In defence of Harry’s Taliban comments

Let’s just simmer down about Prince Harry, at least when it comes to his comments about the Taliban. In his memoir Spare, released this week, the Prince writes that he killed 25 people in Afghanistan and thought of ‘Taliban fighters not as people but as chess pieces.’ 

This wasn’t the best choice of words. He shouldn’t have given a precise tally of the enemy dead – it goes against the unwritten and fragile code of the battlefield. And it fell short of ‘showing decency and respect for the lives you have taken,’ as former army officer and MP Adam Holloway has noted. 

But, at the same time, it’s worth pointing out that most of the people currently criticising Harry didn’t serve in Afghanistan. Most won’t have any idea about what happened in the hellhole that was Helmand province. 

For me, it is refreshing to hear someone talking about what it was like in Afghanistan and being listened to for once. The British Army’s involvement in Afghanistan remains a blind spot in the national conscience. This is partly because there still hasn’t been an honest conversation about what happened there. Meanwhile, the chance for any sort of accountability appears to have evaporated. The generals responsible for the operation have been promoted or retired with fantastic pensions while the soldiers and young officers who served there – like Harry – have been left to shoulder the burden of the Afghanistan curse. For too many that weight has been too much and they have taken their lives.  

‘I actually have a lot of respect and sympathy for him and his situation,’ says Oliver Church, a former army officer who, after experiencing a traumatic brain injury in Afghanistan, co-founded the Eleos Partnership, which focuses on boosting veterans’ mental wellbeing. ‘Instead of bragging or trying to shock, he’s really just stating fact in an attempt to fill the information vacuum that many others are trying to do on his behalf – often with an agenda’.  

What Harry says about the number of Taliban he killed – ‘It’s not a number that fills me with satisfaction, but nor does it embarrass me’ – isn’t that weird or controversial. It’s likely the view held by the vast majority of service people who took lives. That is almost certainly the case for Apache crews and jet fighter pilots, most of whom were probably killing 25 Taliban in an average week (sorry if that comes as another shock, but it was war fighting, what do you expect?). You have to take that approach, or you’d crack under the weight of what you were doing. 

Harry has made apparently controversial comments about viewing the Taliban as ‘chess pieces’ to be ‘removed from the board’ or as ‘bad people eliminated before they could kill good people’. While these are rather simplistic and basic metaphors, I suspect they align with the thinking of just about anyone who has pulled the trigger. 

Yet this hasn’t stopped the likes of the Guardian and media pundits wading in with pontifications and concerns about ‘what the army was instilling in its personnel and how they were being educated to view others.’ 

What on earth do these people think the British military should be instilling in its troops before they engage with the enemy? The ‘othering’ that Harry talks about is the only way an enemy can be killed. You don’t – and you can’t – watch someone in the crosshairs of your gun and think: do I engage, might this person have lots of children or old parents to support? You shoot first. That’s how you defeat your enemy. Yes, it’s conditioning – and it’s exactly how I reacted when I saw men (or perhaps they were teens, who knows) holding RPGs in the crosshairs of my Challenger 2 tank in Iraq. That’s what months of military training achieves – and must achieve – if you want a capable military. Of course it’s not a free for all, which is why the British Army has important rules of engagement. 

Harry says he felt no guilt about taking those 25 lives because he will never forget being at school watching news coverage of the 9/11 attacks, nor his subsequent visits to the US and meeting the families of victims of the attacks. That rationale may be too simplistic, but it’s interesting to finally hear someone being allowed to try and parse the guilt and shame that many veterans struggle with after participating in two disastrous wars in which hundreds of thousands of civilians died.  

I don’t think putting Harry in the gunner’s chair of an Apache helicopter was a great idea from the start. But he was there, and an Apache gunner’s job is to pull the trigger. That’s what you have to do when responding to a call from a British Army patrol that is pinned down by the Taliban, as some poor squaddie ties a torniquet on an even poorer bugger who has just had his leg blown off.  

The people who are opining on all this – including military veterans who did not serve in Afghanistan – would do well to take a moment to reflect on what was actually going down in Helmand. To help them, I’d recommend reading Rain, the war novel by former British Army officer Barney Campbell. Near the end of the book is a passage that is the most searing description of an IED explosion hitting a soldier that I have ever encountered. After reading it I felt nauseous and close to tears. I don’t think I was being soft. A good friend who served in the Special Forces had a similar reaction after reading the book. 

I think Harry is being misled and manipulated by numerous people – and is unwittingly engaging in self-destructive behaviour. This is a common trait among veterans who struggle, both with PTSD and with what Church describes as ‘adjustment disorder’ when transitioning from the military to the civilian realm.

Harry has done the worst thing a veteran can do – he has entirely removed himself from his mates and ties to his service, while replacing that network with a bunch of psychiatry-loving Californians. I made a similar mistake after leaving the army. Though I headed to Texas, and just drank lots of tequila to numb the shame and anger and process the absence of the crosshairs rush, rather than being ‘counselled’ by idiots spouting psychobabble. 

But on this one I’m standing with my fellow Afghanistan veteran. Clearly Harry is no Günter Grass when it comes to his war recollections – I won’t be buying his book. But, in stark contrast to the people who oversaw what happened in Afghanistan, he is being brutally honest about his military service. And that is desperately needed.  

Ron DeSantis is the Republican party’s best hope

Florida governor Ron DeSantis is shaping up as the GOP’s best hope for next year’s US presidential election. Large parts of his popular appeal are his open attack on (now fairly well-established) left-wing infiltration in education and to some extent in commerce, and his expressed intention to make Florida the state ‘where woke goes to die’. Hitherto his success has been limited. But recently there have been signs that he may be learning from his mistakes.

His troubles started with a failure to grasp that a direct legal attack on left-wing influence, however electorally popular, was likely to be doomed. However fed up Floridians might be with the spoutings of left-wing professors – and a corporate culture where wokery was not so much encouraged as compulsory – you couldn’t just ban them. 

This became clear after the state legislature passed the Individual Freedom Act (otherwise called the ‘Stop Woke Act’) last April. This prevented state universities and schools advocating the need for positive discrimination rather than colour-blind treatment; suggesting that any one race bore guilt for past sins or had racism hard-wired into it; or teaching that race or sex determined one’s status as oppressor or oppressed. It also made illegal the promotion of these views by employers in compulsory training, or the disadvantaging of any employee who refused to accept them.

You might have thought this to be fairly uncontroversial – at least if you were not a teacher, amateur urban middle-class activist or part of the new management class obsessed more with public relations than effective action. The views the law attacked amounted, after all, to an open denial of the enlightenment values of empiricism and rationalism and of the role of intellectual argument. It also highlighted a demand to replace them with the unprovable assertion of a cult of activists that race, sex and gender must form the start and end point of politics and social policy. In the case of employees, the law also struck a chord with individualist and libertarian voters unhappy with the propensity of employers to compel workers to undergo what they saw as clear political indoctrination. 

This was all true. However, the law also directly impacted another enlightenment value: free speech. This was fatal. Federal judges very quickly stymied it on First Amendment grounds as regards both employers and universities. They pointed out that, like it or not, the law openly prevented employers and professors from publicising one viewpoint while allowing and encouraging them to espouse its opposite, which was exactly what the constitution prohibited. 

Counter-intuitively, this failure of the direct attack should probably be cheered by conservatives. Whatever the immediate discomfort to the GOP, the judges’ views are not only fairly solid legally but accord neatly with the classical liberal view of free speech, under which even irrational and illiberal beliefs should be permitted. The antidote being counterargument rather than suppression. 

There are some welcome signs that DeSantis now recognises this. Last week, however, two events showed that, at least in public education, he was prepared to return to the offensive in a more subtle – and in the long run, probably more successful – way.

The first involved using the old-fashioned power of the purse. True, this can’t be done by way of direct dictation: government cannot openly fund the propagation of one political viewpoint but not its opposite without falling foul of the First Amendment. But a more indirect approach may work. DeSantis has quietly demanded from all state universities and colleges details of how much tax money they spend on administrative diversity, equity and inclusion programmes. His thinking is clear: such programmes are known for promoting critical race theory and similar questionable ideas as articles of faith to employees and faculty alike, and their continued funding is up for debate. Professors are unhappy, seeing this as an all-out attack on free speech and higher education. But it’s hard to see that they have much to complain about. Preventing the propagation of a particular point of view is one thing. Refusing to fund administrative programmes the state sees as unnecessary and pernicious is different. Not only is it constitutionally a good deal safer, it is probably good educationally – and in any case, the remedy for those who don’t like it ought to be political rather than legal.

The second intervention concerned the power of patronage. By law DeSantis, as Florida state governor, has the right to nominate six governing trustees of the New College in Sarasota, a state liberal arts college and bastion of aggressively liberal views. DeSantis announced last Friday that his appointments would be conservatives, including high-profile culture warriors Chris Rufo and Matthew Spalding, who have no time whatsoever for critical race theory or its offshoots and would fairly clearly change the college’s ethos. Liberals, predictably supported by the New York Times, were up in arms. But here too the complaints were unconvincing. A governor’s right to appoint trustees is presumably there precisely to give an element of democratic accountability: there seems no reason why he should not appoint those he agrees with, particularly as it seems he has no intention of interfering with the tenure or freedom of speech of the existing faculty. The liberals are clearly unhappy that their almost complete control of the institution is about to be challenged, and probably successfully: but what is wrong with that? 

We will have to see how this works out. But for the moment the signs are that DeSantis and the people who elected him may be beginning to make inroads into left-wing control of the institutions, at least in his home state. If successful, this may have further effects nationwide. His political offering, of red-blooded populist conservatism without Trump’s peculiarity and general baggage, already makes him the clear favourite for the Republican primaries. He is very much a candidate to watch for next year, whoever the Democrats end up pitching against the GOP. And he may soon become even more so.

Not enough snow on the slopes? Try Tromsø

Europe’s ‘winter heatwave’ has left large parts of the Alps and Pyrenees bereft of snow over the past fortnight, causing grassy pistes and cancelled ski holidays. So where to go for a guaranteed winter wonderland? Well, Tromsø in Norway is 350km north of the Arctic Circle, so reliably snowy. In an average winter, it sees 160 days with at least 25cm of snow on the ground – and at the moment locals are having to dig out their cars.

This small yet sophisticated city on the periphery of continental Europe is well worth a trip, especially if you’re after some wintry pursuits a little less high octane than downhill skiing. Dubbed the ‘Paris of the Arctic’, the cultural hub of northern Norway is perfect for three or four nights before the need to take on a second mortgage or a vitamin D deficiency kicks in (there’s little daylight during the Polar Night of December and January). The sun won’t start to rise above the horizon again until the end of this month, so for now an indigo-tinged eternal twilight is the backdrop to houses twinkling with fairy lights.

An international airport arrivals hall in a shipping container sets the tone for this quirky and yet fiercely functional place that is the third largest urban area in the Arctic Circle, after Russia’s Murmansk and Norilsk. The small airport is an easy 15-minute bus ride into downtown Tromsø on Tromsøya island, with the rest of the city on the mainland reached by bridge or tunnel.

A major Arctic trading centre during the 19th century, the city has colourful wooden houses like those found in Trondheim or Bergen further south. Polar explorers such as Roald Amundsen used Tromsø to prepare for expeditions and today fishing and tourism drive the buoyant economy.

Tourism is back big time after the travel restrictions of the pandemic, with Asian, Middle Eastern, American and British visitors filling the flights and hotels on my recent visit. The downtown’s main pedestrianised street, Storgata, is full of Nordic sweater shops, cosy coffee places and the city’s yellow wooden Gothic Revival cathedral. There’s even a museum dedicated to trolls (the mythical Norse type), the Polar Museum and a diverse choice of restaurants in this highly cosmopolitan university city – you don’t have to eat reindeer or salt cod every day.

Alcohol is highly taxed in Norway – with a pint of IPA costing NOK 197 (£16) it’s not hard to remain clear-headed for the early pick-ups required for the day’s excursion, whether a whale-watching cruise, snowmobiling tour, snowshoeing trek, dog-sledding or cross-country skiing.

Top of many bucket lists is a glimpse the Northern Lights, so popular that more than 100 companies are bussing people around Finnmark promising this – although six hours ‘chasing’ a gap in the clouds might not be everyone’s idea of fun. Avalanche risks prevented our search extending into Finland but our Afghan guide, Mansoor, kept us optimistic (and awake) with toasted marshmallows and hot chocolate each time we disembarked into the minus ten-degree night.

For an aerial view of Finnmark’s vast icy emptiness take the cable car up to Fjellheiden and lunch on reindeer stew in the convivial restaurant at the top. If you are feeling energetic you can go out on a snowshoeing trek and see live reindeer (if you are lucky) – from Nattmalsfjellet, a mountain in Kvaløya to the west of Tromsø, we could see frozen fjords and peaks for miles and feel the the tops of trees spiking through the deep powder beneath our feet.

Gordon, a marine biologist from Hamburg, guided eight of us through a blizzard on a four-hour round trek and reassured us that there are no roaming polar bears in this tranche of the Arctic Circle (‘But a camper got eaten by one 18 months ago’). You’ll just encounter the odd friendly hiker – the famously happy Norwegians seem especially happy when hiking.

On a clearer day with an hour or two of blue sky, dog-sledding was another way to explore the barren white wilderness, steering a team of Alaskan huskies through deep-sided tracks of fluffy snow up and down the hills of Kvaløya island. You can also meet the indigenous Sami, the only people allowed to own reindeer in the north.

The region’s explorers have long ended up in the city’s oldest pub, Ølhallen, for an ale from the world’s northernmost brewery (Mack, est. 1877) next door, or a glass of hot gløgg in the cosy fug of koselig (Norwegian hygge) under the watch of a stuffed polar bear.

Another worthwhile stop is the Dragøy fish restaurant (Stortorget 1) where in the shadow of a giant aquarium you can gorge on a smoked fish (røkt fisk) platter for two of minke whale, monkfish, halibut, arctic char, roe and salmon for NOK209 (£17). Finally – something not quite so expensive!

Tromsø is unlike anywhere else and there’s a good chance you’ll return as exuberant as the locals. Just don’t think of going without snow boots, a good set of thermals and plenty of kroner.

Direct flights to Tromsø from Gatwick with Norwegian Air take 3.25 hours. Excursions are booked through GetYourGuide, including snowshoe tours with Wandering Owl and Northern Lights with Amazing Arctic Tours. The Scandic Ishavshotel is well located on the quayside of Tromsø.

The dark side of laughing gas

In his memoir Spare, Prince Harry has revealed he ‘enhanced his calm’ during the birth of his son Archie in 2019 by taking ‘several slow, penetrating hits’ of the canister of laughing gas in his wife Meghan’s hospital room. He described how when a nurse returned and tried to give Meghan a dose for pain relief, there was none left: ‘I could see the thought slowly dawning. Gracious, the husband’s had it all. “Sorry,” I said meekly.’

He is far from alone in enjoying the high that comes from laughing gas. Also known as nitrous oxide, it has become the second most popular drug (behind cannabis) among 16- to 24-year-olds, according to data from the Office for National Statistics. An astonishing 3.5 tonnes of canisters were collected in the aftermath of last year’s Notting Hill Carnival – that’s around four skips full of what some dub ‘hippy crack’.

Euphoria, relaxation and dissociation from reality are some of the effects that have made it so popular. But doctors have warned it has a far less funny side, with an ‘epidemic’ of teens and young adults being hospitalised after inhaling the gas – and some ending up paralysed. 

Burst lungs, nerve damage and seizures are other risks. Inhaling the gas can also cause a spasm of the throat which stops you breathing. You suffocate. Neurologists and toxicologists have reported a 257 per cent rise in serious poisonings in the past year, according to the National Poisons Information Service.

Nitrous oxide is a colourless gas which was discovered by an Englishman called Joseph Priestley in 1772. He described it as a ‘remarkable species of air’. It was popularised as an anaesthetic in medicine and an intoxicant at upper-class parties in the late Georgian era – and people have used it both medically and recreationally ever since.

It is a staple of commercial kitchens – used to whip cream – and in medicine due to its pain-relieving properties. But around ten years ago, it began really taking off as a party drug. 

The gas is traditionally dispensed from 8g cartridges into balloons using a ‘cracker’ which makes a distinctive ‘tshh’ noise when the gas is released into the balloon. Breathe in, breathe out. Repeat. The dissociative high is short and sharp, lasting around 30 seconds. After that your feet are back on the ground.

Since 2016 it has been classed as a ‘psychoactive substance’ under the Psychoactive Substances Act 2016, which makes it illegal to supply for human consumption but legal to possess for personal use. Despite this, it’s still easily available to buy. The former Home Secretary Priti Patel pledged to ‘take tough action’ on nitrous oxide abusers in 2021, and considered criminalising personal possession. 

It is estimated that around 700,000 people use laughing gas each year, according to a British Medical Journal report published in September. The latest data from an England and Wales Crime Survey from 2019/2020 reported that 9 per cent of 16- to 24-year-olds had taken it, up from 6 per cent in 2012/2013. But it is difficult to accurately quantify the rise in related hospital admissions because the UK data is generally poor. So it’s suspected that usage and associated hospitalisations far exceed the levels recorded.

Dr Nikos Evangelou, a neurologist at Nottingham University Hospital, told the Sun: ‘I’ve seen two young people completely paralysed and unable to walk because of nitrous oxide. I’m seeing five to six youngsters a week on average with some degree of damage. It’s tragic and terrifying. 

‘Many of those with early symptoms – tingling hands and feet and unsteadiness – don’t seek help. They need to know this is the start of something incredibly serious, and they need to stop before permanent damage is done.’ 

It follows Dr David Nicholl, a consultant neurologist at Birmingham Hospitals NHS Trust, warning of ‘an epidemic of young people coming into hospital with spinal cord and nerve damage because of nitrous oxide abuse’. ‘It’s terrifying to see paralysed young people from laughing gas canisters,’ he said.

Between 2001 and 2020 there have been 56 deaths from nitrous oxide in England and Wales, with 45 of those occurring since 2010, according to the ONS. Despite these relatively low numbers a BMJ report stated that ‘doctors are concerned after seeing more users presenting neurological complications after inhaling from often large canisters of gas’.

This comes as bigger cylinders ranging from 0.58kg to 15kg have swept the recreational market, which has made the gas cheaper to use while promoting wider, more frequent and heavier use. And it’s this heavy use that is compounding the problem. 

‘There is an increase in the number of people who use greater quantities of the gas more frequently and for longer periods of time. It is unclear what dose causes chronic toxicity, although the greater the amount used, the greater the risk,’ a 2022 report from the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction said.

So it’s important to be aware of the risks, raise awareness of the warning signs and encourage moderation if not cessation of use. Party balloons can have permanent and devastating consequences.

The secrets of London by postcode: NW (North West)

This month our trivia-inspired tour of London’s postcode areas reaches NW, where Tim Burton snored, Madness caused an earthquake and Desmond Tutu asked policemen for directions even though he knew where he was going…

• The Renaissance hotel at St Pancras station had the first revolving door in Britain. It was installed at the Midland Grand (as the hotel was then called) in 1899, by the device’s inventor Theophilus Van Kannel. (The door itself – or rather a modern replacement – is still in the same spot, at the entrance nearest the road, rather than the main one set further back.) Another innovation was the Ladies’ Smoking Room, the first in Europe where women could light up. And there was more girl power a century later, when the Spice Girls shot the video for Wannabe at the hotel. (Although, as they filmed it at night during a spell when the hotel was closed, the group were freezing cold – the resulting reaction from Mel B’s nipples meant the video was banned in some parts of Asia.) These days you can enjoy a meal in the Booking Office restaurant, so named because it used to be where the station sold you your train tickets. Rooms from £231.

• The second most famous resident of 221B Baker Street had a war wound that moved around his body. In the first Sherlock Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet, Dr Watson mentions that while serving in Afghanistan he was shot in the shoulder. But in the second story, The Sign of Four, he talks of ‘my wounded leg’. When Sir Arthur Conan Doyle came to write The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor, he covered his mistake by having Watson describe the bullet ‘which I had brought back in one of my limbs’.
• St John’s Wood is the only London Underground station to share no letters with the word ‘mackerel’. (It’s spelled ‘St’ rather than ‘Saint’.)

• When Archbishop Desmond Tutu moved to Golders Green from his native South Africa in the 1960s, he would ask policemen for directions even though he knew where he was going, simply to hear them call him ‘sir’.
• Peter Cook and his third wife Lin lived in different houses 100 yards apart in Hampstead. Cook said that if more couples could afford to do the same, they would. As if to prove the point, Tim Burton and Helena Bonham Carter did the same thing in Belsize Park, though their houses were actually next to each other. Bonham Carter said the arrangement worked because Burton snored and she was ‘outrageously bossy’. When they separated in 2014, she kept both houses, praising him as ‘generous’ for letting her do so.
• That’s Belsize Park, incidentally, from the French bel assis, meaning ‘well situated’.

• And that’s Peter Cook, incidentally, who kept his name despite the actors’ union Equity asking him to change it (they already had a Peter Cook). The satirist responded by suggesting increasingly absurd alternatives. When he reached ‘Sting Thundercock’, Equity admitted defeat.
• Adam Ant’s mother was Paul McCartney’s cleaner. The schoolboy (then plain Stuart Goddard) would accompany her to the house on Cavendish Avenue in St John’s Wood, and sometimes took Macca’s sheepdog for a walk. The dog was called Martha, hence the Beatles song Martha My Dear.
• T.E. Lawrence’s pseudonym when he wrote for The Spectator was ‘Colin Dale’ – a reference to Colindale tube station, used by Lawrence when he was stationed at RAF Hendon.
• Further down the Northern line, the pub opposite Mornington Crescent station is called the Lyttelton Arms in tribute to the late Humphrey Lyttelton, host of Radio 4’s I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue. According to Humph, the famous game was made up to confuse a producer who the panellists disliked. While they were drinking one day, they heard him approaching. ‘Quick,’ said one, ‘let’s invent a game with rules he’ll never understand.’
• The media centre at Lord’s Cricket Ground was built in a shipyard in Falmouth. Look at it from behind and you’ll see how its curved shape resembles the bottom of a boat – so boatbuilding technology was the best way to construct it. Meanwhile, round at the front, the glass wall slopes back at an angle to prevent the sun’s glare distracting the players.

• Gospel Oak takes its name from a tree under which Bible readings used to be given. The oak was removed in the 1800s. Local resident Michael Palin planted a replacement in 1998, but it didn’t survive.
• Winfield House, the US ambassador’s official residence in Regent’s Park, was built as a home for the Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton (Winfield being the middle name of her grandfather Frank, founder of the famous store). She later sold it to the US government for a dollar.
• Camden legends Madness featured in the 1992 British Geological Survey. Their first ‘Madstock’ reunion concert, held in August of that year in Finsbury Park, attracted 35,000 fans. ‘When we started “One Step Beyond”,’ explained lead singer Suggs, ‘they started jumping up and down in unison.’ This registered 4.2 on the Richter scale, causing cracked balconies and windows, with residents of three local tower blocks having to be evacuated. ‘So yeah, Madness caused an earthquake. Which is something to go on the CV.’

Khan’s ‘night czar’ gets 40 per cent pay hike

Much was made of Amy Lamé’s appointment as London’s first ‘night czar’ back in November 2016. The then newly elected Mayor Sadiq Khan trumpeted that she would be a ‘much-needed ambassador for the city after dark… a fantastic hire who will give a big boost to our city’s flourishing nightlife’ with a ‘proven track-record of helping save venues’. But fast forward six years and such rhetoric seems somewhat hollow now.

Estimates vary as to how many London venues have closed in recent years. One count claims 58 venues shut during the pandemic – or 25 per cent of the capital’s nightclubs. Khan’s own City Hall points to data which suggests that the number of venues operating as nightclubs in the capital dropped by 22 per cent between 2019 and 2021, the fewest since the mid-nineties. The pandemic was unavoidable and disastrous for nightclubs in major urban areas across the globe. But London punters appear to be far from impressed by Lamé’s performance in office: a petition was launched in July 2020 calling for her to quit.

A week after that petition began, in August 2020, Lamé gave an interview to the Observer in which she claimed that ‘I will be judged by the work that I do.’ That same piece featured ‘unanimous’ criticism from ‘more than a dozen club owners, promoters and nightlife workers’ who believed that she had ‘achieved little in the post.’ Indeed, only 27 of Lamé’s much-vaunted ‘night surgeries’ are listed on her online page as being held between December 2016 and May 2022: an average of one every two and a half months.

Her supporters in City Hall suggest she has helped stem the fall in the number of grassroots music and LGBTQI+ venues, launching the Women’s Night Safety Charter and a £500,000 programme to create new Night Time Enterprise Zones. But she has not avoided controversy too. After Khan appointed her to the role, Lamé was ordered to delete a number of offensive tweets about the Conservative party, which included celebrating the death of Margaret Thatcher. She has also faced questions over her own tax arrangements too.

Given this mixed record, after six years in post, you would think Lamé’s job might be on the line. Not a bit of it, judging by her remuneration package. For Mr S has today discovered that the ‘night czar’ quietly received a pay increase of 40 per cent more than the £83,169 widely-quoted in recent media reports. She is now in receipt of a salary of £116,925, thanks to two pay bumps in seven months: the first in September 2021 and the second in April 2022 as part of the Greater London Authority’s annual salary increment.

Neil Garratt, the Conservative economy spokesman for the GLA questioned Lamé’s ‘extravagant’ pay rise. He told Mr S that ‘instead of a blank cheque this post needs a fresh start, starting with whether we really need it at all.’ A spokesperson for the Mayor of London said: 

The Night Czar’s job description was independently reviewed to better reflect the responsibilities of the role, as part of a restructure of the Mayor’s Office following the 2021 election. The post was then graded using the GLA’s usual independent process, from a grade 13 to 15.

Lamé said more than two years ago that she will be judged on the work she does. At what point will the verdict come in? Manchester has a nightlife adviser too: the well-respected Sacha Lord, who does the role unpaid. And whereas Lord has appeared on Question Time to champion his city, Lamé’s record of standing up for London clubs amounts to a mere half-a-dozen mentions in the national press last year.

Still, what can you expect at Sadiq Khan’s City Hall? Labour MP Chris Bryant may be spearheading calls in Westminster for ministerial registers to be overhauled but just down the road his party colleague Mayor Khan hadn’t added to his own register of gifts for six months. It was only after Mr S pointed this out today that the register was quietly updated, with Khan now detailing a further £6,898 in travel and accommodation.

So much for transparent government…

Nicola Sturgeon has been exposed

The Scottish parliament returned from its Christmas recess today and held its first debate of 2023. Take a guess what it was about. 

Yes, independence. Holyrood occasionally touches on other matters – the NHS, the educational attainment gap – but these are mere throat-clearings in a never-ending dialogue between the SNP government and its hardline followers. 

This strategy, though counter-intuitive, has thus far proved pretty useful to Nicola Sturgeon: the more she gins up her supporters with talk of breaking away from the UK, the less they seem to notice that she hasn’t taken them a single inch in that direction in eight years as SNP leader. 

Today’s debate was tired and predictable, both sides re-rehearsing the same arguments they’ve been re-rehearsing since 2014. However, one contribution stood out. It came from a first-term Labour MSP, Michael Marra. Unlike other opponents of independence, he didn’t dismiss that cause or its adherents. He addressed them with civility, as a firm but courteous opponent, and told them their leaders were taking them for a ride. 

Here’s a flavour of his remarks:

Those honourable folk who favour independence have been sorely failed by their leadership. Despite the Cabinet Secretary’s rhetoric, there is a route to the destination that they seek. 

Build a case, through honest deliberation and careful compromise, to allow the prosecution of the argument. Build a coalition of those seeking change. Build a consensus, a settled will of the Scottish people. Make it overwhelming. 

That is how the case for devolution was made and how it was won. No one – no one – can seriously suggest that since 2014 that work has been done by the people in the positions to do it.

As you can see, Marra gives a good speech, a woefully rare skill at Holyrood. But what distinguished his words was their ability to avoid all the usual political and rhetorical traps of what passes for the constitutional debate in Scotland and to burrow instead directly under the skin of the SNP leadership. 

With a pointed reference to the once-revered, since memory-holed Alex Salmond, he reminded the nouveau regime how far it had strayed from its predecessor’s competence strategy for winning independence: 

How about proving the case through the successful use of the powers of devolution? Now that’s not my idea. Once upon a time it was the SNP’s strategy, of He Whose Name Shall Not Be Spoken, but what a sorrowful disaster that has been. 

Our precious NHS in chaos. Our schools closed. Our universities steadily losing their lead. The worst drugs deaths on record in the developed world, five times as bad as the rest of the UK under the same drug laws. Long-term, sclerotic growth — now recession. 

Crumbling infrastructure. Ferries that do not sail. Islands locked off from the economy. Our national language under imminent threat. An overwhelming feeling everywhere you go that nothing — nothing — is working as it should.’

This is not the case I would make against Scottish secession. I am far more of a Westminster sovereigntist than Marra and I have also become thoroughly scunnered with devolution. Yet, at a mere four minutes, his was one of the most cogent and compelling deconstructions I have heard of the SNP’s sales patter. 

Nicola Sturgeon holds debates like these to distract her grassroots from her failure to achieve independence. If more of her opponents spoke like Michael Marra, she would never hold one of these debates again. In a few words of Dundonian declamation he landed more blows on the SNP than many others have in 15 years. 

Shapps seeks the mantle of moderation on strikes

Fresh from his photoshop debacle, Grant Shapps arrived in the Commons today to outline the government’s plans for minimum safety level legislation. He and his colleagues are currently engaged in a difficult balancing act: negotiating with unions over pay one day, then seeking to curb their powers the next. It is emblematic of the ‘carrot and stick’ approach that ministers have adopted throughout this winter of industrial action – hinting heavily that workers will receive pay improvements in the next financial settlement, while threatening new restrictions to prevent a future repeat of these strikes.

Shapps is seen as one of the Conservatives’ more affable communicators. He therefore sought to present today’s measures as sensible and pragmatic, a ‘reasonable and mature way’ to ensure that ‘lives and livelihoods are not lost’ in industrial action. He promised to consult on what a minimum service level should look like but confirmed that the legislation will apply to six key sectors of health, education, fire, ambulance, rail and nuclear power.

The Business Secretary also pointed to the ‘mature European democracies’ which have such legislation on their statute books such as France and Germany. Yet, faced with the jeering of the Labour benches, he wasn’t afraid to splice soothing words with a bit of boilerplate union-bashing. He accused striking paramedics of putting ‘lives at risk’ and ‘a lack of timely co-operation’ which meant that ‘health officials were left guessing at the likely minimum coverage, making contingency planning almost impossible.’

Naturally, such talk found little favour with his opposite number Angela Rayner, wearing one of her many hats as Shadow Secretary of State for the Future of Work. She gave a punchy reply, raising a constituent who died, unable to get an ambulance on a day when there was no strike action. Responding to Shapps’ talk of conciliation, Rayner pointed to the ‘dismal’ read out by the trade unions involved in yesterday’s talks with the Health Secretary and noted how some of the countries with minimum service levels still suffer more strikes than Britain. She closed by dubbing the measures a ‘sacking nurses bill: an outright attack on the fundamental freedom of British working people.’

Much of the debate that followed was more heat than light. With few details yet apparent, the two main parties understandably preferred to focus on the broader principles at stake. For Labour MPs that tended to be the right to strike; for the Tories it was about the right to work. Former employment lawyer Laura Farris gave a noticeably helpful intervention from the Tory backbenches while Richard Burgon offered up one of the more hyperbolic claims, arguing that the new measures were proof that Rishi Sunak was running the ‘most authoritarian government in Britain in living memory.’

In truth, the main news happened outside the chamber, with Tory backbencher Stephen McPartland launching a headline-grabbing broadside on Twitter about Shapps’ plans to sack key workers on strike. ‘Shameful, shameful, shameful to target individual workers,’ he wrote, ‘by all means fine the Unions, make them agree to minimum service levels, but don’t sack individual NHS staff, teachers & workers!!!’

With the Tories so divided at present, the success of these strike reforms may come down to whether the average Conservative MP agrees with McPartland’s assessment. For now, however, more Tory MPs side with Shapps. This is one of the issues where the government believe they have backbench support. The bigger fight could be in the Lords.

The UK can’t ignore Scotland’s gender recognition Bill

On Monday we learned that Gender Recognition Certificates (GRCs) issued in Scotland might not be accepted in England and Wales. Last month Scotland passed its contentious Gender Recognition Reform Bill, which means that anyone over the age of 16 can legally change their gender after three months, even if they don’t have a diagnosis of gender dysphoria.  

But now, according to the Times, UK government sources say that unless the Scottish government amends its legislation and requires someone to have a medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria, Scottish gender recognition certificates won’t be recognised in the rest of the UK.

The UK government may think this is the ‘Legoland driving licence’ solution to gender recognition, with Scotland issuing GRCs to anyone who wants one, but with those certificates having as much validity south of the border as permits issued by the Lego City Driving School on the public highway. But there is a problem that the UK government may not have considered. 

At the moment, a GRC is not designed to be produced on-demand to prove someone’s legal sex. That would defeat one key purpose of the original 2004 Gender Recognition Act – to protect the privacy of transsexual people. Section 22 of the GRA makes it an offence for officials to disclose the fact that someone has even applied for a GRC. 

It was a different world in 2004. Back then it was assumed that transsexuals would want to re-integrate back into society in their ‘acquired gender’ and get on with their life. The goal was to let people move beyond transition, not wallow in it. At the time, the government assumed that there were only about 5,000 transsexual people across the UK, most of whom would have gone through a medical process of gender reassignment. 

Today, transgender people constitute a very different group. Census data released last week shows that there are far more of us – 262,000 in England and Wales alone – with a so-called gender identity different from their sex registered at birth. But the basic mechanics of the Gender Recognition Certificate process largely remain the same as in 2004. 

When a Gender Recognition Panel issues a GRC, they email a copy to the relevant office, for example the General Register Office in England and Wales, or National Records of Scotland. The relevant office then issues a new birth certificate showing a person’s new gender – male or female. Crucially, there is no indication on the new birth certificate that someone has changed their gender. 

If Nicola Sturgeon’s SNP government gets its way, anyone born in Scotland will soon be able to apply for a Scottish GRC – simply because they want one – and then will receive a new birth certificate from National Records Scotland. England and Wales might decide not to recognise Scottish GRCs but they can’t refuse to recognise Scottish birth certificates. 

The Equality Act 2010 – legislation reserved to Westminster – allows providers to deliver single-sex services where they can be objectively justified. But those rights are compromised if service providers cannot prove that the holder of a GRC is not the sex they are claiming to be. A transwoman might look like a man, sound like a man and walk like a man, but if their birth certificate says they are female, their paperwork will not distinguish them from a woman. 

That has been an ongoing conundrum since the UK started issuing GRCs almost 20 years ago, but the Scottish GRR bill is a game-changer because it removes all checks and balances from the process. Now the Bill has been passed, it is likely that many more GRCs will be issued in Scotland, to a far more diverse group of people. 

Refusing to accept Scottish GRCs in the rest of the UK is an unworkable solution. But even if we could contain the problem, Scotland is just as much a part of the UK as England, Wales and Northern Ireland. The UK government cannot and must not abrogate its responsibilities to the people of Scotland who have a right to single sex services. 

And Scotland’s gender Bill compromises the rights of organisations to provide single-sex services throughout the UK. It should therefore be challenged by the Scotland Act. Section 35 allows UK ministers to do just that – and prohibit Holyrood’s presiding officer from submitting the Bill for royal assent. 

Yes there will be howls of outrage from the SNP, and no doubt Sturgeon would drag the matter through the courts. But what really matters is the court of public opinion, especially in Scotland. The SNP has been spoiling for a fight over sovereignty. Where better for the UK government to challenge them than over an issue that is unpopular among the people of Scotland? Polling suggests that two thirds of Scots oppose self-ID. 

And if the UK government can shine a light on the dangers of the Gender Reform Bill and the ideological capture of the Scottish government, the independence debate could be kicked into the long grass for a generation. 

Boris Johnson falls victim to Grant Shapps’ photoshop fail

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

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

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

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

Are the Osbornites coming out for Starmer?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Spare reviewed: Harry is completely disingenuous – or an idiot

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why does Israel want to patch things up with Russia?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mysterious hampers greet returning MPs

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

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

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

What better way to start the new year?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The unstoppable march of the celebrity author

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

10 films about brothers at war

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

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

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

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

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

Aquaman (2018) – ITVX, Amazon Rent/Buy

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

East of Eden (1955) – Amazon Rent/Buy

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

Dead Ringers (1988) – ITVX

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

A History of Violence (2005) – Amazon Buy

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

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

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

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

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

The Power of the Dog (2021) – Netflix

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

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

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

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

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

What Howards’ Way taught me about Margaret Thatcher

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AI is the end of writing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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