Nicola sturgeon

When people ask me what my politics are, I have to explain that I support a dwindling faction you might call the Terry-Thomas wing of the Conservative party. This faction dominated the party in the 1980s – the kind of spivvy garagiste who, no sooner was your back turned, would knock down a row of medieval cottages to open a Hyundai dealership. There were probably a few too many of them in the 1980s. Today we need them back. Shakespeare depicts this archetype very well, possibly because (as a Brummie entrepreneur) he was one himself. He understood that you need a few chancers and opportunists around to make things happen. Where are they now? What could be better for Britain than to divert money from Scottish nationalism and spend it on the private sector instead?

Mark Nowak, father of the murdered Henry Nowak, spoke powerfully in public after Vickrum Digwa was convicted of the crime. He said there was ‘no moment when the pain stops’ and he thought there never would be. This prompted a comparison in my mind. Last month, Daphne Hamilton-Fairley died, aged 95. Our families were neighbours and friends in Bayswater in the late 1950s, and kept in touch after we moved to the country. Daphne’s husband, Gordon, was a most distinguished oncologist at Bart’s. One morning in 1975, he was walking in Campden Hill Square. His dogs sniffed under a car. A bomb planted there exploded, killing Gordon (and the dogs). The IRA had intended to blow up the MP Sir Hugh Fraser, husband of the famous Lady Antonia, who lived next door.

Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, stands explicitly in the tradition of Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum 135 years ago. Both seek to uphold the dignity of human work in the age of the machine. The present Leo warns eloquently against building the Tower of Babel rather than, like Nehemiah, rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem by cooperation. He does not, however, engage fully with the discussion of what AI – and particularly AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) – might be. The Pope proposes his ‘civilisation of love’, but the promoters of AGI themselves claim to be conducting ‘a civilisation experiment’. If AGI can discern patterns in an infinity of data which the human mind cannot, will it produce a new understanding of nature, a theory of everything?

Fighting dirty Sir: John Power is very interesting (‘Dark matter’, 16 August) when outlining the ‘dark arts’ being proposed by Labour to counter the political threat of Nigel Farage and Reform. This is nothing new of course, with one of the most divisive examples being during the Batley and Spen by-election in 2021, when Keir Starmer’s future was on the line if Labour had lost. During the campaign, a controversial Labour leaflet, clearly designed to appeal to Muslim voters, made a number of criticisms against the then prime minister, Boris Johnson, including a picture of him shaking hands with the Indian prime minister Narendra Modi, with the words: ‘Don’t risk a Tory MP who is not on your side.

Successful political leaders hold in their minds some idea of what Mrs Thatcher called ‘Our People’. In this context, I do not mean the whole population of the country they seek to lead, or the core of the party they belong to. I mean that group of people with whose aspirations they most wish to identify. In making that identification, they combine direct self-interest – getting their floating vote – with a wider view about who are most important for the nation’s future prosperity and good order. In the Thatcher era, such people were the famous C2s, first-generation home-buyers, millions who could expect not only to earn but also to own. In Tony Blair’s time, the group was not so different, but a bit softer, as one expects when growth has seemed secure for many years.

Home Tulip Siddiq resigned as economic secretary to the Treasury, although she was found not to have broken the ministerial code; she had, however, lived in a flat provided by allies of her aunt, Sheikh Hasina, the deposed prime minister of Bangladesh, apparently under the impression that the flat was a gift from her parents, despite having signed a Land Registry transfer form for it. Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, flew to China and met He Lifeng, one of the four vice-premiers. In her absence the cost of government borrowing rose again, with the yield on 30-year gilts rising to 5.42 per cent, the highest for 27 years. Downing Street said she would remain in her role ‘for the whole of this parliament’. But people wondered.