what is radically implausible is the idea that if we had remained in the EU then the UK’s change in GDP would be up above Spain’s. Why would you think that?
The NBER‑type studies that produce the higher numbers rely on synthetic versions of the UK economy that are highly sensitive to modelling choices and are not derived from any observable causal mechanism. The Office for Budget Responsibility’s famous 4 per cent long‑run productivity loss estimate is built on an assumed 15 per cent permanent collapse in UK trade intensity. That collapse has not happened: UK trade as a share of GDP has broadly tracked peer economies instead of falling off a cliff.
This is not merely a row about the impact of leaving the EU. It is a row about what kind of economic analysis we are prepared to trust.
Shanker Singham and the Growth Commission have set out why the standard CGE and GTAP models beloved of Treasuries are structurally incapable of capturing most of the gains from trade liberalisation and pro‑competitive regulatory reform. These models are essentially static. They focus on tariffs and visible border barriers, and they assume fixed industrial structures and patterns of competition. They count what is easiest to count. They do not count what happens to competition, innovation, investment and entrepreneurial energy when you open an economy and strip out market‑distorting regulations.
The consequences are not trivial. When New Zealand’s Treasury modelled the gains from its trade deal with China, it underestimated the outcome by roughly 500 per cent; gains projected over eleven years turned up in about eleven months. That is a fundamental failure of the framework, not a rounding error. Yet these are the same kinds of models now being used to tell us that the marginal gains from EU alignment are decisive while the costs are modest. It will not be true.
So what happens when you apply a framework that can see dynamic effects to the government’s alignment agenda?
The Growth Commission estimates that aligning UK sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) rules with the EU would cost the British economy around £15 billion. It also notes that the EU’s own SPS regime already imposes costs of about €39 billion (£33.8 billion) on EU member states collectively. These are not regulations that produce prosperity. They are regulations that are already imposing heavy burdens on those who live under them.
More generally, the Growth Commission characterises the EU regulatory model as one of the most anti‑competitive and growth‑destroying in the developed world, with a heavy bias towards precaution and harmonisation at the most restrictive level. That model has produced chronically weak growth across much of the continent. Having left, the UK now has regulatory freedom to set rules that are more open and pro‑competitive than any EU member state: potentially even more agile than the United States, particularly if we pursue mutual recognition and competition‑friendly standards. Every step of alignment forfeits some of that freedom. Once supply chains, investment decisions, and legal obligations are locked to the EU rulebook, reversal becomes politically and economically near‑impossible.
In a customs union with the EU, the UK would be bound by the EU’s trade policy without a say
Singham has repeatedly stressed that there are two competing models for the global trading system. The one reflected in the WTO system, the US approach to regulatory cooperation and agreements like CPTPP¹ is based on regulatory competition, equivalence and mutual recognition. The other, favoured by the EU and by China, is based on harmonisation, with market access conditional on replicating their rules.
The government’s alignment strategy, step by step, chooses the second model just as the United States is elevating the reduction of market distortions into the central plank of its trade policy.
The costs radiate outwards. The Growth Commission warns that SPS and broader regulatory alignment risk undermining our CPTPP membership, weakening our relationships with Australia and New Zealand, and creating precisely the kind of internal distortions that invite justified US trade complaints. By aligning with Brussels, we do not simply bind ourselves more tightly to the EU; we jeopardise the strategic and economic relationships which could, if we chose, underpin a prosperous and renewed UK of global outlook.
Alongside alignment, we are once again hearing siren calls for a new UK–EU customs union although this seems to have been ruled out. As the former trade minister Greg Hands has explained, that would be ‘the worst choice of all’.
In a customs union with the EU, the UK would be bound by the EU’s trade policy without a say. We would be obliged to apply tariffs and trade concessions negotiated to suit the EU‑27, not us, in forums where we no longer sit.
The EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement already provides tariff‑free trade in goods, subject to rules of origin. The remaining frictions are overwhelmingly non‑tariff barriers. A customs union does not remove those unless it is paired with far‑reaching regulatory alignment, which brings us straight back to rule‑taking without a say.
Strip away the inflated estimates of Brexit damage and the static models that cannot capture dynamic gains, and the economic case for alignment collapses. What remains is a political preference for the comfort of familiar institutions, the approval of Brussels and the avoidance of decision, all presented as economic necessity. We should instead make use of the freedom we have.
The Growth Commission shows that credible liberalisation and regulatory reform packages deliver gains several times larger than the narrow tariff‑only estimates produced by official models. The headline sub‑1 per cent GDP gains we are used to seeing for ambitious trade and regulatory deals are known to be too pessimistic.
We should treat regulatory freedom outside the EU as a precious asset, not a problem to be managed away. We should pursue a serious global strategy through CPTPP. We should build our relationship with the United States and other like‑minded countries around a shared commitment to regulatory competition, open markets and reduction of anti‑competitive distortions. We should reform at home – planning, energy, tax, labour markets – using dynamic analysis that fully captures the benefits of greater openness and competition rather than relying on models that have already been shown to mislead.
Above all, we should stop pretending that a policy of gradual alignment is something other than what it is: a policy of subordination and decline.
The misery of working with Chuck Berry
In Ian Leslie’s John & Paul, the creative relationship between the titular Beatles is treated as a platonic love story. Matt Thorne widens the paradigm with seven more pairings, variously rivalrous, amorous, respectful, disrespectful and occasionally frankly tenuous. The 11 American and three British musicians here have careers that collectively cover seven decades of popular music.
There are three dynamics at play. First, there are the Thucydides tensions, where a waning power tangles with a rising one. Frank Sinatra invites Elvis Presley to join him on a television show; Keith Richards throws a filmed concert with Chuck Berry. (Richards, for once, is the younger partner.)
The older player is not always generous. It would be a stretch to describe Sinatra’s career in 1960 as on the slide, but he is feeling the challenge of newfangled rock and roll – ‘the most brutal, ugly, degenerate, vicious form of expression it has been my displeasure to hear’. Presley, for his part, is just out of the army and trying to revive the career that had stalled while he was in uniform. Sinatra’s reputation, by contrast, has never quite recovered from evading military service in the second world war. In the broadcast from the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami, they swap songs: Sinatra mugs through ‘Love Me Tender’ and Presley performs a generous, heartfelt ‘Witchcraft’.
Berry was a formative presence in the birth of rock music, with a peerless songbook. He was also a terrible person to work with – cantankerous, deceitful and sly. Taylor Hackford’s film of the concert ends with Richards almost catatonic with stress from the whole experience. Thorne explores some of the reasons why Berry’s personality curdled, but gives the last word – unprintable here – to one of the many backing musicians he cheated.
Then there are the amorous drive-bys. David Bowie, at a commercial peak and creative nadir, duets with Tina Turner, making a comeback that eclipsed her previous fame as a duo with her abusive husband, Ike. If we believe the lipreaders decoding their onstage chat, the relationship went beyond the recording studio. Similarly, the affair between Madonna – one of whose enduring talents is that she always picks her collaborators excellently – and Tupac Shakur, soon to be murdered, reinvigorated her music.
Finally, there are clashes of ego. At the height of his fame, Paul McCartney goes to see the Supremes play at the Talk of the Town in London and describes the concert as ‘the showbusiness event of the year’. Thorne reads that as ‘a dismissal so poorly disguised as a compliment that it sours mid-sentence’. Perhaps; but under stress McCartney can be unintentionally maladroit when it comes to public pronouncements, as when he described Lennon’s murder as ‘a drag’.
Paul Simon and Lou Reed might not obviously seem to have much in common, but Thorne finds what parallels he can: both were Jewish musicians from New York; both were ‘literate men who loved pretending not to be’; both were doo-wop fans; both were married to musicians (eventually); both were short. Thorne concentrates on Simon’s career, becalmed in pre-Graceland doldrums, making One Trick Pony, a film and an album about a Simonian alter ego who is an unremitting failure, with Reed playing the producer making the singer’s life a misery. In real life, with Simon, it was sometimes the other way round. One Trick Pony was a film about a flop that itself flopped. The account here almost makes you want to watch it.
The last chapter covers the extended feud between Kanye West, currently known as ‘Ye’, and Taylor Swift. This started when the rapper took to the stage at MTV’s Video Music Awards to protest at Swift, then aged 19, winning Best Female Video: ‘Imma let you finish, but Beyoncé had one of the best videos of all time.’ A clash that might more sensibly have been greeted with a shrug instead saw people picking sides, from Barack Obama rebuking West all the way down. There were rapprochements; there were betrayals; there were accusations of bad faith. Swift went on to be the kind of phenomenon who moves macroeconomic indicators and registers on the Richter Scale, while her antagonist’s career spiralled off into dark corners that force his fans to make ever wilder excuses – Thorne being no exception.
Famous is breezy in its narrative and nerdy in its apparatus. At its best it illuminates the wider tactics and strategies – and costs – of fame. Paul Simon was not the only singer to branch out into film. There are quick recaps of the filmographies of Sinatra (excellent in The Manchurian Candidate); Presley (charismatic in dire films); Bowie (Labyrinth comes in for praise); Turner (well cast in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome) and Madonna (Thorne is over-harsh on Desperately Seeking Susan and far too exegetic on Dick Tracy).
The book is perhaps most acute on the pressure of sustaining a career after setbacks – McCartney after Magical Mystery Tour, for example, or Madonna and Simon and Bowie fumbling the follow-ups on what were at the time their biggest hits. In some cases, the wellspring of inspiration contains its own poison. The continued non-release of West’s promised album is a sad place to end.
The mystery of what makes us special remains unsolved
Consciousness is thought by many to define what it is to be human. We know that animals are conscious to some extent, but they don’t have what we have in that department. So if we can explain how human self-awareness works it will be a Rosetta Stone to understanding what makes our species so odd, or, depending on your view, so special.
Also: big brains love exercise. And the great thing about this topic is that it can be tackled by biologists, neurologists, philosophers, physicists and even novelists. It’s an interdisciplinary, no-holds-barred intellectual wrestling match.
Michael Pollan, an American journalist and academic who works at both Harvard and Berkeley, comes from a literature background but is fluent in the relevant science. His book gives a lucid survey of the numerous hypotheses about how consciousness works and what it really ‘is’. But it’s more than a tour d’horizon. Pollan sits down over pots of tea with many experts in the field to interview them; he tests and enlarges competing ideas. He is no credulous scribe, either, but a critical listener. ‘I found this very hard to believe,’ he will often comment over the Lapsang.
It starts with a psychedelic trip and a suggestion that plants may be conscious. The roots of plants do direct as well as nourish the leaves; time-lapse cameras show climbers putting out precarious tendrils in the ‘hope’ of finding a vertical. So plants have at least a sense of purpose. They also die. And what is death but an absence of consciousness? But they are not conscious as we are. So before we start considering our moral obligations towards wisteria, it seems clear that the problem here is not a biological but a semantic one. You can be sentient and purposeful without being ‘conscious’. We probably therefore need new words for different degrees of the faculty under discussion – from that possessed by the daisy via that of the crow or bonobo and onwards to that of the gentle reader.
The chief way in which human consciousness differs from that of other creatures is that it is aware of itself: it is conscious of being conscious. From the 18th century, philosophers have stubbed their toe here. Pollan suggests (not strongly enough, perhaps) that this extra dimension is connected to the function of memory, to which our fleeting sensation of animal existence (at the moment of awakening, for instance) has a lightning-fast connection – and one which, furthermore, operates on a valve that we can open and shut at will, allowing us not only to refine but re-refine our sense of being alive at any point. Tulips almost certainly can’t do that; nor, so far as we know, can dogs. This is also the philosophical basis of Proust’s great novel: that experience can only be transcendent when the most developed and peculiar human faculty, memory, is deployed to its fullest extent.
Does this make humans superior to other creatures? The Spanish Catholic philosopher Miguel de Unamuno thought, on the contrary, that this reflexive self-awareness separated us from the joy of creation and rendered us ‘lower than the jackass or the crab’. Pollan encounters some who talk disparagingly of ‘human exceptionalism’ and call it ‘speciesism’. Being the only creature in the world that wakes every day knowing that it’s doomed to die has certainly taken some of the fun out of things. But a Darwinist will tell you that to have been continually ‘selected’ over a long – in human, though not long at all in evolutionary terms – period, the faculty must have been more useful than not. Mortal self-awareness may be the price we pay for vaccines, dams and Bach. But what is this self-awareness and how does it work?
Presumably through mutation and selection, our brains have acquired some special connections, peculiar to us, that allow it. But maybe not. Neurones (nerve cells) act very fast, but other cells could do a version of their work. Pollan explores the competing neuroscientific theories, making them easy to follow despite their off-putting names (IIT, Integrated Information Theory and Global Workspace Theory, or GWT, for instance).
But perhaps the faculty is not in your head, but seated elsewhere. After all, the brain is merely the servant of the body; its prime job is to keep the flesh alive in the same way that the root is the brain of the plant, which means ultimately being its grunt, its handmaid, albeit a fancy one. So are we guilty of ‘brain exceptionalism’? Probably; and anyway there may be no exact neural substrates, no single home for consciousness; perhaps it’s not ‘seated’ anywhere in particular. After all, we now think memories are stored all over the brain, not in a box or album in one corner of the skull.
Pollan divides his exploration of the subject into four parts: Sentience, Feeling, Thought and Self, with his interviewees assigned to their area of speciality. My review copy of the book is covered in exclamation marks and underlinings as their insights flow: there are many exciting glimmers of dawn, many eurekas. It is part of the joy and the frustration of this subject that they can’t be helpfully summarised out of context, so I’m not going to try. Nor was I able to synthesise the different insights from each of the four parts into an overarching explanation, or even a plausible narrative – though (spoiler alert) neither in the end is Pollan.
One thing most readers will conclude is that the controversy over whether AI is or will become ‘conscious’ is a red herring and a ‘human exceptionalist’ one at that. For all I know, some bots already have a silicon brand of awareness; but the idea that they could become more powerful or intimidating by joining us down here, beneath the jackass and the crab, seems misconceived. We may not yet understand the workings of our ambivalent superpower but we can be fairly confident that it stems from what Pollan calls a ‘wet biology’. AI may develop a version of consciousness, but it will surely function better and be more helpful to us in diagnostics and economics if it does not model itself too closely on such a violent, imperfect and transitional living species as Homo sapiens. Or, as Pollan puts it in a sudden Californian outburst: ‘We casually liken genes to software, but if a computer’s operating system were as buggy as a genome, we’d trash it.’
In the end he admits defeat. He had naively hoped to find an answer, or at least some decisive progress from his diligent search. But he finishes by thinking he knows less about consciousness than when he started his quest three years earlier. ‘But that’s good,’ says one expert interlocutor socratically. ‘That’s progress!’
Pollan is attracted by the idea that consciousness may lie outside the self, as Aldous Huxley suggested after his mescaline experiments. It is quite a big thought to suppose that consciousness may exist independent of the entity that experiences it. Far from relying on neural substrates or their electronic epigones, it may just be out there in its own right, ‘something far more deeply interfused’, as Wordsworth had it, in the entire natural world (and presumably ‘natural’ here should include silicon, the eighth most common element by mass on Earth). Pollan’s experiences in a Zen retreat, with which the book ends, give support to this idea as he reaches a transcendent sate of selfless harmony with the universe.
The conclusion has some force because Pollan has used so much rational thought, scientific and philosophical, to arrive there. He has been fair-minded and analytical as well as marvellously lucid in his examination of competing scientific theories and has won the right to embrace a little mysticism if he chooses. I wonder whether in 100 years’ time our descendants will laugh at the quest to discover how consciousness works and what it is. To them it may seem as quaint as the medieval passion for alchemy: interesting but beside the point. The Rosetta Stone was never to be found in the exitless maze of consciousness studies, they will tell us with a laugh. The question should be answered in 2126.
Meanwhile, Pollan’s book tells us as much as one inquiring mind can now know with any certainty (or lack of it) and is touched with brilliance in the way it is so elegantly offered up for our reading pleasure.
Dark family secrets: Repetition, by Vigdis Hjorth, reviewed
‘Back then, of course, I didn’t know my parents were locked into an impossibility even greater than mine. That I was living in a crime scene.’ So writes the narrator 48 years after the strange events that unfold in this bitter, brief, shattering novel.
But what was the crime? Is the narrator the victim? Is her controlling mother’s hysteria over perfectly normal adolescent exploits explained by the fact that the father had abused his daughter? Is the narrator in truth Vigdis Hjorth? And is this book then the Norwegian novelist’s harrowing memoir? Is autofiction really fact in a cunning mask? Is all fiction waiting to be decoded into reality? Like the police, Hjorth doesn’t do answers.
Instead, near the end of the book, a teenage girl shows up, barefoot, freezing and orphaned, in the snow outside the narrator’s Norwegian cabin one November night, howling like Cathy at Heathcliff’s window. The girl is the narrator’s younger self. ‘She had been crying out to me for decades: Talk to me! Comfort me! Offer your hand of salvation, throw me a lifeline, pull me up!’ Folded finally in her older self’s embrace, time suspended, the successful novelist narrator holds her spectral younger self.
Is autofiction really fact in a cunning mask? Is all fiction waiting to be decoded into reality?
But what happened? One night, aged 16, the girl came home after her disappointing first sexual encounter with a boy. Instead of recording the flabby reality of Finn Lykke’s attempt to deflower her, and his absurd post-coital whispered boast ‘Now I’ve made a woman of you’, she writes in her diary her fantasy of what she wanted to have happened: ‘On paper I did everything I would never have dared to do in a real bed… I wrote and wrote, filled my enormous void with words.’
It’s hard not to read Repetition as disguised autobiography, unlocking the door to explain such fabulous novels as Will and Testament, Is Mother Dead and Long Live the Post Horn!, in which Hjorth depicts women who, despite their evident insecurities and inadequacies, are thrillingly, hilariously and cussedly at odds with what is expected of them. But that, no doubt, would be reductive.
When the father finds the diary it drives him out into the night, to return only when thoroughly plastered and in a kind of existential psychosexual meltdown – to be comforted by the narrator’s mother. Through the walls, in a drunken wail, is heard that Strindbergian line: ‘It isn’t easy being human!’ It certainly isn’t. But the couple bury the crime, whatever it has been, and live on in terror that their novelist daughter will disclose it in her books.
In truth, she had already done something more devastating:
They still don’t know what I wrote in my secret diary wasn’t true, that it was made up… The effect of my first fiction, however, and the horrorit caused, taught me a life lesson: fiction can have a greater impact than the truth, and be more truthful.
This is a heartbreaking book, be it fact or fiction.
Did Matthew Goodwin use AI to write his book?
After losing the Gorton and Denton parliamentary by-election to a leftwing plumber, Reform’s Matthew Goodwin has published a new book: Suicide of a Nation: Immigration, Islam, Identity.
It’s clear that Goodwin was trying to emulate Douglas Murray’s The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam, which was published in 2017. It has almost the same tagline and rough thesis. But while we can be sure that Murray did not use AI to write his book, I cannot extend the same confidence to Goodwin’s attempt, which opens with:
‘There are moments in the life of a nation when everything changes – not with a bang, not even with a conscious decision, but with a quiet, creeping loss of confidence so profound that a people start to forget who they are.’
Anybody who has used Chat-GPT will recognise the telltale signs of possible AI writing, such as the ‘it’s not X, it’s Y’ comparisons and the strange obsession with things being quiet or silent.
‘The sloppiness does not end here.’
Coincidence? Perhaps. Goodwin has responded to my criticisms saying that they are ‘spurious and false’. He has also said, elsewhere, that his critics on the left have clearly not read his book, and that he has not used as many references as an academic book would have as he is seeking to reach a mass audience. But we can see, at the very least, that ChatGPT helped with parts of his book, because he left the ChatGPT URL in some of the few references used to justify his arguments. Goodwin says that he only used AI to obtain datasets and cross-checked them.
Much of his analysis appears to refer to events, places and people which do not exist – another indication that a writer has relied on large-language models (LLMs), which frequently ‘hallucinate’ facts.
Take Goodwin’s claims about British schools. He cites reports that in one Bradford classroom, only four out of 28 pupils spoke English as a first language, with teachers reduced to mediating ‘dozens of languages.’ I can find no reporting that backs up this claim and Goodwin provides no source for it in his book. The case sounds suspiciously like the response when you type, ‘find me an alarming case of no English in a primary school’ into ChatGPT and hit enter.
Goodwin also cites a ‘BBC West Midlands’ report from 2019 about a school where 30 languages are spoken by its pupils. I also cannot find any record of this report. What’s strange is that there are plenty of stories, including in Birmingham, which Goodwin could have cited. In 2021, the Metro and Birmingham Mail wrote about Water Mill primary school in Selly Oak, for example, where 31 languages were spoken. But if Goodwin had read these reports he would have found that Water Mill was at the time one of the top two per cent rated schools in the country.
Instead, Goodwin quotes an ‘inspection report’ which says: ‘Many pupils join the school with extremely limited English.’ Again, I cannot find any reference to this quote after reading multiple Ofsted reports about schools where multiple languages are spoken. What the Ofsted reports do say, repeatedly, is that these schools are generally good at their jobs, that their pupils make strong progress, and that support for English as an additional language is effective. But perhaps this doesn’t fit into Goodwin’s narrative.
The sloppiness does not end here. Goodwin seems to have created quotes by Cicero, Hayek, Roger Scruton, Livy, Noah Webster, James Burnham and Walker Connor – an impressive feat, in a sense. ‘The most dangerous experiments are those conducted on entire societies’, is a quote that Goodwin attributes to Hayek, despite there being no record of it elsewhere. It seems the most dangerous experiment is publishing a book without any fact-checking.
Reading the book at some point you have to ask: did Goodwin verify any of his claims? Did he open a single book writing his own? Or did he just accept whatever an AI chatbot spat out because it would make him sound vaguely informed? After I posted about the errors in his book, Goodwin suggested I was a ‘left-wing troll’ and thanked me for boosting sales. He did not address his use of the seemingly fake quotes or produce a source for them. He has, in fairness, invited to debate him about the veracity of his book on GB News next week, something I am greatly looking forward to.
Goodwin has no real excuse for inaccuracies in his book. In the past he was a well-regarded academic at the University of Kent. If one of his students had handed in a dissertation with hallucinated quotes and references that don’t exist, he would obviously have failed them. Unfortunately, it appears that any academic rigour Goodwin once had has long since dissipated.
The ‘ecocide’ that is Canada’s shame
For a fortnight, four women have been combing through a 30-metre forest plot with infinite care. They have noted the age and height of every tree, measured every fallen branch and twig, identified every plant and assessed the depth and composition of the forest floor. The purpose of this backbreaking work is to understand the critical role played by old-growth forest in carbon storage. Unusually for a field experiment, the team includes a mother and her two daughters. Teenagers are not generally known for their willingness to spend weeks in the undergrowth, but then Suzanne Simard is not your average mother. She is the pioneering Canadian ecologist who has changed the way we think about forests.
Suddenly, lightning flashes overhead. Alerted by the smell of smoke, the women start to run. Fleeing beside them are the forest’s wildlife: rabbits, deer, even a gray wolf. Reaching their truck just in time, Simard radios in a report of a wildfire. The dramatic opening of Simard’s second volume of memoirs highlights one of the major hazards of climate change in British Columbia. Some two-thirds of the vast province is covered with forest, comprised mainly of flammable commercial plantations. The summer of 2018, when the book begins, was the worst on record, with more than 2,000 wildfires consuming an area almost the size of Northern Ireland.
Simard has long celebrated the resilience of old-growth forests. She first came to public attention in 1997 with an article in Nature on the ‘wood-wide web’: the theory that trees in a forest are linked through a communication network of underground fungal threads or mycorrhizae. At the hubs of this network, Simard and her team suggested, were ancient ‘mother trees’, sharing information and resources with their kin and other species. For Simard, forests are sites of collaboration as much as Darwinian competition.
Her idea of a forest community quickly gained ground. James Cameron imagined a version of the mother tree in his 2009 film Avatar and Richard Powers featured a scientist based on Simard in his 2018 novel The Overstory. In 2021 Simard published a memoir, Finding the Mother Tree, which became a bestseller. Her work was recognised in 2023 with the award of the Kew International Medal.
More recently, however, her findings have been challenged. A 2024 Nature article reported the publication of several pieces (some written by Simard’s former collaborators) which raised questions about the rigour of her team’s experiments and the validity of their conclusions. For many, anthropomorphism has no place in science.
When the Forest Breathes picks up where Finding the Mother Tree ended. Simard recounts the progress and setbacks of her ambitious ‘Mother Tree Project’. Spread over nine forests in various climatic zones of British Columbia, the programme tests different levels of timber harvesting, from clearcutting (the standard method) to selective felling. The aim is to discover the best means to regenerate forests in our climate-changed future.
One of these forests is located on First Nations land, in Nlaka’pamux territory. Simard writes of her increasing attraction to Indigenous beliefs and the practices of the ‘first ecologists’. She lends her support to eco-activists. In 2021, she and her younger daughter visit an encampment at Fairy Creek on Vancouver Island, set up to protect old-growth forest from logging. The pair nestle among the roots of ‘Titania’, a 2,000-year-old yellow cedar matriarch, marked for felling. Simard later views a video of Titania’s final moments and imagines ‘the dying sound’ – the gasping of roots, the starvation of mycorrhizal fungi, the death of protozoa and millipedes, the crumbling of soil, the collapse of the forest floor, and the earth finally washed into streams and estuaries – a devastating vision of the environmental consequences of one destructive act.
The dying of mothers – both arboreal and human – preoccupies Simard in this book. Her own mother, Ellen June, is diagnosed with dementia and decides on an assisted death. Simard reconciles herself to this decision by drawing parallels with the forest’s cycle of life. She believes that her own affinity with forests is inherited from her mother’s woodcutting ancestors and will in turn be handed on to her daughters. As her mother tells her: ‘Trees are in your blood. ‘Simard’s memoirs combine family life and scientific endeavour, down-to-earth fieldwork and forest epiphanies. The second volume lacks the narrative drive of the first, which traced Simard’s ascent in the face of opposition; but it successfully communicates the urgency of her call to halt reckless exploitation. This book will attract anyone who is fascinated by forests and their remarkable capacities, even if Simard’s appeals to ancient wisdom may make some readers uncomfortable. For her part, she defiantly embraces the maternal motif, ending with a triumphant vision of herself transformed – into a 60ft Douglas fir, the ultimate mother tree.
No Hungarian rhapsody: Lázár, by Nelio Biedermann, reviewed
Few first novels, let alone literary debuts in translation from German, arrive with quite so many plaudits – or better covers for those who like horses – as the 23-year-old Nelio Biedermann’s Lázár, which sold more than 200,000 copies on its release in Germany and Switzerland last year. ‘A truly great writer steps onto the stage,’ trumpets Daniel Kehlmann, who is no stranger to great writing: his latest novel, The Director, is on the International Booker Prize longlist. To Patti Smith, Biedermann is ‘gifted’.
He is also a scion of the eponymous Lázárs, an aristocratic Hungarian family, making this first foray into fiction a personal project. The narrative spans the first half of the 20th century, taking in three generations; the collapse of the Habsburg empire; two world wars; and the Hungarian national uprising in 1956. Comparisons with Joseph Roth’s The Radetzky March and Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks are inevitable, given that those books deal with familial and monarchical decline. I was also reminded of Nino Haratischwili’s Georgian family epic, The Eighth Life.
We’re never really allowed to forget that this epic novel was written by someone barely out of school
But Lázár is no conventional history. From the outset, the story is imbued with magical realist tropes, such as the birth of a ‘translucent child’, whose tiny organs are visible beneath his skin. The baby is Lajos von Lázár, the year is 1900 and the forest is swallowing ‘the last of the murky blue light’ on the evening of Epiphany. This is the same forest that has also swallowed Lajos’s grandfather, snatched his grandmother, driven his uncle mad and will later devour his sister, Ilona, in a fantastical metaphor that presages the giant loss of life to come with global conflict.
Biedermann, who grew up on Lake Zurich, writes with a Gen Z sensibility. Young Ilona knew the family owed their wealth to the people staring down at them from the portraits on the dining room walls. Later, she feels it is wrong to have children in the hope that things would somehow be all right. He also writes a lot about penises. And he never really lets the reader forget that this epic novel (ably translated by Jamie Bulloch) was written by someone barely out of school, who is trying to justify the blood on his forebears’ hands. The passages about the pogroms in Budapest are haunting. ‘But the worst thing is, everybody knew and nobody did anything,’ a neighbour tells Lajos. Obvious, yes, but no less chilling for it.
Bierdermann is certainly gifted, but the novel isn’t perfect. The prose can be convoluted, with topsy-turvy sentences that leave you hunting for the subject. Reading it is worth the effort; but if the author is to be hailed as ‘a truly great writer’ he will need to prove he isn’t a one-trick show horse.
Why Hitler’s suave architect escaped the noose at Nuremberg
At the Nuremberg trial of the main Nazi war criminals, one man stood out: Hitler’s favourite architect and later armaments minister, Albert Speer. He cut a gentlemanly figure in a gallery of rogues. The strutting, smirking Hermann Goering reminded Rebecca West, who attended the trial, of ‘a tout in a Paris café offering some tourists a chance to see a black mass’. Julius Streicher, the Jew-baiting brute, was like ‘a dirty old man of the sort who gives trouble in parks’. On the same bench, all declaring their innocence in the face of overwhelming evidence of monstrous crimes, were the lantern-jawed SS leader Ernst Kaltenbrünner, the sour-faced ex-champagne salesman Joachim von Ribbentrop, Fritz Sauckel, the thuggish slave labour chief, and the rest of the sorry gang.
But Speer, softly-spoken, handsome, courteous, trim and well-dressed, was prepared to accept the collective responsibility of having served in a criminal regime. However, he declared, as an ambitious architect and industrial technocrat, oblivious to politics, he had had no personal knowledge of such matters as the Final Solution to the ‘Jewish problem’. Like millions of others at the time, he had simply been seduced by the glorious promises of Hitler’s Reich, and the chance to build a great new capital city for the Führer.
In fact we now know that Speer was well aware of what was going on in blood-soaked Poland. He was present in 1943 when Heinrich Himmler gave a speech to SS officers stationed there spelling out the programme to exterminate the Jews. As armaments minister, Speer was also responsible for working many thousands of concentration camp slaves to death. Telford Taylor, one of the prosecutors at Nuremberg, later said that Speer should have received the death penalty instead of serving a mere 20 years in prison. The reason he got off lightly, Taylor said, was that Speer came across as ‘much the most appealing of any defendant in that trial’. When Taylor’s words were played back to Speer during an interview, he said with a dry chuckle: ‘If that was the reason I only got 20 years, I’m glad I left that impression.’
Speer left quite an impression on the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, too, who wrote in The Last Days of Hitler:
If [Speer] seems sometimes to have fallen too deeply under the spell of the tyrant whom he served, at least he is the only servant whose judgment was not corrupted by attendance on that dreadful master.
Not only did many people continue to take this view of Speer after his release from Spandau prison in 1966, but he became a bestselling author and a media star. He died in London in 1988, after speaking to the BBC – one of countless interviews he gave as the suave ‘good Nazi’ who had reflected on his past and repented for having been such a naive, and, yes, opportunistic young man, so blinded by his ambition that he remained unaware of the worst things that happened in his time.
This was a carefully constructed myth that has fascinated many writers and filmmakers, not least Gitta Sereny, who wrote the remarkable biography, Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth. In true French post-modern fashion, Jean-Noël Orengo sets out to deconstruct the myth by writing a book that is neither fiction nor history nor an essay but a little bit of all three. It doesn’t quite come together in any of these forms; but much in this kind of thing depends on literary style. The translation doesn’t really do this justice, nor is it entirely reliable. Courtesan in French means ‘courtier’, so Hitler was not ‘always surrounded by courtesans’.
We now know that Albert Speer was well aware of what was going on in blood-soaked Poland
Still, Speer remains an inexhaustibly interesting subject, and Orengo has some important things to say about his artistic ambition and the role of architecture in Hitler’s phantasmagoria: ‘Architecture was the power of space. All architects are authoritarian and perfectly aware that they dictate our living spaces with their constructions.’ Speer, educated in the old school by the distinguished architect Heinrich Tessenow, surely recognised the vulgarity of Hitler’s fantasies, but there was something liberating about the licence to be unashamedly grandiose. Orengo writes: ‘What architect would not want that? To build freed from the strictures of taste, and money no object?’ True, no doubt, but not a particularly fresh insight.
The book becomes more interesting when the relationship between ‘the guide’, as Orengo insists on calling Hitler, and his architect shifts to the relationship between the architect and ‘the historian’, namely Sereny. The historian, Jewish and born in Vienna, dedicated her life to writing about people who committed shocking crimes, most notably Franz Stangl, the commandant of Treblinka. She tried to get to the source of evil deeds, but Speer was an enigma to her. She could see through his ‘mix of facile charm and glibly worn guilt’, in Orengo’s words, yet ‘she couldn’t bring herself to conclude that he was manipulative’.
Reading Sereny’s book, one feels that she was seduced by her subject – not sexually, but in a weird platonic sense. Orengo is at his most provocative when he compares her attraction to Speer with Speer’s attraction to Hitler:
He talked about Hitler’s charisma; now she could talk about the undeniable charisma of his favourite. He had been Hitler’s architect; now she was becoming Albert Speer’s historian.
In one of her many intimate conversations with Speer, Sereny quotes a psychoanalyst, who proposed that Speer’s relationship with Hitler was a form of homoeroticism – not sexual, but ‘an irresistible mutual attraction for their respective statuses as artist and man of power’. This may have been so. More thought-provoking is the question of why Sereny fell under the former Nazi’s spell. Why did so many people, in Germany as well as Britain, believe in Speer’s mythic status?
Here Orengo waffles a bit, in the post-modern fashion: ‘He manipulated truth in the way that writers in the 20th century manipulated fiction.’ Speer’s memoir, Inside the Third Reich, is ‘a political and aesthetic autofiction, the best ever produced to this day’. In the battle of narratives, Speer is ‘always one step ahead’. Well, OK.
Sereny’s infatuation was less high-falutin. She reveals in the final pages of her book that Speer, a sexually abstemious man, had had an affair with a young female fan near the end of his life. He calls Sereny on the phone, drunk, and brags about having done quite nicely, after all – Hitler’s architect, armaments minister and a successful author to boot. Sereny is shocked. This was not ‘the Albert I know. What happened?’ Well, he replies, he had had ‘an experience’. It is as though Sereny felt betrayed by Speer’s affair.
As for the others who took a liking to Speer, the reason may be no different from what prompted the judges’ leniency at Nuremberg. It is reassuring in a way that a certain decency can still exist in a moral cesspool. We want to believe that this is still possible. Orengo is not a believer. He repeats several times in his book: ‘Pessimism is the only wisdom.’
Tessenow, Speer’s professor of architecture in the 1920s, had a simpler explanation for Speer’s behaviour. He told the German-Jewish grandparents of a friend of mine that Speer was an Arschloch, an arsehole.
Inside horse racing’s civil war
After six turbulent months as chair of the British Horseracing Authority, Lord Charles Allen felt he had no choice but to walk away from the sport. The Labour peer, a former CEO of Granada Television and executive chairman of EMI, was brought in to shake up and modernise a sport wary of change – but he was unable to unite racing’s many factions. His parting words earlier this month were brief: ‘Horseracing is an amazing sport with great potential… I have met some incredibly passionate people, who believe to survive and prosper that change is needed… I wish the sport well for the future.’ He didn’t need to add that he wanted no part of it.
Racing is in a deeply precarious position. The foal crop is dwindling, meaning there are fewer horses in training, and smaller field sizes. The money is running out, too. Labour’s tax rises on the gambling industry kick in on 1 April, leading bookmakers to pre-emptively withdraw race sponsorship. Meanwhile, the clamour from the anti-gambling lobby for affordability checks (which would force punters to disclose personal financial information before making a bet) is persistent. If these checks, which could be introduced as soon as May, drive punters to the unregulated black market, racing will again lose out, since a percentage of the profits made by licensed bookmakers on horseracing bets – the levy – are reinvested in the sport. This is currently a little over £100 million a year but is predicted to decline sharply if punters move to the black market.
And yet, against this gloomy backdrop, Lord Allen’s swift exit represents a turning point, for it has ignited a civil war in racing. His abdication could lead to racing’s ‘Brexit moment’, when this dysfunctional family finally breaks apart. ‘This is heading for a massive blow-up,’ says Charlie Methven of the Business of Sport podcast. ‘It’s going to play out over the summer and it’s going to get very ugly.’
To understand why this civil war has broken out, you have to go back to March 2025 and a meeting in London of the National Trainers Federation, which represents the interests of British racehorse trainers. William Haggas, son-in-law of Lester Piggott and trainer of the King’s horses, put a simple question to the room: who runs racing? The answer was unanimous: the racecourses. ‘If you are looking for a problem with governance, I’d start there,’ said Haggas. Lord Allen soon reached the same conclusion.
The Racecourse Association (RCA), which sits on the BHA board, represents nearly all of Britain’s 59 racecourses. It is immensely powerful and owns the fixture list, but it is not united. Of those 58 racecourses represented by the RCA, the Jockey Club owns 15, including Aintree, Cheltenham and Newmarket; Arena Racing Company (ARC) owns 16, mostly smaller courses such as Lingfield and Wolverhampton; the rest, including Ascot, Goodwood and York are independently owned. Each racecourse has one vote but because significant decisions require a 75 per cent majority, the numbers dictate that ARC, with 16 votes, effectively has a veto.
This is a problem because the Jockey Club and ARC have conflicting interests. Put crudely, the Jockey Club, which is governed by Royal Charter and reinvests all profits back into the sport, puts on a smaller number of high quality fixtures, attracting large crowds; ARC, a commercial enterprise, hosts hundreds of lower grade, less well-attended fixtures and sells the media rights to broadcasters and bookmakers.
So while many in racing would prefer a stripped back fixture list – i.e. more prize money for fewer races – ARC depends on the opposite. As Tom Morgan reports in the Telegraph: ‘For ARC, media rights are worth an estimated 60 per cent of their business model. For world-famous venues such as Ascot, media rights are around 10 per cent.’
Lord Allen wanted the BHA to be an independent board, so it would have more control of the fixture list, and ‘a seat at the table’ in selling media rights. For the reasons outlined above, ARC, and therefore the RCA, could not agree to this – so Lord Allen walked away. And here you have the opening shots of the civil war. The Jockey Club and independent racecourses, furious that the RCA essentially blocked Lord Allen’s proposals, are now demanding radical change.
‘The plan had been that, as an independent body with an independent board, the BHA would be empowered to make some of the tough decisions and lead our industry forward,’ Jockey Club chief executive Jim Mullen wrote recently in the Sunday Times. ‘Sadly, the status quo has won again.’ Lord Allen’s departure, he added, was an ‘emergency warning light on our dashboard… A strong, independent, progressive board at the BHA is worth fighting for, because the alternative is inertia and a dwindling product.’ The subtext was obvious: we can no longer be beholden to the smaller racecourses.
Racing, then, could become a two-tier structure, similar to football where you have the top 20 clubs in the Premier League and the other 72 in the Football League. A better example might be Formula 1, which has a super-league of racetracks. A gambling industry source tells me: ‘We could be on the brink of the biggest shake-up to the sport ever – think Sky and Premier League football. But we could, given British racing’s track record, be right back where we are now in five years’ time.’
ARC’s chief executive Martin Cruddace was quick to try and cool tensions, saying that ‘we should be careful not to talk ourselves into a crisis’. But Ascot has already threatened to walk away from the RCA – one racehorse owner told the Telegraph that the racecourse ‘has pulled a pin on the grenade’ – and a senior industry source confirms that ‘there is the possibility that the Jockey Club will go its own way’, leaving a ‘split racing infrastructure’. The source adds that the mutiny has effectively ‘fractured one of the things [the RCA] holding the sport back’. Their message to the BHA is clear: ‘Here’s the nettle; grasp it.’
Methven, a former executive of Sunderland and Charlton Athletic, also believes this is racing’s chance to save itself. The number one priority, he argues, has to be reducing the fixture list. This is a view shared by the National Trainers Federation, which stated after its AGM this month: ‘Historic attempts to manage volume have been constrained by unresolved fixture ownership issues that are of no relevance to the consumer.’ Dan Skelton, on track to be champion trainer this year, put it even more starkly in an interview on The Paddock podcast: ‘You have to concentrate on the top end because that’s what sells the sport… You’ve got to cut the amount of races because then you can increase the productivity and thus the prize money goes up.’ He concludes: ‘This feels like the last chance to get it right.’
Do elite racecourses have the stomach for a long fight?
Methven explains how this might look: ‘You say to people, “Right, there are only 40 fixtures in the year you need to pay any attention to: the Cheltenham Festival, Grand National, Glorious Goodwood etc.” You’ve then got to market those 40 meetings very aggressively and you’ve got to market betting on them very aggressively… The vast majority of betting turnover comes from those meetings anyway. But this only works once you’re focussing on those 40 meetings; it doesn’t work when you’re focussing on 1,500.’
And what about the lower grade horses, which aren’t good enough to compete at these meetings, and which for the most part run at ARC’s racecourses? ‘If ARC wants to put on races for slow horses because they think there is a market for that,’ says Methven, ‘and if the bookmakers want to sponsor those races because they think there is a betting market there, fine, they can do that.’ But these fixtures, he says, should not be funded by the levy. ARC was approached for comment.
The question now is whether the elite racecourses have the stomach for a long fight with ARC that could very easily end up in the courts. ‘Here is a sport,’ says Methven, ‘which is the second biggest in the country, erupting in civil war because it cannot agree on whether it is a high-quality, narrative-driven, internationally competitive sport, or basically a pile-it-high-sell-it-cheap product, like the greyhound industry.’
Lord Allen’s BHA reign may have been short-lived but, in an ironic twist, his legacy is secured. His unseemly, early departure has forced racing, just a few weeks out from the Grand National, to confront a choice it has long tried to ignore: change or die.
Tim Montgomerie turns on Matt Goodwin’s book
Ding, ding, ding! In the teal corner, it’s Tim Montgomerie, longtime Tory sage turned Reform defector. And, in the, er, other teal corner, it’s, um, Matt Goodwin, onetime academic turned Reform parliamentary candidate. Goodwin’s latest book Suicide of a Nation: Immigration, Islam, Identity has come under fire online over the veracity of its claims and alleged use of ChatGPT. So Montgomerie decided that now was the perfect time to stick the boot in, writing on X that:
The whole controversy over @GoodwinMJ ‘s book reminds me of the early warning sign that Rachel Reeves’ dodgy footnotes provided about her. @reformparty_uk should now fully investigate Mr Goodwin’s book and if there are repeated examples of factual error he should be removed from the candidates list. We need our future MPs to be trustworthy and credible.
Ouch. Goodwin duly hit back, writing that:
What Reform should do is stop taking Tory Wets like you… All you do is criticise Reform & our campaigns. I have no idea why you are even in Reform unless it is to try and weaken it?
Before Montgomerie concluded the online spat by taking the moral high ground:
Play the ball, not the man Matt. If you can. If your book is thoroughly researched you have nothing to fear from an internal investigation. “If” it is.
Suicide of a Nation? More like suicide of a party…
King Charles’s US state visit was never in doubt
Mark Twain famously wrote that “rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated”, and similar rumors have proliferated about King Charles’s state visit to the United States not taking place as a direct result of the ongoing conflict in Iran. Dubiously-informed sources have suggested either that Charles himself is so personally offended by the outbreak of war that he has refused to head to America in a month’s time, or alternatively that the British government, smarting from the tongue-lashings that President Trump has handed out to the hapless Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, have suggested that it would be a bad idea for the trip to go ahead at this time, and that the King should postpone the visit to the fall.
However, state visits do not take place under the purview of conventional politics, and the monarch regards himself as existing above such mundane concerns. Therefore it comes as little surprise to discover, following on from similar briefings to British media sources, that the New York Post has offered a well-informed summary of the plans for Charles’s three-day visit, which is designed to commemorate the 250th anniversary of America’s independence from its former masters. The trip will include a state dinner in the White House, a visit to New York and, most intriguingly of all, an address to both houses in Congress, which the articulate monarch will undoubtedly relish. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the packed schedule will not allow for a trip to Montecito for Charles to reconcile with his estranged younger son Prince Harry, but this is public, not private, business, and will be approached on that basis.
It says a lot for the difficulties that both the so-called “special relationship” and the royal family are currently facing that there was ever any discussion, unfounded though it might have been, about the trip being either postponed or canceled altogether. President Trump has visited Britain twice now, with the second, unprecedented state visit taking place last year, and appeared to thoroughly enjoy the pomp and ceremony that was wheeled out for him.
A committed royalist and Anglophile (who, for a long time, was a greater supporter of Starmer than many voters in Britain, until political differences intervened), Trump will be looking forward to the state visit as much, if not more so, than Charles, as he will relish the opportunity to stand shoulder to shoulder with the monarch – especially in the context of his country’s independence celebrations. He recently remarked that the king was “a great guy” who will be “coming in very soon”. These are not the words of a president reluctantly hosting a tiresome visiting dignitary, but someone who is counting off the days for a heaven-sent PR opportunity.
Not everyone in Britain shares his enthusiasm. The left-wing Labour politician Emily Thornberry told the BBC that the visit should not take place for reasons of royal dignity, saying “If it was to go ahead, it would go ahead against a backdrop of a war, and that, I think, is quite difficult, and the last thing that we want to do is to have Their Majesties embarrassed.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, Buckingham Palace and the White House have chosen not to heed Thornberry’s advice. A well-run state visit is something that bolsters both countries, and even though it is not believed that either the British government or Charles himself will attempt to hijack the event to make any political capital out of, it is a useful reminder of the soft power that the monarchy continues to wield, even in these troubled times.
Still, these troubled times are nothing if not unpredictable, and who can say what will develop in the world – or domestically – over the coming weeks. Yet a trip such as this has been months in the planning and preparation, and it would be far more embarrassing and difficult for it not to take place than for it to happen, albeit against a more dramatic backdrop than anyone would have liked.
Is there a growing rift between the US and Israel?
Denials, contradictions, inflammatory statements and exaggerations have for years characterized the conduct of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Donald Trump. It is therefore difficult to determine who, this time, is closer to the truth in the dispute that has developed between the two countries regarding attacks on Iran’s energy facilities.
Israel’s political and military leadership believe that Trump was angry, but is playing a double game
Twice during the war, the Israeli Air Force (IAF) has attacked Iran’s energy infrastructure. The first time was on the night of March 6 when about 30 fuel storage facilities in and around Tehran were struck. The depots were used by the Iranian military and the Revolutionary Guards (IRGC).
Following the strike, leaks emerged from officials claiming that the operation had not been coordinated with the US administration. Sources in the Israeli Prime Minister’s office responded that they had taken note of the hints and regarded them as a warning, and that it would not happen again.
At first, Iran responded to the Israeli strike only with minor attacks on energy installations in the Gulf states, intended to send a message to the United States that if strikes on its national infrastructure continued, Iran would not hesitate to expand its offensive. At the same time, the regime worked to close the Strait of Hormuz.
Commentators in the United States and elsewhere explained that Trump was not interested in a protracted energy war, which could lead to a global economic crisis, rising oil prices in the US, sustained high interest rates and fears of renewed inflation.
But the commentators were proven wrong. Last Wednesday, the IAF again hit –more forcefully – Iran’s most important energy sites: Fars and Bushehr in southern Iran. The strikes focused primarily on strategic energy infrastructure, especially gas and oil.
In the Bushehr area, the massive South Pars field was attacked, home to some of the largest gas production facilities in the world. The strikes were intended to harm regime revenues, disrupt its internal energy supply and impair the ability of the IRGC to finance its military activity.
Qatar, which shares and partners with Iran in the Pars field, was furious and criticized Israel’s attack, as did other Gulf states – and not without reason. It was not long before Iran responded with a furious attack on major oil and gas facilities in the region. Oil prices surged to $115 per barrel, further harming the US economy and global markets.
Trump quickly distanced himself from the strike. He claimed the US was not involved and had not even known about it. Later, he backtracked and said that he had warned Israel against attacking the complex. He went further and stressed that from now on, he would not allow Israel to repeat similar strikes.
At first, Israel reacted with surprise and concern. But then it recovered. Political, security, and military sources emphasized that the strike had been coordinated in advance with the United States and carried out with its approval.
It appears that Israel’s political and military leadership believe that Trump was angry, but also that his standing in the United States is weakening, and that he was playing a double game – and using Israel as part of his good cop, bad cop routine. It’s hard not to conclude that Israel is correct in this assessment.
It’s a position which suits Netanyahu, who has become a kind of Trump-whisperer in chief. No one is happier to play the role of the whip striking Iran. It was once said mockingly that Israel is America’s largest aircraft carrier. The current war backs up that cynical image – at least as long as it serves Netanyahu’s goals.
Trump also threatened to strike Iran’s energy infrastructure and bomb the country’s nuclear reactors, but said that due to the negotiations he is conducting, he has put the decision on hold until Saturday.
This is where America and Israel’s interests diverge. As has been the case over the past two and a half years, since October 7, Netanyahu is promising Israelis victory in this war. He is building Israel’s entire future on regime change in Iran – a regime which, for now, shows no signs of collapse. On the other hand, while he still supports the Israeli prime minister, Trump now appears to be seeking an end to the conflict.
Netanyahu will be hoping these diplomatic efforts come to nothing. He is betting that a continued war with Iran will help him win elections at the end of 2026. And so far, it looks like the public are willing to support him.
Donald Trump can’t simply talk down the price of oil
When the war against Iran started, President Trump could have justifiably felt confident that the price of oil could be controlled from the White House. America, after all, is the biggest oil producer in the world. It has the most refining capacity, and, separately, it has by far the world’s strongest military. And yet, over the last 24 hours it has become alarmingly clear that America has lost its ability to cap the price of an oil barrel. Does big trouble lie ahead for both the President and the global economy?
With a single Truth Social post yesterday, President Trump managed to send the prices of both WTI crude oil, the main American benchmark, and Brent crude, the main European one, plunging. The prices for both dropped by almost 10 per cent after the President posted that he had started talks with the Iranian leadership and was suspending bombing of the country’s energy infrastructure.
The trouble is, Trump can only play that card once. A day after his post, the price of oil was back up by 4 per cent and looks set to end the week even higher than where it started. Here in the UK, the Chancellor Rachel Reeves has even less control. In the House of Commons today she set out her attempts to protect consumers from price rises. But given that the UK has effectively banned domestic production of oil, it is impossible to take her seriously. Investigations by the Competition and Markets Authority will no more limit rising prices than Truth Social posts. Only increasing domestic supply can lower prices, but Labour has bizarrely ruled that out.
The war in the Middle East is driving up energy prices in the way that it always does
The blunt truth is this: the war in the Middle East is driving up energy prices in the way that it always does. The seaways have been closed, production and refining capacity has been taken out of the markets, and demand is out-stripping supply.
How high will it go? Goldman Sachs has just raised the possibility of a record $147 (£110) a barrel, while according to the predictions market Polymarket, there is a 25 per cent chance it will hit $150 (£112) a barrel by June.
If it gets anything close to those levels, President Trump will be in big trouble, and so will politicians across the developed world. The price of petrol will go up sharply, rising industrial prices will force manufacturers to close down and shortages may mean that rationing has to be introduced. Meanwhile, bailouts and price-capping schemes will be ruinously expensive for budgets that are already stretched to breaking point.
We can all understand why President Trump is trying to talk the oil price down. With a barrel of oil costing $130 (£97) and upwards, the global economy will be in big trouble, and the Republican party risks getting wiped out in the mid-term elections. The problem is Trump’s strategy isn’t working – and unless the President can find a way to increase the supply of oil, the price will keep on rising.
Kneecap’s breathtaking Cuban hypocrisy
While most Cold War cultural battlegrounds have long been paved over or turned into a theme park, Cuba has retained a place in the hearts and minds of the West’s luxury leftists.
Beautiful weather, sandy beaches, famous cigars and, of course, a long-standing enmity with the USA have all ensured the country remains perhaps the last stubborn redoubt of revolutionary, western hipsterism. So it made perfect sense that leading the charge in last weekend’s much trumpeted ‘aid flotilla’ to the island nation was the Irish language-speaking novelty rap act, Kneecap.
Much like their contemporary, Bob Vylan, they take delight in issuing inflammatory statements and then, when they receive the sought after reaction, pretending to be victims.
The trio (Liam Og O hAnnaidh, Naoise O’Caireallain and JJ O’Doherty) joined the ‘Nuestra America Convoy’, a self-described ‘humanitarian mission’, to Havana, to deliver 50 tonnes of humanitarian aid to help the beleaguered local population. As humanitarian missions go, it certainly made for a great photo op. It was also a rather inevitable target for accusations of breathtaking hypocrisy.
Promoted by American leftist group CodePink, the trip featured a cross-generation collection of cranky activists, such as the UK left’s beloved High Sparrow himself, Jeremy Corbyn, who joined forces with internet superstar Hasan Piker and the inevitable Owen Jones. It wasn’t so much an international flotilla of protesters as the line up for the next Guardian tent at Glastonbury.
Speaking at a press conference in Havana alongside Corbyn and Colombian Senator Clara Lopez, Kneecap’s Liam Og O Hannaidh claimed, with a typically inventive approach to historical reality, that there were similarities between Ireland and Cuba, such as ‘colonialism, forced starvation and oppression.’
He also added, with a typically modest understatement, ‘As Irish people, it’s just not in our nature to watch these things happen internationally or domestically and stay silent… It’s important that people who have a platform like us, who reach maybe a certain number of audiences… that we use that platform for what’s right and what’s good.’ Quite.
Of course, it’s not the first time that Kneecap have had a well-publicised dalliance with international pariahs. They first came to the attention of many when one of their members was charged under anti-terrorism laws for flying a Hezbollah flag at a gig in Kentish Town last year. That case was eventually thrown out but they cleverly milked it for all the publicity it was worth.
They also achieved another minor victory in 2025 when they took a discrimination case against the government when former business secretary Kemi Badenoch blocked their application for state funding, claiming she had discriminated against them on the grounds of nationalist and political opinion.
The award itself was a relatively paltry £14,250 but the band, their supporters and management saw it as both a victory and a validation. Since then, they have delighted in being a thorn in the side of what they see as an establishment engaged in a conspiracy to silence them.
Of course, quite how an establishment that awards them government grant money and sees them regularly promoted across all media platforms is actually silencing them is a matter of conjecture which has never been explained. But much like their contemporary, Bob Vylan, they take delight in issuing inflammatory statements and then, when they receive the sought after reaction, pretending to be victims.
For people of a slightly older vintage who have seen novelty acts come and go and who can remember when the word ‘kneecap’ meant something rather more sinister than a boy band dancing on stage while wearing masks, their antics veer between tedious and almost comically offensive.
But for a generation with no memory of the once routine terror tactic of permanently crippling young men, they portray a very safe form of cosplaying, revolutionary chic.
Of course, if Kneecap really were on the side of the ordinary Cuban, as they and their supporters like to loudly proclaim, they could have brought attention to the 1,200 political prisoners who still reside in the island’s jails. They could have mentioned the brutal suppression of protests in 2021 which saw dissidents receive sentences of up to 25 years. In fact, for a band who so keenly portray themselves as martyrs for free speech they might even have mentioned the infamous Decree 35 of the Criminal Code. That’s the law used to censor the very social media platforms so popular with the Kneecap’s millennial fans in every other country.
But not only would that have been a display of bad manners towards their hosts, it would have been an even graver sin: bad business. Because, like so many pound shop provocateurs before them, Kneecap and their manager know exactly what side their bread is buttered on.
Which, sadly, is more than can be said for the average Cuban, who took to the streets in large numbers to protest about food shortages last April. An event which our masked heroes, perhaps unsurprisingly, neglected to mention during their trip.
Will Iran give Benjamin Netanyahu a wartime boost?
Israel’s current war on two fronts shows few signs of wrapping up any time soon. In Lebanon, the indications are that the IDF is looking to establish an expanded buffer zone north of the border, with the intention of holding it for as long as the government in Beirut fails to fulfil its pledge to disarm Hezbollah. In Iran, meanwhile, Israeli air attacks are continuing daily, even as Tehran’s missiles and drones continue to target Israel’s centres of civilian population.
This year is an election year in Israel, with polls required by law to take place by October. So what impact, if any, are the conflicts having on the political debate inside Israel? Are they likely to decide the future political prospects of Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and if so, in what direction?
It should firstly be noted that Israeli public support for both campaigns remains high. Israelis do not need convincing regarding the nature of the Iranian regime’s intentions towards them. Iran has stood behind the Islamist militias that have formed Israel’s most visible and kinetic enemy now for the last four decades. Tehran’s nuclear ambitions, its missile capacities and its long war intended to end in the demise of the Jewish state are not matters of partisan dispute.
The good news for Netanyahu is the public remains largely united behind him as a war leader
Support for the war currently stands at over 90 per cent in the most recent Israeli opinion surveys. Concerns regarding the clarity of Israel’s war aims and the seemingly open-ended nature of the campaigns are raised with increasing frequency by pundits on the main TV channels. But these sentiments have not yet begun to eat into the general consensus regarding the war itself.
Some of the communities hard hit by Iranian missile attacks in both Israel’s north and south are places of traditional and hardcore support for Netanyahu’s Likud party – places such as Kiryat Shmonah and Dimona. But the Iranian missiles are producing a rally round the flag affect.
Interestingly, however, the near unanimity in public sentiment regarding the war does not appear to be leading to a bounce in support for the current government, or for the Prime Minister. Netanyahu’s standing as a war leader is solid. But as of now, it is not enabling him to chip away at support for the rival political camp. Rather, Israeli society remains deeply divided on a number of key matters, with the national unity on the issue of Iran not serving to lessen or blur these divisions.
It’s clear that among his core supporters, Netanyahu’s standing remains rock-solid and fervent. The flavour of this is perhaps summed up in a remark by Dimona Likud mayor Benny Biton following the Iranian missile attacks on his city last week. Biton, speaking to the pro-government Channel 14, noted that in a kindergarten damaged by missile fire, two pictures remained unharmed: one of Netanyahu and another of the Baba Sali, a revered Moroccan Jewish rabbi. ‘You want to talk about miracles?’ Biton said to the reporter.
The clip of mayor Biton’s interview, interestingly, was widely disseminated by both supporters and opponents of Netanyahu. The differing motivations for those sharing the clip neatly encapsulate the deep divide in the sentiments of Israelis regarding their prime minister. Opponents of the current government drew attention to Biton’s remarks since they seemed to encapsulate and include all the elements that most infuriate them regarding Netanyahu’s continued standing among his public.
There was the apparent desire to place Netanyahu’s standing and wellbeing at the centre of an interview about the widespread destruction of public facilities in a major town. There was the near mystical belief in the Prime Minister’s capacities. There was an injection of traditional religious fervor, with the additional reference to the rabbi. And, always present in Israeli debates though rarely referenced openly, there were the communal markers: Biton is a quintessentially Moroccan Jewish name, the Baba Sali an iconic Moroccan Jewish figure. Netanyahu’s and Likud’s traditional base contains a preponderance of voters from this background.
So Netanyahu’s opponents disseminated the clip of Biton, which captured everything which infuriates and concerns them about the Prime Minister. Supporters of Netanyahu, meanwhile, also took delight in amplifying the Biton interview. Partly because they are aware that these elements are what annoy their opponents and hence enjoy celebrating them, and partly out of agreement with the mayor’s sentiments.
This small episode is an illustration of the extent to which wartime unity is not serving in Israel to resolve deeper divides. The good news for Netanyahu is the public remains largely united behind him as a war leader. The bad news is that there has been no wartime boost in his political fortunes. Were elections to be held now, the polls suggest, Netanyahu’s bloc would struggle to form a government. The picture is not straightforward. The Prime Minister’s party has experienced a remarkable recovery in its fortunes over the last two years, helped not least by the divided and fractious nature of Israel’s opposition. The latest polls suggest that were elections held tomorrow, Likud would emerge as the largest single party, with 28 seats in the 120 member Knesset (parliament).
But government in Israel is by coalition. And none of the most recent polls find that the bloc of parties available for joining a Netanyahu-led coalition looks set to command over 60 seats, according to current rates of support. Rather, the most optimistic indications suggest support in the upper 50s, with one poll putting the Prime Minister’s bloc at only 51 seats.
None of this appears to portend disaster, or even defeat for Netanyahu and the current government in elections. Polls are not necessarily reliable. The Prime Minister is a veteran campaigner and a supremely shrewd politician, as even his opponents would concede. But it does mean that Netanyahu has little obvious motivation to bring the elections forward. At present, at least, the aura of a war leader does not appear to confer on him any political advantage.
Perhaps if the campaigns under way were to be brought to a successful conclusion, this might change. But at present, that doesn’t seem imminent on either front. As of now, it therefore seems most likely that elections will take place in the autumn. The Prime Minister will be hoping that he has concrete and lasting achievements on both fronts to present the public by that time. This remains to be seen.
To succeed at the BBC, Matt Brittin must learn to be hated
So farewell then Tim Davie with your spotless white trainers, on-message management speak and complete lack of journalistic nous. And hello Matt Brittin, the new Director General of the BBC, a job which may just be The Most Impossible In The World.
To survive, the BBC is going to have to adapt, big time
Unlike those other two all-time difficult gigs, Prime Minister and England football manager, there are no potential big wins like wars and World Cups, only potential catastrophes.
The Hutton Inquiry of 2004 (more of which later) was, for some, the most damaging episode in BBC history. But then came the Jimmy Savile revelations. And the Martin Bashir interview with Princess Diana. And the Huw Edwards scandal. And the Hamas-sponsored documentary. And the dodgy Trump Panorama edit. You get my drift.
Will Matt Brittin’s reign end with a similar catastrophe? Yes, according to a Times editorial this week, which asked the question “what could possibly go wrong?”
The answer, it argued, was everything: Brittin, a former Google exec, is a tech bro with no broadcasting experience who has never worked in a newsroom or made a TV programme. So his appointment was ‘baffling, to the point of idiocy.”
But, say colleagues, you only have to look at three of the biggest issues facing the BBC – the power of the streamers, how people access content, and the curse of misinformation – to see why his appointment makes perfect sense. This was his daily bread and butter during nearly 20 years at Google.
But how will he cope with the Panorama–style landmines in his path? If Brittin is smart he will minimise the danger – to himself – by finding someone else willing to be blown to bits when the shit hits the fan.
That will probably be the current interim DG, Rhodri Talfan Davies, about whom little is known apart from the fact that he’s Welsh. Davies’ job – Deputy Director General – will, like Morgan McSweeney’s, will be to see round corners. To identify scandals before they happen. Let us hope, for Brittin’s sake, that Rhodri makes a better fist of it than Morgan.
After that, it will be about two things: the politics and the vision.
Politics first. It won’t just be about getting on with the government of the day. Brittin will have to take the workforce with him. But he must also be willing to embrace unpopularity. The job isn’t about being liked. Indeed the most popular DG of modern times, Greg Dyke, was also, arguably, the most disastrous.
Good old Uncle Greg – catchphrase: “let’s cut the crap!” – was so keen to be seen as a people’s champion that he picked a fight he should have known he was never going to win. He squared up to the government over the Dodgy Dossier and started a willy waving contest when he could have kicked the thing into the long grass by holding an internal inquiry and then quietly admitting, months later, that the BBC had made a mistake, albeit a relatively piffling one. The resulting Hutton Inquiry cost him his job.
So which of those two Directors General will the new boy most resemble?
By contrast, the most successful DG of modern times, John Birt, was the most hated. Why? Because he knew that in order to be survive, the BBC needed stiff medicine.
That’s why he ended the gravy train which allowed piss-taking producers to spend several years, and millions of our pounds, making barely watched documentaries about things like Mongolian throat singing. (I am not exaggerating). He also rebooted its journalism by appointing specialists instead of embarrassingly knowledge-deficient generalist reporters (I should know – I was one of them). And, crucially, he prepared the BBC for the digital age by recognising the potential of something called the internet.
Hence his sub-Keir Starmer popularity ratings. Being a charmless, croak voiced Dalek didn’t help of course. But you cannot transform an institution – and that’s what Brittin is going to have to do – without upsetting people.
So which of those two Directors General will the new boy most resemble? “Frankly, a bit of both” says a former BBC executive who worked closely with him at Google.
“He has Dyke’s people skills but, like Birt, he’s also strong on analysis and detail. He won’t shy away from making big decisions but will aim to take people with him. He’s very unusual in that respect: a tech bro who’s good at the people thing.”
Which brings us on to the vision thing. To survive, the BBC is going to have to adapt, big time. The arguments for scrapping the licence fee will only get louder. Currently, disastrously few 16- to 24-year-olds – tomorrow’s licence fee payers – watch the BBC. Ofcom says they spend just five per cent of their viewing time with the BBC, compared to 34 per cent for things like YouTube and TikTok. It will be difficult to argue we should be forced to pay £174.50 a year and rising if that trend continues.
Might subscription take its place? Over to you, Matt. Making it work would be fiendishly difficult. How much should people pay? What if they stop paying? Should adverts be part of the package?
Then there’s the issue of consolidation. Should the BBC join forces with another public service broadcaster like Channel 4? Once, such a partnership was unthinkable. But now it’s very much on the table. A recent Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport report argued that consolidation could “transform the UK’s creative sector, boost audiences and provide much needed financial stability.” But how would that work? Again: over to you, Matt.
A successful DG needs to be wise, politically astute and, above all, lucky. Superman, basically. Who, appropriately enough, Brittin just happens to resemble. Picture him in blue tights, red pants and a cape and you’ll see what I mean.
But how will he cope with the Kryptonite? That is the question. Good luck, Matt. You’re going to need it.
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