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A committed performance of Lerner and Weill’s flop: Opera North’s Love Life reviewed
Once upon a time on Broadway, Igor Stravinsky composed a ballet for Billy Rose’s revue Seven Lively Arts. After the first night, Rose felt that Stravinsky’s efforts might benefit from the attention of Robert Russell Bennett – the king of Broadway orchestrators, who’d collaborated with Cole Porter and the Gershwins. ‘YOUR MUSIC GREAT SUCCESS,’ he telegrammed to Stravinsky. ‘COULD BE SENSATIONAL SUCCESS IF YOU WOULD AUTHORISE ROBERT RUSSELL BENNETT RETOUCH ORCHESTRATION.’ Stravinsky wired straight back: ‘SATISFIED WITH GREAT SUCCESS.’
If you’re mad enough to revive Love Life, you have to commit. Opera North did
There were moments in this revival of the Lerner and Weill flop Love Life when I wondered whether Weill, too, might have profited from a Bennett makeover. Sacrilege! Kurt Weill was one of the very few Broadway composers (then or now) who insisted upon complete control of his own orchestral sound. And it’s true that Love Life is a gorgeous score, soaked in bittersweet melody and bruised romanticism. But you long for a little more sparkle, a touch more sonic pizzazz; anything, really, to buck the show’s long downward trajectory. Come on, boys, give us a smile!
It probably wouldn’t have made much difference, mind. Love Life is a musical about family life scripted by Alan Jay Lerner, who divorced seven times and whose best shows (My Fair Lady, Camelot, Gigi) contain not a single healthy, recognisable marriage. It’s an anti-capitalist critique of the American dream, an epic downer scored by Bertolt Brecht’s old co-writer at the precise moment – 1948 – of peak postwar optimism. Oh, and it’s framed as a flashback, narrated by a magician, and the hero and heroine can travel in time. Got that? Now prepare to be lectured. At one point Lerner trials an early draft of ‘Ah Yes, I Remember It Well’, and it dies on its feet.
In short, Love Life is a multi-car pile-up of terrible ideas – proof (as fans of the film Cats will know) that you can hurl talent at a show, but there’s no guarantee that it’s going to stick. Glorious music, though. It missed out on a cast recording during its original Broadway run; hence this three-night revival by Opera North. For what was essentially a recording project, they certainly went to town, with the orchestra on stage, James Holmes conducting and the director Matthew Eberhardt rustling up rather more than just a semi-staging. So there was a conjuror (Themba Mvula), vocal strength in depth from the Opera North company in Weill’s various pastiche ensembles (everything from a mock-madrigal to a barbershop quartet), and three all-dancing, all-singing little girls in pinafores and bows, who duly brought the house down. Justin Hopkins sang with open-hearted nobility in his solitary number as a sort of mystical hobo and for one brief, shining moment, Lerner and Weill sounded almost like they belonged together.
Quirijn de Lang and Stephanie Corley played Sam and Susan, the couple whose marriage – in the show’s baffling central conceit – gradually disintegrates over 150 years of American history. They could hardly have mustered more conviction, even if (and we have Lerner and Weill and to thank for this) their quarrels felt more real than their early aw-shucks optimism. De Lang’s voice opened out thrillingly in his post-divorce anthem ‘This is the Life’, and Corley really brought it – and then some – in a big bluesy production number about women’s suffrage, singing with exuberant, gravelly flair.
If you’re mad enough to revive Love Life, you have to commit. Opera North did, and Weill’s entire score is now safely captured on record, which is probably the best place for it.
The Royal Opera has revived Claus Guth’s 2021 production of Jenufa, which excited me hugely first time around. Possibly the post-Covid euphoria had gone to my head. Guth’s production, with its stark monochrome designs and bolted-on symbolism (the regimented toing and froing of the chorus, a dark figure with a crow’s head) is a perfectly serviceable example of modern European opera direction. It’s inoffensive, mostly, but I wish Guth allowed the performers to make more eye contact, rather than parking them moodily about the stage. It’s the sort of staging that looks better in publicity photos than in action.
But you should see it: firstly, for Corinne Winters’s presence and pure, controlled singing as Jenufa. Her intensity draws the whole performance in around her. Secondly, for Nicky Spence’s ardent, touching Laca and Karita Mattila’s Kostelnicka – both reprised from this production’s first outing. I can’t recall whether Mattila chewed the scenery quite so frenetically in 2021, but after some early wobbles the inner warmth and expressive range of her singing was still remarkable. And finally for the shot-silk colours of Jakub Hrusa’s astonishingly lyrical and tender conducting, which will come as a revelation to anyone who still thinks Janacek is all about jagged edges. For Hrusa, clearly, it’s all about love.
Would it be worth Trump buying Greenland?
London’s capital market needs a kick in the pants, as I write every week, and ‘activist investors’ are no bad thing if they provoke sharper corporate performance. The assault by the New York hedge funder Boaz Weinstein on seven UK investment trusts – demanding shareholder votes to replace directors with his own people and take the management of the trusts into his own firm, Saba Capital – looks like the kind of intervention that might bring positive change to the UK’s historic investment trust sector, which accounts for a third of FTSE 250 companies but according to critics offers lacklustre returns, with share prices too often stuck at discounts to the underlying value of trusts’ asset portfolios (NAV).
By buying stakes of up to 29 per cent, Weinstein has already caused a narrowing of his targets’ discounts to NAV and claimed that proves he’s on the side of ‘mom and pop investors’. But the trusts – including Baillie Gifford US Growth, a long-term backer of Elon Musk’s ventures, and Herald, a respected investor in tech start-ups whose shareholder vote was due this week – have fought back, accusing Weinstein of lack of UK investment expertise and a poor track record (which he disputes) in his own fund.
They also say he’s picked on trusts with high numbers of retail investors trading through online platforms, who tend not to use their shareholder votes: so he may achieve the bare 50 per cent majorities he needs by default. My advice? Too late for Herald, but if you’re a holder of the other trusts he’s stalking, register your vote, listen to Weinstein on YouTube, and make up your own mind. I think you might conclude he’s more self-serving chancer than market hero.
Destined for Downing Street?
Regret at the departure of Tulip Siddiq as ‘City minister’ can be detected in the Square Mile only in the limited sense of irritation at time wasted trying to win support from a politician with no background whatever in finance or markets. Her successor Emma Reynolds – several times tipped in this column – is better qualified and more trusted, having previously served as head of public affairs for TheCityUK, the lobby group for financial services.
But Torsten Bell, who succeeds Reynolds as pensions minister, is regarded more warily as a policy wonk whose ideas are already fully formed rather than open to persuasion: he has previously spoken against the state-pension triple-lock and advocated both for IHT on unspent pension pots and a £100,000 lifetime limit on tax-free Isa savings. On the other hand, he has also been fingered as ‘a slam-dunk replacement for Rachel Reeves as Chancellor’ as soon as the Prime Minister decides to dump her. So perhaps Bell won’t have time to disrupt the pensions sector before destiny calls him to Downing Street.
Don’t buy Greenland
‘The art of the deal’ is President Trump’s much-vaunted modus operandi as well as the title of his 1987 bestseller. But how smart would he be to make an offer for Greenland to the Danish government? Leaving aside issues of military sites and future unfrozen shipping routes, would the currently still-frozen north Atlantic island be worth a rich price for its mineral deposits alone?
I consulted an intrepid investor who spent six years there prospecting for tantalum, a ‘transition metal’ used in capacitors for mobile phones. His answer was not encouraging. There’s no disputing the potential to find everything from gold and uranium to rare earth elements such as neodymium and dysprosium, in demand for advanced electronics. But the operating difficulties are truly formidable.
‘Half the year it’s almost impossible to work, when Greenland’s dark and freezing winter makes helicopter flying impossible. And most of the resources are under thousands of feet of ice, huge distances from any port. Outcrops along the coast or on dry mountain tops near the sea provide the best hope, but development costs are so high that only the richest deposits stand a chance of being put into production.’
Canapés of walrus blubber and cured whalemeat, washed down with fierce hooch, made local dealmaking even more challenging. On the other hand, where but this column would you find a restaurant tip from Greenland? The Disko Island hotel – says my man on a dog sled with a pickaxe – offers moose steak, fine Burgundy and a view of passing icebergs. As the ice continues to melt, perhaps Trump will develop a golf resort around it.
At my shoulder
My father would have been 100 this week. As deputy chairman of Barclays and a member of the court of the Bank of England – so wrote Nigel Lawson – ‘Deryk Vander Weyer [was] arguably the outstanding commercial banker of his generation’. On the threshold of my eighth decade, I cannot but wonder what other roles and distinctions might have come his way if illness had not forced his retirement at 63 and ended his life two years later. And of course, since I was still making my own career in banking when he died, I ask myself every week what on earth he would have thought of this column.
But then I recall that it was he who encouraged me, as a teenager, to start reading The Spectator. And that many of the themes of Any Other Business are his as much as mine, including innate financial caution, dislike of executive greed, and admiration for the best entrepreneurial risk-takers. Among those of his era he might have cited were the young Gerald Ronson, building his first petrol-station chain; Jeffrey Sterling, a shrewd survivor of the 1974 property crash who went on to chair P&O; and Ernie Harrison, a hard-partying electronics tycoon who bet the farm to found Vodafone.
As the fortunes and follies of the financial world repeat their patterns, I sense my father’s perpetual presence at my shoulder. A crew of old City comrades, his and mine, will be toasting his very big birthday.
Letters: Were we deceived by Labour?
Forced Labour
Sir: Matthew Parris wonders ‘Why was everyone fooled by Rachel Reeves?’(18 January) and goes on to include Sir Keir Starmer in this question. The former he concludes is ‘an empty vessel’ and the latter ‘bereft of ideas’. By ‘everyone’ he chiefly means the commentariat, although he claims he was not himself misled.
They and many others were fed up with the failure of successive Conservative governments, and wanted so badly to believe in Labour’s ability to form an effective administration that they never seriously applied due diligence by questioning its credibility or competences. At no stage were any stones lifted to determine what ‘nasties’ lay underneath. As a result, we are now beginning to see how many worms there really are and how short-changed much of the electorate feels.
The jury is still out, however, on an even more critical issue. Are the events, for which Parris is now effectively apologising on behalf of his colleagues, the result of their failure to do their job properly, or the consequence of a calculated deception deliberately practised by the Labour party as a form of ‘entryism’ to ensure the election of a government far more radical and left-wing than the British people would ever have voted for? I fear the worst on this, but hope for the best. Only time will tell.
Richard Longfield
Weston Patrick, Hampshire
Nasty party
Sir: Matthew Parris makes a good case against the commentariat for failing to recognise the policy vacuum at the heart of the Starmer/Reeves bid for government. Voters were more perceptive, which is surely why only a third of them supported Labour. There was one clear sign of the nastiness to come: the commitment to attack private education. But the Tories made little of it. If only Rachel Reeves’s interview on Political Thinking had been before the election. Then her boasting to Nick Robinson that she was the new Margaret Thatcher might have prompted Conservative stay-at-homes to skip to the polling booths to vote Tory, laughing all the way.
John Hicks
Manchester
Diocese and desist
Sir: The erudite ‘Mind your language’ column (11 January) discussed the etymology of ‘minster’ – a venerable word describing the Anglo-Saxon monasteries from which clergy went out to serve scattered homesteads. As Dot Wordsworth shrewdly observed, Leicester diocese is distorting ‘minster community’ to cover the dearth of local care and clergy in its pastoral ‘reorganisation’: whereby, for example, one paid ‘oversight minister’ will ‘care’ for 23 parishes and 34 churches in Leicester’s Launde deanery from July. This strategy is less ‘shaped by God’, more by a centralised bureaucracy hacking at its own front line.
Ironically, on the same page, your wine correspondent notes increased numbers of acquaintances attending church. In dioceses which pursue policies like Leicester’s, they may soon struggle to find a church to attend. Save the Parish is working tirelessly to champion the social, spiritual and economic value of local provision. May I urge all Anglican readers to ‘mind the language’ in diocesan documents.
Revd Canon Professor Alison Milbank
Canon Theologian of Southwell Minster
Southwell, Nottinghamshire
Lost youth
Sir: Simon Heffer’s interesting article on Kemi Badenoch strikes too much of an optimistic tone (‘Iron will’, 11 January). Electorally, Kemi’s problem is that young people are flocking to Reform, evidenced by the recent election where more 18- to 29-year-olds voted for Reform than for the Tories. Only 13 per cent of students voted for the two right-leaning parties.
When young people become disillusioned by the Labour government – a likelihood at this rate – they will switch to the Reform option. Young aspiring entrepreneurs are baffled by the high-tax Tories and this punitive Labour government. The Tories have to radically think how they can persuade young people, and in particular the graduate class which they perform so poorly with, that their brand of conservatism will benefit them. As someone young, a common theme of concern at university is the high taxes that are required to fund inefficient public sector areas. As we young turn a blind eye to the Tories, things are looking increasingly difficult for Kemi.
Henry Bateson
Whittingham, Northumberland
Breadwinning ways
Sir: It would be juvenile of me to take issue with my husband’s assumption that I have a special feeling for picking up dirty pants and to add detail to his confession that he pulled only some of his weight in the upbringing of our children, but I would like to respond to his article (‘A real keeper’, 18 January) more generally. I agree with him that in many ways we are a traditional couple with a few testing modern aberrations that have been more or less accidental. I also agree that apart from the mental load, I have carried most of the weight of the innovation.
It has been a delicate balance. I have only rarely raged King Kong-like around the house asserting the raw power of my financial superiority, and mostly ensured that the roaring and chest-beating has happened in private. I think our situation has had some beneficial effects: apart from enforcing gender equality it has also meant that we have had reason to restrict conspicuous consumption, which can only be a good thing. We have stood up to the soul-mashing logic of capitalism and refused to let money masculate me or emasculate him.
Of course the whole ghastly situation has been greatly helped by the fact that we love each other.
Tess Wicksteed
Wife and proud patron of Theo Hobson
By email
Write to us: letters@spectator.co.uk
There’s nothing sexy about a sex party
‘Sorry sir, the rules clearly state that all single men must be accompanied by a woman.’ As the frustrated guest is ushered off the premises, my female companion and I are welcomed into a grand reception room where the organised sex party is being held. A barmaid offers us some complimentary condoms and a handful of Quality Street, along with some fluorescent orange punch served in plastic cups.
Should we be engaging in small talk or ripping each other’s clothes off? No one seems to know
The organisers of tonight’s paid event claim they cater for the world’s ‘sexual elite’ but there’s something disarmingly ordinary about the snaggle-toothed mid-lifers trooping in behind us – hardly the glamour models I’d been expecting.
The ‘strict selection process’ appears to be anything but. Applicants are supposedly judged on ‘charisma, interests and success’ as well as on looks, so I’m assuming my wildly exaggerated claims – ‘chalet in Verbier, job in finance and a penchant for business-class travel’ – have yet to be verified.
Tonight’s party goes by the name of ‘Fantasy Fling’ but that doesn’t mean I can just fling myself at any passing fantasy. In an effort to ‘challenge gender stereotypes’, men must always wait to be approached.
The atmosphere is endearingly English as couples dressed in ill-fitting eveningwear stand around looking embarrassed. Should we be engaging in small talk or ripping each other’s clothes off? No one seems to know. And what if none of the women makes the first move? Can we ask for a refund?
Upstairs two couples are writhing around on an enormous bed surrounded by guests, but something feels off. Why are they so much more attractive than the rest of us? And why does their lovemaking appear to be simulated? One of the women even stifles a yawn. Could they be plants, employed to get us in the mood? If so, the strategy doesn’t appear to be working.
My friend Suzie drags me over to meet Gemma and Gareth, who have travelled down from Hertfordshire. They are in their late thirties and have been married for less than a year but say their sex life is in trouble. ‘We’ve come to spice things up,’ Gareth explains. ‘Sex with the same person can get boring.’ With that Gemma invites Suzie and me to join them in the basement hot tub.
I’m already having doubts about tonight’s so-called ‘party’. The whole thing feels horribly forced and there’s a whiff of desperation in the air. Erotic it most certainly is not. In the tepid, overcrowded hot tub a couple from Shrewsbury are playing footsie with me. Will they think it rude if I move my foot away? Gareth is trying to get it on with Suzie but neither looks enamoured by the prospect. Gemma, meanwhile, has hooked up with a random bloke, but their canoodling seems half-hearted. With clothes firmly back on, I head to the bar for another cocktail.
Suzie, who recently separated from her husband, invited me here, assuming I’d be interested in ‘pushing sexual boundaries’. But while it’s true that making out with more than one woman at a time is every man’s fantasy, the reality is rather more prosaic. I’m not sure you can just label something a sex party and expect everyone to start bonking. That’s not how human sexuality works.
Our longing to be sexually liberated is tinged with tragedy. Anyone trapped in a sexless marriage will have yearned for the promise of uninhibited carnality. The serial monogamist hopes that their version of freedom will deliver them unlimited choice, while ageing playboys and playgirls believe that liberation means never having to say ‘I do’. Sex parties may appear to offer a remedy to all these lustful yearnings, but loneliness and disappointment are never far from the surface.
Back in the 1970s when ‘swinging’ became a thing, conservatives such as Mary Whitehouse were concerned about where our so-called ‘permissive society’ might be heading. That particular phrase seems absurdly quaint in retrospect, but the permissiveness that Whitehouse worried about has developed into a much darker, more pornified culture, where organised sex parties are seen as just another lifestyle choice along with OnlyFans and Tinder. Morality, it seems, abhors a vacuum.
Tragedy lies in the impossibility of ever being wholly satisfied by the desires that plague us. Liberation doesn’t always set us free and can end up imprisoning us in a kind of restless unfulfilment. Noël Coward’s masterly film Brief Encounter perfectly illustrates, in its own understated way, the dilemma we all face in varying degrees. Celia Johnson’s lonely middle-class housewife longs for romantic adventure, but eventually ditches her secret lover for the staid respectability of a comfortable marriage.
Likewise, when passion runs dry, making out with a bunch of strangers can seem like a panacea, but – as with all quick fixes – it is unlikely to deliver on its promise. Watching an increasingly desperate Gareth fling himself at random strangers while his bored wife looks on is an unedifying spectacle. But I’d wager that most of the people here, Gareth included, aren’t really looking to expand their sexual horizons. What they are desperate to find is the intimacy lacking in their everyday lives. All the guests I chatted to were either in or had recently left loveless relationships. Sex parties can only ever offer a crude approximation of the human warmth we all crave. Interestingly, very few of the guests I spoke to at the end of the evening had indulged in any actual sex, let alone sex with more than one person. Most had been content to sit around and have a laugh with fellow travellers, which makes sense. If you’re struggling to find sexual intimacy with your actual partner, who says it’s going to be any easier with half a dozen strangers? Cheap thrills often come at a heavy price.
Several weeks later I received a call from Suzie to say that Gareth and his wife had invited us to a private sex party at their place in Watford. The masochist in me couldn’t resist, but that night, as the other guests crept into the dimly lit bedroom of Gareth’s tatty flat, I chose to remain in the kitchen chatting to Gareth’s neighbour about his recent separation. He explained how lonely he’d been since his wife walked out on him. ‘I only come to Gareth’s parties for a bit of company. You certainly won’t catch me in his bedroom.’
James discussed sex parties further with Sophia Money Coutts, Lara Prendergast and William Moore on the latest Edition podcast:
Confessions of a Costco Guy
Those who use TikTok, or are familiar with Ed Davey’s dance routines on social media, may have heard of the ‘Costco Guys’. For those with an aversion to TikTok (or to Ed Davey), Andrew ‘A.J.’ Befumo Jr. and Eric ‘Big Justice’ Befumo are a father-and-son duo who became internet celebrities by gorging on food items in their local Costco in Florida and rating them on a ‘boom or doom’ scale. Cue 2.5 million followers and debut single ‘We Bring the Boom’ – which Davey chose as the soundtrack to his latest bid for online attention.
Patrick Maguire was probably right in the Times last week to say that this sort of soul-crushingly knuckleheaded viral fame justifies Oxford University Press’s decision to make ‘brain rot’ its word of the year. And yet I’m with A.J. and Big Justice. My father and I are devoted Costco Guys.
The wholesaler has everything. You can go intending to pick up some caramel pecan popcorn and come back with a four-poster bed. Costco is also cheap, though fortune favours the brave: heart-stopping bulk deals will appear and then disappear without warning. When cut-price Mutti tinned tomatoes materialised, I urgently instructed my father to buy a trolley load. He refused, insisting we didn’t have space for 50 cans at home. The next time we went shopping, the Mutti was gone. I was angry at him for days.
Why else do I prefer the vast warehouses of Costco to a regular supermarket? Well, they accept returns on basically anything. They also have an excellent optician on site. At checkout, they’ll scan your heavy goods without making you unload them from the trolley. Then there are the exciting pneumatic tubes that whizz bundles of banknotes around the building whenever the cashiers empty their tills. As a kid I would crane my neck heavenward, dreaming that one day a bundle would take a wrong turn and £50 notes would rain down upon us. I still do, actually.
The Costco food court is alarmingly unhealthy but strangely joyful. When I last visited my local branch in Watford, a boy and his granny were together devouring a colossal 18in pepperoni pizza (£9.99). There was a young couple on a date, feeding each other Italian gelato. People queued for the famous ‘¼ pound plus ALL BEEF HOT DOG’ which comes with a 22oz fizzy drink (unlimited refills). That hot dog, which is topped with caramelised onions, ketchup and mustard, is £1.50. The price hasn’t changed since 1985.
A distinguished-looking retired man told me his daily routine consists of gym and spa at the David Lloyd across the road (courtesy of life membership bought on the cheap decades ago), followed by jacket potato with beans and cheese at Costco. ‘It fuels me for the whole day,’ he said cheerily. ‘My wife hasn’t needed to cook for me for 20 years.’ His daily outgoings must be less than the average person spends on a coffee. Costco is ‘members only’, which gives it both an air of exclusivity and helps instil loyalty. Membership costs just over £30 a year – but you need to be either a business owner or on a bizarre list of eligible professions, from chartered accountant to fire service. My father and I failed to make the cut for Soho House membership, so it’s gratifying to know that, in Costco, there’s a club that’s happy to have us.
Learning is a lifelong joy
‘I love learning about things’ (Amelia, aged nine). Not all children do, but many who have not experienced the pleasure of learning early come to see the point of it in later life. Like most writers, I loved books from childhood, and learned favourite pages simply by re-reading. When Thomas Hardy came along for A-level, I was so passionate about his novels that I learned whole pages by heart. But like Amelia, I also loved learning about things – places, cultures, weather, insects, trees, how coal was mined and steel made and glass blown. Ladybird Books were a great source of interest and information, and still are, though when I glanced into The Ladybird Book of the Computer I realised it is now historical and of no practical use.
It was not until my sixties that I began to feel a sort of hollow where learning had been
As life trundles on, through work and parenthood and social responsibilities, we still learn as we go, though we mostly acquire skills which are essential, but not enriching or character-forming in quite the same way as history and literature, biblical studies and classical languages. The mind works tirelessly, whether we are paying attention or not – if it didn’t we would not survive for long. But apart from rote stuff, like times tables, spelling and historical dates, I think we mainly learn by a process of osmosis, absorbing information as we grow up and coming to understand how life works by experience. We learn by our mistakes, too, of course – indeed, I often think that is the only way we do learn everything apart from straightforward facts.
It was not until my sixties that I began to feel a sort of hollow where learning had been, just at the time when my children had left home (if only in the physical sense). I now had space in my head and my days. I wanted to fill the time gaps aside from work, but not with socialising or taking up – dread word – a ‘hobby’.
My generation grew up with Shakespeare, the Bible and classical mythology as inherent parts of life and language, and what I did not already know of the first I learned with marriage to a Shakespeare scholar. But although I went to a convent school, my deeper, more detailed knowledge of biblical and Christian history was more holes than fabric.
Since I read for my first degree, in the traditional way, the study opportunities offered by academia have changed, beginning with Harold Wilson’s great – possibly his only –legacy, the Open University. After it, one by one, the established universities set up their own ‘distance learning’ courses, so that it was easy for me to study for an MA in theology without leaving the house. Perhaps because I was doing it for its own sake and not to embark upon or progress a career, I found this new learning absorbing and also, to my relief, that the skill of digesting new information, before writing an extended essay on it, had not left me, only become a little rusty –nothing a can of WD40 would not fix.
The one barrier to studying for a degree, now and at any time of life, is money. The city of Coventry paid for my three years at King’s College, London, but those privileges are long gone. Younger undergraduates must tie the millstone of a student loan round their necks or rely on the Bank of Mum and Dad; older learners pay for themselves but age does not automatically bring spare cash along with it. It does, however, make one enterprising, and a formal extension of standard education is not essential. There are books, physical and online, journals and libraries.
But, like so many things in life, libraries are not what they were. Book stocks have dwindled, and book stacks disappeared decades ago, except in the British and other academic libraries. Older and scholarly titles were sold off, or – worse – binned, budgets were slashed. Still, even the smallest public library has internet access, refurbished laptops are cheap, every book out of copyright can be downloaded free (check out Project Gutenberg). Then there’s Kindle, though I can’t read books on screen; I need paper and print. But there is a way round every obstacle.
Older learners pay for themselves, but age does not automatically bring spare cash along with it
We have stopped growing physically by our twenties but, other things being equal, never mentally. Our brains renew and repair themselves as long as we live and breathe, sometimes even after quite severe damage, by stroke, say, or accident. ‘You learn something new every day’ is a truth, not a cliché.
Understanding can be harder than in youth. I am currently trying to get to grips with quantum physics. It’s making my forehead bleed and I know I will reach my limit soon, probably at the point when the maths is incomprehensible. Until then, I am not giving up.
Marriage is corny and pointless – but we’re doing it anyway
The one question the priest did not ask me, thank goodness, was why I wanted to get married.
That might have held up the enterprise indefinitely, and we are already so far behind with this attempted wedding of ours that I dare not risk another hold-up. Since serving the notice at Cork Registry Office, it’s a year down the line nearly and the builder boyfriend and I are no nearer to saying: ‘I do.’
Our only option is to get married, despite all my misgivings about how corny and pointless marriage is
I’m nearer to saying: ‘I really can’t be bothered.’ Or: ‘If anything happens to me just bury me in the garden and don’t tell anyone I’m dead. That way you’ll keep the house with no questions asked, and I doubt anyone will notice.’
Because the main reason I want to get married is through a sense of responsibility to the dear BB, who needs to know it will all be fine if I get run over by the proverbial bus.
Yes, I tried to get a will done when we moved to West Cork. Forget it. There isn’t a single solicitor in Ireland with any availability to do a will for the next 50 years. They’re snowed under with probate. They don’t even answer the phone.
Our only option is to get married, despite all my misgivings about how corny and pointless marriage is.
We served the notice and produced umpteen bits of paper. We sent off for the original long-form copies of our birth certificates and all that jazz. But the BB did not have an Irish social security number. And when he tried to get one, it turned out that because I own the house and he doesn’t have his name on any of the bills, he could only have one linked to our address, as I do… if he and I were married.
So, yes, to recap, to get this number we have to be married. And to get married, we have to have this number.
There then began a mind-numbingly boring trudge through the strangely slow and impervious bureaucracy of the Emerald Isle. We almost gave up until the local TD intervened on our behalf.
‘What you’ve been through is ridiculous,’ the lady in the benefits office said as she finally issued him the card, to which he’s fully entitled under Anglo-Irish arrangements. All around her Ukrainian refugees were shouting at the staff to hurry up with their rushed-through applications.
It was chaos in there, and the lady was fuming. But we said nothing, even when she said she was not all that convinced about the EU any longer. ‘Oh dear, well, I’m sure it will all sort itself out,’ said the BB. We didn’t want to push our luck. In our experience, the Irish are very happy declaring themselves unhappy, but it’s best not to tell them you think they should be unhappy. That’s a step too far.
Now we were sitting in the cluttered office of the local priest’s bungalow, trying to persuade him to do the service after he missed our previous appointment the week before to discuss this everlasting wedding because he was snowed under with funerals.
He looked absolutely shattered. We sat down in front of his desk, piled up with papers. His big mop of white hair stuck up at various angles, suggesting it hadn’t seen a comb in an age.
I do quite like this priest. I’ve decided it’s best I park my huff about his pro-Palestine stance and devout prayers for the furtherance of the EU project.
The problem with him doing this wedding for us at our advanced time in life is that all the records that need to be located are in England.
My baptism and First Holy Communion in the 1970s would have to be traced, for heaven’s sake. The priest looked up the church it happened in, and told me there was a contact form I could use to ask them about it.
I looked on my phone at the website he was talking about and there was the formidably rotund priest of the Midlands parish where I grew up looking thunderous above a message about Ukraine: ‘Please pray for the confounding of the evil Russian aggression.’
‘Dear God,’ I said, and the Irish priest looked up from his phone. ‘What’s that?’
‘Please don’t make me ring him. Can’t you ring him, and talk, you know, priest to priest?’ If I rang, I would not be able to stop myself telling him what I thought of his anti-Russian stance, and that would be the end of me getting my baptism and First Holy Communion records.
Thankfully, the Irish priest said he would ring the English priest. Then he went again through our religious history, getting nowhere with the builder boyfriend and his peripatetic upbringing with Irish travellers, and his Italian aristocratic bolter of a mother who might or might not have baptised him before she ran off with the gardener.
So long as we could establish I was a Catholic, that would do, he concluded. He would ring the English priest first thing in the morning.
The next afternoon, we saw the priest at the supermarket in the village, hurrying across the car park looking stressed. He had rung the English priest, but the number wasn’t working. Of course it wasn’t.
Like my father before me, I’ve found comfort in yoga
Malindi, Kenya
In 1967, Tanzania’s socialist rulers seized all my parents’ property – their ranchland, their home and their cattle – and overnight my father saw the fruits of all his labour taken from him. He had no time to dwell on his misfortune, since he had a wife and four children to support, so at the age of 60 he picked himself up and vanished off to work in Somalia.
My father’s last words were ‘yoga breathing’ and he died smiling
We went to live at a beach hut in Malindi, on the Kenya coast, which became our new home. Dad’s job involved long spells out in the wilderness with camels and cattle, but occasionally he had to visit Mogadishu and here he rented a room in a derelict Shirazi mansion overlooking the harbour. His housemates were young American Peace Corps volunteers who did yoga on the flat roof each dawn. At some point they persuaded Dad, this old colonial polo player, to join them – and he became hooked for the rest of his life. As a small boy in Malindi, when he was home I’d watch him going through his asanas, and when he finished we’d sit together and drink our tea, looking out at the Indian Ocean. Every single morning, wherever he was in the world, he did his yoga, alone but guided by Swami Vishnudevananda’s classic, The Complete Illustrated Book of Yoga. Just before Dad turned 90, he had a stroke in Malindi and an ambulance drove him to Mombasa hospital while my mother held his feet. His last words were ‘yoga breathing’ and he died smiling.
During the recent Christmas holidays I found myself alone and divided from all the people I love, for reasons that were my fault. I headed for Malindi, the beach hut refuge which teems with memories from my childhood, of my parents, of my children growing up, of many good times. In the supermarket, crowds of women shoppers in burkhas were wishing each other happy Christmas as ‘Jingle Bells’ played over the sound system, when I broke down in front of the halal meat counter and had no wish to buy anything other than instant noodles and a bag of rice, plus cigarettes, before heading back to the beach. Luckily a fisherman walked up from the ocean with a huge rock cod to sell me and I lived off that for weeks.
One day, while going through my parents’ library, I came upon Dad’s copy of Swami Vishnudevananda’s book. It was falling to pieces, but I sat down to read it. And all the black and white photos of this young Indian yogi in his Y-fronts, contorting his body into the asanas, took me back to the thing that must have helped my father recover from his own despair after losing his farm in Tanzania.
I had been given the number of Morris, a local yoga instructor, so I called him and said I wanted daily sessions. He began tutoring me on Christmas Eve and every day after that for some weeks. I guess he needed the work even when others were taking a rest because his father was in hospital receiving expensive treatment and in Kenya we have no welfare system. Each day he’d turn up and we did a session of yoga on the terrace overlooking the Indian Ocean in the exact spot where my father had done his exercises. I was hopeless, my limbs stiff, my 59-year-old body sclerotic from the long life of a foreign correspondent who spent his time in risky places, bars and airports. The advantage of having one-to-one sessions with Morris was that he’d walk over and with his huge hands he’d help me into the asana poses, as the sweat poured off my body in the tropical heat while my muscles and tendons shook with pain. Yoga became the focal point of my days because before and after the 90-minute sessions all I wanted to do was read, swim or chain smoke. I was astonished how, after quite a short time, I seemed to be making progress in my yoga. I found such comfort while doing my sun salutations badly – Surya Namaskar – alongside Morris, and after the sessions he’d go off to see his dad in hospital.
On the final day he put me through the most punishing session and afterwards he said I had improved well. ‘Yoga philosophy does not quarrel with any religion or faith and can be practised by anyone who is sincere and willing to search for the truth,’ Swami Vishnudevananda wrote. ‘Even comparatively little effort will bring immense retruns of knowledge, strength and peace.” The next day I drove upcountry, ready to face the year ahead.
Hunter’s chicken: the ultimate cheer-me-up-quickly recipe
Pub food in Britain has had a mixed reputation over the years. For a long time, the most a pub would have to offer as food would be some pork scratchings or a pickled egg. There certainly wasn’t a brigade of chefs in white coats in a shiny chrome kitchen.
This is midweek-teatime cooking, it’s sling-it-in-an-oven cooking, it’s cheer-me-up-quickly cooking
Pub grub started to appear in the 1970s, but it was simple, filling and predictable. It was the sort of unpretentious, low-priced food that was suitable for a worker’s lunch break. So up and down the country pub menus all hit the same beats: steak and kidney pie, ham with egg and chips, chilli con carne, fish and chips, even lasagne – and hunter’s chicken.
After decades of that sort of fare, pubs started to have more high-falutin’ ambitions and the gastropub arrived. The term was coined in 1991 when describing The Eagle in Clerkenwell, but it was used to refer to places where the food was deemed by someone to be of ‘restaurant quality’. It changed the way we thought about British food and pub food in one fell swoop. Pubs became a destination for food, and increasingly the bill was restaurant-sized, too. In 2001, the Stag Inn in Titley, Herefordshire, was the first pub to win a Michelin star.
By 2011, the gastropub had been declared dead by The Good Food Guide. What had once meant excellent food now became a catch-all term for expensive menus, a more general gentrification of pubs and the death of the local boozer.
Many pubs have kept the gastropub essence, though: a restaurant dining-room attached to a bar, with changing menus, inventive cooking and lengthy wine lists. Some of our finest establishments in Britain are what would once have proudly been called gastropubs.
However, some pubs distanced themselves from the gastropub backlash by reverting to the more old-fashioned style of pub food – and the dishes that headed up every pub menu of this sort really have become true British classics, filling our supermarket shelves and celebrity chefs’ cookbooks.
Hunter’s chicken bears absolutely no relation to the French dish poulet à la chasseur, which translates to ‘hunter’s chicken’ and is chicken braised in wine with mushrooms and little onions. The British version is a chicken breast, wrapped in bacon and baked before being doused in barbecue sauce, covered in cheddar and then grilled until melted. It’s a chaotic dish in many ways, and it’s hard to imagine where the name came from when the ingredients are barbecue sauce and cheddar, but it has somehow become an indelible part of British cuisine.
Because I like to gussy things up, I have suggested you make your own barbecue sauce (though you can also use bottled) – but even that requires little more than measuring out a handful of ingredients and letting them bubble away for five minutes, and the result is tart and treacly. It is, incidentally, easily doubled, so you can enjoy the smug reward of having homemade barbecue sauce in your fridge for the next two weeks.
But even with that from-scratch addition, I’ll admit that this isn’t terribly clever cooking: it’s not going to require you to infuse or brine or reverse sear. This is midweek-teatime cooking, it’s sling-it-in-an-oven cooking, it’s cheer-me-up-quickly cooking. But more importantly, it is supremely satisfying – the smoke of the bacon and sweet barbecue sauce are ready-made bedfellows. And almost anything is made better by a handful of melty, bubbling cheddar on top. This dish is a riot of punchy, unsubtle flavours; it’s delicious. No one could accuse it of being subtle, but then subtlety is overrated.
Technically, you could slice the cooked chicken up into coins like a natty little roulade, and drizzle it with the sauce, but that seems out of step with its heritage. It should be served whole, in all its bacon-wrapped, melty-cheese glory, with chips for swiping up errant sauce, and peas for health.
Serves 4
Takes 15 mins
Cooks 30 mins
For the barbecue sauce
- 150ml tomato ketchup
- 70g dark brown sugar
- 35ml white wine vinegar
- ½ tbsp Worcestershire sauce
- ½ tsp smoked paprika
- 4 chicken breasts
- 12 rashers of smoked streaky bacon
- 100g grated mature cheddar
- Chives, finely chopped, to garnish
- First, make the barbecue sauce. Place all the ingredients in a small pan over a medium heat and stir together. Bring to the boil, reduce the heat to a low simmer, and bubble the barbecue sauce for five to ten minutes, until it has reduced and thickened – when ready, it should coat the back of a spoon, and look dark and glossy.
- Preheat the oven to 200°C/180°C fan. Wrap each chicken breast in two rashers of bacon, winding them so they overlap, and tucking each rasher underneath, to form a complete bacon layer across the chicken.
- Place the wrapped chicken breasts in a snug baking tray, and cook for 25 minutes. Towards the end of the cooking time, heat the grill.
- Spoon the barbecue sauce onto the chicken breasts, then sprinkle with the cheese.
- Grill until the cheese is melted and bubbling; serve immediately, with a sprinkle of chives on top.
Energy prices are shattering Britain’s remaining potteries
The ceramics industry of Stoke-on-Trent is one of the great survivors of the Victorian era. At its height, some 70,000 people were employed by the likes of Wedgwood and Spode to work in the potteries. Despite the Clean Air Act of 1956 – which banned coal-fired kilns – the deindustrialisation of the 1980s and the struggle to compete against the rise of cheaply made Chinese goods, the industry lives on and still employs around 7,000 people, manufacturing everything from teapots to tiles for the London Underground.
In 2022, some companies saw their six-month energy bills rise tenfold
Stoke can at times seem like it’s living in the ruins of its past – but while the ceramics sector is no longer a large industry, it is still hugely important to the city. Once again, though, it is under threat: this time from high energy prices and rising costs.
Moorland Pottery is one of the firms affected. It is among Stoke’s smaller ceramic businesses, but also a success story. It is based in an old pottery built in 1888, with the blackened bricks of one of Stoke’s bottle kilns overlooking its cobbled courtyard. At one point 4,000 of these kilns were dotted around the city. Now there are just 47. Founded 38 years ago, Moorland mainly manufactures mugs with various local designs. The whole process is done in-house. Despite only having six employees, the company makes around 40,000 mugs a year, all to order.
Most of the production takes place on two floors of the factory. Upstairs, next to the unused chambers of the old bottle kiln, the clay is mixed and pumped next door to be cast into moulds. Downstairs is for dipping, firing, glazing, decorating and packing. The business uses two electric kilns: one for enamelling, which fires once per day in the evening, and a bigger gloss kiln, which fires once or twice a week. When I visit on a cold Monday morning, the room is still warm from the kiln being fired the night before.
It is the high energy usage of the kilns which is a big part of the problem for the industry. Jonathan Plant, Moorland’s co-founder, tells me that its energy bills have gone up from around £900 to up to £2,500 a month. In a business with tight margins, that makes a huge difference. ‘The whole energy system is just broken,’ he says.
It’s not just small potteries affected by energy prices. In 2022, some companies saw their six-month energy bills rise tenfold. That year one of the city’s major firms, Wade Ceramics, went into administration. Last year, Portmeirion announced 35 job cuts and losses of £2 million in the first half of the year.
Even businesses which have been shielded from high energy prices have felt the pinch. A spokesman from Emma Bridgewater tells me the company was fortunate enough to fix its energy prices a few years ago, and so it hasn’t been as affected by recent soaring prices. Still, last year the firm was forced to cut 36 jobs because of rising costs and lower sales.
‘It’s not just the cost of the energy, it’s also the cost of all our suppliers… Every single thing has gone up,’ Plant says. ‘You get to the point where you can perhaps put 50p on to mitigate that increase. But you soon get to the top when your product becomes unaffordable.’ There has also been a ‘real steady decline’ in retail in the past few years.
The last Budget won’t help matters, especially the government’s decision to raise national insurance contributions for employers. This again will affect businesses with narrow margins, particularly in manufacturing.
In many ways, the timing couldn’t be worse. This year is the centenary of Stoke-on-Trent receiving city status, and the legacy of the pottery industry will be central to the celebrations. The way things are going, though, it seems unlikely that there will be much of a ceramics industry left by the time of the next anniversary.
Matthew Lynn, trade unionist Paul Nowak, and The Spectator’s Lara Prendergast and William Moore unpack Britain’s industrial problems further on the latest Edition podcast:
The Trump resistance is dead
Freddy Gray has narrated this article for you to listen to.
The special relationship is dead, long live the special relationship. On Friday, at a ‘Stars and Stripes & Union Jack Celebration’, British and American right-wingers mingled gladly atop the Hay-Adams hotel, which overlooks the White House. Nigel Farage and co smoked cigarettes with their Republican brethren and shared Trump war stories. Dolled-up American girls took selfies with Liz Truss. And Steve Bannon showered Lord Glasman, the Labour peer, with admiration. The horseshoe theory has gone full circle. I bumped into Truss at the bar. ‘You’re a Gove shill,’ she told me, in that delightful, easygoing manner of hers. How did she think Kemi Badenoch was getting on, I asked, trying to change the subject. ‘Kemi is a Gove plant,’ came the firm reply. Truss’s charms seem to be working on the Americans. ‘She’s super-based,’ said a bald young man. ‘I can’t believe she was prime minister,’ added a star-struck girl called Mackenzie. No, Mackenzie, neither can we.
Emmanuel Macron, the French President, was not in town for The Donald’s Big Show. Neither was his likely successor, Marine Le Pen. Yet Éric Zemmour, leader of the Reconquête party, and his influential partner Sarah Knafo were there. On Saturday, I met Zemmour in the lobby of his hotel. He wore a marvellously Gallic beige polo neck, and was rather sweetly boasting to his publisher, Diane Ouvry, about having already gone for a swim that morning. He seemed impressed that the public pools of Washington, D.C. are free at point of use. He then sat down and told me that Lafayette, the Frenchman who helped create Washington, was an ‘imbecile’, before describing, at some length, ‘the permanent reciprocal influences’ between the French revolution and the American one. He explained that Le Pen had shunned Trump because of her politically correct ‘de-diabolisation’ strategy. ‘For me, that means submitting to the dominant ideology of our day in order to be accepted by the system. If you do that and you win [an election], you won’t be able to govern afterwards because you haven’t prepared people for the paradigm shift.’ Trump never compromises, he told me: ‘He is, like me, fighting this ideological battle. He rang me in 2022 and told me: “Don’t change, don’t give in, stay who you are.”’
Zemmour added: ‘You’re well aware that the woke movement was born out of French theorists. But now, against that, there’s a big movement of peoples to defend their identity. They want Paris to be Paris, Rome to be Rome and New York to be New York. It’s all connected.’ I pondered Éric’s words on Sunday, as I watched Trump dancing on stage to ‘YMCA’ with the Village People, one of whom wore assless leather chaps.
At Trump’s first inauguration, in 2017, I witnessed the smashing of windows, rioting and tens of thousands of angry women in ‘pussy hats’ clamouring against his ascent. There was none of that rage for the 2025 sequel. In Farragut Square, two days before the ceremony, I ran into the small ‘People’s March’ – fringey leftists, angry about Palestine, climate change and bodily autonomy. But it was not really an anti-Trump protest, per se. The Resistance, as it was known, proved futile. Now it’s almost dead.
The energy is on the radical right. On the eve of the inauguration, at the Watergate hotel, I attended the Passage ‘Coronation Ball’, an intriguing gathering of New Right thinkers, the Trumpist avant-garde. I overheard Dasha, the softer-faced one from that trendy Red Scare podcast, needling America’s foremost monarchist blogger Curtis Yarvin, for not believing that Jesus Christ was our Lord and Saviour. Steve Bannon gave an extraordinary dinner speech, akin to a commander addressing his men before battle. He called his audience ‘the tip of the spear’. He called Trump ‘America’s Cincinnatus’ and Mark Zuckerberg ‘a criminal who deserves to be in prison. I don’t care how many $1 million cheques he writes’. ‘The Democrats created the oligarchs and it worked for them until it didn’t. And you, the Pepes, broke them,’ he said.
‘I want you to get drunk tonight. I want it to be raw tomorrow, OK? I want you hitting a little something when the ceremony is going on to take the edge off. But in the afternoon, when the first executive orders start hitting… when the External Revenue Service hits tariffs on our good buddies in Canada… OK, I love you men and women but I gotta tell you we are in for a tough fight. The hardest fight is ahead of us. They’re not going just sit there and just toss you the keys tomorrow. [For] the Deep State, the administrative state, this is Götterdämmerung. This is where we fight to the end. If we don’t take care of them in the next four years, they can’t be taken care of… You guys, every day: pounding, pounding, pounding, every day and being relentless. No mercy, no quarter, no prisoners. Are you ready for a fight?’ The crowd, in black tie, stopped consuming their rather lovely scallops, stood up and roared.
Trump adopted a somewhat milder tone for his big speech the next day. He called his re-inauguration ‘Liberation Day’. Yet the ceremony was held inside, officially for weather reasons but probably out of safety fears. The Secret Service, the National Guard and Capitol Hill police effectively shut down much of the city for the occasion. The heart of America’s capital resembled a war zone: checkpoint after checkpoint, iron fencing everywhere and countless bossy men with guns barking at we, the people. Trump’s fans, many of whom had travelled thousands of miles to see their hero, were treated like cattle, herded into the Capitol Hill Arena to watch the event on a big screen. So much for the land of the free. The security state beats populism, every time. SAD!
Freddy joined The Edition podcast to unpack the inauguration, and also explain Trump’s tit for tat spat with the Pope, on the latest Edition podcast alongside The Spectator’s Damian Thompson, William Moore and Lara Prendergast:
Axel Rudakubana should never have been free to kill
Coulter’s Law, named after its originator, the right-wing polemicist Ann Coulter, holds that the longer it takes the authorities or the news media to identify the suspect in a terrorist attack or other notorious incident the less likely that suspect is to be white. Allow me to propose a British corollary to this rule: the law of displaced culpability. Where the identity or motivation of the suspect in a major crime requires the British state to confront shortcomings in its established doctrines, such as multiculturalism, untrammelled immigration or autonomy-maximising liberalism, it will displace culpability onto another factor, one that is secondary or even irrelevant to the crime but which the authorities feel more comfortable talking about. In the case of Axel Rudakubana, it seems that Amazon is the preferred culprit.
Rudakubana, a Welshman, has pleaded guilty to the murders of six-year-old Bebe King, seven-year-old Elsie Dot Stancombe, and nine-year-old Alice da Silva Aguiar at a Southport dance class in July 2024. Home Secretary Yvette Cooper has said it is a ‘disgrace’ that Rudakubana, then 17, was able to buy a knife via Amazon despite a prior conviction for violence. Predictably, the British media has dutifully adopted Whitehall’s framing, with the pro-government Daily Mirror splashing on ‘Total disgrace he was able to buy knife on Amazon’ and the Sun using its front page to brand Rudakubana ‘the Amazon killer’. Ministers are proposing a change in the law that will require anyone purchasing a bladed item from Amazon to record a live video and a copy of their passport to prove their age. Law of displaced culpability: engaged.
The law of displaced culpability protects the governing class and its cherished beliefs from a violent encounter with reality.
Politicians and the papers are more comfortable talking about online retail regulations than they would be about why Rudakubana was at liberty to carry out the murders. Rudakubana – who had produced ricin, who was in possession of an Al-Qaeda training manual; who had been reported to Prevent three times; who had been excluded after taking a knife to school in October 2019; who returned to the school and attacked a child with a hockey stick two months later; who had admitted to carrying a knife more than ten times; who had received five visits to his home from Lancashire Constabulary between October 2019 and May 2022; who had been the subject of five vulnerable child referrals to the ‘Multi Agency Safeguarding Hub’; who was deemed by children’s social care to require support from the ‘Early Help’ intervention service; who had been referred to the ‘youth justice service’; whose father had reportedly stopped him returning to his former school one week before the massacre – was a walking red flag that the authorities somehow managed, or chose, to ignore.
Why is that? In any other circumstances, bearing in mind the Al-Qaeda manual, it would be reasonable to ask whether he was missed because he espoused the wrong kind of extremism. The Shawcross Review found that Prevent ‘takes an expansive approach to the extreme right-wing’ but, in the case of Islamism, the programme ‘tends to take a much narrower approach centred around proscribed organisations, ignoring the contribution of non-violent Islamist narratives and networks to terrorism’. But, as we know, the authorities don’t consider Rudakubana an Islamist because his crimes were not committed to advance that ideology but rather, it is said, to satisfy his fascination with extreme violence in itself. Might it be that he did not match the photofit of a lone-wolf killer that police and the counter-extremism industry have in their heads: angry white male with far-right leanings and a copy of Anders Breivik’s manifesto? Maybe, but the real failing here probably has more to do with policy than political correctness.
Over time, the state has developed an aversion to the long-term confinement of the severely mentally ill, even if the people in question display habitual criminal or anti-social behaviour. For several generations now, it has been considered ‘best practice’ that such individuals be managed within the community rather than treated in a custodial setting. The presumption against placing the insane in secure hospitals was born of revulsion towards over-institutionalisation in the past and the cruelties it allowed to flourish, but noble though the reformers’ intentions were they have contributed to dangerous levels of under-institutionalisation. Candidly, Axel Rudakubana should never have been at liberty to murder because he should have been indefinitely detained in a secure facility.
However, the state is not prepared to confront that question, and so it is displacing the blame to the easier and more populist culprit of internet knife purchases. We have seen this kind of elite denialism before. Following the murder of Sir David Amess, and despite his killer being an Islamist motivated by Amess’s vote for air strikes in Syria and membership of Conservative Friends of Israel, we were treated to the grotesque spectacle of the murdered MP’s colleagues convening in the Commons to blame and urge tighter regulation of social media, despite there being no evident connection between these platforms and Amess’s killing.
Ditto the official response to the Manchester Arena bombing, which encouraged us not to look back in anger and certainly not to look into why the bomber’s parents had been granted asylum in the UK when his father had been a member of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group. The same went for media coverage of the 2020 Reading Park terrorist, Khairi Saadallah. Two days after Saadallah stabbed three people to death while shouting ‘Allahu akbar’, the Guardianinformed its readers that the killer had been suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder from the Libyan civil war. In fact, the psychiatrists who examined him for his murder trial found no signs of mental illness, but the civil war did have an impact on him: he fought in it on behalf of Ansar al-Sharia, an Al-Qaeda-aligned militia. Mental health was the chosen frame because the alternative was asking how Saadallah came to be granted asylum in the UK after informing the Home Office that he had been part of a militant Islamist group. After informing the Home Office.
The law of displaced culpability is a psychic defence mechanism that protects the liberal governing class and its cherished beliefs from a violent encounter with reality. Amazon has questions to answer over how a 17-year-old was able to purchase a knife from its website, but while concerning this is ultimately a secondary matter. Amazon knife sales didn’t kill those little girls in Southport, a dangerous individual who should not have been at liberty killed them. Knives are not hard to come by. Rudakubana was aided and abetted not by online retail practices, but by decades of well-meaning liberal policy that has preferred to manage risks in the community rather than concede that mentally ill people who habitually engage in violent or aggressive behaviour should be separated from the rest of us indefinitely.
Braverman calls on Tories and Reform to ‘unite the right’
Nigel Farage’s Reform UK has had a rather good few months, with a number of opinion polls showing the Clacton MP’s party topping the Tories – and, occasionally, even Labour – among Brits. Tory leader Kemi Badenoch has rubbished the idea of a Reform merger – but it would appear her backbench colleague Suella Braverman has other ideas…
Speaking in Washington DC, the former Tory Home Secretary lauded Donald Trump’s style of ‘unfiltered conservatism’ and said her party should follow his lead in making the ‘unsayable mainstream’. She insisted the ‘formula to beat Labour’ involved the Tories and Reform working together. ‘I like Nigel Farage,’ Braverman told the Telegraph before stressing that ‘there isn’t enough space in British politics for two conservative parties’. Going on, the ex-Cabinet minister declared her support for certain Reform policies, including leaving the ECHR and pushing a ‘very low and robust approach to migration’.
Braverman added:
We do need to unite the right. We need to come to some kind of accommodation. I don’t know what the precise form looks like – whether that is a merger, whether that is a coalition, whether that is a supply and confidence agreement, whether that is a non-aggression pact. I don’t know what it looks like. In general, I am in favour of unifying the right.
How curious. Last year, it emerged that 40 per cent of Tory members backed the idea of a Tory-Reform merger – and according to the polls, a number of Conservative supporters fancy jumping ship to Farage’s party altogether. Not that the former Home Secretary is a stranger to this mindset – in December it transpired her husband Rael had started campaigning for Farage after her former colleague Andrea Jenkyns jumped ship to Reform.
Not that Badenoch is all that keen on the idea. ‘Nigel Farage says he wants to destroy the Conservative Party,’ she told the crowd at her first speech of 2025 last week. ‘Why on earth would we merge with that?’ Shots fired!
PMQs was a particularly dozy affair
The Commons was half asleep at PMQs. Trump’s re-election has severely damaged Sir Keir Starmer’s authority. Last summer, he unwisely allowed his Labour colleagues to campaign for the worst presidential candidate in American history. When Kamala lost, so did the Labour leader who now has zero influence over the US. He couldn’t even bring himself to say ‘Trump’ today, let alone to acknowledge his inauguration on Monday.
Kemi Badenoch might have gloated over Sir Keir’s American gamble but she ignored it entirely. And she failed to bring up the Southport triple-killer. As if obeying the Labour whips, she asked about education, and she claimed that Tory reforms had propelled Britain’s kids to the top of the international league tables. She said that Labour is threatening to undo the Tories’ good work. ‘This bill is an act of vandalism,’ she cried.
The teaching unions have driven their tanks into Britain’s classrooms. They see our schools as their sovereign territory and they want to exclude any outsider who doesn’t have a work permit – that is, a teaching qualification – issued by their minions. Kemi quoted Katharine Birbalsingh, of the Michaela Community School, who said that Labour’s new bill would have stopped her from hiring an army officer to take charge of Year 11. Other anomalies abound. ‘Doctors are not sufficiently qualified to teach biology,’ said Kemi, ‘and Olympic medallists can’t teach PE.’
Sir Keir used children as human shields. His bill includes measures that may protect kids from predators and it expands the provision of free breakfasts and cheaper uniforms. This allowed him to accuse Kemi of hating kids. ‘Why did she instruct [her members] to vote against child protection measures?’
Kemi denounced the bill as ‘the worst of socialism,’ and ‘a return to the closed shop.’
Kemi’s elves have been through the bill with a fine-tooth comb and they’ve unearthed a hidden embarrassment. Salaries for teachers may fall. Kemi accused the Education Secretary of not having read the bill and she asked Sir Keir if he knew about Clause 45, ‘which means that teachers’ pay will be capped.’
‘Of course, we need flexibility in our schools,’ said Sir Keir. Fair enough. He’s happy for teachers to earn less and he admits it. This was the high point of Kemi’s inquisition.
Sir Ed Davey raised his favourite subject, social care. A national inquiry is due to start soon but there’s a problem. The chairwoman, Dame Louise Casey, has been headhunted and ordered to oversee a fresh enquiry into rape gangs. Sir Ed complained that Dame Louise was unable to investigate two scandals at once. Sir Keir soothed Sir Ed’s nerves. He said that Dame Louise’s rape gang probe will deliver its findings in April and she will switch her interest to social care. Sir Ed seemed assuaged by Sir Keir’s words about Dame Louise’s bulging in-tray. What a weird spectacle our parliament must present to the outside world. Knights exchanging assurances about a dame’s onerous workload.
Their matey speeches concealed the truth about the rape gang review. The government calls it ‘a rapid audit’ but it was arranged at the last minute and with great reluctance. Sir Keir was forced to respond to Elon Musk (who is effectively the leader of the opposition) after his aggressive tweets shone a light on the inaction of Jess Philips over rape gangs.
The dozy House of Commons continued with its irrelevant snufflings. Mohammad Iqbal spoke of the West Bank. ‘Let’s pray that the remaining hostages on both sides are released as soon as possible,’ he said. Sir Keir didn’t ask why he equates kidnapped Jewish civilians with Palestinian prisoners. However, he accepted that the West Bank made him ‘deeply concerned.’ He airily informed the House that ‘we’ve raised it a number of times in the various exchanges we’ve had.’
Exchanges with who? When did these conversations happen? He didn’t say. He might as well be talking in his sleep. The only figure on the world stage who still listens to Sir Keir is David Lammy.
Australia can’t blame foreign actors for its anti-Semitism shame
Australia is supposed to be a nation of tolerance and acceptance – the one place in a troubled world where people of different ethnicities, cultures and faiths can get along.
That no longer feels like the case. Since the Hamas atrocities of 7 October 2023, and the conflict in Gaza and Israel, Australia has been exposed as a simmering hotbed of ethnic and religious hatred.
The ugliest strain of all is anti-Semitism. It may have been breathed into life by Hamas’s evil, but it has been latent in Australia’s communities, as they have become ever more ethnically and religiously diverse, for some time. To many Jewish Australians, our city centres have become no-go zones. Every Sunday since October 2023 they have been occupied by noisy, abusive and hate-filled anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian rallies. As in London, New York and other major western cities, it has been fashionable to protest vehemently and violently against Israel, Zionism and, quite simply, Judaism.
These acts of anti-Semitism show no sign of abating
Soon enough, the protests turned into violence against the property of the Jewish community and threats against Jews. Jewish people walking on the street, identifiable by their yarmulkes or orthodox Jewish dress, frequently have been abused and threatened by others.
These acts of anti-Semitism show no sign of abating. The torching of the Adass orthodox synagogue in Melbourne last month made international headlines, but it was just one of an increasing number of anti-Jewish acts of vandalism. Cars in residential areas of Sydney with a sizeable Jewish community are being defaced with ugly anti-Semitic slogans. So too are Jewish synagogues and community buildings, including childcare centres and schools. The former home of a high-profile Jewish community leader, Alex Ryvchin, was recently attacked, presumably because the attackers still believed he lived there.
Last week’s anti-Semitic attack on a childcare centre – which is not specifically Jewish, but situated close to a synagogue in the Sydney seaside suburb of Maroubra – raised the hate bar yet again. This time, the centre was both splashed with vile anti-Semitic messages and set alight.
After a year of lip service about confronting this surge in anti-Jewish hostility, Australian prime minister Anthony Albanese finally was compelled to act this week. On Tuesday, he called an urgent video meeting of Australian’s state premiers and territory chief ministers to determine how best they could work together to combat the scourge of anti-Semitism.
The commissioner of the Australian Federal Police (AFP), Reece Kershaw, briefed the meeting. Effectively, Kershaw is Australia’s top cop. To the surprise of the state and territory leaders, he stated that the AFP and Australian intelligence agencies have been working with Five Eyes partners – Britain, the United States, Canada and New Zealand – to ascertain ‘whether overseas actors or individuals have paid local criminals in Australia to carry out some of these crimes in our suburbs,’ as he said in a subsequent statement. ‘We are looking at if – or how – they have been paid, for example in cryptocurrency, which can take longer to identify’.
On Wednesday, Kershaw went further. ‘We believe criminals for hire may be behind some incidents, so part of our inquiries include who is paying those criminals, where those people are, whether they are in Australia or offshore, and what their motivation is’.
In other words, Kershaw is implying that the likes of Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran or like-minded terrorist groups, are channelling funds to the perpetrators of these acts.
Yet the arrests that have been made so far – including a Sydney man charged with attempted arson of another synagogue earlier this month – do not suggest there has been an orchestrated wave of violence. What they do suggest is that, whether fired up by hatred of Israel or Jews in general, individuals and small groups are committing acts of anti-Semitic violence and intimidation when they have the means and opportunity.
Kershaw’s dramatic and startling assertions may be based on international intelligence. But our prime minister effectively using this to deflect blame from the ugly side of Australian society is just a little too convenient for many Australians, both Jewish and gentile. Many believe that when it comes to anti-Semitism, Albanese and his government, perhaps intimidated by the fear of losing parliamentary seats with sizeable Muslim minorities, have been culpably slow to act on this issue.
The prime minister claims to have acted ‘from day one’ to protect the Jewish community. Yet that ‘day one’ – 9 October 2023 – was also the day a vociferous pro-Hamas and pro-Palestinian rally marched on the Sydney Opera House, shouting vile anti-Jewish slogans and condoning Hamas’s violence against Israeli Jews. And yet it was a single man who dared to confront the protesters, armed only with an Israeli flag, who was arrested that night.
As much as our political and law enforcement authorities want us to at least consider that the hatred that has convulsed Australia can be explained by external puppeteers, the reality is that the cancer of anti-Semitism in Australia is home-grown.
The real reason female footballers aren’t on birthday cards
Oh dear… it appears that birthday and greetings cards are sexist. This is, at least, the claim of a group of MPs who have submitted an EDM (Early Day Motion) calling for more representation of female footballers on such items by their manufacturers. The motion was tabled by Liberal Democrat MP for Epsom and Ewell, Helen Maguire, who told the BBC that the greeting card industry was ‘not moving with the times’.
Perhaps it is not the companies who are sexist then but the public? I certainly am
Poor Ms Maguire explained how she had been motivated by the trauma of searching for a card for her ‘massive football fan’ office manager and finding only those depicting male players. One can only imagine the distress this induced. Ms Maguire concluded that the ‘under-representation of female athletes… undermines efforts to promote gender equality in sport’. She is supported by 12 of her parliamentary colleagues.
Even the BBC, a tireless promoter of ‘gender equality’ in the sporting arena (see the new presenting line-ups for Match of the Day and Sports Personality of the Year) was moved to include in its report the question of whether such a motion was a good use of taxpayer’s money. EDMs are costly to print and distribute and, unlike birthday cards, don’t even bring fleeting joy to their recipients. The motions are rarely even debated.
Let’s be generous and assume that Ms Maguire and her chums are sincere in their efforts on this and not just attempting to nab a bit of publicity and justify their existence. I can well believe that it is difficult to find a birthday card featuring a female footballer. But what does this tell us? And what should we do about it?
It probably tells us that the greeting card industry, which is a business like any other, and a pretty ruthlessly competitive one I would suggest, will respond to demand and produce what sells. Presumably they have calculated that cards with depictions of female footballers don’t exactly fly off the shelves (except perhaps for Lib Dem MPs, but there are only 72 of them). So they understandably choose not to produce them in bulk (though such cards are available online).
It also tells us that despite a seemingly relentless push to popularise the women’s game, spearheaded by our gynocentric public broadcaster, the names and faces of female players or even the concept of female footballers has not penetrated the consciousness of the public to anything like the degree of the men’s game.
Perhaps it is not the companies who are sexist then but the public? I certainly am. I have done my best to correct myself but, sadly, to no avail. And I really have tried. I watched, quite intensely, the last women’s World Cup, partly for the sporting entertainment of it, but also to educate myself on a sphere of my favourite sport I have hitherto neglected.
It was pretty damn exciting in places, with a couple of classic games (Australia vs England in the semi-final was superb) and the general standard was far higher than I had expected. But at the end of it all, and racking my brains now, I simply cannot remember the names of any, any, of the players, except for that prodigiously annoying blue haired woke warrior Megan Rapinoe of the US, who so pleasingly skied a penalty in the shoot out against Sweden.
But aside from incorrigible old dinosaurs like me I suspect the women’s game will forever struggle to claim parity with the men’s game and equal representation on the racks of Cards Galore, however much the Beeb trumpets it and MPs like Helen Maguire demand it. This is simply because the men’s game is too entrenched, too plentiful in supply, and too damned exciting for any other version of the game to compete. The market is saturated, I’m afraid.
This may not be fair but it is probably irremediable. You cannot force people to watch a sport. Nor will Helen Maguire be able to induce people to buy more inclusive greetings cards even if she can pressure the manufacturers to produce them; any more than Victoria’s Secret won’t get people to buy underwear because it is advertised by ‘plus-sized’ models. The world just doesn’t work that way.
Which is a final lesson from this story that other parts of the world seem already to have learned. One day after the reinstalled US President Donald Trump was signing the death warrants of all manner of DEI policies in the US, to the raucous cheers of a majority of Americans, here in the UK at least some of our politicians are still obsessed with a woke mindset that is appearing increasingly redundant. Talk about not moving with the times.
This was Badenoch’s best PMQs yet
Kemi Badenoch had her best Prime Minister’s Questions yet today. She alighted on a topic that Keir Starmer really struggled to answer questions on and which should blow up as a row further in the coming weeks. The Tory leader devoted her six questions to the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, and specifically the reforms that legislation contains on academy freedoms, standards and teacher pay. She called it an ‘act of vandalism that is wrecking a cross party consensus’ by reversing the improvements that led to English school children topping the league tables.
What was interesting was that while the Prime Minister repeatedly insisted throughout the session that his party had set up academies and that they were here to stay, he did not specifically defend the measures Badenoch was attacking. Instead, he diverted attention to other reforms in the Bill, saying it had ‘important provisions for protecting children’, and complained that Badenoch had instructed her party to vote against them.
Sitting on the Conservative frontbench, shadow education secretary Chris Philp shouted ‘you didn’t bother voting’, which Badenoch then repeated in her next question. She compared the Conservative education reforms in England to the situation in Wales, which must have been refreshing for the Welsh given they are normally waved aloft at Prime Minister’s Questions due to the state of their NHS rather than education system. The bill ‘denies children the guarantee that their failing schools will be turned into a better academy’, said Badenoch, adding that it was an ‘attack on higher standards, an attack on aspiration’. It is ‘the worst of socialism’, she said, asking Starmer to agree that it would be ‘deprived children in England who will pay the price’.
Starmer reverted to saying Labour was ‘committed to academies’, and then listing the breakfast clubs, limits on school uniform costs and child protection measures in the legislation. It is an advantage of wide-ranging legislation like this: alongside a lot of policy dross, there is always something unquestionably good that any critics can be accused of opposing. Badenoch was quick to point out this sleight of hand, saying he was trying to distract people from what was really in the bill, and that her questions were ‘not about breakfast clubs’. Parents and teachers, she said, would be horrified at just how bad this bill was. It would cut teachers’ pay, she said. She then did something weirdly unusual for PMQs, which was to refer to a specific clause within the legislation. ‘Clause 45 means teachers’ pay will be capped’, Badenoch said. ‘Did the Prime Minister know that the Bill as it stands will cut teachers’ pay?’
Starmer used one of his weekly attack lines at this point, which was to accuse Badenoch of spending all her time on Twitter. ‘If she had hopped off social media for a whole then she would see the amendment that we put down this morning,’ he said, claiming that this would give schools flexibility. He then switched back to talking about the importance of the other measures in the Bill, something he kept doing in the remaining answers even though the mere presence of good policy in a package of legislation does not automatically make the entire bill well-drafted.
Badenoch had a better line in her final question, which was that it ‘is the same old Labour: bad outcomes for all children, excellence for none’, while Starmer was still burbling about being committed to standards in his. While he deliberately avoided being straightforward in his answers, it was pretty clear that the Prime Minister did not feel fully comfortable defending the legislation – or perhaps that he didn’t know quite what was in it.
There were other instances where Starmer was deliberately unclear. He did not, for instance, give a direct answer to Green MP Adrian Ramsay about his position on a third runway at Heathrow, having previously voted against it.
On other issues, Starmer came under fire for refusing to give a full answer to a question for three years. In what is also now a weekly ritual, Ed Davey used his first question to complain about the length of time the government is taking to even come up with proposals on long term reform of social care. The Liberal Democrat leader pointed out that Baroness Casey is now running a rapid audit of grooming gangs before she even starts her social care work, and said he would keep returning to this issue. Badenoch should do the same as the Schools Bill progresses through the Commons.
The truth about ‘stupid’ footballers
I’ll always remember a conversation I had with someone just after I’d interviewed the footballer Frank Lampard. ‘What was he like? I bet he was as thick as mince,’ they said. The reality was rather different: the former Chelsea captain was a thoughtful, intelligent and beautifully well-mannered man.
Footballers: ‘super clever’? This will shock some, but it doesn’t surprise me at all
Lots of people assume that footballers like Lampard lack intelligence, but a new study has found otherwise. Scientists studied 200 professional players in Brazil and Sweden, putting them through tests exploring various aspects of cognition, from working memory to executive function and problem-solving. They found that footballers consistently outperformed the average.
The players were in the 90th percentile in the tests that they were given, the equivalent of an IQ of 120 to 130. ‘These are super-clever individuals in terms of how their brain works,’ said Predrag Petrovic, of the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, who headed the study.
Footballers: ‘super clever’? This will shock some, but it doesn’t surprise me at all. As a sometime football writer, I’ve interviewed hundreds of footballers, many of them on multiple occasions, and I’ve found almost no evidence of the ‘thick footballer’ stereotype.
Often quite the opposite, actually. Most of the players I met were driven, focused and, yes, quite smart. They’re really not how people imagine. Ask them intelligent questions and they’ll generally give an intelligent answer. Treat them with everyday respect – rather than the hostility or sycophancy they’re used to – and they’ll be respectful back.
So why are so many people convinced footballers are thick? The most obvious reason is that the only time most of us hear footballers speak is in post-match interviews in the tunnel. These are very curious conversations: immediately after they’ve run around a pitch for 90 minutes they’re suddenly live on TV, being asked inane, or occasionally provocative, questions.
What do we expect from them in the circumstances? Rhetorical fireworks worthy of Christopher Hitchens? Shakespearean wit? Try running around your local park for an hour and a half and then being poetry itself when someone says ‘You must have been pleased with that’ or ‘Can you talk us through the second lap?’
It’s also worth considering why a footballer might be careful with his words when a microphone is suddenly shoved in his face. Whenever a player opens his mouth, the tabloids hover like vultures, ready to twist his words to create a back-page splash. So it’s understandable that players prefer to play it safe and hide behind the game’s cliched vernacular rather than risk being dropped in it. Only a stupid person would do otherwise.
Could there also be a degree of jealousy in our perception of footballers? Look at them: they are healthy, rich, often good looking, and adored by millions. Many become millionaires before they’re in their twenties just for kicking a ball around. What a life. I think a lot of people are so envious that they console themselves by thinking footballers must be stupid. Those lucky sods can’t have everything, surely?
The third reason is good old social snobbery. Young working-class men kicking a ball around for a living? They’re bound to be a bit dim, the snobs think. This perception has increased since middle-class fans started to attend games in greater numbers in the 1990s. Faced with a pitch full of millionaires who came from a much less privileged start than them, some fans can’t help but turn up their noses. Assuming footballers are thick is a coping mechanism.
Interestingly, the one exception to the ‘thick’ assumption seems to be for footballers from Europe. A lot of people assume that a Dutch, French or Italian footballer is intelligent as quickly as they assume a British footballer isn’t. It’s football’s version of the ‘French people are soooo much better than us at everything’ mantra of the middle-class Remainer.
Trump is not fooling this time
It is said that the adage “he who hesitates is lost” is an adaptation of a line from Joseph Addison’s 1712 play Cato. I do not believe that Donald Trump is a student of the co-founder of The Spectator, but he has clearly absorbed that nugget of practical wisdom.
Within hours of taking office on Monday, Trump issued some 200 executive orders and proclamations affecting the government’s conduct on everything from immigration to DEI, from energy policy to the 1,500 people incarcerated in Washington jails because they joined in the protest at the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
It is one thing to issue orders and proclamations. It is another thing to see them carried out successfully. But here we are, barely fifty hours into the second Trump administration, and the activity on the ground is furious. On Tuesday, heads of all government agencies were ordered to shut down their DEI offices by 5 p.m. today, Wednesday, and place all DEI hires on paid administrative leave “immediately.” Trump is not fooling this time. The order also directs the heads and acting heads of every agency to ask employees “if they know of any efforts to disguise these programs by using coded or imprecise language.”
That chill in the air that you feel is not due solely to the polar vortex making the mercury plunge. The country is also in the grip of the Trump common-sense vortex. With respect to illegal immigration, Trump’s border czar Tom Homan reports that the Immigration and Customs Enforcement team made 308 arrests yesterday. Following his policy of going after the “worst first,” the people arrested were all violent criminals: murderers, rapists, gang members and the like. The total number of people apprehended crossing the southern border illegally has dropped from between 10,000 and 12,000 under Joe Biden to 766. That’s in two days.
And then there is the so-called “intelligence community.” Do you remember the fifty-one former “intelligence experts” who signed the letter announcing that Hunter’s “laptop from hell” showed “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation?” That action gave Joe Biden the perfect talking point in his 2020 debate with Trump. But Trump was right about the laptop: it was Hunter’s, and all the damaging information was true. The letter from those wretched “experts” was a piece of political agitprop carefully organized by Antony Blinken, then Biden’s campaign manager, later, God help us, his secretary of state. Along with the full-court press of government and social media censorship, it helped get Biden over the hump of the debate and into the White House but now, like the infamous “dossier” commissioned by Hillary Clinton, it has been exposed as political propaganda.
Donald Trump remembers those fifty-one, mostly high-ranking members of “the intelligence community.” On Monday, within hours of taking office, he suspended the security clearances of them all: former director of national intelligence James Clapper Jr., former directors of the CIA Michael Hayden, John Brennan, former secretary of defense Leon Panetta and the rest. For good measure, he also pulled security detail assigned to former national security advisor John Bolton, who then went to Jake Tapper to weep about the unfairness of it all. “This should not be a partisan matter,” Bolton said, thus underscoring the fact that Trump’s enemies, like leftists generally, think that only their political opponents, never they themselves, are partisan. And note that, if you are in the intelligence or national security biz, a security clearance if a prerequisite for your continuing to work in that space. So we’ll have at least an additional fifty-two people padding about looking for work. As a public service announcement, I note that I have heard that Applebee’s is hiring.
Mirabile dictu, the people who spent the last eight years trying to destroy Trump are outraged, outraged that the president of the United States should take a jaundiced view of their activities. John Brennan, one of the most egregious anti-Trump fanatics, whined about the unfairness of it all to left-wing talking-head Andrea Mitchell. It was a pathetic performance, but also revelatory in a minor way. I especially liked it when Brennan described Mark Milley, former chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, as a “American hero.” In my view, Milley ought to have been stripped of his rank and court-martialed when he insinuated himself into the chain of command and contacted his Chinese counterpart to say that he would let him know if Trump was planning to initiate any military action against China.
One of Joe Biden’s last acts as president was to immunize Milley against future federal prosecution by issuing a proleptic get-of-of-jail-free-card, aka a presidential pardon. Milley should be grateful for that benison, but I am not sure it will prove to be the absolution he craves. Remember, we are only two days into the new Trump administration. The shock and awe is just beginning.
Starmer’s academies U-turn
Today’s PMQs won’t go down in history as Sir Keir Starmer’s finest half hour, with the PM losing marks over his performance on education. It seems the Labour politician has reverted to his old ways, with yet another Starmer U-turn making an appearance at today’s session. Quelle surprise…
Opposition leader Kemi Badenoch went in hard on the schools bill, blasting the Labour lot for wanting to row back on measures that propelled English schools to the top of Western league tables. ‘This bill is an act of vandalism,’ Badenoch declared. Pulling no punches, the Tory leader went on:
It is wrecking a cross-party consensus that lasted for decades… This bill is the worst of socialism, Mr Speaker, and isn’t it deprived children in England who will pay the price?
Shots fired…
And when the discussion turned to the subject of academies, Sir Keir was left a little flustered. ‘We introduced academies,’ the Labour leader insisted. ‘We committed to them and we’re driving standards up.’ Er, does that really paint the full picture? Mr S would point readers to an article written by Starmer for the Times Education Supplement magazine during his party’s leadership race in 2020. Pushing an anti-academy argument, he claimed:
The academisation of our schools is centralising at its core and it has fundamentally disempowered parents, pupils and communities. That’s why I want all schools to be democratically accountable to their local communities, not to politicians in London. We need our schools to be working together as one family, to serve their communities, rather than competing against each other.
How times change. It’s yet another U-turn for Starmer Chameleon to add to his portfolio…