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Am I ‘vulnerable’?
I needed to speak, briefly, to my car insurer regarding breakdown cover. After undergoing the usual roster of DNA testing, fingerprinting, recitation of ‘familiar names’, the woman on the other end of the phone said this to me: ‘I need to ask this as well. Are you vulnerable?’ It is now six hours later and I’m still not sure what she meant. I suppose I assume it was a euphemism for: ‘Are you either mental or too thick to tie your own shoelaces?’
But it is difficult to know for sure, largely because of the shape-shifting ‘vulnerable’ has performed in recent years. When news reports, or the police, identify someone as being ‘vulnerable’, it usually means they are pig-thick or doolally. On the other hand, when it is used about whole communities it usually just means that they are not white. Sometimes it is a stand-in for ‘female’. Children are always vulnerable, of course. In short, because we are unable to articulate the truth these days, vulnerable has been forced to step up to the plate and cover a multitude of sins.
Anyway, I told the woman that I wasn’t, at that moment, terribly vulnerable. But there was soupcon of doubt in her voice when she said ‘OK, Mr Liddle.’
Keir Starmer should smash the gig economy
No Frenchman has been as critical as the recent ‘one in, one out’ migrant deal than Xavier Bertrand. A grandee of the centre-right Republican party (and also the president of the Upper France region), Bertrand has denounced the treaty as ‘bad’ for France.
He added that the small boats crisis is ‘the fault of the English’ because the migrants ‘know they’ll end up getting work there’. The only way to end the Channel migrant crisis, says Bertrand, is for the British government to ‘put an end [to] illegal labour immigration’.
Bertrand has been banging this drum for a decade. In the summer of 2015, he wrote to David Cameron, then the prime minister, about the 3,000 migrants massed on the French coast, most of whom were young men from Afghanistan, Sudan and Eritrea. ‘Let’s put an end to the hypocrisy of pretending that we don’t know that most of them want to go to England, where it is much easier to work without papers than in France,’ said Bertrand.
Cameron did promise that year to crack down on the phenomenon, announcing his determination to introduce an immigration ‘taskforce’, the main purpose of which would be to make ‘Britain a less attractive place to come and work illegally’. ‘The truth is’, Camerons said, ‘it has been too easy to work illegally and employ illegal workers here.’
That never happened. On the contrary, it was on Cameron’s watch that Britain’s ‘gig economy’ exploded. Companies such as Deliveroo, Uber and Just Eat were regarded by the PM and his chancellor, George Osborne, as the exciting future of the British economy.
The companies portrayed their workers as students or mums and dads looking to make some cash on the side; for years they vigorously fought attempts to have their drivers and deliverers recognised as workers. That would give them rights.
It has become increasingly obvious in recent years that many of the people working for these companies are illegal immigrants. In 2023, a random Home Office screening of delivery riders found that 40 per cent fitted this description.
Earlier this year, an undercover reporter from the Sun, posing as a small-boat arrival from Afghanistan, was able to sign up as a delivery driver within ten minutes. ‘When asked if having no documents was a problem, one “Deliveroo dealer” told him: ‘You will not be caught, inshallah”’, reported the newspaper.
In France, on the other hand, you will be caught, which is why most migrants looking for easy work, once they have entered France from Spain or Italy, head straight to the Channel coast.
In December last year, Just Eat ceased trading in France, a victim not just of high operating costs but also ‘pressure to improve working conditions for delivery drivers’. Just Eat’s announcement came a month after the Paris Administrative Court overturned its redundancy plan to lay off more than 100 people.
It has become increasingly obvious in recent years that many of the people working for these companies are illegal immigrants
Last month, the Paris Court of Appeal ordered Deliveroo to reinstate a delivery driver who had been fired in 2020 for ‘discrimination on health grounds’. The British company was also ordered to pay the driver €93,000 [£80,000] in unpaid wages.
In 2022, a French court handed two former bosses of Deliveroo suspended one year prison sentences for ‘abusing the freelance status of riders’.
Two years earlier a Paris labour court found the company guilty of ‘undeclared work’ by a delivery rider; his lawyer told the press that paying him as an independent contractor and not a regular employee ‘was an attempt to skirt labour laws’.
In 2022, Joe Carberry, the head of corporate communications at Deliveroo, said that France was ‘the most progressive example’ of gig economy regulation because under its law employees were entitled to social security, pension contributions and unemployment benefits.
Carberry made his remarks at a fringe event at that year’s Labour Party conference; before joining Deliveroo, Carberry worked for the party, first as a special adviser to David Miliband and then as Labour’s head of research between 2015 to 2017.
The event was organised by Progressive Britain, described by the Guardian as a ‘Blairite think-tank’, whose board of directors include Kay Carberry, Joe’s mum; she received a CBE in 2007 for services to employment relations.
The Deliveroo meeting was criticised by Alex Marshall, president of the Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain. ‘It is quite ironic that Deliveroo points to France as progressive… they have received huge fines and a suspended jail sentence there.’
France has also fined Uber ‘for deceptive commercial practices’, forcing the ride-hailing app in its own words to rethink ‘its business model in light of local expectations’.
There has been no such rethink in Britain, but there needs to be in light of the mounting evidence that this business model is fuelling the migrant crisis. Perhaps smashing the gig economy and not the gangs should be Keir Starmer’s priority.
The truth about Meghan and Harry’s renewed Netflix deal
It is important for any self-respecting writer to admit when they get it wrong. So it is with an element of contrition that I must report that, despite my confident belief that the dynamic duo themselves, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, would not have their lucrative Netflix deal renewed, such an event has, indeed, come to pass. Amidst what must surely be the raucous sound of organic kombucha bottles being opened in Montecito in celebration, it has been announced that Netflix and Hal & Megs will be in business for another five years, giving the haters and naysayers ample reason to weep and gnash their teeth.
Springtime for Netflix and the Sussexes; winter for the rest of us
The treats on offer will include not just a second series of the Duchess’s largely unloved and unpopular lifestyle show With Love, Meghan, but a Christmas special – no doubt filmed about now – and a range of potential projects from Archewell’s hitherto undistinguished film and television production arm. This might potentially include their feature film debut, an adaptation of Carley Fortune’s romantic novel Meet Me At The Lake, and worthy-sounding documentaries, including one about orphans in Uganda, tentatively entitled Masaka Kids, A Rhythm Within. If all goes according to plan, then the schedules will be choc-a-bloc with Archewell programming over the next few years. Springtime for Netflix and the Sussexes; winter for the rest of us.
Certainly, the smug quotes from all parties suggest that this particular fait accompli has worked out very well indeed. Meghan, forever with an eye on the prize, announced that:
We’re proud to extend our partnership with Netflix and expand our work together to include the As Ever brand. My husband and I feel inspired by our partners who work closely with us and our Archewell Productions team to create thoughtful content across genres that resonates globally and celebrates our shared vision.
Netflix’s Chief Content Officer Bela Bajaria, meanwhile, gushed that:
Harry and Meghan are influential voices whose stories resonate with audiences everywhere. The response to their work speaks for itself – Harry & Meghan gave viewers an intimate look into their lives and quickly became one of our most-watched documentary series. More recently, fans have been inspired by With Love, Meghan with products from the new As Ever line consistently selling out in record time. We’re excited to continue our partnership with Archewell Productions and to entertain our members together.
So there we are. The wholesome, upstanding couple has been vindicated, sarcastic detractors like me humiliated, and we can expect a happy half-decade of shows ahead. Well, not quite.
Dig beneath the PR carapace and in fact there’s a sting in the tail. The Sussexes have indeed signed a new five-year deal with Netflix, but it’s on considerably reduced terms from the original $100 million (£74 million) handout. Instead, it is trumpeted as a ‘multiyear, first-look deal’, which sounds impressive enough, but in reality means that Netflix are not obliged to make any of the shows that Archewell pitches, simply that they will be the first port of call for their offer.
Should, heaven forfend, they not meet with the streaming service’s interest, they can attempt to flog their wares elsewhere. But given the negligible viewing figures for all the non-Sussex shows – and the unexceptional numbers for the much-maligned With Love, Meghan – this is by no means an inevitability.
Therefore, one cannot begrudge Harry and Meghan a moment of relief after what has been a largely rough and difficult year so far, particularly for the Duke. Yet it is hard to believe that this really does represent the triumphant return to our screens that this has been superficially marketed as. If most of these mooted shows and films do make it to Netflix, I will take pleasure in eating my As Ever-branded raspberry spread (‘with a hint of lemon’) in public, with the smallest spoon I can find. But if they don’t, then this should be seen as a face-saving retreat rather than a progression in an increasingly tarnished media empire.
This Midlands police officer represents true British values
There’s been a tiny outbreak of sanity among British officialdom. Footage emerged on X at the weekend, captured on a doorbell camera in Coventry last Friday afternoon. The householder found a policeman at his door, clutching a small piece of paper.
The footage of this chipper doorstep incident made me snap my fingers and think, ‘oh yes, British values – it’s that’
‘Warwickshire [police] have asked me to come round,’ says the copper, looking affably embarrassed. ‘It’s a load of b******* mate, but it’s about this protest tomorrow in Warwickshire. They’re aware that you might be wanting to attend that planned protest’. The protest in question – outside the town hall in Nuneaton – was called for in response to the alleged rape of a 12-year-old girl in the town involving two men, reported to be asylum seekers.
The policeman continues, ‘and obviously that’s absolutely fine. You’ve got freedom of speech, and there are no issues at all. I apologise – and it’s really woeful. It’s not something I agree with, but I’ve been asked just to drop a leaflet about being involved in a protest. It sounds bad, but it is what it is.’
The homeowner retorts, ‘Do me a favour. Take it back. Say we will no longer be silenced. And tell them to f*** off from me, with love. Cheers.’
Ahead of planned protests in Nuneaton tomorrow following the alleged rape of a 12-year-old girl by two illegal migrants, a visibly embarrassed police officer visits a man on behalf of Warwickshire Police to deliver a leaflet about protest involvement.
— J Stewart (@triffic_stuff_) August 8, 2025
The officer knows this is… pic.twitter.com/h9kmG95BDL
The policeman reacts with cheery mirth and proceeds on his way.
There’s been so much discussion about ‘British values’ over the last few years, so much head scratching and noddle bashing. We never wondered about defining these before about 2010. It would’ve seemed ludicrous even to mention the topic. You just knew; they were woven into the fabric of our lives so innately that you didn’t think about them.
Attempts to define these values have usually felt like trying to catch a cloud and pin it down. Any suggestions have nearly always seemed nebulous or arbitrary. Oftenthe things advanced are something really twee or trivial like a CGI Paddington bear. Or they are banal – the NHS, as if we are the only country with hospitals. Or they are very recent – being nice to homosexuals.
The footage of this chipper doorstep incident made me snap my fingers and think, ‘oh yes, British values – it’s that’. Smiling at nonsense, maintaining a sense of proportion; laughing at spurious nonsense rather than genuflecting – literally kneeling, in the fairly recent history of the British police – to it.
It’s been a very, very long time since I’ve seen this essence in any official representative. I’ve become accustomed to such functionaries having an eerie plasticity, talking in a peculiar language that’s a mix of Apprentice-contestant flannel and Kapo guard. I pray that if I’m ever in a sticky situation it’ll be this officer or somebody like him that comes to my aid.
Naturally the officer is now under investigation, or at least being ‘spoken to’ by his superiors in West Midlands Police. Well, we can’t have a surge of perspective and good humour in the ranks, it just wouldn’t do. Where would it all end? It might inspire other officers – perhaps to say ‘don’t be ridiculous’ when asked to discipline a shopkeeper for describing shoplifters as ‘scumbags’. Or, when dispatched to harass feminists for the possession of ‘offensive’ stickers, a policeman might reply ‘you’re having a laugh’. Heavens to Betsy, the police might even start treating people equally before the law, rather than caving before certain approved ‘communities’ with ‘protected’ characteristics or political views.
In other news, the police are currently seeking the ‘vigilantes’ who restrained and removed a very aggressive naked man on a tube train the other day, with a view to charging them with assault. The cops were nowhere to be seen during the actual incident, hence the public taking matters into their own hands. But they appear afterwards to arrest you, if you are forced to act by their absence.
If there were more officers like our cheerful friend in Coventry, such an investigation would be laughed out before it could even get started.
The shifting of our institutions away from reason since the 90s has been very disquieting, as the New Labour rot percolated through them, but it happened so very gradually that one often didn’t notice until it was too late. There is something perfect about the leaflet in this story; it’s the ideal prop of the petty governing class of our age, who have smashed up so much that was good, and think they can replace it with little signs and notices.
This policeman feels like the last survival of the Britain I knew the dog-end of, growing up. He is a throwback to the days of ‘don’t be daft’, of the assumption that things, generally, worked fine, and that people, generally, had the sense they were born with. He should be treasured, not ‘spoken to’.
Why are schoolchildren making Valentine’s Day cards for refugees?
In Birmingham, schoolchildren as young as five have been reportedly asked to write Valentine’s Day cards to asylum seekers. One group of children were said to have created heart-shaped messages with slogans like ‘You are welcome here!. Let us count the ways that school children sending Valentine’s Day cards to asylum seekers might be misinterpreted or otherwise lead to unintended consequences. Let alone whether it might cause alarm to parents, and generally reinforce the idea that the people in charge in this country are either profoundly naive or politically malevolent.
Firstly – how might a Valentine’s Day card be interpreted by the intended recipients? In most of the world, the celebration of what we used to refer to as St. Valentine’s Day is still a very recent phenomenon; its introduction was largely commercially driven, based around adult conceptions of romantic or sexual relations. As it sadly is in this country nowadays, albeit with its older role as a celebration of more platonic forms of love still lingering somewhere in the folk memory. The journalist David Aaranovitch suggested it was ‘disgusting’ to perceive a sexual connotation in a Valentine’s Day card – but in most of the world, Valentine’s Day has no other connotation.
In many countries there would be uproar if a teacher even mentioned Valentine’s Day to their children
Anywhere in Asia and in most of Africa, Valentine’s Day is regarded as the western import that it is, and is associated with Western conceptions of sex and relationships – or at least, with those places’ imagining of western notions of sex and relations, which they understand to be a complete free-for-all, without any constraints of social or religious propriety.
Outside of the more westernised urban classes in the Middle East or India, it would still be considered a bit racy to mark Valentine’s Day within a marriage. Certainly, no child in those places is making a Valentine’s Day card at infants’ school and giving it to their mother. In fact, in many countries there would be uproar if a teacher even mentioned Valentine’s Day to their children.
Secondly, there’s the question of who exactly the recipients are. As far as we can tell the cards were not sent to named recipients, as opposed to the clients of a particular charity as a whole. This spared the school the trouble of considering these people as individuals with any specific characteristics; names, nationalities, genders or ages.
Much of the outrage to this story has come from people making an educated guess regarding the demographics of the recipients based on those of asylum seekers in the UK generally. That is to say they are likely to be predominantly male, in their twenties or thirties, and from places like Afghanistan, the Middle East or the Horn of Africa.
It’s quite striking that those who encourage us to make asylum seekers ‘feel welcome’ are often very hostile to actually considering specific characteristics that might help us define them as individuals. Even speculating on their nationalities is regarded in such quarters as being slightly conspiratorial. They prefer to think of them generically simply as ‘refugees’.
This brings us to what the actual purpose of the ‘Schools of Sanctuary’ organisation that planned this exercise was. It has nothing to do with refugees as individuals. Instead, it is about instilling in children at a young age the trappings of empathy toward an amorphous, ageless, stateless blob of people for whom they ought to feel sorry, like ‘the sick’ or ‘the poor’. In successful cases, some of these children will retain such simplistic notions into adulthood, and go on to become columnists for the Independent and the Times.
But this is a mockery of real empathy. You cannot truly feel empathy for another human being whilst forbidding yourself from considering them as having an age, being a man or a woman, or as coming from a specific place as you yourself do. But as soon as we start to think about asylum seekers as individuals, we risk running into group characteristics that detract from public sympathy. Only by completely stripping people of their individual characteristics can we hope to remove prejudice, so the reasoning goes.
On the streets of many of our cities, we can see the results of this policy of treating ‘refugees’ as a fungible mass of blank humanity, to be slotted in wherever there’s physical space, and left to mill about aimlessly. Housing of Multiple Occupation with a dozen guys from several random countries, with equally random reasons for making their way to Britain. All they likely have in common with one another is that some Home Office lawyer decided that a rejection of their asylum claim could be challenged plausibly under Article 8 of the ECHR. Perhaps, an anonymous card from a local primary school makes up for any of the normal means by which a human being may find a sense of belonging in this world, and which these men have been convinced to sever themselves from to come to Britain.
We can only speculate as to how baffling the contents of these cards might have been to a lad from Eritrea or rural Syria whose only previous exposure to Valentines Day was when it popped up on the sort of website that he’d now need a VPN to access in this country. I suspect pure bemusement was a more likely reaction than the ostensibly intended one of ‘feeling welcomed’. But the people whose idea it was have no interest in that at all – their interest is in shaping the views and assumptions of young children.
Rachel Reeves’s assault on the British economy continues
There really is no hiding place for Rachel Reeves in this morning’s employment figures. The Office of National Statistics (ONS) release shows that 164,000 payrolled positions have been lost in the 12 months to July, Labour’s first year in office. Those figures are still provisional, but the figures for the 12 months to June show pretty much the same picture, with the number of payrolled positions falling by 149,000. In May alone, 26,000 jobs were lost. The unemployment rate rose to 4.7 per cent. For those who are in work, the figures show a healthy rise in real earnings of 0.9 per cent. The Bank of England said last week it doesn’t expect this to last, but for the moment, those in work are, on average, doing quite well – not that the productivity figures justify any real-terms increase in average pay.
The drop in payrolled employment is all the more stark considering that until last summer there had been strong growth in jobs. And it is not hard to find a culprit, either. Employers had been warning ever since last October’s budget, when employers’ national insurance was jacked up by 1.5 percent and the earnings threshold for contributions dropped from £9,200 a year to £5,000 a year, that they would have to lay off workers. Employment figures for the past few months – the NI rise took effect in April – show that it was no idle threat. Reeves has hit a ceiling, and inadvertently carried out a real-life demonstration of the Laffer Curve – jack up taxes too much and you dissuade economic activity, so you don’t get the revenue you were expecting.
If there is anything for the government to cling to, it is that overall employment did rise modestly to 75.3 per cent. That figure includes not just payrolled positions but also self-employed workers. In other words, it looks as if employers may be dodging the rise in NI contributions by shifting some workers out of regular jobs and into self-employment. The NI rises might not be the only reason for this. The Employment Rights Bill threatens to make life more onerous for employers, too, with its ban on zero hours contracts and the imposition of protections against unfair dismissal from day one of employment. It is about to become much riskier to take on new members of staff because it will be much harder to get rid of them if they prove hopeless at their jobs.
The irony of the trend in the labour market from payrolled employment to casual work is that Labour, you might remember, promised to reverse the growth of the gig economy. It was going to do away with the world of short contracts and temporary employment and give workers much more security in the workplace. From today’s labour market figures it appears that it is achieving the exact opposite.
Will Reeves change course? That is highly unlikely. The shocking borrowing figures and lousy economic growth of the past few months is pushing her further into the destructive cycle of higher taxes curtailing economic growth. Moreover, there is little chance of the government’s drive on employment rights being watered down. No-one should be surprised if the loss of jobs accelerates over the coming year.
Exclusive poll: are you proud to be an American?
With the 250th anniversary of America’s founding approaching next year, the majority of Americans are happy to applaud their country – with 63 percent saying that yes, the birthday of the United States is a moment to celebrate, a new poll from Cygnal released exclusively to The Spectator reveals.
But unfortunately for those who would like such an event to be bipartisan and unifying, that majority is overwhelmingly driven by Republicans, 89 percent of whom say America’s anniversary is a moment of triumph. On the other side of the aisle, only 37 percent of Democrats say there’s something to celebrate at 250 years, with 58 percent of Democrats saying “no, there’s not much to celebrate” or “no, there’s nothing” to celebrate.
The group most likely to find fault in the United States is J.D. Vance’s “childless cat ladies”: 64 percent of single female Democrats say there isn’t anything to celebrate after two and a half centuries of America, with just 28 percent answering in favor of the country in which they live.
The racial make-up of respondents also illustrate a major divide. White Democrats (of which 37 percent say yes, there is something to celebrate versus 60 percent who disagree) are much more pessimistic than black Democrats, (of whom 42 percent say yes and 50 percent no).
Perhaps the driving element is a divide over the effect of America’s policies on the world writ large. Overall, 58 percent of Americans say that after 250 years the United States remains a force for good in the world, while 36 percent disagree. In the breakdown, Republicans are emphatic that the USA is a force for good, by a margin of 86 percent to 10 percent. But just 31 percent of Democrats say America is a force for good, with 61 percent disagreeing. Democrats are particularly emphatic on this point – three times as many say America is definitely not a force for good (31 percent) as say it definitely is a force for good (11 percent).
Once again, white leftists are the drivers of the anti-American sentiment. Hispanic Democrats say America is a force for good at a 33 percent clip, and 41 percent of black Democrats think, regardless of the propaganda surrounding the ills of American racism, that the United States is a force for good.
Cygnal’s survey encompassed 1500 likely voters, with a margin of error of 2.5 percent.
Is Nicola Sturgeon liberated or lost?
Nicola Sturgeon isn’t someone for whom oversharing comes naturally. Throughout her career, she has regularly been labelled ‘dour’ or ‘frosty’ by both her opponents and those on her own side. As her profile grew through the 2010s, so did her popularity among the SNP’s expanding membership – and in her first week of being party leader she mustered a 12,000-strong crowd with which to celebrate in Glasgow’s Hydro. But she remained an introvert with a tight-knit circle of few friends. ‘I can come alive on a stage in front of thousands of people, but put me at a dinner table with four people and I will struggle much, much more,’ she told the Sunday Times. While so much has been written about Scotland’s former first minister, there don’t seem to be many people who really know her. It’s unclear, also, whether she knows herself.
Sturgeon’s new memoir Frankly (which is out today) and the interviews that have accompanied it seem like an attempt to shrug off that reservedness. The events of the last two years – Sturgeon’s gender bill; her impromptu resignation; the Operation Branchform police probe into SNP finances – have been dissected, judged and criticised relentlessly. Now Scotland’s former leader is giving people the opportunity to see things from her point of view. Her critics say she is less offering insight, more rewriting history.
Sturgeon’s interview with ITV’s Julie Etchingham sees elements of both. One of the controversies that, some suggest, prompted her resignation in February 2023 was the Gender Recognition Reform Bill – and the case of Isla Bryson. Sturgeon still struggles to call the sexual offender a man and pointedly sticks to ‘they/them’ pronouns. While she admits that she ‘lost the dressing room’ on the gender debate, calling it ‘her failure’, the former FM appears to regret her communication, rather than the substance of her argument. The closest Sturgeon gets to admitting she might have been wrong on the best way to protect trans people is when she says: ‘We lost all sense of rationality in this debate. I am partly responsible for that… I should have said, okay, let’s pause. Let’s take a step back.’
It is clear Sturgeon doesn’t know how to square this particular circle – but that there is a vocal group of people she is conscious of upsetting. She hints at this briefly: ‘Anything I say about Isla Bryson, in the wider world, will be immediately taken and transferred to every trans person. And if I sometimes still seem as if I’m struggling with how to define Isla Bryson, it’s not out of any concern for Bryson, it’s out of concern for how that then affects the wider trans community.’
There are three moments when glimpses of real, unfiltered emotion are seen in the ITV interview. When the police arrived at her door with a search warrant over an embezzlement investigation, the former first minister left for her parents’ house. She sounds unnerved as she tries to describe the day, saying she can’t remember much except shock at photos that made her home look ‘like a murder scene’. She describes her own arrest some months later as the worst day of her life. ‘Do you stand by that you knew nothing?’ Etchingham asks. ‘If there had been any evidence that I had done anything that constituted a criminal offence, I wouldn’t be sitting here right now having been cleared by the police,’ Sturgeon replies, in a way that doesn’t quite answer the question.
Covid is an emotive issue for the woman who led Scotland through the pandemic. Sturgeon’s daily press conferences and decision making saw her popularity – and that of independence – soar at the time, though she was later accused of having pursued her own public health strategy for political gain. With Etchingham, she discusses how she started going to therapy a few weeks after the Covid inquiry. Yet talking about how she felt when she sought help proves difficult for a woman who has over the last decade demonstrated an otherwise uncanny ability to hold herself together. Sturgeon admits she didn’t tell her mum that she had gone to counselling – and makes a mental note on screen to explain this to her ‘before she gets to this bit in the book’.
Sturgeon has been a politician for so long that she doesn’t know who she is outside of that
And it was talk about Salmond’s death that prompted something of another visceral reaction from his onetime protégée. The Salmond-Sturgeon fallout tore apart the ‘Yes’ movement, leaving a pair that had hoped to secure independence together at each other’s throats. To ITV, Sturgeon says: ‘Do I believe he behaved inappropriately – that’s different to criminally inappropriately – on some occasions towards women? I believe that, and… instead of acknowledging that and showing contrition and apologising for that, he doubled down.’
His death conjures up strange feelings. ‘He died, and I hadn’t spoken to him for years,’ Sturgeon admits. ‘I went through this period of I would still talk to him in my head. I would have vivid dreams that we were still on good terms. And then I’d have this feeling of such sadness when I remembered the reality, so I went through that process. I still missed him in some bizarre way. Even today, I still miss him in some way. The person that I used to know in the relationship I used to have.’
Elsewhere, Sturgeon keeps her answers superficial. On preparing for the 2014 indyref, she said that while the SNP had been ‘caught a bit off guard’ and lacked positions that would ‘withstand the full glare of scrutiny’, the party turned things around with their white paper (which, she claims, Salmond never read). On issues of governance, she switches back into politician mode, shrugging: ‘Do I wish I had done more? Of course I do.’ An expression of distaste flickers across her face at the mention of the Reform surge in Scotland and on Nigel Farage she is scathing about his ‘fragile ego’ and ‘bravado’.
The interview swings between political events and personal travesties, with talk of her miscarriage a tender point. She’s candid: ‘I carry a sense of guilt that I miscarried a baby, because I had been conflicted about the pregnancy.’ She jokes later, on a more light-hearted note, that getting a tattoo at 55 is a ‘mid-life crisis alert’. Its infinity-arrow design, she divulges, symbolises strength, resilience and her continuing to move forward.
Nicola Sturgeon has been a politician for so much of her life that you get the sense she doesn’t know who she is outside of that. Her detractors will dismiss her memoir and these interviews as a blatant attempt to reshape a narrative that slipped out of her control in recent years. But it feels much less contrived than that. The former first minister has chosen to expose herself while still in a period of transition. ‘I do feel a sense of liberation,’ she smiles a little uncertainly at Etchingham as the interview wraps up. But she still seems lost, too.
What Baroness Debbonaire gets wrong about Clive of India
Baroness Debbonaire, addressing the Edinburgh International Book Festival, has called for the removal of the statue of Clive of India, Baron Clive of Plassey, the site of one of his most famous military victories, from its prominent place adjoining the Foreign Office, at the end of King Charles Street, looking out across St. James’s Park from what are known as Clive Steps.
Clive was a founder of British imperial power and control over India. Twice governor in the mid-18th century, he was a brilliant military commander, a determined administrator and an opponent of corruption, though he himself became rich on the profits of empire. He fought warlords by becoming one of them himself. Subjected to waves of criticism for the way he governed from both the conscious-struck and jealous, and subject himself to bouts of depression, he may have taken his own life in 1774. His statue was erected much later in 1912, and like Clive in his own lifetime, was controversial and contested.
The statue of Edward Colston, the Bristol slave trader, was also erected just before the first world war and also commemorated someone who lived much earlier. It’s relevant to this new, confected controversy over Clive because Debbonaire was a Labour MP for Bristol until the last election, a veteran of the rancorous debates in that city over the Colston monument until it was pulled down by a mob in 2020. We might have hoped that the Baroness would have learnt the obvious lesson that disputes of this type set communities against each other and undermine social cohesion. Nobody wins, and society loses, in a culture war.
We might also have hoped that instead of demanding the removal of an artefact of which she disapproves, the noble baroness would have used her speech to call for a new work of public art beside the Foreign Office representing the values she holds dear. She could put herself at the head of a committee to raise funds for such a work. But speech-making, removal and perhaps destruction, are always easier (and more psychologically revealing) than working to win broad support for the commissioning of a new piece of art.
This prominent corner of official London is a work in progress. On one side of Clive is the entrance to the Cabinet War Rooms, Churchill’s headquarters in the Second World War that have been preserved for posterity. On the other side is a new monument to the victims of the Bali bombing of 2002. The area is rich with British history, its victories and tragedies, its heroes and villains. But the subtle and complex nature of the past is lost on Debbonaire who thinks it her right to judge for the rest of us.
She complains that on Clive’s statue, the frieze running around the base depicts ‘tiny, tiny little Indians’ as subservient. The common practice of sculpting, in miniature, key moments or themes in the life of those commemorated may be unknown to her. Does she also disdain the frieze running round the Albert Memorial, depicting great cultural figures, or the allegorical sculptures of Africa and Asia at its corners? Or the panels depicting the lives of ordinary people at the base of the statue known as The Meeting Place at St. Pancras Station where two lovers embrace high above scenes of everyday life, again captured in miniature? (The statue is disdained by our cultural elite, as it happens, but highly regarded by those same ordinary people.)
Debbonaire’s greatest mistake is to complain that Clive’s statue taints and distorts our relationship with India today. Wrapped up in the cliches of contemporary anti-colonialism, she is unaware of India’s profound interest in the British colonial past and respect for the legacies we left behind. She might spend some time reading the splendid essays by the Sri Lankan scholar Rohan Fernando, published by History Reclaimed, on the cultural and scientific inheritance from the Raj and its reception in contemporary India. The British founded dozens of museums across India; established scientific institutions such as the Indian Meteorological Department and the Archaeological Survey of India (whose Director, John Marshall, discovered the Indus Valley Civilisation exactly a century ago); mapped India’s terrain and geology; built canals and railways. All of these achievements are acknowledged and celebrated by an authentic Indian culture which is ever more at ease with its British past.
Debbonaire is not alone in her ignorance of these legacies, of course. University College, Oxford has decided to criticise its greatest son, Sir William Jones, who in the late eighteenth century first identified the family of Indo-European languages, wrote codes of Hindu and Muslim law, and began the study of Indian archaeology. A panel recently placed next to the great monument to him in the college chapel, sculpted by John Flaxman, confects a charge sheet of the usual offences. But Jones is revered by Indians as the founder of the study of their cultures: his grave in Calcutta is the site of regular commemorations and he even adorns a recent Indian postage stamp.
An Oxford college dishonouring a great scholar dishonours only itself. Baroness Debbonaire does greater damage, pitching us all into unnecessary disputes based on faulty history and imagined grievances.
Why is the YHA allowing males to stay in women’s dorms?
On April 16, the Supreme Court ruled that the meaning of the terms ‘sex’, ‘man’ and ‘woman’ in the Equality Act refer to biology. More than three months later, you might think that the Youth Hostels Association (YHA) – an organisation that provides single sex dormitories in hostels across England and Wales – would have reviewed their policies to ensure that they were consistent with the law.
They need to review their arrangements for transgender guests as a matter of urgency
I did and, perhaps naively, I wondered if the ruling might actually work in my favour. I know I am not a woman and so I pay extra for a private room when checking into their hostels. Until April, that was my choice; now it seems that it would be unlawful for YHA to book me into dorm designated for women.
As a YHA member, I’m well aware of the organisation’s ‘pursuit of equity, diversity and inclusion’, and its commitment to welcome people of ‘all genders’ to their hostels. Perhaps, therefore, the days of paying more were behind me? So, ahead of a recent walking holiday along Hadrian’s Wall, I emailed YHA customer services to see if they would accommodate me in a private room at the (cheaper) dorm rate.
I was not looking for special favours, and I explained in my email that I would be quite happy sharing the room with another transwoman. I am also happy to sleep in a designated mixed-sex dorm but, unlike some other hostelling organisations, that option is not offered by the YHA. Nor, it seems, was legal nous. On July 16, YHA customer services told me that,
‘You are welcome to stay in our female dormitory, as you are a woman. We split our dorms by gender, and not sex, so our guests can stay in the room they assign themselves with.’
They added:
‘I also want to assure you, if you did have any issues while staying in our hostels, please talk to staff on reception and they will be able to help you. We do not tolerate discrimination, and pride ourselves on providing a safe, welcoming place to stay for all our guests.’
Which is a very laudable aim, but hardly achievable by allowing anyone to sleep in rooms they assign themselves. We can all tell the difference between men and women, and that shared instinct is not fooled by claims of so-called gender identity or the production of a gender recognition certificate. I replied, and quoted paragraphs 223 and 224 of the Supreme Court ruling that specifically addressed communal accommodation. According to the judges, ‘Here too it is plain that sex has its biological meaning.’
Alas, YHA has chosen to take advice from elsewhere. On 28 July, YHA Customer Service told me that:
If any guest does not want to stay in a dorm with any other guest, we offer private rooms… We consulted our solicitors while developing the policy to ensure that it was informed by and compliant with law. We consulted other organisations including the NSPCC, Scouts, Mermaids and Gendered Intelligence on different aspects of the policy. We have also taken advice from the Equality and Human Rights Commission. Our policy was considered and approved by our Board of Trustees… We sought legal advice from our solicitors following the Supreme Court ruling, which indicated that no changes to our policy were needed, pending the final updated Code of Practice for services, public functions and associations from the Equality and Human Rights Commission, which we now await.’
If the solicitors – or even the trustees of the association – had been following the case brought by nurse Sandie Peggie against NHS Fife and a transgender doctor, Beth Upton, the email didn’t mention it. That employment tribunal case where a female nurse objected to being required to share a changing room with a transgender doctor is surely pertinent to dormitory accommodation offered by YHA.
A judgment in the Peggie case is not expected for months, but NHS Fife’s legal bill has already topped £220,000. YHA does not need to wait for the outcome, or that updated code of practice from the EHRC. The Supreme Court has already ruled on the law. A responsible senior management might have already responded and protected the rights of all the users of youth hostels.
Where separate accommodation offered to men and women, the criteria must be sex, not some self-defined gender. Otherwise, the association risks legal action if a female guest objects to sharing a room with a transwoman whom she perceives to be a man. Meanwhile transwomen who do want to stay within the law (and within YHA policy) are required to pay extra for the privilege. That could be direct discrimination on the grounds of gender reassignment. I will leave that possibility for YHA to mull over.
As it was, I thoroughly enjoyed my stay at the hostel last week. It was a welcome respite from my tent. The local staff were excellent and, as always in my experience, the camaraderie between guests is so much better than in hotels. We commended each other on our wise planning – or rather good fortune – when Storm Floris lashed against the windows on Monday morning. Yes, I paid extra – but I respect the rights of the other sex, and I do not want the organisation to be facing the prospect of significant legal bills to try and defend the indefensible.
In a further communication, YHA said:
‘As a provider of guest accommodation, YHA has always followed legal and statutory obligations as advised by our solicitors and the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC)… We will review the [forthcoming EHRC Code of Practice] to identify whether it necessitates any updates to our policies, as we always do with changes or updates to law and guidance.’
Ultimately, however, we all know the difference between men and women. The YHA trustees are responsible for policy, and they should review their arrangements for transgender guests as a matter of urgency. They can start by paying rather more attention to the highest court in the land than to the likes of Mermaids and Gendered Intelligence.
Do you have a Facebook stalker?
We’ve all seen appalling stories of people, usually – but not exclusively – women, being stalked by a spurned suitor, and how this can have terrifying and sometimes life-threatening sequelae.
However, the popularity of social media has brought about the advent of the less dangerous but mighty irritating social media stalker – or ‘smalker’, as I like to call them. The smalker is usually a spurned friend who has been chewing her lips with fury since you removed her from your Facebook ‘friends’ list. Sometimes they only requested to be your ‘friend’ in the first place so they could lurk on your page, twisting their face into a sucking-a-wasp grimace: an upside-down smile with a wrinkled nose. They are cantankerous loners and, for some reason, many of them are poets who have not attained the level of literary success they feel they deserve.
You can spot a smalker because, even while they are on your friends list, they never contribute a pleasant comment, like or other positive emoticon. They lie in wait for you to write something they can pick a fight with – and that’s the only time they will comment – unless they shoehorn a link to their woeful poetry inappropriately into an unrelated thread.
They are often narcissists. I had a smalker who I initially thought was just a pleasant woman with a similar love for art and books. However, I soon realised that she saw me as a stepping stone to commercial and literary success, because I received more than 40 private messages from her asking me to review one or another of her little-known books in The Spectator.
Being a polite and jolly sort of person until my buttons are pushed, I initially responded with sunny little replies, praising the poem she had shared from her book, and saying regretfully that I wasn’t free to review anything I wanted in The Spectator’s book pages, and that my long-suffering – and bestowed-with-saintly-patience – literary editor had limited space each week in which to review all the interesting books published recently, and that I already suggested too many titles to him to bother him with books I hadn’t read.
But still the messages kept coming. My smalker seemed oblivious to my social media posts about being admitted to hospital for a leg amputation; or ten massive gastro bleeds in five years; or for pneumonia eight times; or for a heart attack; or for a blocked superior vena cava; or for a smashed tibia and fibula; or for endless casts and external fixators for the above; or for gangrene on my remaining leg and, ultimately, for another leg amputation – complicated by two weeks in the high-dependency unit for bilateral pneumonia and heart failure – and then a bowel obstruction back on the ward. To these posts there was no response whatsoever.
Sometimes it was fairly surreal, being connected to lines and monitors and IV drips and respiratory tubing, on 100 per cent oxygen with a strong possibility of not recovering, and hearing little ‘dings’ as the smalker sent yet another link to the same old book or a reading of hers. There were moments of grim humour, as when I noticed from my hospital bed that she always referred to herself in the third person. I wondered if I was dealing with the ghost of Princess Margaret – with an ego to match.
They are cantankerous loners and, for some reason, many of them are poets
In the end, I unfriended her. And there was peace for a couple of years. But then, for some reason, she searched for a post of mine that was open to the public and not just friends, and swooped on it like a vulture. I had written in defence of Israel weeks after the pogrom on 7 October. From this, almost two years later, she deduced that I was in favour of genocide of Gazans, and declared as such in a fairly hysterical post in my thread.
She also saw fit to bring up the fact that I ‘professed to have been a doctor’, which she saw as paradoxical to my belief that the terrorist group Hamas – and certainly not innocent civilians in Gaza – should be rendered powerless by Israeli forces. The doctor thing amused as well as enraged me; I have heard whispered variations of it before by authors who have taken umbrage at a mere doctor being asked to write reviews of fiction books by a national publication. I can usually silence this bitchiness by pointing out that I’ve been published since I was 17, when I was hired by New Musical Express and by No1 magazine, and that since then I’ve written for around 50 national and international publications, with stints as news editor in two journals and regular columns in a broadsheet and two magazines.
As for dismantling the accusation of ‘professing to be a doctor’, I pointed out that I was indeed a retired doctor and that in my time I had been the physician in charge of all medical admissions at the biggest hospital in the west end of Edinburgh, and had my full postgraduate physicians’ exams, as well as passing the full postgrad exams in anaesthetics and working as a consultant anaesthetist in charge of all emergency anaesthetics in Glasgow.
But it’s a waste of time arguing with a smalker. They are usually angry inside and just searching for people to smite. But the only way I’m smitten is my love for my husband, friends and life. It’s funny how it’s sometimes those whose bodies are decrepit who squeeze the most joy out of life. I’ll leave my narcissistic smalker to harangue someone else with 40 emails about her overwrought poetry.
The Isle of Wight is an England that time forgot
‘August for the people and their favourite islands,’ wrote W.H. Auden. My own favourite island in Britain is the Isle of Wight, even though my introduction to it was less than ideal. I was seven years old and had been sent to the island for the ritual initiation for British middle-class males of my generation: immersion in a boarding school with around 50 other pre-pubertal boys.
I was, in fact, the youngest boy in the school and this was the first time I had left home. I have already written in these pages about my five years at a boarding school on the island; bizarre and bewildering rather than the hell of paedophilia and punishment described by others writing about their prep school days. But I want to convey here the curious charm of the island itself.
Famously, the Isle of Wight, though only a mile or so off bustling southern England, is marooned in a genteel time warp that keeps it at least half a century behind the rest of the country. You can still find Wimpy bars and National petrol stations with their head-of-Mercury logos on the island, decades after they have disappeared elsewhere in England.
Before they discovered the Costa Brava, the English used to take their summer holidays on the island, with its chalk cliffs, yellow-sanded beaches, tea shops and ubiquitous yachts; a fact recorded by the Beatles on their Sergeant Pepper album when they hymned the joys of renting a cottage there when they were 64.
The resort of Ventnor on the south-east coast of the island has a balmy microclimate, making it England’s sunniest spot, which drew the Victorians there in droves. Elgar spent his honeymoon here, and the exiled Russian novelist Turgenev was a regular visitor, along with Karl Marx, who enjoyed bourgeois seaside holidays in Ventnor along with the rest of the class he so despised.
Just up the coast from Ventnor is Shanklin, visited by the doomed genius John Keats, and across the island to the west is Farringford House, now a hotel, the retirement home of another poet, Alfred, Lord Tennyson. A less reputable Victorian bard, Algernon Charles Swinburne, also loved the island and is buried in Bonchurch churchyard despite his atheism. Swinburne appropriated the name of another island village, Whippingham, for his little-known erotic work The Whippingham Papers in which he wrote of the joys of sado-masochism, inculcated in him by the beatings inflicted during his education at Eton.
Whippingham is close to Osborne, the coastal village where Queen Victoria and her husband Albert built their Italianate villa, Osborne House, where the monarch spent her happiest times and where she died in 1901. After her death, Osborne briefly became a naval college, and in 1910 was the scene of a famous Edwardian miscarriage of justice when a cadet, George Archer-Shee, was wrongly accused by the Admiralty of stealing a postal order. The cause célèbre was dramatised by Terence Rattigan in his play and film The Winslow Boy, which does not mention the eponymous boy’s real-life fate. Never readmitted to the navy, George joined the army instead and was killed at Ypres in 1914.
Another sovereign had a more trying time on the island than Victoria. King Charles I was imprisoned at Carisbrooke Castle after losing the civil war in the 1640s. He made a couple of unsuccessful escape attempts before being dragged off to the mainland to be executed. The pious monarch also had his only recorded adulterous affair here, with a Royalist named Jane Whorwood.
The Isle of Wight is marooned in a genteel time warp that keeps it half a century behind the rest of the country
These days the island’s prisoners are housed near Carisbrooke in Parkhurst and Albany jails. Current inmates include Radovan Karadzic, the psychiatrist who led the Bosnian Serbs during the savage wars in former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, and who was later jailed for life for war crimes by the International Court at The Hague.
In the 1970s the island became the venue for Britain’s first mass rock festivals. Bob Dylan was one of the first to feature, and both Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix gave their swan songs here before their deaths. Despite its old-fashioned ways, the island has always had a technological cutting edge: the hovercraft was developed here, and still wafts passengers across the Solent, while Shanklin was the place from where Pluto – the pipeline under the ocean – pumped vital fuel to the D-day beaches in Normandy in 1944. The matron at my prep school tearfully recalled how, as a wartime nurse, she had escorted and comforted a desperately wounded GI to an island hospital by ambulance on D-day – only to see him die on arrival.
So much for the Isle of Wight. Today, sun-seeking Brits are more often found on the beaches of one of the many islands around Greece. I too joined the throng when I discovered the island of Skyros, set in the Aegean Sea, in 1993. I was researching my biography of the poet Rupert Brooke, who died of septicaemia on a troopship moored off the island en route to the bloody beaches of Gallipoli in 1915. Brooke is buried in a lonely olive grove on Skyros.
I signed up for a writing seminar tutored by the novelist D.M. Thomas at the Skyros Centre, a holistic, hippyish home of New Age courses with such titles as ‘Finding Your Child Within’ or ‘Accept Life at Any Risk’ (is there an alternative?). It sounds pretentious and awful but is actually quite charming, and the island setting adds to a Prospero-style magic so potent that I have returned on four subsequent occasions.
Not overrun by tourists like more fashionable islands such as Mykonos and Hydra, Skyros, as befitting the birthplace of Achilles, retains the ambience of classical Greece. The car-less, cobbled streets of its tiny capital, Choros, are lined with tavernas, and its safe, sandy beaches are refreshingly empty. By coincidence, the UK HQ of the Skyros Centre, with its slogan ‘Holidays you can take home with you’, is located in Shanklin – neatly bringing together my two favourite islands.
Is it safe to be conservative in Hollywood?
The news that the actress Gina Carano has secured a climbdown and undisclosed (but undoubtedly) generous settlement from Disney over her dismissal from The Mandalorian television series in 2021 is sure to have far-reaching consequences that stretch far beyond La La Land. Carano posted a triumphant statement on X, saying, “I hope this brings some healing to the force,” thanked Elon Musk for bankrolling her case and concluded by saying “Yes, I’m smiling.” Disney, meanwhile, released their own, terse assessment in which they announced, “We look forward to identifying opportunities to work together with Ms. Carano in the near future.”
It was a win for Carano on every level. She was humiliatingly dismissed from The Mandalorian after comparing her status as a Hollywood conservative to being a Jew during the Holocaust. While this might have had some hyperbole to it, the actress rightly pointed out that her co-star Pedro Pascal – an actor firmly to the Hollywood Left – made similarly emotive statements on social media, using the Holocaust comparison, and went undisciplined by the higher-ups at Disney. The question now is what the settlement means not just for Carano, but for conservatives in the industry more generally.
It used to be that gay actors were advised to keep their sexuality to themselves, for fear of alienating their potential audience, but this has been soundly disproved thanks to the mainstream success of everyone from Jonathan Bailey and Luke Evans to Kate McKinnon and Ncuti Gatwa. However, Hollywood conservatives are still a rare breed. There are many leading actors, from Mel Gibson to Dennis Quaid, who have been vocal in their support of Donald Trump, but comparatively few younger A-listers who have dared to voice right-wing or Republican sympathies in public. The revelation that Sydney Sweeney was a registered Republican, and the subsequent anger – coupled with the storm-in-a-teacup American Eagle–jeans advert that she starred in – that this engendered in liberal circles would make you believe that she was a fully paid-up fascist, rather than simply a supporter of the current governing party in the United States.
Still, Hollywood has always been a left-leaning industry, and while its most vocal practitioners may find that their invective damages their careers irreparably (step forward John Cusack, whose transformation from ’90s indie darling to furious keyboard warrior is now complete), the likes of Pascal and Mark Ruffalo can offer their unvarnished opinions without pushback from the executives who hire them. Still, a more intriguing subsection of the industry are those who are, in the words of Jon Voight’s clandestine dining society, “Friends of Abe”: actors or filmmakers who have right-wing or conservative views that they are unwilling to share in public for fear of jeopardizing their career. It is a long, long list – any reader of this could probably name a dozen leading figures who are likely to vote Republican, even if not all of them remain full MAGA supporters – but it has been, up until now, a kind of McCarthyite club in reverse. Nobody wants to lose a successful career because they have voted the wrong way.
It therefore will be fascinating to see whether Carano’s victory leads to a permanent sea change in the industry, or whether it’s just a blip before business-as-usual resumes. Certainly, the success of faith-based films, often starring openly conservative actors such as Kelsey Grammer, indicates that there is a market for films that the American Right, in particular, will lap up, and the news that Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ sequel, currently titled Resurrection, has begun filming for release in 2027 will be catnip for its considerable fanbase. Yet these might be isolated examples rather than a new trend. What will change the industry forever is when there are as many Sydney Sweeneys as Scarlett Johanssons, whose political views are regarded as unexceptional, and then – and only then – being a Hollywood conservative will no longer seem like an oxymoron, or worse.
I’ve finally come round to honey
Honey enjoys almost superpower status. It is credited with healing viral infections, cuts, hay fever and insomnia, to name but a few of honey-curing maladies. On a regular basis, a particular honey is discovered that bodybuilders swear by, or religious leaders have considered akin to holiness.
I had never been keen, considering it an overly sweet inconvenience of a food: however fancy the spoon used to dispense it, it somehow always ends up on my hands (and my hair) before it reaches the yoghurt. I have tended to stick with a very good quality dark brown sugar when in need of something to take the bitter edge off English strawberries.
I long dismissed gushing reviews from friends about honey-infused booze, having once had a terrible experience as a result of picking up what I thought was an extremely good Tennessee whiskey and finding it tasted sweet as hell. I did try drizzling it on ice cream – but all it did was congeal into a hard lump.
Then I read an article about the stuff, in which I was horrified to learn that 70 per cent of the shop-bought honey in the UK contains added sugar. At first, I felt vindicated, since this would account for the too-sweet aspect I didn’t like – but, curious, I bought some natural, organic, raw honey. I wanted to taste the real thing. Yes, I have been to Greece where there was one of those honeycomb sections at the hotel breakfast, with a proper wooden spoon for swirling, and delicious thick creamy yoghurt to accompany it – but by then I had already told myself I didn’t really like it, sticking with a dollop of strawberry jam instead.
What a fool I have been. It all began with a very pricey small jar from a good delicatessen – one where they don’t rip you off to the point you need a mortgage. I had brought a wedge of Parmesan home from Bologna, and I knew that honey and cheese go together. This particular honey was gently scented with black truffle, so clearly intended for savoury food, and when drizzled on top of a slice of the cheese and eaten with nothing but some ripe pear, it was a revelation. I was hooked. How fickle I am.
Next stop, the organic type – expensive, but night and day compared with the supermarket stuff. I became intrigued: what about cooking with it? I added the tiniest drizzle to a dressing for a raw Asian-type salad made with bean sprouts, carrots, sugar snap peas, green beans, shallots, and topped with some crispy duck. Shaken up with some red chilli, fresh ginger and garlic, lemon juice, soy sauce, and half sesame, half peanut oil, it is a total joy.
When drizzled on a slice of cheese and eaten with some ripe pear, it was a revelation
The cheap stuff tastes just like syrup – which is fine if syrup is what you want. But who wants syrup when you can have small-batch, raw, natural honey, unpasteurised, straight from hive to table and infused with orange blossom, a faint whiff of pine or thyme?
I’ve now tried a cocktail with a drop of honey blended with dry gin and plenty of lemon juice, garnished with unwaxed lemon zest. Not only does it taste great – it also solves the problem of those crunchy bits of undissolved brown sugar at the bottom of the glass.
Since converting, I have become somewhat ridiculous: there are currently six different honeys in my cupboard. I do have a limit, though, and am aware of the existence of both honey aficionados and unscrupulous operators seeking to make a massive profit by ripping you off. The wildly expensive manuka honey that Nigella may well courier over from New Zealand is not for me. Nor do I plan on beekeeping to make my own. One of the cheesecloth-clad regulars at the farmers’ market sells the stuff he harvests from his own garden – and his arms look as if he’s wound up more than one of his bees.
The Met Police dealt with the Palestine Action protest admirably
Jonathan Porritt’s arrest under the Terrorism Act 2000 is the apogee of a ‘luxury belief.’ Unlike the dozens of other younger people arrested in Westminster on Saturday for supporting the proscribed organisation Palestine Action (PA), Sir Jonathon Espie Porritt, 2nd Baronet CBE is a longstanding member of the administrative and political boss class. He declared himself ‘privileged’ to be nicked with the grandiose pomposity reserved for people who, by age or means, are insulated from any consequences. Others, inspired by their sanctimony, face potentially lifelong consequences for financial independence and freedom of movement, citizenship or employment, whether arrested or convicted.
The decision to prosecute is likely not to be straightforward
The weekend’s protest in front of parliament resulted in a total of 522 arrests for offences against one of our most punitive pieces of legislation. Many commentators, including the front organisation for the mass civil disobedience group ‘Defend our Juries’, had prophesied the collapse of the Metropolitan police, overwhelmed by sheer numbers of defiant activists.
This isn’t quite what transpired – but the admission from the Met that it faced an entirely ‘unrealistic challenge’ to police a few hundred retired teachers and clerics was oddly defeatist. London’s finest were augmented by officers from other forces across England and Wales. They were there in numbers and the approach was proportionate to all the other public order challenges it faces every weekend, as well as the basic requirement to keep neighbourhoods not in the slightest bit interested in events thousands of miles away safe.
Those offered ‘street bail’ after arrest to conserve police numbers around Parliament Square and stop custody suites from collapsing should take no comfort in later defying any conditions attached to their freedom by rejoining the protest, even without placards. The Met will no doubt have deployed huge evidence-gathering resources and long after the transgressive glee has worn off, the knock on the door will come as a shock for many.
We are also yet to see how the judiciary will act as these cases drift along our bunged-up criminal justice system. The decision to prosecute is likely not to be straightforward, as it will surely involve Attorney General Lord Hermer, whose ‘militant’ activism on the side of the human rights industry is well known. Mind you, the decision to proscribe PA in the first place has his fingerprints all over it. The least anyone can routinely expect on conviction for this offence is a high-level community order including a curfew, unpaid work and rehabilitation activity. There is some wiggle room for ‘exceptional circumstances’ to reduce even that penalty but it has to be justified by the court. All eyes on the judiciary then, magistrates in particular.
It’s a pity that those protesting who were not in possession of a public sector pensions or ancestral hauteur were ignorant of new information now emerging about the decision to proscribe PA. It may have given some of them at least pause for thought.
The government has been woefully uncoordinated when it comes to this point, continually sheltering behind the idea of ‘national security’ and a need-to-know basis. While the Home Secretary Yvette Cooper has alluded to PA’s directly anti-Semitic behaviour and links to malign foreign states, these were only made more explicit this morning when justice minister Alex Davies-Jones spelt out the risk of people with perfectly legitimate anger at the plight of Palestinians being manipulated.
It is significant that ‘Defend our Juries’ aren’t committing to facilitating actions similar to last weekend in the future, preferring to say that they will organise protests against the curtailment of freedom of expression. I hope they do because protesting the power of the state is a precious right in a liberal democracy, one that is in fact a bulwark against extremism. The Met, the subject of relentless criticism around under- or overreacting to public order, played the hand they were dealt with well on Saturday. Ministers must now ensure that ordinary citizens with the most to lose understand the malign nature of the organisation they want to sacrifice their life chances for.
WATCH: DHS tries to make ICE cool again
Cockburn and his colleagues are currently obsessed with the new ICE recruitment video that’s gone viral online. “Allow me to introduce myself, my name is HO HO H to the O V,” Jay-Z, who currently lives comfortably in a Tribeca penthouse with Beyonce, raps over grainy footage of camo-clad soldiers busting open shipping containers, riding rough in the backs of open trucks, and flying in helicopters. It all takes place in dark warehouses or under a dusty, cloudless skies, until the scene shifts to nighttime, and the soldiers raise their hands, getting ready to do violence while lit up in dystopian reds and blues. Denis Villeneuve, who made Sicario, couldn’t have directed it any better.
At the end of the 50-second video, we see the words, in Gothic gang-inspired script: “Hunt Cartels. Save America. Join ice.gov.”
Cockburn doesn’t think Dean Cain is the target audience for this campaign. This isn’t about busting illegal immigrants in textile warehouses or cabbage fields. ICE is clearly aiming at patriots in the tougher districts of Compton, or the Bronx, or, say, Yuma, where danger is a middle name and a $50,000 signing bonus to kick down drug-gang doors while holding a rifle at eye height seems like a huge career opportunity.
Your correspondent acknowledges that drug cartels are an ongoing enormous problem, toxic to security on both sides of the Southern border. But there’s no sign in this video that well-funded, well-armed drug lords and their fentanyl-slinging minions exist on the other side of those doors, or just beyond those walls. It’s no accident that the only “cartel” member we see is some poor innocuous schmo in a pink hoodie who’s about to become a literal dog’s breakfast for a leaping, snarling German shepherd. We assume that badass perrito didn’t have a choice about whether or not it would become a vest-wearing member of the ICE cartel squad.
The Trump administration has, thus far, done a fine job of keeping American soldiers out of harm’s way in foreign entanglements. But it must feed the military-industrial beast somehow; this video makes it clear that there’s an ongoing ramp-up against the cartels, and that ICE agents are the new front-line grunts. The video has a kind of disingenuous ghetto Starship Troopers vibe to it, as though the Nixon administration had used Jimi Hendrix or Creedence songs to try and lure innocent young men to their deaths in Vietnam to fight communism. Instead of the Middle East or Southeast Asia, the plan is to send a generation to its death in Tucson and environs.
Cockburn gets it: this is 2025, gee-whiz “do your part” recruitment tactics don’t work anymore. Whoever put together this ICE video is hip enough to use a 2003 Jay-Z song and the video stylings of an excellent drug-cartel thriller from 10 years ago. But if ICE truly intends to do this fight, then let’s be clear: it will not be cool, it will not be fun, and the music will probably not be particularly good, either. At the end of this endless war, blood will coat the dust. ICE may be recruiting to “Save America,” but in the end, dogs won’t do most of the dirty work. American men and women will die in this quest. That font really is cool, though.
Why is Nicola Sturgeon fighting the ghost of Alex Salmond?
What was Nicola Sturgeon thinking, reopening the war with Alex Salmond, her former mentor, who died last year, in her forthcoming book, Frankly? What did she hope to gain by raking over the darkest episode in Scottish nationalist history, claiming that it was all an attempt by Salmond to ‘destroy’ her politically? Poor me, wronged by the big bad man.
What point was served by claiming that Salmond had ‘privately’ admitted to the ‘substance’ of the allegations of sexual misconduct levelled against him nearly a decade ago? These are allegations that Salmond always strenuously denied and of which he was acquitted in March 2020 by a woman-majority jury before a female judge, Lady Dorrian, in the High Court. Does Sturgeon now expect us to believe that she knows better? It certainly seems that way.
Sturgeon writes that, in seeking to defend himself against these heinous allegations, the Salmond was perpetrating a form of psychological abuse on the complainants. ‘He was prepared to traumatise, time and time again, the women at the centre of it all.’ Well, what was he supposed to do? Admit to charges that he knew to be false, and which were dismissed as such in the highest court in the land?
This self-pitying demolition job, contained in an extract from her forthcoming autobiography in the Sunday Times, was presumably intended to build sales. But it only serves to remind Scottish voters that her government’s investigation into the original sexual misconduct allegations against Salmond was condemned by the Court of Session in 2019 as unlawful and ‘tainted with apparent bias’.
The final litigation score was Salmond 2; Sturgeon nil, but she is still crying foul.
She even claims that Salmond had himself leaked the shocking sexual allegations against him to the Daily Record in August 2018. This claim was duly rubbished by the former Record political editor who broke that very story, David Clegg. On BBC Radio this morning, he said the idea in Sturgeon’s claim that Salmond had been responsible for this potentially criminal leak was ‘not credible’.
And no wonder. The headline splash on the Record read: ‘Alex Salmond accused of “touching woman’s breasts and bum in boozy Bute House bedroom encounter”’. If this was leaked by Salmond to ‘control the narrative’, as Sturgeon suggests, it was a funny way to go about it.
But according to her, it was all part of his attempt to win public sympathy for his cause and bamboozle his detractors. ‘At a stroke’, she goes on, ‘he was able to cast himself as the victim.’ I doubt if the people who read the story thought this.
She can’t move on
Salmond cannot respond to these allegations because he is deceased, but his many supporters in Scottish politics have rounded on Sturgeon’s allegations as self-serving ‘fabrications’. They are pledged to continue the legal action against the Scottish government for ‘misfeasance’ which Salmond launched shortly before he died.
Sturgeon’s renewed assault on Salmond’s integrity will likely also revive attempts by his many allies to expose the women who made the allegations. They were SNP politicians, party workers and Scottish government officials. The judge awarded them lifetime anonymity, even though the jury didn’t believe them. Nearly everyone in Scottish politics knows their identities and their proximity to Nicola Sturgeon.
Salmond told the parliamentary inquiry into the affair that he was subjected to ‘a deliberate, prolonged, malicious and concerted effort amongst a range of individuals within the Scottish government and the SNP to damage my reputation, even to the extent of having me imprisoned’. The Sturgeon memoirs will only embolden those in the independence movement who believe that to be true and consider it their duty to clear the name of the SNP’s most successful leader. Over 25 years in charge, Salmond is credited with having transformed the party from a marginal force in politics to a party of government.
Sturgeon concludes that the court cases were all part of his campaign against her. ‘Eventually,’ she writes, ‘I had to face the fact that he was determined to destroy me. I was now engaged in mortal political combat with someone I knew to be both ruthless and highly effective.’
In that, at least, she is telling it like it is. She can’t move on. Sturgeon is still in mortal combat with Salmond’s ghost. And he is still winning.
Will Zelensky’s appeal to Trump fall on deaf ears?
Over 1,265 days of full-scale war, Volodymyr Zelensky has delivered almost as many nightly addresses to the nation. Only a handful have been truly decisive. There was one just hours before the invasion when he asked, ‘Do the Russians want war?’ and vowed that Ukraine would defend itself. The next day, standing outside his office in Kyiv with his top officials, he told the world: ‘I’m here. We’re all here.’ And last weekend, when he declared that Ukraine would not surrender its land to the occupier – and that the war must end with a just peace:
[Putin’s] only card is the ability to kill, and he is trying to sell the cessation of killings at the highest possible price. It is important that this does not mislead anyone. What is needed is not a pause in the killings, but a real, lasting peace. Not a ceasefire sometime in the future – months from now – but immediately. President Trump told me so, and I fully support it.
Zelensky insists that any discussion of territory can only happen after the guns fall silent
Zelensky has felt blindsided by Donald Trump’s decision to meet Vladimir Putin in Alaska this Friday to discuss Ukraine’s fate without Ukraine present. Putin has reportedly proposed a ceasefire – not an end to the war, but a temporary halt ahead of the next stage of talks – in exchange for Ukrainian territory. Ukrainian forces would have to withdraw from the entirety of the Donetsk region, leaving the 2,500 square miles – about a quarter of the region – that they still hold.
This includes fortress cities such as Pokrovsk, Kramatorsk and Sloviansk, the strongholds Russia can’t seize quickly. The Institute for the Study of War notes that while the Russian push towards Pokrovsk has picked up speed in recent weeks, Moscow has spent the last 18 months fighting for an area of just ten square miles. It took 26 months for Russian forces to advance seven miles from western Bakhmut to western Chasiv Yar. This battle began in April last year and ended only last week, with Russia bearing immense losses. Since January only, Putin has lost 100,000 troops, according to Nato chief Mark Rutte.
Accepting Putin’s offer would strip Ukraine of its main defensive line at the western edge of the Donetsk region, which it has fortified since 2014, leaving only open fields all the way to the Dnipro river. That is why Zelensky insists that any discussion of territory can only happen after the guns fall silent. The idea of Russia pulling back from parts of the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions in exchange for Donbas has been floated before, and this land swap could be agreed de facto but not de jure. But even that seems to be a fantasy at the moment, given that Putin will not give up his land corridor to Crimea, and Zelensky will not hand over hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians still living in the part of the Donetsk region under Kyiv’s control – people who oppose their homes being ceded to Russia.
Kyiv’s stance was backed this week in a joint statement by European leaders, whom Zelensky has been calling to forge a united negotiating position to present to Trump before Alaska. ‘Meaningful negotiations can only take place in the context of a ceasefire or reduction of hostilities,’ it read. ‘We remain committed to the principle that international borders must not be changed by force. The current line of contact should be the starting point of negotiations.’
With Europe behind him, Zelensky tried to appeal to Trump on Saturday. In his speech, Zelensky reminded the American president that Ukraine had backed all of Trump’s earlier proposals, including an unconditional ceasefire and talks with the Russians in Istanbul, even while Moscow stalled and bombed Ukrainian cities. No one, Zelensky said, doubts America’s power to end the war. The mere threat of secondary sanctions on Russia and its allies had been enough to drag Putin out of his bunker and into negotiations. ‘The President of the United States has the leverage and the determination,’ Zelensky said, leaving hanging the question of why Trump is not using them.
Ukrainians have seen where appeasing an aggressor leads. Putin was allowed to take Crimea, and that led to the occupation of parts of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions. No punishment followed when he massed over 100,000 troops on Ukraine’s borders – and that led to the full-scale war, further occupation and hundreds of thousands of deaths.
‘Putin wants to exchange a pause in the war, in the killings, for the legalisation of the occupation of our land,’ Zelensky warned. ‘We will not allow this second attempt to partition Ukraine. Knowing Russia, where there is a second, there will be a third. That is why we stand firm on clear Ukrainian positions.’
Finally, Zelensky turned to the Ukrainian people, many of whom were protesting outside his office just two weeks ago after the government attacked anti-corruption agencies, to thank them for standing with him. A new poll from the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology shows 76 per cent strongly oppose Russia’s proposed peace deal. If even half were in favour of peace at any price, Zelensky might have been tempted to respond differently to Putin’s offer. But as Ukrainians are afraid that without cast-iron security guarantees, Russia will start the war again, they expect their president to fight for a lasting peace.
‘Independence is built on dignity,’ Zelensky said. ‘Fear and concessions do not make nations safe. Russia’s desire to rule over Ukrainian territory will remain just that – a desire – for as long as Ukrainians stand shoulder to shoulder, helping the army and the state.’
Labour is going to have to leave the ECHR
The Home Secretary’s extension of the list of countries covered by the ‘deport now, appeal later’ scheme for foreign criminals, announced this morning, doesn’t actually add to the number of undesirables that we can deport. But it could lubricate the process of getting rid of them.
Barring a Damascene conversion of the Strasbourg court, something pretty inconceivable, withdrawal is fast becoming not only an option, but the only option
For criminals from the new countries just added, which include a number of African and Asian states, India, Canada and Australia, it means that once the Home Secretary rejects an objection based on human rights grounds, physical removal can be automatic. The deportee can still appeal, but any appeal has to be pursued from abroad. This not only saves us the cost of supporting and detaining them here but reduces the possibility of them either disappearing into the black economy, or arguing that the passage of time has itself created of a link with this country so strong as to make their removal inhuman.
This is a step in the right direction. But it is a pretty limited one. There are 700-odd prisoners from the new countries in our jails who will be subject to the new rules; but this is around half the number who come from Albania alone, which tops the list of foreign suppliers of convicts to our penal system and which was already part of the scheme even before its extension. One doubts whether extended human rights claims against removal by, say, unwanted Canadians or Australians are a serious problem. By contrast, we have large numbers of Polish, Romanian, Lithuanian, Jamaican, Pakistani and Somali jailbirds on our hands whom we would love to be summarily rid of, but are still not covered.
Tough-sounding measures of this kind are all very well. But they have a history of coming unstuck. We have been here before. Legislation in 2014 would have allowed all deported criminals to be put on the first plane out and then appeal from abroad. Unfortunately this very salutary provision was declared non-human-rights-compliant three years later by a liberal Supreme Court unhappy about the difficulties faced by criminal deportees forced into long-distance litigation.
The present scheme aims to sidestep this by requiring provisions for pursuing effective online appeals from abroad: countries are not added unless and until these have been agreed. But it would be foolish to rule out a UK court, or the European Court of Human Rights, saying that an applicant has not had a chance to put his case. We also cannot exclude a court staying physical expulsion on the basis that the trauma of immediate removal, say of a criminal with alleged mental health issues, is itself a breach of human rights.
This is, in other words, largely an exercise in tinkering. Furthermore, even if it works it will not make a serious dent in the numbers of foreigners who successfully demand to stay despite having grossly abused our hospitality. To do this, the government knows perfectly well about the migrant elephant in the room. In the last resort something must be done about the European Convention on Human Rights. Whether litigation takes place in the Strand or in the legal ether over a Zoom link from abroad is largely beside the point: even where a person otherwise fulfils the criteria for removal, it always remains open under the Convention to argue that if removed their family life would be destroyed, or that they would face ill-treatment abroad. (Some, indeed, have successfully, if impudently, resisted removal precisely because of the hostility they would face at home as a result of their having committed a heinous crime here.)
This cannot go on. I can quite legitimately eject someone from my house who has taken sanctuary there if they start smashing up my furniture, even if I know a baying mob outside will brutalise them as a result. The same should go for a country: the right to refuge, even from those out for blood, should be able to be lost as a result of serious misbehaviour. Unfortunately this is what Strasbourg, with its almost religious view of human rights, will not accept.
In the end, there is only one way out. Barring a Damascene conversion of the Strasbourg court, something pretty inconceivable (witness its petulant brush-off three months ago of a suggestion from a number of countries including Denmark, Poland and Italy that it should soften its line on migrants’ rights), withdrawal is fast becoming not only an option, but the only option. A number of Red Wall MPs, painfully aware of public opinion, are already making noises along these lines. For the moment this is anathema to Yvette Cooper, and even more so to Keir Starmer and Lord Hermer. But sooner or later Labour, if it wants to avoid electoral irrelevance, will have to think seriously about it.
Sturgeon: I’m ‘partly’ to blame for loss of rationality in trans debate
Oh dear. If Scotland’s former Dear Leader thought she could have an interview about her legacy that didn’t touch on the question of putting male rapists in women’s prisons she was sorely mistaken. Nicola Sturgeon has come under fire for a promotional clip ahead of tonight’s ITV interview with the ex-SNP leader. In the clip, the former FM is quizzed on her gender reform bill and the scandal that saw the double rapist Isla Bryson – born Adam Graham – initially housed in a women’s prison. And yet despite the outrage the case provoked, Sturgeon still couldn’t bring herself to call Graham a man in her latest TV interview. Some people never learn, eh?
Sturgeon’s gender bill – which would allow a person to self-identify as the opposite gender from the age of 16, after living as their acquired gender for six months and without a medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria – grew to become an extremely divisive piece of legislation that was initially passed in Holyrood before being blocked by Scotland Secretary Alister Jack. On the subject, Sturgeon admitted that her handling of the Bryson case – where institutional creep past the point of the law saw the male rapist end up in a female prison – hadn’t been optimal, adding that rapists ‘probably forfeit the right to be the gender of their choice’. At the time, the ex-FM refused to admit whether Bryson was male or female – and it seems not much has changed.
Julie Etchingham: You became unstuck over the questions about the transgender prisoner, the rapist Isla Bryson. Why couldn’t you answer that question?
Nicola Sturgeon: I think I was caught up in the…
JE: Will you answer it now whether you believe Isla Bryson…
NS: Isla Bryson identified as a woman. I think what I would say now is any anybody who commits the most heinous male crime against women probably forfeits the right to be, you know, the gender of their choice.
JE: They forfeit to be the gender of their choice? That’s, quite, I mean, this actually goes to the heart of the difficulty.
NS: That probably was not the best phrase to use… If you rape a woman, then I think you probably… the debate about whether they should be called a woman or not. Probably.
JE: Well, why don’t you simply say then Isla Bryson is a biological male.
NS: They are a biological male. But that’s about whether it gets back into the self-ID thing. I should have been much more straightforward. I wasn’t, but that’s because of the debate. We’d lost all sense of rationality in this debate. I’m partly responsible for that.
How very revealing. Watch the clip here: