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A light in the darkness: Home Kitchen reviewed
Home Kitchen is in Primrose Hill, another piece of fantasy London, home to the late Martin Amis and Paddington Bear. It is a measure of the times that Elizabeth II had no literary chronicler – no Amis, no Proust for her – but was, almost against her will, given Paddington Bear instead. When I saw the small bear at her memorials, I thought: is that her genre? Infants’ fiction? Couldn’t she do better? The question that follows is, of course: would they have eaten together at Home Kitchen?
The barley is doughty, fragrant and from the earth. The crumble is from God
To do so – and forgive this fiction, but Primrose Hill lends itself to fiction – they would first have to navigate the duality of Primrose Hill: that is, the things that make it awful, and the things that allow it to believe it is not as awful as it really is. Denial in bricks, I call it: postcode-washing. So, for every estate agent and seller of over-priced Uggs – they are a kind of fleeced boot – there is a rustic vegetable seller florist and now a restaurant with morals.
Primrose Hill did not invent the restaurant with morals. Notting Hill did that, to allow itself brunch near Grenfell Tower. If I had to choose between a restaurant with morals and a restaurant without morals, I would have said – until now – I don’t know. Neither. Both.
Home Kitchen is not for profit, an oddity for Primrose Hill. It calls itself ‘the world’s first fine dining restaurant staffed entirely by homeless people’, existing to ‘help socially vulnerable people get out of poverty and into work’. Staff are full-time, adequately paid, and take professional qualifications at the restaurant’s expense. If it sounds like the kitchen at Occupy, St Paul’s Cathedral in 2011 – political movements need cuisine as much as anyone, perhaps more – it is nothing like it. That was a tent, and it did not plead. This is a townhouse, and it does, but the world is crueller now.
It used to be Odette’s, a famous restaurant. Home Kitchen is more understated, which suits it: Sexy Fish for Global Justice would not work, and I would not eat there. It has pale walls and wood floors with a slight chaos motif – both art and lighting are variants on squiggles – across two dining rooms: one above, one below. If it is understated, there is a soul to it: the staff are unusually kind and interested. The executive chef is Adam Simmonds, formerly of Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons and Soup Kitchen London. There will soon be sister restaurants in San Francisco and Brighton.
The Sunday menu is tiny, which is always reassuring because nothing from a tiny menu can be forgotten by its chef: three starters, four main courses, three puddings, including cheese. (My serenity is a feint. Call main courses ‘mains’ and I will shoot you.) We have smoked salmon, shallot, lemon and caper salad; 28-day aged sirloin of beef with roast potatoes, crushed root vegetables, tenderstem broccoli, Yorkshire pudding and gravy; toasted barley with fermented celeriac, chervil and summer truffle; lemon tart with crème fraîche; seasonal crumble with vanilla custard. The food is faultless but warm-hearted: loving somehow. The roast lunch is perfectly balanced and pretty as day: unusually, it does not scream greed. The barley is vegetarian food as it is intended: doughty, fragrant and from the earth. The crumble is from God.
I cut into the beef. It is fine – soft and bloody, as it should be – but the knife is not sharp. Even as I process this impediment, the waitress silently places a steak knife at my elbow and I know then, as you do in the tiny moments, that this is a great restaurant. I hope there are queues outside this winter. In darkness, light a candle. Here is one.
The sparkling side of ‘coruscating’
An ‘apoplectic’ reader, Antony Wynn, writes to lament that ‘two much loved writers have been coruscating of late when they should have been excoriating’. In pursuing his tale of horror, I made a surprising discovery.
Let’s start with origins. Coruscate comes from Latin coruscare, ‘to vibrate, glitter, sparkle, gleam’. Excoriate comes from Latin excoriare, ‘to strip off the hide’. Generally, present-day meanings need not be those of the etymological originals, but in these two cases many writers are aware of the ancestry and think of sparkling behind coruscating and flaying behind excoriating.
Yet a large proportion of uses of coruscate are clearly meant to mean ‘upbraid scathingly, decry, revile’ – a figurative sense of excoriate. In the newspapers I have found: ‘Earl Spencer’s coruscating speech at Princess Diana’s funeral’; ‘the most honest and ruthlessly coruscating essay I’ve read’, and an example that simply can’t mean ‘sparkling’: ‘a self-coruscating standout from her first album’.
But coruscating continues to be used in the ‘sparkling’ sense, often in sporting journalism, my husband tells me: ‘a coruscating burst of six-hitting’. Six-hitting might be excoriating, for the other side. It depends on the context. But context is the means by which native speakers learn the meaning of words.
The great surprise is that the Oxford English Dictionary has just updated its entry for coruscating. The meaning of ‘severely critical; scathing’, it says, ‘though sometimes regarded as an erroneous use arising from confusion with another word, especially excoriating, the available evidence suggests this arose by regular semantic development from earlier uses of the word’.
Perhaps coruscating has developed into ‘scathing’. Yet it has not done so unaided by confusion with excoriating. It would be a pity to think it has gone so far as to be unusable in the older sense.
Justin Welby shouldn’t have resigned
There is no proper reason for the resignation of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby. No iniquity was proved against him. It has never been clear why, in the horrendous case of John Smyth, people thought the buck should stop with him. Smyth was never an Anglican priest (indeed, he was refused ordination), nor paid by the Church. When in England, he worked for the Iwerne Trust, an independent evangelical body. Most of the abuse Smyth perpetrated was when he took boys out from Winchester College to lunch with his family in the country nearby. In a hut in his garden, he beat the boys savagely, in the interests, he told them, of purifying them for God. The duty of care there was surely Winchester’s, not the C of E’s. That was all in the 1970s and 1980s. When an internal inquiry found out what Smyth was up to, he fled to Zimbabwe, where he perpetrated more abuse, and ended up in South Africa. The 20-year-old Welby knew Smyth, but nothing about his behaviour, except, possibly, for rumours that there was something strange about him. The abuse crossed Welby’s radar only after he became Archbishop. In 2013, it was brought to his notice by the safeguarding officer of the diocese of Ely, who had been in touch with a Smyth victim. The diocese got in touch with the relevant South African diocese. It had also informed the police, Welby was mistakenly told. Hampshire police later sought Smyth, but failed to extract him from South Africa to face charges. It is probably true – as the Archbishop has himself said – that he should have followed up more zealously, but he had no real locus standi. He had historic cases on his hands – that of Bishop Peter Ball, for instance – which undoubtedly did involve direct church responsibility, the more reason not to take on matters that did not. He was advised – probably wrongly – that if he were to see Smyth’s victims at that point, as they wanted, he might compromise the police investigation. All this was not well handled, but it was not wicked. The damning Makin report implies it disbelieves the Archbishop’s account of what he knew in his youth. It is unprofessional to say that without proof.
After the case was the subject of a television programme in 2017, I had long conversations with Andy Morse, a Wykehamist victim of Smyth who spoke about the matter again on the Today programme this week. I admired and admire Andy’s courage and integrity and also his gentle spirit, and I could see why he and his fellow victims would have liked more from the Archbishop. Their abuser exploited their young Christian faith revoltingly. They rightly hated the thought that Smyth could get away with his evil deeds. But I still think the commission of a great wrong does not justify a retaliatory wrong aimed at a person who is not guilty. The Church of England is not a command structure, and even if it were, John Smyth was not under that command. The Archbishop had no power to try to catch Smyth in South Africa, although he certainly could have made more noise. I feel the cry against him has been got up by factions. One is those who dislike evangelicals, the side of the Church from which Welby comes; the other is those who dislike liberals, the side of the Church to which Welby has increasingly moved. It is right to criticise Welby, but un-Christian to force him out. The consequence will not be mass repentance, but a Church which everyone is too scared to lead. In this panic, there will be a rush to transfer ultimate power over safeguarding from the Church to an independent safeguarding bureaucracy. That really would be an abdication of responsibility.
I have spent plenty of ink criticising Justin Welby, especially his readiness to close churches during Covid, his trashing of the reputation of the late Bishop Bell of Chichester with false accusations of child abuse and his unfair attacks on what he mistakenly called ‘memorials to slavery’. But I also note his courage, which I saw at first hand when I revealed to him that his true father was probably Sir Anthony Montague Browne. He immediately wanted to investigate rather than cover up. He overcame great difficulties in his own life and was full of impatience to do good for his faith.
Last week, I wrote about Henry Keswick, our former proprietor. A friend writes to relay a piece of advice which Henry gave him. Readers may find it helpful: ‘Never invest in a country which has green in its flag.’
When originally drafted for introduction by Lord Falconer in the House of Lords, it was called the Assisted Dying for Terminally Ill Adults Bill. This was a euphemistic title since what is proposed is assisted suicide: assisted dying is a phrase properly used to describe palliative care. Now the same bill is instead starting in the Commons, it has been renamed the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill. This is an even more misleading title, giving no clue about what is at stake – the intervention of a doctor to help people kill themselves.
Our recent opening Meet was attended by an unusually large number of ‘antis’. ‘This is the last season of hunting,’ they hissed as we trotted past. I remember being told exactly the same thing by similar people at a similar meet 20 years ago. They might be right this time, of course – Labour has promised to allow parliamentary time to ban trail hunting. But, then as now, problems of definition vex workable legislation. I also wonder if Labour’s remarkable assault on family farms, announced in the Budget, could combine with other issues such as planning changes and new pylons to arouse so much rural trouble that the government might consider omitting some of its ‘luxury beliefs’ about the animal kingdom from a packed legislative programme. I concede, however, that such a course would be wise, and is therefore unlikely.
After Welby: what’s next for the Church of England?
It’s taken him more than a decade, but Justin Welby has finally united the Church of England. The petition calling for him to resign over the findings of the Makin Review into the serial abuser John Smyth was set up by three clergymen who would normally disagree: Dr Ian Paul, Robert Thompson and Marcus Walker, the spirit animals of the C of E’s evangelical, liberal and High Church wings. ‘Over any other issue Ian Paul and Robert Thompson would practically be suggesting pistols at dawn across the Synod chamber,’ says one member of the General Synod. Yet they were united in their anger against the Archbishop of Canterbury and in their conviction that he needed to resign.
Smyth, an evangelical who ran Christian holiday camps, severely beat more than 100 boys in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The Makin Review, which was published last Thursday, found Welby and other senior figures in the Church had, from 2013, known about the allegations against Smyth (who died in 2018) and had missed opportunities to bring him to justice. It stated that Welby had a ‘personal and moral responsibility’ to pursue the matter further, but that he and other senior Church figures had shown a ‘distinct lack of curiosity’ in the allegations. Welby initially said he would stay on, following the advice of ‘senior colleagues’, yet in the end he saw that his position was untenable.
No Archbishop of Canterbury in history has quit because of a scandal
It’s often said that Welby is more of a politician than a theologian, so it’s grimly fitting that his downfall felt as though it belonged to the Palace of Westminster rather than Lambeth. Many people in the Church I spoke to about his initial refusal to resign compared it with Boris Johnson’s behaviour over Chris Pincher. ‘He wanted to stay to put things right,’ says Jayne Ozanne, a founding member of the Archbishops’ Council and the author of Just Love. ‘But you have to have credibility in order to do that.’
Yet even if his departure was unavoidable, it was still extraordinary. No Archbishop of Canterbury in history has quit because of a scandal, not even in 1621 when the primate of all England shot and killed a gamekeeper with a crossbow while hunting. These are uncharted waters for the C of E. Even those who demanded Welby’s resignation don’t now know what to expect. ‘I have no idea what will happen next,’ says Ian Paul. ‘It’ll be chaotic. But what’s the option? People say, “what’s your plan B?”. I don’t know. I haven’t got one. But he needed to go.’
‘I don’t think it’s right if Welby is a scapegoat,’ says Gilo, a campaigner who co-founded the website House of Survivors. ‘There should be other resignations. Welby’s departure needs to signal a very widespread change in culture not just within the bishops but also in Church House.’ Giles Fraser, the vicar of St Anne’s, Kew (who was himself abused, not by Smyth), believes that there is a coming ‘reckoning’ that will go far beyond Welby. ‘There might well be a domino effect with bishops and other senior clergy.’ There are, he points out, ‘quite a few bishops who are implicated in the Makin report’.
‘This has to be a watershed moment,’ says Ozanne. ‘We’ll have to look at how we manage and oversee safeguarding. Some of us have been calling for an independent commission for years, and we also need to create checks and balances to hold bishops and archbishops to account.’
‘The Church can’t mark its own homework about safeguarding,’ agrees Fraser. ‘It’s shown itself completely incapable of doing this properly.’ The man who campaigners think might stand in the way of change is William Nye, secretary-general of the Archbishops’ Council (the ‘Dominic Cummings to Welby’s Boris Johnson’, as one advocate for change put it to me). ‘William Nye is part of the problem, not the solution,’ Ozanne says flatly. ‘He has led a very poor culture in the Church of England,’ says Gilo. ‘The [C of E’s] National Safeguarding Team is not fit for purpose. If it’s not really functional it can do more harm than good.’
Campaigners for an independent safeguarding body point to a report this year by Professor Alexis Jay, the former head of the independent inquiry into child sexual abuse. Her conclusion was that a complete overhaul was ‘the only way’ in which the Church could address concerns over safeguarding. She recommends creating two separate bodies, independent of the Church, one with operational responsibility for safeguarding and the other to provide scrutiny. The C of E leadership will be under enormous pressure to implement her recommendations, especially now that the deputy lead bishop for safeguarding, Julie Conalty, the Bishop of Birkenhead, has said that the Church is ‘not a safe institution’.
There is a sad irony that during his 11 years occupying the Chair of St Augustine, Welby said repeatedly that his mission was one of ‘reconciliation’. ‘Reconciliation is about seeking to transform relationships that have become damaged or destructive into relationships of trust that bring new life,’ he wrote. ‘The journey towards this is not easy. It requires humility, time and patience.’ He has run out of time and others have run out of patience.
In his public resignation statement, he said he will ‘follow through on my commitment to meet victims’, but for many of Smyth’s victims this is too little too late. ‘I’m not sure now what he could say that would make his apology acceptable to me,’ says one, who didn’t want to be named. ‘He has failed me so spectacularly for nearly 12 years that words are not enough… he has steadfastly refused to meet me and I’m not sure why a meeting now would reverse all that trauma.’ He says the Church needs to investigate every member of the clergy who knew about Smyth and failed to disclose the abuse.
Under usual circumstances, it takes at least several months for the Crown Nominations Commission (CNC) to agree on a successor and pass the name on to the Prime Minister, who will convey it to the King. This time the process will be harder than ever, and not just because of the cloud of the Smyth scandal looming over proceedings. Under Welby’s tenure, the balance of the 17-person CNC was changed to increase the numbers of members chosen from the Anglican Communion from one to five, and reduce the number of members from the Diocese of Canterbury from five to three. The last attempt to appoint an Archbishop of Canterbury in 2012 was rumoured to be very bad tempered. Given the strained relationship between the Anglican Communion and the ‘mother church’, it’s hard to imagine it will be quieter this time around.
The other voting members on the CNC are the Archbishop of York Stephen Cottrell, six members of the General Synod, a bishop chosen by the House of Bishops and a voting chair appointed by the Prime Minister. The two key non-voting figures are the Archbishops’ Secretary for Appointments, Stephen Knott, Welby’s former deputy chief of staff; and the Prime Minister’s Appointments Secretary, Jonathan Hellewell. Between the two of them they take soundings, writing to leading figures in society to ask them what they consider essential in the next Archbishop of Canterbury. The CNC then draws up a shortlist of prospective candidates to interview. The successful candidate must win the support of two thirds of the CNC.
It seems inevitable that in the aftermath of the Smyth scandal and the remarkable nature of the Archbishop’s exit, there will be a strong push for someone very different to Welby. One retired bishop told me sadly that the evangelical tradition is ‘tarnished and diminished’, not only because of the Makin Review but also the abuse scandals involving the evangelical leaders Mike Pilavachi and Jonathan Fletcher.
Yet even if the appointment of a conservative evangelical would be difficult, appointing an out-and-out progressive would have its own problems. ‘The Church of England may literally not be able to afford to appoint a progressive archbishop,’ says Andrew Graystone, a theologian and author of Bleeding for Jesus: John Smyth and the cult of the Iwerne Camps. ‘The conservative evangelicals have the numbers, power and the money. If there’s an attempt to appoint someone who isn’t evangelical, what they would call “orthodox”, on sexual issues, then the conservative evangelicals are ready to pick up and walk away.’
The options left would be to either appoint a fence-sitter or stall the process. ‘On the whole the Church of England would rather have the pandemonium that comes from not deciding than the pandemonium that comes from making a choice,’ says Graystone.
‘Welby’s departure needs to signal a very widespread change in culture’
The possibility of a long period of uncertainty has led to speculation that Cottrell could become an interim Archbishop of Canterbury during the search for Welby’s successor. It would be hard to argue with the authority of someone who already has the archbishop title and since he is 66, four years shy of the mandatory retirement age for bishops, there would be no doubt that the measure would be temporary. Sarah Mullally, the Bishop of London, has also been mentioned as a possible caretaker.
As for the eventual successor, Martyn Snow, the Bishop of Leicester, was once a favourite, but his odds have probably lengthened because of his closeness to Welby. Graham Usher, the Bishop of Norwich and the Church’s lead bishop for environmental affairs, is considered a front-runner, as is Guli Francis-Dehqani, the Bishop of Chelmsford and the C of E’s lead bishop for housing, who came to Britain as an asylum seeker from Iran. As the only bishop to publicly call for Welby to resign, Helen-Ann Hartley, the progressive Bishop of Newcastle, will get support from the Church’s liberal wing. Mark Tanner, the Bishop of Chester, and Paul Williams, the Bishop of Southwell and Nottingham, are thought to be strong evangelical candidates.
Whoever succeeds Welby, he or she will inherit a Church more at war with itself than at any time in living memory. They will also inherit dwindling congregation numbers, the clamour for justice from abuse victims, and an Anglican Communion fractured, possibly beyond repair. There is a tradition in the C of E of nolo episcopari – the idea that the person best suited to being archbishop might be the rare person who doesn’t fancy it. This time around, it’s hard to imagine anyone who would want the job.
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What Kemi Badenoch can learn from her enemies
Kemi Badenoch, in an act of unusual awareness for an MP, intends to learn from her own party’s mistakes as well as Labour’s. She must have been reading the Greek statesman Plutarch’s ‘How to profit from your enemies’, one of his 78 essays and dialogues on a wide range of topics, from the intelligence of animals to old men in politics.
Politics, he said, always encouraged spite, envy, and rivalry. These encouraged the wise man ‘to stay on guard, do everything with due care and attention, and lead a more mindful life’. The reason he gave for this was that there was a weakness in us that made us ‘feel more ashamed of our faults before our enemies than our friends’. For example, many thought Rome secure after conquering Carthage and Greece, but Scipio disagreed: ‘We are the ones on the slippery slope because we have left ourselves no one to fear or to put us to shame.’
When untrue things are said of you, Plutarch went on, you should not reject them because they are false but consider whether anything you said or did might have justified them; and if it did, take care to avoid a repeat. Guard your speech – for as Plato said: ‘Nothing is lighter than a word but nothing heavier than the punishment it can attract from gods and men.’ Do not grudge praise or honour to an enemy who is justly famous. That will enhance you, and if you subsequently find fault with him, you will be believed. But if someone gets the better of you, note how they do it and put all your efforts into doing the same, like Themistocles who used to say that he could not get to sleep for envying Miltiades’ majestic victory at the battle of Marathon.
If you believe that your enemy is superior because he is lucky, closely examine his life and character, his words and deeds; you will find it is those that give him his advantage. Finally, ensure that your delight at his mistakes results in your avoiding them, and your discomfort at his successes results in matching them, by imitating his strengths.
So, Ms Badenoch, how will you approach the criminal Trump?
Labour’s war with Elon Musk
How do you solve a problem like Elon? That is the dilemma facing Keir Starmer. Musk seems particularly exercised about the state of the UK and is quick to criticise the man he calls ‘two-tier Keir’. Using his platform X, he has weighed in on just about all the worst Labour news, from over-taxing farmers to mass-releasing prisoners while locking up others for speaking freely about the Southport riots. ‘Don’t expect him to be invited in for a fireside chat any time soon,’ says a minister.
Now, following Donald Trump’s re-election, another story could bring Starmer’s inner circle into a direct confrontation with Musk, plunging the PM’s top aide into a high-profile congressional investigation.
Downing Street and Ofcom struggle with the pace of what one MP calls a ‘24/7 hate factory’
The latest controversy centres on a hitherto obscure group founded by Starmer’s new Chief of Staff, Morgan McSweeney, back in 2018. The Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) launched at a time when Jeremy Corbyn’s grip on Labour looked unshakable. Locked out of power, moderates diverted their energies outside the party. For 18 months, McSweeney was listed as a director of CCDH, which focused on combating left-wing anti-Semitism, encouraging a successful advertising boycott of the Corbynite Canary website. ‘Destroy the Canary or the Canary destroys us,’ McSweeney reportedly told Labour Together MPs. But in April 2020, he quit to work for Starmer, leaving the project to his ‘dear friend’ Imran Ahmed, a fellow former Labour staffer.
The pandemic proved transformative in CCDH’s fortunes. Covid vaccines sparked a huge online debate and policy-makers embraced outlets waging the fight against ‘anti-vaccination’ propagandists. McSweeney’s outfit joined Whitehall meetings of the Counter Disinformation Policy Forum, tackling the ‘threat posed by Covid-19 mis- and disinformation’. Ahmed personally advised the UK government on ‘conspiracist “news” sites’. Grants from big charities such as the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust enabled the CCDH to set up a Washington non-profit in April 2021. In London, the Center continues to enjoy influence. It met with counter-terrorism police in this summer’s riots and suggested ‘emergency powers’ could be used to ‘fight misinformation and de-amplify harmful posts’ in the future.
In America, the donations rolled in, with the Center boasting $1.4 million in its first 12 months. Tinseltown bestowed its blessing too: Hollywood super-agent Aleen Keshishian joined its board while actor Mark Ruffalo praised Ahmed as a ‘man of great character’. The Center’s activities soon earned it the enmity of conservatives, who railed against its role in the ‘censorship industrial complex’. ‘Cliquey, left-wing’ and ‘selective in choosing targets’ is how one source who worked within the group describes it. Successes included boycott campaigns against Breitbart, the Daily Wire and other outlets for sharing ‘climate change denial’.
However, Musk’s purchase of Twitter in October 2022 brought the CCDH’s success to a sudden halt. With the site rebranded as ‘X’, the CCDH quickly turned on Musk’s new content moderation policies, holding him responsible for a ‘rise in hate speech’ on the platform. Ahmed claimed the Tesla founder was personally undermining ‘decades of progress’ on the ‘human rights’ of ethnic minorities ‘at an ever-accelerating rate’. A lawsuit followed, with X alleging the Center had taken ‘unlawful’ steps to access its data. The CCDH successfully countered on the grounds of free speech and honest criticism.
Then, last month, leaked internal CCDH documents revealed that ‘Kill Musk’s Twitter’ was explicitly listed as a top strategic priority. Plans had been drafted to pressure advertisers, financially destabilise the platform and ‘trigger EU and UK regulatory action’. Ahmed has since admitted that ‘Kill Musk’s Twitter’ was used internally by his staff as a ‘shorthand’ for ‘tackling’ X’s business model. Leaked notes boasted of dozens of ‘meetings on the Hill’ with staff pushing legislators for an ‘independent digital regulator’ similar to the role played by Ofcom in the UK’s Online Safety Act.
The revelations, published a fortnight before the presidential election, sent Republicans in Congress into overdrive. The ‘Weaponization Committee’ run by Trump ally Jim Jordan fired off a two-page letter to Ahmed, demanding files which relate to ‘killing’ or ‘adverse action against Elon Musk’s X’. Supporters of Ahmed’s work fear the CCDH is a victim of the ‘Orban playbook’, in which Musk’s allies wield the machinery of the state against its opponents. The documents are due by 21 November.
As Musk is appointed to head the new ‘efficiency’ department in Trump’s government, the CCDH controversy perhaps illustrates the pitfalls of taking on ‘Big Tech’. During the Southport riots, No. 10 initially hit back hard against Musk’s claims that ‘civil war’ was ‘inevitable’ before adopting a policy of non-engagement. Downing Street and Ofcom struggle with the pace of what one MP calls a ‘24/7 hate factory’. It’s a challenge Starmer’s predecessors never had to face.
Instinctively, most within Labour want more action against Musk. Technology Secretary Peter Kyle, who is reviewing social-media laws, complains that Musk is ‘accountable to no one’. Lisa Nandy, the Culture Secretary, is working on the ‘Local News Strategy’, which aims to address the ‘digital deserts’ which ministers believe allow disinformation to thrive, as in Southport. The Guardian this week joined a string of MPs quitting X, while Labour staff fret in WhatsApp groups whether they should too.
On the right, the contrast could not be more stark. Kemi Badenoch is a self-proclaimed ‘huge fan of Elon Musk’, and told The Spectator that his Twitter takeover ‘has been a fantastic thing for freedom of speech’. Nigel Farage is believed to have met the man himself at the Trump victory party at Mar-a-Lago. The Reform leader is the only MP the Tesla boss follows on X.
The relationship between the British government and the world’s richest man is likely to be an ongoing saga. As four years of Trump 2.0 loom, all signs suggest that Labour still has no clear idea of what to do.
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Will the assisted dying bill pass the Commons?
In the months before the general election, the Labour party had an internal debate about starting a ‘national conversation’ on assisted dying. Keir Starmer had promised Esther Rantzen, the veteran broadcaster with terminal cancer, that if elected he would hold a vote on it. Wes Streeting, in the health brief, argued that it might be the time to start a wider debate with the country on the thorny issue. However, he faced pushback from those in the shadow cabinet mindful of the fact there could be an election within months. Talking about death wasn’t exactly the feel-good change factor they were aiming for. ‘We didn’t want to become the death party,’ recalls a colleague.
‘It could basically blow up the family courts. Is that such a good idea?’
Now, some in the party are wishing that the conversation had got under way sooner. Starmer has made good on his pledge to Rantzen: a vote to legalise assisted dying is due this month. But it’s not clear whether his government or party are convinced. ‘The politics has been off,’ says one Labour MP first elected this year. Backbencher Kim Leadbeater is using her private members’ bill to try to change the law so terminally ill patients with less than six months to live can opt for assisted dying. Technically it is a free vote – but given Starmer’s well-established position (he was one of the 118 MPs to back the 2015 effort for legalisation), the party believes it knows what the leadership would like to happen. ‘There will be soft whipping,’ predicts a cabinet minister.
There had been a sense that the bill should pass comfortably. The combination of Starmer’s support, the large Labour majority and an influx of new, modern MPs means this parliament looks very different to the one that rejected the idea in 2015. Yet the tension within Labour between social liberalism and a more blue Labour approach remains strong. There are also MPs of faith, such as the Christian backbenchers Rachael Maskell and Stephen Timms, who oppose the measure. And then there are the MPs upset by the way in which Starmer has gone about it.
Starmer is not the first prime minister to try to bring in a significant change early on outside of government legislation. Labour’s ban on smoking indoors was realised through a conscience vote – as was the latest Tory clampdown on the habit. But here, the concern is that a topic as thorny and knotty as this requires more careful thought than a private members’ bill and five-hour debate can offer.
The decision to give a matter of life and death such short shrift in the Commons chamber has brought about the unlikely alliance of Diane Abbott, Ed Davey and Kemi Badenoch, who have all raised concerns. One influential Labour MP suggests the whips could delay the vote on the assisted dying bill. One criticism is that a decision that could lead to thousands of people ending their lives voluntarily has been given just five hours of debate time. Whips could intervene and choose to allocate government time to it.
Now not even Starmer seems sure whether he will back it. The Prime Minister has gone from saying publicly ‘I’m personally in favour of changing the law’ to refusing to offer specifics this week to the travelling lobby as he headed to a climate summit in Azerbaijan. ‘Either he was always being bullied by Esther Rantzen or he’s lost his nerve,’ says one MP. He has reason to pause for thought: in an ominous sign for the viability of the bill, both the Health Secretary and Justice Secretary, the two ministers who would be responsible for the implementation of assisted dying in the United Kingdom, have said they will not vote for it.
Shabana Mahmood’s views are long established and based on her faith as a Muslim. As she first told The Spectator last year: ‘I feel that once you cross that line, you’ve crossed it forever.’ Streeting has been torn on the issue, deciding a few weeks ago that he could not in good conscience back the bill. He has warned that ill patients could feel ‘guilt-tripped’ into ending their own lives and questioned the ability of the state (a regular complaint from Labour ministers these days) to support assisted dying. Those in favour of the bill are frustrated Streeting has been so vocal in his criticism given the Cabinet were told not to engage in a public debate. But as one government aide puts it: ‘It’s impractical. Of course ministers are going to be asked about it on media.’ Angela Rayner, the deputy prime minister, is the latest member of the Cabinet reported to be minded to vote against the bill.
Leadbeater published the bill this week, setting out its safeguards. Yet many questions remain unanswered. A member of the public who pressured an individual into assisted suicide could face a jail sentence of 14 years – but a doctor under pressure at work and short on time can suggest it to a vulnerable patient. Might that not lead to some patients feeling under pressure to end their lives?
The High Court must approve all applications. But there are currently 18 High Court judges in the family division, who are already overloaded with cases. There are concerns in the Ministry of Justice – which is facing spending cuts following Rachel Reeves’s Budget – that the implementation of assisted dying will only add to a court backlog. Applications for assisted suicide will, by their very nature, be treated as emergency requests and skip the queue – meaning there will be consequences elsewhere. As one government source puts it: ‘It could basically blow up the family courts. Is that such a good idea?’
All this adds to an anxiety among MPs that assisted dying is not so much a necessary social change as a more a complex issue with no easy answers. ‘It’s hardly gay marriage – not many MPs want to be associated with this,’ says a party figure.
Why rush something so delicate? Given Starmer so far seems to be struggling with the basics of governing, questions are being to asked as to whether this is another instance of the new Prime Minister biting off more than he can chew.
If the first Commons vote in nearly a decade on the issue fails, the bill’s supporters would put the defeat down to poor planning. It would also suggest that Starmer needs to get to know his party better.
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The thrill of the Beaujolais Run
‘Le Beaujolais nouveau est arrivé!’ If that phrase means anything to you, you’re likely of a vintage that remembers pre-Clarkson Top Gear. Growing up in the 1980s, you couldn’t miss adverts for the Beaujolais Run – an annual race to be the first to bring the new wine back to England. People would rush over to Burgundy in their Aston Martins and Jaguars, fill up with Beaujolais and roar back home.
The idea for a race across France was cooked up by Clement Freud and wine merchant Joseph Berkmann in 1970. It really took off in 1974 when the Sunday Times offered a prize to the first person to bring a case of wine back to the newspaper’s offices following its release at midnight on the third Thursday in November.
The first winner was John Patterson, who flew it back in a plane and arrived in London at 2.30 a.m., much to the consternation of all the proto-Clarksons, I imagine. In an amusing footnote, Patterson was the entrepreneur behind Dateline, the first computer dating service. Eventually, the French authorities got tired of speeding Englishmen and moved the release venue to Calais, which rather took the fun out of the event. Beaujolais is, mainly, a light red wine from the south of Burgundy made from the gamay grape. Producers in the region began promoting the release of the ‘nouveau’ wines in 1951.
The quality was usually nothing to write home about. Auberon Waugh described such wines as ‘just an excuse for a lot of repressed businessmen to get drunk on a Monday morning’. The grapes were harvested in September and in order to make sure they were ready by November they might be fermented at high temperature with special fast-acting yeasts. Furthermore, while having a wine that’s only just finished fermenting isn’t a problem if you’re serving it by the jug in a bar in Lyons, it needs heavy filtration to make it stable enough to bottle – meaning less flavour. By the time I entered the wine trade in the late 1990s demand had dropped drastically. We put up a sign saying ‘Le Beaujolais nouveau est arrivé!’ but the bottles sat there in the shop gathering dust. People wanted dark heavy reds like Australian shiraz or Argentine malbec.
But Beaujolais fever has lingered on in some places like, oddly, Swansea where the whole town turns out for its arrival. It’s thought that this peculiar popularity dates back to former Wales rugby international Clem Thomas, who had a house in the region and used to bring cases of the stuff back to the bar he owned in Swansea.
There’s been a modest resurgence in recent years as Beaujolais has become fashionable with hipsters who refer to it as ‘Bojo’, or did until the word became a common diminutive for a former editor of this magazine. The truth is Beaujolais nouveau done right, like the wine I had last year from a producer called Cécile Dardanelli, is impossible not to enjoy as long as you leave your prejudices at the door. Buy a bottle on the third Thursday of November and see for yourself. Le Beaujolais nouveau est de retour!
My brief encounter with online dating
Provence
One of my daughters and a few pals, thinking I need company, have been urging me to get Bumble, the online dating app where women make the first move. I’ve thought in the past month or so that I might like some sort of relationship, but contemplating the reality is scary. When someone you love passionately dies, love lives on but sometimes too much; both sweet and painful memories can be paralysing. ‘You can’t be on your own in the cave for ever,’ someone said recently. Why not?
Friends Dave and Kate met on Bumble. He said: ‘You must remember, Catriona, there are lots of decent men out there who haven’t read The Waste Land. Don’t let it put you off.’ I told him I hadn’t read it all either, and had promised my daughters that if anyone ever so much as began quoting metaphysical poetry or T.S. Eliot I’d run a mile. The girls told me any prospective suitors should have their own house, a legal car and not be in dispute with HMRC. Unrealistically, I added still looks good in a T-shirt.
‘You must remember, there are decent men out there who haven’t read The Waste Land. Don’t let it put you off’
But what about Jeremy and his words? I’m still in love with both. Last summer I was asked by a publisher if I’d like to write a book on coming to France. I sent a proposal and although I haven’t heard back I’ve kept going on from the sample first chapter. To that end I’ve been rereading old emails, journals and notebooks. Jeremy’s still here. Early lovelorn texts during long separations – he in Devon looking after his mother and grandsons, me taking refuge in Provence and struggling to find work. Our agreement was not to live together full-time, but he’d still message: ‘Marry me Treena!’ My reticence, which was only partly due to the fact that it took five years for me to get unmarried, upset him. By the time I thought it might be a good idea, Jeremy, being so ill, was less keen, although we did marry in the end. His final Christmas card dropped out of a book the other day: ‘Merry Christmas darling Treena, with all my love and gratitude and apologies for this pickle I’ve got myself into. It’s been wonderful though – hasn’t it? You and me. Us. You dear thing. XXX.’
Despite – or perhaps because of this – in a despairing and lonely mood, I decided to try Bumble after all, but by mistake joined DateMyAge. Oblivious, I spent an hour setting up a profile, first scrolling through 17,000 photos on my phone looking for six I didn’t hate of myself. The sixth and most flattering was of my feet in Uggs in front of the fire. Then I had to write a spiel, describing myself – that was dispiriting. Next, I was to choose three causes I felt passionate about from a list of eight: the environment, politics, gender, feminism, Gaza – I forget the rest. As a protest against the use of the word ‘passionate’ in this context and the prescriptive list, I left that section blank. The site asked me to set a distance limit. I tried for a minimum distance of 800 miles (a decent arm’s length) but the app wouldn’t allow that: 110 miles was the farthest. Although I was beginning to feel queasy, I pressed the ‘go live’ button. Photos appeared. The men either looked fake, like models, or were all stubble, jowls and grey teeth and made Jackson Lamb look like Brad Pitt. After ten minutes, my inbox began filling up. Claude has viewed your profile 18 times. ‘Hello my dear, what are you doing here?’ Pierre wanted me to know he felt a deep connection with me and asked if I’d thought about the future. Why were these men emailing me? Weren’t women supposed to swipe or something first? The penny dropped. I panicked and went back looking for a ‘delete profile’ option but there was none, so I contacted ‘help’ and asked them to terminate the account, which they did five hours and a bulging inbox later.
Masochism took hold and I downloaded Bumble, correctly this time, and went through the whole rigmarole again. What can you tell from a photo or a poorly written blurb? What can you tell from a date even, where people show only their best side? I haven’t been on a date since I was a teenager – less than 8st with big hair, lots of eye make-up and white heels like a character from a Jilly Cooper bonkbuster. David Bowie was top of the charts with ‘Let’s Dance’ and Margaret Thatcher was about to win a landslide victory. How do you find out quickly if someone has an explosive temper, rages, or is controlling, self-obsessed, too heavy a drinker, aggressive, needy, prone to sulking, paranoid or otherwise weird and best avoided? They’re not going to tell you.
Scrolling again, this time I set the app to ‘travel’ and ‘London’. This lot were professional in their approach. Good, mostly believable photos and funny answers to daft questions. Tom, a retired medic of 67, told us the quickest way to his heart was, in an emergency, through his chest. My heart was sinking and I forgot which way to swipe, inadvertently telling ‘Michael’ I was interested, which caused more anxiety while I worked out how to unswipe. I messaged Kate for a tutorial, but it was no good. Pulse racing, I deleted the app. Instant relief. Safer with ghosts. The record for the shortest time spent online dating surely belongs to me: an hour-and-a-half, and if you subtract the time spent setting it up and messaging Kate – two-and-a-half minutes.
Printers are pure evil
‘Printers are evil,’ said the office supplies salesman after I texted him to complain that my new printer was not working.
A day earlier he had installed it perfectly, and it worked perfectly – all the while he was standing there. Then he left, and the devilish thing looked at me and thought: ‘I’ll have some fun with her.’
The problem could be anything. The printer doesn’t care. All it wants to do is not work
I don’t really understand why we can put men and women in space, but we can’t make printers work unless a tech expert is standing by.
Elon Musk says he is going to Mars, and I believe him. I have his Starlink wifi and it’s brilliant. What I don’t understand is why Elon, who can do everything, can’t help make printers work.
Obviously the new world is not focused on us printing stuff, but the reality is, even if you switch over to everything being digital, you can bet your bottom bitcoin that a couple of times a year someone will ask you to either scan something that your phone won’t scan well enough, or sign a document that you cannot sign digitally, no matter what software you download.
At that point, you have to get your blasted printer working. And let’s face it, you can’t. No one can.
You locate it – in the corner of a room in your house somewhere, or in a box in the attic – and you dust it off. You plug it in, it comes to life, you send it something and it either doesn’t reconnect to the wifi or it won’t talk to your computer for some or other baffling reason.
It could be anything. The printer doesn’t care. All it wants to do is not work. When you start investigating, the problem turns out to be something that would defeat Nasa – and possibly even Elon.
Unlike a mobile phone or laptop, which you can cure of anything by switching it off and on again, the printer will not respond to the usual re-boot techniques.
You need to be able to write code to make it work. Over the years, I have bought every printer going, and the last one was an office-quality laser Brother which I was assured was never going to let me down.
This was true, it was awesome, until one day I turned it on and it refused to feed the paper into itself properly.
It had chronic printer indigestion, or professed to have, and nothing I did, and nothing the builder boyfriend did, could stop its guts from mangling paper. And after a while of it affecting to try, and choking and spluttering, it just lost its appetite for paper altogether.
It didn’t even chew it up and spit it out in balls of screwed-up A4. It simply wouldn’t bite the paper at all, and the paper didn’t move out of the paper tray ever again.
That was more than a year ago, and I haven’t needed to print something off since until someone recently asked me to sign a form that would not take an electronic signature. This person was getting pretty fed up with me trying to download new versions of Adobe unsuccessfully. ‘I’m sure you could watch a YouTube tutorial on how to complete a form,’ she said.
So I fired up the Brother, which I had kept in a box, but it confirmed that it still didn’t feel like eating paper, and how very dare I even ask it to.
I was picking the BB up from Cork airport shortly after that, where I noticed they had computers in the walls you can use by putting a €2 coin in a slot. They had printers too. And you could pay a few euros to print stuff off.
I sat down, fed €2 in, and then realised I couldn’t open my email to print off this form because I didn’t know what the password to my email was.
The BB came out of arrivals looking tired and I pounced on him. ‘This will only take a second,’ I panted, and I pushed him down in front of the €2 computer. ‘I’m so tired. Can’t we just go home?’
‘No. Right, I’ve sent you an email,’ I said, fiddling with my phone. ‘Open your email and print it off for me.’
He sat blinking at the screen for a few seconds and then said: ‘I can’t remember the password to my email. I only look at it on my phone.’
That was as far as that went. I had to contact an office supplies man and he came to the house with a brand-new Epson in a box. He set it up on a sideboard in the kitchen, spent an hour laboriously pushing little buttons on the front to input my Starlink wifi passcode and make it talk to things, and declared it all working.
The Epson icon came up as soon as I pressed print on my phone, or my laptop. It all worked beautifully. I paid, and he went away whistling.
The next morning, I came down for a coffee and thought: ‘Ooh my lovely printer!’ I called up the form I needed to print, selected the signing page and pressed print…
Nothing. I tried it on my laptop. Nothing. Some computer code spewed out on to the screen. Evil. Pure evil.
The brilliance of Alastair Down
Long before I could afford to go racing I began collecting racing books, my first jumble sale acquisition the marvellously entitled Sods I Have Cut On the Turf by 1920s jockey Jack Leach. Leach, who was friends with Fred Astaire and Edgar Wallace, kept his weight down by jogging wearing four sweaters and three long johns under a rubber suit but always had a good steak dinner with wine. ‘If possible I used to take off an extra 3-4lb so that I could have a small sandwich and a glass of champagne before racing started. This made me feel a new man – and if I had a few ounces to spare I had another glass for the new man.’
The book I have reached for most often simply to re-read passages for pure pleasure is The Best of Alastair Down
Although a few back-pages scribes like Hugh McIlvanney could make any sport stand up and sing, racing has attracted more good writing than any other. Its participants – human ones rather than the horses – are around with us for longer. Its anecdotage is richer and the gambling tales in which it is enveloped add extra layers of raffishness, risk and intrigue. My shelves are filled with celebrations of great races and the horses who have won them like Arkle, Best Mate, Red Rum, Phar Lap, Frankel and Seabiscuit. There are classics like Men and Horses I Have Known by the Hon George Lambton, who should have added moneylenders to that title. There are meticulously researched studies of racing dynasties and betting coups at historic training centres like Beckhampton and Manton. The biographies of owners, trainers and jockeys vary from simplistic cuttings jobs to serious psychological studies.
Of the two volumes I most frequently take down to check recollections, one is Oaksey on Racing, which includes the then John Lawrence’s sublime description of how Fred Winter drove the brave little Mandarin to victory in the Grand Steeple-Chase de Paris at Auteuil in June 1962 without brakes or steering after the bit had broken in his mouth. The other is Peter O’Sullevan’s Calling the Horses, for ever a reminder of Dawn Run’s victory in the 1986 Gold Cup ‘…And the mare’s beginning to get up!’ For the past ten years, though, the book I have reached for most often simply to re-read passages for pure pleasure is The Best of Alastair Down: Cheltenham Et Al.
Unique is a word journalists instinctively avoid but when Alastair died at the end of October, just days after Cheltenham’s hack headquarters was most appropriately renamed the Alastair Down Press Room, we lost the ultimate wordsmith: a man who conveyed atmosphere, drama and sweat-stained endeavour with a humour, humanity and transcending love of his sport which was genuinely a one-off. Digesting Alastair’s Sporting Life or Racing Post pieces the day after a memorable event you realised that you had attended something altogether more noble and affecting than it had appeared at the time. He wasn’t afraid of emotion: he embraced and rode it like a champion surfer.
One example of his craft must suffice: snatches of his description in October 2009 of the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe: ‘For the sixth consecutive month with the sort of reliability that makes the Greenwich Time Signal look over its shoulder here was Sea the Stars doing what he does best – winning a Group One… by the time he was on an even keel Sea the Stars was in a bad place in a race in which location, location and location are usually all-important… the last bloke in France to find himself in such an uncompromising position was the Count of Monte Cristo…’
Jockey Mick Kinane said afterwards he hadn’t been worried and Alastair’s report continued: ‘Despite Sir Mark Prescott’s maxim that “whenever a jockey opens his mouth it is time to let your mind wander elsewhere”, these were not the silly spoutings of some young jockey who needs to meet his razor only twice a week. Kinane sets the benchmark for grizzled and at a seen-it-all 50 is more seasoned than a seaside fence…Sea the Stars put the race to bed with a furlong to run and nothing got near him… and here distilled into one horse, in one race, on an imperishable afternoon, the whole magnificent madness of racing not only made sense but, so much rarer, felt completely worthwhile.’
I was not one of Alastair’s intimates but on the racecourse we were friends. He was generous in passing on tips from his many Irish friends and admirers (had he applied for citizenship over there it would surely have been granted instantly). One day when I was BBC political editor he confided that he would like to have been a political commentator. Thank God the five times Racing Writer of the Year never followed that path. In the wasteland that politics has become with its PR-led ‘principles’, counterfeit campaigns and manufactured outrage even his sublime gifts, above them all an instinct for the authentic, might never have flowered as they did. Seeing the plaudits after Cheltenham’s Press Room renaming, Alastair was in the rare position of reading his own obits. He must have chuckled to see how much we all loved him.
Bridge | 16 November 2024
I enjoyed playing in the Surrey Mixed Pairs with my friend Guy Hart last Sunday. It was a friendly event, and Guy, with his frequent witty quips, makes me laugh more than anyone. We played pretty well (not too many mistakes), so I must admit we were disappointed with our below par result.
The thing is, the event was mixed in more ways than one: plenty of good players, but plenty of weak ones too. Poor players give out plenty of ‘gifts’, and if you’re not lucky enough to get any – and we weren’t – it’s hard to do well. Early on, for instance, we sat against a couple who announced that they were playing ‘three Weak Twos’. ‘What’s your strong bid?’ Guy asked. ‘Er… 3NT,’ said North. ’No other?’ Guy wondered. ‘Well, 4NT would be stronger.’ I admit, we metaphorically rubbed our hands together at the prospect of thrashing them. What hubris! We got a zero straight away (see diagram).
A confusing auction. West (Guy) led the ♦️Q. Declarer won in dummy and played a club to the ♣️10. Even when it wins, you still have a problem: with only one entry to dummy to lead clubs again, you need to first cash the ♠️K, cross to the ♥️K and cash the ♠️A in the hope East started with two spades. Bingo.
In fact what declarer did was cross to the ♥️K and play a club. I won with the ♣️A and continued a diamond. Had I played a spade, as perhaps I should, I would have broken up the squeeze. Declarer won with the ♦️A, and ran hearts and clubs, ending with ♠️K, ♦️10, ♣️2. Poor Guy was down to ♠️QJ ♦️J. On the last club, he was squeezed. He pitched the ♦️J and declarer, looking dumfounded, cashed the ♦️10. ‘I was squeezed, well done,’ said Guy. ‘Actually I only had the singleton ♠️K,’ she said kindly, ‘but you weren’t to know.’
Fear and gloaming at Whitby Goth Weekend
Every April and every Halloween weekend, Whitby in Yorkshire is chock-full of goths. As I seem to be The Spectator’s adopted goth, I was asked if I might like to write about Whitby Goth Weekend (WGW). Goth is a fashion that emphasises darkness and death: Edgar Allan Poe and Alice Cooper are the best examples. But the only thing to fear from WGW is the horrific train journey. It took six hours to go from King’s Cross to Whitby. Whoever called the TransPennine Express an express needs to explain themselves.
When I finally got to Whitby, I was met by thousands of people in costumes. Even the dogs were taking part. Some were wearing wings covered in silver cobwebs, others had orange witches’ hats. One was dressed as a bat. As for the people, they wore top hats with feathers and goggles, clown suits or costumes of Jack Skellington from The Nightmare Before Christmas. The most impressive outfit was worn by a university lecturer I met. He had a brown leather cowboy suit with cogwheels, pistons and pipes attached, and a mask covering his mouth. It gave him a sinister air. He also had an ammunition belt and what looked like a trumpet-gun attached to it. ‘This is a blunderbuss made from a trumpet,’ he said. ‘It took seven months to create. It’s all made of scrap.’ His look was classic steampunk, which is Victorian-inspired science fiction. ‘Steam was once the ruler and British engineering was a world leader,’ he told me.
Whitby means ‘white settlement’ which is ironic, given the town now hosts a festival of darkness. It is a Victorian fishing town and I only saw one modern building. There were boats everywhere, as well as lots of lobster pots and references to Captain Cook, who learned to sail in Whitby. It was no surprise to find a pirate captain named Barry Snedden who captains the Black Pearl. He runs 25-minute pirate-themed boat trips. ‘Yesterday, we saw dolphins on three trips,’ he said. He was dressed in a lifeboatman’s top and military trousers, a pirate’s bandanna and he wore a tiny anchor around his neck. Behind him, a sign read ‘beatings will continue until morale improves’. Whitby also holds a pirate festival in late summer when the town is overrun with pirates and mermaids. Barry’s favourite pirate is Johnny Depp: ‘He’s brilliant.’
Bram Stoker used to have regular holidays in Whitby in the 1890s. He stayed at the Royal Hotel on the west cliff and from his hotel window he could see out over the harbour the 199 steps rising up to St Mary’s church and the abbey on the headland. It was in Whitby that he began to write his novel about Count Dracula. When evening fell, I clambered up these steps. The abbey is a gothic ruin and the roof is gone, but the skeletal buttresses remain. At night, it is bathed in red and green strobe lights. Above everything, a drone filmed the ruins, its red light pulsing in the darkness. The sandstone graveyard was full of goths in top hats and Japanese tourists taking selfies. Whitby is known for its Prince of Darkness Gin, which I was able to try once I returned from the abbey. It is infused with citrus peel and black cherries and aged in a Transylvanian wine cask which gives it a scarlet, blood-like colour. I’ve always thought gin is best for removing nail varnish.
I could not go to Whitby without seeing its famous jet. There were jet shops everywhere though the jet museum was closed (on a goth weekend!). This black jewel was popularised by Queen Victoria, who wore jet jewellery when she was mourning Prince Albert. The last jet mine shut in 1920 and you are not allowed to even wrench it out of the cliffs, but if you find a lump on the beach, it’s yours. It goes for £1,000 per kilo. What is incredible is that jet is a fossilised giant monkey puzzle tree from the Jurassic period, which means that Whitby used to be a tropical monkey puzzle forest. Jet looks like a very shiny lump of charcoal. You can tell it used to be a tree.
I decided to have some downtime and contacted the only person I knew in Whitby, a woman called Amy, who is my fiancée’s girlfriend (we are polyamorous). This feisty lass in purple PVC and purple dreadlocks seemed to know everyone. She introduced one of her female friends as: ‘Oh, I had an orgy and a threesome with her.’ Goths have complex social lives.
Jo Hampshire, creator and organiser of the WGW, explained how it all started in 1994, as a pen pal group she had originally advertised in NME magazine. She expected 40 people to meet her in the Elsinore pub in Whitby, but 200 showed up and they had to move into the street. The police then turned up to explain that they weren’t allowed to drink outside. But the landlord, Len McKnight, came to their defence. ‘Get away from my goths, they aren’t doing anything wrong,’ he said. ‘He became our Whitby champion,’ Jo explained. The next year, 500 goths showed up. Jo also runs a goth market in the local leisure centre. When we spoke, she wasn’t wearing an elaborate costume or tons of make-up. She kept saying that the weekend wasn’t about her but about the community.
One thing I heard repeatedly from the people of Whitby was how little trouble there was. Dave Goldsmith, a bouncer at the Whitby Way, told me that he loved alternative nights: ‘There’s no trouble and everyone’s themselves.’ Andrew Fairburn, the current landlord at the Elsinore, also spoke fondly of Len McKnight: ‘This was the first pub in Whitby to let goth people in, it was all down to Len. Lovely fella, he embraced it, it’s a fabulous weekend… People enjoy themselves.’ I asked what the goths’ favourite drink is: ‘Dark rum and coke.’
Nigel told me he’s the new Boris
Last week I arrived in London from the Cotswolds just in time to witness the collective meltdown from everyone around me as it was announced that Donald Trump was the President-elect. I was delighted. Who are we to complain? The American people knew exactly what they were doing. I had been booked on to ITV’s This Morning where we were to discuss Kamala Harris’s resignation speech, a story so feeble it wouldn’t last until the 6 p.m. news. The tone in the studio was ‘poor Kamala’. I was having none of it. She fully deserved to lose. She had no coherent policies on immigration or the economy and banged on endlessly about women’s reproductive rights as though that were all women cared about. At the same time the Democrats patronised women, telling them to vote for Kamala but not to tell their husbands. I’m amazed anyone thought she would actually win.
I wonder if the perma-tanned Emily Maitlis – who had to be told off for swearing during the C4 election coverage as it became clear Trump was the victor – has recovered from her own obvious state of distress. Maybe when Trump visits the UK she will have a chance to interview him and ask some deeply probing questions. St Tropez or Garnier?
Nigel Farage wrote a comment piece in the Telegraph in which he said that if a bridge is required between the Labour government and the US, given the many insulting comments made by various members of the cabinet about Trump, then he’s the man for the job. Although the piece was well argued, I’m not convinced that the leader of a fringe party who has committed himself to Clacton-on-Sea for the next five years is really the right man. As it happens, I met Farage that very evening at Georgia Toffolo’s birthday party. As we stood on the balcony, with drinks in one hand, him with a fag in the other, we looked down on the Thames and out at the London skyline. ‘I’m Boris now,’ he pronounced. I may have looked startled. He went on to explain: ‘The Red Wall voters will never trust the Conservatives again.’ He could have a point, except most of them voted for Boris, not the Tory party – a detail many former Conservative MPs now hanging around the job centre failed to realise when they were calling for Boris to go. ‘They will vote for me, though. I’m going to destroy the Conservative party,’ Farage said with feeling.‘You or Reform?’ I asked, but he wasn’t listening. He’s a man on a mission and given that political parties do die, there is every chance he will succeed. He is bitter about standing down some candidates in the 2019 election – possibly with good reason – but he forgets his party was hardly riding high back then and he wouldn’t have won a single MP anyway. It’s a different story now. I wonder if it has ever crossed his mind that the only reason he is filling the political stage is because Boris has left it.
Now that Trump has said that wars will end when he becomes president, he has a difficult path ahead. The Ukrainians, who have proved themselves to be the bravest of all warriors, will not relinquish their freedom and Vladimir Putin will not retreat. Trump doesn’t want to isolate himself from Europe, an important ally, any more than he will isolate himself from Nato. If I were Trump, I’d be straight on the phone to Boris, who has remained the closest friend to Volodymyr Zelensky and has visited Ukraine many times since he left Westminster. Boris was born in New York, had dual citizenship with the US for years and even his foes admit you would look hard to find a better communicator.
Tea with my dear friend Nicky Haslam, whose living room I often end up in at some point over the weekend. The most invited man in Britain, he likes to say that he’s ‘met everyone, except Churchill’. We sit before the open fire in the divinely lit room, as one would expect from the queen of interior design, and we listen to an album he is about to release called One Night. He sings along to his own recorded voice, a Cole Porter number, and rests his head back against the Nicky Haslam upholstered chintz sofa as I commit the moment to memory. At times like this I am acutely aware that there is far more to life than politics.
The case against assisted suicide
Those in favour of the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill insist they’ve addressed critics’ principal concerns and that ‘stringent safeguards’ are in place. But it is impossible to see how this could be the case. If suicide is institutionalised as a form of medical treatment it is inevitable that vulnerable people will feel under pressure to opt for it, and inevitable that the bill will in time be amended and extended.
In Canada, denying assisted suicide to people who are not terminally ill has been ruled to be discrimination
Under the terms of the existing bill, a terminally ill person given less than six months to live will legally be able to take their own life if sanctioned by two independent doctors and a High Court judge. Doctors are not under any duty to raise assisted suicide – or ‘assisted dying’ as its advocates prefer to call it – with a patient, but the bill does allow for them to ‘discuss the matter with a person’ when it is in line with their professional judgment. The bill promises that those opting for assisted suicide would have to make two separate declarations, at different times, of a desire to die, and that the decision would have to be confirmed by a judge.
The involvement of the courts might sound reassuring, but we know from the scandal of the single justice procedure – under which thousands of people have been prosecuted for TV licence evasion without their knowledge – how easily a judicial decision becomes in practice a rubber-stamping procedure.
The experience of Canada and the Netherlands, which have (among others) already legalised assisted suicide, indicates how the practice would develop in Britain if this bill passes. In Canada, assisted suicide was introduced on the understanding that it should only be available to terminally ill people whose death was ‘reasonably foreseeable’. Then the Superior Court of Quebec ruled that this discriminated against people who are not terminally ill and from 2027 assisted suicide will be available across Canada for those suffering from psychiatric illness. The fact that the judgment of these people is by definition impaired has done nothing to prevent the state offering to help them die.
Wherever it has been introduced, a law legalising assisted dying for the terminally ill has, in short order, evolved into routine euthanasia. In the Netherlands, assisted suicide has been tolerated since 1985, and became formally legalised in 2002. By 2019, it accounted for 4 per cent of deaths and was carried out in many cases by family doctors. In 2018 a physically healthy 29-year-old woman, Aurelia Brouwers, was granted the right to kill herself with a doctor’s help on the grounds that she suffered from a personality disorder and had had suicidal feelings. Rather than treat her for those feelings, the Dutch state chose to help her act on them.
In Belgium, too, euthanasia was legalised in 2002. By 2014 the country had amended the law to allow children to choose to be killed. Within three years, a nine-year-old and an 11-year-old became the first young children to have their lives ended with state approval. Between 2002 and 2021, 370 people suffering from mental illness were approved for assisted suicide in Belgium.
Critics of assisted suicide have consistently warned about a slippery slope and it has proven to be just that. Anyone who votes for Kim Leadbeater’s bill should do so in the knowledge that it is almost certain Britain would end up following the same route, and that the killing of children and the mentally ill would eventually be sanctioned by the state. If our domestic courts did not see to it, the European Court of Human Rights would. As in Canada, to deny assisted suicide to people who are not terminally ill would be ruled to be discrimination.
There has been an attempt in Leadbeater’s bill to guard against people being pressured into dying and a proposal to introduce a criminal offence, punishable with up to 14 years in prison, for anyone who persuaded someone to agree to assisted suicide. But pressure can be put on a person to agree to die without it being explicit. It could come from what family, doctors or nurses fail to say, just as much as what they suggest. Every mention of an ‘overloaded NHS’ or ‘bed-blockers’ can become a subliminal message to patients that they really ought to consider relieving society of the burden of keeping them alive.
In one sense the debate over assisted suicide has been refreshing. For once MPs are having to make up their own minds, with no whips to tell them how to vote. The issue has cut across party lines, with the cabinet heavily divided. For our legislators, it is a case of having to listen carefully to both sides and assess the evidence. But the evidence is clear.
No legal jurisdiction, of course, will ever succeed in eliminating unassisted suicide. The days when it was treated as a criminal offence are thankfully over. But when a state starts to sanction suicide by providing assistance, it leads to a devaluation of human life to the detriment of us all.
Europe’s blind spot over anti-Semitism
You would think that we Europeans might have learned a thing or two about anti-Semitism over the past century or so – and perhaps come to understand pragmatically, if nothing else, that what begins with the vicious persecution of Jews usually moves on to murdering lots of other people, too. But no. Or if we did, then it has conveniently slipped our minds, as things tend to do in these complicated times. Or perhaps we think that the persecution of the Jews we are seeing right now in Europe is of a different marque to that which began in the early 1930s in Germany. Yes, it’s sort of anti-Semitism – but it’s of a nicer kind than that instigated by that psychotic little Austrian with the performative moustache. A little more excusable.
The politicians say ‘It must never happen again’, and then it happens again the following week
That may be the answer as to why we don’t do anything about it, apart from spout platitudinous drivel, when Jews are attacked on our streets. Drivel about how awful it all is and how we must stand together – but never telling the whole truth, and never making sure it will not happen again even if the politicians always say: ‘It must never happen again.’ It happens again the following week, somewhere in Europe. And it is not a different brand of anti-Semitism, either. It is the tried and trusted old brand, based on lies, stupidity, doublethink and racial hatred. Exactly the same kind that Goebbels et al subscribed to, using exactly the same tropes, the same false allegations, the same inchoate loathing.
If only our TV news programmes and politicians could bring themselves to call it all ‘Far-Right Terrorism’, then something might get done – because we all know that Far-Right Terrorism is the biggest threat to our democracy. But they don’t. Even though it is, of course, far-right terrorism, lower case – the real far-right terrorism which our politicians do not want to think about and indeed lock people up when they complain a little vociferously about it.
A week or so back the Dutch football club Ajax of Amsterdam played a cup tie against the Israeli side Maccabi Tel Aviv and as a consequence what the media carefully call ‘pro-Palestinian’ thugs attacked the visiting Jewish supporters, with five hospitalised and 20 to 30 more injured. Many of the attacks were carried out by young men on mopeds – according to one Dutch politician, Moroccan young men on mopeds, which is about as close to actually identifying who these perpetrators might have been as you will get. The Israeli government reacted with shock, booking two planes to bring the football fans home from the fetid ghetto that parts of the decent, liberal Netherlands has become. Dutch politicians lined up to do the platitude stuff. The reliably witless Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, was among the first out of the blocks: ‘I strongly condemn these unacceptable acts. Anti-Semitism has absolutely no place in Europe. And we are determined to fight all forms of hatred.’
Just read that vacuous bilge again – the bloodless and vague ‘unacceptable acts’ and ending with a commitment she does not remotely mean to keep. Oh, and anti-Semitism has absolutely no place in Europe? Au contraire, Ursula. It has many, many places, largely as a consequence of policies enacted by people like you. So, in that crescent (fittingly) of Europe from north-west France, through Belgium to Rotterdam and the Hague – and now arcing further north, to Malmo – these are the places where a large diaspora of Muslims from the Maghreb and the Levant have settled. Hey, it’s just occurred to me – gee, could there perhaps be some connection? If there is you can bank on the mainstream politicians and the mainstream media not to make it.
But there is plenty of anti-Semitism in London (and indeed Manchester), of course, and we have done nothing about it. Every time the Hamas groupies and their useful idiots from the white liberal left chant about rivers and seas they are too ignorant to identify, London’s Jews are targeted and feel afraid. There are fewer than 150,000 Jews in London, but over the past year there have been more than 2,000 attacks upon them. The woman who was dragged to the ground and punched in the face for putting up a poster demanding the return of the hostages. Or just the sort of thing this young Jewish bloke had to put up with on a Tube train last November: ‘I was talking to my friend and then next to me I hear someone say “pigs”. The guy next to me was on FaceTime and says, “I’m on the train with a bunch of dirty Jewish pigs, scumbags and baby killers”.’ If that had happened to someone from any other race, imagine the furore and the demands for retribution.
Please don’t believe this is all about Israel’s actions in Gaza, even if it is used as an excuse. It is a deep-seated problem located at the very centre of Islam and it was in evidence well before 7 October 2023. It has been a recurrent theme. Whenever I have interviewed Palestinian activists they almost always say, ‘off the record’: ‘Well, there’s a reason everyone hates them, my fren’.’ And then the lies come out, the incredibly familiar lies, the lies that take us right back to Treblinka and Sobibor. Islamism bought into Hitler and cannot yet bring itself to renounce him. The ideology of Hamas is drawn directly from Mein Kampf and the Third Reich, in which the Jews are to blame for everything – communism, capitalism, all warfare, the enslavement of other races, controlling the media etc, ad infinitum – and must therefore be exterminated. Genocide, then: explicit and very clear. And yet we are weirdly afraid to articulate this obvious point.
If we really believe that anti-Semitism has no place in Europe, then can we point the finger a little more? And mean it when we say ‘never again’.
Portrait of the week: Justin Welby resigns, interest rates cut and Trump announces appointments
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Justin Welby resigned as Archbishop of Canterbury, after not reporting to the authorities what he knew in 2013 of the abuse perpetrated by John Smyth QC (who ran Christian summer camps in the 1970s and 1980s and died in 2018). An independent review by Keith Makin found last week that Smyth abused more than 100 young men and boys sexually and by beating. ‘When I was informed in 2013 and told that police had been notified, I believed wrongly that an appropriate resolution would follow,’ Mr Welby said. Gary Lineker, who had presented Match of the Day since 1999, agreed to stand down at the end of the season.
Sue Gray turned down the job as the Prime Minister’s envoy to the nations; the mysterious role was said to be hers after she was dropped in October as his chief of staff. Sir Keir Starmer appointed Jonathan Powell, 68, Tony Blair’s old chief of staff, as his national security adviser. David Lammy, the Foreign Secretary, said his description of Donald Trump as a ‘woman-hating, neo-Nazi-sympathising sociopath’ was ‘old news’. At the Cop29 climate change summit in Baku, Azerbaijan, Sir Keir promised to reduce the United Kingdom’s emissions by 81 per cent of 1990 levels by 2035. In Holland, Shell won an appeal against a judgment requiring it to cut its carbon emissions by 45 per cent.
The Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill was published, sponsored by Kim Leadbeater, a Labour MP. June Spencer, who first played Peggy in The Archers in 1950, died aged 105. Frank Auerbach, the painter, died aged 93. The Bank of England cut interest rates from 5 per cent to 4.75 per cent. Unemployment rose to 4.3 per cent in the three months to September, from 4 per cent in the previous quarter. Pay in the three months to September grew at an annual rate of 4.8 per cent – the lowest in more than two years. Seven million workers in Britain, one in five, were found to have been born overseas. In the seven days to 11 November, 1,628 migrants arrived in small boats. A report into the administration of Tower Hamlets in London and its ‘culture of patronage’ opened the way to the government appointing ‘envoys’ to monitor its workings.
Abroad
Donald Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr, reposted an Instagram picture of President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine captioned: ‘You’re 38 days from losing your allowance.’ President Emmanuel Macron of France and Sir Keir Starmer, in Paris on Armistice Day, expressed ‘their determination to support Ukraine unfailingly’. Ukraine said that on 9 November Russia launched 145 drones towards the country. Russia said it had intercepted 84 Ukrainian drones, including some approaching Moscow. Russia suffered its worst month for casualties in the war, according to Admiral Sir Tony Radakin, Britain’s chief of the defence staff, who put Russia’s dead and wounded at about 1,500 a day in October, bringing its casualties to 700,000 since February 2022.
The final tally in the US presidential election was 312 electoral college votes for Donald Trump and 226 for his Democrat opponent, Kamala Harris. He also decisively won the popular vote. The Republicans, having secured a majority in the Senate, edged towards one in the House of Representatives. Elon Musk, 53, was appointed to lead a new Department of Government Efficiency (Doge, a name echoing his favoured cryptocurrency, Dogecoin); he was to be joined by Vivek Ramaswamy, 39. Pete Hegseth, 44, a Fox News Channel host, was to be secretary of defence. Senator Marco Rubio, 53, was expected to be secretary of state. Susie Wiles, 67, was to be the White House chief of staff, the first woman in the role. Tom Homan, 62, was to be the ‘border tsar’. The New York congresswoman Elise Stefanik, 40, becomes ambassador to the UN. The US government charged Farhad Shakeri, 51, believed to be in Iran, over an alleged plot in September to assassinate Donald Trump.
Qatar suspended its mediation between Israel and Hamas until ‘the parties show their willingness and seriousness to end the brutal war’. After a 30-day period for improving access, America said Israel had not breached US laws on blocking aid. Israel put on rescue flights after youths on scooters criss-crossed Amsterdam hunting down supporters of the visiting Maccabi Tel Aviv football team. The International Criminal Court announced an investigation into claims of sexual misconduct against its chief prosecutor, Karim Khan. Germany will hold elections on 23 February, after the collapse of its governing coalition. CSH
Foreign Office flogs off £1bn of buildings
It was Norman Tebbit who joked that the Ministry of Agriculture looked after farmers while ‘the job of the Foreign Office is to look after foreigners.’ So Mr S has done some digging and it turns out that the men and women who run FCDO have ensured HM’s government are making a pretty penny or two. Let’s hope it’s not a case of ‘selling the family silver’, to borrow Harold Macmillan’s words…
A Freedom of Information request by The Spectator says that the FCDO has sold off more than £1.1 billion of embassy buildings since 2010. Among them include the surroundings of the Bangkok estate, the Yervan embassy, the partial sale of Guatemala’s office and Tokyo’s famed compound. Among those who complained include Liz Truss – a famed fan of the small state – who warned earlier this year about ‘our historic embassies’ being ‘sold off to fund a bloated domestic budget.
Foreign Affairs Committee Emily Thornberry has her concerns too, counselling that:
There may be times when it makes sense to sell off parts of the estate. But to do so to routinely fund our diplomatic and consular services is not sustainable. Having a presence in almost every country in the world, in a prestigious building, is an important part of Britain’s soft power.
Over to you David Lammy…
Fact check: How much will Trump’s tariffs hurt the UK?
Last week the National Institute of Economic and Social Research said Britain ‘would be one of the countries most affected’ by Donald Trump’s proposed tariffs, with growth cut by 0.7 percentage points in year one, 0.5 percentage points in year two, and inflation 3-4 points higher. But research from Oxford Economics today suggests the impact would be ‘limited’, even in the worst-case scenario.
During the election campaign, Trump suggested putting tariffs of 10 or 20 per cent on all imported goods – except those from China and Mexico, which would be stung with 60 or even 100 per cent rates. At the moment, average UK tariffs on goods from the US are 2.2 per cent and US tariffs on goods from the UK are 3.3 per cent. But legal difficulties mean the US is likely to prioritise tariffs on countries with which it has big trade deficits – and the UK is a relatively small trading partner that imports more goods from the US than it exports to it.
If Trump does put tariffs of 10 per cent on goods imports from all countries and retaliatory tariffs are imposed too – a ‘full-blown Trump scenario’ – Oxford Economics expects a hit to certain sectors, such as pharmaceuticals and car manufacturers, which send a large share of their exports to the US. But at worst, the effect would reduce economic growth by just 0.2 percentage points. Inflation would be 0.3 percentage points higher, something the UK could largely avoid by not imposing retaliatory tariffs.
During the election campaign, Trump said tariff is ‘the most beautiful word in the dictionary’. Today’s report suggests they won’t be so ugly for Britain.
All smiles for Trump and Biden at the White House
President Joe Biden and President-elect Donald Trump were all smiles at the White House on Wednesday as the two met to discuss efforts to transition to a new presidential administration. The duo appeared in front of reporters this afternoon as Biden emphatically shook Trump’s hand and congratulated him on his victory before promising a “smooth transition.
“We’ll do everything we can to make sure you’re accommodated with what you need,” Biden said. “We’re going to get to talk about some of that today.”
“Thank you very much. Politics is tough and is in many cases not a very nice world, but it is a nice world today,” Trump replied. “I very much appreciate it.”
The two presidents even appeared to share a laugh over the shouted questions and rambunctious behavior from the White House press corps as wranglers ushered them out of the Oval Office.
The gracious meeting comes just over two years after Biden described the 2022 midterm elections as a “battle for the soul of our nation” and slammed Trump and “extreme MAGA Republicans” as a threat to democracy and the “very foundations of our republic.” It’s only been five months since Trump handily defeated Biden in a presidential debate that led the Democratic Party to oust the president as their nominee over concerns about his age and cognitive ability.
Since then, Trump has publicly expressed sympathy for the way Biden was treated by his party — and Biden’s behavior was oft interpreted as signaling he did not want his apprentice and replacement, Vice President Kamala Harris, to win the election. He gave a surprise press conference in the White House briefing room — the first of his presidency — during one of Harris’s big campaign rallies in which he asserted there was no daylight between them in the administration as she tried to distance herself from his unpopularity. He rejected her claims that Florida governor Ron DeSantis was politicizing his response to Hurricane Milton. He jokingly put on a MAGA hat at an event. And he helpfully called Trump supporters “garbage” a week out from the election, while Harris rallied on the Ellipse outside.
Wednesday’s White House visit did nothing to dispel the notion that Biden was secretly happy when Harris got routed by Trump — given the body language and facial expressions, it wouldn’t be hard to believe Trump and Biden were fast friends.
-Amber Duke
On our radar
SECURITY OF STATE President-elect Donald Trump announced that he will nominate Florida senator Marco Rubio to be his secretary of state, and former Hawaii congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard to be the director of national intelligence. He has also picked Florida congressman Matt Gaetz to be attorney general.
MOULTING DOWN The Salem Democratic City Committee of Massachusetts accused Representative Seth Moulton of being a “Nazi cooperator” for suggesting the party is too focused on transgender issues and promised to mount a primary challenge against him in his next re-election bid. Moulton ran uncontested in 2024.
STOP THE COUNT? Wisconsin Republican senatorial candidate Eric Hovde appears ready to demand a recount in his race against incumbent senator Tammy Baldwin, which current vote totals show he lost by nearly 30,000 ballots. Hovde raised questions about a 1 a.m. drop of about 100,000 ballots in Milwaukee, with Baldwin winning 90 percent of those votes and taking the lead.
McConnell gets his guy
The Senate GOP chose South Dakota senator John Thune to be its new leader on Wednesday amid intraparty squabbling over whether someone more loyal to President-elect Donald Trump and his agenda should take the helm ahead of the real-estate mogul’s second term in office. Thune will assume the top leadership position, taking over the spot held for seventeen years by Mitch McConnell, who is stepping aside at the age of eighty-two.
Thune is a McConnell acolyte and thus will likely lead as a political machinist, less interested in ideological ventures than in herding the caucus and maneuvering through backdoor deals and using Senate rules to the GOP’s advantage. Compare this to the pick of the conservatives, Florida senator Rick Scott, who claims to be committed to enacting Trump’s agenda but has questionable skills when it comes to leadership. Scott received public support from Senators Bill Hagerty, Marsha Blackburn, Ted Cruz, Ron Johnson, Marco Rubio, Rand Paul and Tommy Tuberville, but the vote was conducted via secret ballot, and Scott did not pass the first round of voting.
Thune and John Cornyn advanced to the final ballot, and Thune emerged the victor. Trump did not weigh in publicly on the proceedings, despite having a tense relationship with McConnell. Although McConnell kept a Supreme Court seat open for the Trump presidency, helped him confirm two additional justices and fast-tracked numerous other judicial appointments, Trump often accused him of sabotaging other parts of his policy agenda.
–Cockburn
CNN set for major cuts
The Biden economy is kicking some of its biggest cheerleaders while they’re down: reports indicate that CNN is poised to cut “hundreds of jobs” following Donald Trump’s convincing win last week.
For months, CNN’s head honcho Mark Thompson has wanted to trim the fat on the network, which appears to include both bloated contracts of top talent and lower-level staff. “Many of CNN’s own journalists, plenty of whom were blinded by Trump’s significant victory, have evinced similar naiveté about their own fates,” Puck reported.
The potential for mass layoffs at CNN follows a trend we’ve been covering here for well over a year: the first Trump administration saw massive growth in media consumption, with outlets like the Washington Post gobbling up subscribers on the daily as their staff dumpster dived for any rumor of Trump-related gossip.
That monetary success did not equate to journalistic success during President Biden’s time in office: too many journalists were eager to parrot the White House’s bizarre claims that videos of Biden stumbling and bumbling about were nothing more than “cheap fakes.”
On an individual level, a lot of journalists aren’t taking last week’s results well. Newsrooms like the Post and the Los Angeles Times saw minor revolts after their billionaire owners put the kibosh on planned endorsements of Vice President Kamala Harris.
Interestingly, the ownership of both the Post and the Times seem interested in a course correction. Over in Los Angeles, Pat Soon-Shiong, the paper’s owner, promised “a new editorial board” that will feature voices “from left to right to the center.
“Trust in media is critical for a strong democracy,” Soon-Shiong wrote, noting that the board’s burning desire to endorse Harris and its repeated endorsements of George Gascon, who lost his reelection bid for Los Angeles district attorney by about twenty points, shows how out of touch they are with the paper’s readership.
–Matthew Foldi
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