I’m torn between headlining this column ‘Why I’m moving to Portugal’ and ‘Why I’m leaving the UK’. Exhausted, shadowed by tippling towers of cardboard, once more unable to put my hands on a black marker when I bought a whole box or to locate a tape gun when we have bloody four of them, in all having perversely disassembled a working household into a shambled heap, I am hard-pressed to answer either question. Why have I done this to myself? Remind me.
If the UK is falling on hard times, isn’t it when you’re down on your luck that your mates should rally round?
On the positive side, I have knocked together a thumbnail for friends. Shifting to a new country is ‘a last big adventure’, and my husband and I are at an age that we probably have only one big daring leap left in us. The more obvious alternative, returning to our native United States, would have felt like retreat. Stretching to another European country instead is expansive. Adapting will be tough, and taking on new difficulties is what the doctors claim forestalls dementia. Yet this ‘last adventure’ paradigm is a bit abstract.
More tangibly, we have good friends in both Lisbon and Porto already. A professional jazz drummer for more than half a century, my husband has been playing with Portuguese colleagues for years and has built up a network that will make his entry into the music scene graceful. Mercifully, I also have a Portuguese publisher again. Many Spectator readers will have been to the country, so I can keep the tourist-board hard sell to a minimum. Beautiful beaches extend a 15-minute stroll from our new house, roomier than anything we could afford in Britain; from our awaiting back balconies, the sea glistens on the horizon. The fish is fab. The wine is fab too, and cheap. (The one severe downside? I’ll be back in the EU.)
The Portuguese themselves are bafflingly nice. This is what New York Times columnist David Brooks would characterise as a ‘high-trust society’. Crime is low. People honour their commitments. On average, they don’t cheat one another. The builders making a few improvements to our property have been financially scrupulous (no cost overruns, and the project is on time). They clearly take pride in the quality of their craftsmanship, which is impeccable. Not to get stuck into Suella Braverman’s whole multiculturalism palaver, but Portugal is still culturally coherent. The population is only 11 million, and most of them are Portuguese. In the London neighbourhood we’re leaving behind, we have not been living among the English.
Which brings us to the negative drivers. I am profoundly concerned about the future of the UK, whose leaders, Tory and Labour both, have failed to plan like grown-ups. I’ve watched with growing horror for 25 years while coal and nuclear power plants have gone offline with no serious reinvestment in reliable energy sources. Net zero is rapidly rounding into a catastrophe. Everything is meant to be electric by 2035 or so – about 11 years from now – yet, whoops! No one seems to have got round to remembering to generate more electricity. The incompetence is so glaring it makes your jaw drop.
I’ve increasingly had the sensation of living in a country that is falling apart. Any newspaper reader could rattle through the list. The NHS is in a state of collapse; accounting for one out of seven Britons, its waiting list grows only longer. For the last year, the prevalence of strikes has been positively Gallic. Water companies are pouring raw sewage into rivers as if it’s still the Victorian era. Inflation is higher and stickier than in both the US and the EU, and the long-term prospects for an already woefully indebted exchequer look dire. The tax burden is the highest since the war, and last I checked the UK wasn’t making a massive collective sacrifice to defeat an aggressive German dictator. With a fierce and worsening housing shortage, the British government still let in a staggering 610,000 net extra foreigners last year for whom there is no provision; the only country I know of with poorer control of its own borders is the United States. Meanwhile, a disproportionately large domestic population dependent on the state continues to increase; while some are deserving of help, a few of these folks disabled by ‘anxiety’ just might have an attitude problem. Our movers arrive tomorrow. I’ll show you anxiety.
British governance has become only more controlling and punitive, creating a social vibe that’s oppressive. With every new law comes another raft of fines and threats of incarceration. Covid revealed this country’s ugly authoritarian underbelly. Depressingly, too, British institutions have almost universally imported America’s vile race-and-gender mania. If you Brits were going to convert to a self-destructive ideology, you might at least have contrived your own.
I will come clean, however. I feel strangely guilty. Sure, few Britons will give a hoot whether one more expat writer moves somewhere else. I’m still tortured by a sense of betrayal. Technically, Britain is not my country, but I’ve lived here off and on for 36 years and have accordingly formed an attachment. If the UK is falling on hard times, isn’t it when you’re down on your luck that your mates should rally round? As the cliché has it, I feel like a rat deserting a sinking ship. But then, when I confided this, a friend noted: ‘Rats have to live too.’
Although improved weather beckons, I relocate with a heavy heart. For me, one dominant reason for moving to Portugal in particular is that it’s such a short plane ride back to London. So you’ve not got shed of me for keeps. I should clarify as well that I’m not off to a sunny retirement. In my new study, the view from my desk will be a slight improvement on today’s – a garish nail salon covered in graffiti and the sedulous tailback of the Rotherhithe Tunnel – but this digital nomad will continue to be your columnist, keeping close track of British goings on from a step back. The main difference? Maybe I’ll be in a better mood.
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