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Listen: Keegan in excruciating muddle over ‘woman’ definition
Who’s been educating the Education Secretary? If ‘what is a woman?’ was an exam question, Mr S is certain Gillian Keegan would’ve flunked the test — given her abysmal performance on the BBC’s Today programme this morning…
The Education Secretary was on the airwaves today after she wrote for the Sun on the government’s plans to reform sex education in schools. Speaking to interviewer Emma Barnett, Keegan’s first slip-up came when the discussion turned to the issue of educating children about gender identity, one of the areas on which her education changes will focus. The Education Secretary confessed that she didn’t actually know how widespread the problem is — ‘It’s not something that we’ve gone and done a particular survey of,’ she admitted — to Barnett’s horror. ‘That’s staggering,’ replied the programme host to an undaunted Keegan.
But if listeners thought that was the most excruciating part of the interview, they were in for a shock. The Education Secretary was then quizzed about on what she believes a woman is, after some well-publicised U-turns on the matter. In December 2020, Keegan responded to a question from an LGBT+ group with a statement claiming ‘trans women are women’ and that trans people should have equal access to ‘safe spaces’. Last month, Keegan revealed the extent of her volte face in a Telegraph interview where she agreed she’d stop using the phrase that ‘trans women are women’, adding that since 2020 she has ‘learnt a huge amount more about this complex and challenging subject’.
Er, learned what, exactly? Keegan’s case unravelled rather dramatically on the airwaves this morning in a rather mortifying exchange:
GK: I’ve always known that trans women aren’t women.
EB: But you wrote that trans women are women. I’ve got it in front of me when you wrote it.
GK: I’ll go into the details because I did think about it. Somebody who has changed their gender, who has changed from a man to a woman, has gone through the full reassignment, is who I had in my head at that time. So we were not all aware of the various campaigns and all the various groups. And of course, somebody that was a man, that has transitioned, that has fully transitioned is known as a woman.
EB: So you do still think that? So you do still think that a man that has transitioned — a trans woman — is a woman? You’ve just said that.
GK: There’s a huge difference between self-identification, people who want to identify but still have a male body, biologically are male, and then there are a very, very small number of people — but I think we have to be really sensitive about these people and not lose them in this debate — who do have and have had gender reassignment and reassignment surgery and they have gone to a great deal of a lot of pain…
EB: Are they women?
GK: Well, this is what we should say. I personally believe if you’ve gone to that level… If you’ve got the gender recognition, you’ve got the reassignment, then you are legally and medically allowed to say you’re a woman.
Crikey. And this is the person in charge of the country’s education policy? Mr S isn’t sure anyone will be telling Keegan she’s done an ‘f***ing good job’ this time…
Listen here:
Putin can’t hide how dependent he is on Beijing
Vladimir Putin has arrived in China for a two-day state visit, the first since the start of his fifth term as president. The trip began in Beijing, where Putin met with Chinese premier Xi Jinping for the first of several talks.
There remained a distinct sense that once again Putin has come to Beijing with begging bowl in hand
The meeting began with the effusive pleasantries that have become a standard part of any interaction between the two leaders. Putin called Xi a ‘dear friend’ once again and said he had chosen to make his first post-inauguration trip abroad to China to return a favour, after Xi travelled to Russia for the first trip of his new term in 2023. Though less gushing, Xi reciprocated, stating that Russia and China ‘firmly uphold the UN-centric international system, a world order based on international law’.
The Russian president also stated that ‘relations between Russia and China are not opportunistic and are not directed against anyone’. Who this particular statement was for is somewhat unclear, as China is as aware as the West, if not more so, of quite how heavily Moscow has come to rely on Beijing both economically and diplomatically since launching its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
The two leaders sat across from one another at a conference table with compulsory retinues in tow. This included, remarkably, the recently demoted former defence minister Sergei Shoigu to Putin’s left. Putin and Xi then used the meeting to rattle through a variety of topics at a top level. Relationships between Russian and Chinese banks will be strengthened to ‘protect’ mutual investments, and there will be further collaboration in the energy sector, namely on hydrocarbon and nuclear energy. Chinese scientists will travel to the town of Dubna, near Moscow to help complete the particle collider being built there. ‘Experiments and tests at this collider will make it possible to implement breakthrough mega-science projects, which in scale are beyond the capabilities of any country in the world alone,’ Putin said.
Inevitably, Xi raised the topic of Ukraine with Putin. At the press conference afterwards, Xi stated that ‘China and Russia perceive a political settlement as the right way to resolve the Ukrainian crisis.’ Repeating the points China set out in its peace plan for Ukraine at the beginning of 2023, Xi continued: ‘China’s position on this issue is consistent and clear. Namely, compliance with the norms and principles of the UN Charter, respect for state sovereignty and territorial integrity of all countries, the formation of a new balanced, effective and sustainable security architecture.’ Putin in turn thanked his ‘Chinese friends’ for their efforts to resolve the Ukrainian ‘problem’.
The two signed a new joint statement on deepening the Russo-Chinese relationship to further deepen bilateral ties between the two countries and ‘confirm the leading role of Russia and China in the formation of a fair and democratic order’. And Putin made sure to congratulate the Chinese on the 75th anniversary of the People’s Republic of China, pointing out that ‘The Soviet Union was the first to recognise the new China.’
But despite all the efforts by the Russian delegation to pretend that the relationship between Russia and China remains a balanced one, there remained a distinct sense that once again Putin has come to Beijing with begging bowl in hand.
Since the invasion of Ukraine, Beijing has come to be Russia’s largest foreign trading partner. By Putin’s own admission today, last year saw the value of trade between the two countries hit a new record – reportedly $240 billion. In an effort to keep its economy afloat, Moscow has been pushing cheap oil and discounted products on China for over two years now. Russian companies have also been encouraged to take on infrastructure projects in China. This arrangement has suited Beijing well, and it has so far felt compelled to offer little in return.
One of the topics Putin will no doubt raise again over the course of this visit is the prospect of Chinese investment in Russian domestic infrastructure, namely the long-planned ‘Power of Siberia 2’ pipeline. Xi has dangled vague promises of China getting involved in the project for some time, but has yet to make any concrete commitments. There is little to suggest he will relent during this visit.
As day turns to night in Beijing, Putin and Xi are due to attend a state dinner thrown for the Russian president, but not before the two sit down for a follow-up ‘tete-a-tete’ over tea. According to Russian state media, the pair will dine on Peking duck, shrimp dumplings and other Chinese traditional dishes.
Tomorrow, Putin moves on to Harbin, the north-eastern city founded by Russian settlers in the early 1900s. There he will attend the Russo-Chinese trade fair – another exercise designed to show off the economic links between the two countries.
Putin might be hoping to convince Russians back home that Moscow and Beijing have an equally mutually beneficial relationship, but few outside the country are sold on this idea. While for now it suits China to indulge Putin’s seductive advances, Xi is firmly aware that he has the upper hand over his Russian counterpart, economically and diplomatically. When circumstances change, Beijing likely won’t hesitate to turn off the money taps and turf Moscow out into the cold.
Should you buy a folding phone?
Just five short years ago, Samsung released the first mainstream folding phone with their debut Galaxy Fold. It had some quirks — a small, slim, external display, thick bezels, an odd asymmetrical notch and an unprecedented $1,980 price tag — but what mattered most was the screen. Open the slim, TV-remote-shaped phone and you gazed upon a great, wide, 7.3-inch screen, bigger than any you could carry in your pocket before, with a folding crease in the middle. You could multitask, watch full-screen YouTube videos and browse the web as you would on a tablet.
That is, you could do so temporarily. Early review units catastrophically broke at even the mention of a grain of sand, creating a run of viral tweets and videos. This exciting vision of a new mobile future was rushed back to the lab for further development before its delayed release; but hey, at least it didn’t explode like the Note 7. When the Fold eventually released, it came with stern warning that, no, that’s not a screen protector, that’s part of the screen, please don’t peel it off.
The takeaway for most was that the first generation Fold was cool but not quite ready yet. But five years have now passed; and during those five years, AI, worldwide Chinese pandemics and effective weight-loss pills went from sci-fi tropes to semi-dystopian reality — and folding phones are now a competitive segment. A folding iPhone is just a matter of time.
But still, are folding phones any good? And are they worth the premium?
To start, it’s worth separating out the “flips” from the “folds.” The “flip” folding phones resemble their early 2000s namesakes, folding vertically to go from a normal phone shape to a smaller square. The market leader here is Samsung’s Z Flip line — competed against by the Motorola Razr and long winded Oppo Find N2 Flip — and all three are pretty cool, but also, a bit boring.
“Flips” are popular, particularly among women, as they neatly fit into handbags and small pockets, but they’re not doing much new. It’s just the same smartphone experience you’ve always had, but you can make it smaller to carry. Yes, you can prop it half-folded to take selfies, but you’ll do this exactly once, and snapping it closed to hang up on a call sounds great, but you’re going to be gentle with a folding screen — and nobody calls you.
Sure, you don’t pay a lot more than equivalent premiums smartphones — the Z Flip5 only costs $150 more than Samsung’s Galaxy S24 — but that’s because you don’t get much more either.
The “folds” are where things get special. These — like that original Galaxy Fold — are normal-sized phones that unfold horizontally to reveal a large inside screen, like a tablet. They’re expensive, relatively delicate and the software isn’t quite up to snuff yet; but they give you something that no pocketable device previously could. I spent most of my reviewing time with this form factor, switching between the long, thin Samsung Galaxy Z Fold5, the short, wide Google Pixel Fold and the comfortable middle-child, the OnePlus Open.
The biggest thing about these phones are not their screens but their price tags. The Nothing Phone (2) is premium, stylish, extremely well made phone with great cameras and software support — and it starts at $550. The OnePlus is $1,400 (£1,399.00 in the UK, down from $1,700), whereas Google and Samsung are asking for a $1,800 — and that’s just the base storage. Is a folding screen really worth $1,000 more?
Rationally, no.
Every little improvement for multitasking or video viewing or full-screen app use is only a small improvement; pleasant but relatively insignificant. Yes, it’s fantastic being able to put two apps side by side and copy information between them; but at most I do this once a day; it’s not as though switching apps is some great burden on your normal phone. Similarly, that large, wide screen is great for playing chess, browsing fashion retailers, watching Twitch and exploring Google Maps, but you can still do all these things on an ordinary phone. On a folding phone, you can take selfies using the rear cameras, but if you’re anything like me, that’s not really a selling point.
There’s also still the issue of app compatibility. Though Google and Samsung have made foldable-specific versions of their most popular apps, and many apps stretch well to the bigger screen, there are others that simply don’t. Reddit, Instagram and the email app Spark are borderline unusable on the full-screen display, so you have to force them to display in a more narrow aspect ratio, undoing most of the point of a wide folding display.
If you edit spreadsheets on your mobile phone all the time — which some small-business owners do — then you have a real practical reason to buy a folding phone. But for the rest of us, it’s for the vibes. It’s because folding a phone is cool, and because it’s fun to snap the hinge shut, and because it’s really pleasant to message on one side, while your map is open on the other.
You buy a folding phone for the vibes. But not all are the same. In an era where so much tech feels homogenous, each of the “folds” had a really distinct personality.
The narrow, tall shape of Samsung’s Fold 5 is the best for single-handed use; being able to configure separate home screens for the inside and outside displays is great; and though it’s under-screen selfie camera is terrible, having an uninterrupted display is fantastic. It’s also just a beautiful looking phone, with soft touch blue surfaces and gloss aluminum rails.
But it also felt a bit old-hat and bogged down. Samsung’s interface is very busy and overworked; the pop-up ads in the notification shade are maddening on an almost $2,000 device; and because Samsung doesn’t sell that many folds, each successive generation only sees minor improvements, leaving their most expensive phone with a slow, clunky hinge that feels markedly behind competitors — including their own Z Flip. The only upside here is that you could buy an older Fold 3 and get 95 percent of the experience for far less than $1,800; but these are still delicate phones and I wouldn’t advise buying one out of warranty.
Despite being the cheapest, the OnePlus Open was — by far — the best phone of the bunch. The hinge has this satisfying, sharp snap close, the screen crease is the least prominent — and OnePlus has made an clean, un-intrusive Android skin that is fast but also has meaningful improvements for multitasking on the folding screen. Also, though it doesn’t look as pretty as the Samsung, it’s still a chic phone, and the big camera bump becomes a really nice shelf for your finger. Plus, the vibration switch is just lovely. My only issues are the inexplicable lack of wireless charging and the way their Android skin treats the inside screen as two separate screens, rather than a single broad layout, meaning you can’t stretch a widget across the center. But it’s such a pleasant device to use that I have seriously considered making the irrational decision of buying one with my own money. Or at least its successor, which hopefully has wireless charging.
By contrast, I tried a review unit of the Pixel Fold, but didn’t want to use it, even for free. The outside looks chic, despite its odd, wide shape, but it has the worst folding screen of the three, with a thick crease, the smallest size and these enormous, ugly black bezels which are unacceptable on a new device. I would far, far prefer to use a normal slab Pixel over the Fold — and they are less than half the price.
Slovakia is united after the assassination attempt on Fico. It won’t last
Somewhat unfairly, Slovakia is often overlooked and ignored as a quiet and peaceful backwater in the often turbulent turmoil of east European geopolitics. The assassination attempt that almost ended the life of its controversial prime minister Robert Fico yesterday has changed all that. Fico was shot five times in the abdomen and arm. After undergoing emergency surgery, he is now said by doctors to be stable, and likely to survive his life threatening injuries.
That unity is unlikely to last long if Fico bounces back from his brush with death
The suspected gunman, whose motives are still unknown, was arrested at the scene, and has been named as Juraj Cintula, a 71-year-old former security guard and published poet, who ironically once led a group opposing political violence.
Fico, 59, recently won a fourth term as Slovakia’s prime minister, and has proved a deeply polarising figure: splitting the country into two almost equal halves. His Smer, or social democracy, party is a left-wing populist movement which, like Viktor Orban’s neighbouring Hungary, has increasingly cosied up to Russian president Vladimir Putin and been reluctant to support Ukraine in resisting Russia’s invasion.
Fico, like Orban, has also been critical of the EU, and similarly to Hungary and Poland’s former ruling PIS party, has clashed with Brussels over laws which the EU has criticised as authoritarian. Another charge levelled at Fico and Smer by the pro-EU Slovak opposition parties is corruption. Fico had to resign as prime minister once before in 2018 after a young investigative journalist Jan Kuciak and his fiancée were murdered: an unsolved crime linked to circles allegedly connected to the ruling party.
Now that Fico has himself fallen victim to violence how will the attempt on his life affect Slovakia and the wider politics of Europe? The country is in the midst of next month’s European parliament elections and Smer is likely to benefit from a sympathy vote from Slovaks shocked by the assassination attempt.
Supporters and opponents of the prime minister – including the outgoing president Zuzana Caputova – a political opponent of Fico – were united in expressing their grief and horror at the shooting, but that unity is unlikely to last long if Fico bounces back from his brush with death.
Slovakian history shows that the country has a long affection for political strongmen. During the Second World War, it broke away from Czechoslovakia and was ruled by Josef Tiso, a Catholic priest who ran it as a Nazi puppet state and was executed after the war.
After the war, with Czechoslovakia reunited, the Slovak part of the country produced both Alexander Dubcek – hero of the 1968 Prague Spring – and Gustav Husak, the Soviet stooge who ruled as a dictator after Russian tanks crushed hopes of Dubcek’s liberal ‘socialism with a human face’.
Czechoslovakia led the way in overthrowing Soviet communism in 1989’s ‘velvet revolution’ but the Slovaks always resented their status as a rural also ran to their more numerous and sophisticated Czech compatriots. Another strongman, Vladimir Meciar, led the movement which split the two states and inaugurated Slovakia’s independence in 1992.
If Fico recovers, and resumes his premiership, he is likely to ride the tide of a wider movement that is spreading both inside and outside Slovakia, especially as Russia appears to have gained the upper hand in Ukraine. In the face of Putin’s aggression, that movement does not bode well for Ukraine’s freedom – or that of the rest of Europe.
Trump vs Biden could be the worst presidential debate in history
Ding ding ding! Trump vs Biden, the debate rematch, is on – so brace yourselves for the worst presidential tussle in history! This time, ladies and gentlemen, they’re four years older.
The truth is Trump does not have a very good record in presidential debates
In 2020, in the first presidential debate of a Covid-riven election, the two old men set a new low for American politics by shouting over each other like drunk slobs in a bar.
Trump, who may have been suffering from Covid himself, decided to attack Joe Biden for among other things his handling of the swine flu in 2009, when Joe was vice-president. ‘Don’t ever use the word smart with me,’ was probably Trump’s most memorable line. ‘Because there’s nothing smart about you, Joe.’
Biden probably came out just about on top that September night in Cleveland because he said what most people were thinking: ‘Will you just shut up, man?’ But Lincoln-Douglas this was not – and 81-year-old Biden sounds ridiculous today as he tries to puff himself up like some macho pugilist: ‘Donald Trump lost two debates to me in 2020,’ he says. ‘Since then, he hasn’t shown up for a debate. Now he’s acting like he wants to debate me again. Well, make my day, pal.’
Trump is equally silly, of course, albeit more deliberately funny. He accepted the two proposed debate dates – June 27 and September 10 – then posted yet another amusing video contrasting his rallies with Joe Biden’s doddery public performances.
But the truth is Trump does not have a very good record in presidential debates. He’s a sharp rhetorical counter-puncher, largely because he’s willing to be so rude, but he’s not usually one for sweeping arguments and showing a great understanding of his own policies.
In his first debate against Hillary Clinton eight years ago, she outwitted him repeatedly with her superior grasp of the facts.
Biden, who has a speech impediment, has always tended to let his mouth run away with him. In fact, there is a perverse argument that the 46th president’s semi-senility helps: his ability to talk total nonsense on the spot has been reduced, though he still often tries.
But it is clear that expectations for Biden in the 2024 debates will be so very low that, unless he falls over and soils himself, his backers in the media will talk about how energetic and strong he is. That’s the bar for leadership of the free world, folks.
Will this stop players mobbing the referee?
The European football governing body Uefa has informed competing nations at this summer’s Euros that only team captains will be allowed to approach referees to dispute decisions. It is hoped this will reduce the amount of pressure placed on referees and allow for smoother and more orderly officiating. So, two’s company but three or more will be deemed an unlawful assembly and could result in yellow or even red cards. It’s a bold move, but is it necessary and will it work?
The already crucifying difficulty of refereeing is not helped by having a throng of excitable prima donnas ready to encircle you at any moment
The idea comes from IFAB (the International Football Association Board) who describe themselves as the ‘guardians of football’s laws and regulations’. Their proposals appear to have been fast-tracked into a top-tier international tournament by an image-conscious governing body, leaving little time for objections. Roberto Rosetti Uefa’s managing director of refereeing described the rationale for the no-go zone around the officials as being so that ‘the decision can be relayed in a timely and respectful manner’.
Fair enough… perhaps. Refereeing high-profile football matches must be one of the most stressful occupations there is. The intense pressure of making instant ultra-high-stakes decisions while much of the planet is watching you work requires an almost preternatural coolness and resilience. The already crucifying difficulty of the job is not helped by having a throng of excitable prima donnas ready to encircle you at any moment to press their case.
Mobbing the referee, as it is known, is certainly a feature of the modern game and can be spontaneous or, some allege, a deliberate tactic – one thinks of Jose Mourinho’s first spell at Chelsea, where the notoriously aggressive squad would surround the referee to within almost touching distance whenever a decision went against them. This perhaps wasn’t an attempt to get a referee to change a specific decision, which almost never happens (though Jimmy Greaves used to tell a story of Spurs players moaning so much about one particular call that the poor man snapped ‘Oh all right then’ and changed his mind) but to intimidate, to menace, making the referee think twice the next time a crucial but marginal call has to be made.
In the UK, despite VAR, with the real decision-makers safely ensconced in a portacabin near Heathrow, it has endured and may even be getting worse. The body responsible for refereeing the Premier League reported last November that instances of player dissent had more than doubled from 165 to 347 compared to the same point in the previous season. And it’s certainly not just an English disease. The Champions League has seen much on-field ugliness in recent years and the sight of Ronaldo looking like he could hit a referee in a match in the Saudi Super League recently did the game no favours at all.
Players screaming at officials is an unedifying spectacle. Along with all the other abuse refs have to put up, from coaches – and a certain excitable and soon-to-depart premiership boss springs to mind here – journalists, pundits, and of course fans, it has led to many officials quitting the game, sometimes succumbing to mental health problems in the process. One thinks of Anders Frisk who was hounded out of his profession after vicious abuse that included threatening phone calls to his home. Any idea that may give the refs a bit more protection is to be welcomed.
Whether it will work is another matter. After all, strictly speaking, no players should be approaching the referee to dispute a decision, so allowing only the captain to do so might be read as an invitation that the more unscrupulous armband wearer may seek to exploit. And in an international tournament, there is a real danger of misunderstandings, a player could claim his comments or actions were misconstrued given the potential language issues. Suddenly empowered refs could also overreact and go card-happy when faced with a new offence. It’s happened before (think of Gazza having his name taken for playfully booking the ref with his own dropped yellow card).
But perhaps this is mainly about Uefa signalling intent, firing a warning shot across the bows of the competing teams and making plain that no abuse of officials will be tolerated so don’t even think about it – a deterrent in other words. If so, fair enough, and it may even work. Certainly, the FA thinks so; it claims that sin bins led to a 38 per cent reduction in abuse of officials in the testing phase of their project.
Others will take some convincing that this isn’t just more meddling from people who feel they need to justify their positions by making, or at least proposing, regular tweaks to the laws of the beautiful game, many of which either flop or are abandoned. As Jurgen Klopp once said: ‘I can’t remember if IFAB has ever had a fantastic idea. Nope, and I’m 56.’
Well, we’ll soon find out if this is the first time.
France is spiralling out of control
The cold-blooded execution of two prison guards at a Normandy motorway toll on Tuesday has shocked France. It is for many commentators and politicians incontrovertible evidence of the ‘Mexicanisation’ of the Republic.
Prime Minister Gabriel Attal has told the escaped prisoner and his accomplices that they will be hunted down and punished, but it better be done quickly. With every passing hour that they remain at liberty it reinforces the image of a state that, in the words of Senator Bruno Retailleau, ‘has lost control’.
Other politicians are talking of a ‘war’. Eric Zemmour told an interviewer the country was engaged in ‘a civil war’, while Francois-Xavier Bellamy of the centre-right Republicans said that the ‘state is in the process of losing the war’.
France is not yet a failed state, but with its surging debts, soaring violence and crumbling infrastructure it feels increasingly like that day might not be far off
This is not political hyperbole. Last week, two policemen were shot and wounded in their station in the 13th district of Paris, and in the east of the country three officers were injured when a driver rammed a vehicle checkpoint. A few weeks ago in northern Paris a mob of 50 attacked a police station with Molotov cocktails and other projectiles.
Exactly three years ago a warning of civil war was sounded by members of the French military. First a group of retired senior army officers wrote an open letter to Emmanuel Macron, outlining their fears for the country because Republican law was being so routinely flouted.
That was followed by a second letter, this one from serving soldiers, who told Macron that ‘civil war is brewing in France and you know it perfectly well’. Do something, they urged the president, before it is too late. ‘We are not talking about extending your mandates or beating opponents,’ they said. ‘We are talking about the survival of our country, the survival of your country.’
Nothing has been done. France is not yet a failed state, but with its surging debts, soaring violence and crumbling infrastructure it feels increasingly like that day might not be far off.
A disturbing glimpse of what may await France has this week been unfolding in New Caledonia, a French overseas territory in the Pacific.
Macron declared a state of emergency on Wednesday evening after two days of urban warfare that has left four dead, including a gendarme, scores wounded and dozens of building firebombed or looted. Terrified residents have described a state of ‘civil war’ with armed militias taking control of parts of the island.
Hundreds of police reinforcement are on their way from France with orders to restore ‘Republican order’.
The violence erupted suddenly on Monday over an issue that might at first glance appear trivial: an electoral reform that will extend the suffrage to include residents from mainland France who have settled on the island this century.
The violence is allegedly being orchestrated by a radical left group committed to independence, even though three referendums have been held in the issue in the last six years, all returning negative results.
The rioters claim that the electoral reform has been concocted by Paris in order to build a strong base of voters opposed to independence. Essentially, then, the conflict is one of identity.
Eric Zemmour has for a number of years referred not to the ‘Mexicanisation’ of France but its ‘Lebanonisation’. He first made the comparison in a television debate in 2021, predicting that France will be a bigger version of the Lebanon where communities no longer peacefully live side but confront each other face to face. He predicted this will be the case by 2050 but he may have been too conservative in his estimate.
Though Zemmour was pilloried by much of the press for his prognosis, a similar scenario had been sketched in 2018 by Gérard Collomb when he resigned as interior minister from Emmanuel Macron’s first government.
Collomb didn’t reference Lebanon but he did warn of a bleak future for France unless the country confronted the insurrectional element within.
Macron shirked the responsibility, just as his predecessors have done this century. In 2011 President Nicolas Sarkozy declared multiculturalism ‘a failure’ and said the priority in future must be the promotion of French identity.
This never materialised, prompting president Francois Hollande to confess in 2016 that levels of immigration, particularly from Islamic countries, was far too high. ‘That there is a problem with Islam is true, no one doubts that,’ he said. ‘How can we avoid partition? Because that’s what’s happening: partition.’
Sarkozy was from the centre-right, Hollande from the centre-left and Macron is a pure centrist. None of them have had the courage, honesty or will to confront this ‘partition’.
For Macron this is turning into the bleakest of weeks. It had begun so well, with the announcement of record investment in France, but the days since have been anarchic and bloody.
In Thursday’s edition of Le Figaro, the paper quotes a ‘heavyweight’ member of the government assessing the weakness of the president: ‘He was a banker and a former minister of the economy, and that’s why he was elected. His premise was that growth and full employment would solve the country’s problems.’
Macron loves the glamour and the power that comes with being president. He gets a thrill from rubbing shoulders with royalty and he enjoys doing deals with business leaders. But when it comes to law and order his political inexperience and his social naivety have been brutally exposed.
That is why France is spiralling out of control.
The power of restorative justice
David Shipley has narrated this article for you to listen to.
In a week when the Chief Inspector of Prisons published an Urgent Notification detailing the horrors of HMP Wandsworth, I found myself revisiting memories of being jailed there for the crime of fraud. Clanging doors, rattling chains, men screaming at night in anguish or despair or because their cellmate was assaulting them. No help coming. Emergencies unattended for far too long, and people dead as a result. No purpose, no hope, not even the possibility of redemption. Wandsworth is a miserable prison, one which does as much as possible to brutalise, punish and hurt those it jails, and nothing to heal or change them for the better.
The process does provide a different model, where victims and offenders recognise one another as people
My mind full of memories of pain, I then travelled to Nottingham to see James Graham’s new play, Punch, an adaptation of Jacob Dunne’s memoir, Right From Wrong. Aged 19, Jacob threw a single punch at a stranger, James Hodgkinson. James fell to the ground, struck his head and died in hospital nine days later.
Jacob went to prison for manslaughter. In that environment, surrounded by drugs and angry young men, where staff and other prisoners ‘just reinforced… negative feelings’, he might have continued down the path of crime after release. But something changed; Jacob is now a married father of two who campaigns for healthier cultures in and outside of prison. He credits restorative justice with changing the direction of his life. This process offers victims the opportunity to contact the person responsible, with the intent of asking them questions and expressing the harm caused.
Jacob was put in touch with James Hodgkinson’s parents, David and Joan, via Remedi, a restorative justice organisation. They eventually met, and ultimately Jacob worked with Joan to raise awareness of the risks of throwing even one punch. Jacob described restorative justice to me as ‘all about questions… it’s about getting to the bottom of what people’s needs are’.
Punch dramatises this painful, difficult and powerful story with sensitivity. Graham’s dialogue is astonishingly real. In the second act, when we finally see the meeting between James’s parents and Jacob, I forgot I was watching a dramatisation.
I knew little about restorative justice until I started speaking to people who had participated in these schemes. ‘Michael’, for instance, suffered a particularly traumatising robbery. After the offenders had been sentenced to three years, a probation officer approached him to see whether he’d be open to restorative justice, as an opportunity to ask questions and to allow the perpetrators to explain. Michael thought it sounded useful and he hoped he’d get some answers.
More than 75 per cent of all criminal prosecutions in England and Wales result in a guilty plea. This means there’s no trial and little or no explanation of what happened or why. Victims I spoke to found this very hard. They often feel the criminal process focuses on the offender; at the end, the victim still has no idea why the crime happened. ‘Matt’ is a probation worker I spoke to who has also experienced a restorative process as a victim. He believes ‘most victims have questions which don’t get answered in a normal justice process, such as “Why me? Was I unlucky? What’s happening to the offender now?”’
Michael’s restorative process began with him writing a letter to one of the offenders, via an intermediary. The offender’s explanation and apology helped, although Michael acknowledges: ‘I keep changing my mind – what he did was terrible.’ Even so, he likes to think the man has ‘moved on with his life’.
Nicola Fowler has worked for Remedi since 2005. She was the restorative justice practitioner who worked with Jacob, David and Joan. She told me that good restorative justice must be ‘focused on the needs of all participants’ and ‘entirely voluntary and informed’. There is no requirement for victims to meet those who have wronged them. They may simply wish to have messages or letters passed back and forth.
The data supports Remedi’s approach: almost all the victims who participated said it helped them feel safer and recover from the offence, and that it increased their satisfaction with the criminal justice system. If this was all restorative justice did, it would be enough. But it can also help offenders change.
As Jacob explained to me, the power of restorative justice is ‘it doesn’t allow you to remain ignorant’. For most offenders, it increases their understanding of the harm they’ve done and motivates them not to re-offend. And as Graham remarked, restorative justice is far from the ‘soft, liberal and woolly’ process people might imagine. In fact, to go into a room with your victim, or with the person who has hurt you, is – as he put it – ‘hard… muscular and robust’.
Fowler says that the best way to understand restorative justice is to sit in and watch it take place. That is unlikely to be possible for most people, and Punch may be the closest most of us will come to experiencing the power of the processes. I’ve often wondered how a post-Christian society could build a mechanism for forgiveness and reconciliation when even many Christians struggle with these acts. Punch shows us the power of forgiveness, and of the better world we could make.
The process isn’t always smooth, though, and the play doesn’t shy away from that; while Joan managed to forgive Jacob, David didn’t. It is not a panacea, but it does provide a different model, where victims and offenders recognise one another as people, in all their complexity.
The play made me think about my own crime and my victims. Victims of fraud may be less obvious than someone who is punched or robbed, but they suffer all the same. I waited 18 months between confessing all to the police and being sentenced. In that time, I often thought about how much I wanted to pick up the phone or send an email trying to explain. Perhaps restorative justice would have helped both my victims and me heal. Perhaps it still could.
Why are so many young people ‘asexual’?
Who could have foreseen that half a century after the sexual revolution we’d be facing its exact opposite: an asexual revolution? There’s a crisis of fertility across the West, with birth-rates and sperm counts in free fall. But this isn’t only about microplastics, oestrogen in the water or tight underpants. It’s also that the children of the West are choosing to have less sex – even no sex. A growing proportion actually identify as asexual, and rather than wait to see if the absence of lust is just a reasonable, youthful response to all the porn around in schools, they announce their asexuality solemnly to their friends and family.
It is aphobic, I’ve learnt, for anyone in a relationship with an asexual to ever ask them to put out
A fortnight ago a Gen Z journalist, Freya India, wrote a fascinating piece for The Spectator’s Life website suggesting that the boom in asexual kids is being caused by antidepressants. More than half the people who take happy pills are thought to experience some form of sexual dysfunction, she said, and in the UK a third of all teens have had them prescribed.
Freya makes a good case, but peering down from a few generations above, it’s hard to see what wouldn’t push a teen towards asexuality these days. There’s the exciting new fashion for strangling during sex, all the deathly dating via text, the absolute terror of ‘toxic’ masculinity. If you’re taught that fight or flight is the appropriate response to what we once called flirting, asexuality would be an obvious choice. So the kids, mostly the girls, ‘come out’ as asexual and then find themselves stuck with it; pinned in place by the label like moths on a collector’s board. No wonder they’re not procreating.
Last week Emmanuel Macron announced a set of incentives that he said was bound to encourage young people to breed – as if the right combination of tax breaks will crack some code and release a flood of babies. But all that the kids seem really keen on cooking up are ever more esoteric asexual identities. I learnt from a terrible Netflix series for teens that asexuals are known as ‘aces’. In this drama, all the straight boys were portrayed as either impotent or mentally ill (natch) and the gay hero was an ‘ace’. He had considered that he might be ‘greysexual’ (the odd flicker of lust on special occasions) but to his boyfriend’s serious disappointment decided not. Never mind. Love won the day and they stayed together – though as Douglas Murray has pointed out, it’s hard to find two groups with less in common than gay men and asexuals. Oddly an ace can also be ‘demisexual’ which means that they can be attracted to another person, but only after a strong emotional bond has been formed. The asexuals have reinvented women!
It’s all very teen girl, these ever-changing in-groups and out-groups, but the trouble is that teen-girl thinking is now embedded in adult society. In 2010 a civil servant called Robin who identifies as ace successfully persuaded the civil service to add the ‘A’ to its official LGBT group, which then became the LGBA&T network. Robin has made several contributions to increasing the visibility of asexuals within the service, she says, and if you can’t see why someone with no interest in sex would want to be more visible, then that’s your aphobia talking. It is also aphobic, I’ve learnt, for anyone in a relationship with an asexual to ask them to put out, even on your birthday, and definitely aphobic to suggest that they seek therapeutic help. That counts as ‘conversion therapy’. Asexuality brought on by trauma is its own separate identity thanks very much: caedsexuality, from the Latin caedere, to chop or cut out.
Aces have a history of persecution. Of course they do. You can’t be a legitimate minority without an oppression story. But what’s interesting is that their oppressors are often from within the queer ‘community’ (watch the revolution eating itself). As far as I can gather, the As weren’t instantly welcomed into the LGBTQIA+ gang because the Ts and the Qs weren’t quite sure that the As were discriminated against. Aggravating as the Ts often are, this does seem fair. How would any aphobes tell an ace from a non-ace? And how would they set about stopping one from not having sex?
But this pushback from the Ts gave the A-team just the break they needed. The fact they’d been excluded from LGBT groups, they said, proved that they were an oppressed minority – perhaps the most oppressed because they’d been rejected even by queer people. That’s some next level rainbow reasoning. I’ve now found various versions of this argument online and they’re all delightful, like the different formulations of St Anselm’s ontological argument. ‘Often times, people within the LGBT community gate-keep asexuals, their reasoning for this is that we haven’t experienced oppression,’ said one older Ace to an ace-curious girl. ‘This is quite ironic since gate-keeping the community is a prime example of oppression.’
I bring you asexuality because it’s Pride month shortly and for me it’s a relief just to know that there are committed celibates marching amid the leather men in pup masks. Also because it’s clearly not a coincidence that asexuality is growing fastest in the places where free love was once most widely proclaimed. In the same Bay Area haunts where men in fringed suede gang-banged stoned teens during the summer of love, you can now find the Ace SF [San Francisco] Book Club who this month are reading You Are Asexual by A.C. Evermore, a choose-your-own-adventure fantasy book: ‘A dragon-riding, vengeance-seeking lesbian! A cake themed asexual speakeasy! A fatal car chase! And the nefarious Consortium, hiding the truth behind Orientation Day! You get to choose! Where will your journey take you?’
‘Just the representation I was looking for,’ wrote one ace reviewer. ‘A good read but the sex scenes were too tame,’ wrote another. I honestly don’t think she was joking.
Watch Mary Wakefield and Mary Harrington discuss why Gen Z are choosing celibacy on Spectator TV:
The Church of England’s volunteering crisis
Patrick Kidd has narrated this article for you to listen to.
John Betjeman knew that a church cannot run on prayers alone. ‘Let’s praise the man who goes to light the church stove on an icy night,’ he wrote in his poem ‘Septuagesima’, going on to celebrate the ‘hard-worked’ wardens, cleaners, treasurers, the organist and, most of all, ‘the few who are seen in their accustomed pew’ come rain or shine. ‘And though they be but two or three,’ he concluded. ‘They keep the church for you and me.’
In smaller churches, filling voluntary vacancies is a headache, not helped by ever-increasing bureaucracy
Some vicars today may feel fortunate to garner two or three volunteers. A recent Church Times survey found a worrying decline in numbers taking on the lay roles of warden, secretary and treasurer. Between a quarter and 40 per cent of churches in each diocese had only one warden, not the required two, while more than a fifth were missing one or more other key officers.
In rural areas, where clergy numbers have been cut and congregations have fallen, meaning that one over-stretched vicar can be responsible for a dozen parishes, this is stark. In the diocese of Norwich, famed for its number of churches, 267 of them have fewer than a dozen worshippers; in Hereford, 250 get below 20. Reducing clergy, some have observed, does not help to swell numbers.
Even in my own parish in Blackheath, south-east London, where I am one of two wardens, we need more help. The vicar ran through a Betjemanesque encomium at the recent annual parochial church meeting, praising the cleaning team, the sides-people, the readers, those who do the flowers or serve tea et al (some appear several times), but only one of five vacancies on the parochial church council (PCC) was filled.
Our flock, though, is lucky to have many sheep. In smaller churches, filling voluntary vacancies is a headache, not helped by an ever-increasing bureaucracy from the centre. Consider the following recent tweets from C of E clergy and volunteers. ‘No one will be a warden,’ wrote Michael Roberts, vicar of St Michael’s, Cockerham. ‘The volume of stuff from on high puts them off.’ Daniel Thompson, rector of Icknield Benefice, wrote: ‘I am trying to explain the complexity of safeguarding portals and online dashboards to a 76-year-old.’ From Matt Triggs, PCC secretary at St Mary the Virgin in Nottingham: ‘Just had an email from our diocese to put reducing climate emissions on PCC agenda. We really don’t have the time or manpower.’
The C of E does love forms. My co-warden and I recently had a two-hour ‘visitation’ by the archdeacon. We had to fill out a 16-question form on our make-up and attendance figures; answer 55 more on parish finance; fill out a third form on when the drains were cleaned and the lightning conductor checked; and answer the questions ‘Do you have a plan for if the boiler breaks down?’ and ‘How will you make lighting more sustainable?’. My co-warden spent a weekend converting the emails by which our maintenance programme is run into a logbook as required. It wasn’t looked at.
The important thing for volunteers to realise if they want to stay sane is that they can say no to a lot. Our vicar is blessed (he may not always feel so) that a source in the diocese described my church to a colleague as ‘the one with the difficult wardens’. When our diocese was urging churches to close during Covid, we stood firm and worked out how to stay open. It was worth it and only possible because we made our own decisions rather than having to follow a diocesan blueprint. ‘Never forget: the parish is not the branch office of the diocese,’ says Marcus Walker, rector of Great St Barts in the City of London, and the co-founder of the Save the Parish campaign group. ‘It is an independent charity that occasionally sends “voluntary” grants to the diocese.’ He adds that the mentality of some leaders of the C of E towards volunteers is ‘they’re bloody lucky to be allowed to help and if they don’t like it they can just…’ Here he uses a vulgate phrase that may be translated as Nunc dimittis.
Vanishing volunteers is not just a church problem. The Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport reports that numbers of regular volunteers has fallen by 11 per cent in eight years. My vicar, Nicholas Cranfield, says there has been a noticeable shift in availability. Early retirees are on grandparenting duty and more women work full time. Some employers ban staff from volunteering in case it damages their professional reputation. ‘There are not so many qualified accountants out there,’ he says.
At the same time, there is a risk that in some places the church can look like a closed club, Cranfield adds. ‘The church was once seen as part of the community and people helped out, even if not worshippers, because it was something valuable that needed help to preserve.’ Some of them generously donated to our organ restoration fund because they felt a church should have a good instrument. As the 1,500 people in Blackheath who attend our Christmas Eve carol service outside church attest, there are more who feel drawn to church than those who make up the congregation on Sundays.
I see this call to serve in my aunt, who has no religious faith but lives near a church in East Budleigh, Devon, and has joined the cleaning roster and mows the churchyard. She sees it as her community duty to help her neighbours to worship while she drinks coffee and listens to the bells. We need to encourage more like her. I believe that more people will help if you ask them, if you make it easy for them and if you thank them.
At Easter a Church Times article compared the composition of the C of E to an egg. The focus is always on the bright, rich, colourful yolk – the clergy – but it is the volunteers in the pews who form the transparent part that binds the Church together. And if you are not careful, it can so easily run away.
Letters: how to get the uni protestors out
Soft left
Sir: I read with a certain wry amusement in Yascha Mounk’s piece that ‘activists’ occupying Columbia were demanding the university administrators should supply them with food and water (‘Preach first’, 11 May). How times have changed.
In winter 1976 I was the president of the student body at Edinburgh University. A group of ultra-left activists occupied a building of the social science faculty. The administration sent two members of staff to speak to me in the hope that I might be able to dislodge them.
I explained very patiently to them that given my own unashamed Conservatism, there was unlikely to be any meeting of minds on this matter. However I also pointed out that it was in the middle of a Scottish winter and that perhaps simply turning off the heating would be a rather more effective deterrent. It was: the protestors departed less than three days later.
Tim Davies
Winchfield, Hampshire
Fear eats the soul
Sir: Your article by Yascha Mounk makes interesting reading. I am however confused as to why this particular war should draw such a large and vociferous audience. Where were the tents on campuses during the height of the wars in Syria and Yemen? In both countries hundreds of thousands of civilians were killed, but no one went on the barricades for them. Could it be because in Yemen the supporting force is Iran and in Syria it is Russia and students don’t want to risk their cosy lives and future careers by protesting against regimes that would have no compunction in silencing their critics by any foul means?
Jacky Hayward
Maidenhead, Berkshire
Plastic unfantastic
Sir: Matthew Parris is correct in thinking that disposing of plastic tree guards may pose a problem (‘Save us from this plastic plague’, 11 May). A local environmental group very kindly offered to bring some volunteers to our woods to help remove hundreds of plastic tubes from young trees which had outgrown their need for them. The tubes were cut off with Stanley knives, flattened out and stuffed into recycled dumpy bags, the intention being to take them to the local recycling centre.
We were, however, turned away, in spite of the fact that the centre had skips the size of supertankers and we arrived in a family estate car, because they suspected we were bringing commercial waste.
I tried to contact the Woodland Trust who had given us a grant to plant the trees in the first place to see if they had a solution but received no help from that quarter. Neither was there any useful advice coming from the Forestry Commision. So dumpy bags full of trashed plastic tree guards are still sitting by the gate in our wood, waiting for someone to tell us where to take them.
Mary Stastny
Barnard Castle, Co Durham
Naked ambition
Sir: I heartily agree with Julian Spalding on the art establishment’s disdain for Beryl Cook’s work (Arts, 11 May). Surely one major aspect of good art is that it brings joy to people’s lives. Her paintings do that in spades. To paraphrase a 1960s Liverpool poet: ‘When I am sad and weary,/ When I think all hope has gone/ I think of Beryl Cook’s ladies/ with next to nothing on.’
Martin Brown
Coventry
Down – and out
Sir: I share Bob Calver’s conclusion that a spell in opposition will allow the Tory party to change its mindset (Letters, 11 May), but he mischaracterises the problem when he says that with Brexit the Conservative leadership shared ‘populist right-wing views … convinced that the country supported them in all their beliefs’.
In fact, as of the referendum in 2016 and even now, the majority of the parliamentary Conservatives and the civil service were against Brexit. It was only those pesky voters who were in favour, and the people wanted their will executed.
What has done for the Tories is a succession of the worst leaders we have ever had. Rishi Sunak isn’t too bad, but it’s too late. They need a good electoral kicking.
Tim Hedges
Panicale, Italy
Forked tongue
Sir: The leading article ‘Tories for Starmer’ (11 May) states that Zac Goldsmith, given a peerage by the Tories after losing his seat, says he may vote for Keir Starmer. A cursory glance at Erskine May shows that peers with seats in the House of Lords are disqualified from voting at a parliamentary election. Another example of a politician promising something that they have no hope of delivering?
Darren Stevens
Howden, East Riding of Yorkshire
Ghouls galore
Sir: Your review of Judith Flanders’s Rights of Passage (Books, 4 May) is very relevant if you live in Haworth, a grave from whose churchyard you use as an illustration.
I’m a guide in Haworth church and when we established the service we carefully crafted tours to cover the entire church. But a few weeks in, it was obvious what the demand was for and, generally, the more macabre the better. Where people know of the Brontës the demand is to see their ‘vault’, which we have to disappoint; there isn’t one, just a two-shafted high-capacity grave. Many ask if they can see inside and money is sometimes offered for such an opportunity (you can’t, because there’s no vault). People are fascinated and often repulsed at the thought of bodies being buried in the church – but if we really want to rivet them, a few stories of the occasional bones that emerge in the graveyard does the trick.
David Pearson
Haworth
Stresses and strains
Sir: I share Dot Wordsworth’s concern over the mispronunciation of certain words (Mind your Language, 11 May). Particularly noticeable in some circles today is the use of past-oral instead of past-oral – although thankfully I have not yet heard of Beethoven’s symphony referred to in the wrong way.
Peter Bannister
Bridgwater, Somerset
Leases of life
Sir I have to take issue with Charles Moore’s criticism of Michael Gove’s forthcoming legislation concerning the cost of extending leases of flats (Notes, 4 May). Eighty or maybe 100 years ago the owner of the hypothetical Eaton Square flat sold a 90- or 120-year lease of the flat. The owner received the same price as they would have received had they sold a virtual freehold. Don’t take my word for it, ask a valuer! Since then, the service charges have maintained the fabric of the building in which the hypothetical flat is situated so the freehold owner has not spent anything so cannot say that owning the block of flats has cost him anything. All those years ago the owner got paid for what he had. Why would the law help him sell it once again?
Jon Redding
Wandsworth SW18
Can Starmer and Reeves add some fizz to the economy?
If the 0.6 per cent first-quarter GDP uplift reported by the Office for National Statistics is sustained for the rest of this year, Rishi Sunak will be able to claim – as he waves goodbye – that he and Jeremy Hunt have succeeded against their naysayers in dragging the UK economy from pandemic depths back to the level of ‘trend growth’, around 2.5 per cent per annum, that used to be thought of as normal. That’s spookily in line (as is the path of inflation) with Ken Clarke’s achievement as Tory chancellor in 1996 ahead of the election that swept Blair and Brown to power the following May. How lucky is today’s untested, unloved and mostly unknown Labour front bench to be riding to power on a tsunami of anti-Tory sentiment in which a recovering economy, including rising real wages, apparently has no tangible impact on voters’ intentions?
Meanwhile, I’m intrigued by ONS chief economist Grant Fitzner’s claim that ‘you could say the economy is going gangbusters’. Did he pick the right word? Perhaps he meant ‘ghostbusters’, in the sense that, however many economic demons Sunak and Hunt succeed in chasing away, there’s still (to quote Ray Parker Jr’s memorable 1984 lyrics) ‘an invisible man sleepin’ in your bed’: his name is Keir Starmer.
Outside Labour’s box
Labour’s ‘ten policies to change Britain’, published to not much media attention in March, said absolutely nothing about growth or productivity. Other signals so far from Keir Starmer and his shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves have added little: they won’t increase the rate of corporation tax and they will ‘bulldoze’ the planning system to allow more house-building on greenbelt land. But they’ll also add extra costs for employers by enlarging workers’ rights.
So what else might they do to add fizz to the economy without looking like irresponsible incomers on course for a clash with the gilts market? How about some pragmatic pick-and-mix reforms of the VAT system to help smaller businesses that are the bedrock of growth and to boost UK spending by foreign visitors?
Borrow a policy from the Reform party and raise the threshold for VAT registration from £90,000 to £120,000. Borrow a policy from this column and slash the VAT rate for hospitality, so that pub-owners and restaurateurs can make a living and create more jobs. Embrace the Sunday Times campaign for reinstatement of VAT-free shopping for foreign tourists – as announced by Kwasi Kwarteng but rescinded by Jeremy Hunt. And drop the class-war wheeze to impose VAT on private-school fees, the abandonment of which would encourage wealthy foreigners to despatch their kids to our world-class educational establishments while the parents shop till they drop in Bicester Village and Bond Street.
There you are, Sir Keir: if you want a prosperous private sector to generate sufficient tax revenues to fund real Labour public-spending plans, start policy-picking outside the Labour box.
The airport experience
The measure of a civilised and ambitious country – I used to think, in my more exotic travelling days – is the airport arrival experience. Potholed highways into town, rip-off taxis with psycho drivers, even attempted kidnappings straight from the terminal (as befell a friend of mine visiting Kazakhstan), all send bad messages to potential spenders and investors. But nothing’s worse than an airless, hour-long immigration queue – and on that test New York’s JFK Terminal 8 last week really took the biscuit.
There were six or eight desks open in a row of 50, and no e-gates. The snaking queue overfilled the hall until an elderly marshal said with a sigh, ‘Oh look, another plane just came in’, followed by ‘Any o’ you folks have a connecting flight in the next 60 minutes?’ To which the best-dressed woman in the line – Goldman Sachs or hedge fund princess perhaps – said: ‘Yes, I do, on Blade.’ ‘OK honey, come on through.’
With a smile of entitlement, the woman overtook at least a hundred of us: Blade, I googled, is a seven-minute $195 helicopter ride from JFK to mid-town Manhattan. This scene from Succession made me smile too – but boy, do they need to sharpen up that airport.
How was early-morning Heathrow by comparison? Remarkably painless. But that was pure luck, because hours earlier every e-gate in every UK airport had simultaneously failed for the second time in a year, once again without explanation from Border Force officials or allocation of blame to software suppliers.
So here’s another note to Sir Keir. Yes, ‘stopping the boats’ matters – but so does welcoming the visitors you want to impress. Make sure our airports are slick.
The next superfood
And what – we need to know – is Starmer’s policy on avocados? The price of the favourite breakfast item for centre-left millennials is set to skyrocket as hotter, drier weather afflicts growers in Chile, Mexico, Peru and elsewhere, according to a report from Christian Aid. Crops will drastically reduce as temperatures rise and water becomes scarcer – a single avocado needing up to 320 litres of water to bring it to ripeness.
That being so, next-generation Islington-ians are no more likely to order smashed avocado on toast than they are to follow it with foie gras and wear real fur coats while doing so. The smooth green icon of dietary virtue will gradually disappear from our menus – to be replaced by what? There’s an obvious gag here about mushy peas. But observation from my last visit to California tells me the next bien pensant superfood will be the sprout, formerly associated with Brussels but widely grown in my native East Yorkshire – where, this year at least, the rain never stops.
Confessions of a catnapper
As Christopher Snowdon recently pointed out, the past few governments have had a habit of passing laws that are either wildly ambitious or incredibly trivial, while neglecting the real problems Britain faces, such as the housing shortage, the productivity crisis and the eye-watering dysfunction of the NHS. An example of the former is the net-zero emissions law passed in 2019, as if the energy policy of a small island in the North Sea can affect the world’s climate. An example of the latter is a bill that will make it a criminal offence to get cats to follow you down the road. Believe it or not, this had its second reading in the House of Lords last week and will enter the statute books later this year.
Had the Pet Abduction Bill been passed 13 years ago, I myself could have been
sent to jail
I don’t doubt the good intentions of Anna Firth MP and Lord Black, the two sponsors of this private member’s bill. And to be fair, it doesn’t just criminalise efforts to abduct cats by, for instance, saying ‘Here, kitty, kitty, kitty’ as you walk backwards down the street. It also makes it an offence to steal a dog or a cat by removing it from its lawful owner. Nevertheless, it’s an example of what Snowdon calls a ‘petty prohibition’ and will end up exacerbating two of the bigger problems that successive governments have failed to address, namely, the ever-increasing workload of the courts and our overcrowded prisons.
Had the Pet Abduction Bill been passed 13 years ago, I myself could have been sent to jail. That’s when my six-month-old cat Trixie went missing. Now, it’s possible she was stolen and had this law been in place she wouldn’t have been – so there is that. But I think it’s more likely she went to live with a neighbour, was run over by a passing car or was chased into unfamiliar territory by an urban fox. It was this last possibility that I clung to and every evening I would set off with my three-year-old son Charlie, who was very fond of her, and comb the surrounding streets, crying out Trixie’s name. One of the things I remember about those nights is Charlie calling her name, too, his high-pitched voice echoing mine.
Then, one night, about two weeks after she’d disappeared, we found her. At least, I thought we had, and so did Charlie, who started jumping for joy. This was about half a mile away in a part of Acton known as Poet’s Corner. She was the same size and sex as Trixie, had an identical white patch under her chin and seemed to respond to her name. But the only way to be sure was to take her to the local vet where the microchip in her neck could be scanned. I’d got her from an animal shelter in Queen’s Park where she’d been chipped and when I registered her at Medivet Acton they scanned her and noted down the serial number. Unfortunately, the vet wouldn’t re-open until the following morning.
What to do? I couldn’t risk leaving her there, lest I never see her again. But on the other hand I didn’t want to catnap her in case she wasn’t Trixie. I decided to knock on half a dozen doors to see if anyone recognised the cat, partly in the hope of finding the family who were currently looking after her and who would tell me she’d suddenly appeared on their doorstep two weeks earlier. Although, had that happened, we might have had a tussle over who was entitled to keep her. Turned out, no one knew anything about her, although I dutifully left my phone number in each home in case one of the neighbours reported a cat missing the next day.
Having satisfied myself this wasn’t a case of mistaken identity, I then, in effect, walked backwards down the street, saying ‘Here, kitty, kitty, kitty’ and got her to follow us home. Once there, we coaxed her inside and shut the door behind us.
You can probably guess how this ends. Charlie and I took her to the vet in the morning where she was given a quick scan and declared to be… a completely different cat. Yikes! We drove straight back to Poet’s Corner and put her back where we’d found her. Or we tried to. By this point, she’d become quite attached to us – particularly Charlie – and didn’t want to be released into the wild. My last glimpse of her was in the rear-view mirror, sprinting to keep up as we sped off down the street.
Would this be an offence under the Pet Abduction Bill? I fear it would. In section 2, subsection (6)(a), it is a crime punishable by up to five years in prison to ‘cause or induce’ someone else’s cat to ‘accompany’ you. I had an excuse, but would it have been ‘reasonable’? Possibly not, particularly if said cat was never seen again. I just hope this new law isn’t enforced retrospectively.
The Battle for Britain | 18 May 2024
Is pro-golf eating itself?
Spare a thought for Manchester United’s Erik ten Hag. He’s got a fairly crummy, injury-hit team who appear to have given up running (apart from Alejandro Garnacho who is still young enough to think that it’s OK to belt down the left wing and then deposit the ball somewhere, though not in goal). His new owner is pictured in the stands with his head in his hands and he has to cope with the choleric visage of his predecessor Sir Alex Ferguson watching on with an expression of scarcely controlled contempt, while two former United godfathers, Gary Neville and Roy Keane, fulminate in the Sky commentary box about how crap the manager is.
His new owner sits with his head in his hands and he has to deal with the choleric visage of Alex Ferguson watching on
But let’s face it: in the past 20 completed seasons only two Premier League managers have done consistently well – Ferguson and Pep Guardiola at Man City. The two Manchester sides have between them won the title 12 times in this 20-season period, five of City’s seven wins achieved under Guardiola, and all five of United’s under Ferguson. In other words, Ten Hag might not have done well but none of the other managers apart from Guardiola and Ferguson – and Jürgen Klopp – have either.
So what is the triple-X factor that separates the best from the rest? All three have brilliant football brains. More, they have put extra emphasis into man management, with Klopp and Guardiola especially establishing strong bonds with each individual player, while Ten Hag is remote and critical. If the players don’t like you, they won’t play for you. Marcus Rashford seems to have stopped even pretending to show the crowd he’s trying when he ambles back.
Contrast that with the level of motivation at City who are now playing with such cool fluency they make even quite a good team like Fulham look like a pub team. I think whoever takes over at United is going to have his work cut out and whoever can build a team that doesn’t seem happy to nestle at around eighth in the table deserves to operate in a decent stadium, not some decrepit, leaky old dump that’s practically falling down.
Much more fun to think about the upcoming Champions League final. No English clubs but a tale of two English talents: Dortmund’s Jadon Sancho and Madrid’s Jude Bellingham. Jude’s rise has been smooth, steady and irresistible. He has a bit of everything: the class of Brazilian midfielder Socrates, the technique of Beckham and the fierce competitiveness of Roy Keane. Jadon’s journey has been more bumpy: much praised at first, he had a very rough patch at United and you can’t help thinking Ten Hag could have handled him so much better. But now he is flowering in Germany, and in contention for the Euros. What a game to look forward to.
On the eve of another major, it’s time to ask if pro-golf is eating itself. There is much blather about ‘growing the game’ but the game is already a bloated monster. Last weekend an American pro called Eric Cole finished last at the Wells Fargo championship, 35 shots behind Rory McIlroy, and trousered $41,000. Rory pocketed $3.6 million. The total prize money for this week’s PGA Championship is $17.5 million. In the ongoing schism with the Saudi-backed LIV tour, sponsors are pulling out of PGA events amid the continuing uncertainty.
McIlroy compares the split in golf to his homeland’s troubles: ‘I sort of liken it to when Northern Ireland went through the peace process in the 1990s. Catholics weren’t happy, Protestants weren’t happy but it brought peace.’ Quite how a plane-load of pampered golfers jetting off to Riyadh to pick up their millions is comparable to sectarian violence in Belfast is another matter, but that’s Rory for you.
Dear Mary: how should I thank a friend for dead flowers?
Q. I left fashion school last year and since then I’ve spent most of my time applying for jobs and being rejected. (That’s only if they’re kind enough to send a rejection – most simply ghost me.) I finally have a job (the company does fast fashion) but when I tell my friends, who are all recent graduates, they mostly say: ‘Well I’m happy if you’re happy but I could never work for such an unethical brand.’ How should I reply without sounding unethical myself?
– C.P., London SW18
A. Next time you meet with this response you can test the naysayers’ pomposity by replying: ‘Oh that’s a shame. Because they were asking me if I knew of any other talented young designers who were looking for work.’
Q. I was sent a huge bouquet of flowers for my birthday from a friend. When I opened them they were almost dead. In fact the leaves were so brown that I could not even send my friend a photo of them. I contacted the florist directly and sent them a photograph. They said they would replace them but their rules are that they always have to tell the sender this has happened. Unfortunately, because I did not want to seem ungrateful to my friend for such a generous gesture, I had already just thanked her profusely and said that the flowers were wonderful. What should I have done?
– P.S., London W3
A. You could have covered yourself by telephoning the friend the next day to say: ‘The bad news is that the flowers dropped dead the day after my birthday. The good news is that I rang the company and they have sent a beautiful replacement bunch, free of charge.’
Q. I’m in the process of setting up a website for a new business venture. Because cash flow is limited, my father-in-law said he would love to do it. He has now shown me what he has designed and it doesn’t look at all professional – both the text and the pictures he has used are simply not good enough. I’m fairly recently married and I don’t yet have the relationship with him where I can say that it’s not what I want but thanks anyway. What should I do?
– Name and address withheld
A. Find a smart website for a company in a parallel, though non-competing, field to your own. Then spare your father-in-law’s feelings by gushing to him that you had a stroke of luck in running into an acquaintance who works for this company. He kindly looked at your own website and advised you exactly what tweaks it needs to maximise efficiency. In this way you launder the criticism through someone other than yourself.
‘Great restaurants can’t thrive in Hampstead’: Ottolenghi reviewed
Ottolenghi is an Israeli deli co-owned by Yotam Ottolenghi, an Israeli Jew, and Sami Tamimi, a Palestinian Muslim. They met in Baker & Spice in London, where they bonded over the dream of persuading more British people to eat salad. This is an ideal story of co-existence (I have met a group of Israeli Jews and Arabs dieting for peace) and I thought the new Ottolenghi in Hampstead might be picketed by idiots shouting for peace but meaning war. (Martha Gellhorn was right about slogans. Never shout them: even ones you agree with.)
It is fine in that I wish I were in the Middle East to eat the original
But this is Hampstead, not Bloomsbury, and there aren’t any pickets. Politics barely makes it here – I think it’s the hill – which is why mid-20th-century socialists loved it and bought idealised cottages from which to tell the working classes what to think. I lived here during the Foot Locker riots of 2011 and the Hampstead variant lasted about four seconds. There is an old gag about seeing a police car in Hampstead: it means someone’s garden furniture has been stolen. This is a depoliticised land and the photographs of the hostages by Sainsbury’s are only half-peeled off. That’s a happy outcome nowadays.
London’s eighth Ottolenghi is on Rosslyn Hill, surrounded by the eerie boutiques and generic coffee shops that signify any gentrified area. It used to be Carluccio’s and, before that, John Keats lived around the corner. It is decorated in the common style of the modern international rich: that is, barely at all. The tables are white plastic. The walls look like chipboard and plaster. The only colour is an alarming orange banquette. It feels as if you could close your eyes, and it would all be gone. The blurb, which is cheeringly bonkers – ‘low intervention wine list… cocktails change with house shrubs’ – is in denial about this. It thinks Rosslyn Hill is cobblestone. It isn’t.
Salads, then. Ottolenghi specialises in salads (aubergine, green bean, cauliflower, cabbage, beetroot) and it knows how to dress them. Idiots call them stolen salads, or occupation salads, or maybe genocide salads – an idiot has invented the concept of genocide oranges, though any genocide that involves the population quintupling is one any Jew will take. There are also pastries, which are less morally fraught than salads – for now.
We eat shakshuka with braised eggs and smoked labneh, and farinata with roasted mushrooms and green tahini, and scrambled eggs with smoked salmon and grilled focaccia, and buttermilk pancakes, and fruit salad. It is fine in that I wish I were in the Middle East to eat the original. Perhaps it is the closeness of Keats’s ghost, or the fact that perfect tomatoes don’t exist in Britain, or that great restaurants can’t thrive somewhere as shrivelled and uncertain of itself as Hampstead. (That’s the rich for you.) Instead, we have something that feels like a pop-up with brightly coloured food: good enough, but itinerant, and more visually pleasing than anything else. (That’s the rich for you.)
Even so, I’m glad I came. The Jew exists to be projected on to, and part of this ongoing passion play is expecting us to like pickled herring. I don’t like pickled herring. If I must have a slogan, I’ll take that one.
Can you ‘go gangbusters’?
‘Is it anything to do with cockle-picking?’ asked my husband, confident he was on the right track. Naturally he wasn’t.
We’d just heard that the economy, growing by 0.6 per cent, was ‘going gangbusters’. The nearest my husband could get was gangmasters, a word we had both learned in 2004, when at least 21 Chinese migrants drowned in Morecambe Bay while picking cockles for a gangmaster, later sent to prison. The Gangmasters (Licensing) Act 2004 then made it a crime to be in charge of people harvesting shellfish or agricultural produce without a licence.
Twenty years earlier, the name of the film Ghostbusters was added to the world’s vocabulary. An accompanying song went: ‘If there’s something weird/ And it don’t look good/ Who you gonna call?’ The answer was Ghostbusters, but I wonder whether this formulation subconsciously lay behind the annoying train announcement in which the answer is to text 61016.
Ghostbusters was a blockbuster. As a name for a successful film it was coined in 1942 soon after the phrase blockbuster bombs.
Busting things was an American preoccupation. In the 19th century, pestiferous weevils brought a reaction from bug busters. In the 1920s, Prohibition saw booze-busters. In 1924, William Wyler’s first silent film short was called The Crook Buster. So in 1936 when a ‘true crime’ radio series began, it was called Gang Busters. In its coverage of the phrases like gangbusters or go gangbusters, the Oxford English Dictionary doesn’t discuss the success of this 21-year series. At the beginning of each episode, an impression of energy was conveyed by sound effects of sirens, shooting and squealing tyres. But the OED does quote the writer Zora Neale Hurston, in 1942: ‘Man, I come on like the Gang Busters, and go off like The March of Time’ (a cinema newsreel series). Last week, Grant Fitzner, chief economist at the ONS, said: ‘To paraphrase the former Australian prime minister Paul Keating, you could say the economy is going gangbusters.’ Keating often used the phrase in the 1990s. My husband might not understand it, but he does know a parallel phrase from a century ago: going great guns.
All boys should own a Swiss Army knife
Last week, Carl Elsener of Victorinox, makers of the Swiss Army knife (all other manufacturers must refer to their products as ‘Swiss-style knives’), announced that the company is working to develop a knife without any blades in anticipation of modern legislation and safety-conscious consumers. A cutting-edge Swiss Army knife will no longer have a cutting edge.
I’m glad this proposal didn’t come out before Christmas: 2023 was the year my wife finally agreed our son could have a knife of his own. She has friends who won’t let their children wash up knives in case they injure themselves, but let them watch YouTube unsupervised. My son and I were firmly of the view that all small boys should have a Swiss Army knife – as advised in paragraph one of The Dangerous Book for Boys, where it tops the list of ‘Essential Kit’, above even a really good marble or a pencil and paper to write down the car numbers of criminals. Apart from the Swiss flag, which is a big plus, you never knew when you might need to loosen a screw or open a wine bottle. The only thing he has yet to find a single purpose for is the ‘multipurpose hook’ on the back – most guides to the knife suggest it can be used to carry packages tied up with string, but they’re not one of his favourite things. He is saving the fish-scaling tool until Halloween, as he’s heard that it’s perfect for carving pumpkins.
The Swiss Army has always been confident of victory – when the Kaiser asked what its 250,000 soldiers could do if Germany invaded with an army of half a million, a member of the militia replied, ‘Shoot twice, then go home’ – but including a corkscrew in their standard kit always seemed slightly cocky. In fact, this was only part of the officers’ version, the Schweizer Offiziersmesser invented by Carl Elsener’s great-grandfather, which the GIs buying them as souvenirs for the folks back home couldn’t pronounce and renamed the Swiss Army knife.
Billy Connolly may have always wanted to visit Switzerland, just to see what the army does with those wee red knives, but the original version did actually serve a military purpose. The service rifle used at the time, the Schmidt-Rubin, had screws that needed to be undone to strip and oil them, and soldiers’ rations came in cans. The original army issue pocket-knife had a screwdriver, can opener and reamer, with grips made from oak – and a blade.
The fact that the blade folds makes it practically useless as a weapon: if you tried to stab anyone with it, you’d do more damage to yourself than your opponent when it snapped shut on your fingers. According to American survivalist websites – which, possibly due to the influence of the TV series MacGyver (where it was the hero’s tool of choice), devote a lot of discussion to what they call ‘SAKs’ – the only way to use them in self-defence is by deploying the awl as a makeshift knuckleduster.
Recruits to the Swiss Army still receive a Swiss Army knife after basic training – but, after previous models failed health and safety, a new version was designed in 2008. It’s as much a rite of passage for them as it is for proper small boys in Britain. Have you ever cut yourself with it, I asked my son. (My wife had thought that the possibility that he might do so if he wasn’t careful was a bug, not a feature.) Oh yes, he said. But not since Boxing Day.
What makes MPs special
On Monday, the House of Commons passed, by one vote, a motion to allow MPs to be suspended from parliament (a ‘risk-based exclusion’) if arrested for sexual or violent crime. The government had preferred that the trigger should be charge, not arrest, but there were enough Tory rebels, including Theresa May, for the lower threshold to be chosen. Jess Phillips, supporting the change, asked rhetorically, and contemptuously: ‘Why do we think we’re so special in here?’ There is, in fact, an answer to her question, and it has nothing to do with any unmerited self-esteem which MPs may feel. King Charles I entered the Commons in person on 4 January 1642. His purpose was to arrest five MPs. He said: ‘Gentlemen, I have accused these persons of no slight crime, but treason, I must have them wheresoever I find them.’ They were not there. The King famously said: ‘I see the birds have flown.’ Equally famously, the Speaker refused to ‘say anything but what the House commands’. As the King retreated from the chamber, members shouted out: ‘Privilege, Privilege.’ They were not referring to generous expenses (a late-20th-century excrescence), but to the privilege of the proceedings of the House over any other authority, including the King (or what we nowadays call the executive, since King Charles III would quite rightly not dream of attending in person). Because MPs have been duly elected, they have the absolute right of attendance. This is what is implied in the phrase ‘the High Court of Parliament’. That right has never been withdrawn from an individual member – as is now proposed – by a committee, but only by the decision of the whole House.
It is strange this is not obvious to all MPs, because it is the basis on which they must operate and almost always have. In her speech in the Commons on Monday, the Leader of the House and thus the responsible minister, Penny Mordaunt, seemed not to understand it. Yet if the executive, in any form, has the power to decide that an MP be suspended or expelled from parliament, it thereby becomes a higher authority than parliament, so nullifying the voters’ choice. The new rule means that henceforth the police have only to arrest an MP on a sex or violence accusation for a committee to get him or her out. That power is wrong in principle and will, in practice, corrupt.
Applications have just closed for the editorship of Conservative Home, the most important independent website for Conservative news and debate. But why did the vacancy occur? No one knows. Conservative Home was very well edited by a former colleague of mine, Paul Goodman. In February, it was announced that he had been made a life peer. The boss of Conservative Home, Lord Ashcroft, immediately tweeted his congratulations to Goodman on becoming ‘a working peer’, but continued: ‘Paul has been Editor of Conservative Home for ten years for which I thank him for his professionalism in that role as he leaves us for the next stage in his career.’ Goodman has made no public remarks about his departure, and no one has been told why Lord Ashcroft chose to remove him from his post in this oblique way. After all, there is no rule of honour, ethics or employment which says that only one life peer can be involved with Conservative Home. So it may be of interest to note that Goodman has recently put down a written question in the House of Lords to the Department for Business and Trade asking the government about its policy on employment tribunals and unfair dismissal.
As I write this column, my wife is working steadily away in her role as churchwarden and treasurer of the parochial church council in our village. She is filling in answers to laborious inquiries about who she and her fellow PCC members are from Churches, Charities and Local Authorities (CCLA) Investment Management Limited, which does what its name suggests. She must do this work to comply with laws about money-laundering. She bitterly regrets that her parish has no money to launder. If she had it, she says, adapting Psalm 51, she would wash it and it would be whiter than snow. Meanwhile, the Church Commissioners are setting up a £100 million programme of ‘impact investment, research and engagement’ to atone for the earnings from slavery amassed 300 years ago by its predecessor, Queen Anne’s Bounty. It turns out, however, that almost all the Bounty’s earnings came not from slavery but from British government debt, paying out interest on annuities, a fact which the Commissioners discovered once they had investigated it, but in effect ignored. Please could this non-dirty money be quickly recycled into the function for which it was intended – the Christian life of the parishes of England?
The other week, I mentioned Oblomov, Ivan Goncharov’s wonderful 19th-century novel about a man who does nothing. I have been reading it, suitably slowly, and have just finished. One day, Oblomov, trying feebly to learn what is going on in the great world, asks a few desultory questions of a friend, Alexeyev. The talk peters out: “‘Well,’ Oblomov said after a pause, ‘what other news is there in politics?’ ‘They write that the earth is cooling down: one day it will be all frozen.’ ‘Will it indeed? But that is not politics at all, is it?’ said Oblomov.” No, it isn’t, and nor is the belief that the world is warming up. What misery, money-wasting and bad policy have resulted in our time from our failure to understand this.
I find the phrase ‘deep dive’ useful. As soon as you hear it, you know that the person offering it is not to be trusted. It is one of a growing collection of official words and phrases which mean the opposite of what they state. Others include, ‘We welcome the report’, ‘We take allegations of x very seriously’, ‘Your call is important to us’, ‘We’ve been very clear’ and ‘diversity’.