I’m a one-woman man

There’s a fin de saison feeling around here, but the restaurants are still full and the sons of the desert are still moping around. Building is going on non-stop and the cows are down from the mountains, making the village a friendlier and more civilised place. Something of a twilight mood has crept in, especially when I compare the cows with the people. Reclaiming vanished days is a sucker’s game, but it’s irresistible. I was up at my friend Mick Flick’s chalet the other afternoon, talking with Gstaad regulars about how much fun the place used to be. I tried the reverse of an old Woody Allen joke, announcing that taxis nowadays are so expensive I couldn’t keep my eyes on the lovely legs of the lady riding next to me. It went down like the proverbial lead balloon, but then we were all drunk to begin with.

Never mind. The fairer sex in Gstaad is mostly represented by ladies whose chief resource has always been their beaux. Some of them who haven’t received the seal of marriage can look a bit desperate, with bags under their eyes and a boozy roll at their waists. Their meters, in other words, are running, and we know that men keep their eyes firmly on those meters, in taxis or elsewhere. Until I got old, older women attracted me. They still do, and up at Mick’s the other afternoon, when asked by an old maiden whose youth had been a wild one where my wife Alexandra was, I told her that she was nine months pregnant and in bed. Bravo, Taki, was her response.

I suppose attraction to older women was inevitable after a little romance at 21 with the French wife of a Greek ship owner led to my banishment to Paris. That was some price to pay: Paris at 21. It actually traumatised me for life. Parisian society was open to young horny types because most men kept mistresses, and French wives accepted it but retaliated with young arrivals to the city of light. Looking back, I sacrificed myself for women’s equality, stunting my tennis career and many other things I cannot recall at this moment. Adultery is to French men what name-dropping is to Hollywood agents, as is the payback by their wives. Unlike, say, my mother, who would cross herself and pray that my father wasn’t sinning, which he was non-stop, French ladies remained good mothers and perfect hostesses, loved their hubbies and respected the institution of marriage. And they had assignations with poor little Greek boys whenever possible.

That winter in Gstaad, it was déjà vu all over again. When one is 21, most women one meets at chic parties are older, hence the attraction to oldies, or so I’m told by my shrink, whom I’ve never actually met or talked to. In fact, the bum does not exist, but if he did, I’m sure that’s what he would say if I asked him why I still find older women attractive. Paris, Gstaad, Paris, the Riviera, then Paris again; that was the cycle, and what can I tell you, dear readers, it was shameful, sinful, and a waste of time. But it was oh, so much fun that I wouldn’t change it for all the marching powder in Bolivia.

But enough of all this nostalgia. They say one should live for the present, but present life can be awfully degrading. Mind you, military doctrine has it that lucky generals are preferable to good ones, and that applies to marriages also. I’ve been lucky as hell: Alexandra has put up with my shenanigans for 51 years because I’ve never taken anything seriously where the fair sex is concerned, and have never preferred anyone to her. I have crushes all the time, chase skirt non-stop, but I’m a one-woman man. In fact, I think I should get an award from some marriage bureau or something. And I don’t care what anyone says, a stable home is the best thing one can give children.

A happy family is as good as it gets, but I’ve discovered another route to peace of mind and spirit: a total abstention from social media. About 15 or so years ago, while writing for a New York weekly that eventually morphed into Takimag, an online magazine run and edited by my daughter, I got a taste of the venom, hatred, malice and bile shown by the dregs of society if and when given the opportunity to display it. Unknowns would write in wishing people dead and telling the most egregious of untruths in order to make their sick point. Although I’ve been around more than most people, it was a first for me. I simply could not understand or believe how bitter and hateful people could be, especially when reading something they disagreed with or, in my case, when I described a lifestyle they could never afford or imagine living.

Envy must be at its most painful when there’s nothing the envious one can do about it. I am not about to change the way I live or the things I believe in, so the envious ones will just have to live with it. Oh yes, I almost forgot. I did away with the right to respond unless the complaint was valid. And I have never read or looked at anything online; never communicated on social media with anyone except The Spectator. Hence I’m a very happy man.

Britain’s recent darkest hour: the betrayal of the Chagos Islands

Philippe Sands’s compelling new book opens in 2018 at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, where Liseby Elysé – ‘a distinctive lady dressed in black’, who can neither read nor write – is making a video statement before 14 judges. In Creole, she describes how, in 1973, she and the last of her 1,500 fellow islanders from Peros Banhos (part of the Chagos archipelago, south of the Maldives) were forcibly deported to Mauritius. They were herded in the dark onto a boat for a four-day passage, with neither notice nor explanation given, restricted to one wooden trunk of possessions apiece, homes abandoned and all their pets rounded up and gassed. The boat’s captain said he had ‘never transported people in such terrible conditions’. Mme Elysé was four months pregnant, and later lost her child.

The author, a distinguished academic and barrister, then took to the podium, acting for the Mauritian government, and argued that this removal was illegal, as was the original British severance of the islands to set up a new colony in 1965, the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT), which is the subject of this succinct, impressive work. And it’s not some retrofitted anticolonial story, either: the matter is very much current, and unresolved.

For most of us, if we’ve heard of the Chagos at all it will be because of its militarised atoll of Diego Garcia, which became the site of a US base in 1971, nicely named Camp Justice. The first aircraft to land carried Bob Hope and a troupe of fellow entertainers. Later (after half a billion dollars had been spent developing it), the island apparently became a CIA ‘black site’ and part of the post-9/11 rendition system. Then, in 2003, it was the launch base for initial air strikes against Iraq.

‘I am not an independent observer,’ writes Sands. His own involvement with international law is one of the key elements of this saga, which has origins in the 1940s with the United Nations Charter, the setting up of its General Assembly and the new ICJ. Decolonisation and the treatment of ‘non-self-governing territories’ became a vital issue; and, as it had been at the Nuremberg trials, deportation was classified as ‘a crime against humanity’. (Two of the author’s great-grandmothers, each with a single suitcase, were deported by the Nazis and perished; his mother was a child refugee.)

When the European Convention on Human Rights was drawn up in 1950, Britain specifically excluded Mauritius from the list of colonies to which it applied. In 1953, the year Liseby was born, Sir Hilary Blood was the governor of what he termed his ‘pocket handkerchief paradise’. She recalled a happy, religious island upbringing: ‘We had everything we needed.’

With the deftness of marquetry, Sands lays down the groundwork of international law and its evolution during the Cold War, when he believes both Britain and America were selective and hypocritical in their attitudes toward UN policy. This particularly applied to the 1960 Resolution number 1,514, a few paragraphs about the granting of independence, which asserted: ‘All peoples have the right to self-determination.’ Both countries, which were covertly discussing security issues, abstained. So, when Mauritian independence was being negotiated, the strategic potential of Diego Garcia was kept secret, though the detachment of Chagos as part of a new BIOT colony was part of the deal.

Anticipating international criticism (not least disapproval from the UN, which was ignored), Britain falsely claimed that there was no ‘permanent population’ on the islands, which would have been puzzling news to the Chagossian diaspora that ensued. It is still unclear why we insisted on deporting the inhabitants of the entire archipelago, since the US only required the clearance of Diego Garcia itself. There has never been an apology. When he comes to discuss the Falklands, Sands unavoidably concludes: ‘One rule for whites, another for blacks.’ If there is an alternative interpretation, I’m sure Spectator readers would be interested to hear it.

One of the many merits of this intriguing account of how the case against Britain was finally brought to The Hague is its human focus (enhanced by Martin Rowson’s grand guignol illustrations), and the author’s emotional restraint. His indignation occasionally burns through into sarcasm, but the overall tone is steely. Despite the eventual ICJ ruling that Britain had acted unlawfully, all requests for resettlement have been resisted. Precious little of the promised compensation has been paid. It is probable that the government is looking for a way to back down without loss of face, but this continued intransigence seems shameful.

Earlier this year, Mme Elysé and some others revisited Peros Banhos for five emotionally charged days. Sands was of their party, and on the last page allows himself to write: ‘I find it hard to repress the sense of fury at the wrongs that have been done here.’ Yet you feel he has done the islanders proud.

The curse of Medusa: Stone Blind, by Natalie Haynes, reviewed

Natalie Haynes has been compared with Mary Renault, the historical novelist who scandalised readers in the 1950s with her unflinching portrayal of homosexual relationships in ancient Greece. While the comparison isn’t quite right – their prose styles could hardly be more different – Haynes is certainly alert to what rankles most deeply in modern society, and the ways in which these issues may shape attitudes to antiquity.

In Stone Blind, her retelling of the Medusa myth, women emerge from the other side of #MeToo and reveal the gods and heroes for the dolts and sexual predators they always were. ‘I’m moving because you’re sitting so close that your hip was touching mine and I didn’t like it,’ Athene explains to Hephaestus. A few moments later, the lame-footed god ejaculates on her thigh anyway, proving that even goddesses have a way to go in making their words count.

The sea god Poseidon is the creepiest. His attempted seduction followed by rape of the young Medusa, and his misreading of her sparring as a come-on, feel uncomfortably true to life. His brother Zeus is simply predictable. As his own wife reflects: ‘The only good thing about his sexual incontinence… was its extreme brevity.’ Zeus’s memories, too, are extremely shortlived. It takes Hera to remind him of the not insignificant fact that any son born to him by Metis will be capable of usurping his throne.

Writers have been mocking the moral duplicity of the gods since Homer. Haynes’s approach is more Ovidian in its self-knowledge and humour. Andromeda, one of the many characters she develops in what we might call Medusa’s social network, complains of being betrothed to her paternal uncle: ‘I don’t want to marry a man as old as my father – who even looks like my father.’ Haynes puts her former career as a stand-up comedian to particularly good use in a hilarious chapter on the Gorgons’ sisters, the Graiai, whose comedic potential is obvious once you know that they share a single eye and tooth.

Haynes’s previous novel, A Thousand Ships, was a bestseller. Stone Blind is in many ways a more daring and accomplished book, with multiple narrative viewpoints and even a literal talking head. Her women may be down on men, but there’s nothing overtly moralising in the way she presents them, nor forced about the modern sentiments she has them express. Less successful are the passages in which she address the reader directly with ‘you probably don’t need to know this but I’ll tell you anyway’ type pieces of mood-killing background knowledge. The narrative also meanders towards the end.

There’s real tenderness in Haynes’s portrait of Medusa, a mortal abomination born into a family of divinities, and the efforts of her immortal Gorgon sisters to protect her from herself. Athene is harder to pin down. A victim one moment, a vengeful goddess the next, her punishment of Medusa is horribly irrational, and not even Haynes is prepared to contort the myth to let her off the hook.

A.N. Wilson has many regrets

‘Spare thou them, O God, which confess their faults.’ A.N. Wilson seems, on the surface, to have taken to heart the wise words of the Anglican general confession.

Aged 71, he looks back on his life and career and records his regrets and failures both private and professional. His major concern is the failure of his marriage, at the age of 20, to Katherine Duncan-Jones, the Renaissance scholar. Katherine, ten years his senior, was a distinctive Oxford figure, recognisable by her sideways limp and for riding a wicker-basketed sit-up-and-beg bicycle. In later years they reconciled and met weekly for lunch. Wilson records Katherine’s sad, slow descent into dementia, which mimics that of one of his chief mentors, Iris Murdoch. Wretched to watch the destruction of great minds.

Most important of his regrets about his professional life are his indiscretion after lunch with the Queen Mother and his mischievous alteration of a book review by Bel Mooney for this magazine. The first made Katherine, among many others, very angry; the second earned him the sack as literary editor.

He now says that he cannot believe that the ‘young fogey’ of the 1970s and 1980s, dapper, elegantly suited, was him. He describes himself as thrustingly ambitious, full of himself and unfaithful not only to his wife but to his own better nature.

He was an ardent self-promoter. He cites the example of David Jenkins, Bishop of Durham, who, ‘showed addiction for cheap publicity’. Wilson reportedly said in the 1970s that he would be prepared to hang naked upside down from a hot-air balloon if it brought publicity. Naturally this eagerness to capture the public eye brought him enemies. He repelled them, and has done so since. He has been described as reptilian, with a venomous bite; his critical dismissals have been cruel.

Yet he became a prolific novelist, historian and biographer. One of his failures was as an academic. Paradoxically, it became a success, because he subsequently turned himself into a man of letters.

This autobiography has its high points, irrelevancies and irritations. Wilson’s exposure of the woefully Dickensian conditions of his prep school, described in another context as ‘a concentration camp run by sexual perverts’, is horrendous and timely. The paedophile headmaster, Rudolf Barbour Simpson, and his sadistic wife with her ‘casual infliction of pain’, are denounced. He reflects on ‘the strange British custom of sending children to boarding school’. Later, he recounts his experiences as a theological student at St Stephen’s House in Oxford. The camp, Firbankian description is written by an accomplished humourist; the mischievous, observant wit is clear and critical.

The failure to become an academic – his career having been largely undermined by one Anne Barton, ‘a strange, twitching, blinking, obese figure’ – may account for his later excoriation of academe. As a successful ‘jobbing journalist’, he castigates universities, which have descended into ‘weird’ institutions, and wonders why anyone would want to amass a £30,000 debt to attend one.

What does not entertain is Wilson’s telling so much of his family history. There are longueurs when one wants to shout, ‘I don’t need to know that’, or ‘so what?’ – an experience similar to reading Hermione Lee’s 992- page biography of Tom Stoppard. Still more annoying is the constant mention of ‘the great (but not necessarily) the good’ people he knows, which comes across as name-dropping. On one page alone, Ferdinand Mount, Terence de Vere White, ‘a wise old friend’, ‘my old friend’ Naomi Lewis, Craig Raine and Lord Snowdon all appear. Elsewhere, C.V. Wedgwood, Victoria Glendenning, Humphrey Carpenter, Tanya Harrod, Rowan Williams and many others are all ‘friends’.

Wilson sees himself as repentant, sceptical (‘to visit any library is to walk past a graveyard of the forgotten’) and religious – ‘as a confused and very disobedient Christian’ – but more agnostic as he grows older. His earlier waspishness has mostly disappeared. But the question remains: why write an autobiography? Is it through strong residual self-regard? The reappraisal of his life, his failures and mistakes, is admirable. Will he need to pen another consideration in five or ten years’ time if still scribbling?

Traces of the old venom are still there. He condemns his father’s unaesthetic successor as managing director of Wedgwood for ruinously transforming the company. Wilson is not easily going to find redemption while he wishes Sir Arthur Bryan a place in Dante’s Inferno, where demons stuff wet clay into Bryan’s mouth and shove ‘red-hot pokers up his arse’.

Ian McEwan’s capacity for reinvention is astonishing

McEwanesque. What would that even mean? The dark psychological instability of The Comfort of Strangers and Enduring Love? The gleeful comedy of Solar and Nutshell? The smart social realism of Saturday and The Children Act? The metafictional games of Atonement and Sweet Tooth? Ian McEwan’s brilliant capacity for reinvention is a hallmark of his literary career.

It’s simpler to say what McEwanesque is not: baggy, meandering, plotless, long. Yet all of these adjectives could be applied to his surprising new novel, Lessons. This cradle-to-grave (well, seven-ish to seventy-something) narrative concerns the life and times of Roland Baines, born, like McEwan, in 1948. Roland shares more than just a birth date with his author. Previous novels have made use of material from McEwan’s own life, but ‘autobiographical’ is another word we don’t associate with his fiction. Lessons represents a sustained and knowing flirtation with that mode.

When the novel opens, Roland is in his late thirties, sitting in an untidy house in Clapham, cradling his infant son. His wife Alissa has just vanished, leaving only a note: ‘I love you but this is for good. I’ve been living the wrong life.’

Behind Roland is an army childhood – Aldershot and Libya, same as McEwan – and then adolescence at ‘a boarding grammar school, run by London County Council’. Description of these early years is immersive and vivid. You sense the red blood of real memory pulsing behind such episodes as young Roland’s dread certainty that he’s going blind, a secret he keeps for two years (it turns out he just needs glasses).

The source for the school is there in the acknowledgements – Woolverstone Hall, where McEwan was a pupil – and an English teacher whose name appears in the text is thanked. Crucially, we also read: ‘No such piano teacher as Miriam Cornell was ever there.’ Beautiful young Miss Cornell disciplines the 11-year-old Roland harshly, but she also kisses him on the mouth. She becomes the object of his earliest fantasies, and when Roland is 14 they begin a fully-fledged, obsessive affair that ends only when he finally leaves school two years later. The damage is lasting. In adulthood, Roland believes that ‘the only happiness and purpose and proper paradise was sexual. A hopeless dream lured him on from one relationship to the next. If it had come real once, it could, it must do so again’.

Roland drifts through his early twenties, travelling and playing jazz piano; becomes an ‘ardent autodidact’; coaches tennis and smuggles records to friends in East Berlin. Then comes love, marriage and parenthood with Alissa. After her flight, there is a brief police investigation. Alissa is located, alive and well in her native Germany. She just wants to write novels and can’t contemplate combining that ambition with motherhood.

The second act of Roland’s footloose life begins. He gives up his own ambitions to become a poet and makes a lot of money in the greetings-card business, then loses it again. He re-encounters Alissa in Berlin immediately after the fall of the Wall. Her first novel is due out and she wants nothing to do with her former life. Roland begins a relationship with an old friend, Daphne. His father dies. Roland’s son grows up and visits his mother, who still doesn’t want to know him. Roland starts keeping a diary. Alissa becomes the pre-eminent German novelist, ‘bigger than Grass… almost as big as Mann’. Daphne goes back to her husband.

Memories of Miriam continue to haunt him. An old family mystery is resolved: Roland is contacted by a long-lost brother, born before his parents’ marriage and put up for adoption – as was McEwan’s bricklayer brother David Sharp, one of the book’s dedicatees. Roland’s mother dies. He finds work as a lounge pianist. The thing with Daphne starts up again. And so on, marching through the Blair years and 9/11 right up to the pandemic.

‘I’ve been living the wrong life.’ Lessons is a novel about alternate lives. What if, instead of an inspirational English teacher, the major figure of your schooldays was a sexually deviant piano teacher? What if you were a great writer – but you were also a woman, with harder choices to make in order to protect your gift? What if you were born to the exact same parents but you grew up in a completely different family?

Roland is haunted by the many-worlds theory, in which ‘the world divides at every conceivable moment into an infinitude of invisible possibilities… Somewhere out of sight they were all true’. Which is also, of course, how fiction works. Alissa issues a warning against overly literal readings, to us as well as to Roland, who is upset that one of her characters appears to be based on him. ‘Have I really got to give you a lesson in how to read a book? I borrow. I invent. I raid my own life. Everything that ever happened to me and everything that didn’t.’

This is a sprawling, branching narrative. There are dropped storylines, non sequiturs and apparently inadvertent repetitions. The messiness is not straightforwardly a detraction. All the haphazard shuttling back and forth makes for a rich texture, with people and places fading in and out of focus – just like memory, just like life.

More problematic are the regular lapses into McEwanese, an easier term to define than McEwanesque. You know what it means: those overbearing news bulletins that punctuate so many of the recent novels. ‘The Profumo affair was only a year away…’ It’s like someone constantly checking their watch. I understand that McEwan wants to give us a sense of the times that Roland is living through. But what we get are whole paragraphs in op-ed mode, great fatbergs clogging up the works.

The most egregious example occurs when Roland meets Alissa in Berlin. They haven’t spoken in years, and she says she has something to tell him. While he waits for her to speak, he reflects for half a page on the state of the world, which in 1989 feels hopeful. ‘Mrs Thatcher had demonstrated it at the UN – the political right had finally understood climate change and believed in action while there was still time…’ The commentary is intrusive and implausible at this moment of high personal drama. Too often, these incongruous asides rupture the delicate tissue of convincing consciousness. The summaries of the Covid crisis at the end of the novel are particularly tiresome.

The novel’s second half is notably slacker, as if an elite sprinter had signed up for a marathon and discovered around mile 16 that there’s more to this pacing business than he’d imagined. But Lessons is a consistently enjoyable read, written, for the most part, with McEwan’s fearsomely intelligent fluency. Roland’s shifting perspective on his own past is brilliantly done.

And the sheer novelty is entertaining – to be reading a McEwan that feels more like a William Boyd or a Jonathan Franzen. John Updike also comes to mind: all four Rabbit books rolled into one, a whistle-stop tour of the decades. Surely we have to applaud McEwan for breaking so boldly from type, and for daring to go long distance at this stage of his career. (Think of late Roth’s more circumspect page count.) Ultimately, the heft of Lessons is what lends it its power. Despite those op-eds, despite the rambling and the rushed patches, here is a whole, unruly life between the covers of single book: a literary feat of undeniable majesty.

Russia’s Ben Stiller ban is a sign of Putin’s desperation

What do Ben Stiller, Sean Penn, the chairman of the BBC, Piers Morgan, and, er, me, have in common? The answer is that we’ve all been banned from Russia. For some of us, that’s a blow. For others, an irrelevance. But for all of us, it’s a strange accolade: somehow Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin thinks we’re significant, dangerous or hostile enough to need to be kept out at all costs.

What level of insecurity does it take to worry that the screen Zoolander and Harvey Milk, respectively, represent a threat to the stability and integrity of the Russian Federation? And what desperation demands that this be done not quietly, if, as and when the need arose by simply denying a visa application (which is how all states can exclude unwanted visitors), but by a public, open-ended, formal ban?

Sean Penn, to be sure, famously said that he was ‘thinking about taking up arms against Russia’ (though he concluded that he wouldn’t). Likewise, Ben Stiller, joined the pilgrimage to Kyiv in June, gushing over Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky that ‘you are my hero.’

But seriously, so what? The array of Western luvvies eager to display their virtue by leaping on the armoured bandwagon, from Angelina Jolie to the ubiquitous Bono, is an inevitable as it is easy to mock. In some cases, it clearly does reflect a genuine commitment to the cause of Ukraine (in fairness, Stiller is ambassador for UNHCR, the UN refugee agency); in others, a cynic might suggest it is more about a genuine commitment to the cause of their own PR.

Ironically, though, it does matter. Arguably, the greatest danger to Kyiv is not some unexpected Russian military breakthrough, but Ukraine fatigue in the West. The flow of weapons and ammunition is clearly making a real difference on the battlefield, yet perhaps even more important is the financial support that is keeping the Ukrainian economy on life support. Already there have been some signs of faltering commitment.

Beset by soaring energy prices, weary of yet more overt and hidden tax hikes, desperate for some surcease, already many in the West are questioning the scale and nature of our commitment to Ukraine. Even while the Czech government applies draconian controls on Russian students at its universities, for example, 70,000 people protested in Prague, demanding an end to sanctions and new energy deals.

In this context, every little helps. It also helps explain – beyond his own presumed enjoyment of his new cult status as today’s Che Guevaraesque icon – Zelenskyy’s frequent appearances at cultural events from the Cannes Film Festival to the Grammy Awards. He is engaged in a desperate struggle to keep his country’s plight visible and relevant (and, for want of a better word, fashionable) in a West which has not in the past distinguished itself by its ability to maintain focus and discipline.

If a documentary from Sean Penn, or a gushing endorsement from Ben Stiller helps stiffen the sinews of policy makers in Brussels or wins over a voter in Bavaria, then this helps Ukraine’s cause.

Besides, there is also a degree of jealousy on Moscow’s part. It is hardly holding its own in this particular ‘star wars.’ Ukraine has a seemingly endless flow of boosters and cheerleaders, but who has Moscow got? Steven Seagal? Even the superannuated Gérard Depardieu, who received Russian citizen in 2013 in a ceremony in which Putin hugged him, has since broken with the Kremlin.

Russia’s bans are always framed as responses to perfidious Western sanctions. However, the West has been kicking out or excluding potential agents and propagandists like TV host Vladimir Solovyov, who has invoked the threat of nuclear Armageddon if Russia continues to be defied, or chair of the National Media Group board (and Putin’s alleged girlfriend) Alina Kabaeva. By contrast, Moscow seems desperately casting around for people to ban, often apparently regardless if they have ever travelled to Russia or show any signs of wanting to do so.

In an age when even luvvies can be weaponised, Russia is becoming aware that while it has in the past been very good at disrupting and undermining the policies and narratives of others, it is proving much less able to mobilise active support for itself. Banning Ben Stiller is a sign of the Kremlin’s weakness.

Truss’s appointments are ruffling Tory feathers

Liz Truss has started to appoint supporters of her leadership campaign rivals to ministerial positions, answering the demand (mostly from said supporters of her leadership campaign rivals) to ‘reach out’ across the party to bring the Conservatives back together. There are Rishi Sunak backers in the latest slew of jobs – Robert Jenrick returns to government as health minister, Jeremy Quin goes to the Home Office, Mark Spencer to Defra and Victoria Prentis goes to DWP – along with two who had previously backed Kemi Badenoch (Rachel Maclean goes to Justice and Julia Lopez goes to DCMS). In the interests of fairness and equality, there are a few Truss backers in there too, such as Jackie Doyle-Price and Conor Burns – though I suspect the latter will be disappointed to be moved sideways to the International Trade department. Burns spent much of the summer putting in much legwork setting up meetings designed to resolve the stand-off over the Northern Ireland Protocol.

There are a lot of sore Tories around at the moment. Many of them have chosen to focus on the top jobs all going to not only Truss’s backers but Truss’s pals, muttering variously that she’s ‘preparing to hit the ground’ and that she’s ‘already started our two-year-long decline’. There is a lot of talk today about Tories in marginal seats starting to contact headhunters as they anticipate losing their seats in the next election. 

Now, a lot of this is the sort of emotional outpouring you get after one side has lost a leadership contest and it is aggravated by the fact Truss didn’t win by as big and emphatic a margin as had been expected. What then tends to happen for the losing side is that the noisiest figures go off to the backbenches and have a period of silence and reflection (often, if Labour’s anti-Corbynites are anything to go by, growing a beard of grief) before working out when the most likely moment of vulnerability is for the victor and seizing on that.

Rishi Sunak has already given two parliamentary speeches, and the Commons has only been back for three days, so clearly less silence and more vocal reflection from him. A number of his supporters who were sacked from the government have said they plan to be ‘strong and independent voices’ on the backbenches, which suggests not much silence from them either. Clearly they currently think the point of vulnerability isn’t far off.

The following MPs have been appointed to junior ministerial roles:

• The Rt Hon Jesse Norman MP as a Minister of State in the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office; 
• Leo Docherty MP as a Minister of State in the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office;
• Tom Pursglove MP as a Minister of State in the Home Office;
• Jeremy Quin MP as a Minister of State in the Home Office;
• Jackie Doyle-Price MP as a Minister of State in the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy;
• The Rt Hon Conor Burns MP as a Minister of State in the Department for International Trade;
• The Rt Hon Mark Spencer MP as a Minister of State in the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs
• The Rt Hon Robert Jenrick MP as a Minister of State in the Department of Health and Social Care;
• Rachel Maclean MP as a Minister of State in the Ministry of Justice;
• Victoria Prentis MP as a Minister of State in the Department for Work and Pensions;
• Julia Lopez MP as a Minister of State in the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport;
• Michael Tomlinson MP as Solicitor General. 
• Paul Scully MP has been re-appointed as a Minister of State (Minister for London) in the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities.

Is long Covid all in the mind?

What’s the link between long Covid and mental health? A study just published in the Journal of the American Medical Association suggests it’s a significant one. The paper looked at more than 3,000 people who tested positive for Covid in the US. Of those who went on to develop ‘long Covid’, it found many of them already experienced mental distress before catching the virus.

The study looked at 3,193 people – mostly women – who reported Covid symptoms continuing four weeks after first falling ill. They found that those reporting long Covid were more likely to have already experienced a range of symptoms including ‘depression, anxiety, worry about Covid, loneliness and stress’ before they tested positive. The risk increased between 1.3 and 1.5 fold. Scientists say this shows an association between prior mental health conditions and symptoms of Covid that last for more than four weeks. They were keen to stress that this only means mental health may be a risk factor, not that it is one.

Speak to doctors and they’ll tell you they knew this from the start. One says it was fairly obvious early on that long Covid patients were suffering from anxiety. But as a long Covid lobby grew, it became a taboo for GPs to say this. 

That’s not to say there aren’t some who are suffering from a genuine physical condition. Post-viral fatigue (ME) is already a well-established disease, for example. The study’s authors don’t rule out physical mechanisms at play. One possibility is that pre-existing mental distress makes people’s bodies more susceptible to attack from the virus.

But they are adding to a growing pile of evidence. British researchers writing this June in the journal Nature found an increase in the odds of developing long Covid in people who already had anxiety and depression. That study of 6,907 Covid sufferers also found age, being female, white or obese were factors in longer-lasting virus symptoms. Women had a 50 per cent higher chance of developing these symptoms than men. It also found less-educated people were significantly less likely to have symptoms for more than three months. Interestingly though it found no link between long Covid and prior physical conditions such as diabetes, high blood pressure or high cholesterol.

In short, the most typical long Covid sufferer is a well-educated, obese white woman with a history of poor mental health. A less-educated non-white man is less likely to report having persistent symptoms. Other studies have found interesting associations too: in the US, a census study found 47 per cent of transgendered Covid sufferers reporting long Covid, compared with 39 per cent of women and 26 per cent of men. If you’re a child of a long Covid patient, your odds of reporting the condition went up too.

According to the ONS, a million Brits might suffer from the condition. Another study, React, put the number as high as three million in England alone. Millions of pounds have been poured into treating and researching it. But if the cause of many cases is found in the mind, not the body, then doctors may have been approaching treatment in the wrong way. 

Sickness is affecting the economy too. Britain’s labour shortages – a driver of inflation – are being driven by a rise in those on long-term sick leave. Some 43 per cent of the recent rise in economic inactivity (those not in work or looking for work) can be explained by sickness. While many of these people are languishing on NHS waiting list, a significant proportion will also be long Covid sufferers. Getting to the bottom of what long Covid really is can only be a good thing, for its sufferers and for the British economy.

Liz Truss’s first PMQs felt like a dress rehearsal

That felt like a dress rehearsal. Liz Truss sailed through her first PMQs which will probably be her easiest. It may turn out to have been her best. When she arrived, the House burst into ecstasies of joy as if she’d just found the cure for malaria, solved the Jack the Ripper case and liberated Hong Kong.

The questions lobbed at her were as soft as pizza dough, and each was prefixed with a note of congratulation and welcome. The mood was warm enough even to thaw the frost that covers Theresa May. Suspending her sulk for a moment she made an ironic observation. ‘Why does she think it is that all three female prime ministers have been Conservative?’

Liz improvised. ‘There doesn’t seem to be the ability in the Labour party to find a female leader. Or a leader who doesn’t come from north London.’ Not bad. That was her best moment. To defend herself, she’d come with promises for the future and excuses for the past. She claimed that the energy crisis was caused by ‘Putin’s war’ and by Labour’s failure to go nuclear while in office. Nothing to do with the Tories, then. Liz’s selective amnesia helped the Labour leader.

‘She nodded through every decision that got us into this mess,’ said Keir Starmer, ‘and now she says how terrible it is.’ He asked her to rule out a windfall tax on Big Oil. When she obliged he accused her of forcing taxpayers to fund profiteers. This is a caricature he loves to paint: smug lazy Tories handing billions to fatcats while shivering British kiddywinks go to sleep in damp, unheated hovels. And Starmer made it stick today. His tone of icy bemusement on behalf of helpless wage slaves gave him a real sense of moral authority. Which must be a novelty for him. When he faced Boris’s colourful and erudite clowning he seemed a grey, petulant, small-minded scold. But Liz is a weak orator and Starmer outclassed her without trying. She made him look poised, thoughtful and statesmanlike. He may well duff her up every week, but it’s too early to say because this was a party not a debate.

Peter Bottomley said he’d asked a question at PMQs in July and Boris had promised a meeting with the housing minister. ‘But,’ said Bottomley, ‘he resigned 17 minutes after hearing that’. Liz fluffed her reply but it scarcely mattered. Her ‘mind-the-gap’ style is not easy to warm to. She emphasises odd words and she uses a halting, barking tone as if trying to catch the attention of kids at the back who are texting. Her turn of phrase is banal. She relies on slogans that seem as stale as bottled fog.

‘A positive future… get Britain moving… high-skill high-wage jobs… investment across the country…’ Her clothes were a success. A tunic of Thatcherite blue, naturally. A lapel badge showing the flags of the UK and Ukraine fused together like conjoined twins. Her white shirt was accented with ruff-like frills at the collar and cuffs. An Elizabethan touch which was doubtless a pun on her name.

Throughout the session, there were smiles all around the chamber. And not just on the faces of the new cabinet of Liz trusties. Labour backbenchers were grinning from ear to ear as well. Especially the women. The Age of Truss makes the election of another male Labour leader an impossibility. Today the dreams of Andy Burnham vanished in a puff of Liz.

Sturgeon’s rent controls will hurt Scots

It’s all getting a bit Latin American in Britain and not in a good way. Inflation is stuck stubbornly in the double digits, the current account deficit is at record levels, our new Prime Minister is preparing to spend the annual budget of the NHS on subsidising energy purchases, and regional separatists are tightening their grip on the Scottish economy by introducing price controls. At least the weather’s still good.

Nicola Sturgeon’s plan to freeze all rents in Scotland would be a disaster for Scots. Economists almost universally agree that rent control is one of the worst possible ways the government can intervene in a housing market. The short-term consequences are predictable; the policy freezes the price of renting and puts a moratorium on evictions. This makes people who have a property to rent better off; it makes people looking for somewhere to rent worse off.

When rents are held below market prices, two things happen. The first is that landlords start to withdraw their properties from the market; if you can’t evict a tenant who won’t pay and aren’t earning enough profit after covering your mortgage and upkeep, it doesn’t make a great deal of sense to rent a property out. Far better to wait for prices to go up again, or convert it into owner-occupied housing and sell it. This preserves the total stock of housing but results in misallocation between short-term rentals – ideal for people who don’t really want to live in an area for more than a few years and long-term purchases.

The second is that the number of people looking to rent in an area at an artificially low price will start to exceed the number of houses available to rent. This makes house hunting an even more frustrating experience than it already is, with people traipsing from viewing to viewing to find an available property. For the wider economy, with people unable to live in the areas where their best job offers are, productivity starts to drop.

There are some ways of hiding these short-term effects. Some landlords will cut corners, scrimping on maintenance and furnishings to restore their profit margins. Others might simply take the loss this year, hoping for a return to normality later. The long-term consequences are much worse. Once a government has intervened on one pretext, it’s more likely to do it again in the future. Sturgeon’s decision has just substantially reduced the value of building new houses in Scotland, exacerbating the long-run supply issues that have driven rents up in the first place. The longer the controls stay in place, the worse things get.

The socialist economist Assar Lindbeck famously commented that ‘rent control appears to be the most efficient technique presently known to destroy a city – except for bombing’. This was wrong in one important sense; the Blitz, in the longer term, made London substantially wealthier by removing obstacles to building massive skyscrapers filled with productive office drones. It’s an impressive testament to Britain’s ability to make the best of a situation; even the Luftwaffe’s bombings eventually became another marker of our absolute triumph. Rent controls on the other hand have never made a city richer, although in Vietnam it eventually did to Hanoi what American bombs never could.

The continuing popularity of rent controls – see Sadiq Khan’s endorsement earlier in the year – speaks to one of the biggest failure modes in British politics: mistaking prices for a sort of morality play. In this framework, prices go up because landlords or companies are greedy and squeezing profit from the consumer; when they come down things become magically abundant. Imagine how much better off you’d be if we simply fixed the price of electricity at £0!

The actual answer of course is that you wouldn’t have any electricity; there would be no supply. The price mechanism might not be popular, but it does actually work to make sure that there’s food on the shelves when you go to the shops. Prices go up when demand is high and they go down when supply is abundant; they work to match the two together.

What politicians don’t seem to understand is that every economic system has some way of allocating resources that takes into account the basic reality that supply is finite, while human wants are not. If you don’t have prices, then you allocate by good luck, by queueing, by rationing, by state planning and corruption, or by any number of other ways. None of these have proved to work as well as prices do. And when politicians interfere with the price mechanism, they increase the role of these other mechanisms in deciding who gets what. In the long run, this leaves everyone worse off.

Liz Truss revealed her weakness at PMQs

In her first Prime Minister’s Questions, Liz Truss said that before she was anything else she was ‘on the side of people who work hard and do the right thing’. In response, Keir Starmer showed that Labour’s first task was to make clear that she was nothing of the sort.

And I suspect he will have the easier time of it. For a Prime Minister to portray herself as the faithful friend of Big Oil is – how to put this politely? – a ‘brave strategy’ at the best of times. It looks terrible when fuel prices and the national debt are in a race to see which can inflate the fastest.

As I wrote on these pages a few days ago, Labour will regroup after losing the sitting target of Boris Johnson. It will attack Truss for being in the pocket of big business and for taking risks with the nation’s finances. The opposition’s mingling of critiques from the left and right would not normally hang together. However, they make sense in the crisis of 2022.

Starmer began by pointing to the unconfirmed Treasury estimate that fuel companies will make £170 billion excess profits over the next two years. Why should they be allowed to keep money Vladimir Putin has effectively gifted them when working families suffer?

When pollsters last asked the question in May, 63 per cent of respondents supported a windfall tax – including a majority of Conservative voters. I suspect more would today. The money for the astonishing subsidies we must find to hold fuel costs down has to come from somewhere, why shouldn’t the energy giants pay their share?

For all her admirable support for Ukrainian resistance to Russian imperialism, Truss and an influential section of Conservative opinion still does not understand that we are at war with Putin. It may be an economic rather than a shooting war, but it is war nevertheless, and no wartime prime minister ought to have the slightest hesitation in requiring contributions from powerful conglomerates engaged in unvarnished profiteering.

It is foolish to make predictions on the first full day in the office of a new Prime Minister, but you can guess how Truss will suffer if she does not change course. Unlike Johnson in the covid crisis, she will not be able to count on the opposition endorsing her policy. Whatever other troubles he faced during the pandemic, the last prime minister did not have to worry about Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the SNP going for the fundamentals of his lockdown strategy in news broadcast after news broadcast, day after day.

Truss will be exposed. She will find herself under constant attack by rivals delivering a simple populist message: don’t make working people pay big business’s bills.

Now I don’t doubt Conservative readers nodded along to her response in the Commons that Labour just wanted to raise taxes, as it always did.

The charge may once have had force, but it doesn’t wash today. Under Truss’s plans, voters will have to pay for the cost of the subsidies one way or another – either directly through higher taxes or indirectly through jacked-up fuel bills. The question is not should there be higher taxes, but who should be taxed.

Nor do I imagine that all the businesses staring at incredible rises in their costs think it is somehow ‘anti-business’ for Labour to suggest that the energy companies should be required to pay back profits they have made at the expense of everyone else

Then we come to the money markets. They are not remotely concerned about the danger of windfall taxes deterring investment. What could push us from an inflation crisis into a full-scale financial crisis is their belief that the government is losing control of borrowing. Truss looks as if she is ready to confirm their fears. She is proposing to fund fuel subsidies with borrowing and then fund tax cuts with borrowing, in particular by failing to go ahead with a corporation tax rise proposed by the former chancellor Rishi Sunak.

Add in the new administration’s reckless willingness to risk a trade war with the European Union over Northern Ireland, and we could soon be at the stage where the financial markets would prefer a Labour to a Conservative government. Don’t raise your eyebrows too high. Advisers to Rachel Reeves, the shadow chancellor, are claiming that significant sections of British business already do.

As I said, it is churlish and foolish to damn a new Prime Minister on her first full day in office. But her defence of the beneficiaries of Putin’s war, her careless unwillingness to protect the public finances, and her indifference to the burdens the crisis has played on the majority of voters suggest that she has already made a monumental blunder.

Liz Truss should increase Universal Credit

Liz Truss’s plans for a two-year energy bill freeze, estimated to cost £100 billion, underscore three points. One, the incoming Prime Minister expects the energy crisis to be with us for more than one winter. Two, she grasps how lethal it will be to the Tories’ hopes of re-election if the Treasury doesn’t intervene in a big way. Three, she is prepared to run up government debt even further in order to mitigate a crisis that threatens people’s quality of life. This third point is the crucial one.

When a neo-Thatcherite like Truss concedes the merits of transformative interventions funded by borrowing, it opens up a broader conversation. If the Treasury can burn through a few more national credit cards to buy the Tories a fighting chance in 2024, why can’t it do the same in areas where there is at least as much need but not the same chance of political reward?

Take poverty. Absolute child poverty currently stands at 23 per cent but the Resolution Foundation forecasts an increase to 31 per cent by 2023-24, which works out at 1.3 million more children living in poverty. Bear in mind, under the terms of the 2010 Child Poverty Act, we are supposed to have less than five per cent of children living in absolute poverty by this point. Overall absolute poverty is heading from 17 per cent to 22 per cent in the same timeframe. That means an additional three million Britons living in poverty between last year and next year, when the headline figure will hit 14 million. Again, these figures don’t describe relative poverty, poverty measured against median incomes today, but absolute poverty, where families are living on less than 60 per cent of the median income more than a decade ago, adjusted for inflation.

Poverty is a moral evil but it is also a social evil. Given what we know about the ripple effects of poverty on health and education outcomes, on family and community cohesion, and on crime and drug and alcohol dependency, no conservative worth his or her salt can tolerate these levels of deprivation. Funnel as much cash as you want into the health service, schools and policing, but unless you tackle poverty, you’re just pouring water into a bucket with a hole in the bottom.

Naturally, Tories want to emphasise wealth generation, job creation and lower taxes, and, deployed correctly, these can be useful anti-poverty tools. But applied in isolation, they merely alter the size of the bucket without reducing the size of the hole. Fiscal interventions are essential if you want to reduce the proportion of the population living in poverty. Truss needn’t abandon her economic instincts; she can complement them with a different kind of fiscal tool. She has already committed to scrapping the outgoing government’s hike in National Insurance Contributions, which is expected to cost £13 billion, but this would have no impact on the incomes of Britain’s poorest families. The Prime Minister could buttress an NI tax cut with a cash transfer that gives some relief to those doing it tough.

What might such an intervention look like? We have a recent example thanks to the Treasury’s Universal Credit uplift, a pandemic-era policy that put an extra £20 a week in the pockets of the worst-off. The impact? Some 400,000 children were lifted out of relative poverty. Instead of consolidating these gains, the government withdrew the uplift. Restoring it would cost £6 billion, a significant outlay but roughly five per cent of what Truss is prepared to spend freezing energy bills and half the cost of giving less deprived people a tax cut. Inflation means a new uplift would probably not lift the same number of children out of poverty, but that is an argument for supplementing it with proposals like those from the Resolution Foundation for twice-annual uprating of Universal Credit, lifting the benefit cap in line with consumer price inflation and boosting local housing allowances by rental price growth.

This would mark only the beginning of the interventions needed, and a modest beginning at that, but it would numb some of the current and coming financial pain for the poor, and especially children in poverty. Built upon with enough political will and fiscal ambition, it could bring about a substantial reversal in poverty trends.

What’s the point in making this case? Liz Truss is never going to go for it, is she? Maybe not, but the case should be made all the same. Conservatives, particularly since the Thatcher years, have consistently espoused (though less consistently delivered) fiscal continence. Yet a conservative philosophy of life and government should be at least as concerned with social continence, given the correlations between inequality and crime, family breakdown, and drug misuse. It is in the interests of the Conservative government, and the sort of society conservatives wish to see, to reduce the economic circumstances that lead to unconservative outcomes.

In her victory speech yesterday, Liz Truss said she ‘campaigned as a Conservative’ and would ‘govern as a Conservative’. In her first major policy measure, she has signalled that her conservatism is capable of being pragmatic. The question is whether Truss’s pragmatism only extends to the electoral needs of the Conservative party or whether it can be put in service of a conservative conception of the common good.

Why Liz Truss’s political journey matters

As is now well known, Liz Truss has travelled politically. Her parents are left-wing, and there is a photograph of her as a child posing with them and their CND banner in Paisley. She herself was active in the Liberal Democrats. Professor Truss is reportedly upset that his daughter became a Conservative.

I can identify with this story a little since both my parents were/are (my mother is still alive) ardent Liberals and I fear my own move to the right – though never really a party-political thing – upset them. Parents tend to be more upset by children moving to their right than to their left. This is because non-conservative politics is pseudo-religious. It sees political allegiance as a test of virtue and political programmes as means of salvation. If your child moves to your right, you may think it immoral and fear your darling has been corrupted by bad company. My Liberal parents were/are equally opposed politically to Labour and the Conservatives, but it was only the Tories they called ‘wicked’.

For the offspring making the move, it is upsetting to upset one’s parents (even if one’s rebelliousness is partly intentional) but it may make one think harder about what politics is. Liz Truss’s change of allegiance may explain the relish which she brings to new policies – always testing, always searching.

There was mockery on the BBC because Boris and Liz Truss had to go to Balmoral to effect the change of prime minister. It was a waste of time to go so far to see the Queen, was the implication. I should have thought the sight of Deeside might assist calm reflection. It is also good for the Union that you can be made Prime Minister of the United Kingdom in Scotland.

The new Prime Minister shows herself an ‘ally’ of diversity by including among her appointees to the great offices of state a member of an increasingly marginalised minority, Old Etonians. When first a candidate in Spelthorne in the 2010 election, Kwasi Kwarteng was often stigmatised for this disadvantaged background. So he felt nervous when, in a supermarket car park, he was approached by a tattooed, shaven-headed, middle-aged white man.‘ ’ere,’ the man said, ‘is it true you didn’t go to a normal school like us ordinary people: you was at Eton?’ Kwasi anxiously assented. ‘Good,’ said the man, ‘I don’t want the country run by bloody oiks.’

As I write, the new government is about to launch its plan for energy prices. Last week, our coal merchant Steve rang me. Would I like a big pile of coal? He was contacting his regular customers first, because from spring next year it will be illegal for him to sell the stuff. His price increase of about 15 per cent on my last load seemed deliriously low. I gratefully settled for as much as my cellar could fit. The coal ban will be seen by history as a small example of how our energy policy was blind to emerging realities, like the British guns facing the wrong way at Singapore.

Which brings me to the interesting case of Michael Gove, who is leaving frontline politics. In many ways, this was sad news. Gove was probably the most original and certainly the most experienced minister in the administration. Except for a short break, he was in the cabinet for 12 years, longer than giants of the past like Nigel Lawson or, come to think of it, Tony Blair or David Cameron. No one understood Whitehall better, was more helpful across departments, is more acute as an analyst of politics. He could also be bold, as his education policy and his decision to back Brexit proved. But somehow it all got too complicated and perhaps too driven by fashion. Possibly I over-obsess (who doesn’t, now?) about the excessive price of energy, but on the subject of net zero, I feel that Gove, who even sought, as Defra secretary, to ban wood-burning stoves, neglected Enoch Powell’s famous dictum that ‘The supreme function of statesmanship is to provide against preventable evils’. Britain cannot unilaterally prevent the evil of climate change (if, indeed, it is evil), nor unite the world against it. It most certainly does have the power to provide against the evil of energy insecurity and consequent price vulnerability. Yet, backed by Michael Gove’s eloquence, it refused to do so.

This year’s AGM of the National Trust on 5 November will see a determined effort by the growing Restore Trust movement to challenge the extraordinary level of control exercised by the Trust’s management. The preparations already show how concerned that management is. Each candidate for the council has to submit a short manifesto. One, Philip Gibbs, who is backed by Restore Trust, was surprised to be told that his manifesto was being altered. A ‘governance support coordinator’ (the NT has numerous titles of this sort) emailed him attempting to water down his criticism of the proxy vote system by which the chairman can outvote resolutions he does not like. The governance man tried to make him say that it should be reviewed rather than abolished. Mr Gibbs refused.

Sometimes a phrase – ‘perfect storm’, ‘shock and awe’, ‘tipping point’ etc – gains currency and people overuse it. At present, the buzz phrase is ‘Overton window’. It is named after an American thinktanker, Joseph Overton, who, before his sadly premature death, devised it. The window is the range of mainstream ideas which the public will, at a given time, accept. Politicians who wish to change opinion must squeeze their policies to fit in this window. As a description of opinion, this may be a helpful concept, but as a rule of conduct, it is repressive. It suggests that a new idea can succeed only if smuggled in. It therefore discourages clear original thinking and encourages deception. Right now, when radical thinking is so needed, it is the opposite of an idea whose time has come.

Liz Truss’s well-scripted first PMQs

Liz Truss’s first Prime Minister’s Questions was well-scripted, both for the new Tory leader and Keir Starmer. They had come along planning to talk about the cost of living crisis: Truss so that she could reassure the public (and her own party) that ‘immediate action to help people with their bills’ was on the way, and Starmer to probe her on how she was going to pay for it. The exchanges worked for both of them this time around.

Because Truss is going for an energy price freeze – proposed by Labour – Starmer had to move his attack from ‘what are you going to do’ to ‘how are you going to do it’. He told the Chamber that the ‘real choice, the political choice, is who is going to pay’ and that Truss’s refusal to contemplate a windfall tax would ‘make working people pay’ while leaving the excess profits of the energy companies ‘on the table’. The Prime Minister for her part argued that ‘this country cannot tax its way to growth’ and that ‘the Right Hon. gentleman is looking at this the wrong way’. When Starmer accused her of being the same as her predecessor, she retorted that ‘there is nothing new about a Labour leader who is calling for more tax rises’, saying Starmer didn’t understand aspiration or that people wanted to keep more of their own money. She sat down looking pleased with the lines she had produced – as did Keir Starmer.

Judging by the mood of many Tory MPs I’ve been speaking to over the past 24 hours, Truss is going to have a rocky ride from the very start. But one of her potential critics chose a kind question to start. Theresa May visibly enjoyed her new incarnation as a backbench scrutineer of her successor, but today asked Truss why it was that all three female prime ministers have been Conservative. This allowed the new PM to bask in her success – something she won’t have much of a chance to do given the challenges she faces – and wind up Labour on an issue of intense discomfort to them.

But even though Tory MPs weren’t openly hostile, the number of questions seeking reassurance about energy bills in particular showed how anxious they are. There were also plenty of questions across the House asking about her approach to the Northern Ireland Protocol, to which she gave a very similar answer to the one in the campaign. That line is that her preference is for a negotiated solution but that it would need to address all the issues raised. And there were plenty of questions about the NHS, too, to which she promised Therese Coffey would have a solution. There was also a response to a Spectator concern. In response to one question about the Online Safety Bill, Truss confirmed that she will be pressing ahead with it but that there were ‘issues’ that needed to be addressed, including the impact on free speech.

It’s worth pointing out, though, that when a backbench Labour MP called on Truss to hold an immediate general election, very few of her colleagues on the opposition benches looked at all pleased by this suggestion. It’s almost as though the fear that the poll lead Labour is currently enjoying over the Tories might still prove rather soft when voters are asked to make the big choice.

Tory ministers shouldn’t fall for these purity tests

Liz Truss’s ministers had not even got their feet beneath the cabinet table before they were treated to a barrage of objections to their appointments. Talk about playing the man rather than the ball. No sooner had Jacob Rees-Mogg been appointed business secretary than Caroline Lucas was declaring him unfit for the position because he has previously expressed sceptical views on climate change. She didn’t even wait to learn that Rees-Mogg will not, in contrast to his predecessor Kwasi Kwarteng, also hold the climate brief, which has gone to Graham Stuart. Meanwhile, Clare Murphy of the British Pregnancy Advisory Service lashed out at Therese Coffey’s appointment on the grounds that Ms Coffey committed the dastardly sin of voting against the extension of making abortion pills available through the post – a temporary measure during the pandemic. ‘We need a health secretary who wants to improve access to a medical procedure that one in three women will need in their lifetime, not impose further restriction,’ said Murphy.

This is how politics works nowadays. Many on the left deal less with arguments than in trying to undermine the legitimacy of their opponents. They try to impose a set of beliefs to which everyone in a public position must adhere. Anyone who fails to do this is beyond the pale, and is unsuitable for public office.

One of these subjects is abortion – or ‘reproductive rights’ as it has been branded by activists who want to deflect attention from what abortion actually entails. Anyone who privately holds views against abortion will be attacked for their suitability for public office even if they are not seeking to change the law, as Coffey has made clear she is not. The same treatment was meted out to Maria Miller when she was appointed minister for women in 2012, with one columnist trying to argue that her belief that the abortion limit should be reduced from its current level (it already is much lower in most countries) made her ‘unsuitable’ to be women’s minister.

These sentiments are, in effect, trying to take us back to the 18^th century when Catholics were still barred from standing for parliament. As for climate change, there seems to be an underhand campaign to try to exclude from office anyone who disagrees with Britain’s legally-binding net zero target by 2050 – something which only a handful of countries, representing a tenth of global carbon emissions – have agreed to emulate. Even former leadership candidate Kemi Badenoch, who has called the net zero target ‘unilateral economic disarmament’ felt obliged to agree to a pledge to keep the target when put under pressure by campaigners.

Why do Conservative ministers fall for these attempts to manipulate them by trying to make them sign pledges? There is only one proper answer for an election candidate when a campaign groups sticks a pledge beneath your nose: tell them to stuff it, in a terribly polite way. Tell them that you will be making up your own mind on policy and not be tied down by pledges. You would have thought that MPs would have learned this after Nick Clegg, prior to the 2010 election, signed a pledge that he would not raise tuition fees. But apparently not. Pledging to stick to net zero by 2050 will, especially, prove to be a hostage to fortune when, as is pretty inevitable, the 2050 target has to be revisited.

Inside Liz Truss’s No. 10 shakeup

How 10 Downing Street works – or doesn’t – always reflects the character of the prime minister who inhabits it. Boris Johnson’s No. 10 was chaotic and scandal-ridden. Theresa May’s indecision meant that hers was led by the will of her strong-minded advisers, not by her own agenda. David Cameron’s was slick, but last-minute. Liz Truss served in government under all three of them, and so witnessed all three approaches. She wants her Downing Street to be different.

Even before Truss entered Downing Street on Tuesday, change was under way. After No. 10 earned a reputation in the past year as a louche place full of late-night drinking, aides have been told that the government is smartening up: there will be a shirt-and-tie dress code. But the more important change is structural. The old policy unit has been drastically slimmed down. The delivery unit, the data team and legislative affairs have been moved. In their place is a new economic unit whose role is to help Truss and her Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng take on the ‘Treasury orthodoxy’ that Truss spent so much of her leadership campaign railing against.

In a bid to strengthen the relationship between Truss and her most important ministers, new offices are being created in Downing Street for both Wendy Morton, the new chief whip, and Thérèse Coffey, the Deputy Prime Minister. ‘We’ve blown up the No. 10 floor plan,’ says an aide. The idea is to create a leaner, nimbler operation. And slimming down doesn’t just set an example to other departments; it’s also intended to create higher accountability. Truss views a new economic approach as crucial to her premiership.

As well as appointing a like-minded Chancellor in her old friend Kwarteng, she wants No. 10 to have far more economic oversight. As such, Matthew Sinclair is joining as her chief economic adviser. Truss knows Sinclair from his thinktank days, when he was director of the Taxpayers’ Alliance and specialised in attacking wasteful government spending.

History shows that such a move can lead to friction. Nigel Lawson quit as chancellor over Alan Walters’s role as Margaret Thatcher’s economic adviser. Aides believe Truss and Kwarteng are too closely aligned to have such issues (his mantra in the role is ‘facilitate, not emasculate’) and that he too needs backup to fight Treasury officials who are instinctively opposed to the deficit financed tax cuts which have become Truss’s signature policy.

The No. 10 operation will be led by Mark Fullbrook, a political strategist who set up a business with Lynton Crosby. The appointment is not without criticism seeing as Fullbrook has little experience of government and isn’t exactly a Truss loyalist. He worked for two of her leadership rivals this summer – Nadhim Zahawi, then Penny Mordaunt – before joining her team. However, the view is that a senior figure (he’s 60) was needed given the relative youth of Truss’s longer standing aides. Fullbrook is regarded as a unifier, who is liked by many Tory MPs. ‘He’s good at boosting team morale,’ says a colleague. ‘He is happy to celebrate others’ achievements.’

The Prime Minister’s circle is tight-knit. Her advisers bonded over group dinners at Chevening – the country house used by foreign secretaries – as she made her plans for government. ‘There are about ten aides with key roles,’ says one member of Truss’s inner circle. After the official victory party for supporters on Monday night in Cannon Street, Truss and her closest staff ended up going back to Admiralty House for a private drink. Already some MPs say they feel sidelined.

Loyalty has become a defining part of Truss’s government. Her cabinet is largely made up of those who backed her for the leadership and there are almost no Rishi Sunak supporters. The purge has upset those MPs who now think they will be left out in the cold. ‘Her margin of victory wasn’t huge. She should have acknowledged that and reached out,’ says one who backed Sunak.

The preference for loyalty runs deeper still. Ministers have been told they cannot hire aides without approval from Fullbrook. Already some candidates have been vetoed.

If Truss appoints people she trusts, it should mean in theory that she will be able to devolve decisions. The restructure is meant to empower cabinet ministers. She would like most policy to come from departments, working closely on her clear instructions. Part of the reason for the slimming down of the No. 10 policy unit is a view that it creates policy for the sake of it.

Should the devolving fail, it will fall to her enforcer-in-chief to push things through: Zahawi, the new head of the Cabinet Office, who is a close ally of Fullbrook. The delivery unit is now under his watch, where he is reunited with the civil servant Emily Lawson, with whom he worked on the vaccine rollout. ‘If Kwasi is going to be a chief finance officer, Zahawi will be a chief operating officer,’ explains an ally. Zahawi has had to work quickly on a charm offensive given that many of the civil servants he has inherited feel rather snubbed to have been pushed out of No. 10. In Whitehall, proximity is regarded as power.

Trying to slim down the operation isn’t a new idea. Lots of prime ministers have started off doing it, only to bulk up staff numbers as they run into problems. Some of Truss’s supporters are speculating that the No. 10 roles will change before the year is out. But for now, she wants not just to lead by example but also to make sure that those around her are people she can rely on – the people who got her into No. 10 in the first place.

If her approach goes to plan, her Downing Street will be hailed as a nimble and lean operation. If things start to go wrong, it will be criticised as short-staffed and inexperienced. With so many crises ahead, the verdict might not be long in coming.

Who cares about Liz Truss’s ‘diverse’ cabinet?

‘Great offices of state set to contain no white men’ was the way one national newspaper reported the formation of the first Truss cabinet. In addition to Liz Truss, the positions of Chancellor, Foreign Secretary and Home Secretary would respectively be held by Kwasi Kwarteng, James Cleverly and Suella Braverman.

Of course, all this was presented as something incredibly new and exciting: real progress at work. In fact it isn’t remotely new. As Chancellor, Kwarteng follows those two famous white men Rishi Sunak and Nadhim Zahawi. As Home Secretary, Braverman succeeds Priti Patel and Sajid Javid. And now that Truss is Prime Minister she is the first woman to relieve us from male-dominated rule for a full three years. Also, after Theresa May, thank God a woman is back in charge, eh?

Nevertheless the diversity lobby remains ecstatic at the sheer diverseness of it all. Sunder Katwala, who runs a group called British Future, told the Times:

‘The most striking thing is how ordinary and extraordinary it is at the same time. This is an extraordinary pace of change even in two or three years, never mind a decade.’

And needless to say that is the only way to talk about this. The more the dastardly white man recedes into the background, the more positive change we will be undergoing. It reminds me of Ken Livingstone when he was mayor of London once telling me how thrilled he was that something like a third of Londoners were born outside of the UK. You got the distinct impression that he wouldn’t be happy until absolutely everybody in capital was not born in Britain.

All of this, naturally, is laced with false presumptions. For example, there is the notion that being a female leader is in some way better than being a male one. There are three reasons that somebody might think – or pretend to think – this. First, that since men have had the field for so long it is time to give women a turn; second, that the only post-war PM with any cojones was Margaret Thatcher and so the more female prime ministers you elect, the more likely you are to get another Thatcher; third – the view I call Christine Lagarde-ism – that women are the same as men and also magically better. (Lagarde, you may remember, often said that if Lehman Brothers had been Lehman Sisters, the crash of 2008 might never have happened. Because as every man reading this will know, women are preternaturally incapable of spending money unwisely.)

But the diversity cult has other presumptions too. It supposes that people who are not white bring some other types of perspective to their roles. ‘Diversity is our strength’ has long been one of the Pravda-style mantras of our era. Yet while diversity may bring some benefits, they are certainly not endless.

Nor is diversity necessarily transmitted through skin pigmentation. Kwarteng, for instance, was educated at Colet Court, Eton and Cambridge. Is it likely that he will bring a whole new set of insights to his new post by dint of his ‘diversity’? I would be surprised. Kwasi’s parents came to the UK from Ghana, and if the diversity lobby believe it would be advantageous were he to bring some Ghanaian economics to the mix, I have some history to tell them. Most likely Kwarteng’s ideas will reflect the education he received. His race will have nothing to do with it.

In any case, this is all such patronising rubbish. We have already had three years of Boris Johnson boasting about appointing the most diverse cabinet ever. And now it looks as if we are going to have another few years of Tories boasting about how wildly diverse they are. They will keep pointing out that Labour has never been led by anyone other than a white man. And yet despite all this, Labour MPs will still accuse the government of institutional racism. The entire Conservative party could to a man and woman be the product of Ghanaian parents and the whitey-white Labour would not change its line.

But there is another aspect of the diversity issue that needs to be mentioned – and that is the vast demoralising effect it has on the portion of the British population who are still the majority in this country. One of the problems with the more-diversity-the-better mantra is that it makes white people, and white men in particular, feel like they are not just a problem but the problem. As though their main task in life is to get out of the way.

Many prominent race hucksters across this country actually say as much: because white men did so many things in the past, white men today must step aside and allow other people to take positions of power. Of course, they will not be expected to step aside when it comes to tasks such as road-laying, pylon-fixing, refuse-collecting or any number of other low-income, low-esteem jobs. White men will still be permitted to do them. But in the rest of life it is time to back off.

There can be only two possible results from this. One is that in the name of diversity you demotivate most of the people in your country, and therefore most of the talent. The other is that you store up resentment among majority populations who over time come to notice that they are being passed over, talked down to and treated as less than. This would be a stupid thing to do to a minority community. To do it to a majority community is madness.

We shall see how our new cabinet performs. But if it gets on top of the numerous problems that our country faces, it will be because of the skill and ability of the people involved. After all, that has to be the case doesn’t it? Because if they fail, will it be down to the ‘diversity’? As they say, to ask the question is to answer it.

Britain after Boris: Coffee House Shots Live, with Andrew Neil, Fraser Nelson, Katy Balls, James Forsyth and Kate Andrews takes place on 13 September. To book tickets click here

How do you screw up a movie about Hunter Biden?

Hunter Biden is a great cinematic character: the loser son of an elite career politician who bounces between semi-powerful jobs on the strengths of his contacts and his name while inhaling mountains of drugs and banging prostitutes. How can you make a bad film about that?

Well, somehow the creators of My Son Hunter have pulled it off. Produced by filmmakers Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney, directed by Robert Davi, starring British actor cum right-wing commentator and Reclaim party founder Laurence Fox and distributed by Breitbart, the movie will please only people whose politics have compelled them to do so.

The script is the big problem. Within the first few minutes of My Son Hunter, the viewer is beaten round the head with well-worn tropes of right-wing discourse. A newsreader reporting on violent Black Lives Matter demonstrations calls them ‘mostly peaceful protests.’ Two protestors tell each other they are on the ‘right side of history.’ Joe Biden smells a woman’s hair. The audience is presumably expected to clap like a seal and say, ‘I get that reference!’ The screenwriter thinks that you — the viewer — are that easy to impress.

The plot largely concerns Hunter’s laptops and the Bidens’s shady dealing with the Ukrainian holding group Burisma and the Chinese. I’m not going to dig into the truth of whether criminality was involved. After all, it is a film. The problem is that the plot has been constructed from an insane amount of smug, tedious exposition — largely delivered by poor, wasted Carano and a hulking black security guard who delivers lines such as, ‘turns out Devin got convicted for a conspiracy to commit security fraud against the Native American tribe of the Oglala Sioux nation, but he claims he’s not a racist.’ No, it doesn’t sound any more natural when he says it.

Joe Biden is portrayed as being a sort of jovial, slightly comic mob boss — alien from the wide-eyed bumbling septuagenarian you see being manipulated in the White House today. I’m not sure John James, who plays Biden, has ever actually seen the president.

Ultimately, Hunter’s #BLM bimbo friend — portrayed with artless earnestness by Emma Gojkovic — turns out to also be an expert on Chinese politics, just in time to lecture Hunter on his dad’s dealings with the Chinese. How convenient! She blows the whistle on the Bidens’s corruption, and, with the aid of a heroic Rudy Giuliani, returns Trump to power. Or does she? Well, you’ll have to watch the film and find out.

Surprisingly, the best thing about the film is Fox. Sure, his Americanish accent is quite bad (he’s no Hugh Laurie, that’s for sure). But he has a naturally sleazy bearing, making him quite an effective Hunter Biden, and unlike most of the people in this film he acts as if he wants to make a proper film. His Hunter Biden is not just a gurning grotesque, but has a kind of boyish sadness hanging about him. I salute the effort.

Sadly, there is not much else to praise. The cinematography is so uneven that it gives the viewer whiplash. Some scenes are nicely lit and framed. Others — especially the ‘news’ segments — have the production quality of an underfunded YouTube video. Aside from Fox and Carano (who cannot be blamed for having little else to do), the acting is atrocious, though to be fair I am not sure Laurence Olivier and Meryl Streep could make some of these lines sound good.

I said that Fox behaved as if he wanted to appear in a proper film. What I mean is a film that exists as art as well as propaganda. I suspect that the creators of this film wanted to make a political statement and framed it in artistic terms — instead of wanting to make art that was also political. They really should have made a documentary. Nothing would have been lost and the point would have been clearer.

This is in fact the biggest problem with explicitly conservative books and films. They are ‘conservative’ before they are anything else — defining the limits of their artistic and commercial possibilities.

Ah well. I guess we’ll have to wait for that brilliant Hunter Biden biopic. Who do you think should direct it? I say David Lynch.

Truss is in a stronger position than Thatcher – for now

People used to understand that they were ageing when they noticed police officers in their neighbourhood looking unfeasibly young. Given that nobody ever sees a police officer on foot patrol these days, a new benchmark for startling youthfulness needs to be identified. After Liz Truss unveiled her top ministerial team yesterday perhaps ex-cabinet members could serve the purpose.

Because Dominic Raab (48), George Eustice (50), Grant Shapps (53) and Priti Patel (50) have just joined the bulging ranks of former cabinet ministers to have moved from young thrusters to backbench elders with, in one or two cases, no discernible period of achievement in between.

At least nobody can say that the line-up chosen by Truss is ‘male, pale and stale’. In fact, she is the only surviving member of David Cameron’s cabinet of just six years ago.

Truss must have heard advice from assorted pundits and Tory grandees that she should assemble a top team of all the talents, representing every wing of the parliamentary party and including high-profile supporters of her rival Rishi Sunak and one or two greybeards from former regimes: heard it and then completely ignored it.

Instead, she chose to reward her own supporters with a clean sweep of plum roles and cast out those who had crossed her, either in the leadership contest or at any point before it. Of the other leadership candidates, only Suella Braverman, whose support for Truss upon being eliminated from the contest herself proved so crucial in getting her to the final two, was spectacularly rewarded (by becoming Home Secretary).

Kemi Badenoch and Penny Mordaunt were given full cabinet roles, but only mid-ranking ones, while Nadhim Zahawi was moved from being Chancellor of the Exchequer to Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, which might sound posher to the wholly uninitiated but obviously isn’t.

Truss’s political best friend and karaoke partner Therese Coffey gets to be Deputy Prime Minister and Health Secretary, while her political second-best friend Kwasi Kwarteng takes over at the Treasury and will soon deliver an emergency Budget which will set the context of politics this autumn.

Pundits such as the BBC’s political editor Chris Mason are surely right to observe that taking such a factional approach risks storing up trouble for Truss on the backbenches further down the line. On the other hand, by handing out fiefdoms to allies in the manner of a latter-day William the Conqueror she has also just incentivised loyalty and disincentivised disloyalty among younger MPs who could jump either way.

Ability-wise, her line-up is surely no worse than that of Johnson, who also chose to reward his chums and freeze-out those among the Tory former establishment who had taken an opposing view on the main issue of the day – in his case, Brexit.

The main issue now is the state of the economy. And the latest Tory former establishment is clustered around Rishi Sunak, leaving the likes of Theresa May and Jeremy Hunt as ancient relics of the former Tory establishment but one. They do go through them quickly these days.

If we are to compare Truss with her heroine Margaret Thatcher at this juncture then we must conclude that she is in a far stronger position. Thatcher’s early cabinets saw her almost completely surrounded by troublesome ideological opponents who briefed against her economic policy and put her under enormous pressure. Not until her September 1981 ‘purge of the wets’ was she able to tilt the balance in her favour.

Truss, who is about to embark on an economic strategy at least as radical and risky as was Thatcher’s, begins her tenure with a cabinet in which a large majority of ministers pass the ‘one of us’ test with flying colours.

Right now the Tory grassroots, sick of disloyalty among MPs towards the party leadership and fretful about the price to be paid for disunity, will surely act as an effective deterrent against trouble-makers on the back benches.

But if a year down the line Truss’s courageous economic policy (copyright Sir Humphrey Appleby) has not borne fruit do not be surprised to see a disorderly queue forming of ex-cabinet ministers outside the Today programme studios.

Putin’s gas war endgame

What is the Kremlin’s gas war endgame? Based on the various statements from Gazprom, the foreign ministry, and Dmitry Peskov, Vladimir Putin’s spokesperson, it’d be reasonable to conclude that it is getting western sanctions lifted. The message coming through is that the so-called technical issues that Nord Stream 1 is suffering from would be fixable, if not for the collective west’s ongoing economic embargo of Russia.

If this is what Putin actually wants, it would suggest that sanctions are having a large enough impact on Russia for them to use their major source of leverage. Russia has now substantially reduced its pipeline exports to Europe. Because of pipeline and liquefied natural gas capacity constraints, these are supplies that can’t be sold on anywhere else. Russia can mitigate some revenue loss through higher European gas prices. But that runs out of road if flows are zero, or close to it.

Of course, if the sanctions are damaging the Russian economy and Vladimir Putin thinks that Europe will stop buying Russian gas anyway, there’s a good reason to turn off the taps. There is some recent evidence to suggest that they are hitting Russia harder than the Kremlin is letting on, especially when it comes to Russian military access to western technology. Over time, Russia may be able to adapt. But in the short term, they face a potentially difficult challenge getting the components necessary – in particular semiconductor chips – to make guided munitions.

But it’s also possible that getting the sanctions lifted is not Putin’s ultimate aim. Even if major European gas buyers like Germany or Italy were to push back against the sanctions, which is far from certain, the political path towards any reversal would be extremely difficult. Now that they have been enacted at the EU level, reversing them would similarly require unanimity, as it is a foreign policy decision. It’s hard to see Poland or the Baltic states being willing to go back on the sanctions package now. They’re a fact of life, whether the rest of the EU remains happy with them or not.

This is something the Kremlin is surely aware of, so the point could simply be to cause division within Europe. The lesson they will have learned from both gas-for-roubles and the turbine saga is that this isn’t necessarily difficult. In both cases Germany bent the rules on sanctions in order to try and secure supplies, or at least remove the pretext for the supplies being taken away in the case of the turbine.

The idea would be to lean on European governments and reduce their support for Ukraine’s war effort, in the hope that a ceasefire could bring an end to sanctions and get the gas flowing again. Russia has indicated more openness to the idea of negotiating than before, suggesting that they may increasingly view a take-and-hold ceasefire as their best option. Experience indicates that if this were to happen, it would not be an end to the war, but simply provide an opportunity for Russia to regroup and plan its next move.