Lionel Shriver

This is a two-parter, albeit linked. If you’re interested in the duplicitousness of British journalists, then keep reading. If you’re only interested in self-destructive British tax policy, skip to the middle. Burnt repeatedly by hacks who pretend to be enraptured by my latest novel while snooping through my cupboards, I long ago learned the hard way not to let British journalists into my home. Thus for years I only conducted interviews in the safely impersonal lobby of a West End hotel. But lessons learned are too often lessons lost. That may be an overly kind formulation of: I am an idiot. In my new hang in Portugal, I reverted to gormless naivety last month and let a British journalist into my house.

Every couple of years a columnist-cum-novelist will inevitably stoop to shameless self-promotion. In my defence, at least the novel released this month is germane to the political moment. Lest its simple title, A Better Life, come across as lame, I asked the designers of my British and American hardback covers to use imagery that conveys the book’s focal subject matter: immigration. See, proponents of unfettered mass migration have eternally assured us that most illegal immigrants – or as the Biden administration instructed federal law enforcement to call them, ‘newcomers’ – are merely seeking ‘a better life’. This explanation is routinely trotted out as an irrefutable justification for a potentially near-infinite imposition of foreigners on western polities.

No matter how many jurisdictions discover the hard way that wealth taxes backfire, in California an initiative is collecting signatures to put a ‘one-time’ (ha!) 5 per cent tax on the net worth of the state’s roughly 200 billionaires on November’s ballot. Hey, those guys are rich. They won’t even notice. But the funny thing about people and money is that even folks with lots like to keep it. The 2026 Billionaire Tax Act is slyly retroactive, a variety of pre-crime legislation – applying to anyone resident in California on 1 January this year, looping a bungee cord around the ankles of would-be absconders. Thus billionaires such as Peter Thiel scrambled to establish a presence in a lower tax state before midnight on New Year’s Eve.

Convicted last month of plotting what could have proved the worst terrorist attack in British history, Walid Saadaoui had hoped to murder at least 50 people in Prestwich, because ‘Prestwich is full of Jews’. He was caught purchasing four AK-47s, two handguns and 1,200 rounds of ammunition. For Saadaoui’s fires of righteousness on social media had earlier drawn the eye of British law enforcement. ‘Avenge your religion Oh Muslims in Europe,’ he posted. ‘I pray to you not to catch me until I break my thirst with Jews, Christians and their proxies’ blood.’ Thus Saadaoui instructed an undercover officer: ‘Grab a Jewish person and slaughter him and remove his head, rub blood on my body, throw it away. That is the least we can do.

Many years ago, a friend described one of my serious literary novels as ‘clever’. I was offended – but I shouldn’t have been. The friend was from across the pond, where I now understand ‘clever’ simply means smart. For Americans, cleverness infers a shallow, facile intelligence. Applied to people, it often hints at sly, calculating deviousness or cunning. It has no positive moral qualities, as westerners understand them. Tax evasion can be ‘clever’. Let’s move on to ‘culture’ – a big, fuzzy word we throw about with careless abandon that often summons images of traditional clothing and cuisine. But, parsed in its most profound sense, culture might best be defined as ‘what a people admire and what they deplore’.

During last week’s excruciating Oval Office make-nice between an insultingly buddy-buddy American President and a fraudulently obsequious New York City mayor-elect, the contest was over which pol was the more patronising. At one point Trump graciously granted his petitioner permission to call him a ‘fascist’ while clearly implying the guy’s OTT campaign rhetoric had been embarrassing. Donald Trump sat regally on his throne, patting Zohran Mamdani’s arm while commending ‘Attaboy!’ as if petting a golden retriever that had fetched a ball. For his part, Mamdani stood mutely by the Resolute desk with cartoonish humility, hands over crotch. This cowed performance of beta-male submission was meant to disguise who’d got a leg over whom.

Aside from streaming on an iPad, one of the few entertainments on offer when riding a stationary bike is tracking your heart rate. Breaking 150 beats per minute provides a fleeting (and doubtless misplaced) sense of achievement. Yet the wearable heart monitor that came with my exercise bicycle proved unreliable; one’s BPM never truly drops from 137 to 69 in one second. This is to explain why I bought the fitness freak’s fetish: an Apple watch. Its heart-rate monitors are accurate. I opted for a reconditioned older model, not only half the price of the new ones but inclusive of the blood oximeter function, which a medical technology suit has forced Apple to eliminate in current American models until the litigant’s patent runs out in 2028.

A personal note this week, as 15 October 2025 marked an occasion of sorts: when my husband’s and my Portuguese residency permits expired. Isn’t that a bit sloppy, you might ask, allowing your permission to remain in a country where you live to lapse? On one party’s part, very sloppy, but not ours. At least a dozen people must have exclaimed to me: ‘Oh, I’ve thought about moving to Portugal!’ After emigrating from London in 2023, I’m not issuing a warning exactly. We don’t regret the move. Landscape gorgeous, food great, people nice, wine cheap. But this country is notoriously bureaucratic, and the paperwork side of playing Mother, May I? with Portuguese immigration was and remains a nightmare.

For years, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) has wrapped itself in a guise of medical expertise, advising doctors, schools and corporations in America about how best to treat the hundreds of thousands of people who have mysteriously become confused about which sex they are (personally, I’d recommend a quick dart to the loo to pull down their pants). In truth, WPATH is an advocacy organisation whose storm troopers comprise manic men in dresses who hate women but also think they are women. Get your head round that. Last year, a trove of intra-organisational emails exposed the recklessness of its indiscriminate promotion of ‘gender-affirming care’ (neither affirmative nor care) for ostensibly transgender minors.

The Charlie Kirk assassination has triggered a spate of duelling death counts. The usual media suspects on both sides of America’s epic left-right divide have trotted out set lists of the past decade’s politically motivated violence. For once, the faction that chocks up the most fatalities in this warped real-life video game loses – for the competition is over which end of the political spectrum can blame the other end for the frenzied ideological bloodlust we’ve been told for days now characterises the contemporary United States. For the left, the starring evidence that the right’s crazies pose the greater threat to the orderly conduct of civic life is January 6th.

During the immigration deluge in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, it seems one Afghan and one Indian national who threw themselves on the mercy of much-besieged Ireland got lost in the shuffle. Fobbed off with €25 vouchers, they were obliged to sometimes sleep rough for two months, without access to food and hygiene and exposed to hardship and fear. They’ve sued the Irish state. Knowing Irish NGOs, I bet they got help. The government has argued that the pressures on Ireland’s hospitality at the time were severe enough to qualify as a force majeure. Their reception centres were full to bursting and there was no room at the inn (and haven’t we heard that before). The Irish High Court sought a ruling from the European Court of Justice.