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The childhood terrors of Judith Hermann
The German writer Judith Hermann burst on the literary scene in 1998 with her short story collection Summerhouse, Later, and was soon heralded as one of a new wave of Fräuleinwunder – girl wonders who were writing fiction that felt fresh and uninhibited. Now she has produced a memoir of sorts – in parts slyly moving, in others so stony-faced and self-serious as to border on the parodic.
First the parodic. The book opens one night in Berlin with Hermann running into the psychotherapist she has been seeing three times a week for ten years. Over the course of these sessions, she recalls, she fell in love, then out of love, with him, though he hardly spoke to her at all. This encounter feels initially charged and full of promise, but it leads nowhere in particular. Dr Dreehüs orders Hermann a gin and tonic, they chat, then she leaves. Readers who aren’t signed up to the whole Hermann Fräuleinwunder thing might reasonably wonder why they should care. Later they might ask themselves the same thing when the author recounts, in grave detail, her dreams.
But eventually Hermann turns to childhood, and things get interesting. Brought up in a large, gloomy flat in Berlin, she was bullied by her father, who ‘had a clear desire to frighten me’. He would work himself up into violent rages and once told her, to her lasting terror, that they had a lodger – a stunted man who lived in the suspended ceiling. This disturbing portrait is complicated when Hermann describes her closeness to her father in later life. In one touching episode he takes her to the theatre, making an awkward palaver of presenting her with a little birthday cake afterwards.
Other characters emerge as vividly: Marco, a friend with spectacular teeth who develops MS; Ada, an acquaintance who once stripped off in front of Hermann, striding naked into the North Sea; and the Russian grandmother who made bread soup and collected voodoo dolls.
The book began as a series of lectures on poetics, and along the way Hermann writes about her craft. Every piece, she observes gnomically, ‘is the story of a ghost’; to write stories ‘is to be distrustful’. What will stay with me aren’t these rather grand pronouncements but the author’s evocations of the past: Ada’s dark, ‘almost masculine’ perfume, and the smell of her beloved grandmother – ambergris, sage, sandalwood and smoke.
Round the world in a vast, unlovely barge
Ships change not just their location but their identity throughout their lives. Medieval trading vessels became warships at royal command. The Queen Mary was a troop ship during the second world war. Ian Kumekawa, of Harvard University, has had the clever idea of following a modern ship through its metamorphoses and asking how these changes in use reflect the economic conditions of our time. But this ship is no Queen Mary. He calls it the Vessel, because it changes its name and owner so many times. Without its superstructure, no one would give it a second glance. It has neither an engine nor a rudder. It had to be mounted on a heavy-lift ship or towed to reach it destination.
It is, in fact, a simple steel barge, originally little more than a hull, built on the outskirts of Stockholm in 1979 and sold to Norwegian owners. But it has moved extraordinary distances: first to Scapa Flow in Scotland, then to Gothenburg in Sweden, before being taken to the Falkland Islands, a Volkswagen factory on the German coast, Manhattan, Portland Bill in England and Onne in Nigeria, where it is now laid up, rusting away. Meanwhile its superstructure has provided accommodation for British troops, Gastarbeiter, American and British prisoners and oil workers in the Gulf of Guinea.
The many vicissitudes of the Vessel, along with a sister ship that shared some of the same journeys, provide Kumekawa with a springboard from which he can jump to lengthy discussions of the global economy. It is a history of economic flux. When the ship was constructed, Sweden appeared to be enjoying boom times. But high wages began to undermine the country’s well-established heavy industry. In western Europe and North America a massive shift towards service industries took place. This was a story repeated again and again as the Vessel moved around the Atlantic. As well as the gradual decline in manufacturing, sudden crises had a shock effect on the global economy.
The most significant of these were generated by a hike in oil prices, notably during the Yom Kippur War of 1973, and again during the Iran-Iraq War seven years later. There was, nonetheless, a silver lining. Higher oil prices rendered viable costly investment in exploration for new sources of oil and gas, such as the North Sea, enabling Britain to become a net exporter for a while. These changes affected the viability of the companies (often just shell companies) that owned the Vessel and explain why it has changed hands so often.
The Vessel was a product of the age of containerisation. The invention of standardised containers revolutionised global commerce and had a dramatic effect on the labour market. The opportunity arose to shift large quantities of low-cost goods across the world in containers that were cheap to manufacture and could be loaded to the sky. The largest container ships now carry up to 20,000 units. This was the making of modern China. But the units aboard the Vessel were put to other uses. The need for short-term accommodation for British troops in the Falklands led to the transfer of the ship to Port Stanley in 1983.
The ship’s final reincarnation was
as an ill-adapted, steamy hostel for hundreds of oil workers in Nigeria
Container units could be adapted into not very snug quarters for other people difficult to accommodate when pressure on resources was high. The New York Department of Correction had run out of space for prisoners, so in 1989 it took out a lease on the Vessel, turning it into a jail known as Maritime Facility II. In 1997, the Vessel moved again to Dorset and became HMP Weare, home to a drug treatment programme that was widely praised, as were the conditions on board. One inmate said that the food was ‘the best he ever had’. Its final reincarnation, in Nigeria, was as an ill-adapted, steamy hostel for hundreds of oil workers based in the Onne Oil and Gas Free Zone. This was a free port, able to operate outside the supervision of the Nigerian government, which was, in any case, beset by massive corruption, especially in the oil industry.
Kumekawa’s assessment of the economic and social setting of the Vessel’s history is quite opinionated. He sneers at Great Britain: ‘For both the Argentines and the British, the Falklands War was a calculated exercise in rousing nationalist sentiment.’ Margaret Thatcher used the war, he opines, ‘to shift attention away from disastrous economic conditions and political crises at home’. This fits ill with his demonstration elsewhere that global economic changes were transforming the labour market, and that Thatcherite policies attempted to address that.
And there is his equally contradictory treatment of the admittedly tough policies of the NYPD in suppressing drug-related crime, leading to an increase in New York’s prison population. These policies made it a much safer city, but for Kumekawa this was simply to appease an alarmed white middle-class. He likes to throw in the unexplained term ‘international capitalism’ (clearly a Bad Thing) and at the end of the book launches into a diatribe against neoliberalism, which he admits is hard to define.
Naive comments of this order spoil what is in other respects a brilliantly conceived and fascinating demonstration that the history of one rusty ship can illuminate our understanding of the global economy.
Amid the alien corn: Beautyland, by Marie-Helene Bertino
‘I am an Adina,’ the four-year-old protagonist of Marie-Helene Bertino’s Beautyland writes to her extraterrestrial superiors on Planet Cricket Rice, which is light years away from Earth. ‘Yesterday I saw bunnies on the grass,’ she adds, using the fax machine her mother retrieved from their neighbour’s trash. ‘DESCRIBE BUNNIES,’ they respond, sparking a dialogue that continues well into her adulthood.
Adina’s premature birth in September 1977 coincided with the departure of the Voyager 1 probe, which was launched with a phonograph record of sounds intended to explain human life to intelligent extra-terrestrials. The timing is significant because Adina was sent to Earth from Planet Cricket Rice to report on human life.
Or so she thinks – for speculative fiction, Beautyland, which takes its title from a ‘dash-to-in-a-pinch supply store that contains what humans believe are necessities’, is strongly grounded in realism. Bertino’s third novel, published in the US last year, intersperses Adina’s story with news flashes from the intergalactic front line, from the 1991 discovery of exoplanets outside our solar system to the 2017 revelation of the interstellar asteroid Oumuamua.
Like E.T. (Adina will later watch the film at the cinema, bemoaning the choice of popcorn – ‘the loudest sound on Earth’– as the official food of movie-watching), she longs to return home. She has faith that this will happen, despite growing up in north-eastern Pennsylvania with her single Sicilian mother, Térèse.
Adina keeps her alien existence mainly to herself, but before quitting college to move to New York she tries to tell Térèse the truth:
She uses the word extraterrestrial, hoping it will sound less scary to her mother and because she has never understood what she is allegedly alien to. The word is derogatory and overly general.
Throughout the novel, Bertino makes a strong case for individualism. The joy of Adina, a delightful character, is how she gets people to look at life through fresh eyes. She is very much Team Yoko, telling her superiors how the Beatles
sing about vanilla desires, and in reward the world turns them into an institution… Yoko Ono shows up, ideal for othering: petite, Asian, maker of hard art that dares to venture beyond the idea of holding a girl’s hand.
If a künstlerroman is a novel about an artist maturing, this is an ausländerroman, a foreigner coming-of-age story that is as tender as it is witty and perceptive. When Adina, who suffers from sensitivity to certain sounds, such as people swallowing, gets diagnosed with misophonia, ‘she wonders what other rational human qualities she wrote off as extraterrestrial because of a human’s tendency to other what they don’t understand’. Beautyland is a novel that celebrates being different and reminds us that we are all, in our own way, a little bit alien.
A psychopath on the loose: Never Flinch, by Stephen King, reviewed
Stephen King, 77, is a writer of towering brilliance whose fiction appeals to a reading public both popular and serious. His 60th novel, Never Flinch, unfolds in Buckeye City, Ohio, where a serial murderer is on the loose under the alias of Bill Wilson – the name of the man who co-founded Alcoholics Anonymous. Wilson has sworn to kill 14 people in revenge for the death of a friend and former alcoholic who was framed and convicted for child pornography offences. The plot is steeped in AA lore (‘Honesty in all our affairs’) and an awareness of the deleterious effects of drinking to excess.
It’s no secret that King is himself a recovering alcoholic. His scariest novels – Carrie, The Stand, The Shining – were written in the mid-1970s when his life was dangerously tipped by booze. Never Flinch, a superior crime thriller, opens a window on to the world of smalltown American AA meetings and the vexing devil of substance abuse among the Ohioan poor. In pages of heart-pounding suspense Wilson targets various innocent people, among them even AA old-timers he has known (one of whom is called Big Book Mike for his habit of quoting verbatim from the AA handbook).
Parallel to this is an equally disturbing campaign of violence against a feminist activist called Kate McKay, whose bookshop signings attract unwanted crowds of angry white men disgruntled by all things woke. The private investigator Holly Gibney, who made her debut in King’s 2014 novel Mr Mercedes, offers to help the Buckeye City Police bring the AA killer to book and lend McKay the bodyguard protection she demands. A cast of minor characters, ranging from the gospel singer Sista Bessie to the hip-hop artist YoungBoy Never Broke Again, enlivens the intertwining storylines.
This is a zingy, fast-paced cliffhanger with moments of signature horror. If it falls short of the author’s best work, it remains very respectable. King’s frightscapes are among the most haunting in contemporary fiction, and Never Flinch does not disappoint. The novel is brocaded with allusions to Edgar Allan Poe, Shirley Jackson and other maestros of horror-suspense. Before King became the emperor of bestsellerdom he studied American literature at the University of Maine, his birthplace. He achieved AA sobriety in around 1988 and has not looked back.
My obsession with ageing rock stars – by Kate Mossman
‘The older male rock star isn’t just my specialist subject, it’s my obsession,’ admits Kate Mossman in the opening pages of Men of a Certain Age. Over the 15 years she’s spent interviewing ageing rockers such as Sting, Tom Jones, Ray Davies, Glen Campbell and Nick Cave for the Word and the New Statesman, she describes feeling ‘something inside of me ignite… so excited, yet so at ease’. ‘How is it,’ she asks, ‘that in the presence of a wrinkly rock star twice my age, I sometimes feel like I’m meeting… me?’
Having encountered my share of these guys myself, I know precisely what she means. Rock journalism is a field in which all the writers are fans, but, as Mossman notes, ‘part of the art is pretending not to be’. Consequently, she bookends each of the 19 insightful and often funny interviews republished here with personal memoirish introductions and afterwords, making the book as much about fandom as about rock stars. I relished her honest analysis of the yearning for connection that interviewers feel when they meet artists who’ve set their hearts ablaze by the music they made – and sometimes the poses they struck– in their youth. As professional journalists, we’re sitting with their older, sometimes wiser, incarnations and asking them to explain themselves and make sense of their impact on us.
It’s often weird. My blushing 13-year- old self was somewhere in the mix while I was chatting with A-Ha’s Morten Harket, utterly bewildered by the fact that the 45-year-old me was bonding with the 1980s pin-up over a shared love of houseplants. The electric exhilaration I felt at 15, walking home from school with Pink Floyd’s ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’ exploding through my spongey headphones, was both soothed and confounded as I stood in Dave Gilmour’s kitchen watching the hands which played that spine-tingling riff wash up the mug I’d just been drinking from.
But I’ve never been so overwhelmed by the prospect of an interview that I feared I might black out, as Mossman did on her way to meet Brian May at an Italian restaurant in Holland Park in 2011. She’d grown up as a devotee of Queen – ‘nutcase/ stalker’, she says – at a time when the band’s fist-pumping, stadium-chanting, gee-tar noodling pomp was deeply uncool.
Born in 1980 – a member of the generation, she says, that ‘slipped down the crack between the spotty cheek of Gen X and the well-moisturised buttock of the millennials’ – and raised in rural Norfolk, Mossman loathed the irony that suffused the 1990s culture in which she came of age. ‘Perhaps it was fin-de-siècle ennui,’ she writes, and the acute awareness that the rock’n’roll of our parents’ generation was all coming to us ‘second hand’, but Jarvis Cocker and Damon Albarn upset her by being ‘so arch, so sneering, so over it’. By contrast, Queen’s shameless performative passion dialled right into the heart of a shy, academic girl who didn’t trust her own feelings to fully unfold. She hid her obsession from friends – ‘this secrecy produced a kind of intensity that makes me rather uncomfortable now’ – and was so embarrassed by the more sexual lyrics rattling from the car speakers on trips with her dad that she pretended to be asleep.
In the event, Mossman’s lunch with the ‘religiously kind’ May is a benign affair which leaves her feeling ‘like a child again’. But in retrospect she’s aware of the ‘barely disguised eroticism’ in her write-up of her interview with the Queen drummer Roger Taylor. She locates it in her description of his wet hair and her unfounded assumption that he’d just rolled out of bed. She also confesses that meeting the object of her teenage affections caused an ‘easing up in my heart, in my body… I could hold my head up higher and look to the sky a little more’.
Mossman is a tender chronicler of the sex symbol on the slide. She gets the artist formerly known as Terence Trent D’Arby to joke: ‘The only thing I could think to do with a cock ring now is keep my house keys on it.’ Elsewhere she cracked me up by reminding readers that the young Shaggy – Jamaica’s ‘Mr Lovah, Lovah’ – has ‘an aptitude for pastels’.
Not every interviewee is willing to accept their transformation from sex symbol to dadlike bloke. Maybe that’s understandable after a pretty young woman like Mossman has spent hours asking them rapt, interesting questions about what makes them so fascinating. When she met Soft Machine’s Kevin Ayers in Carcassonne in 2008 she says he assumed ‘I would be coming back to his and sleeping with him’. Ayers’s manager stepped in while Mossman waited outside Ayers’s house. ‘After a brief silence,’ she writes, ‘I heard the crash of a few pots and pans in the kitchen and the manager shouting “It’s not 1967, Kevin!”’ Ayers, she notes without judgment, ‘was from a better age, when rock stars and journalists hooked up on sheepskin rugs and wrote features together in blissful, claret-fuelled symbiosis’.
Now when we’re all reassessing the ways in which old male rockers treated women, Mossman is refreshingly kind and capable of putting these men in the cultural context. She’s no apologist for abuse, but her book features mostly decent guys who’ve muddled their way through chaotic lives of unimaginable fame and money. They are compellingly odd as a result, and Mossman makes allowances without ever flinching from their peculiarities. Above all, her interviews illuminate the music she loves. Her failure to forge a desperately sought connection with Sting leaves him thrillingly remote in his falsetto yelps. Her warm friendship with the virtuosic Bruce Hornsby brings his more abstract keyboard experiments gently into the reader’s emotional range. All the minor chords, swollen egos and backstage bust-ups find safe harbour in this book. It’s a rocking good read. Encore!
Farage skips ‘Brexit reset’ debate for French holiday
To the Commons, where just after midday Prime Minister Keir Starmer delivered a statement on his brand new UK-EU deal. Sir Keir told MPs that the new agreement would ‘strengthen our borders’ and ‘release us from the tired arguments of the past’ on Brexit. But as opposition politicians heckled – ‘tell that to the fishermen!’ one yelled – there was one notable absence in the Chamber. The Brexit kingpin himself, Reform UK’s very own Nigel Farage, was nowhere to be seen. How very strange…
One would think that this was a moment Farage would not want to miss – given Starmer’s deal has given rise to accusations that the Labour PM is ‘betraying’ Brexit less than a year into his premiership. Already, Sir Keir’s deal – which includes a controversial youth migrant scheme and makes concessions to the EU over fishing rights – has been torn apart by Tory leader Kemi Badenoch, who slammed it as a ‘stitch up’, with Lib Dem leader Sir Ed Davey bemoaning the fact the deal didn’t go further and the SNP’s Westminster leader Stephen Flynn calling Starmer’s EU market access claims ‘simply absurd’. At this point, Steerpike would have been rather interested to hear the thoughts of Brexit campaigner-in-chief Farage – yet it was his deputy Richard Tice who had to take the reins instead.
Wherever could the Reform founder be? Well, it has since transpired this evening via the Times that instead of attending the Commons debate, Farage has, er, jetted off to France. Alright for some! For his part, the Reform leader said: ‘There seems to be great consternation in the press that they have not seen me for 48 hours. Well, they will have to wait some time. After months of touring the UK in the run up to our hugely successful local election campaign I will resume travelling the country next week.’
Farage may not be a fan of Sir Keir forging closer ties with Europe – but he seems to have no problem basking in the delights of the EU when it suits him…
Britain is playing into Hamas’s hands
Keir Starmer’s government has suspended trade talks with Israel and summoned the Israeli ambassador over the ‘intolerable’ offensive in Gaza. To be honest, I’m surprised it’s taken ten months for any doubt to be cleared up. But now it is entirely clear where the government stands vis-à-vis our supposed great ally in the Middle East, Israel, and the Islamist death cult which seeks to wipe Jews – yes, Jews, not Israel – off the face of the earth: it stands with Hamas.
Don’t rely on my take, but on the words of Hamas
Don’t rely on my take, but on the words of Hamas, who last night issued a statement in response to the latest attempt by the UK government, along with France and Canada, to force a win for Hamas in the Gaza war: “The Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) welcomes the joint statement issued by the leaders of the United Kingdom, France, and Canada…Hamas considers this stance an important step in the right direction toward restoring the principles of international law, which the government of the terrorist Netanyahu has sought to undermine and overturn.”
You read that right. We now have a government whose stance towards Israel is praised by Hamas; a government which is taking praise for sharing Hamas’s stance towards international law.
That’s the same Hamas which spent a decade stealing and diverting aid money to build a network of tunnels under Gaza, specifically so that any military action taken against it had, by necessity, to mean Palestinian citizens dying. The same Hamas which sought to have as many Palestinians killed as possible because their deaths would, as its former leader Yahya Sinwar wrote to his fellow terrorist Ismail Haniyeh on 11 April last year, “infuse life into the veins of this nation, prompting it to rise to its glory and honour.”
And the likes of Keir Starmer, Emanuel Macron and now Mark Carney do just what Hamas wants. Yesterday, it was a joint statement. Today, the UK government has suspended talks on a trade deal with Israel. Earlier, it was restoring funding to UNRWA, the UN body which admits that some of its staff may have been involved in the 7 October attack; and supporting the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrants against Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, the former Israeli defence minister.
It’s difficult for those of us who aren’t motivated by jihadism to comprehend the sheer bestiality of Hamas’s strategy. But Hamas’s aim on October 7 2023 was not just to slaughter as many Israelis as possible, it was to use the response to that slaughter to turn the tables on Israel.
Hamas seeks to maximise casualties on both sides. It aims to see more dead Palestinians, precisely so that Israel can be portrayed as the real villain. Every time Israel is condemned, Hamas wins – and it further incentivises Hamas to get more Palestinians killed.
Remember: this war could stop today if Hamas released the remaining hostages and left Gaza. But it won’t, because the West is now precisely where Hamas wants it.
Lucy Connolly is the victim of a great injustice
Lucy Connolly has lost her appeal against her 31-month sentence for inciting racial hatred following the following the horrific murders committed by Axel Rudakubana in Southport.
But having attended the hearing l believe she is the victim of a great injustice. I believe the evidence I heard at the Royal Courts of Justice showed that Lucy Connolly did not understand the effect of pleading guilty after she was advised by her original lawyer. I believe that Lucy Connolly is a victim of the state’s desire to crush the spontaneous rioting which took place last August. And I believe that comments like Lucy Connolly’s, however unpleasant, should not be illegal in a civilised country.
Having attended the hearing l believe Connolly is the victim of a great injustice
Lucy Connolly posted the tweet that led to her being jailed on 29 July, just hours after those murders. It read: ‘Mass deportation now. Set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards for all I care. While you’re at it, take the treacherous government and politicians with them. I feel physically sick knowing what these families will now have to endure. If that makes me racist, so be it.’
As Connolly explained during the appeal hearing, when she posted that tweet she was feeling, ‘Really angry, upset, distraught that those children had died and their parents would have to live a life of grief…I couldn’t understand how it had been allowed to happen – could it happen to my children? It made me desperately upset and angry.’
I sympathise with this. Given the horror of the crimes, and the failure of the state to prevent them, it was entirely rational to feel cold rage. Lucy Connolly’s response was particularly intense because she lost her son Harry at a very young age, in a way which destroyed her trust in the authorities.
In any event Lucy Connolly walked her dog that night, came home and deleted the tweet. At the appeal she said, ‘I’d calmed down – I knew it wasn’t an acceptable thing to say or the right thing to say.’
When Connolly deleted the tweet, no rioting had begun. The awful attacks on migrant hotels didn’t begin until the weekend of 3-4 August. And yet she was jailed for ‘inciting serious violence’.
During her appeal Lucy Connolly made it clear that she had no intent to cause violence. Indeed, as the riots began, but before she’d been contacted by the police, she tweeted her opposition to the violence taking case.
So why did Lucy Connolly plead guilty? After her arrest on 9 August she was held in police custody and then HMP Peterborough until she was taken to the Crown Court on Monday 12 August. There she met with her solicitor.
Both Lucy Connolly and her solicitor gave evidence at her appeal hearing. They disagreed about the advice Lucy Connolly had received. She was insistent that she did not realise she was pleading guilty on the basis that she had intended to incite serious violence. Connolly’s solicitor claimed that he had been clear with her.
They made for very different witnesses. Lucy Connolly was clear about what she could and couldn’t remember, but was very clear that her solicitor had not made the basis of plea clear. Her solicitor was far less convincing. He phrased his claims indirectly, saying things like ‘I would have told her…’ or ‘I would always have’.
Unfortunately for Connolly, the appeal court believed her solicitor, describing him as ‘conscientious’ in its judgment, and finding that they had ‘no doubt that he advised’ Connolly properly. They also described Connolly’s evidence as ‘incredible’. Having listened to the evidence I think they have made a grave error.
Then Crown Prosecution Service barrister, Naeem Valli, spent quite some time during the appeal hearing questioning Lucy Connolly on whether she is racist:
‘Do you accept that you hold strong views on immigration?’
‘I do’
‘Do you believe this country is being invaded by immigrants?’
‘I believe that we have a massive number of people in this country that are unchecked and that’s a national security risk.’
‘Do you believe that children in this country are not safe because of that?’
‘I believe that children in this country are not safe for a lot of reasons…anyone where we don’t know why they’re here or for what purpose is a risk to our children.’
‘Do you feel threatened by immigrants?’
‘Not threatened personally – I believe that anyone who comes into the country should be checked and have background checks.’
Clearly this questioning convinced the judges. Adam King, the leading barrister representing Connolly, argued that the original trial judge, His Honour Melbourne Inman KC, had given insufficient weight to the mitigating factors in Lucy Connolly’s case. The appeal court dismissed this, concluding that what they deemed to be Connolly’s ‘racism’ meant her attempts to discourage rioting and violence should be ignored.
Lucy Connolly will stay in jail until August. The state will continue to refuse to grant her either early release on ‘tag’ or the chance to see her family via Release on Temporary Licence, both of which are offered to prisoners who pose a real threat to the public. A country which honours free speech would free Lucy Connolly. We do not live in such a country.
Teachers are turning on Labour
When Labour won the 2024 general election, many of my fellow teachers were delighted. After fourteen years of one Conservative or another occupying Downing Street, they felt that finally ‘the right people’ were in power.
Ten months later, their excitement has turned to despair. Promise after promise has evaporated. The jubilant attitude in staff rooms around Britain has been replaced by a kind of exhausted bewilderment as the effects of the government’s economic illiteracy start to bite.
Keir Starmer is quickly discovering that governing is not the same as protesting
Keir Starmer is quickly discovering that governing is not the same as protesting. Making quick pay deals may have appeased the unions, but it did huge damage to public finances, even before the capital and labour flight caused by the Government’s tax policies.
Having run out of other people’s money so soon, Labour has speedily closed down maths and computing hubs in state schools as well as Latin excellence programmes. Its sights are now on level 7 apprenticeships. Those same politicians my teaching colleagues assumed would open new doors to disadvantaged children are closing existing openings and bolting them shut.
The government is also squeezing school budgets. Schools are expected to fund pay rises amid a real-term cut in funding. This is not the first time a teacher pay increase has been promised without providing adequate funding, but the shortfall is cavernous. It is happening alongside a simultaneous increase in national insurance contributions for employers, dealing a double whammy to the payroll.
As a result, heads are having to let staff go. Labour promised to hire 6,500 new teachers over this Parliament, yet we now face the ugly irony of maths teachers being made redundant because Labour’s Treasury team cannot do their sums. As Sir Dan Moynihan of Harris Federation said recently, the situation is ‘unprecedented’. In another twist of irony, those teaching unions that worked hard to help Labour get into power are now watching their most experienced members face the axe because their longevity in the job makes them more expensive than novice teachers.
When teaching economics to sixth-form students, there are few more enjoyable lightbulb moments to experience in the classroom than when learners grasp the Laffer curve. They finally understand why we can’t just tax rich people ‘until the pips squeak’.
Unfortunately, with record numbers of millionaires and billionaires leaving the country, this is a moment of epiphany that leading members of the Government clearly failed to enjoy themselves. We have moved from a fictional £22 billion black hole dismissed by the Office for Budget Responsibility to an actual, predicted £63 billion crater of the Treasury’s making. Schools are now paying the price.
As costs spiral, my Labour-supporting friends’ social media have gone quiet. This Government badly needs its lightbulb moment – the kind that flickers into life in a Year 12 classroom when students understand the Laffer curve. Until then, the government is trapped in the half-dream state of opposition, convinced that consequences are for other people.
Anthony Boutall is a teacher. He is writing in a personal capacity.
Could (bottled) Watergate sink Macron?
History repeats itself. In the beginning there was Watergate and then one gate followed another: Camillagate, Partygate, Monicagate. Hundreds, thousands of gates. And now, it’s Watergate again, in France this time, as a wave of allegations about the cover up of a bottled water treatment scandal threatens to submerge President Emmanuel Macron.
What did Macron know and when did he know it?
What did Macron know and when did he know it? A French Senate investigation this week found that Nestlé used unauthorised purification methods (such as ultraviolet treatment and microfiltration) on products labelled as ‘natural mineral water’. EU and French law says bottled water must remain untreated. The Senate report also found that the French government ‘at the highest level’ was aware of these practices as far back as 2022, but covered up the scandal.
In February, Macron was asked about the Élysée’s role in the Nestlé case and claimed there had been no ‘agreement’ or ‘collusion’. Yet now, a large tranche of heavily redacted documents have been released alongside the Senate report, detailing conversations between the President’s staff and Nestlé and its lobbyists. Watergate the sequel cannot be compared to the crisis of drug gangs, the porosity of borders, the immobility of government, and the stagnation of France’s economy. Nevertheless, it shows how government and industry danced in tango when it came to the scandal.
My own skim of the documents reveals, for example, a 2024 email from an Elysée adviser describing a meeting with ‘the head of Nestlé on Monday’ at which concerns were discussed including excessive use of filtration treatment, ‘with potential impacts on the affected sites and a communications issue on how to manage the sequence.’ Interpretation: never mind the problems with the water, it’s one for the spin doctors.
Sparkling or still, bottled water is as essential on French tables as bread, wine and cheese. The French have never fully trusted tap water, for sound reasons, given the rank pits that passed for plumbing in comparatively recent memory. Although tap water is now drinkable, and despite official efforts to persuade the French to drink tap water instead, French consumers have conditioned themselves to drink water from bottles, often believing it to have mysterious health benefits for the gut.
The water shelves at my local supermarket offer a dazzling array of brands including special expensive red bottles of Perrier with tiny bubbles. Consequently, bottled water is a gigantic, €20 billion industry in France.
At the centre of the affair is Nestlé, the gigantic Swiss food processor which makes everything from Nespresso to your KitKat chocolate wafer to your cat’s Purina pet food. Nestlé was dinged last year when its Perrier brand was ordered to destroy more than two million bottles of water due to E. coli and faecal bacteria found in one of its wells. Nestlé brands Vittel, Contrex, and Hépar are all accused of using unauthorised purification methods on products labelled as natural mineral water, to make them safe for consumption. Last year, the firm agreed to pay a €2 million fine to avoid legal action.
Nestlé has form when it comes to food safety scandals, despite its wholesome image. In early 2022, serious E. coli infections in children were linked to the consumption of Nestlé frozen pizzas. Dozens of children across France fell seriously ill, with several developing hemolytic uremic syndrome, a life-threatening complication. At least two deaths were reported.
Still, Nestlé will probably survive this bottled water scrape, especially after it is forced to perform some corporate grovelling and make deputy heads roll. So will Macron, even if he is discovered to have received a lifetime supply of Nespresso capsules from George Clooney personally.
Meanwhile, the French, I suspect, will continue to consume bottled water. They imagine their bowels depend on it.
Why the Trump-Putin dialogue is so dangerous for Ukraine
“Look, are you serious? Are you real about this?” That question, according to US vice president J.D. Vance, was the essence of yesterday’s phone call between his boss Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. What Vance meant was to question whether Putin was serious about peace. But turning the question on its head would actually be far more revealing. Is Putin serious about winning the war? Absolutely. Is he real about fighting on until he achieves his goal of subjugating Ukraine? Also very much yes.
Is Trump serious about pressuring Russia into ending the war?
There’s a second way to flip the question, and that’s to ask: is Trump serious about pressuring Russia into ending the war? And the answer to that, sadly for the Ukrainians, seems to be resoundingly negative.
The most obvious sign that the two-hour phone call had not gone well for Kyiv was that Putin himself professed that the peace process was “generally on the right track,” according to a readout on RIA Novosti. The Kremlin professed the conversation “very informative and helpful” – but that Russia and Ukraine must agree on “compromises that suit both sides.” And anything that makes Putin happy is, pretty much necessarily, bad news for Ukraine’s hopes of ending the war with its political independence intact.
Donald Trump, too, professed to be happy with the call. “I believe it went very well,” Trump posted on social media. “Russia and Ukraine will immediately start negotiations toward a ceasefire and, more importantly, an END to the War…The tone and spirit of the conversation were excellent.” However, in a crucial detail that will ring alarm bells in Kyiv, Trump also insisted that the details would be “negotiated between the two parties…because they know details of a negotiation that nobody else would be aware of.”
Trump couched his announcement as an upbeat call for peace talks to start, and name-checked a long list of European leaders and the new Pope Leo XIV whom he had “informed” of his call. But with Trump signaling that he is ready to hand over talks to Moscow and Kyiv, what many Ukrainians will hear is that the US is no longer interested in playing an active role, much less in applying serious pressure to compel Putin to compromise.
It is becoming increasingly clear that what Putin wants is not so much territory (though he has vowed to reach the boundaries of the four provinces he controls only partly) but rather political control over Ukraine’s strategic future. That, decoded, is the meaning of the Kremlin’s demands to address the “root causes” of the conflict. And as Putin’s negotiator made clear at recent talks in Istanbul in practice that means two key remands.
One is “demilitarisation” – i.e. restrictions on the size of Ukraine’s armed forces and limits on deployments of foreign troops there. The other is “denazification” – which means guarantees of the rights of Russian speakers and a reversal of a campaign to de-Sovietize street names and the memory of World War Two.
Or as Putin himself put it in a long TV documentary made to coincide with the 80th anniversary of Victory Day last week, the goal of his “special military operation” was “to eliminate the root causes of this crisis,” to “ensure the security of the Russian state” and to “protecting the interests of our people,” both in the occupied territories and inside Ukraine.
Most chillingly, Putin vowed that Russia has “enough strength and resources to bring to a conclusion what began in 1922 to its logical conclusion.” That was a reference to drawing the borders of the Soviet Ukraine drawn up by Vladimir Lenin, which remain the international boundaries of modern Ukraine today.
Putin’s move from territorial to political demands makes the Trump-Putin dialogue very dangerous for Volodymir Zelensky. Kyiv fears Trump may buy into peace plans cooked up with Moscow – and try to force it on Ukraine as a way to get to a deal by any means necessary. Indeed, the Trump administration has signaled very clearly that it is keen to get the talking over as fast as possible.
“There’s fundamental mistrust between Russia and the West,” Vance told reporters in advance of the Trump-Putin phone call. “It’s one of the things the President thinks is frankly stupid, and we should be able to move beyond the mistakes that have been made in the past, but that takes two to tango. I know the President’s willing to do that, but if Russia’s not willing to do that, then we’re eventually just going to have to say, ‘This is not our war.’”
Having Washington walk away is an outcome that would suit Putin just fine – especially as Putin has become convinced that Ukraine’s other major allies, the Europeans, are fundamentally unserious and irresponsible. That’s an impression that recent rounds of empty European promises to escalate sanctions in a vain attempt to force the Kremlin into a ceasefire has only reinforced.
Furthermore, Putin is convinced not only that that the threats of new sanctions are empty but also that the war on the ground is going his way. Indeed Ukrainian MP Heorhiy Mazurashu (a member of Zelensky’s Servant of the People party) warned yesterday that a military collapse and a crisis in recruitment is taking a serious toll on Ukraine’s fighting ability. “The army is critically understaffed,” Heorhiy Mazurashu told Politika Strany. “We can hide your head in the sand and pretend that everything is fine, that we can keep chasing people into the army and this will solve the problem somehow, but…hope for hope’s sake won’t have any effect.”
At the same time, there are signs that Putin is preparing a serious build-up of forces in Donbas in preparation for a summer push. So even if Trump’s exhortation to “Let the process begin!” comes true and Kremlin negotiators sit down with their Ukrainian counterparts for systematic talks, the work will be “painstaking and lengthy,” as Putin’s press secretary Dmitry Peskov put it. But in the meantime Putin will continue to pound Ukraine’s cities and grind on in Donbas – while the US takes a back seat to the whole mess.
A version of this article originally appeared on Spectator World
Lucy Connolly is in prison because of her politics
Childminder Lucy Connolly was caring for infants at her home in Northampton on July 29 last year when she heard on the news about the murder of three young girls in Southport. She was upset – like many people – and had seen – again, like many – rumours that an illegal immigrant was responsible.
These had been fuelled by early eyewitness reports describing the killer as dark skinned, boosted by fake online news reports, and growing public discontent about hotels being filled with mostly young men claiming asylum.
The state treats expressions of majority nationalism as an existential threat in a way it doesn’t any other worldview, including Irish republicanism or even Islamism and this explains the extraordinarily harsh way it polices online discourse on the right
Connolly described herself as a ‘ridiculously overprotective’ mother to her own 11-year-old daughter, and the news from Southport sent her into a panic. In anger and fear, she typed out to her 9,000 Twitter followers:
‘Mass deportation now, set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards for all I care, while you’re at it take the treacherous government and politicians with them. I feel physically sick knowing what these families will now have to endure. If that makes me racist so be it.’
This tweet, up for less than four hours before deletion, would cost her a year in jail, where she remains today, following today’s decision over her appeal.
Connolly was sensitive to stories about infant suffering. She and husband Ray, a Conservative local councillor, had lost their son Harry 12 years earlier, a tragedy made more painful by catastrophic failures within the NHS.
Convinced her infant son’s illness was more serious than doctors told her, she had contested their diagnosis until eventually worn down by expert opinion. After numerous visits to the local hospital, Connolly had pleaded with doctors to put her son on a drip; instead, they were sent home to put Harry to bed. They woke at 4 a.m. the following morning to find their 19-month-old dead; her husband had attempted CPR, but nothing could bring him back.
The coroner ruled that the hospital had committed a series of catastrophic failures, but had not gross negligence manslaughter, as Ray and Lucy had believed. This tragedy left her heartbroken and fragile, and with a profound suspicion of the authorities. Even many years later Connolly would become profoundly upset at the suffering of children, and according to her husband would write to papers if there were stories about child neglect in the news.
Connolly was well-liked by the parents of the children she looked after, a diverse bunch who came from all over the world. Her husband joked that the house looked like ‘the United Nations’ after the morning drop-off. She was caring by nature, and described by one African parent as ‘the kindest British person I’ve met’.
She also held right-wing views on immigration, and it is impossible to read the transcripts of her court case without concluding that this played a significant part in her fate. In terror of losing control amid last summer’s rioting, the government and justice system were determined to make an example and, like many weak regimes, lashed out where they could.
Connolly, shaken by events in Southport, tweeted out in anger but, having taken the family dog for a walk and had a chance to think better of it, deleted her tweet the same evening. Later that week, and before she realised she was in trouble with the law, she had tweeted her condemnation of the rioting that followed. ‘FFS, I get they’re angry. I’m fucking raging, however, this is playing right into their hands. I do not want civil unrest on our streets. Tommy Robinson is not going to say but this is not going to get anyone anywhere. Protests yes but not riots,’ she tweeted over the weekend, by which point disorder had erupted across England. In another tweet, she wrote: ‘Last night was not protesting, it was rioting. People are playing right into the hands of the establishment and the media. We need people to come together intelligently and articulately, not riots.’ Again, she posted ‘I know people are angry, but violence is not the answer’. By then it was too late.
Her tweet came on the day of the murders, a Monday. The first stirrings of disorder had begun in Southport the following evening, spreading across the country on Friday and Saturday. In his sentencing remarks, the judge who sent her to jail mentioned the febrile atmosphere as an aggravating factor, yet while the country was shaken by Southport, there was no suggestion on the Monday that violence would follow. There had been no rioting following immigration-related atrocities in Manchester or Nottingham, when the authorities had successfully cultivated a message of togetherness. There was yet no indication that this time would be any different.
Yet Connolly’s tweet had already been viewed 310,000 times by the time she deleted, and screenshotted. As the days went on, she became subject to a ‘twitterstorm’, with some trying to get her husband sacked and others snitch-tagging in the police and Ofsted. By the end of the week Connolly had deleted her account, her last tweet asking: ‘Why are people more concerned by my political views than by the actual murder of three little girls?’
Many of us have experienced such a twitterstorm, returning to our laptop or phone to find that hundreds of people suddenly hate us. It’s not a nice feeling, but it passes.
Not for Connolly. A few days later, a woman who had never had any contact with the law found herself in a police station, then a courtroom and jail. She was charged under Section 19 of the Public Order Act 1986, with distributing material intending to stir up racial hatred, and with the far more serious crime of intending to incite serious violence. Arrested on 6 August regarding the offending tweet, and then bailed, she was arrested again three days later and interviewed about previous tweets – and that was the end of her previous life as a free woman.
The Daily Telegraph’s Allison Pearson, who has become Connolly’s leading champion, wrote last month about the surreal process that upended a woman’s life. Pearson described how Lucy went with the police ‘quiet as a lamb, she thought if she did as she was told everything would be fine,’ in her husband’s words. It was only when she was in the police station that the enormity of the situation dawned on her. One prison officer described Connolly at Peterborough jail as ‘the most petrified person I’ve ever seen arrive here’.
‘I couldn’t quite believe what they were telling me – someone who’d never broken the law,’ she said later. ‘Whatever I’d done, police made it quite clear I was going down for this, their intention was always to hammer me.’
Even while this was happening, strangers on the internet were trying to get at the Connollys: West Northamptonshire council received 13 anonymous complaints against Ray, calling for his resignation for standing by his wife. Denied bail – like almost all of the August transgressors – Lucy found herself potentially waiting months inside for a trial, and felt that she had no choice but to plead guilty to the charges laid before her.
Ray gathered character references, including a Nigerian mother who described Lucy as the ‘kindest, most diligent person who looked after everyone and anyone without any regard for their race or ethnicity.’ There was clearly a need to acquire diverse character references, rather resembling the persilschein which Germans once had to produce as proof they were not Nazis.
None of this seemed to matter when Connolly faced Judge Melbourne Inman KC on October 17. Sentencing her to 31 months in jail, which included a 25 per cent discount for pleading guilty, the judge said: ‘As everyone is aware some people used that tragedy as an opportunity to sow division and hatred, often using social media, leading to a number of towns and cities being disfigured by mindless and racist violence, intimidation and damage.’
He directly linked her tweet to ‘serious disorder in a number of areas of the country where mindless violence was used to cause injury and damage to wholly innocent members of the public and to their properties’. Her culpability was ‘clearly a category A case – as both prosecution and your counsel agree, because you intended to incite serious violence’.
Pearson described how the police and Crown Prosecution Service afterwards released a statement saying that Lucy ‘told officers she did not like immigrants and claimed that children were not safe from them’.
‘But Lucy hadn’t said that,’ Pearson wrote: ‘What she said in her long interview with the police was, “I’m well aware that we need immigrants… I’m well aware that if I go to the hospital there are immigrants working there and the hospital wouldn’t function without them. I’m [also] well aware of the difference between legal immigrants and illegal immigrants and they are not checked and [nor is] what they might have done (any crimes) in their country of origin – it’s a national security issue and they’re a danger to children”.’
Pearson wrote that Connolly had cried about the misrepresentation; she was not a bigot, she said, and had been raised by a socialist mother. She had looked after children from all sorts of backgrounds – Lithuanians and Poles, Bangladeshis and Jamaicans, Nigerians and Somalis. Connolly was clearly someone with strong views about immigration but still capable of treating each individual on their own merits.
‘The Connollys asked for a transcript of the police interview which was grudgingly handed over after a long delay,’ Pearson wrote: ‘Lucy’s mother complained to the CPS and they corrected the statement on their website to match what Lucy had actually said. Too late.’
Connolly’s mother told the Telegraph journalist that ‘it would be hilarious… if it wasn’t so horrifying’. Her fellow inmates included murderers, and when they ‘questioned Lucy about her crime – “What you in for?” – and she explained it was a post on social media, “they cracked up”.’
In January, Connolly spent her 42nd birthday in prison, and with his wife’s income gone, Ray was forced to sell his car. She was even denied Release on Temporary Licence, something granted to fellow inmates who had killed people by dangerous driving. ‘You’ve upset a lot of people, Lucy,’ one probation officer told her when asked why.
On Thursday last week, I attended Connolly’s appeal at the Royal Courts of Justice on the Strand, the prisoner speaking by video phone from jail. The appeal came about thanks to the Free Speech Union, the group founded by Toby Young to campaign on behalf of people who have fallen foul of Britain’s speech laws.
The FSU had hired the services of Adam King, the highly-rated barrister who has become something of a free speech champion of late. King recently secured the release of a man who faced up to two years in jail for going to a fancy dress party dressed as the Manchester bomber. Yes, you read that correctly.
Without wishing to become a bore on the subject – and perhaps it’s too late – Britain has a real problem with speech laws. This shouldn’t be a right-wing talking point, but it goes against human nature to defend the rights of people whose opinions horrify you. Laws such as the Communications Act (2003) are used to harass people making basic statements of belief, while hateful online language is policed excessively. Connolly’s tweet may well have merited a criminal record and a fine; the question is whether a jail sentence represents justice or anarcho-tyranny.
It was certainly interesting to witness the anarcho-tyranny of the British state at close quarters; before Connolly’s case was heard in front of three judges, we sat through discussions of two previous cases, one involving a man who had run down and killed a 16-year-old boy. The murderer, we heard, had 22 previous convictions for 39 offences at the time of his offence, including robbery, affray and assaulting a police constable. The British state is filled with endless compassion for habitual criminals, always ready to give them ‘once more chance’ to turn their life around – but utterly ruthless against those who breach its speech codes and transgress its sacred values.
In a small courtroom off a corridor on the first floor, about 30 people were in attendance, including Lucy’s husband, representatives from the Free Speech Union, some well-wishers and a handful of sympathetic journalists (including Pearson and former GB News presenter Dan Wootton). In a very British scene, Connolly protesters outside were outnumbered by campaigners trying to stop a music festival in south London (they won, of course), and vastly outnumbered by pro-Palestinian demonstrators. I queued behind two well-spoken elderly ladies in keffiyeh scarves as we waited to get through airport-style security.
Questioned by King about her state of mind when she sent her tweet, Connolly described feeling anxious and scared and worrying about ever sending her own daughter out.
Was she upset about the Southport killings? ‘Absolutely, yes.’
Was she more protective than the average parent? ‘Ridiculously so.’
The tweet was read out, and King asked: Did you intend anyone to set fire to an asylum hotel? ‘Absolutely not’.
Did you intend for anyone to murder any politicians? ‘Absolutely not’.
Connolly said of her post that it was ‘not a nice thing to say’ but ‘it was never my intention to stir up racial hatred’. She felt ‘extreme outrage and emotion. I posted words which were wrong in every way.’
Connolly broke down in tears as she described the process of being arrested, taken to a magistrates’ court and then to a police station before arriving in Peterborough prison, all within the space of 24 hours. She had little sleep on the Saturday and Sunday before meeting her lawyer on Monday.
King argued that Connolly clearly did not intend to incite violence against migrants nor politicians, but had tweeted in anger and then deleted soon after (not ‘in due course’, as the original court judgement stated). Clearly, he argued, no one could claim beyond reasonable doubt that she intended to incite violence. What this looked like was someone who was scared and, facing months inside, pleaded guilty to something she does not accept she was guilty of – incitement to serious violence. She was totally out of her depth.
In the news reports last autumn, Connolly was sometimes described as ‘middle class’, but a keen observer of the English class system – as every journalist is – would be aware, from her accent and her history, employment and her home in a 1930s semi in a Midlands suburb, that she is not People Like Us. I make this point only to reiterate that it’s rarely PLU who find themselves in trouble with Britain’s authoritarian hate speech laws – it’s those who lack the connections, the nous or the sense that they can change the system. Perhaps if I was honest with myself, I’m sympathetic to her predicament because it offends some suppressed patrician sensibilities.
I also broadly share her politics, and feel that she’s in prison because of them. Earlier this month the music world rushed to the defence of an Irish rap group, Kneecap, who had called on people to ‘Kill your local MP’. Kneecap may face travel restrictions in the US as a result of their provocations, or perhaps there will be pressure on Glastonbury to ban them (which will be resisted). Despite the counter-terrorism police now investigating the case, it seems extremely unlikely that they will end up in jail – and rightly so.
Yet the state treats expressions of majority nationalism as an existential threat in a way it doesn’t any other worldview, including Irish republicanism or even Islamism, and this explains the extraordinarily harsh way it polices online discourse on the right. Would I have the deep-seated fairness to care about free speech if it was mainly leftists being punished? I’d like to think so, but I couldn’t be sure. True liberalism goes against our instincts, and requires a ruling class who consciously cultivate such a generous spirit.
The obviously political nature of the sentencing was reiterated at the appeal, where the prosecution lawyer interrogated the childminder about her political views, opening with the words ‘Mrs Connolly, I have some questions about something you posted on social media platform X’.
‘Do you accept that you hold strong views on immigration?’ he asked: ‘You believe this country is being invaded by immigrants.’ It’s unchecked and it’s a national security issue, she replied. ‘Is it fair to say you do not want immigrants in this country? Do you feel threatened by immigrants? You do want mass deportations?’ All of these framings she denied, and argued her case coherently.
The court was reminded of other tweets brought up at the trial to show her views, where ‘further racist remarks’ were noted. She had been accused of having a ‘racist mindset’ and ‘extended hatred of immigrants’, and these tweets gave ‘further insight into her racist views’. Perhaps she holds racist views, or perhaps she’s the kindest British person an African immigrant could meet; perhaps both are true, and people are complex. Either way, being in possession of racist views is not a crime.
Belief in a ‘two-tier’ justice has stuck since last summer, and with good reason. While Connolly was denied bail, Labour councillor Ricky Jones, who was filmed telling a real-life crowd that ‘We need to cut their throats and get rid of them’, is still a free man, on bail awaiting trial (he denies encouraging violent disorder). Many have noted the extraordinary sentences handed out for online speech by judges who show leniency elsewhere, but then judges are constrained by sentencing guidelines and the laws passed by politicians.
It is true, however, that the arrest, trial and sentencing of Connolly was carried out in a feverish atmosphere. As Laurie Wastell wrote in The Spectator, three days into the disorder ‘the Prime Minister told the country that the unrest we were seeing was the work of “gang[s] of thugs” who had travelled to “a community that is not their own” to smash it up.’ Stating that the violence was ‘clearly whipped up online’, Starmer was ‘whipping up the police, Crown Prosecution Service and courts to hysteria, demanding convictions. And none of it was true.’
As her extraordinary sentence was handed down, Connolly’s judge had declared that ‘It is a strength of our society that it is both diverse and inclusive. There is always a very small minority of people who will seek an excuse to use violence and disorder causing injury, damage, loss and fear to wholly innocent members of the public and sentences for those who incite racial hatred and disharmony in our society are intended to both punish and deter.’
That is certainly true, although one might wonder if a society can be strengthened by being diverse and inclusive if that entails incredibly draconian punishments to deter ‘hatred and disharmony’. That rather sounds like a weakness – it certainly is to the British citizens who find themselves sent to prison for words written in anger.
This article first appeared in Ed West’s Wrong Side of History Substack.
Is it wise for King Charles to drive a Chinese-made EV?
There is no such thing as a ‘royal car’. Traditionally, the monarchy has been associated with various British manufacturers, such as Bentley, Rolls-Royce and (until their recent, breathtakingly misjudged advertising campaign, at least) Jaguar. But there is no equivalent of the Popemobile, brought out on every public occasion so that the King might be received by his adoring people. Instead, when one glimpses Charles, or the other major royals, in public, it is usually in the back of an extremely expensive and suitably petrol-guzzling vehicle, which sits at odds with the monarch’s avowed commitment to the environment.
In private, at least, the King has now found a compromise. It has been suggested that he has ordered a Lotus Eletre, an all-electric vehicle that its manufacturer modestly describes as ‘an unprecedented merger of exhilarating performance, luxury and technology. A one-of-a-kind Hyper-SUV that defines a new class of cars – and redefines your standards’. Yours for a mere £120,000.
The King’s own personal feelings towards the Chinese leave something to be desired
Certainly, although we are unlikely to see Charles appearing on Top Gear any time soon (although who knows?) the King has a deep interest in motoring and in expensive, high-end cars. This may seem at odds with his ascetic, vaguely monastic tendencies, but it is also a reminder that the monarch has never been one to stint himself on luxuries and the high-end stuff. This will strike most people, apart from deep-seated republicans, as fair enough; after all, not only is it his own money he is spending, but it would be rather embarrassing to see the country’s monarch scooting about in a Fiat 500.
The Lotus Eletre, which proudly trumpets its green credentials, may yet replace Charles’s traditional choice of a Bentley as his private vehicle. It is understood that the King wishes to ensure that his own cars (including a 21st birthday gift from his mother, the deeply stylish and equally expensive Aston Martin DB6 Mk2 Volante) can be as environmentally friendly as possible. Noises have been made about how he wishes to become the first monarch to have a wholly net zero-compliant stable of vehicles; a commitment that will require a great deal of expensive refurbishment if his existing cars are going to make the cut.
Few would raise any serious objection to Charles’s desire that his cars should be electric-powered (and his decision to eschew Tesla might be seen as a tacit rebuke to that company’s founder Elon Musk, whose political leanings over the last couple of years stand in stark contrast to the King’s) but there are still questions over his choice of Lotus as a manufacturer. Although the company was founded in Britain in the fifties and would superficially describe itself as British to this day, the division responsible for their electric cars, Lotus Tech, is headquartered in that most notorious of Chinese cities, Wuhan, and Lotus itself is majority owned by the Chinese automotive conglomerate Geely.
Relations between Britain and China could hardly be described as warm at the moment (although Starmer seems to want to address this), and the King’s own personal feelings towards the Chinese leave something to be desired. Not only has the recent espionage scandal involving Prince Andrew caused the monarchy reputational damage, but in remarks about the 1997 handover of Hong Kong to the Chinese, Charles made several unguarded comments about the move, which he disapproved of. In a private document entitled ‘The Handover of Hong Kong of the Great Chinese Takeaway’, he referred caustically to senior Chinese officials as ‘appalling old waxworks’ and lamented the ‘ridiculous rigmarole’ and ‘awful Soviet-style display’ that the ceremony was freighted with. It was leaked, to great embarrassment, and much damage ensued.
There can be no doubt as to the King’s patriotism and sincere love of his country, nor his genuine interest in environmental issues. Yet neutral observers might note that this is Charles all over, in that an idea that looks sound – even commendable – in theory swiftly falls apart when it is placed under greater scrutiny. Once, the then-Prince of Wales held China in contempt, but now he is King, he is happy to buy their cars and therefore further their technological economy, rather than directly investing in his own country’s. Plus ca change, alas.
Clegg: Starmer’s EU deal is a ‘damp squib’
In a blast from the past, the UK’s onetime deputy prime minister Nick Clegg popped up again in London today to muse, 15 years on, about his party’s coalition with the Conservatives. But despite this being the purpose of his talk, it didn’t take the arch-Remainer long to get to the subject of the European Union. Lauding the coalition he helped lead as a ‘five-year haven of stability’ between the earlier financial crisis and the referendum on the EU that followed, Clegg blamed Brexit for slowing UK economic growth – and dubbed it ‘one of the greatest acts of economic self-harm in modern times’. Is he happy then that Prime Minister Keir Starmer yesterday struck a new deal with our European allies? Er, no. ‘It’s a bit of a damp squib,’ he huffed.
Despite Sir Keir’s agreement with the European Union suggesting closer ties on issues from defence to borders to energy, Clegg is unimpressed. The former leader of the Lib Dems is annoyed that the PM had not gone far enough on forging better bonds with the EU. Taking aim at the ‘ducking and weaving’ he says the UK government has engaged in over recent weeks, Clegg fumed that the government had negotiated just ‘trade scraps from the high tables in Washington and then Brussels’. Ouch.
He went on:
Now, whilst no one should begrudge the government’s attempts to eke out concessions from the larger economies to our east and west, we should be under no illusion that Britain is now reduced to the negotiating status of a mid-sized state with far less leverage over the Europeans and Americans that that than at any time in the last 50 years. All this is made worse by the government’s needless red lines against the EU’s customs union and single market, without which a major resuscitation of the British economy will always prove difficult. Fear of the red wall appears to have produced red lines, which just don’t make much sense in the real world.
Are we a satellite state of the United States or a leading member of our own continent? The answer for now seems to be that we’re trying to be both, but in truth, we will be neither until we decide to be one of them. For generations, we have fancied ourselves a bridge between Europe and America. But a bridge connects to solid ground. A Eurosceptic minority in Britain have spent a generation chipping away at one end, only for nationalists in America to tear up the foundations on the other.
Tell us what you really think, Nick!
The ex-politician added:
The European deal is hailed as being a great triumph by the government and condemned by all the normal people still having the same debate of ten years ago saying it’s a terrible betrayal. It’s neither. It’s actually a bit of a damp squib. You know, the world has changed. And yet, after months of negotiation, they still can’t work out how to allow young people to travel effortlessly across the channel. I mean, what an underwhelming response for the moment we’re in.
Not that Clegg has been subtle about his stance on rejoining the EU in recent years. Putting his cards on the table, he confessed again today: ‘It will come as no surprise that my preference would be a full throated return to a reformed European Union.’ After almost a decade, Mr S notes he continues to be as bitter as ever about the 2016 result. Typical Remainer, eh?
Bruno Retailleau’s quiet revolution
Bruno Retailleau has done something nobody expected. He has made himself the most serious contender for the French presidency, not by campaigning, but by governing. In a government few thought would last, under a president widely seen as disengaged and more focused on foreign stages than domestic affairs, Retailleau has taken the hardest job in the country and quietly mastered it. This week he was elected leader of Les Républicains with 74 per cent of the vote – a crushing result that signalled just how completely he has taken control of the party. He is already Minister of the Interior. Now he is starting to look like the man most likely to replace Macron.
Since entering government, he’s pushed through the most hardline immigration measures France has seen in years
At 64, Bruno Retailleau is not new to politics, but he has never looked more relevant. He’s methodical, uncompromising, and uninterested in theatrics. As Interior Minister and now head of Les Républicains, he represents a different model of leadership – one rooted not in charisma but in control. Unlike Macron’s opportunistic centrism or the National Rally’s hollow populism, Retailleau is rebuilding the right around authority, discipline and conviction.
His vision is unapologetically conservative. He supports tougher sentencing for repeat offenders, longer working hours and welfare conditionality. He wants to scale back the administrative state, strip public institutions of what he calls their ideological drift and enforce a stricter application of laïcité (secularism) in schools and universities. He sees the state as a guarantor of civilisation, not a social safety net. Where Macron improvises and Le Pen emotes, Retailleau acts methodically – to preserve order, transmit values, and protect a shared civilisation.
Retailleau has real power, and he’s using it. Since entering government in September 2024 under Michel Barnier, and staying on under François Bayrou, he’s pushed through the most hardline immigration measures France has seen in years. While Le Pen postures and Bardella poses, Retailleau governs. And with the presidential elections less than two years away, his steady, ruthless conservatism is starting to look like a real threat to Le Pen and Bardella.
Les Républicains were once the main centre right party, originally the UMP (Union for a Popular Movement). For decades it was a party of presidents, prime ministers and majorities in parliament. Then came Macron, who raided the party’s ranks, and Le Pen, who raided its voters. The result was hollow collapse. Retailleau is not trying to rebrand what’s left of the party, he’s restoring it. Not as empty Macronism, or a populist imitation, but as a force built on authority, order and ideological coherence.
The National Rally remains dominant in the polls, channelling voter anger over immigration and economic stagnation, but remains untested in power. Marine Le Pen has now lost three presidential elections. Following her recent conviction for misusing EU funds, she’s barred from holding public office. That ban may or may not be lifted, but the fact is that she’s never run a ministry and never passed serious policy reform. Her politics are performative and reactive, pitched to a permanent campaign, not to governing. Jordan Bardella, her designated heir, is more polished and less toxic, but just as shallow. He too has never held a portfolio, never managed a budget, and has no economic programme beyond protectionism and anti-immigration slogans. He’s popular on social media and is carefully stage-managed in the press. But when asked to name a flagship reform he would implement in power, he flounders. His speeches are slick, but his policies are hollow.
The truth is that the RN dresses itself in nationalist rhetoric, but its economics are indistinguishable from the interventionist left. This is not a party of the hard right, but of incoherent populism. Its platform is a grab bag of short-term giveaways and statist fantasies: higher public spending, early retirement, protectionism, fuel price freezes. The 2022 manifesto proposed nationalising motorways and energy companies, and slashing the retirement age, all without explaining how to pay for any of it. Le Pen and Bardella recite these promises without irony, but neither has the faintest idea how to implement them.
What Retailleau exposes is just how little substance the RN offers. He doesn’t posture about authority. He uses it. He doesn’t pander to resentment. He drafts policy. While Le Pen and Bardella campaign in soundbites, Retailleau governs with paperwork. He offers not anger, but a structured response. He’s already restoring the authority of the state, reasserting the rule of law, and ending the right’s long flirtation with populism.
Retailleau’s conservatism was shaped in the Vendée, a deeply Catholic region on France’s Atlantic coast, long defined by its resistance to the ideals of the French Revolution. In 1793, it rose up in armed rebellion against the new Republic’s centralising authority. That legacy still lingers. The Vendée remains instinctively counter-revolutionary, hostile to the progressive consensus of Paris. Retailleau inherited that instinct. He rose through the Senate while remaining loyal to François Fillon. He’s methodical, austere and rarely headline-grabbing. He opposed gay marriage, backed pension reform, and warned of the slow erosion of the state. While others in the party drifted toward Macron, or dabbled in populism, Retailleau stayed where he was, politically patient, quietly waiting for the right to return to him.
As Interior Minister, his methods are matter of fact. No stunts or cameras – he governs like a provincial prefect, through circulars and directives. He scrapped the rules giving the right to remain to illegals, reinstated penalties for illegal immigration, extended the administrative detention period of dangerous foreigners, and signed bilateral deportation agreements with governments once considered uncooperative.
Retailleau has not softened his message. He’s said France should refuse citizenship to those without a deep connection to the nation. No more handing out passports to immigrants who can’t show that they have integrated. His language is sharp. His critics call him authoritarian, but for his supporters, everything he’s done since he’s been appointed Minister of the Interior are measures that are long overdue.
Retailleau’s not a performer. He has no cult of personality, and no talent for social media. He speaks in paragraphs, not slogans. There are no youth rallies, no viral clips, no choreographed outrage. But his politics are unyielding. He comes across more like a civil servant than a party leader.
And yet, in a political culture dominated by theatre and managed decline, that is precisely what makes him different. He has a worldview. He has administrative command. And he has now taken control of the party machine. For the first time in years, the French right has a leader who is neither ashamed of its traditions, nor confused about the direction in which he’s going.
Retailleau will not unite the right or charm the centre. He offers something rarer in politics than charisma or consensus: seriousness. In a political class addicted to appearance, he’s a threat to the current candidates, not because of his message, but because he’s competent. That, in France today, is revolutionary.
The EU’s power is waning. If only Starmer could see it
Britain is back in the big time. Or at least it is according to Sir Keir Starmer, who was tickled pink with the ‘reset’ relationship agreed with the European Union on Monday. ‘It’s time to look forward,’ declared the Prime Minister, standing alongside the EU Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen. ‘We’re ready to work with partners if it means we can improve people’s lives here at home.’
The Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, shared the PM’s delight at a reset she believes will be good for trade, defence and energy. Others weren’t so sure. Reform leader Nigel Farage – Mr Brexit – accused the government of selling out Britain to the ‘ever-diminishing political union’ that is the EU.
Even Mario Draghi admits he has ‘nightmares’ about the state of the EU’s economy
But don’t just take Farage’s word for it. As Starmer welcomed Brussels’ top brass to London, the Europhile French newspaper Le Figaro published a bleak critique of the EU. This, incidentally, is the newspaper that, above all others in France, has been the most hostile to Brexit. A week after the referendum vote in 2016, Le Figaro called it an ‘historic error’. The paper quoted the French banker David de Rothschild, who expressed his bafflement that anyone would want to leave an EU that ‘is improving in terms of growth, employment and investment’.
Nine years later and Le Figaro hasn’t got quite the same confidence in Brussels. In an op-ed entitled ‘The EU is a hostage to its bureaucracy’, the paper lamented that the bloc refuses ‘to take the initiatives that would relaunch European capitalism’. As a consequence, Europe has ‘ruined its agriculture and industry’ and is no longer capable of competing with America and China.
The facts and figures the paper lists are damning. European industry has shrunk on the world market from 22.5 per cent to 14 per cent since 2000. Steel production in the world market has, meanwhile, fallen from 7 per cent to 4 per cent. Chemicals production has fallen by almost 15 per cent since 2020. The number of automobiles manufactured in the EU has plummeted from 18.7 to 14 million since 2017. Three million farms have disappeared since 2015. Energy prices in Europe are four times higher than in Asia and five times higher than in the US.
Le Figaro’s grim assessment of the EU’s diminishing clout was reminiscent of the warning sounded last September by Mario Draghi. A former Italian prime minister and the president of the European Central Bank between 2011 and 2019, Draghi couldn’t hide his fear for the bloc’s future.
He laid it out in a 400-page report on competitiveness commissioned by the EU. ‘For the first time since the Cold War, we must genuinely fear for our self-preservation,’ he stated. Europe was stagnating. It needed less bureaucracy and more investment. If not, said Draghi
We will not be able to become, at once, a leader in new technologies, a beacon of climate responsibility and an independent player on the world stage. We will not be able to finance our social model. We will have to scale back some, if not all, of our ambitions.
The EU has not been galvanised by Draghi’s alarm bell. The latest forecasts from the European Commission, released as Starmer met von der Leyen, reveal that the economy is still dire. As a result, the Commission has revised its growth projections downward and now predicts GDP growth of 0.9 per cent in 2025 – and not the 1.5 per cent forecast last November.
If the EU has failed to rise to the economic challenge of the last decade, the same is true of immigration. I predicted last month that Europe’s annual migrant crisis is just getting started, and so it has proved. The number of migrants crossing the Mediterranean (predominantly Bangladeshis, Afghans and Malians) into Italy in April was up 40 per cent on the same month in 2024. In the last week of April, nearly 1,300 migrants reached the Italian island of Lampedusa; in the same week in 2024 it was 106.
This is deeply embarrassing for the EU, and also Giorgia Meloni, who has cultivated a reputation since coming to power as the ‘iron lady of immigration’. If this continues, she may soon be likened to Boris Johnson in a blouse. Why are so many migrants still crossing the Mediterranean? Didn’t the EU hand over huge piles of cash to Egypt, Tunisia and Libya in the expectation that they would stem the flow?
It is because these countries see what Keir Starmer doesn’t. That the EU is weak and ineffectual, and not to be taken that seriously. That’s the view of the Trump administration. Even Mario Draghi admits he has ‘nightmares’ about the state of its economy. Anyone who thinks the EU is on the up is living in dreamland.
Keir Starmer has walked into the same Brexit trap as Theresa May
One of the most depressing concepts in physics is entropy – the principle that all systems tend toward disorder and breakdown. That’s all I could think of while reading today’s headlines praising the so-called “reset” deal between the UK and the EU.
I know the tricks of the EU’s trade – and “tricks” is the key word here
We’re being told this deal represents a new direction for Britain and its neighbour, a “new era”. It’s nothing of the sort. If anything, this “deal” is more of a repeat than a reset, a continuation of a long story of sellouts.
I can claim some experience here. Having served as the UK’s deputy chief negotiator in the trade talks with the EU in 2020, I spent hundreds of hours sitting opposite the EU’s negotiating team. I know the tricks of their trade – and “tricks” is the key word here.
Many commentators have expressed some surprise at the sheer paucity of Keir’s deal – and, indeed, it reads more like a glorified press release than a treaty. It’s not so much a contract as it is a set of pinky-swear promises between the UK and EU to hash out and sign a set of treaties in the coming months.
To my eye, the UK Government – desperate to announce they’d negotiated something – has fallen into a classic EU trap. And I don’t mean the obvious betrayal of fishermen but the fact that, littered throughout the document, are a set of principles that will inform the subsequent negotiations. Accept ECJ (European Court of Justice) jurisdiction? Tick. An obligation to follow EU rules? Tick. The UK should pay shedloads of money for the privilege? BIG tick.
This is EU negotiations 101. European negotiators know that elected politicians must get deals done as soon as possible to try and get headlines (an issue the unelected Commission doesn’t need to worry about). As one senior member of the EU negotiating team once told me, “elected politicians are temporary. We are eternal.”
By exploiting this, Brussels can get the other side to agree to a set of principles that will shape the subsequent talks and bind their negotiating partner. They famously did this to Theresa May, getting her to agree early on to the idea of “sequential talks” and a “Northern Ireland backstop.”
And now it appears that Starmer has walked into the same trap. Sure, he’s got many gushing headlines today, but he’s also bound himself to a set of commitments that the EU won’t let him wriggle out of. The upcoming negotiations will be characterised by reminders that the UK has already signed up to all sorts of horrors — with Keir Starmer, head in hands, being told: ‘But you agreed to this, Prime Minister.’
While I want to be enraged, I actually feel despondent. After all, the UK Government falling for the same trick for the umpteenth time is just another example of how successive British Governments have prioritised getting a cheap and easy headline over serious governance.
Remember, this is the same administration which is currently smashing up successful schools to please vested union interests, which is prosecuting British war veterans and paying to surrender strategic assets to Beijing’s proxies in a desperate attempt to flaunt its so-called “human rights” credentials, and which has been gaslighting its citizenry with announcements based on a fictional drama about incels while shutting down investigations into the real-life rape gangs.
That’s the real tragedy of this “deal”. It shows that British politicians – of all colours – remain profoundly uninterested in turning the country’s fortunes around. Chasing a sexy headline will always come before serious governance.
This country is in trouble. Productivity has been flat on its face for nearly 20 years. Crime is out of control. Every day, more and more successful businesses and entrepreneurs move abroad. We are beset with complex problems. While we were in the EU, it was impossible to meaningfully tackle these issues. But the last five years have shown that we face another problem: that both the Tories and Labour, despite now being free to make changes, are profoundly uninterested in doing so.
Decline is a choice – history is littered with examples of countries that turned their fortunes around. But until we get politicians who are prepared to take on the vested interests that parasite off our national malaise, who are prepared to make tough and unpopular choices, and – yes – who are willing to tell Brussels to shove it when they make a bad offer, things are going to continue to get worse.
So, sure, this deal is a bad one. The treaties that follow it will deliver little and will end with more of our money being sent to an international bureaucracy to be misspent. But at the end of the day, the fact Starmer has walked into such a blatant trap is just another example of how successive politicians, with their appalling short-termism, have turned entropy from a force in physics into the operating principle of the British Government.
The problem with Shabana Mahmood’s electronic tag roll-out
David Gauke’s sentencing review, which will report this week, is going to be far bolder than anyone expected. Today it has been reported that the Lord Chancellor Shabana Mahmood has secured £700 million of funding from the Treasury to buy 30,000 more electronic ‘tags’ which will be used to curfew people at home, track their alcohol and drug usage, and log where they have been. This will be a huge expansion of the tagging system, which currently oversees about 20,000 people. Given that the system is already struggling, it’s hard not to be sceptical about this announcement.
At present, about 11,000 tag-wearers are people on bail, or immigration offenders, while the other 9,000 are wearing a tag as part of their sentence for a crime. This may be home detention curfew (HDC), a ‘sobriety tag’ (to measure alcohol consumption) or a GPS tag (for offenders who aren’t allowed in certain places – often used for domestic abusers). The aim of these systems is to support probation in supervising people so that they don’t reoffend.
If probation becomes overwhelmed, we will likely see crime and recalls to prison rising
It’s important to understand that tags don’t manage offenders. HDC is usually used at the end of a prison sentence for lower-risk offenders, who spend up to six months on a curfew at home. Between August and December 2021, I was on HDC. This meant I had to wear a chunky ankle tag all day, which would communicate with a ‘base station’ in my house. If I wasn’t at home between 7 p.m. and 7 a.m., the base station was supposed to contact Electronic Monitoring Services (EMS), the outsourced tagging provider. Then, in theory, they would alert probation.
I never breached my curfew, but I am aware of numerous cases where curfew breaches have not been communicated to probation officers. Similarly, GPS tags don’t provide live location information to those supervising the offender. Instead, they report historic movements, meaning that it may be possible to only punish a domestic abuser after they’ve visited their victim.
Even worse, Serco, the outsourcing company which has operated the EMS contract since last spring, has often proved unable to tag people. First, in September of last year, I discovered that people who should have had tags fitted on the day of their release from prison had been free for weeks with no contact by EMS. Although there have been efforts to blame this backlog on the mass early release scheme, a number of the people I spoke with had been released before it came into effect. There have also been backlogs of weeks in fitting sobriety tags.
It’s very hard to understand how Serco will cope with this vastly increased workload. I asked the Ministry of Justice if these new tags would be Serco’s responsibility or if they’d be tendering for a new supplier. They declined to comment.
The other great challenge is what this means for probation. At a press conference last week, the Lord Chancellor mentioned that probation has beaten their target of hiring 1,000 new trainees by March 2025. While this is true, in the past year 601 experienced probation officers left the service and the organisation has a shortfall of about 20 per cent compared to its ‘target staffing level’. This is before the massive increase in work for the probation service, as earlier releases and a greater reliance on community sentences drive up their caseload. If probation becomes overwhelmed, then we will likely see crime and recalls to prison rising.
In fairness to the government, I know they are absolutely aware of the need to fix probation – and fast. They believe that technology may save the day, with better automation and smoother processes allowing individual probation officers to manage more cases. The ultimate goal is a phrase I have heard from senior officials and people in government is ‘prison outside of prison’ – as system under which people can be securely managed in their homes via technology.
The problem is that many of these people have very complex and unstable lives. They often struggle with substance abuse issues, and many have rarely been in work. They are not simple to supervise, and all this technology can only be a tool for capable probation staff.
The Gauke review is ambitious. In an ideal world we would have years to test and deploy technology, increase staff numbers in probation, and ensure prisons are ready for the new model. Unfortunately, there is no time. The jails will soon be full again, so the government will need to hope that Serco ups its game and that probation staff are able to cope. Otherwise, we may see thousands of unsupervised people reoffending, filling the prisons and destroying public support for fixing the justice system. For all our sakes, we should hope this works.
Could Boris make a comeback?
Events have a useful way of illustrating changing fortunes in political stock. Keir Starmer’s EU reset yesterday proved to be one such occasion. The fishing deal, mobility scheme and legal obligations prompted predictable fury from the Tory press. But one voice dominated in the chorus of criticism: Boris Johnson. It was the former prime minister’s arresting description of Starmer as ‘the orange ball-chewing gimp of Brussels’ which led both the Telegraph and Mail’s write-ups today.
A minority in his party view Boris Johnson as the only character big enough to eclipse Nigel Farage and his Cheshire cat grin
Such prominence is not unsurprising. Johnson’s role in the 2016 referendum and then the 2019 election ensures that he, more than anyone, can credibly claim to be the enabler of Brexit. He is also a gifted penman, whose anti-Brussels screeds have delighted Fleet Street copy-editors for decades. But the timing of this fresh intervention has sparked excited chatter about a possible comeback, coming at a time when the Conservative party is facing an existential crisis.
A new YouGov poll out today makes for grim reading for Kemi Badenoch. Her party has now slumped to fourth, on 16 per cent, behind Reform (29 per cent), Labour (22 per cent) and the Liberal Democrats (17 per cent). A dire set of local elections looks to have put rocket boosters under Reform, which is clearly no longer seen as a wasted vote. One Tory MP says: ‘Forget renewal. More like resuscitation.’ ‘The Greens gaining on us as well’, adds an ex-MP. ‘Fifth place here we come.’
The problem for Badenoch is how best to cut through in a crowded market. Labour and Reform are happy to deny the Tories oxygen: last night Keir Starmer told his MPs that the next election would be all about the 'moral imperative' of ensuring 'Farage never becomes PM.' Against the inane-but-effective Liberals, a surging Reform and a landslide Labour government, Badenoch – one of the most high-profile and interesting Tories in office – risks being cut out of the picture completely.
Which explains the renewed focus on Boris Johnson. For all his known baggage, his flair, guile and sheer stage presence mean that a minority in his party view him as the only character big enough to eclipse Nigel Farage and his Cheshire cat grin. A poll earlier this month by More in Common suggested that Johnson was the only Conservative who could outpoll Reform. It was shared with much interest among friends, critics and other observers on Tory WhatsApp.
Of course, chatter is one thing, returning to Westminster would be quite another. With four years left in the life of this parliament, a by-election would seem the most obvious way for Johnson's return. But given the dire state of the party's polling, Tory holds, let alone gains, seem unlikely. For now, Boris Johnson might be content to just watch from afar – as his successor tries desperately to turn it all around.
Miliband’s wind farms won’t ease Britain’s sky-high energy prices
Rachel Reeves is perhaps not a great fan of Donald Trump, but she should be grateful to him nonetheless, and Ed Miliband even more so. The trade war sparked by Trump’s ‘Liberation Day’ tariffs is about to lower energy prices for UK consumers.
According to a forecast by consultants Cornwall Insight, Ofgem’s price cap will fall in July by 7 per cent – to a level at which the average home with a dual gas and electricity bill will be paying £1,720 a year. It will reverse the uplift in the price cap in April and moderate the rise in the Consumer Prices Index (CPI), giving Reeves a bit of breathing room and – temporarily – diverting attention from the fact that Britain has the highest energy prices of any member of the International Energy Agency.
That doesn’t mean that the good news for energy consumers is going to last
The likely fall in the energy price cap from July will be purely a reaction to lower wholesale prices on international markets. Much though Miliband wants us to believe that fossil fuel prices are set by scheming dictators, it is simply markets at work. The fall in wholesale energy prices has been caused mostly by negative factors: energy traders were expecting the world to fall into recession as a result of the trade wars, killing off energy demand along with economic growth. The chances of global recession have receded quickly as Trump has indicated his preparedness to do rapid trade deals to mitigate – at least in part – higher tariffs, but it seems as if a sharp fall in energy bills in July has already been baked in.
That doesn’t mean that the good news for energy consumers is going to last, however. If global demand for energy picks up, the energy price cap can be expected to rise again in October, in time for winter. Miliband’s wind farms and solar farms are certainly not going to save us. Britain will continue to have sky-high gas and electricity prices.
According to the government’s own figures, UK consumers in 2023 paid an average of 36.39 pence per kilowatt-hour for their electricity compared with the equivalent of 35.43 pence in Germany, 20.57 pence in France and 12.86 pence in the US. Contrary to Miliband’s assertion that it is Britain’s reliance on gas which causes us to have the highest prices in the world, the US derives more of its electricity from gas (42 per cent) than does Britain (34 per cent).
Britain has such high electricity prices because of the way we are using gas: increasingly as a short-term backup for lulls in wind and solar. Use a gas power station for an hour a day and the unit cost of electricity is inevitably going to be much greater than if it were in constant use, because it still has to be maintained and the capital investment repaid. This, combined with Britain’s bizarre ‘marginal cost pricing’ – where wholesale prices at any one time are fixed by the most expensive form of energy available – are the reason that UK consumers are paying through the nose.
None of this will change as a result of a fall in the energy price cap in July. All that will happen is that the moment of realisation when the public begins to understand that Britain’s high energy prices are caused by an over-reliance on intermittent renewables – not gas – will be postponed. Miliband’s ruinously expensive target to decarbonise Britain’s electricity by 2030 will linger for a bit longer.