What’s the difference between rocks and stones?

‘You rocks, you stones, you worse than senseless things,’ exclaimed my husband, misquoting Shakespeare as though it were an improvement. In English a rock is different from a stone and it can be annoying when news reports, especially on radio and television, speak of crowds throwing rocks.

This Americanism has not yet ousted stones in British English. ‘It is one of the peculiarities of the dialect of the people in the westernmost states, to call small stones rocks,’ wrote the Revd Samuel Parker in his Journal of an Exploring Tour Beyond the Rocky Mountains (1838).

My husband had been set off by a report from France. During the disorder there, the offices in Nice of the leader of the Républicains, Eric Ciotti, were attacked. In a rather mangled sentence, the BBC news website reported: ‘Mr Ciotti said people threw rocks at his office overnight on Twitter.’ What Mr Ciotti had said on Twitter is that his offices had been caillassée, ‘stoned’. There was a picture of a broken window to prove it, and a message scrawled in marker-pen: ‘La motion ou le pavé.’

Reuters reported that his office ‘was ransacked overnight and tags were left threatening riots if the motion was not supported’. I’m not sure it was ransacked, which implies entry causing damage. And the statement that ‘tags were left’ must have puzzled readers who had not seen the picture of the scrawled message. A tag is an identifying mark written as the signature of a graffiti artist; the same word is used in French.

The reference in the Nice message to le pavé was translated in some reports as ‘paving stone’. In English that suggests a slab of York stone paving. In French street-protest culture, the stones normally used as missiles are smaller squared stones, properly called setts in English, but referred to sometimes as cobbles, which really denotes rounded stones.

What worries me is that rock as a label for a throwing-stone (like cooking-wine) is gaining a foothold that will lead to its wider use. Soon it may be: ‘Sticks and rocks may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.’ When that happens, words jolly well will hurt me too.

2595: Three of a kind – solution

The unclued lights each contained a letter which appeared three times.

First prize Janet Hill, Eastbourne, East Sussex

Runners-up Gareth Davies, Langstone, Newport, Gwent; Andrew Bell, Shrewsbury, Shropshire

Fear and loathing in New Zealand

The mob lunged towards me, screeching and grabbing, and I knew that if I fell I would never get up. I’ve stopped expecting mercy from anyone whose motto is ‘Be kind’ but the event last week was terrifying. I was sure in that moment, on the New Zealand leg of my ‘Let Women Speak’ tour, that the trans activists who surrounded me would trample me to death if they could. They gather in menacing groups to intimidate us and hurt us if they can, just to prevent us speaking a simple truth: that women don’t have penises, men don’t have vaginas, there is no such thing as non-binary and transitioning children is abuse.

We started these talks at Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park, London and have now taken them around the UK and across the USA. The format of the event is a gathering with a microphone and amplification, livestreamed to my ‘Kellie-Jay Keen’ YouTube channel. Women can finally say what they want, protected by the group. It’s a genuine free speech event. Sydney, Brisbane and Perth events saw a few hundred women in total attend and speak about the impact transgender ideology is having upon their lives. They were afraid and yet defiant – they’ve had enough. There were tears and a triumphant resolve to bring our society back to a place where the truth has more value than virtue-signalling.

The turn towards violence came in Melbourne at our largest gathering. The police had done a pretty fine job of protecting women with buffer zones between us and the rabid trans activists. But this gathering included competing groups of woman-hating losers: trans incels to the left of me and Nazis to the right, and here we were stuck in the middle and blamed by the media and politicians for the Nazi salute that occurred. I’ve been asked following that incident whether I have sympathies with the far right, but seriously, who does? It’s a vile ideology and frankly anyone convinced by it in 2023 is pathetic. John Pesutto, the leader of the Liberals in Victoria, repeated dangerous lies about me and suspended Moira Deeming MP from his party for her association with me.

The Tasmanian event was pretty horrifying. The women who spoke were visibly terrified and an angry mob drowned out their voices with hysterical screams and cult-like mantras. Following the event, I was called ‘a Terd’ – a play on ‘Terf’ – in the Tasmanian parliament. This storm gathered pace and in New Zealand it was magnified a hundredfold. There was a case brought to the high court to try to stop me entering the country and their media started a constant spew of lies, insisting I was a dangerous anti-trans Nazi. At the border I had a two-hour interrogation and search, one hotel cancelled my reservation, and in another a threatening note was slid under my door while I slept. I had been told I would be protected by the police. That couldn’t have been further from the truth.

The big event, the one that has been in the news, was in Auckland, and the minute I arrived I felt rising fear. As the car pulled up I could see the thousands gathered to oppose me. My security gathered around me and we pushed through the hateful mob to the centre, where the local organisers and attendees were who had come to speak. Where were the police? Not one officer was in that crowd; not one officer was there to protect the brave women who turned up. Within seconds a man had tipped tomato soup all over my head. I continued to live-stream. But over the next few minutes the mob took on a life of its own. A frenzy grew until it was a deafening swell, a modern-day ‘Burn the witch’. Men started ripping down the barriers and charging forward. ‘The police aren’t coming,’ said my head of security. ‘We have to get you out.’ This meant placing me in the centre of my security and some stewards, women who had volunteered to help, pushed through the baying mob. As we moved, we stumbled. I knew that a body on a floor is fair game and ripe for stomping and kicking. When we eventually got to the outer edge of the park, the police did step in and helped get me to a car. They took me to the nearest police station where I was guarded for six hours before I had an escort of three officers to the airport. They didn’t leave until my plane took off.

That day I was told emphatically by each police officer and security that had I fallen I would have been killed. Women were injured that day, women who you may never hear about. You will never know their names. They didn’t get to hop on a plane and leave; they have to stay and live in a country that has told them their lives are not worth protecting.

2598: By any other name

The unclued lights (one of two words) may be paired, one past and one present.

        Across

   1    USA dealt out compliments (8)

11    It’s still a healthy drink in spring! (7,5)

14    Go on to take legal action (7)

18    Parallel grooves are first adjusted (6)

23    Irritable, like our cats and dogs? (7)

24    Title father backs for Tarzan (3-3)

25    Salmon, by the way, for fellow presenter (2-4)

27    Example of first person in record book (7)

29    University officials South African cricketer Mike’s suggested (8)

33    Continuous story broadcast back in the Home Counties and London, initially (6)

35    Resistance units – I see thousands (4)

37    Seeking forgiveness around Goat Inn (7)

38    Cox for Hereford, perhaps? (5)

39    Endurance visiting Tyrone? (7,5)

40    Some wide variety in Roman Chester (4)

41    Ring for ages? (8)

         Down

   1    In the centre of a poorly lit uphill street (6)

   3    Intro containing Pb (4-2)

   4    Scottish confection’s from iPads and pills (7)

   5    Poor hirelings at end of lane in Moray once (10)

   6    Disorganised patriarch took Catholic out to area of Alexander the Great’s empire (7)

   7    A polemicist reviewed nuclear reactors (6,5)

   8    Put down for month on railway (5)

   9    Degas and Miro adapted Chinese characters (9)

10    Ure’s little flies (6)

15    Authoritative soldier’s in khaki, say (11)

19    Popular clerical garb that’s placed in a bank (10)

20    Don’t forget note on pay increase (8)

21    Cloth from pilot at pottery centre (9)

26    Cruise accepts £25 for Champagne, say (7)

28    Spend time in alley (7)

29    Some philanthropic, ardent starship commander (6)

30    Old tracks to college for Frenchman (6)

31    Sudden excitement from light snowfall (6)

Download a printable version here.

A first prize of £30 and two runners-up prizes of £20 for the first correct solutions opened on 17 April. Please scan or photograph entries and email them (including the crossword number in the subject field) to crosswords@spectator.co.uk, or post to: Crossword 2598, The Spectator, 22 Old Queen Street, London SW1H 9HP. Please allow six weeks for prize delivery. The dictionary prize is not available at present.

Dear Mary: How do we avoid paying for our friend’s restaurant over-ordering?

Q. When my husband and I meet certain friends for lunch, the bill is always higher than it should be, since one friend orders about five different dishes because she’s never sure what she wants. She barely touches any of them. We don’t want to quibble when it comes to dividing the bill, but we have retired and have to be watchful of our spending, unlike them. What should we do?

– D.F., London SW10

A. Next time, you and your husband could feign reduced appetites due to a hectic social life and order small starters for each course. Then, when your friend doesn’t eat the array of dishes presented, you can help yourselves without guilt, claiming it looks too delicious not to eat. ‘Mmm – we were hungrier than we thought!’

Q. I am doing a postgraduate degree in a European university. I want to go into publishing and applied for a subediting job on a well-regarded literary magazine here (I am bilingual). I was interviewed and appointed and duly posted on Instagram. Now I find it is unpaid, though this was never mentioned to me. I believe it was known that I could afford to do it pro bono, which is true, but now I feel slightly ‘played’. How should I extricate myself?

– Name and address withheld

A. Turn a blind eye to the possible reasons for your appointment and do the job. Whether you were played or not, you should not let personal pride come between you and a valuable learning experience.

Q. I have just moved to London from Seville and was happy when a neighbour invited me for drinks. She said ‘Come any time, but not too early’, so I came at 8 p.m., but she said she had assumed I was not coming and was about to go out. How could I have made things right?

– C.C., London SW7

A. Unlike in Spain, drinks in England take place between 6 and 8 p.m. You could have immediately invited her to drinks with you at 6 p.m. the following night. This would have shown sufficient enthusiasm on your part to dispel any bitterness from the neighbour (who was at fault for not specifying a time).

Q. Re your correspondent of 18 March, surprisingly few good hotels in Paris have single beds. This same situation arose for me some years ago, and when I remarked to the glamorous receptionist ‘So I have to sleep with another man’, she remarked without humour: ‘It has been known.’ Our friendship survived.

– R.I., Kangaroo Valley, NSW

A. Thank you for shedding further light on this dilemma. You are right, and indeed even twin beds in Paris are usually pushed very close together, putting one of the roommates into the awkward position of having to push them apart.

The Guardian’s slavery dilemma

When you read the Guardian free online, a yellow notice appears asking you for money (‘Will you invest in the Guardian?’) to support its fearless journalism. But now arises a donor’s dilemma. After two years’ work, the paper has just produced a full report on and apology from its current owner for its founders’ involvement in slavery. The historian David Olusoga, part of the project, says that what the Guardian owes the descendants of slavery for this is ‘an unpayable debt’. The paper is attempting to pay it, however, setting aside £10 million for the purpose of restorative justice over ten years. So for the conscientious Guardian reader (is there any other kind?) the question arises: ‘Which is the more important destination for my money – the current needs of the newspaper or reparations to the victims of its past complicity in a great evil? If the latter, should I not pay directly to that cause rather than rewarding a paper which has taken two centuries to admit its wickedness?’ Is the Guardian letting itself off rather lightly?

The current crisis in Israel is poorly explained. Binyamin Netanyahu’s opponents are described as ‘pro-democracy protestors’, but in fact they oppose judges being chosen by MPs rather than by other judges. (They may be right here, but democratic they are not.) The real source of the trouble is the electoral system which empowers tiny extreme parties in coalition-building. It is the results of proportional representation, a subject which usually engages only the dullest and most moderate politicians, which now excite the basest passions. 

Some say it is an unfair advantage for Oxford and Cambridge that college, rather than university, teams enter University Challenge. I imagine that this Oxbridge exception, present when the programme started in 1962, was made to stop Oxford and Cambridge being the joint finalists most years, thus turning the programme into the intellectual equivalent of the Boat Race. But members of either university have, so far as I (Trinity, Cantab) know, no collective Oxbridge pride here. We care only (if at all) about the victory of our own college. Indeed, there is more needle in being beaten by a rival Oxbridge college than by another university. Of course, it is undeniably remarkable that, say, Peterhouse, currently with only 254 undergraduates (and the winner in 2016) could take on, say, Manchester, currently with 30,900 undergraduates (and itself a multiple former winner). But anyone shocked by the inequality inseparable from the attainments of a few can take comfort from the thought that once Oxbridge has finally decolonised its curriculum, expunged its past and excluded any applicant previously well-educated, future undergraduates will know nothing not readily available on social media. They will then declare themselves ‘uncomfortable’ at the thought of speedy questions fired at them on air by a male authority figure and refuse to appear on University Challenge. 

As a Cambridge graduate, I regularly receive emails from the university’s Development and Alumni Relations. The latest includes items about the danger of nuclear winter (a real throwback to CND in the 1980s, the sin here being western retaliation more than Russian nuclear attack), our youngest ever black professor, an archaeologist who explains why her exhibition about islanders is ‘especially relevant in a post-Brexit Britain’, and an item about the Boat Race that puts the women’s race above the men’s. What strikes me most, however, is the launch of a criminology scholarship for ‘under-represented’ students in memory of Jack Merritt, a student at Hughes Hall. In 2019, he died in a terrorist attack at the Fishmongers’ Hall. The nature of the attack is not explained in the bulletin. As a course coordinator for the ‘Learning Together’ programme of the Cambridge Institute of Criminology, Jack was helping a former offender, Usman Khan, recently released from prison after a stretch inside for al Qaeda-inspired terrorist offences. Khan had been considered a success story for rehabilitation. In the criminology conference at the Fishmongers’ Hall, however, wearing what later turned out to be a fake suicide vest, he suddenly produced two knives and started stabbing people. He succeeded in murdering 25-year-old Jack and a colleague, Saskia Jones, before being shot dead by police on London Bridge. None of this terrible story invalidates criminological work, but surely it should not be glossed over. Tales of Christian martyrs always include an account of how they died, as inspiration. In that spirit, Jack’s story should be told to those encouraged to follow his path.

Sitting in the new UnHerd Old Queen Street Café in Westminster, I interrogated myself: ‘Why do I feel so content?’ The answer, I realised, was because there was so little choice on the menu. Freedom of choice is a wonderful thing but can be cumulatively depressing. As someone with no ‘dietary requirements’ other than nice food and plenty of it, I want to eat whatever is put before me in a place I trust. The reduction of food choice in restaurants and clubs because of the great inflation is therefore most welcome. It has long been my ambition to start a chain, perhaps called Hobson’s, which offers no choice whatever (not even a vegetarian option, though it could sometimes be a wholly vegetarian day). It would save waste, thus reducing price; and the customer could relax in complete confidence.

We columnists all dream of the perfect first sentence to capture the reader’s attention. In the latest Sunday Times, Hadley Freeman began her column thus: ‘The first time a man choked me in bed, I assumed I was being murdered.’ My immediate reaction was not so much wanting to know what happened next, as one of pure professional envy.

Westminster School and the sad decline of boys’ schools

Westminster School, one of Britain’s oldest public schools, has announced it will go fully ‘co-ed’ from 2030. Having first admitted girls to the sixth form in the 1970s, the school will now admit girls from the age of 13. This decision means that soon there will only be four remaining boys’ boarding schools left in the UK: Radley, Eton, Harrow and Tonbridge. Westminster says the decision is ‘based on a desire fully to reflect the community we serve, and to shape that community by educating brilliant young men and women with a commitment to making a difference.’ But the decline and fall of boys’ schools is not something to celebrate. 

There are roughly 800 single sex schools left in England, but most of these are for girls. That’s good for parents looking for an empowering education for their daughters, but bad if you have a son who would benefit from a single-sex education. 

There are about 24,000 schools in England. If paying fees is beyond you (which it is for most) then your chances of finding a state boys’ school are slim: only 157 state schools offer an education just for boys. Many of these are grammars who cling to their single-sex traditions. Single sex schools, and particularly those for boys, are disappearing fast as more and more schools follow Westminster’s lead and go ‘co-ed’. So much for diversity and choice. 

These schools appear to have convinced themselves that boys somehow ‘need’ girls to civilise them (imagine the same being said in reverse) and that boys do better with hard working girls to pull them up. The evidence is not all one way. An academic study conducted in 2003 found that boys did better in an all-boys classroom when other factors had been controlled for, something the researcher claimed ‘directly contradicted the educational myth that males performed better in classrooms if females were present’.

When academics got together and looked at the data for single sex schooling, they concluded it didn’t really have much impact on exam results. It is the social side of school where this makes a difference.

Being a teenager is hard enough without the added stress of the presence of the opposite sex. Some boys will do well with the supposed civility of girls, but, for others, mixing with the other sex during their teenage years will make life harder. In the end, parents will know best – but that is pointless without the choice.

You don’t have to be a parent of a boy to understand that boys and girls are wired differently. A school that can structure its education just for boys should then be something we welcome. But they are quickly going out of fashion.

‘Boys don’t feel that schools are listening to them or taking the problems they face seriously enough. The emphasis has to be on schools to take more care of boys,’ Mark Brooks, a co-founder of the Men and Boys Coalition, told the Times earlier this week. He’s right – and we should start by protecting those schools that offer education only to boys, before it’s too late. 

The demise of boys only schools should leave us wondering where boys can learn to be boys; an environment just for them. Parents should have much greater choice in education, allowing them to decide what is best for their son or daughter. After all, we will regret the loss of boys’ schools once they are gone.

Spectator competition winners: poems for Betty Boothroyd

In Competition No. 3292, you were invited  to provide a poem to mark the death of Betty Boothroyd.

The formidable Lady Boothroyd – the Guardian obituarist’s description of her exuding ‘warmth and wit’ and ‘a whiff of glamour’ was spot-on – brought out the best in you. There were neat acrostics from David Silverman and David Shields, and head–turning double dactyls from Richard Spencer and Alex Steelsmith. Here are Mr Steelsmith’s final two quatrains:

Eulogists speak of her
Honourability;
Countless admirers, while
Raising a cup,

Picture her shattering
Paradisiacal
Ceilings of crystal where
Time’s never up.

It was a struggle to whittle down a large and stellar field, and Janine Beacham was only just nudged out of the prizewinning line-up. The following five earn their authors £30 each.

The tolling bell now sounds its sad farewell.
No more we’ll hear the steely referee
Who ‘Order! Order!’ cried to cast a spell
And quell the Commons’ wild cacophony.

She was no flower born to blush unseen
Nor mute was she but, destined for success,
From Tiller Girl, the lively dancing queen,
She rose to be a noble baroness.

Trained as a Whip, she learned to crack the whip,
Became first woman Speaker of the House,
She’d crush the mighty with a cutting quip
And rule more like a lioness than mouse.

‘Time’s up!’ is called. The death knell ends her day.
She’s breathed her last and given up the ghost.
To heaven now she’ll doubtless wing her way
And call to order the angelic host.

Alan Millard

So farewell then, Betty Boothroyd,
She who, born in darkest Yorkshire,
Joined a troupe of dancing ladies
Till a fateful foot infection
Possibly a disguised blessing
Like unto an April shower
Germinating summer flora
Made of her a politician,
Speaker of the House of Commons
Where her honoured elevation
Proved unique, unprecedented,
Landmark, breakthrough and historic.
Thus the press and public hailed it.
Thus she called for ‘Order! Order!’
Thus she carries on, still wigless,
Sorting stroppy backbench angels.

Basil Ransome-Davies

The celebration table features Davis, White and Grable
And Miss Stöve, who is served a double fault.
At an honorary pinch, Lilibet and Corrie’s Lynch
are invited, but are well below the salt.

Hitherto the most adored was First Lady Betty Ford
although many had the hots for Betty Boop.
Now in the Speaker’s chair and her own West Riding hair
Betty Boothroyd calls for order and the soup.

She was born amid the mills dotting smoky Pennine hills,
and elected as the Member for West Brom.
With a bass voice built on drags from a daily pack of fags
she controlled a febrile Commons with aplomb.

She bellows ‘Time’s up!’ now, and tells the table how
as a Tiller Girl you can’t be prim or shy.
Ms Friedan has her qualms, but the Bettys all link arms
and then kick their shapely ankles to the sky.

Nick MacKinnon

When you start work by simply typing letters
   but see a world beyond the office door;
when you aren’t cowed by class-division ‘betters’
   but have a sense of what your life is for;
when you can pass the Tiller Girls’ audition
   but notice showbiz isn’t gold but brass;
when you make Labour politics your mission
   but don’t lose sight of being a Northern lass;
When you have five attempts at being selected
   and don’t give up your fervent MP aim;
when, finally, for West Brom you’re selected
   and prove a glamorous player in the game;
when you’re the Speaker both sides love, through knowing
   that Erskine May’s where everyone must sup,
then you’re a national treasure, and your going
   is deeply mourned when, in your words,     ‘Time’s up!’

D.A. Prince

Betty call’d me and I stood
Irresolute before her Chair;
Then she whisper’d ‘You’ll be good!’
And sitting back, she touch’d her hair;
All at once I found my voice
Though the sound of it appall’d me:
But I heard the whips rejoice –
Betty call’d me!

Betty call’d me and her bright
Eyes and smile were full of kindness;
I felt I’d regain’d my sight
After long dark years of blindness.
Say I’m silly, say I’m wet,
All I know is she enthralled me;
Say I’m sad, but don’t forget
Betty call’d me.

J.C.H. Mounsey

No. 3295: End of

You are invited to submit a comically appalling final paragraph to the worst of all possible novels. Please email entries of up to 150 words to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 12 April.

My advice to the new First Minister

Last Friday I found myself in the magnificent Carnegie-funded Central Library in George IV Bridge, Edinburgh. I was due to speak at a Scotonomics conference and, after glancing at some of the more challenging questions that had been sent in advance, concluded that an hour or so’s revision was urgently called for on the respective attributes of new monetarism and wellbeing economics. Entering the reading room, I was asked by the kind library staff if I had a reading card. ‘Well, I was a regular user as a student,’ I ventured. ‘When was that? Our records go back a fair way,’ they said helpfully. ‘1973,’ I answered. ‘Please fill in the form.’

The conference itself was an erudite and fairly serious affair – as befits a group of people who study the economics of independence on a liquid Friday night in Dundee. I told the assembly that my three favourite economists were Adam Smith, John Maynard Keynes and J.K. Galbraith, which I think is not a bad halfback line, although perhaps not quite green enough to impress this audience. What unifies all three? None was really an economist. Smith was a moral philosopher, Keynes an academic mathematician and market speculator and Galbraith an agriculturalist – thus all three tempered economic theory with practical experience. That’s what made them immortal.

I spent Sunday fielding calls from journalists looking for gossip on the SNP leadership and first minister’s race. The Sunday Mail published a striking front page on the ongoing police investigation into the murky matter of SNP HQ finances – ‘Buy Buy SNP… and hello to the cops!’ But why do they call me? Why would the leader of another nationalist party – Alba – have inside knowledge on the workings of the SNP? Even the now-ex first minister Nicola Sturgeon proclaims she didn’t know about its plummeting membership figures. What I do know is that both frontrunners – Humza Yousaf and Kate Forbes – believed (rightly, as it turns out) that the race would be very closely run. A worrying number of SNP members ended up voting for the self-declared ‘continuity candidate’. Is this really wise when ‘continuity’ means shedding members, voters and support for independence? They seem afflicted with Einstein’s definition of insanity – doing the same thing over and over but expecting different results.

In the end, the race was Humza’s – by a cat’s whisker. On the positive side, he is the first Muslim leader of any country in the western world: a strong declaration of Scotland’s commitment to diversity. That is not an insubstantial moment. Unfortunately, the downsides are also very evident. It’s not that he is Humza ‘Useless’, as the Unionist parties claim. He isn’t. He is better than the tartan Tory leader, Douglas Ross; he’s on a par with Labour’s branch office manager in Edinburgh, Anas Sarwar. It is just that the task facing him is much, much greater. He has to unite a divided party, a fractured national movement, and also convince an increasingly sceptical nation that the SNP has not totally forgotten how to run the country wisely and well.

I doubt if the new First Minister is looking for my advice, but here it is anyway. He should appoint his very best people to key portfolios: finance and health. He needs both Ash Regan and Kate Forbes in the cabinet. Dump the Greens and their daft obsessions. Stop asking Westminster for a referendum (the section 30 referendum cul-de-sac) and instead establish an independence convention. This means front up rather than back-pedal on independence. He should concentrate on self-determination rather than self-identification – and fight every national election on seeking a mandate to negotiate independence. Working through the points on that list won’t, in itself, guarantee success. But not addressing any one of them will invite a comeuppance at next year’s general election.

Being elected first minister by the Scottish parliament is always a great day for the nominee. Even when the vote is sewn up, there is a tendency to sit there waiting and wondering what could possibly go wrong. Will one of the beams fall off the roof? Will the presiding officer have a brain storm? In Humza’s case, the nomination went well – but he immediately ended up in a car crash by ineptly offering Kate Forbes a demotion which she promptly rejected, returning to the backbenches. It is an early lesson for our new First Minister on the scope and limitations of power. He may feel safer with his bosom pals in the top jobs – but he will not be stronger. And he may not be there long.

The battle for Britain | 1 April 2023

Portrait of the week: Scotland’s new First Minister, Prince Harry’s day in court and Amsterdam’s campaign against British men

Home

Humza Yousaf was elected leader of the Scottish National party, beating Kate Forbes by 52 per cent to 48 per cent after Ash Regan was eliminated; MSPs then elected him First Minister. Of 19 transgender prisoners in custody in Scotland, 12 began their transition ‘after their date of admission’, according to data obtained under Freedom of Information laws. The National Executive Committee of the Labour party voted 22 to 12 to bar Jeremy Corbyn from standing as a Labour candidate at the next election. The terrorism threat level in Northern Ireland was raised from substantial to severe, meaning an attack was highly likely. The Grenadier Guards who carried the late Queen’s coffin into St George’s Chapel, Windsor, were among those recognised in the Demise Honours list, in which the King made appointments to the Royal Victorian Order by his own choice. The Duke of Sussex visited the High Court to watch proceedings in a privacy case he has brought against Associated Newspapers. Children below 11 will be offered the polio vaccine in London, where there has been some transmission of the virus, although the disease had been eradicated in Britain in 2003. James Bowman, the countertenor, died aged 81.

DP World, which built the London Gateway container port and also owns P&O Ferries, which sacked 800 British workers last year in favour of cheaper foreign ones, was approved to co-run the Thames Freeport in Essex. After interest rates were raised another quarter of a percentage point by the Bank of England, Andrew Bailey, its governor, blamed early retirement for ‘upward pressure on inflation’. Royal Mail, in dispute with the Communication Workers Union, considered declaring the business insolvent under the Postal Act. British Airways cancelled about 32 Heathrow flights a day at the start of the Easter holidays because of a ten-day strike by security workers in the Unite union.

Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister, came up with some scheme to make vandals mend the damage they had done within 48 hours of being ordered to do so. The government would also make possession of laughing gas (nitrous oxide) illegal. The government said migrants would no longer be put up in hotels but concentrated in camps. The Gambling Commission imposed penalties of £19.2 million on William Hill, the bookmakers, for failing to protect consumers or watch out for money laundering. Westminster School set about becoming fully co-educational by 2030. Cambridge won the 168th Boat Race, widening its lead over Oxford, which has won 81 times.

Abroad

Russia would station tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus, President Vladimir Putin announced. Germany sent its first shipment of 18 Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine, joining the first of 14 British Challenger tanks. Banking shares came under pressure in Europe, notably those of Deutsche Bank. Lebanon found itself keeping two different times after Najib Mikati, the Prime Minister, delayed summer time until the end of Ramadan later this month, although Christian authorities put the clocks forward in March. Amsterdam launched an advertising campaign discouraging visits by British men aged 18 to 35.

In France, uncollected rubbish was set on fire in the streets. The protests against the raising of the pension age from 62 to 64 led to the cancellation of a state visit by the King of the United Kingdom, who made his first state visit to Germany instead. President Emmanuel Macron quietly took off an expensive watch during a television interview, an act pounced upon by his critics. Uganda passed the death penalty for ‘aggravated homosexuality’, such as sexual abuse of a child or vulnerable person. Shou Zi Chew, the chief executive of TikTok, which is used by 150 million Americans, was questioned and verbally abused for four hours at a US congressional hearing, which called the app a security risk. At a primary school in Nashville, Tennessee, three adults and three children were shot dead by a 28-year-old former pupil who identified as a trans man. A tornado hit Rolling Fork, Mississippi, pop. 1,883, killing at least 25. At least 29 sub-Saharan migrants bound for Italy drowned off the coast of Tunisia; a record 2,500 migrants arrived on the Italian island of Lampedusa in 24 hours. An asteroid perhaps 300ft in diameter, big enough to obliterate a city, passed between the moon and the Earth.

There’s no bargaining with my wife

For me, one of the joys of going abroad is bargaining with the local sellers. They name an extortionate price; I make an insulting counteroffer; they threaten to walk away; I increase my offer by a fractional amount; they accuse me of not being serious, then name a price that’s fractionally lower than their opening bid, accompanied by elaborate hand gestures to indicate this is their absolute final offer; now it’s my turn to start walking away; and so on, until eventually we arrive at a mutually agreeable price that leaves us both feeling we’ve got the better of one another. In reality, of course, I’ve been ripped off, but I can tell myself I’ve struck a tremendous bargain.

Unfortunately, Caroline takes a different view. She believes the great benefit of foreign travel is that it often involves a transfer of wealth from the haves to the have-nots. A successful holiday means plenty of opportunities to hand over money to hotel owners, taxi drivers, restaurateurs, tour guides and – yes – local vendors. In her eyes, they aren’t grifters and hustlers using every ruse in the book to shake down credulous holidaymakers, but honest, hardworking folks doing their best to support their families.

As you can imagine, this difference of opinion often leads to awkward moments, which is what happened in Spain last week. I’d been invited to give a talk on free speech at the British International School of Marbella and Caroline tagged along, thinking it would make for a pleasant mini-break. And so it was, save for the moment an African gentleman wandered past when we were seated at a beach bar. He was carrying a bushel of Vilebrequin swimming trunks, saying: ‘Buy one, get one free.’ As I’d forgotten to pack a costume, I beckoned him over.

‘How much?’ I asked.

‘Sixty euros,’ he said, carefully unfolding about two dozen pairs and laying them before us.

‘Sixty euros for a pair of fake designer swimming trunks? You’re having a laugh. I’ll give you ten.’

He gave me a look of withering contempt and started folding the trunks back up, supposedly preparing to walk away. Inwardly, I was thrilled – the game was on! All I needed to do was wait for him to name a new price. But then Caroline intervened.

‘Ten euros is ridiculous. Don’t be such a meanie. Pay the man what he’s asking. If you bought a pair in the hotel shop they’d cost at least €200.’

He suddenly broke out in a big grin. And no wonder! Caroline was playing the part of the stooge in a game of three-card Monte – an undercover accomplice helping her partner-in-crime bilk unsuspecting patsies.

‘Okay, 20,’ I said, looking daggers at Caroline in the hope that she’d keep quiet. ‘I only want one pair, so given that you were offering two for 60 I’m not far off your asking price.’

I thought this was a generous offer – far more than he could have hoped. But before he could accept, Caroline piped up again. ‘Oh for God’s sake. He didn’t mean that. That was just a lure to get you to show interest. Give him 30.’ The rascal looked at me expectantly. This was the easiest sale he’d ever made.

‘Twenty-five,’ I said. ‘Final offer.’

At that point, not wishing to push his luck, his hand shot out and the deal was sealed. Caroline had the envelope full of euros in her handbag, but instead of handing it to me she peeled off three €10 notes and forked them over. He fished in his pocket, pulled out some change and offered it to Caroline, but she waved him away. ‘Keep it,’ she said.

As he trotted off down the beach, presumably to spend his unexpected windfall on rum and reefer, I turned to Caroline in a rage. Didn’t she understand the first thing about negotiation? How was I supposed to get him to drop his price if she was pooh-poohing every offer I made? And what was the point of agreeing a price if she wasn’t going to stick to it? She was having none of it. According to her, it was petty of me to haggle with the poor man over a few coins. Think how much more they meant to him. Thanks to me, his brood of small children wouldn’t go to bed hungry that night.

I tried to explain market forces to her, but she wasn’t interested. I pointed out that the beach in front of the hotel was teeming with Africans hawking their wares. If she was so hellbent on redistributing our wealth, why stop at one? ‘Why indeed?’ she replied, grabbing the envelope and getting up from the table. It took all my diplomatic skills to persuade her to sit back down.

Such are the travails of being married to someone who is, at heart, a Guardian-reading liberal. Remind me never to take her to a Moroccan souk.

No. 745

White to play and draw. Composed by A. Lifanov, 2002. The pawn on h4 looks unstoppable, but the draw is still within reach with an accurate sequence. What should White’s first move be? Email answers to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 3 April. There is a prize of £20 for the first correct answer out of a hat. Please include a postal address and allow six weeks for prize delivery.

Last week’s solution 1…Qxd2+! 2 Bxd2 e3+ and 3 Kxe3 Nd5+ or 3 Bxe3 Ne4+ or 3 Ke1 exd2+ 4 Kxd2 Ne4+

Last week’s winner Mark Benson, Chipping Campden, Gloucestershire

The American Cup

An uncharacteristic blunder from Wesley So handed tournament victory to Hikaru Nakamura at the American Cup, which finished at the St Louis Chess Club last weekend. The event was held with an unusual ‘double elimination knockout’ format, in which players who lost a match would continue playing in the ‘elimination bracket’, and only a second loss would see them exit the tournament.

Nakamura won their first encounter, which shunted So into the elimination bracket. But since So triumphed in the elimination bracket, he was resurrected to face Nakamura in the final, where he took his revenge. Each player having lost one match, they were left to fight it out one more time.

The first three games were drawn, and the fourth game saw Nakamura advance his knight into the centre, opening the file for his rook, whereupon So decided it was safe to snatch the pawn on d2 with his queen.

Hikaru Nakamura-Wesley So

American Cup, March 2023

But 17…Qxd2? was a fatal blunder. Nakamura pounced with 18 Rfd1 Qb2 19 Nc4!, and So’s queen was trapped, so Black resigned. It is a mysterious fact that simple knight retreats are occasionally overlooked even by the world’s best players.

The creative highlight of their matches was this game, from the match that was won by Wesley So.

Hikaru Nakamura-Wesley So

American Cup, March 2023

The rook on f1 is attacked, and 31 Rxf4 Qd1+ is not convincing. Nakamura came up with an inventive solution. 31 h4! The beautiful point is that 31…Nxf1 32 Rg5! attacks the queen and prepares Ba1-g7 mate. After 32…Qf7 33 Bg7+ Qxg7 34 Rxg7 Kxg7 35 d7 White wins. Qd3 32 Rxf4 Qd1+ 33 Kf2 33 Kh2! was stronger, as 33…Qxa1 34 Re7 favours White, whose king is safer. One crucial detail is that the alternative 33…Qxd6 loses to 34 Rf7 Nd5 35 Bg7+ Kg6 36 h5+ Kxh5 37 Be5! Qxe5 38 Rf5+ winning the queen. Qxa1 34 Rg5 Black still faces serious problems, as the queen must guard against Rf4-f6 mate, while simultaneously dealing with the passed d-pawn Nd5 35 d7 Qh8 36 Re4 Qf6+ 37 Kg1 Qd6 38 d8=Q Qxd8 39 Re6+ Nf6 40 Kh2 Even with the pawn eliminated, Black’s queen is not easily freed from the defence of f6. But this natural step to secure the king was a mistake, since 40…Qc7+ 41 g3 Qf7! 42 Rd6 Qe7 shakes off the rook, when Black should win. For that reason, 40 Kf2! was stronger. Qd4 41 Kg3 In this strange situation, neither side can make progress, so the game is bound for a draw. But there is one more surprise in store. b6 42 Rxc6 Qe3+ 43 Kh2 Qf4+ 44 Kh3 Qf1 45 Re6 Qf2 46 Rc6 Qe3+ 47 Kh2 Qd4 48 Kg3 Qxh4+ Not essential, but it brings about a pretty stalemate 49 Kxh4 Draw agreed

David Kezerashvili: ‘Georgia is a proxy of the Russian state’

David Kezerashvili knows better than most what standing up to Russia entails. He helped to overthrow the Kremlin-aligned Georgian government during the 2003 Rose Revolution. Then he served as Georgia’s defence minister for two years including when Russia invaded in 2008. He eventually fled to London in 2012 when the Kremlin-backed Georgian Dream government accused him of embezzling $5.2 million in state funds. Seven criminal charges were levelled against him, including extortion and money laundering. None was upheld in court, until two years ago when the country’s Supreme Court overturned the embezzlement acquittal, sentencing him in absentia to ten years in prison.

When we meet in The Spectator’s offices, Kezerashvili, who owns Georgia’s pro-democracy television channel, Formula TV, insists the charges are trumped up, the result of a politically motivated campaign against him. Courts in both Britain and France have refused requests from Georgia to extradite him. ‘The ridiculous thing is that the [Supreme Court] judge who tried my case was the general prosecutor when the prosecutor’s office appealed my acquittal in 2018: it was the same person sitting on both trials,’ Kezerashvili says. ‘Without calling my defence, in a few hours they decided I was guilty.’

Kezerashvili, 44, says that his decision to meet me is ‘not without risk’. A week before our interview, Georgia’s former president Mikheil Saakashvili, who is serving six years for abuse of power (which he denies), passed a note to journalists from his prison hospital bed claiming he had been poisoned. ‘Vladimir Putin said at the time [of the Georgian war] that he will go after him. And that’s what we are seeing now.’

Saakashvili was referred to in a recent US State Department report as a ‘political prisoner’; two-thirds of the cabinet that served under him are in exile or living under the threat of jail time. This week, Norway gave Saakashvili the Sjur Lindebrekke Award for his work promoting human rights and democracy, which was dismissed by Georgia’s Prime Minister Irakli Garibashvili as an ‘insult’.

Kezerashvili claims that even in London, he is not free from Russian intimidation. ‘I’ve spotted strangers taking photos of me meeting people,’ he says. ‘And then somehow they appear on the TV channel Imedi, which is the pro-government, pro-Russian TV channel in Georgia. They show my meetings with my ex-colleagues or with business partners. It happens every few weeks.’ He shrugs: ‘It’s become part of life.’

Part of the reason for this intimidation, Kezerashvili says, is his work on Formula TV. The station has been targeted since it was launched in 2020, but in the past few months the government has upped the ante: Kezerashvili expects the channel to be shut down imminently. The US State Department report notes that media watchdogs believe the state’s lawsuit against Kezerashvili is ‘aimed at seizing the government-critical television station’.

When I ask if he is concerned about meeting a similar fate to that of his old boss, or of Alexander Litvinenko or Yulia and Sergei Skripal, he replies: ‘It’s uncomfortable for sure.’ Friends and family have even been pushing him to get bodyguards. ‘I’m against it. I don’t like the idea.’

Questions have been raised over Saakashvili’s claim that he was poisoned. But Kezerashvili – who affectionately refers to Saakashvili as ‘Misha’ – says what happened is not, as the Georgian government claims, the result of natural illness. ‘On multiple occasions, Putin promised that he would punish Misha… now he’s doing it with the hands of the Georgian government. It’s all according to this Kremlin playbook, if you like. But that’s how they treat their enemies and those they don’t like.’

Kezerashvili says tests recently performed in the United States on samples of Saakashvili’s hair and nails indicate poisoning: abnormal levels of heavy metals were found in his system. Politico, too, said that medical reports revealed traces of ‘mercury and arsenic’ in Saakashvili’s hair and nails, and lacerations ‘throughout his body’.

Last month, there were violent protests across Georgia over the government’s attempts to pass two ‘foreign influence’ laws. These laws would have required any organisation which received more than 20 per cent of its funding from abroad to register as a ‘foreign agent’. The laws would have affected the freedom of the press and NGOs. After being criticised for ‘Russian-style’ threats to free expression, Georgian Dream dropped the legislation.

But Kezerashvili doesn’t believe the government will stop there: he suspects crackdowns on civil society are coming. ‘[Georgia] is becoming more and more pro-Russian almost every week… nowadays I would call it a proxy of the Russian state. It would have been difficult calling it that maybe a couple of years ago. But not from what I see now… [the government] are getting their instructions from officials in Moscow.’

The German foreign minister Annalena Baerbock last week accused Russia of trying to destabilise Georgia and Moldova because of the countries’ decision to ‘follow the European path’, and said this was ‘intensifying’ because of the Ukraine war. Britain has also pledged £500,000 to help shore up Georgia’s security against Russian interference ahead of the country’s election next year. ‘It’s getting to the point where everyone should start speaking up and attract as much attention as possible… Georgia needs help from the West,’ says Kezerashvili.

Russia continues to occupy the Georgian territories of Abkhazia and South Ossetia which were established as effective Russian territory during the 2008 war. There are reports that these territories might hold ‘referendums’ on joining Russia officially. Soldiers from the regions are also being sent to fight for Russia in Ukraine.

Kezerashvili has visited Kyiv at least six times since the war broke out, each trip lasting several weeks. He returned from his latest visit the day before we met; he stresses that his trips are for humanitarian purposes and gets defensive when pressed for details. ‘What details are you interested in?’ he says coyly when I ask. ‘There was lengthy travel involved because you have to drive all the way from the Polish border, which is about seven, eight hours.’ This is as much as he will give. It doesn’t seem far-fetched, perhaps, to imagine that a former defence minister – with first-hand experience of Russian military aggression and a strategic knowledge of how to defend a country against Putin – could have found a receptive audience among Ukraine’s wartime politicians.

Shortly after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, Georgia applied for EU membership along with Moldova. That application now hangs in the balance, in part due to the government’s attempts to repress free speech. Kezerashvili is ‘very doubtful’ the current government will fulfil the conditions set by the EU.

Nevertheless, he hopes that Georgians will have a future in the EU: ‘Georgians see themselves as – and they are – European people. Georgia is a European country.’

Kezerashvili will only be able to return to Georgia if there is a change of regime and an end to the ‘madness’ that he and many of his former colleagues have been subjected to. He hasn’t given up yet. ‘I hope one day I’ll be able to go back and see my family, friends, and the city where I was born and grew up,’ he says.

The banishment of Jeremy Corbyn

Rishi Sunak is on a policy blitz. Humza Yousaf is facing party backlash after losing former leadership rival Kate Forbes from his cabinet. Ed Davey has this morning launched the Liberal Democrats’ local election campaign. And Keir Starmer? The Labour leader is once again making headlines for his bid to distance the Labour party from his predecessor.

On Tuesday, the party’s National Executive Committee met to vote on Starmer’s motion to block Jeremy Corbyn from running to be a Labour MP at the next election on the grounds that the party’s chances of winning the next election would be ‘significantly diminished’ if Mr Corbyn was endorsed. The motion passed by 22 votes to 12.

It marks the completion of an effort by Starmer to oust Corbyn from the party since winning the leadership. A key part of Starmer’s strategy to win the next election is to persuade voters how much the Labour party has changed since 2019. One of the early acts under Starmer’s leadership was a decision to suspend Corbyn from the party over his reaction to a report on anti-Semitism. Since then, the Labour leadership has grown more confident in its efforts to say Corbynism is an idea of the past. The polls, too, suggest that Starmer’s attempts to pick a fight with the left of the party to show voters he has changed are bearing fruit.

Yet this latest move could prove more complicated. The view among Starmer’s allies is that he has no choice but to do this – were Corbyn to stand the Tories would relentlessly attack the Labour party and try to depict Starmer as still having links to the far left. Dislike of Corbyn was a key factor in the Tories’ favour in 2019 so distancing the party from a divisive former leader will help them in red wall seats and beyond.

However, the downside of this move is that while a fight can make a point, it also risks offering a visual and regular reminder of both Corbyn and internal fighting in the first place. The former Labour leader has signalled that he could stand as an independent, while his close political ally John McDonnell has said he believes the motion is temporary and there will be a way to reinstate him at a later date. Corbyn’s local party has come out behind him. It means there could be messy scenes in the build up to a general election should Corbyn choose to stand.

It also plays into an attack that the Tories are keen to amp up in the coming months – that Starmer is shifty and changes position. On Corbyn, ministers point to the fact Starmer served in Corbyn’s shadow cabinet and played up his closeness to the former leader during the Labour leadership contest as Starmer tried to woo the grassroots. Sunak has already been polishing his attack lines accusing Starmer at a recent Prime Minister’s questions of supporting ‘free movement of principles’. The plan is to keep pushing this line to suggest that Starmer’s pledges and promises come polling day cannot be taken at their word.

Beware the AI voice thieves

After years of blissful indifference, finally I’m scared of AI. I’ve been complacent, slept soundly beside my husband as he stares and mutters, sleepless with anxiety about robots. But now I’m frightened too. What happened was this.

A few weeks ago a friend received a phone call from her son, who lives in another part of the country. ‘Mum, I’ve had an accident,’ said the son’s voice. She could hear how upset he was. Her heart began to pound. ‘Are you OK? What happened?’ she said.

‘I’m so sorry Mum, it wasn’t my fault, I swear!’ The son explained that a lady driver had jumped a red light in front of him and he’d hit her. She was pregnant, he said, and he’d been arrested. Could she come up with the money needed for bail?

It was at this point that my friend, though scared and shocked, felt a prick of suspicion. ‘OK, but where are you? Which police station?’

The call cut off. Instead of waiting for her son to ring back, she dialled his mobile number: ‘Where are you being held?’ But this time she was speaking to her real son, not a fake of his voice generated by artificial intelligence. He was at home, all fine and dandy, and not in a police station at all.

Voice scams are on the rise in a dramatic way. They were the second most common con trick in America last year, and they’re headed for the top spot this year. In the UK: who knows? Our fraud squad doesn’t seem to be counting.

It’s just so horribly easy to con people when you’ve an AI as an accomplice. With only a snippet of someone speaking to learn from – a Facebook video, say – an AI tool can produce a voice clone that will sound just like them, and can be instructed to say anything.

In January, a British start-up called Eleven-Labs released its voice-cloning platform. Just a week later someone used it to cook up the voice of the actress Emma Watson reciting Mein Kampf. I didn’t think much of it at the time. Now all I can think of are the millions of elderly parents, the sitting ducks in their sitting rooms, all eager for a call from their kids, all primed.

In Canada, an elderly couple called Perkin were conned out of $21,000 in a scam nearly identical to the one my pal went through. One afternoon they received a call from a man who said he was a lawyer and told them that their boy had run over a US diplomat. The lawyer passed the phone to the ‘son’ who told his frightened parents that he loved them and that yes, he urgently needed cash. What did they know? It was their son’s voice, says Mrs Perkin. They paid up, and now the money’s gone. No one’s liable.

Even after she knew it was a con, she still couldn’t shake the feeling that she’d spoken to her son, says Mrs Perkin. And this is what seems so brutal to me about deepfake voices. If you love a person, the sound of them goes straight to your heart. You respond instinctively and emotionally.

If I even imagine taking a call from my husband, hearing him tell me that my son’s been hurt, my blood pressure rises. I’d send him my bank details in a heartbeat, and if I thought to pause to check his identity, that in itself would feel wrong. ‘Logic wasn’t even helping me,’ says my friend of her experience, ‘because one of my “logical” thoughts was that the voice was too much like M not to be him. I thought I was just grasping for any excuse to not believe what I was hearing.’

Now that it’s obvious how easily AI can hack into and manipulate human emotions, I feel daft for not being afraid before. For that, I blame memes and porn.

We’ve all known about deepfake video for a while. One famous clip shows a very real-looking Tom Cruise playing pranks, doing magic tricks and eating lollipops. I’ve been reassured by this because on close scrutiny it’s clearly not actually Tom Cruise. No AI-generated Tom can replicate the real one’s look of suppressed rage; the scalding contempt in which the original holds ordinary humans.

Obviously, predictably, most of the demand for deepfake video has been in pornography. In 2019 it was estimated that a very amusing 96 per cent of deepfake material online is porn. There’s a lot of media fuss about deepfake sex tapes but again, this doesn’t worry me one jot. It’s a self-correcting problem: the more people know about the possibility of pornographic deepfakes, the more plausible any denial – even when the footage is real.

In January a gamer called Brandon Ewing – online name ‘Atrioc’ – was busted with deepfake pornography of his female colleagues and friends. The colleagues and friends said they were angry and hurt but… what did they think would happen? There’s a reason deepfake video services are advertised on Pornhub.

But anyway – who cares about sex tapes really? It’s the parents and grandparents I mind about, and in this new world of AI crime they’re almost completely alone. There’s nothing the cops can do, except to insist that they’re recruiting ‘cyber-experts’ and that the fraud squad is ‘taking it very seriously’. It’s going to be up to you and me to warn our relatives. I can’t see it going so well.

‘Mum, if you hear me on the phone saying I’ve had an accident, be careful…’

‘You’ve had an accident?’

‘No Mum, it’s just, if I ask for money, make sure it’s me.’

‘You need money, darling?’

I lie awake now next to my husband, both of us sleepless in the half dark. I imagine all the ways in which deepfake audio could be used. I imagine a call in later life from a spoofed number: ‘Hi Mum, I’m just at the front door. Can you come down and let me in?’

The plan to house migrants on barges could soon come unstuck

Frank Sinatra once sang about the seductive properties of bright and shiny ephemera. ‘Her heart will sing, singa-linga, wearing baubles, bangles and beads,’ crooned Ol’ Blue Eyes. There is a temptation for anyone cynical about politics – that’s nearly all of us by now – to view the Government’s announcement of planned new asylum-seeker accommodation as a similarly knowing exercise in buttering us up with something eye-catching but insubstantial.

Barges, barracks and airfields make up Immigration Minister Robert Jenrick’s latest attempt to get the electorate in the mood to couple-up with the Conservatives at the next election. These are the favoured and suitably Spartan-sounding new locations for thousands of the young men who have arrived in the country illegally on small boats.  

We are certainly entitled to wonder whether it is just a distraction, given that those accommodated in this way are likely to be free to come and go as they please rather than being held in secure detention. But that would not be entirely fair.

Having briefed the cabinet that providing hotel rooms for 40,000 unlawful arrivals plus nearly another 10,000 who have come in under authorised schemes now costs taxpayers almost £7 million a day and constitutes a significant pull factor for further illegal immigration, it falls to Jenrick to sell the idea of a new and less salubrious accommodation regime.

The acquisition of a giant barge, similar to those used for oil rig workers, is the most attention-grabbing aspect of Jenrick’s latest contribution to Rishi Sunak’s mission to ‘stop the boats’. The other, former military installations so far earmarked for housing asylum applicants currently tucked up in hotel rooms – the RAF airfield at Scampton in Lincolnshire and the Ministry of Defence Police site at Wethersfield in Essex which is replete with vacant Nissen huts – have already attracted strong local opposition.

In fact, Jenrick deserves a measure of praise for his dogged determination to bring the hotels regime to an end. In so far as there is a public relations element to his latest announcement, it is as much directed towards future waves of potential Channel-crossers who have heard via TikTok about the commodious accommodation presently awaiting them, as it is to the British electorate.

Community relations in towns with hotels turned over to housing asylum seekers have also come under increasing strain in recent months, with demonstrations and counter-demonstrations resulting in scuffles and creating the potential for far more serious violence. 

Sending out a signal that the era of cancelled weddings and flagship station hotels putting-up vast numbers of young men who have knowingly gate-crashed Britain will shortly come to an end is a necessary intervention. 

But it simply won’t work if the removals arm of the policy is long-delayed. The barge will have to be docked somewhere and locals won’t like that when they hear about it, just as residents in Scampton and Wethersfield are already protesting. Lots of other sites are also going to be needed if the Home Office’s ludicrously expensive block-booking of hotel rooms is to be ended.

Only when it has secured the power to fast-track illegal arrivals out of Britain – back to their countries of origin or, failing that, to third countries such as Rwanda – will the Government be well-placed to stem the human tide crossing the English Channel.

When Sunak made stopping the boats one of his five key pledges at the start of the year, he told a press conference:

‘The country will be the judge of whether we as a Government are straining every sinew to focus on their priorities and deliver meaningful progress.’

The sinews are straining again today and anyone who wishes to see the large-scale abuse of our asylum system brought to an end should be glad. It shows the Tories still fear the wrath of the electorate should they fail in that mission. Jenrick’s new policy is best filed under ‘necessary, but not sufficient’.

Now Mark Drakeford’s bureaucrats turn their guns on shooting

Imagine the scene: you’re sat in the First Minister’s office in Cardiff Bay. Your desk groans under the weight of the great issues of state: a crumbling health service, a botched roads review, mismanaged millions and conditions so bad even your own staff are going on strike. So, what do you do to win the masses back on side? Announce a licensing scheme to regulate the release of game birds. Brilliant!

Natural Resources Wales has announced a 12-week consultation on behalf of Mark Drakeford’s government on whether they ought to licence the release of pheasants and red-legged partridges in the Land of My Fathers. NRW claim that there are concerns over the potential environmental impacts from the release of such birds – especially on protected sites.

But despite their insistence that such a move is ‘not a consultation on whether or not shooting live quarry should continue to be allowed in Wales’, opponents fear that the proposals will present future governments with an open goal to introduce further restrictions – effectively banning it in all but name. The Countryside Alliance has now vowed to fight back, today launching a digital campaign to rally the troops. You’d have thought after the last Labour government’s experience with hunting, they’d be a bit less gun ho when it came to countryside affairs.

Talk about shooting yourself in the foot…

Our poor deluded MPs

They say that death and taxes are the only certainties in life. But I would add a couple more things to that list. ‘French rioting’ is one. And ‘MPs getting caught trying to make cash on the side’.

This week a campaign group called Led by Donkeys released footage of a sting operation they have been running to try to trap MPs into agreeing to do consultancy work for a South Korean company. You may not be surprised to learn that the company does not actually exist. A number of MPs, however, clearly were.

After some initial flirting, Gavin Williamson did not fall for it, though we can see from the beginning of the interview the horrific sight of him trying to be charming. It is like watching the Demon Headmaster on a date. Others fell right into it, and it is quite instructive who did. They included Matt Hancock and Kwasi Kwarteng.

After some opening niceties Hancock can be seen on video portentously announcing that his daily rate is ‘Ten thousand sterling’ – a fee I suspect he has yet to earn outside of the jungle. Kwarteng, meanwhile, announced that he wouldn’t do anything for less than ten thousand dollars a month. Asked whether he means pounds or dollars, he says: ‘Well pounds, sterling.’ When the ‘interviewer’ says they were looking at a fee of £8,000 to £12,000 a day, Kwarteng magnanimously meets them on this. ‘We’re not a million miles off,’ he says. Kwarteng’s time at the Treasury makes ever more sense as the months go on.

But I don’t wish to be mean to either man. The problem is a perennial one. On the one hand being an MP is a part-time job – as evidenced by the fact that MPs can also become cabinet ministers. On the other hand, there’s probably quite a lot that any sitting MP could do for their constituents before they decide to attend to the needs of sundry South Koreans. Yet both Hancock and Kwarteng are men who are unsure whether they have any future. And this is the moment of maximum danger for any MP.

So long as some hope is dangled before them, it is extraordinary the privations and degradations that MPs are willing to go through. Being a parliamentary private secretary, principal bag-carrier or the like is bearable because the person carrying the bag believes that one day it will be their bag that is being carried. Beyond that, almost all MPs are united in a singular common delusion – which is that someday the nation will call on them. Given the number of prime ministers we have got through in recent years, and the quality of some of them, you might begin to believe that the 650 members of the House of Commons are not on to nothing on this. Perhaps they will indeed all get a crack at the top job in due course.

Still, my point is that ‘hope’ (an unkind person might say ‘ambition’) is the thing that keeps MPs in line. Absent hope from their future and MPs start to do the stupidest things, as might we all. And this is where the idea that the Conservative party is in a1990s situation starts to become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

After all, just consider the future that Hancock and Kwarteng doubtless once imagined for themselves. Whether or not they ever thought they were going to get the top job, they must have believed that they could always be players, and that even if they ended up not being in cabinet they would at least parachute on to various boards and rake in money there. It isn’t such an extraordinary delusion. John Major, for instance, is widely regarded – against stiff competition – as one of the worst prime ministers in living memory. But in retirement he has made himself very nicely and quietly rich. You and I might wonder why anyone would want Sir John Major’s name on their company board. But some folks do.

Now imagine who would want Hancock’s name, or Kwarteng’s. As it happens I have nothing against either man – and indeed am rather fond of Kwarteng – but it must have become plain to both in recent months that it would be hard to find a bank or investment fund delighted to have their names on their masthead. The sight of Kwarteng’s name alone might not wholly reassure shareholders. Perhaps if both men were to let the dust settle for a decade or so they might return. Stranger things have happened. But that is to speak of the long-term. In the meantime there is the eternal problem of what to do with the short- and medium-term. Sadly, the most obvious answer for many MPs is to make a bit of cash to soften the pain.

And I predict that this is where many an MP is about to come a cropper. As we can tell from the number of Conservative MPs who have announced they will not stand at the next election, a lot of Tory politicians can see the writing on the wall. They sense that they and their party have been weighed in the balance, found wanting and have decided to leg it before the details are made clear.

That is where the problem will lie for the rest of this government. Nobody has much of an idea what to do about inflation. If you think that the Conservatives are out of ideas, just wait until you hear Angela Rayner on the subject. But entrapping MPs will remain something which everybody knows how to do. There are scores of MPs who now see that they have no future in politics. What is worse, they intuit, perhaps correctly, that their time in politics is likely to prove a handicap rather than a boon in the job market they are entering. That makes them exceptionally easy prey for fake sheikhs offering easy money and asking them if they wouldn’t mind speaking a little more clearly into the briefcase over here.

Sleaze doesn’t run in the Conservative bloodstream any more than it does in the Labour one – it can infect any politician who senses that all their hopes are going to go the way of all flesh.