Boris Johnson falls victim to Grant Shapps’ photoshop fail

It seems that Grant Shapps’ day has just gone from bad to worse. Having cursed the Virgin Orbit mission by declaring that ‘tonight all eyes are on the United Kingdom’ an hour before, er, it failed, the Business Secretary has become embroiled in a Twitter row about photoshop.

Shapps is, famously, a keen user of all things tech-related. He exploited his Excel spreadsheet to help co-ordinate MPs trying to bring down the Truss government. He also became something of an unlikely TikTok star while at the Transport department, teaming up with Michael Portillo in a viral video to promote trains.

So it must be to his consternation then that one eagle-eyed Twitter user spotted how his account had tweeted out a picture of the Virgin Orbit mission which removed former prime minister Boris Johnson. The airbrushing of Bozza from the image that Shapps used has prompted tongue-in-cheek comparisons with the propaganda efforts of Stalin’s Russia, in which onetime grandees were purged from images after losing favour with the all-powerful party leader.

Given the ongoing attempts to ‘Bring back Boris’, some in No. 10 must be wishing that they could remove Boris from the picture as easily as Grant Shapps just did…

Are the Osbornites coming out for Starmer?

Is there something in the Westminster air? This morning the Times reports that Claire Perry O’Neill– the Conservative MP for Devizes from 2010 to 2019 – has quit the party and lavished praise on Sir Keir Starmer. In an article she praised the Labour leader’s ‘sober, fact-driven, competent political leadership’ and warned that Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt have become too beholden to inter-party factions to ‘deliver the big changes we need in a fact-based, competent way.’

Just a straw in the wind? Or a sign of something more significant? Perry O’Neill was once considered something of a rising star in that great Tory vintage of 2010. Widely seen as being on the left of the party, she nevertheless obtained ministerial office under both David Cameron and Theresa May, having backed Remain in 2016. More significantly, perhaps, she was also considered a member of the ‘Osbornite’ wing of the party; those MPs were close to then Chancellor personally, temperamentally and ideologically during his tenure at the Treasury between 2010 to 2016.

Members of this clan included Perry O’Neill, Nicky Morgan, Sajid Javid, Matt Hancock, Gavin Barwell and Amber Rudd. Javid and Hancock are now both quitting at the next election while Barwell and Rudd have both expressed public warnings about the current direction of their party. And let’s not forget that Osborne himself has spoken warmly of Starmer’s Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves, offering her advice and praising her in a glowing Times profile as ‘clearly intelligent and serious… more than capable of governing the country.’

While it may be too early to talk of an ‘Osbornites for Starmer’ campaign, it’s clear that Labour are impressing their onetime opponents with a relentless focus on fiscal credibility. It’s a portent too of a likely political ‘sea change’, to use Jim Callaghan’s famous phrase. As Oliver Kamm notes, the same trend happened during the fag end of the Major years, when moderate Tory MPs like Alan Howarth and former MPs like Tony Nelson backed Tony Blair ahead of the 1997 election.

Rishi Sunak will just be hoping that Starmer doesn’t secure a landslide to rival that result…

Is this the real reason Russia is trying to seize Bakhmut from Ukraine?

Bakhmut is not of immense strategic importance. It’s a backwater, empty of almost all civilian life, and largely in ruins. But the city is where Ukraine’s war of self-defence has been at its most intense for months. 

The defenders are suffering, under a hail of artillery fire and under constant threat of attack. But the Russians are losing more. Almost daily, it seems, Putin’s forces advance without cover across a moonscape torn with shell-holes. They are cut down in their tens every time. The front line has barely moved in weeks. Russian bodies, uncollected in the cold, litter the surrounding fields.  

To Ukrainians and their allies, these suicidal attacks are no longer simply foolish. They are almost disconcerting. There seems to be no strategy. The Russians appear not to value their forces’ lives, or the small pieces of Ukrainian territory they hope to take. 

One cannot talk about Bakhmut without mentioning the Wagner Group and its boss, Yevgeny Prigozhin. It is for his benefit, it appears, that so many have needlessly died. Prigozhin is a thuggish oligarch, a former criminal, who first acknowledged his controlling stake in the Wagner Group during this war, when he became its public face. 

The Wagner Group claims to be a for-profit business and a private military company. It is ‘patriotic’, Prigozhin says, but not state-controlled. Most serious analysts no longer believe this to be true. 

There are a number of for-profit private military companies. None of them act like Wagner does. Wagner has appeared in wars in Libya, Mali, Syria, and across Africa. It has sent thousands of men to die in Ukraine since 2014.  

But it has never done so with an independent spirit. Instead, analysts like Ruslan Trad see the Wagner Group as a not-so-deniable cut-out of the FSB (Russia’s foreign intelligence agency, successor to the KGB) and the military intelligence agency, GRU – with, of course, links to the Russian army, too. In the war in Ukraine, conveniently, Wagner has sprouted its own air force. 

In short, Wagner does the dirty work of the Russian regime and its dictatorial allies in the Middle East and Africa. It can only be seen through the lens of Russia’s broader imperial project. 

The Wagner group has slowly begun to take over larger and larger parts of Russia’s war against Ukraine. It has collected many former soldiers. It has recruited aggressively from prisons and penal colonies, promising murderers and rapists the chance to kill again, and a dice roll of freedom or death.  

Those who retreat, Prigozhin has said in speeches in prison courtyards, will be mercilessly killed by their own comrades. One man who was captured by Ukraine and returned to Russia in a prisoner exchange was executed by his Wagner comrades using a sledgehammer. The murder was filmed, widely disseminated, and Prigozhin endorsed it online. 

Prigozhin has his own ambitions. He has been filmed meeting his men – he claims – in Bakhmut itself; he has an active Telegram channel where he recruits and spews vitriol at the Russian ministry of defence and the minister, Sergei Shoigu. He says his men can win the war on their own – although that is hardly what is happening.  

One of his most recent videos saw him visit a storage space filled with the bodies of men whom he had sent to their deaths. ‘Their contract is over’, he said, somewhat redundantly. 

American officials fear Prigozhin is trying to set himself up as a warlord in order to challenge Vladimir Putin for domestic power. Others say he is preparing himself for when the Russian Federation collapses and he has to fight a civil war, like Leon Trotsky or Admiral Kolchak a hundred years ago. Both ideas seem somewhat fanciful. 

Last month, the White House claimed that one of the reasons the Wagner Group has thrown so much away in pursuit of Bakhmut is purely financial. It’s a mining town, and Prigozhin is, according to this account, interested in its minerals.

One of the reasons lives are being thrown away by the thousand in Bakhmut is the pursuit of its nearby salt and gypsum mines. On Telegram this weekend, Prigozhin all but confirmed this theory. Like the White House, he said that Bakhmut has a lot of mines. But Prigozhin put up another view. He suggested a new war, one fought among the tunnels.  

He also indicated that the real fight is now for a nearby town called Soledar, which the Russians have been attacking relentlessly for the past week, at what is described by pro-Ukrainian sources as ‘immense cost’. This is where Ukrainian general staff believes the battle will develop next – and where, according to the UK’s Ministry of Defence, Russia is soon likely to gain a foothold.

‘The system of Soledar and Bakhmut mines, which is actually a network of underground cities, can not only (hold) a big group of people at a depth of 80-100 metres, but also tanks and infantry fighting vehicles, which can move about there’, Prigozhin posted on Telegram. 

This is absurd. But it is no more absurd than arming criminals without military experience and sending them in human waves to charge well-entrenched defenders over and over again.  

Spare reviewed: Harry is completely disingenuous – or an idiot

A surprising number of royal personages have published books under their own names, and sometimes they have even been written by the purported authors. The first, I think, was the Eikon Basilike, published shortly after Charles I’s execution and presented as his account of himself and of events. The authorship of this highly effective piece of propaganda has been questioned, but its simple, direct, haughty tone is very similar to the king’s recorded speech at his trial. After Prince Albert’s death, Queen Victoria published two journals of her life in the Highlands. We know that she was an enchantingly vivid writer from her diaries and letters, with a novelist’s ear for dialogue. (Lord Melbourne’s debauched, drawling conversation is beautifully captured in the single volume of her diary that Princess Beatrice didn’t get around to editing.) Publication, in the Highland volumes, put a restraint on her lively prose; but they still show how much pleasure she took in talking to people in remote places who had no idea who she was. Disraeli’s amusingly oily opening in an audience, ‘We authors, ma’am…’, is not as ridiculous as you might think.

There have been others since. I recommend a popular success of the 1950s, My Memories of Six Reigns by Princess Marie Louise, the granddaughter, through Princess Helena, of Queen Victoria. She can’t really write (‘Here I think I must relate an amusing remark my mother made’), but she is that rare thing, a bore who is not at all interested in talking about herself (unlike the author under present consideration). Her book is a mine of stunningly inconsequential tales – like Queen Victoria snobbishly telling a religious lady-in-waiting that when she died she would not receive the prophet Abraham.

The Duke of Windsor published an autobiography, A King’s Story, which rather demonstrates the factors preventing royalty from writing well. At the end of this interminable volume, you can only conclude that nobody ever said to the duke ‘Oh do shut up’ or, at the end of an anecdote, ‘Is that it?’ or ‘No, I don’t think I want to read your letter from 20 years ago to your father about meeting the Japanese ambassador’. The duke comes across as a frightful bore who was under the impression that he fascinated everyone he ever met. But how should royalty ever think otherwise?

The Duke of York only produced one book, an inept volume of his photographs, back in 1985, but his wife has been very energetic. Among her dozens of books are at least two autobiographies, published after her departure from the royal family, though the first still uses her royal title. The apparent aim of the second of these, Finding Sarah: A Duchess’s Journey to Find Herself, was to explain the great spiritual journey she went on after being caught by the News of the World attempting to sell introductions to her ex-husband. Also to offer life advice to her readers: ‘Always be grateful for your family and friends.’ Interestingly, there is a chapter about escaping to the sanctuary of a place in California called Montecito, where a kind lady called Oprah offered her support and a deal to make a docu-series.

Despite all the whipped-up outrage over the Duke of Sussex’s memoir, we should try to remember that it is basically Sarah York’s autobiography with better, or at any rate more transparently vindictive, timing. You will have read the principal revelations elsewhere, which I will not dwell on. They seem to fall into the dog-bites-man category, including that a public schoolboy took cocaine at a party when he was 17, two brothers had such an angry argument that one hit the other, and a medium got in touch with a famous and rich adult orphan with the news that ‘You’re living the life [your mother] wanted for you’.

Other stuff includes the astonishing news that the present Prince of Wales drank rum on the night before his wedding, and that though he didn’t mind having his brother as his best man in church, he asked other old friends to speak at the reception. I don’t know why you might not trust your brother to give a speech on one of the most important days of your life. Maybe it was because two years earlier he referred on camera to his ‘little Paki friend’? My general view of the supposedly devastating revelations contained in this book is: the publisher paid £20 million for it?

Spare represents a well-established literary genre, the misery memoir, like Ma, He Sold Me For a Few Cigarettes and The Boy Who Was Raised As a Dog (real examples). The reader is not expected to recognise his own life in these pages, whether through not being royal or not growing up in the direst poverty. The villains are plain, and in the later stages redemption is offered, quite often, though not in the case of Sussex alas (‘Not really big on books’), by learning to read and write. One has to feel for the Duke of Sussex to some degree, though his account is unconvincing and horribly hurtful to decent and honourable people who can never answer back. He was born into a position he is patently unfit for. He suffered a terrible tragedy when young. He evidently has very few inner resources such as intellectual curiosity or even interest in other human beings to sustain him. He is easy prey for the sycophants and opportunists who always surround royalty in ways that his brother and father aren’t and his grandmother never was. All that is exceedingly sad.

His version of events is worth reading, although it should be read in conjunction with more detached accounts, such as Tom Bower’s biography. The most damaging claims against members of his family are hearsay, such as what the King is supposed to have remarked when the Prince was born. Or they are toxic speculation, such as comments about the Queen’s long-term strategy to acquire the crown, which I find very implausible about such a patently decent woman. Some of Sussex’s accounts of incidents are objectively incorrect, such as his version of the Daily Mail’s defence in the court case – it was specifically a claim that the Duchess had shown friends the letter the Mail had published, with the intent that they quote it in the American media. Sussex gives the impression that they were being taken to task merely for defending her, which is quite wrong. Other previous claims have now been dropped. The Duchess’s absurd suggestion that they were married by the Archbishop of Canterbury in private before the public ceremony is not repeated.

Of course we will never know the truth about much of the rest of it, since the individuals berated are not going to respond. But within the Duke’s version of events lie a number of inadvertent suggestions that the reader will ponder on. It was not so very unreasonable for the then Duchess of Cambridge, heroically continuing her official duties through a difficult pregnancy, to be offended when the Duchess of Sussex told her that her condition was making her stupid, nor for the Duke of Cambridge to tell his brother that he found his wife rude. The Duke of Sussex now says that his brother was ‘parroting’ the characterisation of his wife in the media. But why would his thoughts about his sister-in-law come solely from the Daily Mail? He’d met her. He knew her. The solipsism of Sussex’s version of the confrontation is interesting. Cambridge asked him not to tell his wife that they had had a fight. For Sussex, this shows Cambridge in a bad light; but there may be a reason that justifies his brother. Untrue and very upsetting stories about the Cambridges’ private relations had started to appear in American magazines. Some of them, the Cambridges may have believed, were magazines with a close relationship either with the Duchess of Sussex or her intimates. The belief may have been unfounded, but it is plausible that Cambridge said ‘Don’t tell your wife about this’ primarily because he didn’t want to read about it in glossy magazines. Trust had quite broken down.

Spare has been ghosted by the experienced American writer J.R. Moehringer, who is the 130th name to appear on the list of people thanked by Sussex. I personally would have placed him higher than the ‘superb’ fact-checker who approved the claim that the Koh-i-Noor is the ‘largest diamond ever seen by human eyes’ when it isn’t even the biggest diamond owned by the royal family. Cullinan 1 is four times the size. But there you go. Moehringer has made a decent stab at simulating an English voice for his narrator, though there are too many ‘mates’ to be quite convincing, and the register weirdly varies. Unlikely American usages enter, such as ‘worrisome’ ‘tardiness’, or ‘snack’ as a verb. I can’t admit to being terribly enthralled by Moehringer’s evocations of Africa (‘The sun beat down from a hot blue sky’) or by his encouragements to emotion (‘Her tears glistened in the spring sunshine’). The reader may be amused by his making the Duke the first person in history to stand in front of Sandringham and say: ‘I was struck again by the beauty of it all.’ But that is part of his chosen genre, and may be forgiven.

The Duke says that he wants to repair the relationship with his father and brother. He is either completely disingenuous, or an idiot. Whatever feelings the King and Prince have for him personally, there is no possibility they will have any conversation with him while knowing that his account of it will be promptly sold to the highest bidder for broadcast. Nobody would. The Duke has said in a television interview that he has a ‘huge amount of compassion’ for the Queen. It’s just as well: I don’t think anyone else is going to make that observation about his attitude to that admirable woman unprompted.

This is a sad and a lowering book, and the saddest aspect of it is that the Duke of Sussex strangely believes that he is the person to lead a charge against the practitioners of the written word, to control and restrict it. I may be old-fashioned, but I don’t consider that the appropriate person to advocate any restrictions on published writing is somebody who has only ever, it appears, read one book under the demands of his very expensive schooling, and who evidently regards our noble trade with undiluted contempt, which may of course be justified, and unmitigated ignorance, which never is.

This article appears in the forth-coming edition of The Spectator, out on Thursday.

Why does Israel want to patch things up with Russia?

Is Israel cosying up to Russia? When Eli Cohen, Israel’s foreign minister, spoke to his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov last week, it was the first such call between the countries’ foreign ministers since the start of the war in Ukraine. Israel’s ministry of foreign affairs, Cohen said, was planning to establish a new ‘responsible’ policy with regard to the country and ‘talk less’ about the war in public.

The announcement of the call caused a frenzy, with speculation that Israel wants to adopt a pro-Russia policy. It prompted a public admonition from senior Republican senator, and ally of Israel’s newly reinaugurated prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Lindsey Graham. Graham tweeted ‘The idea that Israel should speak less about Russia’s criminal invasion of Ukraine is a bit unnerving.’ He continued, calling Lavrov ‘a representative of a war criminal regime that commits war crimes on an industrial scale every day.’

Cohen’s decision to hold a call was surprising for another reason: the tide of antisemitism Russia’s war in Ukraine appears to have led to. Conspiracy theories that Jews are responsible for the war have emerged in Russia. Jews have been increasingly blamed for Russia’s difficulties in the war, prompting Moscow’s exiled Chief Rabbi to urge Russian Jews to leave the country. So far, roughly 20,000 Jews (out of about 165,000 Jews living in Russia) have left. Antisemitic tropes have been pushed by government officials, Russian media, think tanks with government connections and pro-Russian, usually far-right, ‘influencers’. In May, Lavrov repeated the baseless claim that Hitler was partially Jewish, in an attempt to portray Ukrainian president Zelensky, who is Jewish, as a Nazi. This understandably caused outrage in Israel – so why is Israel reaching out to Russia?

Prior to the war in Ukraine, Israel enjoyed positive relations with Russia. Bibi and Putin’s bond allowed Israel to operate against Iranian and Hezbollah targets in Syria and Iran. This necessitates a certain level of quiet consent from Russia, that holds considerable power in the region. However, under the leadership of Bibi’s more centrist predecessors Naftali Bennet and Yair Lapid, relations between the two countries suffered significantly following the start of the war. 

Israel initially refrained from publicly addressing the war. It did not want to alienate Russia, but was also reluctant to side with a country that had been condemned by the West. Israel’s government gradually adopted a more favourable rhetoric towards Ukraine and criticised Russia’s behaviour. It has been providing Ukraine with non-offensive equipment and humanitarian aid, although it refrained from providing weapons, and resisted requests from Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, to arm Ukraine with its anti-rocket defence system, Iron Dome. 

Bibi’s new government was sworn in on 29 December. His right-wing-orthodox administration seems intent on undoing many of the policies implemented by its centrist predecessors: from health, to justice, communications, environment and transportation. Nearly every ministry faces major reforms.

Israel’s decision to seek to repair its relationship with Russia is another example of this shake-up. Putin’s regime employs antisemitic propaganda to justify its aggression against Ukraine, commits war crimes, and is ostracised by every liberal democracy. Surely this increases the risk of alienating Israel from its closest allies?

But Israel think it’s worth the risk – largely because of Israel’s anxieties about Iran. The war has brought Iran and Russia – both suffering from international isolation and sanctions – closer. Russia has reportedly been using Iranian drones in Ukraine. In turn, it has agreed to provide Iran with political, military and economic support. 

At a time when the West’s nuclear deal with Iran hangs in the balance, this new strategic relationship between Russia and Iran is a major concern for Israel. Bibi, who has long been accused of having an obsession with Iran, is fearful that Russia’s support will make it possible for Iran to achieve nuclear capabilities. In a call with Putin in December, Bibi expressed apprehension about the alliance between Russia and Iran.

The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs released a short statement about Cohen’s talk with Lavrov on 3 January. The succinct notice said regional and bilateral issues, and the ‘importance of the relationship between the two countries’, were discussed. What was missing is far more telling of Israel’s new policy: Israeli media reported that the two also talked about the Netanyahu government’s concern about Russia’s cooperation with Iran.

Israel’s decision to prioritise regional interests means that it will need to tread a fine line between rebuilding relations with Russia, without supporting, politically and militarily, its war conduct. It will have to find a balance between forging a close enough relationship with Russia to distance it from Iran, without alienating Israel’s allies. Key among these is the US, which is already concerned by far-right and anti-democratic elements in the Israeli government. To find this balance, Israel may try to establish itself as a negotiator between Russia and Ukraine.

Going forward, Israel’s policy will be less pro-Russia, and more pro-Israel, looking after its own interests. But Bibi ‘the magician’ may find it impossible to have his cake and eat it too.

Mysterious hampers greet returning MPs

Gifts, earnings and outside interests: all are in the news this week thanks to an interactive tracker unveiled by Sky News and Tortoise. One of the headline revelations is that Theresa May earned £107,600 speech for a speech she delivered in Saudi Arabia in November – a country she blocked ministers and officials from visiting temporarily while she was prime minister following the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

But there’s a belated Christmas gift for those MPs who feel left out by some of their colleagues coining it in. For a number of Fortnum and Mason hampers have turned up this week at the Houses of Parliament to greet MPs and their staff, returning from their festive break. Inside is a message which reads: ‘Happy Holidays from Royal Embassy of Saudi Arabia.’

A spokesman for the Commons declined to say how many MPs have received the hampers; the Saudi Embassy has also been contacted for comment. The unsolicited gifts in question are Fortnum’s £140 ‘express hamper’ which boasts ‘teas and coffees for sipping; biscuits for nibbling; preserves and condiments for spreading, and even more deliciousness ready to enjoy.’

What better way to start the new year?

Prince Harry’s Spare ends with a whimper not a bang

The epigraph for Spare, Prince Harry’s frenziedly awaited memoir, is from William Faulkner’s Requiem for a Nun. It states simply ‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past.’ As a gesture of authorial intent, it’s a bold one. It suggests from the outset that this is not going to be some backwards-gazing book, but instead that it is going to be fully engaged with the present. Given the fact that Spare’s publication has dominated headlines for days, it’s not an inaccurate statement.

Yet – how best to put it? – Harry has never struck most of us as the kind of man who habitually quotes Faulkner. His Pulitzer Prize-winning ghostwriter JD Moehringer (credited in the acknowledgements as ‘my collaborator and friend, confessor and sometime sparring partner’), however, seems like someone who might. So it’s something of a surprise when Harry announces, early in the book, that he discovered the quote on BrainyQuote.com, before he asks ‘Who the fook is Faulkner?’ 

We all know who the fook Harry is, though. It’s impossible to come to Spare without the weight of expectation overwhelming it. It’s the first autobiography to be written by a male member of the Royal Family since the Duke of Windsor’s A King’s Story in 1951. Although that one caused no end of controversy when it was published, it didn’t contain a description of the Duke losing his virginity (which reads just as cringemakingly in context here as it did in the leaked extracts, although ‘ass’ has become ‘rump’) nor his youthful penchant for drugs. Neither does it contain the notorious description of how he killed 25 Taliban fighters during his military service – which, to be fair, makes a great deal more sense here than it did in the leaks.  

Just as the Duke of Windsor collaborated with an American author, Charles Murphy, on his autobiography, so Moehringer’s influence can be seen. The chapters – 232 of them in total – are short and concise; the lean and economical writing owes a debt in equal part to Faulkner (naturally), therapy-speak and airport bestseller novels. This is a book in which italics are used to denote speech, where sentences. Exist in. A couple. Of meaningful. Words, and in which Harry has to portray himself simultaneously as the ultimate insider, giving his readers a privileged insight into life in the bosom of the Royal Family, and an outsider, fleeing an archaic and outdated institution in favour of a new life in California.  

Still, of everything that Harry has been associated with since his quasi-abdication in 2020, this is the most interesting endeavour, even if it’s not wholly successful. Perhaps if it hadn’t been spoilt by the pre-publication leaks, it might have greater emotional and literary effect. Nevertheless, there is a great deal of filler between the genuinely interesting segments, most of which revolve around the ever-compelling Windsor family dynamic.

One can detect Moehringer’s influence throughout; not just in the distinctly American prose, but also in the narrative arc. It begins with a genuinely affecting prologue, detailing his discovery of his mother’s death and its aftermath, and then we’re into the usual bildungsroman territory: schooldays, army life and career, relationships with ‘Mummy’ and ‘Pa’ and a tempestuous, love-hate dynamic with ‘Willy’, the heir to his spare. Surprisingly, he is the main antagonist of the book, other, of course, than the hated media. It’s heavy on introspection and perfectly readable, if lacking in the surprise value it might have had. Harry isn’t afraid to portray himself as a little boy lost, but sometimes it does verge on ‘poor me’ self-indulgence. One can almost hear his therapist’s voice: ‘Go on, let it all out…scream, man, scream!’ 

The book’s third section, the ‘Invictus’-referencing ‘Captain of my soul’, is its most compelling. It is, of course, largely about ‘Meg’, and there is yet more of the sentimental gush that anyone who suffered through Harry and Meghan will be familiar with. But it is also here that the narrative really grips, as Harry attacks the ‘novella’ and ‘sci-fi fantasies’ peddled by the tabloid press: the famous quote ‘whatever Meghan wants, Meghan gets’ is singled out for particular ridicule.

Harry takes aim at his family for what he describes as their craven complicity in the face of the all-devouring tabloid media. Charles is quoted as saying ‘you must understand, darling boy, the institution can’t just tell the media what to do’ – remarks which may be on the nose, but perfectly encapsulate his son’s bubbling grievance. 

The content may be familiar, but the anger with which it’s written is engaging and vivid. The story comes to life on the page in a way, strangely enough, that it never has in any of Harry’s endless televised interviews. When it’s back to Meg and sentiment and name-dropping, it sags once again; we never forget, for all of Harry’s purported everyman qualities, that he’s the sort of man who is invited by Elton John to come to his home in France to escape the cares of the world. 

The much-ballyhooed appearance by a medium who purports to pass on a message from Diana comes at the end, and provides a cathartic climax of sorts, even as Harry acknowledges ‘the high-percentage chance of humbuggery’. (Moehringer, if we can ascribe such turns of phrase to him, has an arrestingly vivid style, when he’s allowed to flex his literary muscles.) Then there’s some overwritten stuff about a hummingbird flying away (metaphor alert!) and the 407-page long book concludes, with more of a whimper than a bang. No doubt the paperback will have an extra chapter dealing with the Queen’s death and the extraordinary controversy that has occurred ever since. 

Still, there’s a laugh to be had at the end, as the back cover of the dustjacket solemnly describes Harry as ‘husband, father, humanitarian, military veteran, mental wellness advocate and environmentalist.’ Some will finish this obviously heartfelt and never less than interesting book and think that the missing word is ‘author’. Other, less partisan, readers may think that ‘provocateur’ should be supplied. If you loathed him before coming to this book, this is unlikely to engender sympathy, and if you’re Team Harry, then this will be a stirring rallying cry.  

For the rest of us – if there is anyone in between – the next step will be to await his wife’s inevitable memoir. My money’s on it being called Care. Will readers? I wouldn’t bet against it, if her husband’s book sells the millions that it undoubtedly shall. 

The unstoppable march of the celebrity author

The anticipation surrounding the release of a certain memoir today obscures a bigger question about the changing face of our publishing industry. Why does every Tom, Dick and Prince Harry think they can write a book these days?

Figures last week showed the number of independent bookshops in Britain reached a ten-year high in 2022, thanks to a reading frenzy fuelled by pandemic lockdowns, the mushrooming of book groups and, perhaps most of all, the incessant, unstoppable march of the celebrity (not to mention royal) author.

It is good news that there are now more than 1,000 independent bookshops in Britain and Ireland, the culmination of six years of growth at a time when other retail sectors have taken a battering. Not only does it preserve the character of local high streets against the all too familiar line-up of bookies, charity shops and coffee chains, but it is an encouraging sign that, perhaps, the nation is happy to read something longer than a social media post.

However, one look at the bestsellers laid out in such shops also exposes something deep within the psyche of the British public. Just like the author formerly known as a prince, everyone thinks they have a book in them.

A recent survey of ‘life goals’ by the financial platform Bestinvest found that, among ‘paying off the mortgage’ and ‘travel the world’, one in ten of those questioned said it was their ambition to write a book. Across the population, that adds up to millions of British adults harbouring ambitions to see their name on a dust jacket.

It would be nice to think this is inspired by reading some of the finest works produced by literary giants over the centuries – but is probably more to do with Baddiel than Brontë, Walliams than Woolf and Jordan than Joyce.

By Jordan I mean Katie Price, the former glamour model who has almost a dozen books to her name and was, at one point, among the UK’s 100 bestselling ‘authors’. Such was her status that her daughter, Princess, was snapped up by a publishing company in 2017. Princess was nine at the time. Now 15, she appears to be forging a successful career as the latest nepo baby to become a model.

How many of the millions of adults who want to write a book have read something by a TV presenter, C-list celebrity, influencer or even a hapless former health secretary and reality TV star and thought ‘I can do that’? Or perhaps they have picked up a fictional work by a favourite right-on comedian such as Alexei Sayle, Stephen Fry, Ben Elton or Rob Newman, and fancy their own chances based on little more than the fact they get lots of likes every time they post a joke on Facebook?

The literary aspirations of non-celebrities are no doubt helped by a burgeoning industry in self-publishing, which gives everyone a way of fulfilling their ambition to get that third-rate crime thriller or substandard ‘steamy’ romantic fiction into print while avoiding seeing their efforts turned down by a host of publishers for the simple reason that it’s rubbish.

There are even companies that offer to help compose a person’s autobiography for them, supposedly to leave a written record for their descendants. Ordinary folk can talk to their very own ghostwriter about the hardships they faced, their attitudes to life, their relationships with their family and perhaps even losing their virginity behind a pub in Gloucester.

But when it comes to celebrity writers, it is not just biographies and fiction that are being churned out. There is also a relentless outbreak of the rich and famous who believe they are the next Enid Blyton.

From the outside, children’s books must appear among the easiest to make money from when a 32-page tale about slime or snot can top the bestselling list without having to go through all the hassle of the genuine creativity of a Rowling or Dahl. A list of popular children’s authors includes David Walliams, of course, but also Pharrell Williams, Frank Lampard, David Baddiel, Madonna, Ricky Gervais, the Duchess of York and two members of the pop group Busted.

That is not to say those celebrities who do put pen to paper cannot be acclaimed for their literary prowess on occasion, though. Book groups all over Britain have helped Pointless host Richard Osman’s The Thursday Murder Club become one of the bestselling debut novels of recent years. It won him a seven-figure publishing contract and is due to be made into a movie by Steven Spielberg’s production company. At 6ft 7in, at least he’s one celebrity who can can justifiably call himself a literary giant.

10 films about brothers at war

Sibling rivalry is nothing new, as the Old Testament’s story of Cain and Abel attests. Back in 1966, director John Huston cast hellraiser Richard Harris as fratricidal bad boy Cain in The Bible: In the Beginning. Years later, Ray Winstone played Cain’s even naughtier descendent Tubal-Cain in Darren Aronofsky’s decidedly odd Noah (2014). 2009 also saw the tale of Cain and Abel recounted more jocularly in Year One (2009), with David Cross and Paul Rudd as the feuding brothers. Of course, the Biblical duo’s argument was settled in a more lethal way than Harry and William’s ‘dog bowl brawl’.

Moving to the 17th century, rivalry between identical royal twins was the theme of Alexandre Dumas’ Man in The Iron Mask section of The Vicomte of Bragelonne: Ten Years Later (1850).

But sometimes, as recent royal events show, real life can be even more dramatic than fiction. If William or Harry are looking for some pertinent viewing, here are ten movies where brotherly forbearance would have been advisable:

The Godfather I & II (1972-1974) – NOW, Amazon Rent/Buy

John Cazale’s middle Corleone brother Fredo is now a byword for stupidity, weakness, and treachery ­– so much so that former CNN host Chris Cuomo (brother of now-disgraced New York governor Andrew) blew a gasket when compared with the fictional character in 2019. In the film, Fredo is spectacularly useless from the get-go, failing to protect his father Vito, who, in the book, he is said to most closely physically resemble out of the three brothers, and getting slapped around when under the supposedly protective wing of Moe Greene (Alex Rocco) after being sent off to learn the casino business in Las Vegas. He’s also a chronic whiner, can’t hold his drink and (it’s hinted) is riddled with STDs. So when he betrays his brother Michael (Al Pacino), it’s time to say good riddance to bad rubbish. After their mother dies, that is. On the plus side, Fredo appears to have a kind heart underneath it all and seems to genuinely regret his disloyalty to the Family.

Aquaman (2018) – ITVX, Amazon Rent/Buy

The clash between two half-brothers – human/Atlantean Arthur Curry (Jason Momoa then aged 39) and younger pure-blood undersea dweller King Orm (Patrick Wilson, 45) – is at the heart of this hit DC superhero picture. Curry must claim his rightful crown as King of Atlantis, both to recover his heritage and also to turf out Orm, who is preparing to wage war on the surface world. Much like Namor in 2022’s Wakanda Forever. Orm is dethroned and imprisoned, but apparently will team up with Arthur for this year’s ‘buddy movie’ sequel Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom. Shades of Marvel’s Thor and adopted bro Loki then. By the way, Orm bears no relation to the fondly remembered 1980s children’s series character of the same name, a puppet worm voiced by Richard Briars (The Good Life) in the ITV series Orm and Cheep.

East of Eden (1955) – Amazon Rent/Buy

Elia Kazan filmed John Steinbeck’s then contemporary take on Cain and Abel, East of Eden (1955), with James Dean as rebellious Caleb Trask (Cain) and Richard Davalos playing straight arrow Aron (Abel). Kazan typically overheats the melodrama; so much so the proceedings verge occasionally on the comical. Raymond Massey is especially annoying as pious family patriarch Adam Trask, who, if not a professional killjoy in the picture, is certainly a top-ranking amateur.

Dead Ringers (1988) – ITVX

Many felt Jeremy Irons should have taken the 1989 Best Actor Academy Award (Dustin Hoffman won for Rain Man, discussed later) for his portrayal of identical twin gynaecologists in David Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers. Elliot and Beverly Mantle experience a joint breakdown when Beverly falls for a patient, the actress Claire Niveau (Geneviève Bujold). Irons is superb, providing fully rounded characters for the twins, far more impressive than say Tom Hardy’s rather risible work as The Krays in Legend (2015). Cronenberg was inspired by the tragic case of identical twin gynaecologists Stewart and Cyril Marcus, who were found dead in July 1975 at their Manhattan apartment aged 45. Irons won the Oscar a few years later for his over-ripe Claus von Bülow in Reversal of Fortune (1990). Interestingly (or not), the Arnold Schwarzenegger/Danny DeVito comedy Twins was released in the same year as Dead Ringers.

A History of Violence (2005) – Amazon Buy

More Cronenberg on the menu, with the very excellent A History of Violence. There’s no love lost between former gangster Joey Cusack (Viggo Mortensen) and estranged older brother Richie (the late William Hurt), miffed by his sibling’s flight over a decade ago to backwoods Indiana to start a new life under the name of Tom Stall. As this hampered Richie’s smooth progression through the ranks of the Philly Irish Mob, he’s in the mood for payback. What’s the betting he’ll get it?

The Brothers Grimm (2005) – Netflix, Amazon Rent/Buy

Terry Gilliam’s fantasy shows the Grimm brothers as two quite different characters. Older brother Will (Matt Damon) is a cynical womaniser, happy to grift money from ignorant villagers; his sibling Jake (Heath Ledger) is a dreamer with a real belief in folklore tales which they exploit for financial gain. But don’t you just know it, the pair are forced to re-evaluate their relationship when they encounter a genuine malevolent supernatural force in the shape of Monica Bellucci’s evil Mirror Queen. A similar premise was exploited (minus the confidence trickery) in 2013’s Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters starring Jeremy Renner and Gemma Arterton as the titular characters.

Rain Man (1988) – MGM, Amazon Rent/Buy

Although Dustin Hoffman won a Best Actor Academy Award for this portrayal of institutionalised savant syndrome sufferer (not autism, as is mistakenly believed) Raymond ‘Ray’ Babbitt, I’m not the only one who found his performance a trifle contrived. Tom Cruise as his selfish/exploitative brother Charlie offers the better turn, at least in my estimation. The picture as whole appears designed as Oscar bait; in that it certainly succeeded, also winning awards for Best Picture, Best Director and Best Original Screenplay.

The Power of the Dog (2021) – Netflix

It’s not so much sibling rivalry as seeming total domination of one brother, George (Jesse Plemons), by another, Phil (Benedict Cumberbatch), in Jane Campion’s award-winning revisionist western. But when the largely passive George brings home his new bride Rose (Plemons’s real life partner Kirsten Dunst) the dynamic changes, especially since she has a teenage son of her own, the outwardly vulnerable Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee). Although George rarely (if ever) rises to his brother’s baiting, this winds Phil up to even greater acts of nastiness, until he meets his match from an unexpected quarter.

The Brothers Bloom (2008) – STUDIOCANAL PRESENTS, Amazon Rent/Buy

File Rian Johnson’s (Looper) motion picture under ‘too cute for its own good’ as we follow ‘Bloom’ Bloom’s (Adrien Brody) efforts to end his lifelong participation in brother Stephen’s (Mark Ruffalo) elaborate confidence schemes. But, as ever in the movies, Bloom is roped into one final con… Johnson’s film has some nice location work (Prague, Montenegro and Mexico) and a good cast, which also includes Rachel Weisz, Maximilian Schell and the late Robbie Coltrane, but it is all a bit too arch for me. The director improved his fondness for misdirection with Knives Out (2019) and (to a lesser extent) the recent Glass Onion (2022). Ruffalo essayed a similar role in the two Now You See Me movies, while The Brothers Bloom’s narrator, the late Ricky Jay, was a stage magician, writer, lecturer and actor once described as perhaps the most gifted sleight of hand artist alive.

The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (2005) – Disney+, Amazon Rent/Buy

Shrek director Andrew Adamson’s adaptation of the first entry in C.S. Lewis’s barely concealed Christianity-proselytising Narnia fantasy novels features a particularly egregious piece of familial backstabbing. Irritating teenager Eustace (Skandar Keynes) rats out not only his older brother (William Moseley) but also his sisters Susan (Anna Popplewell) and Lucy (Georgie Henley) to the wicked White Witch (Tilda Swinton). For what did the boy peach on his siblings? ‘Sweeties’ offered by the Witch – Turkish Delight, to be precise. Eustace later repents his actions, but to this viewer at least, his treachery left a nasty taste in the mouth. Netflix has bought the rights to C.S. Lewis series of books and ‘creative architect’ Matthew Aldrich (Coco) is working on their planned ‘Narniaverse’. If it’s anything like Amazon’s dire J.R.R. Tolkien travesty The Rings of Power, Lewis will be turning in his grave at warp speed.

What Howards’ Way taught me about Margaret Thatcher

Splice the mainbrace! Howards’ Way, the BBC’s Sunday night sailing and sex 80s soap, is back, courtesy of UKTV Play, with the whole first series now available to stream free with ads. Nearly 40 years on, I’ve found myself caught in its swell all over again.

The combination of corporate chicanery (Fry and Laurie’s ‘Damn you, Marjorie!’ sketches owe a lot to this) and sizzling sex on satin sheets is made all the more glorious because the backdrop isn’t the sun-drenched skyscrapers and rodeo ranches of Texas or Colorado but the village of Bursledon on the Hampshire coast, renamed Tarrant for the fiction. The sailing, and there’s a lot of sailing, all takes place on the river Hamble. Now, Bursledon is a pretty little place but its shortcomings as a glamour location are immediately obvious as episode one of Howards’ Way opens on the final stages of a thrilling yacht race taking place under grey, smeary skies.

It’s that amalgam of attempted glitz and homely reality that drew in millions of viewers to Howards’ Way over its six-year run. Like much of the best television, you can’t quite believe they had the nerve to make it. As I watched these opening episodes again I was instantly snared, thinking ‘My God, what tosh!’ and ‘Yeah, you tell him, Jan!’ simultaneously.

The inciting incident – draughtsman Tom Howard is made redundant and decides to become a freelance boatbuilder – is so low-concept in this age of she-hulks and alternate reality computer simulations that it now feels positively outré. His wife Jan is scandalised by what he’s done, and seems likely to fall into the greasy clutches of Ken Masters, the Andrew Tate of Eastleigh. (In these early episodes, Ken is paired with a bimbo who gets two lines a week, but who was shortly after to become known as Jeffrey Archer’s mistress, always referred to in the news as ‘Howards’ Way actress Sally Farmiloe’, to which the reaction from even the most hardened devotees was always ‘Who’?)

Tom’s son Leo is a reminder that my generation was once the unfathomably strange, socially concerned left-wing one (he wears a Greenpeace T-shirt and is obsessed by ‘foxes and fall-out’) before we all mysteriously became gammons somehow in about 2012. Then there is daughter Lynn, daddy’s girl and a keen sailor. You know she is a keen sailor because she employs nautical metaphors for everything – ‘mum and dad are cruising along steady now’, ‘it’ll soon blow over’. She even uses the Beaufort scale to measure the force of family squabbles. The only other youngster is miserable Abbi, who rather hilariously wanders through the background of the whole glamorous thing looking like boiled death, and throws herself into the rapids of the Hamble after three episodes. Luckily Leo is on hand to save her and convince her that a life of reef knots, sou’westers and lovely kitchens is worth living.

I’ve had to remind myself that these are the early, more grounded episodes before everybody starts up their own business, before housewife Jan instantly becomes an international high-end fashion designer for ‘The House Of Howard’, and before Kate O’Mara shows up at full pelt and at full décolletage as the head of a fibreglass conglomerate with the improbable trading name of Wilde Mouldings.

Where did this wonderful hokum come from? Interestingly, producer Gerard Glaister and script editor John Brason had worked as a team before on two-fisted PoW drama Colditz and on the incredibly tense and cynical French resistance wartime thriller, Secret Army. The final episode of Secret Army, written by Brason and set 20 years later, was pulled by the BBC before transmission. Nobody is quite sure exactly why, but I’ve seen it and it ends with a remarkably direct anti-Soviet statement addressed directly to camera, which would have gone out almost at the very moment Russian tanks were rolling into Afghanistan.

These were tough men from another age of television. Secret Army makes it very clear that Brason loathed socialism as much as he loathed Nazism. Glaister was a DFC who flew Lysanders back and forth throughout the war and had escaped occupied France disguised as a female German civilian. It is impossible to picture them doing karaoke at Soho House.

Howards’ Way is the peacetime world they dreamed of – a free market land fit for heroes, with businessmen and women taking risks and reaping the rewards. Contracts signed with celebratory cigars, busy manufacturing yards, share certificates in ‘Country Diary Of An Edwardian Lady’-branded notecases. It’s a kind and generous place, bound by family and community, where there’s a Leo to rescue every Abbi.

Looking back on it now, a word keeps swimming into my head as it does when I think of Margaret Thatcher: a word you don’t normally associate with her. Naive.

Thatcher thought that, given the chance, everyone would act like her dad, Alderman Roberts. Glaister and Brason thought Ken Masters was an unavoidable, acceptable cost for a free world to bear, and that heroes and rough diamonds would win out. But there aren’t enough aldermen or Howards in the world. Far too much energy and effort is required.

When politicians talk, as they still do, about dynamic entrepreneurial Britain – both Sunak and Starmer used the D word just last week – I scratch my head and wonder: where on earth is this nation, bursting with energy and productivity, that they’re referring to? Now I’ve realised. It’s the Britain you’ll find at the Mermaid Marina, Tarrant. Always there.

AI is the end of writing

Unless you’ve been living under a snowdrift – with no mobile signal – for the past six months, you’ll have heard of the kerfuffle surrounding the new generations of artificial intelligence. Especially a voluble, dutiful, inexhaustible chatbot called ChatGPT, which has gone from zero users to several million in the two wild weeks since its inception.

Speculation about ChatGPT ranges from the curious, to the gloomy, to the seriously angry. Some have said it is the death of Google, because it is so good at providing answers to queries – from instant recipes comprising all the ingredients you have in your fridge right now (this is brilliant) to the definition of quantum physics in French (or Latin, or Armenian, or Punjabi, or – one memorable day for me – Sumerian).

Others go further and say ChatGPT and its inevitably smarter successors spell the instant death of traditional education. How can you send students home with essay assignments when, between puffs of quasi-legal weed, they can tell their laptop: ‘Hey, ChatGPT, write a good 1,000-word A-level essay comparing the themes of Fleabag and Macbeth’ – and two seconds later, voila? Teachers and lecturers, like a thousand other white-collar professions, are about to be impacted, in bewildering ways, by the thinking machines.

It’s at this point that the usual essay on ChatGPT points towards something consoling. Something like ‘Ah, but do not despair, humans will always yada yada’. I’m afraid I am not here to offer any such solace. I’ve done writing of all kinds for several decades, from travel journalism to art journalism to political journalism, from literary fiction to youthful memoirs to notorious-letters-to-No-10 to Fifty Shades porn (a pseudonym) to, lately, religious or domestic thrillers. And I have to say: we are screwed. By which I mean: we, the writers. We’re screwed. Writing is over. That’s it. It’s time to pack away your quill, your biro, and your shiny iPad: the computers will soon be here to do it better.

Here are the reasons for my ultra-gloom. All writing is an algorithm. As in: all writing is ‘a process or set of rules to be followed in calculations or other problem-solving operations’. The fundamental problem to be solved in writing is how to impart information in the form of words.

Computers are good at algorithms. It’s their thing. That means that, given enough data to train on (e.g. all the words ever written on the internet) computers can get really good at running the algos of language. As we can see with ChatGPT. Especially as AI is a dab hand at algorithmic autocomplete: predicting what words should usually follow from words already given.

Of course, there are multiple, complex, layered, interlinked algorithms in most writing. Some have to follow the algorithms of story, some have to follow the algorithms of academe, or the haiku, or fanfic, Korean erotica, Python code, divorce documents, or verse drama. But they are all combos of algos, and therefore all, ultimately, prone to automation. In the end.

For an example take poetry. In its simplest form this is:

Mary had a little lamb
Its wool was white as snow
And everywhere that Mary went
The lamb was sure to go

The algorithms at work here determine language, meaning, metre, rhyme and syntax. So it’s not quite as simple as it looks (you could argue this verse has a simplistic genius, as it is so easy to remember). ChatGPT can already do this. To get the following response I asked for ‘a short funny poem about Harry and Meghan, making one of them a cat‘:

Harry had a little cat
Whose name was Meghan, how about that?
She was fluffy, full of sass
And loved to sit on Harry’s lap

I got plenty of more boring responses with perfect rhymes but this one was slightly amusing. Also, later on in this poem the chatbot rhymed Meghan with ‘shenanigan’, which is top class.

ChatGPT can therefore do simple poetry, and do it quite well. How about the other end of things? High art? Some of the most complexly beautiful poetry ever written in English is by the Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, who played with abstruse verse forms like cynghanedd – once described as ‘the sparks thrown up by the wheels of Welsh’. Cynghanedd is a demanding style, using repeated consonants and particular stress patterns. Here is mid-season Hopkins on the job (from ‘The Sea and the Skylark’):

Left hand, off land, I hear the lark ascend,
His rash-fresh re-winded new-skeinèd score
In crisps of curl off wild winch whirl, and pour
And pelt music, till none’s to spill nor spend.

ChatGPT is not about to produce anything quite that good. Not yet. However, there is absolutely no reason why a successor of ChatGPT should not. The machines will do this. Because Hopkins was also following algorithms, some of them formal – like cynghanedd – some more informal and in his head: avoid cliché, make new comparisons, chuck in a strained metaphor about God.

Indeed, even as I have been writing this article, a new AI chatbot has emerged which is persuasively talented at mimicking and adapting famous poetry. The chatbot is called ‘Claude’ and in one example it was asked to write a poem about itself, and the impact of machine intelligence – but to do it in the style of Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Raven’. Here’s one sample couplet:

‘Mortal,’ said the sprite, ‘be wary; shallow learning is unwary;
Heed the perils of reliance on machin’ry’s mere compliance.’

Note how the AI knew to drop the ‘e’ in ‘machinery’ to keep to the metre. You can see the rest of this astonishing poetry here.

Now read across to my profession: mystery/thriller writing. I know this craft is all about algorithms, because I’ve learned this on the job (what works, what doesn’t) and I have read all the books about classic storytelling (Screenplay, by Syd Field, is maybe the best). These algorithms surround narrative pattern: beginning-middle-end, but there are also rules about the identification of heroes/villains, the disclosure of concealed information, variations of pace and drama, and so on. All algos – and all do-able by machine. And this applies to the apex of the genre: Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None is one of the best-selling books in history. Because it is a deeply satisfying, brilliantly constructed puzzle. A mathematical puzzle. Computer says Yes.

Putting on my pointy hat of pessimism, here’s how I think it will pan out. The machines will come for much academic work first – essays, PhDs, boring scholarly texts (unsurprisingly it can churn these out right now). Fanfic is instantly doomed, as are self-published novels. Next will be low-level journalism, copywriting, marketing, legalese, tech writing; then high-level journalism will go, along with genre fiction, history, biography, screenplays, TV drama, drama, until eventually a computer will be able to write something like Ulysses, only better. The only prompt will be ‘write a long amazing novel on whatever’.

Will any writers survive? A few human brand-names might be used to promote expensive fiction written by the machines. Memoir and travel writing might be OK (aha!) because computers can’t go to war, get addicted or sip excellent mojitos in the Maldives. Perhaps there will be a genre of resistance literature, stuff that’s not as good as the machine stuff but has a radical emotional value, because it is ours, because it has survived. We still buy rough artisanal pottery, and admire wobbly vernacular architecture, because of the deep human emotions embodied.

But this is seriously niche. For the rest of us, the verdict is bad, sad and terminal. 5,000 years of the written human word, and 500 years of people making a life, a career, and even fame out of those same human words, are quite abruptly coming to an end.

Foreign Office U-turns on Truss’s legacy

What, if anything, will survive of Liz Truss’s legacy? Last week it was her childcare review that was dropped by ministers. And now, the Foreign Office (FCDO) has reversed her decision to end the department’s funding for the the Great Britain China Centre (GBBC), an executive public body established to support UK-China relations.

Just seven months ago, Mr S broke the news that the FCDO, then run by Truss, was ending its grant-in-aid funding in response to cuts in the development budget. A spokesman told Steerpike in June 2022 that ‘due to the current fiscal climate, including reductions to Official Development Assistance, we have made the decision to end FCDO grant-in-aid funding to the GBCC.’ This funding was worth £500,000 in grant-in-aid in the 2021-22 financial year, which helped cover 61 per cent of the centre’s budgeted core operating costs. Without this funding, some feared the GBBC could close.

But this evening, the Foreign Office has confirmed it has now U-turned on this decision. Future grant-in-aid funding will instead come from the FCDO’s non-ODA budget and is expected to be at a lower level than in previous years. An FCDO Spokesperson added that ‘the Great Britain China Centre works to increase HMG expertise, which together with its strong relationships in China, helps to support and develop UK interests.’ Insiders hope that the centre will play a role in bolstering the department’s expertise and China-facing capabilities via tailored courses and an understanding of how the Chinese system functions.

It’s a shift away from some of the rhetoric seen in last summer’s Tory leadership contest, when Rishi Sunak’s team released stark graphics declaring that ‘China is our number one threat.’ At least now our mandarins might know more about the nature of the threat they face…

Can Lula use the pro-Bolsonaro riots to unite Brazil?

A week is a long time in politics. Just ask Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. 

On 1 January this year he was greeted by adoring crowds at Brasilia’s presidential palace after being sworn in for a four-year term. Seven days later that same building had been overrun by far-right insurrectionists intent on overthrowing him. The incredible scenes in Brasilia were almost a carbon copy of the Trump insurrection of 6 January 2021, bar a few key details. 

First, the North America mob wanted to prevent Joe Biden taking power. In Brazil, Lula was already in office, having replaced Jair Bolsonaro after winning a narrow election victory in October.

Second, hundreds of those who marched on the Brazilian capital were arrested. Lula has vowed to use the full force of the law to bring them and their financial backers to justice.

And most importantly, the Brazilian insurrection was multi-pronged and more serious than the DC version. Brazil’s fanatics did not just attack one branch of government, but all three. The Congress, the presidential palace and the Supreme Court buildings were all targets. 

In each of the three, computers and televisions were smashed and stolen, furniture was destroyed, windows were smashed. Works of art were ripped from the walls and slashed or defaced.  

Sunday’s horror show was a rude awakening for Lula, as if he needed one. The 77-year-old former union leader knew Bolsonarismo was firmly ensconced in the Brazilian politic and commentators have been warning for months of an attack on the seats of power. But the speed and breadth of the assault was still shocking and brought home just how difficult it will be to unite a divided nation.

In a perverse way, though, it also offers the leftist leader a golden opportunity. When he won election in October, Brazil was split down the middle. Lula took 50.9 per cent of the valid votes, signalling that half the nation either sympathised with the far-right candidate or was prepared to overlook his sexism, misogyny, racism and vulgarity rather than forgive Lula and the Workers’ party for their past misdemeanours.

The immediate reaction to Sunday’s insurrection suggest that opinions might be shifting. Social media monitoring by the Quaest polling firm showed that 90 per cent of mentions condemned the vandalism, with most people calling it either ‘sad’, ‘scary’ or ‘disgusting’. People who just a few months ago would never have voted for Lula may now ask themselves, do I stick with the lunatic or go with the legislator?

A fair chunk will surely decide that Sunday was an outrage too far. Before the cleaners had even started sweeping up the broken glass, Lula had formed a democratic alliance with Congressional and judicial leaders who were equally shocked by Sunday’s events. Compared to Bolsonaro and the lunatic insurrectionists, Lula suddenly looks like a safe pair of hands.

‘If he can take advantage of this opportunity, Lula could broaden his arc of alliances and corner radical Bolsonarismo,’ said Thomas Traumann, a former minister in the Workers’ party government. ‘Right-wing and centre-right groups that reject Lula but are democrats may find themselves with a more moderate option.’

If he strikes quickly, Lula could even transform the outrage into concrete gains. ‘This gives Lula the political legitimacy to take measures against the most radical Bolsonarismo, such as expanding public social spending and punishing illegal gold miners and deforesters in the Amazon,’ Traumann said in a column for El Pais on Monday. ‘The protests in Brasilia tried to hit Lula’s governability, but in practice they hit Bolsonaro’s credibility.’

One of the obvious and challenging reforms is that of Brazil’s militarised police bodies. Police were conspicuous by their absence on Sunday, with videos posted online showing some officers taking selfies with the insurrectionists or standing by drinking coconut water while the mobs went to work.

Lula called police inaction a result of either ‘incompetence, bad faith or malice’ and immediately put federal forces in charge of the capital’s policing. The governor of Brasilia and its police chief were both stripped of their commands for giving protesters too much leeway. 

Just over a month previously, another pro-Bolsonaro police chief, the head of the Federal Highway Police, was fired and charged with trying to influence the election by stopping Lula voters from getting to the polls. 

Those sackings reveal how, from the highest echelons down, right-wing figures influence law enforcement bodies. Further down the ranks, more than half the members of the military police engaged with Bolsonaro groups online. The number of those interacting with these groups has grown significantly since he took office in 2019, according to a study released last year by the Brazilian Forum on Public Safety. 

None of this will be easy but the far-right’s depravity means it has all of a sudden become possible. Lula will need more than a week to win the skeptics over. But time is now on his side.

Eight policies Labour claimed are ‘unworkable’

It’s a tricky time for Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves. They’re well ahead in the polls but have little to say on strikes: bankrolled by the unions, they are nevertheless unable to support the cause because of their remorseless mission to prove their political credibility. They need to look sober, sane and sensible: wild spending pledges are out, jettisoned in favour of fiscal restraint.

Having shed themselves of the ideological baggage of the Corbyn years, Labour have instead resorted to often just criticising government policies on the grounds of practicality. Take efforts to crack down on illegal immigration, for instance. Labour knows that such measures are popular: God forbid they be depicted as standing up for free movement of people, as, er, Keir Starmer did in April 2020. The party’s spin doctors have therefore hit upon a brilliant wheeze by describing Tory schemes as simply ‘unworkable’ rather than objecting on the grounds of principle.

And it’s that word ‘unworkable’ that keeps cropping up again and again in the endless comments and press releases by Labour MPs which feature in our national media. Just today, Angela Rayner described plans to clamp down on electoral fraud by requiring voters to prove their identity with a form of photographic identification as ‘unworkable’’ before, er, claiming it would ‘lock millions out of voting.’ How exactly can it be both?

Rayner of course also used that same word ‘unworkable’ to describe the government’s planned minimum service level legislation just four days ago. That came barely a fortnight after first Keir Starmer and then Yvette Cooper used the same buzz word with regards to the Rwanda scheme on 13 and 18 December. Similarly, plans to house asylum seekers in disused holiday parks and fast-track the removal of Albanian migrants on 13 December were also branded ‘unworkable’ by Starmer in the Commons.

It’s not just the big beasts of the Shadow Cabinet who use such language: shadow culture minister Lucy Powell branded the Online Safety Bill ‘unworkable’ in November – the same phrase used by shadow communities secretary Lisa Nandy to describe efforts to allow people to use housing benefit to contribute towards mortgages in June. The then shadow health secretary Jon Ashworth also branded Sajid Javid’s plans to reorganise the NHS as ‘unworkable’ while shadow Home Office minister Holly Lynch argued too that Priti Patel’s immigrations plans were ‘unworkable.’

Will we get a new buzzword in 2023? Or is such a proposal ‘unworkable’ too?

Sturgeon is irresponsible to blame Scotland’s NHS crisis on patients

Nicola Sturgeon has blamed ‘unnecessary attendances’ at hospital for the mounting crisis within Scotland’s health service. In a speech defending Health Secretary Humza Yousaf this morning, she said ‘hospitals right now are currently almost completely full’. Turn to Facebook and her government is running a series of adverts where the government’s clinical director, Jason Leitch, advises patients to seek help online as well as more messaging saying the country is facing ‘unprecedented’ levels of flu and Covid. But is Scotland’s NHS really seeing more demand than ever before?

Statistics on hospital attendances suggest not. In the week to Christmas day, 22,892 Scots turned up at A&E departments. But in the same week before lockdown (ending 29 December 2019) there were over 25,000 attendances. In fact, as the below graph shows, since the pandemic began there have only been five weeks where emergency attendances have risen above the average for 2019.

But A&Es are performing worse than ever. Just this morning The Scotsman splashed with a warning from senior medics that Scottish emergency departments are ‘not safe’. Looking at the figures it’s easy to see why. Some 1,900 patients waited over 12 hours for treatment and nearly half of those turning up at Scottish emergency departments are not seen within the four-hour target time. 

So why is all this happening if demand on services is lower than before the pandemic? The government points to bed blocking, though the majority of hospital beds are occupied by people who need to be there. Many of the people Sturgeon and Yousaf describe as ‘unnecessary attendances’ will be sick people at their wits end. They may not be at death's door but if they can't get seen by their GP and have found the online and phone services as useless as many people seem to then can we blame them for turning up in A&E?  

It’s not staffing either. Government press officers were keen to point out last March that the health service workforce has increased every year for the last ten. There are more staff per head of the population than in England too, yet the two countries face near identical problems. 

Maybe then, the people arriving at Scottish hospitals are in worse nick than they were before Covid struck. Virus infections and lockdowns, which were longer and harsher in Scotland, have led to increased heart attacks and strokes. Cancer diagnoses fell off a cliff during lockdowns and at one stage Scotland had the highest rate of excess deaths in Britain. It seems likely all this is coming to a head. All the more strange then that the government would want to discourage use of the health service again.

Sturgeon’s words could prove dangerous. We know that any policy that discourages use of the service just stores up problems for the future, even if it provides short term relief. The SNP can’t just blame winter bugs either. BMA Scotland’s deputy chair was clear on this over the weekend saying: ‘This isn’t down to flu. This isn’t down to covid. It definitely isn’t the fault of any patients and “unnecessary” attendances.’ But yet again, the SNP seem intent on kicking the can further down the road.

Who cares if Rishi Sunak uses a private GP?

Rishi Sunak is absolutely right to say, in softer terms, that his family’s healthcare arrangements are no one’s business. 

There is a reason that one of the core tenets of the Hippocratic Oath is confidentiality: accessing healthcare is a deeply personal and private matter. That’s as true for the prime minister as it is for anyone else. That right to privacy doesn’t diminish because it’s suspected that an insurance bill or out-of-pocket fee might be involved in the process. 

This is one of the many ugly ironies of socialised medicine: a purported universal public service gets used as a political tool to single out and criticise people (often politicians) who might go about accessing care in a different way. But, as he searches for any and all solutions to improve current service levels in the coming months, pressure will only build for Sunak to answer questions about his family’s GP and healthcare set-up.

Speaking to Katy Balls for The Spectator’s Christmas issue last month, Sunak – ever the pragmatist – said that there were plenty of examples of ‘doing things differently’ to get better results for patients, refusing to rule out the independent sector to help achieve such outcomes. Having now set himself the task of getting the NHS back on track in his new year speech, he will almost certainly need to look outside of existing NHS structures to find the capacity and skill sets to do so. This means his personal arrangements are going to be a key talking point for anyone who takes issue with prioritising patient outcomes over political ideology. This will make Sunak’s task of improving healthcare delivery even more politically difficult to achieve.

The Conservative party needs to shoulder its share of the blame in all this. It has spent over a decade both in power and in denial about healthcare outcomes. Sunak was right yesterday when he suggested that drawing focus to his own arrangements is simply a ‘distraction’ from the bigger issues. But it’s his own party that has so often used that tactic of distraction: celebrating the NHS’s birthday, throwing money at the system to avoid the topic of reform, reverting to false platitudes about the wonders of the NHS when questions about its performance were too tricky to answer.

Meanwhile, as British politics gets whipped up into a frenzy over whether the PM sees a private GP, the rest of the world looks on gobsmacked. How can this G7 country, which does have plenty to envy, be in such a sorry state of debate about its crumbling healthcare services?

The ideological obsession with the NHS – summed up by dancing nurses in the Olympics opening ceremony back in 2012 – has always seemed a bit strange abroad, especially when almost every other developed country offers universal access to healthcare. A decade on, this oddity has morphed into tragedy, as the outright denial about patient outcomes, and refusal to critique the NHS in any meaningful way, has brought the system to its knees.

France is losing patience with Macron

When the Sunday newspaper, Le Journal Du Dimanche, recently published its annual list of France’s fifty most popular personalities, politicians barely got a look in. Only two made the cut: Emmanuel Macron, at number 35, and Marine Le Pen, at 48. When the list was first published in 1988 the president of France was François Mitterrand, ranked third, one of fifteen political figures that year. 

Frédéric Dabi, the head of IFOP, the polling company responsible for the annual list, explained that its changing composition was telling. ‘It is a reflection of the society’s mistrust towards its politicians,’ he said, noting that conversely admiration for scientists, sports stars and comedians had increased over the years.  

‘It has to be said we are in an unprecedented era of pessimism,’ remarked Dabi. Asked if he detected the same groundswell of unrest that preceded the Yellow Vest movement of 2017/18, Dabi replied that the despair was greater because of the dire economic situation. 

Every day the media report on the ramifications of the soaring energy costs, the small businesses struggling to survive as the consequences of France’s disastrous energy strategy this century hit home. Emmanuel Macron blames Putin, but the people know much of the real blame lies with him and his predecessor, Francois Hollande, for prioritising renewable energy over nuclear. 

The consequences of Macron’s equally short-sighted Covid response are also now being felt; what did he think would happen to cafes and restaurants that were forced to close for more than six months in 2020/21?  

A recent report revealed that over 41,000 businesses went bust in 2022, 14,000 more than the previous year, and this year there are warnings that number could increase by 30 per cent. Worst hit is the hospitality sector, where insolvencies doubled on 2021.  

Now restaurant owners face energy bills that, in some cases, have increased ten fold. Their union leader, Thierry Marx, has written an open letter to Bruno Le Maire, the economy minister, warning him of the gravity of the situation and accusing the energy crisis of profiteering. Do something, he told Le Maire, ‘or our businesses will close down and France will take to the streets.’ 

The message is the same from France’s 33,000 boulangeries, many of whom are on the brink of going out of business because they can’t pay their rocketing energy bills. Last week, the prime minister, Elisabeth Borne, promised the government would do everything to ease the burden on bakers, including staggering the payment of taxes and social security contributions over time. Le Maire has demanded energy suppliers renegotiate their contracts with bakers who can’t pay bills that have risen as steeply as restauranteurs.  

Last Thursday, Macron hosted some bakers to the Élysée for the traditional New Year cutting of the galette. He championed the profession and extended his support, but behind the bonhomie as he wielded the knife the president will be worried.  

Even he, a man frequently accused of being out of touch, is aware of the potent symbolism of the baguette, which in November received Unesco’s world heritage status. For many villages in La France Profonde, the boulangerie is the beating heart of the community; if they start to go bust what message will that send to the people?  

Against this backdrop of economic strife, Macron is determined to push through pension reforms he first tried to introduce in 2019, before the onset of Covid led to their suspension. That initial attempt led to weeks of strike action on public transport, bringing much of Paris to a standstill. The unions have warned there will be a repeat if the government extends the age of retirement from its current 62 to 64 or 65. Some economists say that France – whose public debt to GDP is 113.7 per cent – is in urgent need of such reform and should raise the age of retirement to 67. 

Frédéric Dabi believes that the climate is conducive to what he calls the ‘gilet-jaunisation’ of France; in other words the return of the Yellow Vest movement that rattled Macron with its scale and seething anger. 

Others aren’t so sure. Jérôme Rodrigues, one of the figureheads of the movement five years ago has expressed his scepticism.

‘Everyone is talking about a ‘comeback’, but the Yellow Vests alone won’t reignite anything because there has been too much bloodshed,’ he said. ‘People are afraid to take to the streets.’

Rodrigues lost an eye to a rubber bullet fired from a police gun in 2019, one of dozens of demonstrators who suffered life-changing injuries during the weeks of protests. The police response was criticised by human rights’ organisations, but its ferocity achieved its aim of frightening the people off the streets. Since then, the government has invested in dozens of new and improved armoured vehicles for the security forces; last autumn, it was announced that 8,500 police will be recruited in Macron’s second term of office, with 3,000 the target for 2023. 

Hundreds of armour-clad riot police were in Paris on Saturday to greet the Yellow Vest demonstrators who gathered to express their dissatisfaction with the government. They were small in number, just 2,000, and across France fewer than 5,000 people took to the streets.  

Have the French been cowed into submission or are they biding their time? The next demonstration is scheduled for 23 January, and this one is being led by the collective for the survival of boulangeries and artisans.  

Many more ailing professions will be represented, particularly as tomorrow Elisabeth Borne unveils the retirement reform. Over the weekend, one union leader, Laurent Berger of the CFDT, warned the PM to leave the retirement age alone because ‘there is a lot of social tension…a lot of negative feeling among the population.’

Another leader, Frédéric Souillot, was more direct, declaring: ‘If Emmanuel Macron wants to make it the mother of reforms, for us it will be the mother of battles’.

Macron’s reputation is on the line. He came to power in 2017 with a promise to the world to reform the labour market and make France more business friendly. Covid interrupted what he’d begun so he now intends to crack on, liberated by the knowledge that he is in his final term of office. 

If he’s spoiling for a fight, then so are the unions and the workers, who despise the ‘president of the rich’. It is likely to be a brutal confrontation, with blood on the streets, but will it be Macron or the masses who back down?     

In pictures: Bolsonaro supporters storm Brazil’s presidential palace

A few days after the anniversary of the 6 January events in Washington DC, thousands of Jair Bolsonaro supporters stormed Brazil’s congress, its presidential palace and supreme court to protest against the inauguration of Lula da Silva. They were evicted within hours, but that they got so far – in the face of a heavy military police presence – made worldwide news. Here are pictures of events as they unfolded:

3:30 p.m. local time: Protesters dressed in Brazil’s national green and yellow colours are repelled with tear gas outside Planalto Palace, official residence of the Brazilian president. Da Silva, 77, himself was not in the city yesterday, visiting flood victims in the state of São Paulo. He was elected in October with 51 per cent of the vote.

4 p.m. local time: Protesters find a way of scaling the Planalto Palace, breaking a window to enter the building. Hundreds then follow.

A crashed police car lies outside Brazil’s National Congress as protestors continue to scale and enter the building. Alexandre de Moraes, Brazil’s supreme court judge, said such a security breach ‘could only have happened with the acquiescence, or even direct involvement, of public security and intelligence authorities’.

Approximately 5 p.m. local time: Security forces storm the Planalto Palace in pursuit of protestors who broke into the building, vandalising many of the rooms and interiors. According to some reports, as many as 3,000 protesters were involved.

A member of Brazil’s security forces aims at the Planalto Palace. Protesters were said to be armed with some reported to have stolen guns from within the presidential palace.

Images showing damage inside the Planalto Palace after all protestors had been removed from the building. The photographs and videos show upturned, broken tables and chairs, battered computers and printers and reems of scattered paper, as well as damaged artwork and dirty footprints throughout the building.

1) Imagens do ataque terrorista divulgadas pelo Planalto. pic.twitter.com/Vyy9mC7iCb

— Carlos Alberto Jr. (@cajr1569) January 8, 2023

A policeman inspects damage to the Planalto Palace. The authorities restored control around 6:30 p.m. local time. Local curfews have been imposed. President Lula inspected the damage overnight.

And now the big question: how did this happen? How, after the 6 January protests in Washington, was the security defence not in place? ‘They did absolutely nothing,’ said Mr. da Silva of the military police, which is seen as a hotbed of Bolsonaro support. Ibaneis Rocha, the governor of Brasilia, has been removed for 90 days over security failings. More inquiries follow.

Bolsonaro, who still describes himself as president of Brazil in his Twitter biography, said: ‘Peaceful demonstrations, as allowed by law, are part of democracy. But vandalisation and invasions of public buildings – as occurred today, as well as those practised by the left in 2013 and 2017 – are not part of this rule. Throughout my term, I have always acted been within the four pillars of the Constitution: respecting and defending the laws, democracy, transparency and our sacred freedom.’

President Biden, and a number of other international politicians, also condemned the violence.

Harry’s interview is an explosive, flame-throwing spectacle

Bombs away! Prince Harry’s mission to dump ordnance on his nearest and dearest continued last night in a riveting interview with Tom Bradby of ITV.

Their explosive tete-a-tete began well for the royal escapologist who described the heart-breaking scene on 31 August, 1997, when Charles (whom he calls ‘Pa’) woke him at Balmoral. ‘Darling boy, mummy’s been in a car crash.’ Harry’s instinct was to rush to her bedside but Pa didn’t mention a hospital visit. And he kept calling him ‘darling boy’ which seemed unusual. Eventually the truth dawned and Harry immediately went into denial. He convinced himself that Diana had faked the accident to escape her hellish life. 

When he reached adulthood, he arranged to be driven at high speed through the Paris tunnel where she died. Later, he learned that William had performed the same experiment in a bid to relive her final moments. This is tragic, harrowing stuff. Whole movies could be devoted to the princes’ agonised attempts to cope with their grief.

He added more details to the infamous bout of fisticuffs which resulted in the breaking of a royal dog-bowl. He claimed that William begged him to retaliate. ‘You’ll feel better if you hit me,’ he taunted. Harry, in a rare of moment of serenity, replied, ‘No, only you will feel better if I hit you.’ He was receiving psychiatric care at the time and this saved him from thumping his older brother. ‘If I wasn’t doing therapy sessions I would have fought back 100 per cent.’ As William left, he asked Harry to keep their bout a secret. ‘No need to tell Meg,’ he said contritely. So Harry knows just how harmful this story is and whose reputation it undermines. Maximum damage. Scorched earth. That’s his policy. 

Yet he remains stubbornly convinced of his personal rectitude. Bradby suggested that his palace tittle-tattle had been ‘scathing’ but he rejected the description. ‘Nothing of what I’ve done has been with any intention to harm them or hurt them.’ He’s like a fireman entering a burning orphanage with a flame-thrower. ‘I can save you kids, just watch me spray this magic liquid around.’

He refers to Camilla rather coldly as ‘my stepmother’ or ‘certain members of the family’, and he admits that he pleaded with his father not to marry her. William took his side but Charles overlooked their wishes. ‘Certain members of the family,’ Harry goes on, ‘have decided to get in bed with the devil to rehabilitate their image.’ He suggests that Camilla leaked private conversations with the press, and that she played a ‘long game’ to win Charles ‘and ultimately the crown.’

His portrait of her as a scheming, ambitious hypocrite is new and shocking. Harry resents any words of abuse aimed at Meghan and yet he throws these toxic barbs at his father’s wife. What does he hope to achieve? Ill-temper haunts him and although he claims to be satisfied with his life in California he’s unable to mention it without aiming a shaft at somebody. ‘I am very happy. I’m very at peace,’ he says. ‘I’m in a better place than I’ve ever been. And that angers some people and infuriates others.’ But those who are truly at peace don’t dwell on the bitterness of their enemies. They have no enemies. They’re at peace. 

Bradby asked if the chances of a reconciliation might improve if Harry were more discreet and he instantly shifted the responsibility to Charles and William. ‘Silence only allows the abuser to abuse so I don’t know how silence is going to make things better.’ Asked if he’d burned his bridges, he used the same ploy: blame-dodging and self-exoneration. ‘I’m not sure how honesty is burning bridges.’ 

Bradby updated viewers on a handful of legal battles which continue behind closed doors. We learned that Harry is pursuing the Daily Mail for breaking into property and planting bugs. Pretty serious allegations. And the prince suggested that since he hasn’t been sued for defamation, the Mail must be guilty. That’s not how it works. Submissions to a court are rarely, if ever, the subject of libel proceedings. Why has no one told him this?

He seems a decent, well-meaning chap with a certain measure of charm and wit but he suffers from delusions. When others attack him, they’re being malicious. When he attacks others, he’s being ‘honest’. Had he completed a law degree and a journalism course he might have gained some insight into the two professions which appear to obsess him. His madcap ambition is to use the courts to tame and silence the British press. Alas, no journalist or lawyer has any interest in disabusing him of these sad imaginings. Barristers like nothing better than a prickly millionaire with a list of scores to settle. 

After last night’s bizarre act of self-harm, he seems further than ever from the family he claims to love. He won’t sue for peace because he’s too steeped in his own sense of injury. As for the upcoming coronation, the fifth-in-line has now relegated himself to a place on the guest-list just below Gerry Adams and Bashar Al-Assad. Poor fool. He needs help. He won’t get it. Harry’s pain is now a global industry and although he can profit from it to a limited extent he’ll never gain control of the beast he has unleashed. It will consume him for the rest of his days.

Can Barclay and Sturgeon get a grip on the NHS crisis?

Both the Westminster and Scottish governments are trying to show they have a grip on the crises in their respective National Health Services today. Neither currently find themselves politically in a strong place on the winter crisis. 

English Health Secretary Steve Barclay is giving a statement to the House of Commons when it returns this afternoon in which he will reheat two existing policies. He will confirm details of a £200 million plan for speeding up the discharge of patients from hospitals and into care settings. This was something the government did fund during the early months of the Covid pandemic, but which the Treasury quickly shut down, despite abundant evidence that the money made a lot of difference and freed up beds. Some of those ‘care settings’ are hotels, which underlines that capacity within the care sector is one of the many problems bleeding into the NHS. 

Barclay is also announcing six ‘discharge frontrunners’, which will be local care systems keen to explore new and radical ways of getting medically fit patients out of hospitals. The NHS invited integrated care systems to express interest in becoming these frontrunner sites back in June 2022, so it’s not a brand new idea by any means, but it is a convenient way of suggesting the government is getting a grip on a very long-standing problem. There are currently around 13,000 people stuck in English hospitals, so the bottleneck moving from the NHS to social care is having a significant impact on the pressures in emergency care. 

Meanwhile Nicola Sturgeon and her Health Secretary Humza Yousaf are giving a press conference this morning. Yousaf has already conceded what Westminster Tories won’t: that there is a ‘crisis’ in the health service. He too is facing accusations that he ignored warnings from health leaders about this winter when there was still time to do something about it. 

Both the SNP and Conservatives are also grappling with a wider political debate about the future of the NHS. More and more airtime is being devoted to whether the model needs to change. The most popular suggestion at the moment is that wealthier patients could pay more for their care – something the SNP felt intensely embarrassed by when it was mooted in a confidential discussion by NHS Scotland leaders. Normally, those kinds of ideas are what the SNP accuse the Tories of having, not the other way around. The Scottish government quickly distanced itself from the paper, because even raising changes to the basic NHS model is a heresy in British politics.

The main problem with charges for the middle class, by the way, is a political one: if the NHS continues to work poorly, then the most influential group in society will be doubly dissatisfied with the service they are getting. The enthusiasm of the middle classes in the 1940s for a national health service was key to the NHS coming about: back then, they were able to access good healthcare but only via expensive insurance contributions which they resented. British society has obviously changed quite a bit since then, and the universality principle may not be quite so important. But it tends to be the reason politicians pull back from increased charging beyond prescriptions. 

The political risks in fundamentally changing the model are probably still too high for any party to seriously contemplate them. But what this is an opportunity to do is to start talking seriously about rebalancing the NHS so that acute care isn’t the focus, and primary and preventive services are better funded and more prominent.

That is not an easy policy to pursue properly, as it would ultimately lead to closing hospitals, which is never popular, even when the hospitals in question are very bad. Then there are questions about workforce and, yes, proper long-term reform and funding of social care (I wrote more about the decades-long on this front in the Observer over the weekend). All of these issues suggest that the model might not be the problem, or at least not the first problem, that politicians and healthcare leaders really need to fix.