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Do high taxes make you less generous?
Here’s a question: do you think that Bill Gates would have started and built up his Microsoft empire had the top rate of US income tax been 99 per cent? I don’t know Gates but I think the answer is obvious. Why would he have put in all those hours and taken all those risks if the state was going to snatch away virtually all the rewards? Either he wouldn’t have bothered or – my guess – he would have jumped on a plane and founded his business somewhere else, even renouncing his US citizenship in the process in order to avoid the taxman coming after him.
I pose the question because 99 per cent is the proportion of his worldly wealth that Gates announced this week he intends to give away over the next 20 years. That is a pretty useful sum of money: £150 billion is nearly enough to fund the entire NHS for a year. This is on top of the £75 billion he has already donated to humanitarian projects through the Bill Gates Foundation.
Cynics might say that Gates is only making such a magnanimous gesture because he knows he is approaching the final phase of his life – in 20 years he will be 89 and may not be in much of a position to spend any money at all. And if the US federal government taxed his personal income more during his career it would have got its claws on his money at an earlier date, helping to fund schools and hospitals back in the 1980s. But that misses the point. Society has ended up getting far, far more out of Gates than it would have done through punitive tax rates. In fact, it has almost certainly been getting more directly out of Gates than it would have done had the US government been too greedy. With punitive taxation there might not even have been a Microsoft to pay corporate taxes, let alone a high-earning Bill Gates to pay personal taxes. Gates’s philanthropy should really be thought of as a bonus, which comes on top of his large contributions to the US Treasury over the decades.
It isn’t just Gates. Whole ranks of US institutions rely on the generosity of individuals. Why are US universities so rich, and so able to fund places for poor kids? Because they are swimming in donations from alumni rather than sourly begging the government for money.
Ask why the US has so much more of a developed culture of philanthropy than Britain and there is an obvious answer: with lower tax rates wealthy Americans feel more able, and more inclined, to distribute their wealth to social causes. When you are paying a top rate of tax of 37 per cent rather than 47 per cent (the effective upper rate of tax in Britain) you have significantly more to give away. But it isn’t just that: the more of your wealth you are forced to hand over to the state, the more you might be inclined to think: the government sees to social stuff, so I don’t need to bother.
Do you really think that Bill Gates would have started and built up his Microsoft empire had the top rate of US income tax been 99 per cent?
Just look at the World Giving Index, compiled by the Charities Aid Foundation. The countries at the top of the pile all have relatively low upper rates of income tax: Indonesia (35 per cent), Kenya (35 per cent), Singapore (24 per cent), Nigeria (24 per cent) and the US (37 per cent). The UK sits at position 22 when it comes to giving.
Now look at the countries which have an effective top rate of income tax of over 50 per cent: Finland (51.4 per cent top rate, 70th on the World Giving Index), Denmark (55.9 per cent and 39th) and Japan (55 per cent and 139th).
Not everyone will agree, of course, with all the causes which Gates has supported. But then it is his money; it is not coming out of your pocket. I challenge anyone to say that they think their own government – which very much is spending their money – spends it more wisely than the Bill Gates Foundation does. No one is saying that philanthropy is a complete substitute for public spending, but it is something which deserves to be encouraged – and punitive rates of taxation levied by many countries are doing the opposite.
Coffee House Shots Live: The local elections shake-up
The May elections were a disaster for the Tories – but a triumph for Reform. As the dust settled on the results, Spectator subscribers and readers heard from Reform UK’s chairman Zia Yusuf and former Tory MP Jacob Rees-Mogg at a live edition of Coffee House Shots: The local elections shake-up. Joining them at the Emmanuel Centre in Westminster on 7 May was The Spectator’s editor Michael Gove, deputy political editor James Heale and political correspondent Lucy Dunn.
‘The reality is that people simply do not believe anything that the Tories say anymore,’ says Yusuf
‘I remain more confident than ever that Nigel Farage will be our next Prime Minister,’ Yusuf told the audience. ‘Our ambition is for Nigel to get the keys to Number 10 Downing Street, and for us to have 350 to 400 Reform MPs in 2029.’
Reform’s resurgence is certainly causing trouble for the Conservatives. Yusuf said there is a simple reason why: ‘The reality is that people simply do not believe anything that the Tories say anymore.’
Rees-Mogg said that his party urgently needs to listen to voters: ‘We as conservatives have to recognise that these elections were a huge victory for conservatism, but not for the Conservative party. They were a victory for views that conservatives hold. The advice I would give to the Conservative party is to be conservative and get back to what we’re meant to do, which is to be on the side of the people who vote for us.’
Should Reform and the Tories team up? Yusuf suggested that a pact isn’t in Reform’s interests, because, he said, the Tory party is now toxic: ‘The brand of the Conservative Party and the Tory brand is broken. We live in a world now where a young startup can make big moves very quickly.’
Reform’s success can only continue, of course, if it can keep hold of its new voters. To do so, it needs to ensure that it delivers. Michael Gove who chaired the discussion asked what voters in the places where Reform is now in charge can expect from their Reform representatives.
‘We’re going to govern in a very different way,’ says Yusuf. One of the party’s big targets is wasteful spending. ‘If you are a DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) officer, or if you have a sneakily slightly different job title to protect you from FOI (Freedom of Information) requests, you should potentially start looking for new work’.
As well as tackling waste, Yusuf says Reform is determined to do something to address voters’ fears that their communities are being hollowed out: ‘So many of these communities have been totally left behind. And I do think there are serious questions that we need to ask as a country about how do we revivify a community spirit? I don’t think that has been done in decades.’
As James Heale pointed out, the signs of the economic malaise of the last decade that has gripped Britain are clear to see on high streets around Britain: ‘We have just failed to grow for a generation. What you are seeing is the visible decline, particularly compared to other nations around the world, which are growing at a much faster rate.’ This was a theme explored in Gus Carter’s cover piece for The Spectator.
Unhappiness about the state of the country is one of the reasons voters are turning to Reform. But it isn’t only in England that the party is capitalising. Lucy Dunn said that Reform is riding high north of the border too. Reform’s message to Scottish voters to ignore the Tories and Labour and turn to Reform is cutting through, particularly in working-class areas in cities like Glasgow, says Dunn.
The event concluded with questions from the audience before a few lucky subscribers joined the panel at a post-event drinks reception back at The Spectator’s Westminster offices, courtesy of our partner Charles Stanley.
You can listen to a full recording of Coffee House Shots Live: The local elections shake-up here. Join our events newsletter here for updates on upcoming events and special offers
Putin’s ‘biggest ever’ Victory Day goes off without a hitch
Not to be outdone by the celebration of VE Day across Western Europe yesterday, Vladimir Putin this morning staged his own ‘biggest ever’ Victory Day celebrations in Moscow. Over the course of Putin’s rule, the annual celebration of 9 May has gradually morphed from a solemn commemoration of the victory over Nazi Germany to being a key ideological cornerstone of his regime. Never one to miss a chance to send a message to Russia’s foreign adversaries, today’s 80th anniversary parade across Red Square – Putin’s 25th – was more a neat showcase of the President’s own militaristic and jingoistic ambitions than a tribute to the country’s past sacrifices.
Everything associated with the preparations for today’s event was a degree of magnitude bigger than in previous years. A three-day ceasefire in the war in Ukraine, announced by Putin last month to honour the occasion, began yesterday. Unsurprisingly, the Russian army is already reported to have broken it, according to Ukrainian authorities.
The Kremlin was clearly nervous about the potential havoc Ukrainian saboteurs could cause
In the centre of Red Square, a huge viewing platform had been erected next to, and over the top of Lenin’s tomb – quite the statement given the macabre reverence in which the site is usually held by the Kremlin. Joining Putin on the stand were the leaders of more than 20 foreign countries, notably including Chinese President Xi Jinping and Slovakia’s Robert Fico, the only EU leader to have dared to make the trip.
Today’s parade also marked the first for Minister of Defence Andrei Belousov, who replaced the jaded Sergei Shoigu shortly after last year’s commemorations. More than 11,500 servicemen took part, as did parade units from 13 countries, including Belarus, Vietnam, Egypt and most strikingly China. The presence of Beijing’s leader and troops marks Xi’s most overt endorsement of Putin’s military aggression – an ominous, although not altogether unsurprising, collaboration.
Now in the fourth year of its invasion of Ukraine, Russia’s armed forces made substantial efforts today to quite literally bring out the big guns, after heavy losses sustained in previous years at the front meant that weapons and machinery available for traipsing across Moscow’s Red Square were noticeably lacking. In a jarring reminder of just how superficially 9 May has become a celebration of the USSR’s victory over Hitler, a stream of modern military equipment being used in Ukraine joined the parade, including BRM-1K combat reconnaissance vehicles, Giatsint-K and Malva 152-mm artillery systems and a number of drone models.
Intriguingly, for the ‘bigger and better’ mantra that clearly encapsulated the Kremlin’s planning of today’s parade, this didn’t seem to apply to Putin’s speech. The Russian President gave an uncharacteristically snappy address – one of his shortest in recent years. Paying tribute to the Soviet veterans of the second world war, he said ‘Our duty is to defend the honour of the soldiers and commanders of the Red Army’. Linking his own invasion of Ukraine to Hitler’s march on Moscow, he added, ‘fathers, grandfathers and great-grandfathers saved the Fatherland and have bequeathed to us the defence of the Motherland.’
In a not-so-subtle reference to Ukraine – or the ‘special military operation’ to ‘denazify’ the country, as the Kremlin has frequently described it – Putin continued: ‘Russia has been and will be an indestructible barrier to Nazism, Russophobia, anti-Semitism, and will fight the atrocities committed by the proponents of these aggressive, destructive ideas.’ The ‘entire country, society, and people’ support those fighting in Ukraine, he claimed. A poll published by the Levada Centre earlier this week would, however, beg to differ: just 30 per cent of respondents still supported the war in Ukraine – the lowest number since the invasion began in 2022. A 18-gun salute a stone’s throw away at the foot of the Kremlin marked the end of the minute’s silence that followed Putin’s speech.
Following the end of the parade, Putin descended from the stands to inspect the nervous, sweating generals of the units – including the foreign ones – represented on Red Square. One chief, starstruck or perhaps terrified, froze up, lost for words, palm stuck to his temple in salute, leading to several seconds of painful silence in front of the President and Russian state media. Putin actually reached up to the poor man’s head to prize his hand away – not without visible force – into a handshake before moving swiftly onwards.
Despite all the pomp and ceremony, the Kremlin was clearly nervous about the potential havoc Ukrainian saboteurs could cause. In a shockingly casual breach of civil liberties, Russian media began reporting yesterday that the capital’s authorities would be imposing an internet and mobile signal blackout across Moscow. This followed swarms of Ukrainian drone attacks on the capital this week, and while the communications – and even online banking – of ordinary Muscovites were apparently affected for a number of hours this morning, the parade on Red Square did seemingly go off without a hitch.
The Resistance will be woke
After surviving an assassination attempt and winning reelection with a clear lead in the popular vote, Donald Trump was – briefly, and for the first time in his political career – seen by many pundits as incarnating the future rather than the past. In his first months back in the White House, the radicalism and vindictiveness of the administration have given jitters to a lot of independents who were key in helping him win and hardened opposition among his longtime critics. Any fleeting sense that the MAGA movement was culturally ascendent appears, at least for now, to be gone.
And yet, the conventional wisdom holds that a broader ‘vibe shift’ is here to stay. Starting in 2013 or 2014, mainstream culture was for a decade dominated by the rise of wokeness, which can perhaps best be understood as a combination of a new left-identitarian ideology and a determination to expel anybody who violates its moral norms from the community of the righteous. But that culture has now supposedly foundered on its deep unpopularity. Opponents of wokeness have become much more willing to speak out about it in forceful terms. Cancellations have become much rarer. Wokeness, so the story goes, is on the way out.
I’m not so sure. The extremism of the Trump administration is now in danger of making left-leaning institutions and organisations as reactive as they were during his first term in office. While Joe Biden was in office, it was possible, with care and circumspection, to criticise wokeness, DEI or the more extreme forms of trans ideology from a left-of-centre perspective. Now, any such dissent is once again starting to be perceived as ‘running interference for Trump’. The reversion to the culture which prevailed from 2016 through 2020 is only in its beginning stages, and it may never be fully consummated – but once you become attuned to its possibility, the signs are everywhere.
Here, in no particular order, are some recent news stories and personal experiences which suggest that reports of the death of wokeness are greatly exaggerated:
At a recent townhall, Tim Walz explained how Kamala Harris, his running mate, had lost to Donald Trump: ‘We let them define the issue on immigration. We let them define the issue on DEI. And we let them define what woke is.’ The remedy Walz, a potential 2028 hopeful, prescribed for Democrats was a whole-hearted embrace of identity politics: ‘We got ourselves in this mess because we weren’t bold enough to stand up and say: “You’re damn right we’re proud of these policies. We’re gonna put them in. And we’re gonna execute them”.’
Arbitrary firings and cancellations are making a comeback. Sewell Chan is a distinguished journalist who has had stints as a senior editor at the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times as well as the editor-in-chief of the Texas Tribune. Less than a year ago, he was hired to rescue the ailing Columbia Journalism Review, and quickly scored some big journalistic hits. Then he was abruptly let go for reasons that resemble the witch hunts of a supposedly bygone era. The ‘misdeeds’ which apparently led to his unceremonious firing include requiring a staff member to come into the office rather than letting her work from home and chastising another for a conflict of interest after repeatedly publishing in a radical publication shortly after writing a glowing profile of it. A hit piece also accused Chan of such heinous crimes as growing agitated while trying to get a major scoop online and standing too close to an employee in the process.
A faction of left-of-centre liberals has for the past years been pushing a major American university to make some key reforms: they wanted to abolish mandatory diversity statements in faculty hiring; to make sure that orientations for incoming students emphasised the importance of open dialogue; and to push back against the friend-and-enemy thinking that suffused its DEI office. Until recently, a friend of mine who teaches at the university told me, numerous colleagues of hers were sympathetic to such common sense concerns. But that all changed once Donald Trump took office for the second time. In the latest faculty meetings, even comparatively moderate faculty members whom she had previously seen as allies were deeply hostile to the proposed changes. They now opposed any ‘concession’ as ‘capitulating to Trump’.
When celebrity pollster Nate Silver recently sat down with Galen Druke, a former colleague of his at 538, to predict who might lead the Democratic Party into the 2028 presidential elections, they both agreed on the most likely candidate: ‘My first pick of the first-round draft is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’, Druke ventured. ‘Fuck you! That was going to be my fucking first pick!’, Silver replied. Though AOC, perhaps the most famous national representative of ‘woke’ politics, has poor approval ratings in the electorate as a whole, Silver emphasised how formidable she would be in a primary contest: she is very popular among Democratic voters, dominates the progressive lane, and is capable of commanding tremendous media attention.
Over the last months, I have attended a number of gatherings and conferences and dinners at which the leaders of some of America’s biggest foundations sought to figure out a strategy for how to defend American democracy. Few of them were as openly devoted to the most extreme forms of identitarian ideology as they might have been a few years ago; Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X. Kendi largely went unmentioned. But the reigning worldview at the top of the philanthropic world has changed little since the summer of 2020. The general consensus holds that voters turned to Trump because American democracy did not deliver for the ‘historically marginalised’. The solution supposedly revolves around ‘mobilising underrepresented communities’. The most urgent imperative of the moment is to ‘fight for equity’ and ‘listen to the global majority’.
In February, Laurel Libby, a Republican state representative in Maine, posted a montage of two photos from award ceremonies for the state high school high vault competition on Facebook, showing the same student athlete before and after their transition. ‘Two years ago, John tied for 5th place in boys’ pole vault,’ she wrote. ‘Tonight, “Katie” won first place.’ Democrats in Maine didn’t just publicly disagree with Libby’s stance on the participation of trans girls in female sporting competitions or criticise her decision to publish the photograph of this particular athlete on social media; 75 out of 76 Democratic legislators in the state voted to censor Libby, depriving her of the capacity to do her job as an elected representative. Until she agrees to delete the post, she is barred from speaking on the floor of the House or from voting on legislation.
Some senior Democratic strategists, the New York Times recently reported, have coalesced around a new strategy modelled on the Dark Brandon meme, a Biden-era attempt to give an air of cultural cool to their octogenarian president. This approach involves defending old progressive positions in a more provocative, supposedly social media-friendly manner. Its main practitioners include legislators like Jasmine Crockett, who has insisted that only ‘mediocre white boys’ have reason to be worried about DEI and referred to Greg Abbott, who sits in a wheelchair, as ‘Governor Hot Wheels’. The name of the strategy which will supposedly save Democrats? ‘Dark Woke’.
History rhymes, as the famous saying goes, but it does not repeat. So make no mistake: the new era of woke is in important respects going to be different from the old.
The silence about the immorality and the incoherence of key woke positions, which was maintained in polite society for the better part of a decade, has been breached. The ideology no longer enjoys the complete dominance it maintained for a few years. The crazy-making period in which you could only confess certain forms of ‘wrongthink’ to your closest friends, with the decibel level of your conversation notably dropping if you happened to find yourself in a public place, has already come to feel like a surreal nightmare. The most extreme forms of identitarian ideology, which were so manifestly absurd that they could only be maintained amidst this atmosphere of omertà, are probably gone for good.
But this doesn’t mean that either the fundamental assumptions of identitarian ideology or the tendency to cancel people for violating them have disappeared from the left-leaning institutions and milieus in which they have long been dominant. A big part of the faculty at Ivy League universities, the leaders of many major foundations, even the managers of some massive corporations continue to view the world through the lens of equity, social justice and intersectionality. And while we may be unlikely to go back to the times when professors at famous universities were suspended for using common Chinese words in the classroom or electricians lost their job because somebody hallucinated that a hand dangling outside a truck was making a secret white supremacist symbols, breaches of consensus positions remain heavily penalised.
Those who are convinced that a vibe shift has taken place are sure to claim that my evidence for the resurgence of wokeness is anecdotal; for now, it assuredly is. But as it happens, the supposed evidence for a systematic shift away from these practices is just as anecdotal – and far more sparse.
When I ask friends and acquaintances for concrete examples of the supposed vibe shift, they virtually always cite Seth Moulton and Gavin Newsom expressing mild reservations about letting athletes who have gone through male puberty participate in competitive female sporting competitions. But Moulton’s statements came in the immediate aftermath of the election and attracted fierce pushback. Even Newsom has not in any meaningful manner acted on his supposed views in his day job as Governor of California; indeed, Democrats in the state just voted down a proposed bill that would have stopped trans girls from participating in female sports. For now, the evidence that Democrats are willing to course-correct on their most unpopular positions regarding cultural issues remains strikingly sparse.
In the Structure of Scientific Revolutions, probably the most influential book about the history of science written over the course of the last hundred years, Thomas Kuhn tried to understand a strange paradox. Again and again, scientific ‘paradigms’ failed to explain the world to the extent they promised. While Newtonian mechanics could describe certain natural phenomena, such as the speed with which an apple fell from a tree, it could not describe other phenomena, such as Mercury’s orbit around the sun. And yet, many senior scientists who were well aware of the paradigm’s failure to explain such ‘anomalies’ would persistently refuse to abandon it. Why?
Kuhn’s explanation had to do with the need for all of us humans to see the world through some kind of coherent lens. Newtonian physicists who tried to explain how the world works may, over time, have come to be painfully aware of the ‘anomalies’ which demonstrated the imperfections of their model. But so long as Newtonian physics worked better than the alternatives, they were unwilling to give up on it. Only when Albert Einstein published the theory of relativity, offering an alternative paradigm through which to see the world, did some of them start to abandon the old model. ‘The decision to reject one paradigm is always simultaneously the decision to accept another,’ Kuhn concluded.
The supposed evidence for a systematic shift away from wokeness is anecdotal
Kuhn’s insight, originally developed in the context of science, helps to explain why it is difficult to overturn the conventional wisdom in all kinds of other contexts as well – including the hold which a somewhat softened form of wokeness now retains over the imagination of the American left.
Many of its most influential exponents are starting to recognise that the woke ‘paradigm’ leads to a lot of ‘anomalies’. With varying degrees of clarity and honesty, they grasp that Latinos and other minority groups helped to put Trump back in the White House even though ‘people of colour’ were supposed to be the salvation of the Democratic Party. They recognise that the extreme cultural positions that their coalition has taken ended up alienating a majority of Americans when it was meant to represent the end point of history’s arc. Perhaps they have even experienced in their own organisations and social circles that an ideology which had promised an inclusive America turned into a weapon which victimised many of their own friends and family members.
But, as Kuhn predicted, the ability to notice anomalies in the reigning paradigm is not a sufficient condition for abandoning it. The triumph of wokeness has been so fast and so complete that it has effectively turned older forms of leftism, from economic radicalism to liberal progressivism, into relics. As a result, the elite communities which hold power in left-of-centre America today lack a viable alternative to the reigning ideology; For anybody who is committed to remaining on the left, there simply isn’t an alternative paradigm.
Kuhn made another observation which is relevant the the topic at hand: Even once an alternative paradigm was available, the scientific consensus shifted much more slowly than the evidence would have warranted. This led Kuhn to another key insight about how groups of humans change their minds. Because senior scientists have invested their entire careers in developing the old model, they have too much riding on it to give it up. Usually, it is younger scientists who have yet to make their name who end up embracing a new set of ideas. This is why paradigm shifts, according to Kuhn, tend to happen one funeral at a time: ‘Rather than engage in debate, [older scientists] may simply ignore the new views, or dismiss them as unscientific. A generation must pass before the new paradigm becomes the norm.’
The fact that many leaders of the American left were personally and institutionally complicit in the rise of wokeness create a parallel resistance to change. Like aging scientists who have staked their career on scientific discoveries which take the validity of some defunct paradigm for granted, everybody from the prospective contestants in the 2028 Democratic primaries to the presidents of America’s most wealthy foundations has spent the defining years of their career talking about equity and pledging themselves to anti-racist action plans. While many might be nimble enough to drop their references to the most embarrassing exponents of that ideology, such as Kendi or DiAngelo, few will be sufficiently intellectually curious or strategically astute to become fluent in a new paradigm which would allow them to abandon the old one.
The Trump administration is using the mighty power of the American state to root out any practice and punish any institution he suspects of being woke. This can (seemingly) make it hard for those of us committed to philosophically liberal principles like free speech and individual rights to know how to fight against identitarian ideology without throwing the liberal baby out with the woke bathwater.
Some Trump administration attacks on wokeness turn out to be well-founded. But other supposed attacks on wokeness are designed to punish disfavoured political speech or undermine rival power centres. When it comes to the country’s leading universities, for example, the Trump administration had two options. It could fight against genuine forms of ethnic discrimination and ideological coercion. Or it could decide that universities will always have a strong progressive lean, and try to weaken them as much as possible. The administration has clearly taken the latter path.
But as so often in politics, what seems like a dilemma when you look at it in terms of whose side to take turns out to be rather more simple when you analyse it in terms of principles. Both the identitarian philosophy of the left and the practices of cancellation it has inspired over the last years are fundamentally illiberal; those of us who are committed to principles like free speech should have no hesitation in fighting against the power they have long held in some of America’s most important institutions. But the Trump administration’s attacks on free speech, academic freedom, and the rule of law are just as illiberal – and all the more dangerous for directly enlisting in their cause the mighty power of the federal state. Philosophical liberals must not allow well-founded concerns about wokeness to tempt them into making excuses for blatant violations of their fundamental principles.
As I have written many times before, it is a profound mistake to think that left-wing identitarianism and right-wing reaction are implacable enemies. In reality, every victory for one side immediately strengthens those who fight for the other side. The way out of this dangerous spiral is not to pick one side as the lesser evil and shut up about its dangers; it is, calmly and consistently, to resist both.
What has Ofcom got against the Carry On films?
Why must we all be such killjoys? Why so prudish? Why so terrified of history? In the dock this week, accused of crimes against common sense, are the bods at Ofcom, whose ‘guidance’, say broadcasters, means that Carry On films are now under threat.
It appears the Carry On films have made the unpardonable error of reflecting the social and cultural norms of their time rather than having the foresight to mirror those of half a century later
In fact, niche broadcasters of older films – and where else can you watch a Carry On film these days? – are so terrified of earning Ofcom’s wrath that they feel obliged to butcher the films by removing language and scenes that were once just jolly good seaside fun. It’s like taking the cheese and pickle out of a cheese and pickle sarnie.
We might ask what Carry On films have ever done to hurt anyone, and what crime they might have committed. Well, it appears they made the unpardonable error of reflecting the social and cultural norms of their time rather than having the foresight to mirror those of half a century later.
Ofcom’s response, therefore, is to punish history for not being current enough. So, it takes it upon itself, based on public research, to decide which words are so offensive to modern tastes that they require a ‘clear and strong contextual justification for broadcast’. This means that, as the years go by, and as social norms and attitudes inevitably change, more and more of the Carry On output is deemed unacceptable. There will soon be a naughty black market in old DVDs, I suppose.
And what exactly is Ofcom worried about? Well, in a recent report it describes how Carry on Cleo (1964) includes a scene with ‘a White actor plays an Egyptian guard. His skin is darkened with very dark make-up. He is unable to speak, using sign language to communicate instead.’ Ofcom moderators then encourage research participants to focus on this piece of offence by asking: ‘Did you notice that one of the actors is wearing dark make-up? What do you think about this? Are there any situations where it is acceptable for a television programme to show someone in blackface? Would a warning make it more acceptable?’
With questions as leading as that, it’s hardly surprising that the Carry On films are now in trouble. And of course, it’s not just Carry On. While Little Britain wasn’t offensive in 2010, it was by 2020. Fawlty Towers, with its 1970s racist Major and nasty hotel manager who bullies elderly deaf women, has no chance today. Even Friends, apparently, is too ‘cisgendered’ and ‘heteronormative’ for modern tastes. The goalposts are constantly moving.
We can’t blame Ofcom for all of that, of course. Yet in its keenness to protect sensitive viewers from offensive material, it is in danger of denying today’s generations not just the entertainment value of Carry On films, which is considerable, but an education into what post-war Britain was actually like.
You can learn more about 1960s Britain from a Carry On than from any number of academic tomes. Amid all the bottom pinching, leering and outrageous double entendres is a window into a country I was just too young for, but still recognised – of seaside holiday camps, loosening sexual norms, cultural homogeneity and a desperation to move on from wartime deprivation without the resources to quite manage it.
Must it all be lost? Well, broadcasters report their hope that a happy medium can be agreed whereby a ‘trigger warning’ at the start of older films will satisfy the censors. Fine, but I don’t see why history needs such a thing. After all, and to slightly misquote L.P. Hartley in The Go-Between, of course history is different. That’s the point. That’s what makes it so interesting. So, let’s not deny ourselves the ability to travel there and enjoy it.
Sadly, we’ve become so dismissive of individual responsibility, that we actually need a taxpayer-funded quango to police our taste in films. Well, we shouldn’t be surprised, I suppose, given that the big state already sends people to prison for offensive social-media posts and takes it upon itself to teach children how to clean their teeth.
But there is one inconsistency I’d like ironed out. If history is a matter for policing, why not geography? If the racism in Carry On films is enough to warrant a warning, why isn’t the racism in, say, Japan (which, according to research, is one of the three most racist countries on earth) not mentioned in the travel advice issued by the Foreign Office? Perhaps it’s just racist to accuse another country of being, well, racist.
None of that helps the Carry On films, of course. And Ofcom won’t change tack any time soon. So, get yourself the box set while you still can.
Why is Macron courting the Freemasons?
Emmanuel Macron turned this week to France’s shadowy Freemasons for support. In a speech delivered to the secretive Grande Loge de France, he asked for their help to defend the Republic’s core values, and urged them to stand up to extremes, by which he means Le Pen’s National Rally. Macron needs to stabilise the political centre, which he once comfortably occupied, but which is shrinking fast under pressure from the right.
That a sitting French president would attempt to enlist the Freemasons is astonishing
That a sitting French president would attempt to enlist the Freemasons is astonishing. Normally shrouded in discretion, the group has never been publicly courted by any president. There have been numerous political scandals over the years linked to Freemasons, who have a history of manoeuvring behind the scenes.
Macron directly appealed to the Freemasons and asked them to serve as ‘ambassadors of fraternity’ and to actively promote secularism. The latter underpins Macron’s immigration policies, which seek to integrate newcomers by requiring adherence to secular and republican values through measures such as language training, civic education, and controversial restrictions on religious symbols in public institutions. Secularism is often held up by French policymakers as the key to ensuring that immigration does not undermine the unity or neutrality of the state, by framing it as a question of civic integration rather than cultural conflict. As such, Macron’s speech was a shot across the bow of his opponents, most notably Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella’s National Rally and the harder line now being pushed by Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau. The latter has called for stricter secular and immigration policies that blur the line between Macron’s centrism and the discourse of the right.
Freemasonry is not just a gentleman’s club or philanthropic society, it is a parallel power structure, with its own internal codes, rituals, and ranking systems. Members, often senior figures in politics, the judiciary, the police and the civil service, swear loyalty to their lodges, meet behind closed doors, and never speak publicly about their affiliations. The inner workings of the society remain secret.
Initiates help one another in professional circles, promote preferred candidates in institutions, and quietly shape public debate through dense, informal networks. The secrecy isn’t accidental, discretion is a key part of Masonic culture, from coded handshakes to secret meetings. In the 1990s, French media linked Freemasons to several high-profile scandals. The Affaire des HLM de Paris involved allegations of fraud in public housing contracts, with rumours of Masonic ties among the officials who were implicated. Two military procurement scandals also raised questions about lodge connections protecting insiders. The Affaire des Frégates saw unconfirmed reports of alleged Freemason judges shielding lodge members. These scandals stirred public suspicion of elite networks operating behind closed doors.
The most prominent scandal potentially linked to Freemasonry was the Elf affair, a corruption case in the late 1990s and early 2000s involving France’s oil giant, Elf Aquitaine. Hundreds of millions in misappropriated funds fuelled political slush funds and international deals, implicating figures like Roland Dumas, then Foreign Minister. While Dumas was not confirmed as a Freemason, speculation surrounded several people involved.
Macron’s appeal to the Freemasons carries real risk. For a President already viewed as aloof and technocratic, openly courting a fraternity with a reputation for backroom influence and elitism further erodes public trust in him. His appeal for help to the Freemasons reveals just how precarious his position has become. The broad centre-ground on which he was elected is disappearing, squeezed on both flanks.
Macron sees his legacy at risk if the right takes power and is searching for allies wherever they can be found. But openly courting an organisation as secretive and elitist as the Freemasons is risky. His move might strengthen his hand in Parisian salons, but for ordinary voters, it simply confirms the impression that the President is grasping for influence in all the wrong places.
Bets for Chester and Ascot
Today’s Ladbrokes Chester Cup (3.05 p.m.), run over a distance of more than two miles and two furlongs, is an intriguing affair with 15 runners competing for a first prize of more than £86,000.
The best handicapped horse on the basis of his hurdles form is the likely favourite East India Dock, who was third in the Grade 1 JCB Triumph Hurdle at the Cheltenham Festival in March and can run off a lenient official flat mark of 89 today.
The slight downsides to his chances are that he is untried at such a marathon trip as this on the flat and he has no experience of the unique twists and turns of Chester. East India Dock is the most likely winner of the race but at odds of 7-2 I am happy to look elsewhere.
Hot Fuss, the selection of two top tipsters in Tom Segal (Pricewise in the Racing Post) and Matt Brocklebank (sportinglife.com), also ran a cracker at the Cheltenham Festival when fourth, despite being too close to a red-hot pace, in the Fred Winter juvenile handicap hurdle. He, too, has a winning chance but he is not as well handicapped on the flat as he is over hurdles and he would definitely prefer softer ground.
I put up Zoffee each way for this race seven days ago at 20-1 and he has all but halved in price. He has drawn stall four today which is pretty much perfect and he goes well fresh too. Furthermore, his trainer Hugo Palmer had a double at the course yesterday so Zoffee clearly has a big chance of landing this race for the second year in succession.
The likes of Irish-trained Leinster and the Andrew Balding-trained Who’s Glen have big shouts but for my second selection in the race I will back CABALLO DE MAR for the in-form George Scott/Callum Shepherd trainer/jockey combination.
The four-year-old gelding is on a six-timer after five wins on the all-weather and he is 5 lbs well in because the handicapper would put him up to a mark of 93 if he was allowed to evaluate his most recent form. Instead, in the early-closing handicap, the horse can run off a mark of 88 today. His draw in stall eight is acceptable too.
Will he be as good on turf as he is on the all-weather? I don’t know but his handler tells the Racing Post today: ‘Going back to turf isn’t a concern and he clearly enjoys going left-handed.’ Back Caballo De Mar 1 point each way at 6-1 with Paddy Power paying five places.
There is a quality card at Ascot tomorrow when the Schweppes Victoria Cup (2.40 p.m.) is another fascinating contest with 19 runners competing for a first prize of more than £51,000.
Course and distance form is a big plus on Ascot’s seven-furlong straight course and so my suggestion is to back METAL MERCHANT trained by Jack Channon and ridden by David Probert.
The five-year-old gelding likes these big field handicaps having won the 21-runner Newbury Spring Cup in April last year off an official mark of 91.
Apart from his course and distance win at Ascot in October 2023, Metal Merchant ran a big race when fourth in the Moet & Chandon International Stakes here in July last year, a race where the form could hardly have worked out better.
His official mark of 96 gives him a winning chance tomorrow. Back Metal Merchant 1 point each way at 11-1 with SkyBet offering a generous seven places, rather than backing him a point bigger with other bookmakers but with less places.
There are dangers aplenty including Gleneagle Bay, a horse with top form in big handicaps in Ireland last season and who will be ridden by Hollie Doyle tomorrow. However, he does not have form at Ascot and he might prefer softer ground too so, on balance, I will stay with just the one selection in the race.
Pending:
1 point each way Zoffee at 20-1 for the Chester Cup, paying ¼ odds, 4 places.
1 point each way Caballo de Mar at 6-1 for the Chester Cup, paying 1/5th odds, 5 places.
1 point each way Metal Merchant at 11-1 for the Victoria Cup, paying 1/5th odds, 7 places.
Last weekend: – 4 points.
1 point each way Obelix at 11/2 for the Thirsk Hunt Cup, paying 1/5th odds, 5 places. Unplaced.
1 point each way Green Impact at 12-1 for 2000 Guineas, paying 1/5th odds, 4 places. Unplaced.
2025 flat season running total – 4 points.
2024-5 jump season: – 47.61 points.
2024 flat season: + 41.4 points on all tips.
2023-4 jump season: + 42.01 points on all tips.
2023 flat season: – 48.22 points on all tips.
2022-3 jump season: + 54.3 points on all tips.
Bonnie Blue deserves to be cancelled
Dr Gail Dines, a professor of sociology and women’s studies, defines the ‘pornification of society’ as a culture where explicit content isn’t just tolerated, but actively celebrated: the hardcore becomes mainstream, the shocking becomes desensitising, the transgressive becomes ever-more competitive.
Leading this race to the bottom is OnlyFans ‘model’ Bonnie Blue. Blue, ever-the-expert in attention-grabbing stunts, has hit headlines again after she revealed her plans for a ‘dogging tour’ of the UK, announcing this jaunt as casually as if it were just a couple of stand-up gigs.
We blame Andrew Tate, rightly, for teaching men to disrespect women, but where is the blame on Bonnie Blue and Lily Phillips?
This is the same ‘mattress actress’ who slept with over 1,000 men in a day, went to a university freshers’ week with a sign saying ‘bonk me and let me film it’, recently claimed to be pregnant, and, in a teaser for a video, said she would be ‘leaving here in a wheelchair’.
In our era of cancel culture and perpetual outrage, you would assume that Bonnie Blue – who has boasted about using ‘barely legal’ girls and boys in her videos and helping men cheat on their wives for a living – would be a demonised pariah. Far from it. She is a regular on podcasts and radio, and was even interviewed on ITV’s This Morning (which is ironic given how recently they sacked their main presenter for inappropriate relations with a younger man).
The same is true for Lily Phillips, subject of the documentary I Slept With 100 Men in One Day, who was interviewed on Newsnight last month about her experiences in the sex industry. Rather than being thoroughly challenged on the negative impact she might be having on younger audiences, Phillips was instead treated as an authority on sex and spokesperson for her generation, when the reality is she is clearly a deeply disturbed young woman.
Given the devastating damage pornography is inflicting on both men and women, why are Bonnie Blue and Lily Phillips not subject to more scrutiny? Why are they platformed and promoted and treated as if they are just regular, normal businesswomen?
It may be partly out of pity; there are plenty who see the girls as infantilised ‘victims’, exploited by the big bad patriarchy, and unfairly targeted compared to the men who appear in their videos. It may be because #girlboss feminism means that others have drunk the Kool-Aid that prostitution is empowering, and if objectification is inevitable, then you may as well make money out of it. It may be because we live in a world where content is everything and everything is content, and we accept that all content creators go to increasingly extreme lengths for views (remember when YouTuber Logan Paul uploaded footage of a hanging body in Japan’s suicide forest in 2018).
When campaigners warn about the dangers of pornography, the response – especially from government – is usually apathetic shoulder-shrugging. Compare this to the high-pitch hysteria around the manosphere and misogyny: schools being explicitly told to talk to their pupils about Andrew Tate, to show the Netflix series Adolescence as if it were a documentary, to educate pupils about consent, and yet not care that porn is literally the monetised violation of it.
We blame Andrew Tate, rightly, for teaching men to disrespect women, but where is the blame on Bonnie Blue and Lily Phillips? Blue and Phillips are not just porn stars: they are influencers. Every interview they give, every stunt they pull, every teaser they post on Instagram (yet another failure of moderation) normalises the degradation of women. They – and the porn industry as a whole – are far more responsible for perverting young people’s perceptions around sexual intimacy and relationships than incel Reddit forums or right-wing podcasts. After all, Andrew Tate could only dream of having the reach Pornhub does (42 billion visits in 2019).
Blue and Phillips may be exonerated because what they are doing is technically ‘legal’, but it doesn’t make it any more ethical. The fact that they have to find ever-more creative ways to demean themselves reminds us that porn is not so much about selling sex as selling transgression: as Mary Harrington writes, porn is about the ‘monetisation of taboo’. The boundaries have been pushed so far they are no longer there at all: the easy accessibility of extreme content explains why we have a generation who have been exposed to scenes of sexual choking online long before they even have their first kiss.
In their quest for viewers and subscribers, Blue and Phillips have turned pornography into an extreme sport: pushing their bodies to the limits, taking on increasingly humiliating challenges, and asking how far we are willing to go for a dopamine rush. It’s high time we stopped cheering them on.
Pope Leo probably isn’t that liberal
Frankly, most people knew little about Robert Prevost before his election as pope, so there’s been a scramble to unpick Leo XIV’s past record to judge where he might take the papacy.
‘The promotion of gender ideology is confusing, because it seeks to create genders that don’t exist,’ he told journalists
We know already that he’s not terribly keen on the US President’s repatriation of illegal migrants, nor on J.D. Vance’s particular take on social issues. And he’s got the whole Francis programme on putting the poor centre stage. There are other Francis touches; when he did visitations to Augustinian communities as head of the order, he’d help with the washing up after dinner. He seems, in fact, a genuinely humble sort.
But it would be a mistake to take from this that Robert Prevost will be another Francis, excitingly disruptive and liberal on the usual matters, such as gender and homosexuality.
Au contraire! There’s been some digging in his previous pronouncements for clues about his views and they’re really not that surprising.
Crucially, in a 2012 address to bishops, Prevost took a dim view of the popular culture that fostered ‘sympathy for beliefs and practices that are at odds with the Gospel.’ Two cases in point being the ‘homosexual lifestyle’ and ‘alternative families comprised of same-sex partners and their adopted children.’ And as a bishop in Chiclayo in Peru, he opposed a government plan to add teachings on gender in schools. ‘The promotion of gender ideology is confusing, because it seeks to create genders that don’t exist,’ he told journalists.
Granted, he may have changed during Francis’s pontificate, but all that sounds to me like normal Catholic teaching, not the kind of approach that progressive Catholics might favour. Let’s see what he actually says in the job.
Tory MPs are forgetting Britain
After the next election, Bob Blackman’s role as chair of the 1922 Committee should be much easier. With the Conservative party set to be wiped out across the country, it’s not inconceivable that the Harrow East MP will be the last Tory left in the Commons. It is the only seat in the country where the Conservatives exceed 50 per cent of the vote last year.
Alone on the green benches, Blackman will no longer need to worry about organising no confidence votes, massaging backbench egos, or finding exciting new ways to pledge loyalty to the latest failing leader. He will be the Parliamentary Conservative Party. In which case, one suggests, he should bite the bullet and reach the logical conclusion of his political journey over the last decade: declare the Tories dead and relaunch as the official Yookay MP for India’s Bhartiya Janata party (BJP).
Earlier this week, Blackman retweeted a BJP post celebrating India’s armed forces striking nine targets in Pakistan as part of #OperationSindoor. This is far from the first time that Blackman has expressed his support for Narendra Modi’s party. He attended a UK4Modi car rally in London in 2019 and expressed his support for India’s Prime Minister revoking Kashmir’s special status in the country’s constitution the same year. He has described the BJP as a ‘natural ally for the Conservative party’ and is a long-standing supporter of Overseas Friends of BJP.
The reasoning behind Blackman’s perhaps surprising role as a flying buttress to India’s ruling party isn’t hard to discern. According to the 2021 census, 29.8 per cent of his Harrow East constituents are Hindus. The BJP are Hindu nationalists. Blackman has made the rational decision that, if he wants to keep his seat, Modi is a more important leader to cling to than Kemi Badenoch. His persistence in recent years has turned a majority of 1,757 in 2017 into one of 11, 680 today, and won him the Padma Shri – India’s equivalent of an MBE.
One must admire Blackman’s hutzpah. But as lucrative as it might prove electorally, ethnic minority vote-grubbing is as regrettable when done by a Tory MP as a Labour one. A situation where the Tories become the party of India and Labour the one of Pakistan – or the Tories the party of Israel, and Labour the party of Palestine – will be disastrous for national cohesion in an increasingly multi-ethnic society, especially as the subcontinent stands on the brink of war.
But at least Blackman’s cheerleading for Modi has an electoral rationale, however depressing. It is hard to discern the same in the decision by seven senior Tory MPs to sign a letter to Keir Starmer calling for the immediate recognition of a Palestinian state. The letter was organised by Kit Malthouse, MP for North West Hampshire, where 0.8 per cent of the population was Muslim in 2021. Gainsborough, Dorset North, and South Holland and the Deepings are also hardly renowned as hotbeds of pro-Palestinian activity. Nonetheless, their respective MPs all signed.
As Mr Steerpike highlighted yesterday, Sir John Hayes, of South Holland and the Deepings, is not a Tory MP one naturally associates with the Palestinian cause. Having recently chaired a Westminster Hall debate on the subject for his constituency near-neighbour Edward Leigh, the best explanation is a loyalty to an old friend. Yet it is striking that the signatories were all MPs of (relatively) long-standing – the latest having been elected in 2015, the earliest in 1983. Even in the reduced ranks from which shadow ministerial offices are now filled, none can be considered greasy pole-climbers.
All have seats that would have hitherto been considered safe. But surviving an election defeat as shattering as last year’s can convince those who clung on that they possess a particular form of electoral alchemy. Comforted by survivorship bias, freed from the duties of supporting a government, they have the licence to indulge their own special interests. If they have a personal affinity with the Palestinian cause, now is the time to champion it. A rap on the knuckles from CCHQ is worth little if Badenoch won’t be there in a couple of months. Hence the calls, like clockwork, to bring back national service.
Yet between Blackman’s vote-grubbing, Malthouse’s two-state compromises, and the persistent desire of aging Tories to send youngsters to die in a Donbas cabbage patch lies the fundamental unseriousness of so many current Tories. Striking poses about foreign policy is so much easier than facing the reality of the ‘Scuzz Nation’ collapsing around them, as Gus Carter outlined in this week’s magazine. It’s also less hard work than admitting their leader is a charmless dud marshalling the party into electoral oblivion, and taking the necessary steps to remove her.
Those Conservative MPs who do show signs of life tend to be the most exercised about the pernicious consequences of our crumbling public realm, wild imbalance between foreign policy ends and means, and the dire consequences for our democracy of a dissent into Balkanisation. The inability of their colleagues to follow their example is one of many reasons why the party finds itself in the dire state it is in. Wisdom does not always increase in direct proportion to seniority.
Why it makes sense to have an American pope
Around 40,000 people gathered in St Peter’s Square last night, the mood markedly more expectant than the evening before. While Wednesday had felt like a formality destined to disappoint, Thursday hummed with anticipation – and it delivered.
The general consensus in the run-up to the conclave was that an American pope was unlikely. As the world’s strongest economic and political power, adding to that the honour of hosting the world’s most influential spiritual leader seemed excessive. The United States has also had the furthest to go in addressing the problem of clerical abuse. The ghost of the serial sexual predator Cardinal Theodore McCarrick has not yet been fully exorcised, and the Church still appears to be under reconstruction after its credibility was demolished by countless scandals.
Leo may help bring disaffected English-speaking Catholics back into the fold – particularly Americans, many of whom have felt alienated over the past decade of Church politics
Robert Barron, the bishop of the diocese of Winona–Rochester, who has become something of an internet personality in recent years, summed up the papal pundits’ consensus on an American pontiff in an interview with EWTN. When asked whether it was a possibility, he said: ‘My basic answer is no.’
However, at around 7.15 p.m. local time, the crowds at St Peter’s were treated to their first glimpse of the American Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost – from then on to be known as Pope Leo XIV – the 267th leader of the Roman Catholic Church.
There was some confusion over who exactly had been announced. My American friends did not recognise the name, and the Paraguayan mother and daughter next to me confidently said he was a Russian – which, even at the time, seemed unlikely. What was clear from the beginning was the name Leo XIV had been chosen.
That, in and of itself, was already an indication of the pontificate ahead. There have been popes named Leo since the fifth century, beginning with Pope Leo the Great – the first pontiff to be given, by general consensus among historians and theologians, the posthumous title ‘the Great’. Leos were particularly prevalent in the tenth century, when four reigned, but the name has otherwise appeared sporadically through the centuries. Recent popes have tended towards the novel, with two of the previous four choosing names never previously used.
The name naturally evokes the most recent Leo, Pope Leo XIII. Born in 1810, he is thought to be the earliest-born person ever captured on film. His pontificate spanned two centuries, beginning in 1878 and ending with his death in 1903. His 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum is widely credited as the formal foundation of Catholic Social Teaching. It criticised both unfettered capitalism and socialism, championed the rights of workers, and affirmed the right to private property.
The papal name Leo conveys a sense of continuity, combined with a readiness to address the needs of the age.
After the initial confusion, it was eventually confirmed that the new pope was indeed Cardinal Prevost, prefect of the Dicastery for Bishops.
Prevost, an Augustinian friar, follows a Jesuit. This marks the first time since 1294 that the Church has had two consecutive popes from religious orders, rather than diocesan priests. Given that Pope Francis was the first order priest in almost 200 years, this suggests a new openness to this ecclesiastical path.
Born in Chicago, much has already been made of Prevost’s nationality. Donald Trump almost immediately took to his social media platform to say what ‘a Great Honor for our Country. I look forward to meeting Pope Leo XIV.’
Yet the Italian newspaper La Repubblica called him ‘the least American of the Americans’ – and it is easy to see why. Prevost spent much of his ministry in South America and has more recently been based in Rome. He joined his congregation as a missionary priest in Peru in 1985, held various leadership roles within the Augustinians – including Prior General – and was appointed Bishop of Chiclayo in 2014. In 2015 he became a Peruvian citizen and in 2023, Pope Francis brought him to Rome to lead the Dicastery for Bishops.
We will never know the exact reasons the cardinals chose Prevost. Those who witness the conclave are bound to secrecy under pain of excommunication, and the thus far impenetrable Vatican security measures have kept journalists out.
But we may speculate on the advantages his election brings. Prevost is an international man and a unifying presence in a Church divided. He has remained firm on Catholic doctrine, from female ordination to gender ideology. Yet in a Francis-like tone, he has also criticised both J. D. Vance and Trump for their immigration policies. His most recent post on X took aim at the US deportation of Kilmar Ábrego García to El Salvador. He also added three women to the voting bloc that decides which bishop nominations to forward to the pope, a revolutionary move.
He may also help bring disaffected English-speaking Catholics back into the fold – particularly Americans, many of whom have felt alienated over the past decade of Church politics. Catholics in the US tend to take their faith seriously, observe doctrine, and give generously. Excluding them from a Church that is struggling for relevance in the West is short-sighted.
The smiling face of an American pope – deeply formed by Latin America and wearing once more the papal regalia set aside by Francis – is, for many, welcome news. While the odds on Prevost were long, one cannot help but think the cardinals knew exactly what they were doing. After weeks of speculation and conflicting forecasts from pundits and Vaticanisti, their choice now appears, in hindsight, an exceptionally wise one.
Greens to reject gender ruling in next leadership contest
To the Green party, whose membership will be called on to vote for their next leader this summer. Currently the party operates a curious policy whereby its next leaders or deputies, if job-sharing, must be of different genders – with Adrian Ramsay and Carla Denyer currently occupying the top job, having been elected in 2021. In the wake of the recent Supreme Court ruling – which backed the biological definition of a woman – Mr S was rather curious about how exactly the judgment would impact the eco-activists. The short answer is, er, it won’t.
The environmentalists are determined to ignore the judgment from the highest court in the land, it seems.
The environmentalists are determined to ignore the judgment from the highest court in the land, it seems. Despite justices unanimously concluding that ‘women’ in the Equality Act referred to biological sex, the Greens will not change their constitution – which states that while job-sharing leaders must be ‘two individuals of a different gender’, ‘gender is self-determined’. The eco-zealots at the environmentalist HQ insisted to Steerpike that: ‘No, the party doesn’t support the Supreme Court judgment.’ They said it was not the Green party’s position that trans women aren’t women – and their constitution continues to note that ‘gender is self-determined’. How very interesting…
The revelation comes after Denyer announced on Thursday morning she was stepping down from the top job to focus her energies on her parliamentary constituency duties in Bristol Central – just days after her deputy Zack Polanski launched a leadership bid of his own. Despite their constitution going to such lengths to specify the party’s chosen leaders must be of two different genders, it would appear the Greens’s refusal to get behind the Supreme Court ruling effectively makes that null and void. Oh, the irony…
Can Pope Leo fix the mess left by Francis?
The numbers, as the saying goes, don’t lie. And heading into the conclave two days ago, anyone who could count had reason to expect a pope at least in the mould of Pope Francis, who appointed the majority of the cardinal electors.
Even so, few predicted the first American Bishop of Rome to emerge in the person of Pope Leo XIV, formerly Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost – and the second pope in a row to arrive in Rome from South America.
The most important unknown about the new pope isn’t what he will teach but how he will govern
The joy of the crowd in Rome was sincere, it always is, and its enthusiasm didn’t audibly dip or spike noticeably as his name was formally read out by the cardinal deacon with the famous words Habemus papam – it was already at fever pitch.
Romans, and Catholics everywhere, are conditioned to celebrate a new pope, whomever he may be and wherever he is from. Of the gang of four expected frontrunners to go into the conclave, Cardinal Prevost, as he then was, was probably the least familiar to the wider world. Neither a preeminent diplomat, nor a famously charismatic preacher, his most recent job was quietly advising the pope on the appointment of new bishops around the world, and policing their negligence when necessary.
Elected on the afternoon of the second day of voting, Leo’s election took as long as those of his two immediate predecessors, though unlike them he didn’t head into the Sistine chapel as an odds-on favourite.
Emerging on to the balcony, he delivered his first address and blessing pointedly name-checking the new era of a ‘synodal Church’ which Francis set out to make his legacy, while repeatedly encouraging the thousand gathered in the square to look ahead ‘without fear’ and build bridges to deliver the peace which is the promise of the Christian Gospel.
Pope Leo has, in this, set himself a difficult but necessary task.
The synodal Church he inherits is, under the surface, far from ‘united hand in hand’ as he challenged it to be from the famous balcony.
Even as the cardinals were locked away in conclave, Church leaders in Germany were laying out their commitment to women’s ordination and church blessings for same-sex couples – the very issues which threatened to derail Francis’ synodal project, and which finally drew a firmly conservative ‘no’ from the last pope.
Leo inherits, too, a fractured Vatican teetering on insolvency, which will need urgent, diligent and distinctly unpopular attention in the very near future, and will likely require the new pope to make stick the reforms which ultimately proved too much for Francis.
Looking out from the Church, the cardinals will have known exactly what they were doing electing to the chair of St Peter an American – one who has spent the bulk of his priestly and episcopal ministry in Peru – in the era of Trump
A quiet man by reputation, Leo is unlikely to make as many off-the-cuff remarks as his predecessor, nor is he likely to expend papal ink challenging directly J.D. Vance’s Twitter feed.
Nevertheless, his choice of name, Leo, is likely a nod to the author of Rerum novarum, the great work which created and defined what has become known as Catholic Social Teaching, and he’s likely to prove as equally strident a defender – though perhaps a more studied one – of migrants, refugees, and the global poor as Francis
But if that is so, the most important unknown about the new pope isn’t what he will teach but how he will govern. Francis tended to live by his own admonition to ‘make a mess.’
Leo will have the less glamorous but fascinating job of deciding how to tidy it up, bringing a measure of coherence to often contradictory papal laws and teachings. How he chooses to do so, what he delicately rolls back and what he decidedly doubles down on, will shape the Church for decades to come – conceivably for the next century.
All in, Pope Leo appears easily primed to be, if not Francis 2.0, at least Francis 1.5. After he is formally installed in the coming days, many Catholics will be looking to see if Leo intends to limit himself to debugging the system left by his predecessor, or aims to bring real upgrades to what has come before.
Xi has no right to be ‘guest of honour’ at Putin’s Victory Day
The presence of Chinese president Xi Jinping as ‘guest of honour’ at Vladimir Putin’s Victory Day military parade in Moscow today, which will include soldiers from the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), is both chilling and fraudulent. Chilling, because it is the most explicit endorsement yet by Xi of Russia’s militarism and its poisonous narratives about the Ukraine war, and fraudulent because the Chinese Communist party played a marginal role at best in the Allied victory in the second world war.
In the run-up to today’s parade, Putin has linked victory over Nazi Germany with his unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, which he has falsely claimed is to achieve ‘denazification’ of the country. The Kremlin has served up daily propaganda depicting the Ukraine war as a continuation of the ‘Great Patriotic War’, comparing the soldiers fighting in Ukraine to ‘our grandfathers’ who achieved victory in 1945.
The Communist party played only a marginal and cynical role in the fight against the Japanese
A new monument unveiled in Khimki, near Moscow, depicts a Red Army soldier side by side with a Russian soldier fighting in Ukraine. In parts of occupied Ukraine, Russian authorities have erected huge billboards carrying patriotic messages about the 80th anniversary of victory over Nazi Germany. The parade itself is expected to include military contingents implicated by investigators in atrocities in Ukraine.
All of this has been accompanied by a growing glorification of Stalin – and, of course, no mention of the 1939 pact between the Soviet dictator and Hitler, which carved up Eastern Europe between them, before Hitler turned on his erstwhile ally. Nor the fact that many of the estimated 27 million Soviet citizens who died in the Great Patriotic War were Ukrainian. How many is hard to say, but since the bloodiest fighting took place on the eastern front, the Ukrainian sacrifice was potentially greater than that of the Russians.
Ahead of Xi’s arrival in Moscow, airports were closed by Ukrainian drone attacks. Assuming the parade itself is not disrupted, it will be the first time the PLA has sent an honour guard to take part since 2015. ‘Together we must foil all schemes to disrupt or undermine our bonds of amity and trust,’ Xi wrote before leaving Beijing. His presence will endorse the growing fraud that surrounds Russia’s most important holiday, but the Chinese leader, no slouch when it comes to rewriting history, is also making increasing use of fraudulent narratives of the second world war to legitimise his own rule.
While Putin manipulates victory in Europe to his advantage, Xi does the same with regard to the defeat of Japan. ‘The victory of the Chinese People’s War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression,’ as he calls it, is being used increasingly to buttress the CCP’s growing nationalism, on which it depends for legitimacy. Xi describes the defeat of Japan as ‘the first complete victory won by China in its resistance against foreign aggression in modern times,’ while heaping praise on the CCP and its armed wing, the People’s Liberation Army – which mostly avoided fighting the Japanese.
In 2015, Xi held his own ‘victory day’ military parade to mark the 70th anniversary of the defeat of Japan in the second world war, at which Putin was his special guest. That kicked off a decade of increasingly virulent mythmaking and chest-thumping. The defeat of Japan marked ‘the full victory in the global war against fascism, re-established China as a major country in the world, and won the Chinese people the respect of all peace-loving people around the world,’ the China Daily newspaper recently claimed. It has become a key pillar of CCP propaganda, which depicts the party as a redeeming power in the face of foreign hostility.
In fact, the Communist party played only a marginal and quite cynical role in the fight against the Japanese. Most of the key battles in China were fought by the party’s civil war rivals, the Nationalists, led by Chiang Kai-shek, whom Mao would go on to defeat in 1949. For the most part, Mao resisted pressure from an increasingly exasperated Stalin to put aside his differences with Chiang and fight the common Japanese enemy – thereby reducing the pressure on the Soviet Union. Mao rightly calculated that if the Nationalists exhausted themselves against Japan, it would hasten his seizure of power.
The communist mythology surrounding that period is embodied in the ‘five heroes of Langya Mountain’, where a vast memorial marks the spot where five of Mao’s soldiers, fighting off Japanese invaders, supposedly leapt to their death shouting ‘Long live the Chinese Communist party’, rather than surrender. It is a staple of CCP propaganda, force-fed to children from an early age as an example of the ‘heroic spirit of the Chinese people’. A historian who questioned the story was convicted of ‘defaming the heroes’ and forced to apologise.
Chiang’s defeated Nationalists fled to Taiwan, whose official name is still the Republic of China, where they dreamed for a while of retaking the mainland. These days few Taiwanese want anything to do with an increasingly belligerent China, but Chiang’s successors probably have more right to be marching at a victory day parade than Xi’s PLA does.
Why do some Irish people hate Israel so much?
It was a quiet lunch shift at the pub in Oxford where I work, the kind of day when the bar feels more like a confessional than a business. A lone customer, a woman with a light accent I took for Dutch, had just finished her meal and approached to pay. Playing the host, I made small talk.
How bad have things become for Israelis here?
“Where are you from?” I asked, expecting the usual tourist’s reply. Her face tightened, her voice dropped to a near-whisper. “Israel,” she said, bracing herself as if I might leap over the bar and chase her out into the street. I reassured her – I support Israel, I said, and I’m ashamed of how Jews are being treated in Britain today. The look of relief on her face was almost comical, tinged with a gratitude that felt, in its own way, deeply sad. Christ, I thought, how bad have things become for Israelis here?
She lingered, and we spoke for the next 20 minutes, the empty pub giving us space to talk freely. She was an academic, here for a conference, her second year attending after a bruising experience in 2024. Last year, she’d been singled out, harassed, made to feel like a pariah – simply for being Israeli.
Determined not to let the “shits” win, she returned this year, though clearly on edge. We found ourselves in easy agreement: the historical illiteracy of Britain’s youth, their obsession with a simplistic oppressor-oppressed narrative, the myth of Israel as a white settler colonial project – all of it ignoring the reality of a nation where the majority of citizens trace their ancestry to the Middle East and North Africa, from the 850,000 Mizrahi Jews expelled after 1948 to the Ethiopian Jews airlifted to safety decades later.
“Why do the Irish hate Israel so much?” she asked suddenly, her question catching me off guard. It was a fair one, and, as I fumbled for an answer, I realised the roots of this hostility run deeper than I’d first thought.
The Irish case is a peculiar one, steeped in history, theology, and a kind of moral posturing that has curdled into something uglier.
Start with the Catholic past. For centuries, the Church peddled the old lie of Jews as “Christ killers,” a venom that lingered in Ireland well into the 20th century. In 1959, Pope John XXIII struck the word “perfidis” – commonly translated as “perfidious” – from the Good Friday prayer for the conversion of Jews, a belated acknowledgement of the damage such language had done.
However, in Ireland, where Catholicism was more than a faith but a cultural bedrock, the stain proved harder to wash out. Figures like Denis Fahey, a theology professor at the Holy Ghost Fathers’ seminary in Dublin, and Edward Cahill, a Jesuit confidant of Éamon de Valera, fanned the flames of anti-Semitism into the 1930s and ’40s. Fahey saw Jews as a threat to Christian civilisation, tying them to communism and Freemasonry in a grand conspiracy against Christ. These weren’t fringe voices; their ideas appeared in respected Catholic journals, like the Irish Catholic. During the Nazi era, Ireland’s government turned a blind eye to Jewish refugees, offering asylum to the wealthy, middle-aged, and Catholic – hardly a lifeline for many of those fleeing the Holocaust.
Ireland hasn’t always been hostile. In 1948, Seán MacBride, Ireland’s minister for external affairs, wrote to his Israeli counterpart, Moshe Sharett, drawing parallels between the two nations: both ancient peoples, both new states born of struggle. Yitzhak Shamir, a future Israeli prime minister, took the nom de guerre “Michael” after the IRA’s Michael Collins, inspired by Ireland’s fight for independence. Once, as Foreign Policy notes, Ireland was a staunch supporter of Jewish aspirations in the Promised Land. What changed?
The shift came with Ireland’s own historical lens. By the mid-20th century, the Irish – especially republicans – began to see the Arab-Israeli conflict as a mirror of their own struggle against British rule. A 1945 piece in Dublin’s the Bell magazine cast Palestinians as the virtuous Irish, suffering under British “terrorists,” with Israelis doomed to play the role of the occupying British.
By the 1980s, Belfast murals in nationalist areas showed IRA and PLO fighters united under the slogan “IRA-PLO one struggle.” Sinn Féin, the IRA’s political wing, remains a vocal critic of Israel, its rhetoric often veering into anti-Semitic territory.
In recent years, Ireland has seen growing support for the BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) movement against Israel, exemplified by parliamentary debates and the advancement of measures like the Control of Economic Activity (Occupied Territories) Bill 2018, which targets trade with Israeli settlements. Some observers have noted vituperative anti-Israel rhetoric in these discussions, including a legislator’s invocation of ‘Jewish supremacy’. This isn’t a grassroots phenomenon but a top-down one, driven by Ireland’s political and academic elites aided, as Mosaic Magazine notes, by activist groups amplifying anti-Israel sentiment on campuses.
The modern Irish left, steeped in a simplistic oppressor-oppressed binary, finds this narrative irresistible. It ignores the reality of Israel’s diverse population – Mizrahi, Ethiopian, and Ashkenazi Jews alike – and casts the nation as a European colonial implant, a myth that erases the Middle Eastern roots of most Israelis.
My guest shook her head as she spoke of the pro-Palestinian activism she’d encountered at universities, the way it framed Israel as a white settler state. “It’s a lie,” she said, “but it fits their story.”
There’s a deeper tragedy here, one that extends beyond Ireland to Britain itself. My guest’s whispered admission of her nationality, her braced posture as she awaited rejection, speaks to a broader failure. Oxford, a city that prides itself on enlightenment, should be a place where an Israeli academic can speak freely, not one where she fears ostracism. Ireland’s hostility – rooted in historical resentment, theological baggage, and modern activism – sets a dangerous precedent. We’ve seen where this leads: Dublin’s indifference in the 1930s, Belfast’s murals in the 1980s, the parliamentary rants of 2024. Britain, too, risks losing its way if it allows such attitudes to fester unchecked.
As she left, my guest thanked me, her smile a mix of relief and cautious hope. “You’ve made my day,” she said. I smiled back, but inside, I felt a quiet unease. How many others like her are out there, whispering their identities, bracing for the worst?
Britain and Ireland once stood for something greater – free speech, historical truth, the right to exist without fear. We must not forget those values now, lest we wake one day to find them gone, replaced by the shadows of old hatreds we thought we’d left behind.
The Lord of the Rings gave me my moral compass
In a recent diary for The Spectator, the editor noted that many of the world’s leading tech companies have names inspired by The Lord of the Rings: Peter Thiel’s Palantir and Mithril; Palmer Luckey’s Anduril. ‘J.R.R. Tolkien has a curious hold on the minds of Silicon Valley’s Trump supporters,’ he wrote.
Well, they’re not the only ones. If I had founded a company I probably would have called it Anduril too. While less odd teenagers spent their money on CDs or football boots, I used to have a life-sized replica of the Elvish sword hanging above my bed. I, like the tech bros, was a LOTR obsessive. A super fan. I still am.
Tolkien was a genius and I have read his books many times over. But I am unashamed to say I have been equally as influenced by the LOTR films, Peter Jackson’s adaptation being for my money the greatest trilogy ever made (and which serves to highlight just how badly the Harry Potter equivalents have failed to do J.K. Rowling’s world justice). I credit Howard Shore’s film score as the thing that first got me into classical music. And I regard LOTR as perhaps the single greatest influence (after my parents) on my ethical code.
Each take away something different from Tolkien’s world. But it is, for everyone, a story of good pitched in battle against unquestionable evil. A world where courage and loyalty are among the highest virtues. A world of manliness, and of men having a clear role. A world of standing up to defend not just one’s kin but one’s home. To this day, when I grow weary from the culture wars and our civilisational fight, I find fresh inspiration in Aragorn’s final battle cry before the gates of Mordor: ‘By all that you hold dear on this good earth, I bid you stand, Men of the West!’
It is a story of friendship, and of fellowship. As Michael Gove wrote in his column – of good people banding together, and putting aside their differences, to defeat a mutual enemy. It’s a world where family and ancestry are sources of pride and respect – one thinks of the patronymics used to address characters. There is a love of adventure too – recall Bilbo reminiscing about ‘seeing the Misty Mountain again, one last time’.
Hope against all odds and beyond all reason. Beauty defended from forces that seek to destroy it. Love of home. The corruption of power. All of these things, and more, I learned from LOTR. Yet while it is full of meaning and moral lessons, it is entirely free of moral hectoring or social commentary. That absence gives LOTR its substance.
Tolkien’s world convinced me that there exist things like chivalry and honour. That there is nobility in standing by friends; but not standing by as one’s country is engulfed by darkness.
Unlike his friend and contemporary C.S. Lewis, Tolkien explicitly expressed his aversion to allegory. Hence, despite being deeply Catholic, he sought to avoid all explicit reference to Christianity or other parts of the real world. Simplistic metaphors – like that the ring represents the atomic bomb – are therefore usually bunk. But the leitmotifs from Christian theology are hard to deny: self-sacrifice, repentance, free will and divine providence. Man’s weakness in resisting evil. The hope invested in the return of the king. Gandalf, Frodo and Aragorn have even been said to exemplify the three offices of Christ’s earthly ministry – prophet, priest and king.
Middle Earth’s morality has been criticised. Edwin Muir lamented it as simplistic: for him, Tolkien’s ‘good people are consistently good, his evil figures immovably evil’. I am not sure that is true. For all Boromir’s bravery and patriotism, he exhibits weakness in the face of temptation too. It is that which has made him many fans’ favourite character – his humanness. Certainly LOTR does not provide a complete and faultless moral framework, as Tolkien himself was the first to admit as he grappled with a philosophical dilemma posed by the orcs (to regard them simply as beasts to be slaughtered without compunction, or as sapient, morally-aware creatures deserving of mercy?).
But young men today require purpose, meaning and identity. And while it would be an overstatement to say that LOTR gave me those in their entirety, Tolkien’s world did convince me that there exist things like chivalry and honour. That there is nobility in standing by friends; but not standing by as one’s country is engulfed by darkness.
What stays with me perhaps above all is the Shire. If Tolkien envisaged his work as a kind of national myth for an England that lacked one, as Homer was for the Greeks, the Shire must stand as the purest encapsulation of what England meant to him. At a formative time in my life, it filled me with an abiding love of the English countryside. For Gollum the ring is his ‘precious’; but the rest of us are left feeling that the Shire is the thing truly deserving of that descriptor. Like Robert Browning dreaming home thoughts from abroad, of an April’s day in England, I think often of Sam’s words as he and Frodo lay on an erupting Mount Doom: ‘Do you remember the Shire, Mr Frodo? It’ll be spring soon, and the orchards will be in blossom. And the birds will be nesting in the hazel thicket. And they’ll be sowing the summer barley in the lower fields. And they’ll be eating the first of the strawberries with cream.’ That is as clear an expression of love of home as to be found anywhere in the English language.
His tender depiction of the Shire reflected Tolkien’s despair at much of modernity. As David Engels has written: ‘In his own epoch he already felt himself to be an outmoded man, and had put his creative power… to cast the memory of the basic truths of the old Occident into a new form, to save it over the hated modern age and to make it available to a new generation.’ Tolkien showed me where lies honour and goodness. Or, in Samwise Gamgee’s words: ‘That there is some good in this world, and it’s worth fighting for.’ Another tech bro, Elon Musk, has said that he keeps that quote on his bedside table.
Which brings me back to that replica sword. You see, for several years as a teen I spent much of my spare time on obscure internet chat forums, nattering away with characters I imagined to be overweight, middle-aged Americans who took part in Viking battle re-enactments at the weekend. Perhaps they were, but now it seems that their number also included those who would go on to become the world’s most successful entrepreneurs. On one level it’s surprising. But perhaps it’s also not that strange that these geeky personalities with names like ‘Slayer of the Nazgul’ or ‘Gimli son of Gloin’ have become the Musks and Thiels of today. If you’re entrepreneurial enough to sell replica armour and wizard staves, and bright and determined enough to learn Elvish, you’ve probably got what it takes to found a multi-billion dollar company. Perhaps the tech bros, like me, even had replica swords mounted on their walls. Granted it’s a far cry from your ordinary teenager’s celeb poster. But LOTR tends to have an extraordinary effect on people.
Magic and the art of lying
Talking to a former politician about lying felt very appropriate. It was during one of my ‘Magical Thinking’ sessions, a corporate team-building event I run in which I perform close-up magic tricks and the participants try to work out how they’re being done. Among those at this session was Anne-Marie Trevelyan, who had initially been baffled by a particular mentalism effect. She thought of a day of the week, then a month of the year and finally a playing card, and my guesses on all three proved correct.
Every possible route by which I could have cheated seemed blocked off – but Anne-Marie was brilliant at responding to my hints (part of the process, of course), and gradually she led the team towards the solution. The moment it dawned on her how the trick worked was wonderful. ‘Oh my God!’ she cried. ‘That’s proper lying!’ I replied with the obvious joke – ‘Given your previous profession I’ll take that as a compliment’ – before we agreed that actually the credence Anne-Marie had given to the lie was proof of how honourable our political class really is.
Of course it isn’t just politicians – the ‘good at lying’ jokes are there to be made with bankers, insurance brokers, any number of professions. But beyond the humour, every team, no matter what they do for a living, soon realises that a huge part of magic is about presentation. The sessions are designed to give lessons in problem-solving, which people are expecting. What they don’t tend to expect, though, is how magic teaches us about confidence, about the way we sell ourselves to the outside world.
I got into magic as a kid, learning from books by Paul Daniels, as well as a series of branded tricks he produced that came free with petrol tokens. It was the classic story – magic as social currency, the ability to baffle people making me feel clever, giving me confidence. My interest faded as I grew up, though never entirely, and when my own son reached the age of about six I taught him a couple of simple card tricks. This led to us learning new stuff together: inevitably he was quicker, a situation I loved. Watching your child outdo you is one of the joys of parenthood.
Then I ran a magic club at Barney’s primary school. Occasionally the parents of the kids involved would be round at our house for Sunday lunch. ‘How the hell does that trick work?’ they’d ask (some of the best tricks can literally be done by a child). I wouldn’t give them the answer, but I’d perform the trick several times, and offer hints, until they could work it out. That gave me the idea for the sessions.
In some cases the trick’s success rests solely on how well you present it, how convincingly you tell the audience a story
Yes, some of the tricks involve sleight of hand, and take a lot of practice. But some of the most impressive effects are achieved by what magicians call ‘self-working’ tricks. There is little or no technical skill involved – the trick’s success rests solely on how well you present it, how convincingly you tell the audience a story. The British magician Paul Zenon is fascinating on this subject: ‘There’s a lot of snobbery [among magicians] about the idea that if a trick’s difficult to do technique-wise then it’s somehow better. That’s nonsense. If an audience don’t know how a trick is done, it doesn’t matter how it’s done.’
I love watching people realise how much you can achieve with not that much skill. This again gives rise to humorous parallels with other professions, but underneath them the serious lesson is there, the notion that confidence counts for so much. What do you think the ‘con’ in ‘con artist’ stands for? It’s not just the confidence you portray in yourself, it’s the confidence that this engenders in others. People buy into a trick because they want to buy into it. With one of my favourite card tricks I let the team be wowed by it – and then I tell them that it happened entirely inside their own heads. At no point did I make the claim they assume I must have made. This amazes them even more than the trick itself.
People are always much better than they think they’re going to be at working things out. It’s very rare that someone solves a trick on their own – it almost always takes teamwork, with one person saying ‘Is it x?’, before a second jumps in with ‘No, it’s not quite that, but it could be y’. Neither of them would have got there on their own. Once a team’s grey cells are firing, it’s incredible what they can achieve.
And you can never predict which type of person will work out which type of trick. There are so many routes to a solution. A very logical brain might be able to spot a trick’s weak point – lawyers are often good at this, as their whole job is about exploiting weaknesses in the other side’s argument. But equally there are tricks where conventional logic is doomed to fail, where you need a ‘creative’ brain to come at things from a completely unexpected direction, to engage in lateral thinking. There’s more than one way to skin a liar.
If you fancy pitting your own wits against the cards, the coins and the elastic bands (long story), I’m holding a session for readers in the Spectator boardroom on 22 May. Tickets are available here. When an ex-cabinet minister praises the quality of the lying, you know there’s fun to be had.
Does Leo see himself as an American Pope?
In theory, we’ve got the first American Pope, Robert Prevost.
Born and raised in Chicago, university educated in Philadelphia. Parents French/Italian and Spanish – hence his command of four languages.
Did Leo XIV so much as mention the US during his first speech from the balcony? He did not. Maybe conscious that being an American cuts less ice in the church than being Latin American, he mentioned the Peruvian pilgrims in St Peter’s Square and the Peruvian church (where he ministered as a bishop) during his address, and spoke to them in Spanish. But zilch about his country of origin, nada in the English language.
It would have been fascinating to hear American-inflected English from that balcony. But we didn’t. This is significant. In theory, being an American aligns him with the most powerful country on earth – and Americans were previously written off as papabile precisely because of that. But he is an American who is plainly identifying as Peruvian. President Trump may be proud that he’s the first American Pope – and fair enough – but Leo isn’t doing anything to fly the flag.
It’s probably unfair to parse his first address too closely, but let’s give it a go. First of all, before he opened his mouth, he was not, like Francis, in simple white; he was in a muzetta – that velvet cape, just as in pre-Francis days of lovely vestments. So it’s back to business as usual for Gamarelli’s, the papal outfitters. More to the point, it’s back to the pre-Franciscan tradition.
Many of the faithful will be reassured by his conclusion to his address: the Hail Mary
Secondly, he didn’t start off with Francis’s simple Good Evening to the crowd below. That too may have been a conscious break. What he did do was mention peace incessantly during his address. Peace and bridges – he laid stress on building bridges, and the primary title of pope is of Pontifex Maximus, the big Bridge-Builder. I don’t know about you, but those themes didn’t suggest to me that he is a man who sees eye to eye with the US president. He was making a point of reconciliation, which isn’t the first thing that comes to mind with the Trump. Francis too incessantly spoke of peace and unsuccessfully offered his services as a peacemaker for the Ukraine conflict. Leo will also make this a theme of his pontificate.
But Leo did explicitly align himself with Francis’s legacy. He spoke of his predecessor by name. He spoke of a synodal church, which was Francis’s contribution to church governance. In theory this is Leo backing a model of a listening church emphasised by Francis. Let’s see where he takes it.
And he addressed the people of Rome – because, let’s not forget, the actual title of the Pope is the Bishop of Rome. It may be that he’ll take that aspect of the role as seriously as it merits.
He’s also a former head of a worldwide religious congregation, the Augustinians (sorry, not the English one; Augustine of Hippo, the African). He spoke of a missionary church, and he himself was in Peru as a missionary. That means lots of emphasis on global outreach. But with a bit of luck it will also entail missionary activity here in Europe, which arguably needs it even more. (And it was as an Augustinian that he took J. D. Vance to task for using a quote from Augustine, about the ordo amoris, out of contest.)
But many of the faithful will be reassured by his conclusion to his address: the Hail Mary. That is to say, the most Catholic of prayers, invoking the Virgin. Indeed he expressly aligned his work as Pope with her. That’s an element of tradition that modernists and conservatives will warm to.
One more thing. The first Pope Leo, the Great, had a celebrated encounter outside the city of Rome in which he saw off Attila the Hun. Now who might fit into that role?
Robert Prevost…the first American pope? Yes and no.
Is Pope Leo XIV part of the ‘Trumplash’?
It feels a bit facile and tasteless to say that the first American Pope, Leo XIV, has been elected to counter the influence of Trumpism. Popes often change in the role and, since Catholicism is a religion and not an electoral party, the servants of the servants of God tend to defy political caricature.
Consider the limited evidence, however. Following an unusual social media spat between, of all people, the podcaster Rory Stewart and Vice President J.D. Vance about the Christian obligation to love (ordo amoris), in relation to the subject of immigration, the then Cardinal Robert Prevost posted an article entitled ‘J.D. Vance is wrong: Jesus doesn’t ask us to rank our love for others’. The article, by a woman called Kat Armas, attempts to dismantle Vance’s argument that Christians should ‘love your family and then you love your neighbour, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country, and then after that, you can focus and prioritise the rest of the world.’
No, wrote Armas: ‘the problem with this hierarchy is that it feeds the myth that some people are more deserving of our care than others.’ The new Pontiff clearly agreed with that. More recently, too, he retweeted a progressive Catholic writer called Rocco Palmo criticising the Trump administration for its ‘illicit deportation’ of a prisoner to El Salvador. Responding to the election of Pope Leo XIV this evening, Palmo added: ‘First, Canada… Then Australia… now The Conclave. Just unreal.’ He’s referring of course to the so-called Trumplash – the rejection of the US president’s policies across the world.
In his first words as Pope, he said ‘We are all in the hands of God… Let us walk together, build bridges, and proclaim the Gospel without fear.‘ The ‘bridges not walls’ evocation is a near constant refrain of liberal bishops who oppose right-wing border policies. At Pope Francis’s funeral, Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re used the line to sum up the late Pontiff’s message to the world. And then they picked an American who has done a lot of his spiritual work in Peru.
We must wait to see how Leo XIV conducts himself as Pope. But it’s fair to say that the College of Cardinals has made it clear that Rome is no fan of Donald Trump. Not that Trump much minds, of course. He just congratulated Pope Leo:
What excitement, and what a Great Honor for our Country. I look forward to meeting Pope Leo XIV. It will be a very meaningful moment!
So it will.
Is America really ‘OPEN FOR BUSINESS’?
‘America is OPEN FOR BUSINESS’, President Donald Trump shared on Truth Social, just as the details of the US-UK trade deal were coming to light. It was an important clarification. Not only did the substantial tariffs announced on ‘Liberation Day’ suggest, strongly, that this might not be the case, but the President’s rhetoric since then has ranged from ultra-protectionist to free-trade enthusiast.
‘I’m just saying [children] don’t need to have 30 dolls. They can have three,’ Trump told NBC just days ago, when asked about the prospect of empty shelves and higher prices. ‘They don’t need to have 250 pencils. They can have five.’ The comments came at the same time the administration was hinting that a free trade agreement with India was about to be signed.
Britain, however, beat all other countries to it, becoming the first example of America being open for business – on Trump’s terms, of course. The deal is not a comprehensive FTA: it focuses on key industries, including steel, aluminium, agriculture and automotives.
The simple numbers suggest this is a deal weighted towards American interest. UK barriers to trade have been reduced substantially, offering British consumers easier and faster access to a range of US goods, including ethanol and beef. Critically, the 10 per cent on all US imports remains in place. And as Michael Simmons points out on the latest Coffee House Shots, the exemptions carved out for automotive exports from the UK to the US may end up acting more like a cap than a privilege of free trade.
But a notable compromise has been made on both sides. It is very surprising the US did not manage to dent the Digital Services Tax, which disproportionately affects American companies like Amazon. Furthermore, the major hindrance to a deal in the past – exporting chlorinated chicken to the UK – was brushed aside. It turned out, it wasn’t a priority for Trump. ‘They’ll take what they want,’ Trump told the pool of reporters during the press conference. ‘People are going to be able to have options, choice. And they’ll have more of it. And that usually means lower prices.’
This is a very different world to the one that existed just weeks ago, with the President making basic yet important points about the benefits of free trade. But it’s still a world heavily weighed down by the new US tariff regime, which is expected to hike prices globally and limit those options and choices Trump talks about. We have barely begun to feel the impact of the 10 per cent baseline tax. While today’s deal may have mitigated some of the more extreme outcomes, it has not eliminated them altogether.
For other countries gearing up to try to secure their own trade deals, there are two key takeaways from what the UK has secured. First, it seems unlikely that the 10 per cent levy is going to disappear anytime soon. The other was a comment made by US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. When commenting on how the UK managed to strike this deal – and so quickly too – he mentioned that the UK trade team looked at where their other imports were coming from, what ‘they’re importing from other people,’ and how instead they could start ‘sending them over to America.’ In other words, rather than have your own country produce less, look at what you rely on from other parts of the world, and ask: could I source this from America instead?
This is, to use MAGA’s favourite phrase, the ‘America First’ agenda: to ask countries to make America their first source for what they import. This is bound to become a bigger factor, and challenge, as America starts negotiating with countries that feel other trade deals are distorting their export game. Trump may not find every country is as nimble, or happy to negotiate, as Britain.
And why was Britain so happy to negotiate? Especially considering the backlash Keir Starmer is already under for agreeing to a deal that seems to benefit America more when it comes to trade levies? The answer – albeit the tough argument to make – is that it is always beneficial to lower your own barriers to trade, even if the other country is keeping their barriers high. This was articulated, ironically, by Trump himself today: it’s a deal, he said, that is ‘so good for both countries…[Britain will] end up getting products that they’ll be able to price. And if they like ‘em better, and we make great products, they’ll be buying those products. But they were not available in the UK.’
That is the huge benefit to British consumers – more products, lower prices – in addition to the reduction in tariffs Starmer managed to negotiate. A high tariff is a high tax on your own citizens. The 10 per cent blanket tariff on foreign products coming to America is a price paid by Americans. The $6 billion Trump keeps touting will be raised from this deal is the additional tax American businesses will pay for foreign goods and foreign parts.
Britons, on the other hand, will get more and pay less for it. It’s a win for Britain. And it’s an encouraging sign for America that neomercantilism has not – yet – won the day.