How did the Tavistock gender scandal unfold?

Another week, another blast of evidence as to why putting kids on hormone blockers is an abomination. Time to Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock’s Gender Service for Children by BBC journalist Hannah Barnes, which is released on 16 February, is dynamite. The revelations it contains are horrifying: former clinicians at the Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS), part of the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust in London, detail how some children were placed on medication after one face-to-face assessment, despite many having mental health or family issues. More than a third of young people referred to the service had moderate to severe autistic traits, compared with under 2 per cent of children in the general population.

Much of the detail in the book has been known for some time, but has been denied, ignored or dismissed. Finally, action is being taken: the Tavistock clinic is due to close this Spring. But why did it take so long for this scandal to fully emerge?

My own dealings with GIDS – and the backlash faced by those who have dared call into question the practice of giving kids hormone blockers – goes some way to explaining what has happened. Even back in 2003, when I first contacted the clinic, I was horrified by the approach to transparency. I was writing an investigative piece on the diagnosis of ‘transsexuality’ in relation to children. I explained the angle I was taking (critical and sceptical) and that I was hoping for a response from the service, refuting (I assumed) my allegations. Instead, I was sent on a wild goose chase, from clinician to clinician, and ended up speaking with an administrator who was spectacularly unhelpful.

I couldn’t quite believe the diagnosis made of trans people, which, in my view, effectively amounted to being ‘trapped in the wrong body’. As far as us feminists were concerned, this view of gender and sex looked like the most insidious type of sexism and promotion of 1950s gender roles. How could this perspective still be so prevalent so long after the women’s liberation movement had made its mark?

The ‘girls like pink, boys like blue’ sex stereotype nonsense should surely have been dead in the water by the turn of the millennium. But it seemed that some medical professionals who thought they knew best – and believed there is something like a ‘sexed brain’ – were keeping it alive and well.

Back in the 1980s, when I first encountered Claudia, who, as a gay man aged 26, was given irreversible cross-sex hormones – and underwent full sex change surgery two years later – it was plain to see that something was already wrong with the debate surrounding ‘transexuality’. When we met, Claudia told me that, despite ‘passing really well’ as a woman, they had always deeply regretted transitioning. ‘If only I had been supported to live in the body I had, I am certain I could have had a good life,’ Claudia said.

Today, there are many more people like Claudia who regret transitioning, and who feel their mental health problems were ignored when their condition was put in a neat box marked ‘gender dysphoria’. Some of these people will have passed through the doors of GIDS. As Barnes outlines in her book, when it comes to children arriving at the clinic, mental health issues were sometimes overlooked. As well as claiming to be trapped in the body of the opposite sex, some young patients claimed to be of a different ethnic background, such as Japanese or Korean. One young person had, as Barnes details, ‘three different alter egos, two of whom spoke in an Australian accent’.

It’s true that not everyone who worked at GIDS was happy with what was unfolding: some mental health professionals were deeply concerned with the medicalisation of children. They believed these children required talking therapies, not irreversible hormonal and surgical interventions. But these staff were in a difficult position: they were under pressure from ‘powerful lobbies’ to opt for medication, as a report from 2005 revealed:

‘…it is the consistent impression of a number of GIDU (Gender Identity Dysphoria Unit) staff that the service was coming under pressure to recommend the prescription of drugs more often and more quickly, and that the independence of professional judgement was also coming under increasing pressure. Young patients may threaten suicide if their anxieties are not immediately addressed. Parents and others may threaten to complain and there are powerful lobbies from older patients pressing for the use of medication, which even more worryingly, is now available without regulation via the internet. Clinicians will differ in their ability to resist the pressure to comply.’

Clinicians feared the consequences if they refused to comply with what patients, and their parents, wanted. Sonia Appleby, a former safeguarding lead, told Barnes that those who spoke out against the transition of children were ‘demonised’.

The resulting scandal is now plain to see: children damaged for life having been placed on medication that should not have been given to them. Some of those who worked at GIDS compare what unfolded at the clinic to the Mid Staffs hospital scandal of the 2000s, or the doping of East German athletes in the 1960s and 1970s. They’re right to do so – and it’s vital that lessons are learnt. If we fail to review what went so wrong, those that were instrumental in creating such devastation will be allowed to get away with it.

Is Brexit really costing households £1,000 each?

They never give up, those Remainers. Like the Japanese soldier found on a Pacific island still fighting the second world war – in 1974, every other day there is another loose shot from the undergrowth. After last week’s Ditchley Park gathering involving Lord Mandelson, David Lammy and others, comes an interview in the Overshoot with Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) member Jonathan Haskel. In it, Haskel makes the claim that Brexit is costing each British household £1,000 a year through lost trade and investment.

Let’s start with the assertion that this is a loss per household. In any other context, of course, many of the same people who are promoting the £1,000 per household figure today would argue that the trickle-down effect is a mirage: that wealth stays in the hands of a lucky few. Yet, when it comes to attacking Brexit, it seems that the trickle-down effect is alive and well: if the whole economy suffers a loss of £29 billion then that can be divided up between Britain’s 27 million households and presented as money which is taken out of the pockets of each and every one of us. This is nonsense – if the economy shrinks, it will impact most people, but not in such a direct way.    

But let’s pass over that and have a look at how Haskel has arrived at his figure. Needless to say, this is a piece of modelling which tries to predict what would have happened had Britain not voted to leave the EU and compares that with what has actually happened. Given the Bank of England’s pretty appalling record at predicting economic growth, or inflation – which two years ago it was still predicting would peak at two percent – one might well ask the point of this exercise, but never mind.

What Haskel has done is to look at the rate of business investment growth over two periods – 1997 to 2007 and 2010 to 2015 – and extrapolate from those periods to where he thinks investment might be now had it continued at those trend rates. Both lines lead to a similar sort of place, far above the current level of investment.

Eagle-eyed readers might just spot an omission here: what about the period 2007-10? Why doesn’t that feature in Haskel’s reckoning? Those three years were, you might just remember, the years of the financial crash. Haskel has taken a couple of trend lines from the boom years, ignored the recession in between, and used that to calculate where he thinks investment would be now. Then he has blamed the lot on Brexit and ignored the pandemic and the sharpest recession in modern times which followed it, as well as the current global economic difficulties.

It is true that the graph seems to show investment flattened after 2016, but then it had grown sharply from a deep pit in the 2008-09 slump, so you might not have expected it to continue on trend. Moreover, Britain is not the only European country to see a tailing-off in investment – Germany saw a similar tailing-off, beginning a couple of years later. The MPC has already attempted a similar exercise with post-Brexit trade – asserting that the level of goods trade is around 10-15 per cent below where it thinks it would otherwise be. That led to the assertion that a Brexit-related loss of trade has cost the economy 3.2 per cent. 

The beauty of modelling is that you can get it to tell you pretty much anything you want it to, if the parameters are right. But no, we would not all have an extra £1,000 to spend had we not voted for Brexit.   

Who really owns Britain’s waterways?

Stop press: Fleet Street is officially full of sewage. Flicking through the papers this morning, Steerpike was intrigued to see water pollution feature prominently on the front page of both the Times and the i newspapers. ‘Water firms to be spared threat of £250m fines’ roared the former; ‘Sunak facing Tory rebellion over sewage in UK rivers’ retorted the latter. Both are worthy stories but neither were splashed across any of the other national newspapers. What’s going on?

It turns on that the i are keen on the story because on Friday they proudly launched their new campaign to ‘Save Britain’s Rivers.’ It is a new UK-wide drive to rescue the country’s polluted waterways, champion a manifesto for our rivers and features Undertones singer Feargal Sharkey as a prominent spokesman. And the Times are keen on the story because today they have proudly launched their new ‘Clean it Up’ campaign to save Britain’s waterways. It, er, is also a new UK-wide drive to rescue the country’s polluted waterways, champion a manifesto for our rivers and features Undertones singer Feargal Sharkey as a prominent spokesman too.

Talk about putting the mainstream into media, eh?

Red-faced Angela Rayner embarrassed over expenses

Labour have been out this morning, trumpeting their much-hyped ‘GPC files’ about the use of government procurement cards. Mr S has had a look and there’s some interesting things in there. But was Angela Rayner really the best choice to lead on this issue? Especially when it was Emily Thornberry who did all the work. It was Rayner whose quotes about ‘lavish spending’ and ‘a scandalous catalogue of waste’ led the Labour attack in the write-ups today, as part of her party’s attempts to paint her as the Prescott-like bruiser to Starmer’s sensible southern style.

Unfortunately though Rayner has form in this area, having once charged the taxpayer £249 for a pair of personalised AirPods which she claimed on expenses – even though Bluetooth headphones can be bought online for as little as £15. So it was to Steerpike’s amusement this morning when the Guardian of all places opted to lead on Rayner’s past claims this morning, headlining its live blog with the words ‘Angela Rayner defends own expenses.’ Not a good sign for Labour when even the Graun turn on you.

Bet that wasn’t on the media grid in Victoria Street…

Do face masks work?

Throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, international agencies, national governments, and local public health departments claimed that their policies followed ‘the science’. The imposition of face masks in public areas was a prominent example. 

‘Hands, face, space,’ we were told; the belief was that wearing a mask would prevent the transmission of the SARS-Cov-2 virus. Critics who called into question the evidence for that claim were accused of peddling ‘misinformation’. Yet the latest review of mask wearing studies suggests they were right – and that masks made little to no difference in curtailing the spread of Covid.

When the virus first arrived in the UK in 2020, the official view, based on the science of the time, was that masks had no value outside health care. This verdict drew heavily on the Cochrane Review of physical interventions to interrupt or reduce the spread of respiratory viruses. 

Since they started in 1993, Cochrane Reviews have become the international gold standard of evidence for medical practice. They are only published after an exhaustive process of peer review, with full transparency about the way they identify and rate studies to include. They are rightly treated as definitive summaries of the contemporary state of scientific knowledge. 

The Reviews give greatest weight to Randomised Controlled Trials (RCTs) as evidence. These have the lowest risk of bias of any epidemiological method. A population is randomly assigned to a group that receives an intervention (e.g. masks) and one that does not (control). In principle, the intervention is the only difference between the groups, eliminating other factors that might confuse the picture. In practice, this is difficult to achieve. Cochrane Reviews deal with that problem by pooling results from different studies in a meta-analysis. Any biases that have crept in are likely to cancel each other out so users can have confidence in the overall result. If RCTs are not available, the Reviews look at other types of study but warn that this is inferior evidence. 

Cochrane Reviews have been tracking face masks since 2007, with updates in 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2020. They found only a few, small, RCTs and the evidence base was rated as low quality. Nevertheless, it suggested little or no benefit from masks. The 2020 review repeated earlier conclusions that it was ‘uncertain’ whether community use of cloth or surgical face masks slowed the spread of respiratory viruses. 

This scepticism informed the starting position of many experienced public health leaders in 2020. Doubts about the value of masks were not misinformation. Yet this view was reversed for reasons that are not yet fully understood – and debate about mask wearing was largely off limits. Anyone who criticised mask wearing was likely to be branded as a peddler of untruths. Serious questions about the legitimacy of overt state intervention, through law, or covert state intervention, through ‘nudging’, to promote a policy based on ‘uncertain’ evidence were dismissed as fringe libertarianism. Treating all criticism as misinformation, rather than as loyal opposition intended to improve policy and governance, is a throwback to 17^th century claims about the right of governments to impose tests of religious belief as a condition of participation in public life. 

A further updated Review has just been published, after the usual thorough peer review. More and larger RCTs are now available. The quality of evidence has been upgraded from low to moderate. The Review strengthens its conclusion to saying there is ‘probably little to no benefit’ from the use of cloth or surgical face masks in the community. It also considered N95/FFP2 masks. The evidence was weaker but suggested that these made little or no difference. The Review regrets the absence of funding for additional trials, which would have permitted a stronger conclusion. This reiterates a call that many have been making since summer 2020, which has consistently been ignored by those in a position to fund such studies. 

There is now one further report, from a large trial in Guinea-Bissau, in west Africa, in a pre-print that has not yet been peer-reviewed. It has limitations but its results are consistent with the studies included in the Cochrane Review. There is nothing to change the Review’s conclusions. 

Lacking support from RCTs, mask advocates have shifted their ground to rely on ‘mechanistic’ evidence from physics and engineering, claiming laboratory studies should be judged by different standards. However, such evidence has never led health and safety agencies to recommend even N95/FFP2 masks for protection against respiratory viruses. The RCTs establish the failure of masks once they leave highly-controlled experimental conditions and arrive in the real world. 

Some argue that masks should be worn in solidarity with ‘the vulnerable’. Yet if the evidence is that masks are unlikely to work, it is irresponsible to promote a false sense of security – particularly as the definition of ‘vulnerability’ is often very selective. Most people with an immunosuppressive condition will still benefit from vaccination. Others need to act as they did before 2020 to manage their personal risk from any respiratory virus.

Mask mandates were never evidence-based policy. They simply triggered a search for policy-based evidence. My mask never protected you and yours certainly did not protect me. 

Six of the worst revelations from Labour’s procurement files

Labour got much of the lobby exercised last week with its latest wheeze: mysteriously rebranding its Twitter account as ‘the GPC files’ and sending out a link to ‘theGPCfiles’ to launch 7 a.m Monday morning. Sadly, for fans of the Global Powerlifting Committee eagerly expecting a string of revelations, the website in question focuses on government procurement cards. These allow purchases to be made directly against departmental budgets without going through regular invoicing procedures.

Dozens of parliamentary questions and Freedom of Information requests have been tabled by Labour in recent months to try to find out what this money has been spent on. The website itself looks like an attempt to copy Sky and Tortoise’s recent ‘Westminster Files’ project by increasing the transparency around information which Whitehall makes it difficult to obtain. And while the ‘GPC files’ don’t have the same punch as the expenses scandal, Mr S has nevertheless had an enjoyable morning trawling through the details online.

Below are six of the more embarrassing revelations from Labour’s new project…

Post-pandemic splurge

Spending controls were relaxed during the pandemic, with holders of GPCs now able to spend £20,000 a transaction and £100,000 a month. Total spending is now up by 71 per cent on 2010, with 14 departments spending a total of at least £145.5 million throughout 2021 compared to £84.9 million in 2010/11. Worst offenders? The Ministry of Justice, up from £36.9 million to £84.9 million, and the Foreign Office, whose spending was nearly four times higher than ten years previously.

Truss and Sunak’s ministries in the firing line

The pair of Prime Ministers were both serving in departmental briefs during the period covered by the files. Sunak was at the Treasury from February 2020 until July 2022; Truss was at the Foreign Office from September 2021 until September 2022. Under Sunak, the Treasury spent £3,393 on 13 fine art photographs from the Tate Gallery and, more damningly, they still haven’t published a single month of GPC data for the calendar year of 2022. So much for the disinfectant of sunlight.

While Liz Truss was Foreign Secretary meanwhile, government cards were used to pay £3,240 for access to a Heathrow VIP lounge, £1,443 on lunch and dinner in Jakarta and £7,218 on a reception at a Sydney amusement park. The Foreign Office spent £344,803 on restaurants and bars in 2021 as well as £23,457 on duty-free wine and spirits, rising to £95,834 in the first ten months of 2022.

Branded merchandise

Thousands are still being spent on questionable branded items. Among these include the Prison Service spending £9,236 on branded hand sanitiser, Natural England spending £1,411 on branded mugs ‘in recognition for the difficult year of 2020’ and the Ministry of Justice paying £4,019 for branded USB cables for a virtual conference. Top of the pile though is £1,552 spent on ‘purple cups’ for UK Visas and Immigration and the Passport Service. How are all those small boats going?

Misleading descriptions of spending

Labour have pointed out that records of spending are often poorly-detailed with misleading descriptions. Examples include English sparkling wine classed as ‘computer equipment’, £3,266 of luxury lighting as ‘computer software’ and £3,158 from a five-star hotel in Bahrain described as ‘accounting, auditing and bookkeeping services.’

Shoddy record keeping

At least four departments have had to be prompted by Labour’s parliamentary questions to correct major errors or omissions in their GPC data, which had otherwise gone unnoticed. These include the Business Department publishing the wrong data for April 2020, the Home Office and Health ministries failing to publish records and the Cabinet Office missing data. This is despite the National Audit Office warning about the need for ‘timely and accurate management information,’ without which they said departments could not maintain effective controls on GPC use.

The Opposition is doing its job

Perhaps the worst takeaway of all from the ‘GPC files’ is that it shows the Opposition doing precisely what it ought to be doing: exposing waste, causing mischief and generally putting the government on the back foot. The figures primarily come from the 248 written questions which Emily Thornberry has tabled since May. Her longtime media advisor is none other than Damian McBride, a past master in the intricacies of Whitehall and Westminster.

Labour’s sophisticated research and briefing operation today shows just how far the party has come from the shambles of the Corbyn years. CCHQ have launched a decent fightback – pointing out that it was Labour who brought in GPCs in 1997 – but they will have a tough fight on their hands come the next election.

Has Macron turned France into America’s poodle?

A notable feature of how the French public view the war in Ukraine is that the strongest support for its continuation is among voters who identify as Centrists and Socialists. Those most in favour of a peace settlement are backers of the left-wing Jean-Luc Mélenchon and the right-wing Marine Le Pen and Eric Zemmour.

A poll in December revealed that 69 per cent of the former and 77 per cent of the latter would prefer that negotiations take precedence over the delivery of weapons to Ukraine, a number that rose to 88 per cent among Zemmour loyalists. These dropped to 57 per cent for Socialists and 60 per cent for supporters of Emmanuel Macron’s Renaissance party. 

The majority of Socialists and Centrists in France are from the same demographic, the affluent middle-class, and it may be that they are not as anxious about the rising energy bills and petrol prices as those who vote for Mélenchon and Le Pen, the majority of whom are blue-collar workers – or students, in the case of Mélenchon. But this is not to say that the French are fans of Vladimir Putin. Earlier this month, a poll revealed that only 9 per cent of people had a favourable opinion of the Russian leader, compared with 60 per cent for Volodymyr Zelensky.

French opposition to the war is predicated on several factors; the worsening economic situation in the country is one, and the fear of a nuclear conflict another. But it’s also a result of Gallic anti-Americanism. The hard left dislike America because of its capitalism; the right for its cultural undermining of the Republic over the years with its food, films and, more recently, its progressive ideology, which is slowly but steadily infiltrating French society.  

But there are also memories of the Iraq War, a conflict that began twenty years ago and caused a deep and bitter rift between France and the USA.

The French reluctance to join George W. Bush’s ‘Coalition of the Willing’, as it was branded in 2003, proved subsequently to be justified. But for many months France was barracked and insulted in Britain – and particularly in America – for this choice.

On 11 February that year, the Guardian reported that the USA regarded the French as ‘wimps, weasels and monkeys’. Just about every media outlet was united in bashing them for not falling into line against Saddam Hussain’s regime in Iraq. There were insulting references to the second world war, numerous mocking cartoons and the New York Times proposed that India should replace France in the UN security council because India was a ‘serious’ country whereas France ‘is so caught up with its need to differentiate itself from America to feel important, it’s become silly’.

Chat-show hosts such as Jay Leno and David Letterman piled in, infuriated that then-president Jacques Chirac refused to join the coalition because he had not seen adequate proof that Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, and that he feared war would destabilise the region. ‘The last time the French asked for “more proof” it came marching into Paris under a German flag,’ quipped Letterman, to roars of approval from his audience. 

Restaurants and diners across the USA – including some on Capitol Hill – renamed French Fries ‘Freedom Fries’ as a rebuke to the ‘Cheese-eating surrender monkeys’. But no one was laughing a year later as the American-led invasion became bogged down in a bloody insurgency that dragged on until 2011 and cost thousands of Coalition lives.  

In December 2006, the New York Times admitted that ‘most Americans have come to see the Iraq War as a mistake’ while the paper regretted that France had been traduced because ‘they dared to urge caution’.  

The French understandably resented the insults but, throughout the war, opinion polls showed that the public overwhelmingly supported Chirac’s stance – just as they had in 1991 when François Mitterrand joined the alliance in the first Gulf War. The second invasion was different, however, and the electorate shared Chirac’s belief that the reasons for going to war were spurious. 

That scepticism has returned, and it is being aired in newspapers and on radio and television. The French approved, a year ago, of Macron’s shuttle diplomacy as he attempted to avert war – not least because it put France centre stage internationally. But many are growing concerned at what they perceive to be their President’s growing belligerence; this year Macron has mooted sending heavy tanks and fighter jets to Ukraine.

The issue has divided the left-wing NUPE coalition, comprising Communists, Socialists, Greens and Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise [LFI]. The Communists and LFI want parliament to decide whether arms should be sent to Ukraine; they claim that at a time when France is suffering a debilitating cost-of-living crisis, money should not be spent on a foreign war that doesn’t directly involve France. The Greens and Socialists believe Zelensky should be given whatever he needs ‘to repel Russian aggression’. 

In interviews last week Mélenchon, Le Pen and Zemmour expressed deep unease about a conflict they fear has lost sight of its original objective – the defence of Ukraine – and has turned into to a war of which the ultimate aim is regime change in Russia. Zemmour said that, for several months, France’s foreign policy has been directed by the USA. 

Concerns about where the war is going – and what it could mean for France militarily and economically – have also been expressed by historians, philosophers and economists. In an interview in December, Thierry de Montbrial, chairman of the French Institute of International Relations, explained that the USA will be ‘the big winner from this war’. Europe, on the other hand, is in danger of impoverishing itself. ‘Sanctions hurt us a little more each time,’ he said. ‘We become a little more dependent on the United States, whose unemotional strategy is a combination of values and interests.’

Many of the war’s critics believe that France has become too closely aligned with the USA and has lost its diplomatic and military sovereignty. These critics trace this back to 2009 when, under president Nicolas Sarkozy, France rejoined Nato four decades after Charles de Gaulle took them out.

In last year’s presidential election, eight of the 12 candidates pledged to withdraw France from Nato if voted into office. This, according to Le Monde, was because they see it as an organisation ‘dominated by the United States, which uses it as a tool to serve its interests’. Only Macron and those candidates from the Socialists, Greens and centre-right Republicans wished France to remain. 

The other candidates were representative of the millions of French citizens who would prefer to be mocked as a ‘surrender monkey’ rather than seen as an American poodle.

It’s time for ‘reality-based’ politicians to start addressing Brexit

Praise be. A day or two ago, something potentially quite exciting took place in Ditchley Park in Oxfordshire. It was a two-day conference and its guiding question – according to documents obtained by the Observer – was: ‘How can we make Brexit work better with our neighbours in Europe?’ Gathered there, and not a moment before time (though some might say five or six years ago might have been better still), were a number of politicians and public figures. It’s described as having been a ‘private discussion’.

There are two things that seem worth noticing about this. The first, which is very encouraging, is that the meeting involved people who were both pro- and anti-Brexit in the first place, and that it included people on both sides of the House and neither. There will have been an inbuilt check, therefore, on the group polarisation effect. This wasn’t just a bunch of Remainers sitting about, like at the north London dinner party of cliché, taking competitive pleasure in pointing out how wrong their political opponents turned out to be. Nor will it have been a bunch of Brexiteers stewing in resentment at how ‘sneering elites’ sabotaged their project. 

It seems to me, pace those altogether in denial about the matter, that it’s uncontroversial to say that Brexit has not yet proven the unmitigated success some had hoped for and others had promised. That lovely Union Flag butterfly has not steered effortlessly into the spring sunshine; it has struggled to emerge from its cocoon. Its wings are sticky and scrunched up. A meeting on ‘the failures of Brexit’, as reports have described it, is therefore a meeting grounded in reality. But that doesn’t mean it’s defeatist: my sense is that none of those people would have been there had they not thought that there were things that can be done to mitigate those failures. 

Some of us always thought Brexit was a terrible idea, but that’s a bit beside the point. It has happened, we are where we are, and it seems a good idea to take that as a starting point. Remainers must acknowledge that Brexit is a reality, and any hope of reversing it is a generation off. Leavers must acknowledge that it’s been a bit of a boggins so far. So the Ditchley Park conspirators were, we’re entitled to hope, a collection of pragmatists trying to address the real politics of where we are – and see what can be done to make the best of it. 

The second thing worth noticing is much less encouraging. It’s that the people who were gathered in this conclave came together in what’s described as ‘high secrecy’. Had it not been leaked to a Sunday newspaper, none of us would have had the first idea that this had even happened. It is – and sorry if this counts as mental health shaming – completely bonkers that the tone of the public conversation about the major fact of our national life is so polarised and unreal that ecumenical groups meeting to talk about reality feel the need to do so in conditions of deathly omerta. 

And, in large part as a result of that situation, the people having this conversation were not, for the most part, those in a most direct position to implement whatever good ideas came out of it. I don’t want to call them the B-team – the attendees whose names have been made public have a lot of wisdom and experience and clout – but they certainly don’t seem to have been the greatest powers in the land.

The only senior figure in government there was the Levelling Up Secretary Michael Gove, and good on him. There was a smattering of members of the shadow cabinet, but for the most part the guest list seems to have been party grandees (Norman Lamont and Michael Howard for the Tories; Peter Mandelson and Gisela Stuart from the Labour party) and miscellaneous poobahs of the sort who don’t always have one eye on the safety of a seat at the next election: ‘diplomats, defence experts and the heads of some of the biggest businesses and banks’. 

Rishi Sunak is still hostage, or half-hostage, to the European Research Group. Keir Starmer is still terrified of saying anything which will allow him to be painted as a secret rejoiner and cost him the Red Wall or whatever his psephologists are telling him. But since one of these men is in power now, and the other one is likely to be power soon, it seems kind of important that they should be having conversations of exactly the sort that took place in Ditchley. It might not even be the worst idea in the world, in democratic terms, for them to have these conversations in public. 

I wrote this time last week of how there seemed to be a deficit in what my might call ‘reality-based’ politics. Here’s a prime example of it. We need to acknowledge that Brexit has happened in order to move forward. And we need to acknowledge that it has been, in many respects, a failure so far in order to try to fix it. Doing those two things, it seems to me, shouldn’t be secret-squirrel stuff. ‘How can we make Brexit work better?’ is arguably the central question in our national conversation, and we won’t begin to answer it until we can admit it is.  

The Disneyfication of Prince Harry

After Prince Harry’s first date with the future Duchess of Sussex, he repaired to a friend’s house off the King’s Road. ‘Out came the tequila,’ he recalls in his much-discussed autobiography, Spare. ‘Out came the weed. We drank and smoked and watched… Inside Out.’

Meghan, however, interrupted his stoned reverie by Facetiming him, and immediately asked: ‘Are you watching cartoons?’ Harry replied: ‘No. I mean, yeah. It’s… Inside Out.’ It was, he recalls, ‘good weed, dude’. The quality of the Disney film, he doesn’t mention – though his pointed double use of ellipses around its title suggests it perhaps has some significance in relation to this new girlfriend.

Three years later, in July 2019, by now not just an item but married, the couple enjoyed a high-profile date night at the London premiere for the relaunched stage version of The Lion King, sharing the leopard-spotted yellow carpet with Beyoncé, Jay-Z and the like.

It was to prove an important evening in the coalescing narrative around the Sussexes for two reasons. Firstly, because it was subsequently suggested that Harry had, at the after-party, taken the opportunity to tout his new wife to Disney’s chief executive, Bob Iger, as a potential voiceover artist – foreshadowing by six months their so-called Megxit to California which would be largely funded by American media money from deals of this kind. Secondly, because it was about a conversation at this event that Meghan would later make a claim that was greeted with international scepticism, saying of a cast member: ‘He said, “I just need you to know: when you married into this family, we [in South Africa] rejoiced in the streets the same we did when Mandela was freed from prison.”’

But away from these two headline-generating moments, did the evening also resonate with Harry for a more personal reason? Because this was a new take on a story he was long familiar with: The Lion King is one of his favourite films. He revealed as much when answering questions from children at a 2018 charity event – and was sufficiently conversant to add: ‘You know who does the voice of Zazu? Rowan Atkinson, who plays Mr Bean.’

The original Lion King came out in 1994, shortly after Harry’s tenth birthday, so he was its prime target audience. The film tells the story of a boy prince, Simba, who is haunted by guilt over the death of a parent, detailing his struggles to find a pathway into adulthood – which he accomplishes through a judicious mixture of martial action and emotional sensitivity, becoming heroic in the process. 

You can see why Harry might identify with this, particularly after the death of his mother in 1997. Indeed the film’s appeal to adult men unable to process complex feelings was explored to comic effect with the Riz Ahmed terrorist character in 2010’s Four Lions. Harry’s connection seems to be similar – even if they were on opposing sides in Afghanistan.

At that same meet-and-greet with children, Meghan cited another pair of recent animated films that Harry was apparently fond of: DreamWorks’s 2016 Leap! (‘Harry likes it because she [the main character] has got red hair,’ Meghan said) and Disney’s Moana, also from 2016, with Harry citing his favourite moment as being ‘when the chicken comes up and he finds himself out at sea in a boat’. This was in 2018. The couple’s first baby, Archie, would not be born for another year. But this as yet childless pair, well into their thirties, were conversant with three of the major children’s films from recent years. 

This is not, please note, a criticism – I am an active fan of animated cinema myself and still watch such films even though my now adult children no longer want to watch with me. But I mention it because I think it demonstrates that watching these films appears to have been a childhood habit Harry never gave up – and several of the strands of the story he has so publicly told about himself and his family seem to have origins in or echoes of the narratives in these cartoons.

Inside Out, like The Lion King, may have some personal appeal to the prince beyond its colourful charm when stoned: the story of the 2015 film is about processing troubling emotions, and specifically those thrown up by a move away from the familiarity of home to California. But more generally, Inside Out is a film which very much endorses the idea of self-examination and personal growth. 

And there’s more. The hero growing up without the love of a saintly mother who is taken from him violently is a staple Disney motif, most famously in Bambi but reprised again and again: the eponymous lead in Finding Nemo sees his mum murdered by a barracuda; Elsa and Anna, in Frozen, lose both parents to a storm. Parental absence also affects Dumbo, Mowgli in The Jungle Book and some 84 of the 101 Dalmatians. 

Sitting neatly with the taken-mother is the trope of the wicked stepmother parachuted into her vacated place. Perhaps the most surprising aspect of Spare was the sheer vitriol levelled at Camilla long after most of the rest of us have accepted her as benign. It was almost as if Harry had been steeped in the legend of Snow White or Cinderella. As for Charles, the bungling father king character unaware of risk also recurs in Disney – in Sleeping Beauty for one.

And just as Meghan opened Harry’s eyes to the coarseness of his soldiering and rugby banter days, his unconscious bias and worse, and saved him from it, so Beauty rescued the Beast from his curse with her true love in another Disney film released during Harry’s boyhood. For the Harry and William dynamic, look to Frozen again, in which an impetuous and romantic youngster is cut off from a more powerful and yet remote, even icy older sibling. Neither can let it go. 

Then there is the love story that transcends a rigid class system which underpins the legend of the Harry and Meghan union – and is also seen in Lady and the Tramp and The Aristocats. That kind of love inevitably leads to a battle with the established order: Encanto sees the exciting young Mirabel made miserable by the pressure of her family’s adherence to tradition, laid down not just by her strict grandmother but by the house itself. In the same film, her brother Bruno is forced to flee after he is made to feel he is hurting the household, even though in truth he loves them all dearly.

So much of Harry’s turmoil is foreshadowed in Disney, it seems. Perhaps even in remaining true to his childhood vision of the world and its realities he is the boy who never grew up – Peter Pan.

As for Meghan, when she was asked the same question, she said her favourite Disney film was The Little Mermaid – rebellious teenager falls out with her father when she falls in love with a prince from a different world. Which also perhaps rings true for her. But that might be one to explore more fully when her autobiography comes out.

It’s not all roses: 6 alternative Valentine’s Day gifts

We can blame Robbie Burns. That line about my love being like a red, red rose didn’t actually specify Valentine’s Day, but it has meant that 14 February is forever associated with roses at a time of year when they’re not in bloom. Not here anyway, which means that all the red roses around are from far-flung places. Plus they’re not really scented. No. Hold the red roses. Keep them for June and send them for midsummer or something.

Here are six suggestions for Valentine’s gifts that don’t entail actual roses. And on the whole, let’s steer clear of pink, shall we? The usual line up of pink items for Valentine’s, from bears with hearts on their paws to hear-shaped chocolates, can be a bit yuck. And since we’re all struggling to make ends meet, I’m including thrifty options. But if you add a bottle of champagne to any of these, so much the better.

• Flowers that Do Not Include Roses. The obvious option at this time of year is of course bulb flowers – tulips, narcissi, daffs, hyacinths – which are simply lovely, or flowering shrubs and hellebores. They’re far prettier than long-stem roses and practically every supermarket has a mixed bunch. May I just say that for most women, having a bouquet delivered to your place of work is terrifically gratifying. Two options: M&S Springtime February Fabulous Flower Bouquet – a bit of a mouthful for a very pretty (all right, pink) selection of hyacinths, tulips and stocks, £25. Or the Real Flower Company does a lovely bouquet of narcissi, tulips, anemones and herbs, from £56 for a posy.

• Chocolates (obviously). My joint favourite chocolatier (with Paul A. Young) is William Curley, whose caramels and truffles are heavenly. For Valentine’s, you could go for his new heart-shaped passionfruit caramels, or simply a heart-shaped beribboned box of his couture chocolates, which would do it for me. Hurry: order by midday today for delivery on The Day, unless you’re based in London and can drop into his Soho shop or the outlet in Harrods. Or, for something simple and delicious, how about a selection of Bare Bones chocolate bars, nicely ribboned? The Valentine’s Five Bar Collection is £30. 

• A Romantic Book. This is quite tricky because obviously tastes differ (I would run a mile from anyone who gave me Sally Rooney), but the obvious option is a book of love poems. I love Macmillan Collector’s Library editions because they’re terrifically covetable – just the size to slip into your pocket – and affordable with it. For Valentine’s, you can’t go far wrong with its Poems for Love anthology. Or how about Shakespeare’s Sonnets, with lovely fat cupids on the cover? £9.99. 

• A Nice Cheese. Not everyone has a sweet tooth, so how about a nice, heart-shaped cheese? Corny, but is this really a time for austere good taste? The long-established cheesemonger Paxton and Whitfield does a nice heart-shaped unpasteurised goat’s cheese, Coeur du Pic (£7.75). Or if it’s for me, a nice ripe Vacherin would do it.

• Scent. Obviously, you can go the whole hog with roses here, though I find full-on rose scent a bit cloying. But I’d certainly stick with florals. So how about Ormonde Jayne’s lovely Levant, which is like a bunch of peonies mixed with orange blossom? £135 for 50ml. But order quickly. Or if sweet florals aren’t what you’re after, Frederic Malle does an interesting rose and leather combo which is subtle and intriguing. £240 for 100ml eau de parfum.

• The Valentine’s Hamper. If money’s no object, just go for this Fortnum & Mason hamper. You can’t go wrong. Eleven items from tea and chocolates to cheese and wine in a wicker hamper. Yum. £210. Next-day delivery is available for orders placed before 6 p.m.

PS: If you want an interesting take on an e-card, you could try JiveBird, which has the option of sending a song with it. I was put on to it by one of the founders, my friend, Dominic McGonigal.

Why it’s time for a pilgrimage revival

At 3 a.m, with sleepless hours slipping by as storms besiege my tent, it’s easy to ask: why? Why swap the security of a home for a pilgrimage on foot with no itinerary beyond a smudged path on a 14th century map? And no comforts beyond those carried on my back or offered by strangers? Back on the bright path next morning, though, the question answers itself. The way is its own reward: the land resonates; the past speaks; my soul sings – and so do I.

But my departure had not only been inspired by the pull of the open road. There were push factors, too. The economic attrition of the past two years had caught up with me, as it has with many. A bad bout of Covid; the apparent end of a cherished relationship; the loss of a pilgrimage charity which I had started. Like the folk-song hero in Spencer the Rover, I felt ‘so reduced, which caused great confusion’. And so – making a virtue of a necessity – I packed my belongings into a container and sought solace on the footpath. 

Embracing uncertainty when your life hits a crossroad may sound counterintuitive. But pilgrimage is a very traditional way to restore wellbeing. St Thomas Becket of Canterbury – my destination – was called ‘the best doctor for the worthy sick’. The words ‘holy’, ‘healthy’ and ‘holistic’ all share the same root in Old English. 

What changed to make this ancient travelling balm into an anachronism? I blame the two Henrys: Henry VIII and Henry T. Ford. The first aggressively dissolved England’s pilgrimage infrastructure and created vagrancy laws, the taboo of which lingers to this day; while the second combusted miles into minutes.

Pilgrimage has been part of my life for 15 years, ever since a seven-month walk from Kent to Cornwall revealed the extraordinary power of slow travel. Self-discovery, new friendships, a closer alliance with nature and freedom to engage with spirituality: all were waiting on the path. Plus a wellspring of traditional songs to draw from along the way. 

Since then, I rediscovered the forgotten coastal route from Southampton to Canterbury – relaunching it as the Old Way. I started a charity to promote pilgrimage, and a website to share my vision for a healthy itinerant life.

My goal is to revive the English traditions of pilgrimage. Medieval pilgrims would carry a gift to present at their destination. Reciprocity – to both give and receive – remains vital to the spiritual architecture of pilgrimage. My votive offerings are songs. They are blissfully light, and never run out. I offer songs to anyone wanting to listen – and to anything, too. Each village church; each natural spring and river; each great tree – all have received a song of thanksgiving. I often despatch the recordings on to social media, hoping they might land where else they’re needed. And a night in a stranger’s house has been paid for similarly. The more I give them away, the closer they become to me.

This time, I am carrying another commodity essential to human life – water. Deep in urban Southampton, the city’s ancient holy well – the Colwell – still flows faithfully. I drew a flask from it to drip into each waterway en route to Canterbury. There I will refill my flask from the – equally forgotten – healing well of St Thomas and do the same on the return. 

The apogee of pilgrimage may be a shrine but its ultimate destination was always home itself. And so, for the first time, I am walking the Old Way both ways. Places still seem new when approached for the second time, with each day retaining its customary denseness. Research has shown that it is not ageing but rather the deadening accretion of routine that makes time pass quicker as life goes on. With my days still enriched by uncertainty – including core considerations about sleep and sustenance – time slows right down. A friend who joined me for a week said it felt like a month. Pilgrimage really does expand your time on Earth.

But the greatest reward is something even rarer in our modern lives: trust. I felt this lack most keenly as I set off. Beset by doubts, I only just made it out. Now my meagre deposit of trust has compounded into a wealth of faith and fearlessness. Households great and humble have opened their doors to me as a pilgrim. Strangers have become friends. Trust is better than gold: the more you spend it, the more you receive. 

I hope that others facing uncertainty might also take up the peregrine staff and launch themselves into the arms of England. Her hospitality is warm, her holy places are bright and her ways are open. We all face problems in these unsteady times – but, as St Augustine said, we may solve by walking.

Watch: Andrew Mitchell flounders over Rwanda

We haven’t seen much of Andrew Mitchell since his recent promotion and today was perhaps a reminder why. For more than ten years, the onetime Chief Whip languished on the backbenches post-plebgate, until last October Sunak appointed him Minister of State for Development and Africa. It was Mitchell’s turn to do the government media round today but it proved to be a pretty tricky outing for the Old Rugbeian.

His trenchant criticisms of Boris Johnson’s policies came back to haunt him today when Mitchell was asked by the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg  about his punchy past statements on the decision to cut Britain’s aid budget from 0.7 per cent of Gross National Income. Mitchell claimed that ‘collective responsibility fortunately is not retrospective’ before insisting that his job now is to ‘try and make the system work as well as possible’ and that the 0.7 figure’s return ‘cannot come soon enough.’

That interview was tricky enough for Mitchell but he really came unstuck later on Andrew Neil’s Channel 4 show. First, the broadcaster grilled him about his previous criticisms about Boris Johnson’s flagship Rwanda scheme. Mitchell was unable to fully back efforts to off shore migrants there and told Neil that the benefits would merely be ‘marginal’. And then, he had to concede that leaving the European Convention on Human Rights was not ‘on the table’ and is ‘not being seriously considered’ by the government.

Questioning whether the Rwanda scheme ‘is to have any benefit?’ Didn’t see that one on Rishi’s slick posters last year. Given Mitchell’s admirable commitment to producing news lines, let’s hope we don’t end up waiting another decade for his next government media round…

The Knowsley disruption shows the UK’s incompetence on asylum

This week’s public disorder outside a hotel accommodating asylum seekers in the town of Knowsley in Merseyside was in some ways inevitable.

A total of 45,756 people entered the UK on small boats via the English Channel last year – which, according to the 2021 Census, is a number larger than the entire population of English towns such as Dover in Kent, Boston in Lincolnshire and Kirkby in the Metropolitan Borough of Knowsley. Britain’s asylum regime should be prioritising the world’s most persecuted peoples, especially women and girls at major risk of sex-based violence in their conflict-ridden homelands. Instead, it has been reduced to a survival-of-the-fittest system which has been taken to the cleaners by people-smuggling enterprises importing predominantly young, able-bodied men into the country. According to recent French data, people smugglers made £183 million from small-boat crossings last year.

But what has been a long-standing injustice which is all too often overlooked is the distribution of asylum seekers in the UK. That political slogan ‘we’re all in this together’ doesn’t apply in most spheres of life – including the rehoming of newcomers. One notable example is where asylum seekers (some clearly being illegal Channel economic migrants from countries such as Albania, which has not experienced conflict since the 1997 civil war), have been relocated in recent times, which should be at the forefront of any debate in this area of public policy.

The blunt truth is that the UK’s internal dispersal system has been a failure for some time. Back in April 2017, it was revealed that more than five times as many destitute asylum seekers live in the poorest third of the country as in the richest third. According to the Guardian’s analysis of Home Office data at the time, a comfortable majority of all asylum seekers – 57 per cent – housed by the government were placed in the poorest third of the country. A more recent analysis last year found that almost one in four asylum seekers in the UK supported by the Home Office was housed in just ten local authorities – the majority of which are among the most deprived in the country. Along with cities such as Glasgow, Cardiff, and Stoke-on-Trent, it included northern towns such as Rochdale, Middlesbrough, Hartlepool, Stockton-on-Tees, and Gateshead.

The current state of affairs is not sustainable and risks intensifying social tensions in underprivileged communities where there is a perceived competition for limited resources. It is a select number of deprived inner-city areas and left-behind provincial towns which are doing much of heavy lifting when it comes to accommodating asylum seekers – which is morally unjust as well as being a genuine threat to community cohesion.

What should also be highlighted is the degree to which the Home Office fails to provide appropriate forms of notification to local councils when it comes to the rehoming of asylum seekers. Knowsley Council previously said it had been given less than 48 hours’ notice in January last year that the Home Office intended to temporarily accommodate asylum seekers at the Suites Hotel. This is nothing but top-down centralised imposition of asylum-seeker relocation by Whitehall on a hyper-deprived local authority in north-west England.

Knowsley is a corner of the country which is blighted by a myriad of severe social and economic problems. For the 2020-21 academic year, Knowsley recorded the lowest average ‘Attainment 8’ score (across eight GCSE-level qualifications) out of all English local authorities. According to data published in June last year, it has the highest percentage of state-funded secondary pupils who are eligible for free school meals in the whole of England – nearly half, at 46.4 per cent. The recent lack of A-level provision on offer in the Merseyside borough meant that many of its students had to travel outside of it to continue their studies – making trips to St Helen’s College or sixth forms in Liverpool to do their exams. The 2021 England and Wales Census revealed that Knowsley had the country’s highest proportion of residents who were identified as being ‘disabled and limited a lot’. It is also in the top five local authorities for the percentage of people aged five years and over who provided a form of unpaid care – 11.5 per cent, which is marginally behind the highest local authority (neighbouring St Helens at 11.7 per cent).

Knowsley is the definition of left-behind. It should be identified as a place in need of emergency-level public investment and social support – not one that is treated as some sort of asylum-seeker relocation ground in the middle of the country’s border-security and cost-of-living crises.

The Knowsley disorder should be a wake-up call for this beleaguered Conservative government. It must not only shore up the UK’s border security, but ensure that the system for dispersing asylum seekers across the country is a much fairer one for the most deprived areas in the country.

The Westminster Holocaust memorial ignores Jewish suffering

It’s groundhog day all over again for the long-planned Holocaust memorial and learning centre in Westminster’s Victoria Tower Gardens.

This huge, Brutalist construction would destroy a quiet green oasis valued by local residents. Last July, the Court of Appeal upheld a ruling that the structure was prohibited by a 1900 Act of Parliament, passed to protect the park from such developments.

Yet now the government – which previously overrode Westminster council’s objections – has declared it will legislate to cancel out that 1900 law.

It will thus ride roughshod over a historic legal protection for the local community. Is this really a desirable context for a project supposedly devoted to memory and law as a defence against oppressive and arbitrary power?

There are more fundamental objections to the memorial’s supposed message.

Although the Nazis murdered many types of people in the Holocaust, their principal driver was the intention to wipe the Jews alone off the face of the Earth. Yet much Holocaust memorialising denies the unique characteristics of anti-Semitism and the genocide of the Jews.

A graphic example was provided by the UK Online Commemoration for Holocaust Memorial Day last month. Its 23 sections referred to ‘genocides’ in Rwanda, Bosnia, Cambodia and Darfur, to ‘the Nazi persecution of gay people’ and to ‘people being persecuted simply because they were ordinary people who belonged to a particular group’.

But there was no mention of the genocide of the Jews other than two fleeting references in personal messages from Michael Gove and Sir Keir Starmer. The chief executive and chair of trustees of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust didn’t mention it, urging reflection instead on ‘the Holocaust, the Nazi persecution of other groups and more recent genocides’.

In evidence to the planning inquiry, the memorial’s architect said he envisaged a place to mark the murder of six million Jews, Roma and ‘all victims of Nazi persecution’; and to reflect on ‘the murder of the millions of Cambodians by the Pol Pot regime, the million Rwandans murdered by the Interahamwe and the thousands of Muslim men and boys murdered in Bosnia’.

In its 1939 white paper, the British government tore up its legal obligation to settle the Jews in Palestine. Instead, it barred entry to those desperate to flee Nazi Europe, causing untold numbers to be murdered and making Britain an accessory to the Holocaust.

Will the memorial really deal with this? The Holocaust Memorial Trust claims it will provide ‘an honest reflection of Britain’s role’. Yet the project’s supporters simultaneously claim that situating it next to parliament demonstrates that democratic ‘British values’ will prevent such horrors happening again. Well, which is it? It can’t be both.

If it were really to address Jew-hatred, it would show that the Nazi period wasn’t an aberration but on a continuum stretching back to earliest times – and encompassing the war waged against Israel today.

It would accordingly highlight the Nazi-themed incitement against Jews incessantly pumped out by the Palestinian Authority, whose leader is a self-professed disciple of Haj Amin al-Husseini – the Nazis’ ally in Palestine, who promised Hitler he would annihilate every Jew in the Middle East.

There’s no indication it will focus on any of these things. As the leading protestor, Baroness Deech, wrote in a letter to the Times this week, the promoters ‘envisage visitors leaving the learning centre, seeing the Palace of Westminster and realising that British democracy prevents genocide and anti-Semitism. History has shown no such thing. It will engender complacency and a sense of ‘job done’”.

Today’s epidemic of anti-Semitism is perpetrated mainly by Palestinian Arab supporters, Muslims and communities radicalised by Black Power.

Jewish grandees say the Westminster memorial is essential to help protect the community against anti-Semitism. Yet these establishment figures are silent about the Muslim or black anti-Semitism driving the Jew-hatred in Britain, America and Europe. They are silent about the tsunami of incitement against Jews from the Palestinian Authority.

Instead, these Jewish leaders label those who do speak about these sources of Jew-hatred as Islamophobes, racists and extremists, and treat them as pariahs.

The Jewish dignitaries promoting the Westminster memorial are establishment toadies and Tory party donors. Government ministers, who very decently want to do the right thing by the Jews, may think the community is united in support. Not so.

Last October, a debate about it hosted by the National Jewish Assembly was attended on Zoom by more than 100 members of the Jewish community. Digital polls recorded 62 per cent opposed at the start of the debate and 82 per cent opposed at the end.

The memorial’s backers refuse to discuss the project with its opponents. The board of deputies has never debated it.

Instead, various politicians, officials and Jewish community bigwigs have attacked both Jewish and non-Jewish opponents with emotional blackmail, bullying and character assassination, including spurious accusations of anti-Semitism.

The Chief Rabbi, Sir Ephraim Mirvis, has referred to this project as a ‘sacred task’. It is not. It threatens to be a desecration of memory, an abuse of civic engagement and a shameful betrayal of the slaughtered Jewish millions.

Can the BBC’s chairman carry on?

It’s more bad news for the Beeb with a stinging set of Sunday papers today. The Culture select committee has released a report in the appointment of Richard Sharp as the Corporation’s chairman – and it makes for damning reading. The MPs accuse him of failing to publicly divulge his role in facilitating an £800,000 loan for Boris Johnson by omitting key details in introducing Johnson to businessman Sam Blyth. He is accused of making ‘significant errors of judgement’ and undermining the selection process for his role.

The omissions ‘constitute a breach of the standards expected of individuals’ applying for top public jobs. And while the MPs stop short of calling for Sharp to go, their conclusions suggest his future at the BBC ought to now be in doubt. The committee find that the chairman ‘should consider the impact his omissions will have on trust in him, the BBC and the public appointments process’. The implication is that Sharp has damaged not just the Corporation but the appointments process as a whole too.

It comes five days after a tough grilling for the former Goldman Sachs banker in which acting Culture chairman Damian Green seemed distinctly unimpressed with what he heard. Labour’s shadow Culture secretary Lucy Powell has seized on today’s report, suggesting Sharp’s position is ‘increasingly untenable’. Sharp’s team insist he has acted ‘in good faith’ throughout and point to the previous reassurance he received from the Cabinet Office that there has been no conflict of interest.

The select committee report does not limit its criticism to just Sharp. It also calls on Simon Case to clarify his role in the saga. Sharp says he never gave Johnson financial advice, which begs the question then as to why Case drafted a memo for the then Prime Minister in December 2020 on why he should ‘no longer’ seek Sharp’s ‘advice on your personal financial matters.’ Its conclusion is pretty withering of the government too, arguing that:

the fact that Ministers have cited this Committee’s original report on Mr Sharp’s appointment as a defence of the process was followed, when we were not in full possession of all the facts that we should have had before us in order to come to our judgement, is highly unsatisfactory.

So, what now? There is little indication that the government will seek Sharp’s resignation and the man himself shows no sign publicly that he intends to quit. What might do for him is the reaction from within the Corporation to this report. The Observer today suggests ‘the affair has caused serious anger within the BBC’ and carries anonymous quotes from a senior executive suggesting that the government is actively undermining the Beeb’s editorial independence. Sharp’s decision to sit in on the meeting to decide the director of news last year was heavily criticised by former staff. If more damaging stories involving current or former staff emerge then that could undermine Sharp’s authority still further.

Today’s report is by no means the end of the affair. There are at least two further investigations for Sharp to endure. One inquiry into the BBC chairmanship selection process is being overseen by Adam Heppinstall KC; the other is by the Corporation into whether any further conflicts of interest occurred since the chairman joined. Sir Laurie Magnus, the ministerial ethics advisor, could decide to make it a hattrick should he deem Boris Johnson’s involvement worthy of yet another probe.

Ukraine shouldn’t cancel Russian culture

It is entirely understandable that the barbaric attack on Ukraine launched a year ago by Vladimir Putin has sparked enraged reactions among Ukrainians as they endure Russian missile strikes and await Putin’s much anticipated spring offensive.

But in spurning and destroying Russia’s incomparable musical and literary culture the long-suffering Ukrainians are hitting out at the wrong enemy.

The Times reports that Kyiv Opera House is deleting the music of the Russian composers Tchaikovsky and Prokofiev from a ballet, The Snow Queen, that is currently in rehearsal. The work’s director Serhii Skuz calls Tchaikovsky ‘a symbol of Russian culture and Russian aggression’ and cites that as the reason for cancelling him. 

At the same time, books by great Russian authors like Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy and Turgenev are being withdrawn from Ukraine’s bookshops and libraries to be pulped and recycled, and a statue of the Russian Empress Catherine the Great in Odessa has been removed and hidden in a museum basement.

This extension of the war on the battlefields to an attack on culture is completely comprehensible in view of the agony that Russian aggression has inflicted on Ukraine over the past 12 months. But it sends the wrong signal to both friend and foe.

Sadly, attacking the culture of an enemy nation has a long and ignoble history, and it rarely ends well. Britain, too, was guilty of such cultural vandalism when the music of German composers was banned in both world wars (although the opening bars of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony were later broadcast as symbolic of the Allied ‘V for victory’ slogan).

The worst example of cultural warfare was carried out in 1934 on Berlin’s Opernplatz by the Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels who organised a mass bonfire of books by Jews and other writers that the Nazis disapproved of, including Freud, Marx and Thomas Mann. An earlier German author, Heinrich Heine, had correctly prophesied ‘those who burn books will end by burning people’ and so it proved.

The distinguished Jewish conductor Daniel Barenboim bravely rose above cultural warfare in 2001 when he defied the unofficial Israeli ban on the music of the anti-Semitic German composer Richard Wagner – Hitler’s favourite composer – by conducting Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde before an Israeli audience. Though some walked out, most stayed, and Barenboim was warmly applauded for his courage.

However strongly Ukrainians feel under the heat of Russia’s attacks, they need to know that it was one man and not a country who ordered the destructive assault on them last February, and that Vladimir Putin represents the worst, not the best, of Russia culture. They should not stoop to his level.

How African gold pays for Russia’s war in Ukraine

African wars are paying for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, at least indirectly. When Vladimir Putin was running low on manpower and money in October last year, he turned to Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Wagner group for more of both. Wagner have had troops in the Donbas region as far back as 2014, though in limited numbers. Now the Wagner group is providing thousands of troops throughout occupied Ukraine and funding the Russian army with its spoils from Africa. That though is creating a cashflow crisis for Prigozhin whose income is primarily from African gold and diamonds.  

Wagner makes its money by hiring itself out to African leaders who are fighting jihadis, rebels and other insurgents. In the dysfunctional, war-ravaged Central African Republic, President Faustin-Archange Touadéra hired Wagner to protect him from rebel groups who’ve torn the small country to shreds, and to keep the rebels out of the capital Bangui. Wagner mainly ‘defend’ the country’s gold mines while robbing the CAR’s treasury of much needed revenue. The group has also been accused of dealing in so-called blood diamonds that still pour through the region. 

There are possibly as many as 1,000 Wagner operatives in the CAR and they continue to suffer heavy casualties in the conflict between Touadéra and the rebels seeking control over the gold mines. It’s chaos – and the few observers able to report say Wagner troops have been accused of rape, the massacre of innocents, and, of course, alcohol-fuelled human rights abuses like torture. They haven’t defeated the rebels, though there is an offensive underway in an attempt to move the frontline further from Bangui. 

Further north, the United Nations has called for an investigation into a massacre in Mali in which Wagner is said to have taken part. ‘We are particularly worried by credible reports that over the course of several days in late March 2022, Malian armed forces accompanied by military personnel believed to belong to the Wagner Group, executed several hundred people, who had been rounded up in Moura, a village in central Mali,’ the UN said on January 31.  

The massacre happened after the Malian junta leader Assimi Goita fell out with France last year, evicting French and other western troops battling Islamist terror groups linked to Isis and al-Qaeda. The Wagner group was happy to step in. Mali is Africa’s fourth-largest gold producer, with reserves of about 881 metric tons in 2022, according to its own mining ministry. Malian law has been changed to allow Wagner to exploit three gold mines, the French General Laurent Michon told Agence France Presse in July last year.

The mercenary group is also courting the Burkina Faso regime and will likely send men to the landlocked nation where Jihadists control almost half of all the county’s territory. Burkina Faso’s coup leader Captain Ibrahim Traoré has, like his Malian counterpart, recently expelled the French. Burkina Faso produces about 70 tons of gold a year, and already has a licenced Russian gold miner operating in the country, Norgold, making it a perfect client for Wagner. 

Before the Ukraine crisis, Wagner obtained a licence to help Mozambican troops fight Ansar al-Sunnah, an Islamist terror movement that claims affiliation with Isis (though Southern African intelligence agencies say the group’s connection with Islamic State is tenuous). Primarily Ansar al-Sunnah are bandits in a lawless province of a lawless country. The war is being fought in Mozambique’s northernmost Cabo Delgado province, close to a region where $20 billion has been invested in gas by western companies like France’s TotalEnergies SA.  It’s also close to the world’s biggest ruby mine, Gemfields-owned Montepuez.  

The Mozambican contract ended abruptly when Mozambican authorities asked a retired Zimbabwean colonel to forcibly evict the mercenaries. Wagner’s men, they said, were almost perpetually drunk in beachside barraca bars, eating prawns and downing 2M beer. They were ill-trained and badly equipped and often refused to fight. 

Wagner’s problem, and thus Putin’s, is that a conventional land war in Ukraine costs more than a handful of counter-insurgency wars in Africa. With sanctions on Russia, moving gold is easier than moving money, but intelligence agencies watching Wagner’s African operations say the mercenaries aren’t getting the gold they need for a protracted Ukrainian war. They’ll need more, which is why Wagner is flirting with Burkina Faso and why Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov is jetting between African states on a charm offensive ahead of the Africa-Russia Summit planned for June this year in St Petersburg. Prigozhin is rich, but nowhere near among the world’s super-rich and his pockets aren’t deep enough to finance full-scale war.

The problem for the EU, and Britain, is that they can’t take the lead in stopping Russia’s mercenaries. Neither the notoriously toothless African Union, nor Africa’s regional organisations, will overtly side with the West against Russia – or China. The reasons are more complicated than they seem, but essentially much of Africa feels beholden to Russia and China for their support half a century ago when the Cold War gripped Africa in a vice and Soviet Russia won friends by supporting Southern African liberation movements with training and armour. For the same reason, it feels it can’t be seen to publicly support western nations who were former colonial powers. 

What happens in private is another matter, but it’ll likely take another half century before Africa and the west hold hands in public. For now they must conduct their relationship in secret, ducking and diving in the dark. 

Further complicating matters is the fact that Russia’s African goals don’t align with China’s, and China is the far bigger threat. Russia is in Africa for short-term financial gain because it needs to feed the twin beasts of oligarchy and war. China is there for the long haul and wants to manipulate African governments through debt and obligation. It wants to control commodity markets, not simply trade on them. China seeks monopolies where Russia seeks quick gains.  

Russia doesn’t hang around. It takes what it wants and leaves. And in its rush to fund the increasingly costly war in Ukraine, the Wagner group are leaving a trail of destruction behind in Africa.

Is Kim Jong Un’s daughter being lined up to lead?

The photograph shows a happy family. After a 35-day public absence, the corpulent Kim Jong Un has been pictured this week with his wife Ri Sol Ju, and sitting between them their daughter, Kim Ju Ae, as they dine in the presence of North Korean military officers weighed down with medals. 

Is Kim Jong Un’s daughter being lined up to take over North Korea? The photograph has only heightened speculation that the stage is now being set for her to be leader, as the fourth generation of Kim to rule the country. This week North Korean state media gave Kim Ju Ae the honorific of ‘respected’ when writing about the event, an adjective which had previously been bestowed upon leaders of the DPRK and their spouses.  

The occasion for the photograph was the 75^th anniversary of the founding of the Korean People’s Army (KPA), North Korea’s military force, which was established in 1948. A military banquet preceded a lavish parade. 

These events are frequently used as an opportunity to display the North’s latest conventional and nuclear weaponry. This year’s parade predictably saw a cornucopia of missiles on show. One of the Intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) featured was the Hwasong-17 – the world’s largest road-mobile liquid-fuelled ICBM, first unveiled in October 2020 – which graced Kim Il Sung Square in Pyongyang. State media also appeared to show a new design of solid-fuel ICBM which, if this is the case, would be a technological breakthrough for Pyongyang. With fewer moving parts, solid-fuel missiles launch at faster speeds and are harder to detect than their liquid-fuel counterparts. Expanding the technological scope and sophistication of North Korea’s weaponry has been one of Kim Jong Un’s central aims, as he made clear when he outlined his five-year shopping list of new and expanded weaponry at the eighth Workers’ Party Congress in January 2021.  

It is not the first but the fifth time that Kim Jong Un’s daughter has appeared in public. Yet Wednesday was no ordinary ‘bring your daughter to work’ day. Missiles mean a lot to Kim Jong Un and his family. At Wednesday’s banquet, eagle-eyed observers noted how Kim Jong Un’s wife, Ri Sol Ju, sported a pendant of the Hwasong-17. Their daughter followed protocol, cheering as the missiles went past.  

The second child of Kim Jong Un, Ju Ae is reportedly only nine or ten years old. Years before the world had even seen her, the infamous former US basketball player, Dennis Rodman – a confidant of the North Korean leader – leaked Ju Ae’s name to the international press. Whilst it is quite possiblethat she may be groomed as heir apparent, only time will tell. Indeed, North Korean state media has not even revealed her name. She is one of several children of the Supreme Leader, and little is known about the others. Showing her in public may be a symbolic way for Kim to allow the North Korean elites, people, and the world to get to know her face.  

He may have his own experience in mind. For decades, the world impatiently waited for his father, Kim Jong Il, to name a successor. Only in September 2010 did the fog clear, when Kim Jong Un was promoted to the equivalent of a four-star general in the Korean People’s Army. The then-youthful and unknown Kim took the mantle of the North Korean leadership following his father’s sudden death in December 2011. In contrast, Kim Jong Il was officially announced as the successor to Kim Il Sung – the founding father of North Korea – in 1980, 14 years before the former’s death.  

There is another explanation for the public appearance of Kim Ju Ae. Her appearances have been hitherto limited to military parades and missile launches, which carry immense propagandistic value for her father’s rule. In November last year, both father and his ‘most beloved’ daughter – as North Korean state media then termed Kim Ju Ae – inspected an ICBM before they gleefully watched the launching of the missile. Although it is unclear whether Kim Ju Ae will inherit her father’s role, one message is being made crystal clear: that it is not just the Kim regime that is here to stay; so too is a North Korea with ever-expanding missile and nuclear capabilities, a North Korea which future generations will witness and continue to uphold. And the treasured ‘Baekdu bloodline’ will be sustained by keeping the leadership within the Kim family.  

A third consideration of whether Kim Ju Ae will succeed her father pertains to North Korea’s patriarchal society. Similar speculation abounded during Kim Jong Un’s absence in 2020, when many observers suggested he might have died, and if the time had come for his acerbic younger sister, Kim Yo Jong – rising the ranks of the elite – to succeed him.  

Though unlikely, it is not impossible for a woman to lead. Kim Jong Un may wish to break with the historically male-dominated nature of the North Korean military and Party officials if doing so allows the Kim dynasty to continue. And although it is rare, it is not unknown for women to have been appointed to senior positions of leadership in the country. Choe Son Hui, North Korea’s sharp-tongued negotiator in the infamous meetings between Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un, was, in June last year, promoted to Foreign Minister. At the same time, being the next Supreme Leader is no mean feat.  

History tells us that we should not jump to hasty conclusions. Perhaps to the frustration of observers and analysts, a long waiting game lies ahead. But even if the next leader of the hermit kingdom turns out not be Kim Ju Ae, this young Kim will certainly grow up in a state with ever-expanding nuclear and missile capabilities. North Korea’s nuclear weapons are not going anywhere, and Kim Jong Un wants the world to know that his family are here to stay as well. 

We are living through a golden age of misogyny

I hope I’ll be forgiven for not dropping my dog-eared copy of The Female Eunuch in sheer molten awe upon reading in the Times that ‘Courses for teachers on how to tackle Andrew Tate’s views are selling out as schools try to persuade teenage boys to shun so-called toxic masculinity.’ One teacher said, ‘Andrew Tate is just a personification of this rampant masculinity that’s existed in schools and been tolerated for years – boys harass and abuse peers and teachers and male teachers haven’t done enough to combat this. Schools have racism and homophobia policies but hardly any have sexism policies; it’s become naturalised.’  

Better late than never, but it’s no good schoolteachers getting their knickers in a twist over one miserable little incel (Tate brings to mind the greatest ever Little Britain character who got away) when – since the birth of gangster rap (bitches and hoes), the growth of Islamophilia (M&S selling hijabs for three-year-olds) and the trans-activism of the 21st century which seeks to erase the very word woman from public life, a climate of woman-hating has been steadily building.   

Music may be bad, films may be trash, but one thing we’re certainly living through is the Golden Age of Misogyny; indeed, a Rainbow Coalition of misogyny where fear and loathing of women unites millions of men who would otherwise have nothing at all in common.  

We saw this when police and grooming gangs across this proud nation were united in the belief that raped and trafficked children were ‘white slags’ whose word was not to be trusted.   

Misogyny is like Whack-A-Mole, popping up everywhere. We used to expect it from the Tories, but individuals in the Labour party have also recently demonstrated troubling behaviour.   

Recently the Labour MP Lloyd Russell-Moyle’s idea of an apology for acting in an aggressive way towards the Tory MP Miriam Cates during a parliamentary debate was saying that he had failed to control his ‘passion’ – a concerning excuse. 

In a decade’s time there may well be none of what we widely recognise as feminists – people who put women’s rights at the centre of their concerns – in the Labour party, so widespread is the adoption of trans-maid ideology. The Peoples Party remains the only political party in the UK never to have had a female leader and the way things are going, it’s entirely likely that the first eventual one will have been born a man. I wonder if man-panderers like Lisa Nandy – who has said that male trans rapists should be allowed in women’s jails – will think that failing to support some of the most vulnerable women in our society was worth it. 

Centrists can display what could be perceived as a shocking level of misogyny – think of David Lammy accusing women who don’t want to strip off in front of a stranger with a penis of being ‘dinosaurs…hoarding rights’ – but of course the extreme left is far worse. One of the reasons I’ve always viewed what we may call wokeness as a reactionary rather than a revolutionary instinct is due to the extremely short shrift it gives women’s rights.   

The trans-activists of recent years are another example of misogyny popping up where it was least expected, but as befits the only ‘liberation’ movement born from and fuelled by pornography, the monstrous regiments of the Stunning & Brave are chock-a-block with woman-haters.   

Porn is yet another arena in which men who might otherwise be each other’s worst enemies appear to find mutual ground – like that legendary football match between the British and German soldiers during world war one, only this time women are the thing being kicked around. Whether it’s Pornhub declaring loyalty to BLM while touting numerous videos depicting the humiliation of black women, Tory MPs watching it in parliament (‘looking for tractors’) or the police watching it at work when they should be attempting to clear up the all-time low in rape convictions, the horn of pornucopia is a bottomless well of nourishment which fuels woman-hating.   

How much easier to blame everything on Andrew Tate than look at the humdrum hatred all around us, though it was amusing seeing liberals tie themselves in knots late last year when he converted to Islam, the Muslim Abu Yusuf Al Hanbali noting that Tate was drawn to Islam by its ‘uncompromising stance against toxic feminism, LGBT and the liberal world order’.   

The Great and the Good have found their emblematic Bad Guy in Tate and are now busy signalling their virtue about it. Doing so is easier than dismantling the vast structure of misogyny which at times can seem overwhelming. A baby girl is four times as likely to be sexually abused than a boy from the day she is born. As a toddler she is treated to Drag Story Time, where she will learn that the state of being a woman is inherently ridiculous, and that though Blackface is something people of colour quite rightly get upset about, Womanface is something she’ll have to learn to laugh at if she doesn’t want to be appear a humourless scold. As a pre-teen schoolgirl at her most self-conscious, she’ll find that boys who say they are girls can spy on her at her most vulnerable. If she seeks to enjoy her own body – which often appears to be public property, judging from the number of adult men who harass her in public – through the apparently innocent medium of sport, males claiming to be females will easily beat her. Never mind, here come her fertile years – she can prepare herself for the biting, slapping and choking which pornography portrays as a normal part of the dating game, as well as revenge porn and deep faking of her beauty in its prime. She may think getting married provides a safe haven from the sorrows of the singleton life – but she’d better not displease her lord and master, or she risks becoming one of the two women a week killed by ‘partners’ and exes. Having survived the menopause, she might believe that her experience may lead to the kind of respect older men get – but no, she’s mocked as an old witch, forever in the wrong, taunted for her very ability to stay alive by angry young men wearing black nappies on their faces and calling her a TERF. Finally in her dotage she will experience a better outcome than men, living longer – let’s hope the BBC don’t put her in jail for forgetting to pay her licence fee, as a whopping 76 per cent of those prosecuted for this deadly crime are female.  

Of course I exaggerate – but if this was happening to any other group but women, there would be rioting in the street. And don’t believe for a moment that it can’t get worse. Look at photographs of young Iranian women in the twentieth century, on the beach and at college, their faces turned to the sun. Think of all the American women who had safe abortions, now criminalised. They thought that Gilead could never come, too.  

What can women do to fight this? Never vote for a political party which puts the feelings of men before the rights of women. Don’t #BeKind – it’s not kindness,  it’s cowardice, and you’re selling out the women who were prepared to be hated to win. And don’t believe for a minute that – just because Andrew Tate is behind bars – this tsunami of melting-pot misogyny will not come for you.  

Turkey’s earthquake and the growing anger towards Erdogan

It’s Monday morning and Sam is late to work. The cafe he owns in a quiet residential area of Istanbul is already busy with émigré Russian IT workers tapping away at their laptops and small groups of locals scrolling through the news on their phones in silence. ‘This earthquake,’ he says, walking around the counter and burying his face in his hands. ‘My best friend from back home is trapped under the rubble.’

Sam is from a city near Gaziantep in the south of the country where, just hours earlier, a colossal 7.8 magnitude earthquake struck, destroying around 6,000 buildings across ten separate regions and leaving tens of thousands of people buried in the ruins of their own homes. At 4am, almost everyone was in bed and few had any chance to get out. Now, six days on, more than 28,000 people are confirmed to have been killed and the death toll is still rising as rescuers sift through entire neighbourhoods reduced to smashed concrete and twisted metal.

Videos of a newborn baby pulled from the rubble and a photograph of a man holding the hand of his 15-year old daughter, who died while pinned under a concrete slab, have been shared around the world. However, on Turkish social media, it is clips of brand new apartment blocks, marketed as ‘earthquake proof,’ crumbling into dust that have sparked the strongest feelings, and shock and grief is turning to anger.

‘My friend is a civil engineer,’ says Sam. ‘It’s such a sick irony that an engineer is trapped because he lives in a building that hasn’t been constructed properly.’

‘Many of the collapsed buildings appear to have been built from concrete without adequate seismic reinforcement,’ says Mark Quigley, an associate professor of earthquake science at the University of Melbourne. ‘Building codes in this region suggest these buildings should be able to sustain strong earthquakes without incurring this type of complete failure.’ And yet, even miles away from the epicentre, whole cities have been flattened, and entire families killed as the floors above them collapsed downwards.

In 2011, more than 570 people died in another, far smaller earthquake in the east of the country. In the aftermath, then-Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan blamed ‘bad quality’ building materials and said that local officials and construction companies had not done enough to learn from past mistakes, arguing their ‘negligence amounted to murder.’ Now, after almost a decade in office as his country’s president, Erdoğan is himself facing criticism for not doing enough to protect people living in known earthquake hotspots, despite seismologists warning for years that a major quake was on the cards.

‘Such things have always happened. It’s part of destiny’s plan,’ Erdoğan said on a visit to the disaster zone, insisting there was nothing more to the chaos than an act of god, while admitting rescue operations were initially not as fast as they should have been. He has resolved to build new homes for all those living in buildings that are now uninhabitable. The Turkish authorities have now made several arrests, including detaining one of the contractors responsible for building luxury developments in Hatay, one of the provinces worst affected by the earthquake.

However, this has seemingly done little to put the public at ease. With frustrations growing over what critics say was a delayed response to a preventable disaster, Twitter was blocked for many users across Turkey on Wednesday as officials sought to dampen tensions and halt the spread of alleged ‘misinformation.’ Service was later restored.

Now, even one of the country’s most eminent civil engineers, Professor Mustafa Erdik of Istanbul’s Boğaziçi University has blamed building standards and shoddy craftsmanship. ‘We allow for damage but not this type of damage – with floors being piled on top of each other like pancakes,’ he told the BBC on Saturday. ‘That should have been prevented and that creates the kind of casualties we have seen.’

The row comes at the worst possible time for Erdoğan, who is seeking re-election for an unprecedented third term in office and will face a public ballot in May. His party, the governing AKP, has already seen its popularity crater in major cities amid a worsening economic crisis and his refusal to tackle runaway inflation rates of more than 80 per cent  by raising interest rates, which he has described as ‘un-Islamic.’ Now, voters will be asked to decide whether they still trust him after a decade in power at the very moment they are wondering if they are safe in their own homes.

While the crisis opens Erdoğan up to awkward questions, it is being used as a political opportunity for another leader. Just across the border in Syria, where as many as 5.3 million people are believed to have been made homeless by the earthquake, the government of Bashar al-Assad is capitalising on calls for western sanctions against his regime to be dropped, claiming they are hindering relief efforts. With aid shipments held up by the fact the country is still consumed by a raging civil war, the US on Friday agreed to ease restrictions for six months to help supplies get through.

At the same time, Assad is accused of cynically bombing quake-ravaged areas held by Turkish-backed rebels, even as locals dug through the rubble with their bare hands to rescue loved ones. ‘It is these same opposition-held communities from whom Assad has been stealing medicines and aid,’ said Alicia Kearns, a Conservative MP and Chair of the House of Commons’ Foreign Affairs Select Committee. Now, there are fears that the Russian-backed government – which has long shown a disregard for the lives of its citizens – will leverage the disaster to strengthen its hand in the north of the country, while Turkey is distracted with its own humanitarian catastrophe.

As hopes fade of finding many more survivors beneath the shattered remains of their homes, the tectonic plates underneath Turkey and Syria are still shifting. For Erdoğan and Assad, the race is on to be on the right side of them.