Sam Leith

Quite the scoop in yesterday’s Sun. An anonymous cabinet minister has briefed the paper that to secure Britain’s economic future, we need a baby boom. The birth rate has fallen from 2.93 children per woman in 1964 to 1.58 today. We have an ageing population, and a shrinking workforce, and something must be done. 'We need to have more children,' says this minister. 'The rate keeps falling. Look at Hungary – they cut taxes for mothers who have more children.' And, indeed, they do. In Viktor Orban’s fiefdom you’re let off income tax for life if you manage to squeeze out four or more kids.

Liz Truss has, if nothing else, been working on her delivery. Her first speech to conference as Prime Minister was only about seventy per cent as stilted as usual. She occasionally, though just occasionally, sounded like she was speaking to the audience rather than reading something off an autocue. She remembered to smile. She even had a go at pointing matily into the crowd when she was saying nice things about her 'dynamic new chancellor' or her 'fantastic deputy prime minister'. And – which was the most she could have hoped for – she got through it without dropping any sort of clanger. The speech itself, perhaps deliberately, was a hopelessly dull effort: a compendium of exhausted buzz-phrases chunked into groups of three or strung together with laborious anaphora.

‘You are here’, as those signs in windswept carparks unhelpfully point out. Yup. No mistaking it, you will tend to think glumly as you look at them. I had the same feeling when I looked at a new report from no less an institution than America’s National Bureau of Economic Research. The report is called The Midlife Crisis. It tells us that in the western world, one’s forties and early fifties are associated with problems with sleep, clinical depression and suicidal thoughts, disabling headaches and dependence on alcohol, alongside a decline in basic measures of life satisfaction. Well, fancy. I don’t know about clinical depression and suicidal thoughts, I should say. Not so melodramatic, me.

It is an almost unquestioned orthodoxy that war is hell, and that every needless death in a needless war diminishes our common stock of humanity. It’s curious, though, how we're able to hold that conviction alongside a positively visceral excitement at watching the Ukrainian counter-offensive carve its way through the Kharkiv Oblast. Some 3,000 square kilometres have been recaptured: Ukrainian troops are moving through their own land at such a clip that they’ve made more progress in three days than the massed might of the Russian invaders have since April. I’ve been eating it up. Haven’t you? The images of abandoned armour, the fuel dumps, the sullen faces of Russian commanders rounded up as prisoners of war.

Many years ago, when the earth was young and leaving the European Union was a position espoused only by those trying to stay on the right side of Bill Cash at a drinks party, Ken Clarke stood for the Tory leadership against Iain Duncan Smith. He said one memorable thing while making his doomed bid for the captaincy – which was that the Tories needed to decide whether they were going to be a political party or a debating society. What I understand him to have meant by that was that ideological purity buttered no parsnips in politics. For most of its history, its friends and its enemies alike would agree that the Conservative party has been a magnificent machine for winning and retaining power.

With an honourable exception for the Beastie Boys, I can’t stand the use of ‘party’ as a verb. It immediately reminds me of ‘Party, party, party, oikies!’ – the war cry of the drunken potbellied Afrikaaners who once roared in their bakkiesonto our Namibian campsite at about 2 a.m. and proceeded to be, well, Boerish. It’s a usage that smacks of creepy men in movies inviting young women into their cars, or footballers in search of questionably consensual sex. It has passed from a frat-boy Americanism into a tabloid euphemism for illegal drug use and sexual sleaze without ever quite passing through a phase of meaning, actually, having a party. Yet ‘partying’ is what the Finnish Prime Minister stands accused of.

When I met Salman Rushdie in New York a couple of years ago, he told me that the days in which he feared physical attack were long behind him. ‘It only affects my life when I talk to journalists,’ he said, a little pertly. ‘It is 20 years since I required any form of protection. I go everywhere I want.’ That was true, and not true. It was obvious to me – and, Sir Salman being no fool, will have been even more obvious to him – that thirtysomething years after the philistine clerisy of Iran sentenced him to death, there was nothing to prevent a lone nutter making an attempt on his life. And it looks like that is exactly what has now happened. The reason he denied something so obvious is that he didn’t want it to define him.