Bridge | 12 November 2022

I was very sad to learn last week that Dinah Caplan has died. She was 90, and had been a hugely popular and respected player on the bridge circuit for as long as any of us can remember. But more than that, she was an inspiration to anyone who worries that they’ve left it too late to make their mark. Having joined her family’s clothing business at just 15, she juggled the demands of a job and motherhood for much of her life, and it wasn’t until 2011 that she decided to get more serious about bridge. She entered the England women’s trials (with Lizzie Godfrey), ended up winning, and at the age of 78 made her international debut – surely one for the record books. As it happens, I was also on the Lady Milne team that year, and I’ll never forget what a supportive and calming presence she was. We ended up tying for first place with Scotland – another first in the history of the Lady Milne.

After that, far from resting on her laurels, she achieved success in many more tournaments; perhaps her greatest triumph was winning the Portland Pairs with Michael Byrne at the age of 87. Here, Dinah showed just how sharp she still was:

West led the ♥K followed by a low heart to East’s ace. Back came a low club. Is it a pure guess? No. Dinah realised that for the contract to make, West had to hold the ◆K. The lead had already revealed 5 of West’s points (the ♥KQ). If he held the ♣A too, that would bring his total to 12 – and he would have opened the bidding. So she hopped up with the ♣K, drew trumps, took the diamond finesse twice, discarded the ♣J on the ◆A – and made a precious overtrick.

My Twelve to Follow over jumps

We all tend to put a value on what we haven’t got. Talking to a West Indian friend, Mrs Oakley, a foodie to her core, envied her the fresh pineapple, mangoes and bananas of her Caribbean childhood compared with our post-war canned fruit. ‘Oh no,’ said her friend, ‘it was the rare canned fruit treats we yearned for.’

Through the final weeks of the fading Flat season, I yearn too for the mud-spattered glories of the full jumping season, contests as much about courage as class. The sleek speedsters contesting million-pound prizes at the Breeders’ Cup in Keeneland were a fine international spectacle, but for me there was no comparison with Al Dancer’s win by a nose the same day over Aintree’s Grand National fences or with Frodon’s gutsy all-the-way win in the Badger Beer Handicap Chase at Wincanton.

This winter will be especially intriguing. How long will Fergal O’Brien manage to stay at the top of the trainers’ table as the big-money boys move into action? How well will Joe Tizzard do having taken over the training from his wise dad Colin? So far he seems to be flying. Will Sam Thomas and Christian Williams, both like Joe former riders for champion trainer Paul Nicholls, continue to churn out big Saturday winners?

In putting together 12 horses for readers to follow through the winter campaign I have ignored the superpower yards who will supply many winners and horses that might win championship races at the Cheltenham Festival partly because such horses won’t run that often but also because the stars will be written about everywhere and priced accordingly by the bookies.

Let’s start with Aucunrisque, a gutsy hurdles winner last season for Chris Gordon who looks to have his best team ever. Jonjo O’Neill, too, looks to have extra quality young horses this year with the likes of the 270,000 guineas Saint Davy, Mellificent and Springwell Bay. From his team I choose Iron Bridge, a bumper winner in Ireland who won a Carlisle chase impressively. From a Fergal O’Brien shortlist including Marble Sands, Peking Rose and Go To War I will include Manothepeople, an impressive winner of a Chepstow novice chase. Donald McCain mops up races on the northern tracks and in goes his Maximilian, a quality bumper winner who collected on his hurdles debut, while from Sam Thomas’s winners this season I pick Our Power. Sam says he is streetwise off the Flat and will never win by far but he won well at Ascot. Ruth Jefferson’s Sounds Russian won at Kelso in October and was a close second to the classy Dusart at Ayr last year. He should win a staying handicap chase. Mel Rowley, who does well with her horses at Aintree, looks to have a useful prospect for mares’ races with Blue Beach, a bumper winner who was a good second to a Jamie Snowden winner at Worcester on her seasonal debut.

We must have two from Ireland these days and I will go for John McConnell’s Encanto Bruno, already a Cheltenham winner, and Emmet Mullins’s So Scottish who won at Carlisle in October. Milton Harris is a trainer to watch and should do well with Scriptwriter, who ran well for Aidan O’Brien on the Flat. I have to include Nicky Martin’s Bear Ghylls whom I selected last year but who was not rushed back into action after minor injury. He resumed well enough behind the classy Beauport in a Carlisle novice chase. I am sure, too, that Dan Skelton’s Midnight River will add to his victory in a Stratford Handicap Chase.

Fortunately those who take an interest in our Twelve to Follow should be embarking on the winter dozen with some cash in their pockets. Of the dozen recommended in May, one never reached the racecourse but of the 11 who did, eight won races. Their 15 victories (plus seven seconds and three thirds) included some significant triumphs. Ralph Beckett’s Westover, after an unlucky third in the Derby at Epsom, went on to win the Irish equivalent. John and Thady Gosden’s Emily Upjohn was one of the unluckiest losers ever of the Oaks. Stumbling on exiting the stalls and dropping to last, she recovered sufficiently in Frankie Dettori’s hands to contest the lead through the final two furlongs only to go down by a short head to the brilliant Aidan O’Brien filly Tuesday. Emily Upjohn made handsome amends by winning the Fillies and Mares Stakes at Ascot on Champions’ Day. Honourable mention must be made, too, of Michael Dods’s improving sprinter Azure Blue who won for us on four of his eight runs and of Joseph O’Brien’s Above The Curve whose two victories included a Group One success at Longchamp. William Haggas’s Hebrides and Andrew Balding’s Spirit Mixer were other dual winners while Hughie Morrison’s Mrs Fitzherbert and Hugo Palmer’s Rajinsky also made the score sheet.

The Twelve’s 46 trips to the racecourse on the basis of a £10 win bet every run left us with a decent profit of £59. Thanks to all of them.

I have been locked out of my pension

With only five to ten more years to work out how to log in to my pension plan I need to get a move on.

The Fidelity website is so impenetrable to someone like me that, aged 50, I fear I will have run out of time to get access to ‘planviewer’ by the time I am 65, never mind 55.

They write to me all the time, asking me to verify this or that by scanning a QR code and entering a reference, along with my National Insurance number, but it never works.

‘Sorry, we are unable to find your details in our system. Please make sure you have entered all of your information correctly. If the problem persists, please call us on…’

Persists? It never stops. It’s been defeating me for years. When I email to tell them I can’t log in they send back an email which is encrypted so I have to log in to see their answer about why I can’t log in.

When I ring, I hold for an age before a nice Irishman looks up my plan and says: ‘Ah, here it is.’

‘You mean you’re able to log in to my pension?’ I asked the last time I did this. ‘Yes, I’m in.’ ‘Well, would it be too much to ask for me to get in too?’ Because while listening to him looking at my pension was reassuring, it was not nearly as good as me looking at it.

I read him the reference code I’m always being sent, which could be seen as beginning C, then O or it could be C, then zero. That, in itself, could have kept me locked out for a good five years.

He confirmed that it was C zero and we moved on to my NI number. I said what I thought that was, from memory, and he went away to ‘check something with my supervisor’. When he came back he said they had it down wrong.

‘Oh dear,’ I said. ‘Now hang on. Have you got it wrong or have I got it wrong?’ And I said it again, only a bit different because I’m never sure whether it’s 55 twice or 75 twice in the middle.

I tried it both ways, but he said neither of those were on their system. I scratched my head. The problem about theoretically nearing retirement age and needing to actually look at your pension account is that you’ve never been so ill equipped to do such a thing.

I said: ‘Can you wait while I try and find something with my NI number on it?’

I had held for half an hour listening to the same five bars of sub Richard Clayderman piano music repeated over and over, so I begged: ‘Don’t ever leave me, will you?’

He promised he wouldn’t. I flung open all the drawers and cupboards in my desk and starting pulling papers out. ‘Are you still there?’ I called into the phone on speaker as I tore unopened envelopes open and riffled through old tax returns.

I ransacked every folder full of papers until my entire existence was thrown all over the floor, then an age-old letter dropped from a bundle and there it was: ‘I’ve got it!’ I read it out, and it was precisely as I had first said it from memory.

‘That’s not what we’ve got,’ he said, ‘so we will have to change that. It will take five working days.’

I’ve made so many failed attempts to log in, I’ve hung on the phone so long, and I’ve sent so many emails, that I did not dare to dream the problem was finally sorted with so prosaic a solution.

So I said: ‘Can we just do some of the things your latest letter is asking me to do now, over the phone, like update my contact details?’ He said he would do that. ‘And it also says I have to nominate my beneficiaries.’

He said he could not do that. I would have to log in to ‘planviewer’ in five days’ time. But he could email me the documents and I could send them back by post if I preferred. I said I did.

Because now it’s been put in writing that I have not named a beneficiary, it’s just my luck I’ll get run over by a bus before the system lets me in.

I’m determined that whatever it takes, even if it has to happen from beyond the grave, with the builder boyfriend logging in by poking the keys of his iPhone with one finger, and even if the economy totally collapses, and there’s nothing in it but two shillings and an old button, I’m not going to be frozen out of my pension by a blasted computer system.

I dropped a morphine capsule in my Moscow Mule

A dear friend came to stay for two nights. Could I be persuaded, wondered he and Catriona, on the first morning, to venture out to a restaurant for lunch?

Descending the stairs to welcome guests these days takes a bit of effort. Bare feet, boney ankles, flapping pyjama bottoms; the guests look up in fascinated horror as the anchorite wobbles down the creaking wooden steps attended by importunate flies with his revelry face on. They have even stopped insisting how well I look. I might last an hour in an armchair in the sitting room, refusing alcohol, before exercising an ague’s privilege, excusing myself, and returning to the horizontal upstairs. Since my last trip to Marseille in the taxi three weeks ago for treatment, the farthest I’ve been is to the composting bin to scrape in leftovers and usually contemplate for a moment the insatiable forces of putrefaction. 

But my friend is a wonderful man who had driven 14 hours in spray from Yorkshire to come and cheer me up. His peerless impression of Marlon Brando’s judicious Godfather is all it takes. I said I would put on my medals and give it a try.

It was a day of sparkling sunshine. I felt far from well. Wellness now seems as remote and unlikely to me as Arthurian legend. I showered and shaved and put on a green Fred Perry and clean pair of Levi’s and topped these off with a Peaky Blinders cap. In the bathroom mirror the overriding impression was a praying mantis in a funky hat.

They had chosen a mid-range restaurant enclosed on four sides by vines, which run right up to the terrace edge giving the delightful impression, in full summer, of dining in nature’s abundance. It wasn’t far to drive – three or four miles – yet on the way there I felt nauseous and was glad when the car came finally to rest with dead and dying vine leaves brushing the bonnet.

We filed in. The proprietress was a pale-skinned woman with delicate Arab features who welcomed us with the endearingly human complaint that she was tired, so tired, and was looking forward to closing the place and going on holiday. She sagged at the knees and mouth as though it were touch and go whether she would make it through even this lunchtime session. Unfortunately we couldn’t eat outside today, she said, owing to the wind. Suiting my opinions to my limited vocabulary as I normally do when conversing in French, I said that it hardly mattered and we were content to eat indoors.

She showed us to the only vacant table. It was circular and so absurdly large that after the cheery intimacy of the car the distances involved estranged us from one another. The Saturday lunchtime clientele was crowded around smaller, more suitable tables. It was entirely French, decent, unassuming, attached to reality, family-minded and unselfconsciously absorbed in the usual celebration of eating, drinking and affectionate intimacy. A mainly black collie with a psychologist’s eye for soft touches and collaborators wandered between the tables, accepting chance treats as nothing more than his due. For an aperitif I bared my teeth at the waiter and asked for a Moscow Mule. Deciding not to mess about, Damian and Catriona said they preferred to get stuck into the wine list straight away. Hoping for some sort of mental lift-off or elevation, I emptied a morphine capsule into my Moscow Mule.

But it wasn’t to be. Isolated from my jolly table companions by distance and consciousness of frailty and death, and further isolated by that peculiar deafness in crowded rooms where voices become indistinguishable, I struggled against falling into melancholy.

Leaning in as far forward as possible to catch the drift of the conversation was physically painful. So I made myself as comfortable as possible by sitting sideways and crossing my legs and tried to take an intelligent interest in my surroundings. In the grown-up good manners of the older children at the next table, for example. And in the almost freakish beauty of a teenage girl, and the expression of wisdom, discretion, sympathy, experience and contentment on the face of her old senator of a father.  

But it takes energy to take even a polite interest in one’s surroundings and I’d spent what little I had showering, shaving and dressing. With profuse and sincere apologies, cheerfully and graciously accepted, I asked Catriona for the car keys, chucked my paper napkin on the table and made my way out of what was presumably my last-ever restaurant.

I eased myself gratefully into the front passenger seat and wound down the window. The early afternoon sun burned hotly on my cheek. The vines were almost bare. Here and there a tatty red or yellow leaf clung on despite a plucking breeze. I never liked restaurants much anyway, I said to myself. And with that happy thought, I closed my eyes and fell immediately asleep.

Why Russia pulled out of Kherson

In one of the biggest developments of the Ukraine war, Russia’s Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu has just announced the evacuation of his troops from Kherson. The city, located on the western bank of the Dnipro river, is the capital of one of the ‘oblasts’ (or regions) that Vladimir Putin recently declared to be part of Russia. Kherson is also the only major Ukrainian city that Russian forces have captured intact.

Ukraine’s troops have been closing in for months on the city, making sustained Russian occupation impossible. The city has now been surrendered without a fight – assuming, that is, the retreat is not a bluff. The question is whether Russia intends to bomb Kherson when Ukrainian troops move in.

Mykhailo Podolyak, a senior adviser to Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky tweeted: ‘We see no signs that Russia is leaving Kherson without a fight. A part of the ru-group is preserved in the city, and additional reserves are charged to the region. Ukraine is liberating territories based on intelligence data, not staged TV statements.’

Shoigu’s announcement came minutes after reports confirming that Kherson’s Russian-appointed deputy governor Kirill Stremousov had been killed in a car crash. Whether this was an accident or assassination remains unknown. Soon after the news, the commander of Russian troops in Ukraine, Sergey Surovikin, appeared on Russian TV saying to Shoigu that the withdrawal operation would be carried out ‘in the nearest future’. He offered to organise the defence along the west bank of the Dnipro river ‘to save the lives of our soldiers and the combat capability of the troops’. This is not the language of a country winning a war. Russian pro-state media report about it as ‘manoeuvre of troops’ – a Kremlin-style attempt to hide another frontline setback.

So why was Russia unable to hold Kherson? The bridgehead controlled by Russia was perhaps one of the reasons: its location was disadvantageous for Putin’s commanders as it was vulnerable to Ukrainian artillery. Russian supplies to the city have depended on only two bridges – the Antonovsky and the Nova Kakhovka dam bridge – both of which have been under constant bombardment. As a result, Russia’s army was forced to keep building new crossings or launch ferries to transport and supply their personnel.

Now, Russia’s troops are on the retreat. If Ukraine’s forces are able to move in to Kherson, they will regain a vital foothold on the Dnipro river. This offers a natural obstacle to a Russian incursion, securing the western flank of the country. Regaining Kherson could also help to facilitate a new offensive against Russia’s army from the north – pushing Russian troops back to Crimea. If Ukrainian troops liberate Kherson in the following days, it will be one more devastating Putin’s defeat before winter.

No. 728

Black to play. Fedoseev-Carlsen, Fischer RandomWorld Championship, 2022. 1…Qd3, 1…Qc2 and1…Qh2 all create deadly threats, but only one ofthese wins. Carlsen chose wrongly. Which move should he have chosen? Answers should be emailed to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 14 November. There is a prize of £20 for the first correct answer out of a hat. Please include a postal address and allow six weeks for prize delivery.

Last week’s solution 1 Rg6+! fxg6 2 Qh8+! Kxh8 3 Rxf8# Or 1…hxg6 2 Qg7#

Last week’s winner G. Pierbattisti, Grantham

The roots of America’s unhappiness

New York

An American columnist whose writing I used to enjoy until his bosses signalled to him that activism is more important than journalism recently reported that Americans are unhappier now than they have ever been. Especially in places that voted for The Donald. Apparently, a pollster found that Trump got the most votes in places where people felt the unhappiest. But that makes sense, doesn’t it? Don’t people vote against the status quo when misery levels are rising? Mind you, it could also be that those who ask the questions have a vested interest in the answers they get. Invent a misery level where voters are for Trump, then pour it on and predict strikes, crime and anti-government demonstrations.

By the time you read this, the American midterm results will be in, and boring pundits will be telling us why people voted the way they did. What they will not be doing is telling us why they mostly got it wrong, because sitting and talking with thinkalikes does not a Delphic Oracle make. I am no longer for The Donald because I do not wish to see ratings and subscriptions of left-wing rags such as the Bagel Times augment. Nor do I wish to see a media backlash against The Donald obscure stories that actually matter. Trump hogs the headlines and dominates all news. Knowing hacks, if a fully dressed Trump fell into the White House swimming pool, it would lead the news even if Russia unleashed a nuclear bomb that same evening. The trouble is that there are more than 70 million voters who love The Donald, the so-called ‘Deplorables’ according to the poet Hillary Clinton. Last but not least, Trump is to presidential dignity what Harpo Marx was to speech. But the fact that the Justice Department may appoint a prosecutor to go after Trump makes 75 million of them not best pleased.

Never mind. We’re here to talk about American unhappiness in general. This was not the case when an 11-year-old Taki arrived in an American boarding school speaking Greek and German and a few English words to boot. I had to quickly learn the language to take part in any school activity. Some previous Athenian knowledge came in handy, such as goalkeeping in soccer, wrestling and tennis – activities that did not require speaking the lingo. That came soon enough, to the detriment of my excellent German.

Wasps were the big bamboos back then. They ran the government, owned Wall Street and the banks, and were the heads of universities. As a 12-year-old, my classmates were Ben Cooper, Bob Trowbridge, Bucky Weaver, Bill Trimble, Temple Brown, Colin Thompson, and so on down the line. (They sound like those brave Pilgrims on the Mayflower.) There was a Sonnenberg and a Taki, but that was it. We stuck out like a rich Wasp does nowadays. But the country worked. There were 150 million Americans, most of them happy as hell.

Seventy or so years later, things ain’t what they used to be. There are 350 million Americans complaining non-stop about their life. In 2020 American cities burned and lots of innocents died because they were told over the internet that the country – and its police especially – is out to subjugate its minority population. But in about 25 years or so minorities will be the majority, and already are in some of the cities that burned, so it’s not clear why these majorities are so unhappy.

Fear about the crime that is rampant these days makes for unhappiness, as does the glorification of criminals in the movies. Another newspaper headline tells us that first-time buyers are losing out to older, whiter and wealthier folk. Gee whizz, first-time buyers are really hacked off. Another unhappy group.

Nearly 70 million Americans descend from those who served the Confederacy. How do you think they feel when they see their heroes called criminals and their statues spat upon? Back in 1900, Congress voted to allow the remains of Confederate soldiers to be buried at Arlington – a big deal, turning it from a Union cemetery to a national one. ‘Sectional feeling no longer holds back the love we feel for each other,’ President McKinley told the South. A 32ft memorial to the Confederacy’s fallen was unveiled in 1914 by Woodrow Wilson as an emblem of unity, reconciliation and happiness.

‘No one in the South would have raised an arm to fight for slavery,’ said Moses Ezekiel, the monument’s sculptor. He’d fought with the Confederacy, so would know. ‘It was an inherited evil. The struggle was simply a constitutional one, based upon state’s rights, and especially on free trade.’

 Now, the statue-topplers want to recast the Confederacy as a racist empire and refight old battles. Last month, a commission said that the memorial – one of the biggest in Arlington – should be removed. So there we have it: a monument to civil peace, toppled in the new civil war. And they wonder why there’s more unhappiness? What would Greeks say if activists called Alexander the Great a slave-holding monster? What would a Frenchman do if Napoleon’s name were dragged through the mud? And would a Brit accept the fact Nelson and Wellington were war-loving imperialist bums?

This is what’s going on over here, and it makes for a very unsatisfied multicultural society – and deeply disunited states.

Syntactical error

The chess lexicon has adopted a useful word from German, fingerfehler, fehler meaning mistake or error. Sometimes, the hand does not obey the brain. Imagine that you are busy contemplating A, followed by B and then C, and engrossed by the consequences of C. Meanwhile, the hand is eager to get involved, and picks up the piece to make move C. Standard competition rules are that once you’ve touched a piece, you must move it, so even if you catch yourself before executing the move, the damage from picking up a different piece may be terminal.

Mercifully, I don’t recall ever doing this, but I’ve come close enough to know that the phenomenon is real. That’s my understanding of fingerfehler, although I’m just as often mildly frustrated to hear the word used interchangeably with ‘blunder’, sometimes by a player who would sooner blame their physiology than admit that their intended move was a straightforward howler.

It happened in a game at the Fischer-Random World Championship last month. In the diagram above left, Magnus Carlsen played 31 a6?? and Hikaru Nakamura responded with 31…Qe4+, forking the king and rook. It was an extraordinary mistake for a player of Carlsen’s calibre, who explained to Nakamura that he had been thinking about 31 f3 Nb5 32 a6, which was indeed the strongest sequence in the position. After losing his rook, Carlsen struggled on for a few moves, but the result was never in doubt.

A famous fingerfehler occurred on the top board at the European Championship in 2003. (On that day, I was playing against Alexander Grischuk on board 4.) Reaching the position in the second diagram, Zurab Azmaiparashvili intended to exchange rooks on d1 and then flee with the bishop, but his hand picked up the bishop first. According to Malakhov’s account, his opponent said something like ‘Oh, first the exchange of course’, put the bishop back and carried on. Of course, this was absolutely forbidden, but Malakhov was too stunned to prevent things from taking their course. He noted that he ‘didn’t want to ruin the logical development of the duel’, which is remarkable because he surely knew that after 25…Rxd1+ 26 Kxd1 Be5, with the f6 pawn weak and c7-c6 on the way, he would face an uphill struggle to save the game. ‘Azmai’ did indeed win the game, even suggesting to split the point at the end of it. But the win for Black was allowed to stand, and he went on to win the tournament, half a point ahead of Malakhov.

Who will be next week’s ministerial exit?

For the past fortnight, it was Suella Braverman. Now it’s Sir Gavin Williamson. The media aims to destroy two careers a month, on average, and the present quest to topple Sir Gavin has already produced a result. He’s gone.

But that’s not enough. It never is. The new clamour is for the nasty knight to be stripped of his title and reduced to plain old Mr Williamson. At PMQs, the resignation was problematic for Sir Keir because he had to argue over a dead parrot. He quoted Sir Gavin’s unhelpful suggestion to a colleague that he should ‘slit his own throat.’ It might have served Sir Keir better to conceal the phrase and to describe it as too shocking and violent to bear repetition. Once he’d quoted the words, his attack lost oomph. He asked us to imagine the victim’s reaction to Rishi’s expression of ‘great sadness’ at Sir Gavin’s departure. Theoretically a strong point. But only theoretically. He called Sir Gavin ‘pathetic’, and ‘a cartoon bully with a pet spider,’ (where did the pet spider come from?). And he enlarged on Sir Gavin’s history of menacing behaviour. ‘He spent years courting the idea that he can intimidate others.’ Even worse, he ‘gets off’ on power-trips, said Sir Keir, hinting at an erotic component to Sir Gavin’s methods. He challenged Rishi to apologise for putting such a creature in a position of authority. 

Rishi: I obviously regret appointing someone who’s had to resign in these circumstances.

Against the rules, clearly. Ignoring the question while pretending to answer it. But he got away with it. Rishi has a rather fragile and delicate appearance, like a glazed china statuette on your great aunt’s mantelpiece. But in debate, he’s as tough and nimble as a farm-dog trained to harry rats out of a grain-store. Sir Keir tried to associate Rishi with Sir Gavin’s character defects and he claimed that the Prime Minister is ‘weak … and worried the bullies will turn on him.’ Rishi brazened this out and praised himself for the great triumph of Sir Gavin’s departure. He said it was a fine example of ‘integrity, professionalism and accountability’. This was laughable. But Sir Keir didn’t laugh, and instead he turned to his favourite mugging victim, Shell, which Rishi refuses to clobber in accordance with Labour’s demands.

Rishi wants a filthy rich oil industry. Sir Keir wants a filthy rich state, and he spends as much time prospecting for untapped revenues as Shell does looking for oil. Why do the Tories never mention that pension funds are heavily invested in the oil majors and that plundering their profits means stealing from granny’s biscuit-tin?

Labour’s Karl Turner took up the class-war battle-cry and asked Rishi to imagine a medical emergency at home. Most of us have three options, said Turner: to phone a GP who doesn’t take calls, to spend 12 hours in Casualty, or to wait for a non-existent ambulance. But Rishi has the luxury of using his ‘£750m of unearned wealth’ to summon a private doctor. Rishi thanked him for this important question and paid tribute to his local hospital, North Allerton, for keeping his family in good fettle.

Labour are maddened by Rishi’s mega-wealth. He could give every MP a million pounds and still have enough to buy a sky-scraper. But the opposition can’t find a way to turn his assets into a toxic liability. And this failure fuels their bitterness when they fight the class-war. Barry Shearman had a go. He said that back in February he warned Rishi, then chancellor, that there were ‘children going to bed at night with no food in their tummies and no heat in their homes.’ Rishi shrugged this aside and declared that ‘workless households’ are the real cause of poverty. Which is an interesting message.

Trump’s bumpy road back to the White House

Washington, D.C

My local polling station is a Christian Brothers high school set amid football fields and parking lots. On Tuesday a woman who lives on our street was arriving to vote just as I was. She had come from a mandatory ‘active-shooter training session’ at her office. Of course, all shooters are ‘active’. Active shooter is what the TV stations call an armed psychopath during the brief period between the moment he starts gunning people down – say, in a cinema, church, school or office – and the moment he dies in a blaze of police- or self-inflicted gunfire. These episodes don’t happen often, of course, but they make quite an impression on CEOs when they do, and my neighbour is not the first person I know who’s been to a training session about how to deal with them. The firearms experts who ran the session, she said, were military veterans of some sort, and pretty homespun. They explained that an active-shooter incident usually lasts three to five minutes, during which time you would probably want to leave the area. Someone asked what would happen if you couldn’t. Well, you could barricade yourself in a room, one replied, or look for a makeshift weapon. That stapler or something. That wasn’t much of a choice, one of her co-workers said, although you don’t always get good choices in life. ‘Woampy purty,’ he agreed.

Lately I’ve been reading a lot about the transformation of Indian politics since the 1990s. A very useful introduction to right-wing Indian thought is the veteran journalist (and now BJP member of parliament) Swapan Dasgupta’s Awakening Bharat Mata. It begins: ‘Till the turn of the century, the counting of votes in an Indian general election was a prolonged three-day affair. Since the electronic voting machines were introduced nationally, the tense wait for an outcome has been reduced to barely three or four hours.’ The message I take is that delayed election counts are the hallmark of corrupt and underdeveloped 20th-century sinkholes, and prompt election counts the mark of civilised modern nations on the rise.

The United States is moving in the other direction. Until two elections ago, it was possible to stay up until the contours of a midterm election were crystal clear. But this year five Senate seats and 66 House seats were undecided the day after the election. Perhaps there are still some votes to be brought by rickshaw once spring melts the frost in the mountain passes. If you wonder why so many American voters tune out Democrats’ warnings that Republicans are a ‘threat to democracy’, you haven’t been listening to Democrats’ own plans to make vote counts more opaque. ‘Elections are not over when the polls close,’ said President Joe Biden’s cybersecurity chief Jen Easterly at a Washington event recently, adding: ‘Sometimes it takes weeks.’ Not in functioning democracies it doesn’t.

The reason the count takes so long is the radically expanded menu of voting options introduced during Covid – vote-by-mail, universal absentee ballots, unmanned drop boxes, sometimes even extended deadlines. Democrats – with more institutional memory of ‘organising’ votes on shop floors, at church gatherings and in care homes – have gravitated to these more free-wheeling forms of voting. Republicans prefer voting at a polling booth on election day. You could also say that Democrats want to maximise ballot access, Republicans ballot security. The upshot is that the US is fracturing along yet another axis – it is acquiring two separate voting systems. To oversimplify a bit: just under half the ballots get cast before election day by mail, and Democrats win those overwhelmingly. The remainder are dropped in the ballot box on Tuesday and Republicans win those in a landslide. So to the television viewer, election night is no longer an intelligible flow of information. You get what looks like a Democrat landslide as the mail ballots are counted first, then Republicans rally, then Democrats have a final spurt as ballots pour in from urban districts. Not a system best calculated to allay worries about fraud.

Republicans’ failure to lock up the Senate is a blow to Trump’s future. It marks the second election in a row in which he has cost his party the upper chamber. In 2020, he denounced the Georgia election process after his own loss, suppressing his party’s vote in two crucial runoff elections. This year he imposed two candidates on the party for safe-looking seats that immediately became unsafe: Mehmet Oz, a Turkish-American TV doctor; and Herschel Walker, a much-battered football star. They conformed to Trump’s idea of politics: that it’s not really about anything, except watching famous people react to the news.

Gaucherie is easier to forgive than incompetence. Trump’s legal circumstances make it likely he will announce his candidacy soon. But after Tuesday, he will not do so from a position of strength, and his road back to the White House looks more arduous.

What the Gavin Williamson saga says about British politics

I wonder if the fall of Gavin Williamson is the latest evidence that British political parties are becoming harder to govern. It seems quite possible that his resignation is part of a story that will see Rishi Sunak struggle to command Conservative MPs to accept difficult choices on tax and spending. Any upset could even bother the bond market. Additionally, this story carries a warning for Keir Starmer. 

Contrary to some of the media narratives visible today, the end of Williamson is more complicated than ‘Bad man who did bad things quits – Hoorah’. Sam Coates of Sky News has written a very good piece about the resignation of Sir Gavin, pointing out that for all the negatives of his public image, there’s a reason that four of the last five Conservative PMs considered him a useful and even necessary part of government. 

In sum, Williamson is good at getting MPs to do what their leader wants them to do. In Sunak’s case, that meant making him leader unopposed. For Theresa May, it meant a confidence and supply deal that kept her and the Conservatives in office after the 2017 election disaster. You can see why leaders value the things that people like Williamson can do. He may not have held the title of chief whip in the Sunak government, but one of his main functions in that government was to do what whips do: make sure MPs do the leader’s bidding.

The process of getting MPs to follow instructions is rarely a pleasant one. Everyone knows the quote about making laws and making sausages. Well, Williamson is one of the people who stuffs the meat into the grinder. He enjoyed it too, which helps explain why he has so many enemies, who have now used his past conduct to undo him.

One perspective on this is: about time too. Politics needs to catch up with the modern world. In most workplaces, nasty messages, threats (implied and direct), coercion and fear are not considered acceptable management tools. Instead, most employers now seek to empower, support and care for colleagues, whose wellbeing and happiness is considered an important goal of management. I spend a bit of my time talking to members of the CEO-class and almost all of them name recruitment, retention, morale and development of staff as high priorities. The imperial CEO, barking at fearful underlings, is largely a myth – at least in publicly-owned companies.

So, the argument goes, politics needs to get with the programme, start treating MPs as adults and drop all the ‘dark arts’ nonsense. Then, maybe, we’ll get better people standing for parliament and politics and policy will get better.

I have a lot of time for that argument. I’ve spent most of my career in places that have a rather anachronistic approach to HR and management: fear and loathing are commonplace in parts of the media and politics, but they’re rarely the most effective way to achieve things. And undoubtedly, such a culture is exclusionary: people who can’t or won’t endure shouting and pressure don’t take part. Yes, people who can’t stand the heat aren’t in the kitchen. But that means a lot of talent goes unused.

The Williamson downfall is another sign that the culture of the outside world is slowly seeping into Westminster, changing political norms for the better. Ten years ago, Williamson’s messages to Wendy Morton wouldn’t have been news. They would have been seen as routine and unremarkable grumpiness between political colleagues. Twenty years ago, such communication would have been seen as insipid and bland; ‘bullying’ at that time meant the threat or reality of physical violence, probably involving alcohol.

And a decade or two earlier, such violence was simply part of the business of whipping. Walter Harrison, the Labour whip who kept the Callaghan government in office by keeping Labour MPs in line, famously grabbed a newly-elected Jack Straw by the testicles to explain to him the importance of following the whips’ instructions.

No one should lament the passing of such a culture. Nasty behaviour towards parliamentary staff and civil servants in particular has been tolerated for far too long, even at the very highest levels. I’ve known household-name politicians whose treatment of their staff would have got them sacked from any proper workplace. One in particular continues to enjoy a public reputation for towering moral integrity that is extremely hard to reconcile with his treatment of staff who couldn’t answer back.

But importing the norms of normal workplaces to Westminster raises some big questions, not least about how possible it will be for governments to actually govern. MPs are not employees of political parties. Technically, they’re not employees at all – they’re office-holders. The only people they ultimately answer to are their voters. That means they’re under no obligation to follow the party line. This is where whipping comes from: how do you get a large group of independent individuals (some of whom may well think they, rather than you, should be in charge) to do what you tell them to on a routine basis?

For decades, the answer has been a combination of moral suasion, charm, bribery and intimidation: vote the way we tell you to, or something bad will happen. Williamson, even his many enemies would agree, is very good at deploying that combination of tactics.

He’s not alone, of course. Really effective whips are always regarded with a measure of fear by colleagues. It is unnecessary (and unwise) for me to name them, but such MPs can be found on both the Tory and Labour benches, politicians who have done things that are at least comparable to the acts now attributed to Williamson. 

No doubt members of the whip’s guild are looking at the Williamson saga with keen interest, wondering what is now acceptable and unacceptable. If a cabinet minister can fall because he sent nasty messages and said nasty things, just how much pressure can whips reasonably apply to MPs to make them fall into line? Their flocks will also be pondering the same thing.

This is how the end of Gavin Williamson increases political volatility. It says to MPs that they have even less reason to comply with the instructions of the whips and the leadership. This is likely to further accelerate the trend for MPs from newer parliamentary intakes to put their relationship with their constituents ahead of their obedience to the leadership. 

Generations of MPs, who know only a political climate shaped by social media are less and likely to behave like ‘lobby fodder’, a phrase that is increasingly falling into disuse as a result. Instead, they are tribunes of their local area, willing to say no to things that might displease the voters who elected them.

For Rishi Sunak, that’s an obvious problem. His primary objective as PM is to hold together a fractious and divided Conservative party until the next general election. The path to that election leads through some very rocky terrain, starting with the Autumn Statement next week. A political environment in which Gavin Williamson is a weapon that cannot be deployed is an environment in which it will be even harder for Sunak and his team to make Tory MPs to accept a fiscal tightening programme that could include raising more money from inheritance tax.

This is why I think Williamson’s departure should be seen as a small negative for gilts. It means Sunak’s challenge in implementing his fiscal plans will be greater than it might currently appear.

And this is where the warning to Keir Starmer arises. It’s a reasonable bet that he’ll be PM after the next election, but probably without a huge majority. He will also inherit those same dismal public finances, forcing him too to make some hard choices and then demand his MPs support them. When and if that day comes, he may find himself very privately wishing he could deploy someone like Gavin Williamson, yet be unable to do so because those (healthy, positive) social norms of political conduct make doing so impossible.

The end of the ‘dark arts’ in politics is nothing to regret, but we should be clear-eyed about what it might mean. And one consequence could be greater political volatility and weaker governments.

Advertising’s false picture

An advert for jobs in the prison service has fallen foul of the Advertising Standards Authority because it portrays an ‘imbalanced power dynamic’. The poster showed a white prison guard (or ‘screw’ as I believe they are known) and a black prisoner. The ASA concluded that the advert was ‘likely to cause serious offence on the grounds of race, by reinforcing negative stereotypes about black men’. It would have been OK if the prisoner had been white. I am not sure what the views of the ASA would have been if both men had been black. The fact that both of the people in the ad were men also negatively reinforces a stereotype – that men tend to commit the most crime. This is the problem: men do commit the most crime, overwhelmingly so, but there is no political desire to hide that fact.

Of course, black men commit only a small minority of crime in the UK and are far more likely to be the victims of violent crime (almost half of Londoners stabbed to death are black). But the statistics put the black population of the UK at about 3.5 per cent, while the percentage of prisoners in English and Welsh jails who are black is just over 12 per cent. I’m sure this is solely the consequence of the institutional and structural racism we have in this country: some black people, driven to despair by the iniquities of life sometimes, understandably enough, resort to shooting or stabbing other black people. Perhaps one way out of this advertising conundrum is to show a black prisoner but to make it clear he is doing a three-year stretch for embezzlement, a white-collar and largely white crime. That would challenge the stereotype. You thought he was in for a spot of stabbing? Racist!

Stereotypes are very useful things. Psychologists will tell you that they are invaluable shortcuts which we use while navigating our way through life, enabling us to spare our brains lots of processing time. They are also broadly accurate or at least contain a modicum of truth. The problem we have at the moment is that in denying this modicum of truth we replace it with a vision of society which is wholly untrue. We lie to ourselves in order to perpetuate myths which are crucial to the liberal agenda.

Do you remember the BBC programme Crimewatch? Viewers of this show, presented for a long while by Nick Ross, were invited to help catch a whole bunch of crooks the police had failed to apprehend. Some of the crimes were mocked up on film, but there was also a rogues’ gallery each week of sullen miscreants we were enjoined to look out for.

In a blog for The Spectator 12 years ago, I wrote the following about this section of one edition I had seen: ‘Of the ten faces on this rogues’ gallery, accused largely of violent crimes, eight were non-white. It is the same every time this programme is broadcast, a deliberate attempt to suggest that non-white Britons are overwhelmingly more likely to commit crime than the whites. Clearly, this cannot be true. The real proportion of non-white rogues in the gallery should be about 10 per cent, i.e. equivalent to the population of non-white Britons. And yet week after week, it’s about 80 per cent instead. How can they get away with this? Who is editing Crimewatch these days, Nick Griffin, or Julius Streicher?’

I was being a little arch and tongue in cheek – but it did not surprise me enormously when the programme was taken off air, supposedly due to falling viewing figures (although that doesn’t bother the BBC unduly most of the time). Every month or so the general public saw a picture of who committed violent crime in this country, and this did not sit easily with the corporation, I suspect.

It is interesting to note that since then our attitudes towards immigration have changed markedly. According to the opinion polls, we have become much more kindly disposed towards taking people in and do not complain about any inconveniences occasioned by their arrival. Perhaps this is because we have become nicer, gentler people. Perhaps it is also because the ‘reinforcing of negative stereotypes’ or, as some might put it, ‘telling the truth’ has become something to be stamped out by the programme-makers, the opinion-formers, the ASA and so on.

Just for the record, in May this year the government produced a bunch of stats on arrests and ethnicity. White folk were arrested at the rate of nine per thousand, Pakistani people at the rate of 14 per thousand and black people at the rate of 29 per thousand. There was another category – ‘black other’ – who had an arrest rate of a hard-to-beat 61 per thousand. I’m not sure who they are, but they are clearly full of vim. If the prison service really wanted to challenge stereotypes, it should probably show individuals from ethnic groups who commit hardly any crime as prisoners in their posters – such as Indians (six arrests per 1,000) or Chinese (three).

It is not just crime where the imperative is to present a false picture of life in our country. You are no longer likely to see, in your television adverts, a woman holding a vacuum cleaner or a mop or shoving clothes into a washing machine and adding some unguent in order to make the clothes smell like a quiet walk in the forest, or something.

This is not because women do not do these things, it is because the Advertising Standards Authority would bash the advertisers over the head for reinforcing negative stereotypes: henceforth it is blokes who do all the cleaning. It is women who use power drills and play football. I’m sure there are some families where this division of labour pertains – but is it the majority, or anywhere near the majority? Is the official view of women who do vacuum the front room from time to time that they are throwback dupes to be excised from our world?

The new era of austerity

It’s the Chancellor who will deliver next week’s Autumn Statement, but every-one knows it will have been ghost-written by Rishi Sunak. When Jeremy Hunt ran for party leader, his own proposal was to take corporation tax from 19 per cent to 15 per cent. Now, he wishes to raise it to 25 per cent. When Hunt speaks next week, we should imagine Sunak’s voice.

Liz Truss spooked the markets by combining unexpected tax cuts with a spending splurge bigger than Sunak’s furlough scheme: a £10 billion-a-month subsidy on energy prices, going even to the richest. This was a shock, sprung on markets at a time when interest rates were rising globally. About two-thirds of the interest rate rises that emerged under Truss would probably have happened anyway, but politically this is irrelevant. Her timing was so spectacularly bad that she – and the Tories – will now be blamed for all of it.

Kwasi Kwarteng imagined that high borrowing would stimulate the economy and do it so effectively that the problem of debt would diminish. In this respect Kwarteng and his opposite number, Rachel Reeves, had similar ideas; it is the Labour approach to borrowing.

It is not in Sunak’s power, or anyone else’s, to bring back the old era of dirt-cheaploans. His mission will be to adapt to a harsh new reality. Governments once again need to balance their books. The Chancellor has already signalled what to expect: tax rises and spending cuts. Unless he has been misleading us, his Autumn Statement next week will mark not just a reversal of Truss’s economic policy but a rejection of Boris Johnson’s too. ‘Cakeism’ will give way to gruel. Austerity is back. Many on both the Labour and Tory benches will be appalled by the idea of significant austerity, which some expect to be the most severe since 1970.

The Tory plans are disruptive and chaotic; they are rewriting what was supposed to be a long-term economic agenda. The Tories stood on a 2019 manifesto pledge not to raise income tax, National Insurance or VAT; Sunak tore up that pledge for the sake of a relatively paltry increase in NI.

There is, of course, a price to pay for such unreliability. If the Prime Minister places a low value on Tory manifesto pledges, voters can be expected to do the same. Businesses had made long-term plans based on a solemn Tory promise that corporation tax would steadily fall. If that is now replaced by panicked tax hikes – compounded by smash-and-grab windfall taxes – it also sends the message that the UK is now a dangerous place to invest.

Tax rises may be the only option facing a country which has lost face in world markets, but when the Prime Minister asks why companies are reluctant to spend their cash, he should bear this in mind: if his party keeps changing its tax regime, then businesses will be reluctant to make long-term plans. We should not expect to hear the mantra ‘growth, growth, growth’ for quite a while.

The Bank of England’s chief economist Huw Pill has expressed the fear that the recession will be blamed on the Bank. He also pointed out that growth is hampered at present by a flurry of early retirement. It is compounded by the fact that 5.3 million people are claiming out-of-work benefits – a scandalous figure that the Tories will not acknowledge because they prefer to cherry-pick figures and pretend that unemployment is at a 40-year low.

This pretence is destructive and counterproductive. In a country where job vacancies are near a record high, vast swaths of our great cities are now workless zones. No wonder economic growth is so dismal. How can any country prosper if it is failing so spectacularly to use the talents of so many of its citizens? The Tories have brought us a world first: they have somehow managed to combine mass worker shortages with mass unemployment. That’s quite a feat – and a very expensive one.

Sunak is lucky in that he is not yet under attack for this. This scandal remains hidden because the big figure – the 5.3 million – has been broken up into various components behind password-protected government websites. It’s amazing how easy it is, in politics, to throw people off the scent. But the PM will be under no illusions. If he cannot cut taxes to grow the economy, he has only one other option: to reform welfare and persuade more people to join an economy crying out for workers.

David Cameron’s great success was to increase employment: at one point, he called the Tories the ‘workers’ party’. With enough honesty, imagination and determination, it could be again. Welfare reform is one of the hardest jobs in politics, but as Britain enters a new austerity era it may well be the only pro-growth option that the Tories have left.

Midterm madness: the only clear winner is paranoia

Election night, folks – America decides! Except, it doesn’t. On 8 November 2022, as on 3 November 2020, the polls closed, the votes came in and, er, nobody appeared to have won. Everybody now looks nervously again to the state of Georgia, which is probably too close to call and will be decided in a run-off in four weeks’ time. 

The people have spoken but once again nobody knows quite what they’ve said. Americans have spent decades arguing that Washington doesn’t work and their political system is broken. Well, they’re right. America is indeed polarised and terribly divided, as this week’s results show. It’s not just the politics, though: it’s the elections, stupid.

The most powerful and sophisticated democracy in the world can’t get the basics right. They can’t tabulate the votes very well. In Maricopa County, a vital part of the swing state of Arizona, the voting machines malfunctioned, triggering delays – and inevitable outcries from angry Republicans who think the system is rigged against them. Cock-up – or conspiracy? You decide! The only clear winner of each American election is paranoia. 

One problem is that, with at least a third of Americans now posting in their votes ahead of time, there isn’t really election ‘night’ as such. It’s more of a season. The much-hyped television debates between candidates are often silly, since large chunks of the electorate have already voted by the time they are held. Different states have different rules and processes for counting mail-ins and other votes. As a result, in some of the most decisive states, more early voting means more late counting, which means more mystery and suspicion. In a sane and functioning democracy, both sides would agree to a new set of federal rules to regulate modern voting habits. But America is a long way from democratic sanity. 

What is glaringly obvious is that most media pundits don’t know what they are talking about. The polls in fact said all along that the Senate would be very close, yet a great many conservative and even progressive analysts spent the days before the election predicting with utmost confidence that a great Republican ‘red tsunami’ was about to crash over Joe Biden’s sorry head. 

They were wrong. As election night dragged on, the increasingly disgruntled right-wing heads on Fox News started talking instead about a ‘red mirage’ or ‘a ripple’. In Pennsylvania, arguably the most important swing state in American politics, Republicans lost the governorship and the Senate race. It turns out that Pennsylvanians didn’t mind all that much that the now senator-elect John Fetterman, who recently had a stroke, wasn’t altogether compos mentis. For a majority, it seems, the key point was that Fetterman was not Mehmet Oz, the celebrity TV quack whom Donald Trump supported. 

But if right-wing partisans were too optimistic on Tuesday morning, they were too gloomy come the early hours of Wednesday. The Republican party appear to have taken the House of Representatives, albeit by a smaller margin than expected. In New York, a state that Biden carried by more than 20 per cent two years ago, they gained several house seats and very narrowly lost the governor race. 

The Republicans also stormed Florida, continuing the Trump-era trend of winning ever larger numbers of Hispanic voters, which represents a long-term headache for the Democrats. Florida governor Ron DeSantis, the man many want to take the Republican nomination away from Trump in 2024, enjoyed extraordinarily large swings in his favour in normally Democratic districts such as Miami Dade. 

Across the country, in fact, Republicans made gains among traditionally Democratic minority groups, although these swings were not quite as dramatic as the excitable analysts expected. In a close nationwide election, with so many races breaking in so many different ways, each side will always have disappointments and consolations. 

But in the fervid political atmosphere of 21st-century America, any sober analysis of the results is difficult for Republicans and Democrats. These days, everything must be portrayed as triumph or disaster. Every loss at the ballot must be another descent towards authoritarianism, civil war or American Gomorrah. Every victory is a last-ditch win for freedom over tyranny. It’s not surprising that voter participation keeps going up. America’s politicians are bullying the public against apathy. Don’t you care about the end of western civilisation?

Democrats bet the house – and lost, just – on lecturing everybody at every opportunity about the menace that Trump poses to their country and the world. The international media, enthralled as it is by the idea of evil right-wing Americana, lapped that up. Such talk also seemed to fire up the Democratic youth vote, as did the relentless and hugely expensive advertising drives about the threat Republicans pose to legal abortion following the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe vs Wade. 

Democratic pundits – and Republicans who desperately want to move on from the Age of the Donald – will point to the failure of high-profile Trump-backed candidates, notably in Pennsylvania and in Arizona, and call it a humiliation for Trumpism and the nationalist right. If only it were that simple. The truth is that Trumpy nationalists thrived elsewhere – in Ohio, for instance, the author turned populist J.D. Vance won easily. 

Democrats tried very hard to denounce as beyond the pale the ‘election denier’ Republican candidates – that is, those who’ve repeated or even refused to disavow Trump’s claims about the 2020 election being ‘stolen’. But the truth is that Democrats are also guilty of fouling up the democratic ‘norms’ they pretend to revere. They’ve just being doing it for longer. 

To drum up support in the last days before Tuesday’s vote, senior Democrats, chiefly Barack Obama, reheated their trusty ‘democracy is on the ballot’ line. In other words, vote Democrat or you’re anti-democratic – or an enabler of fascism. 

Biden has sounded even more alarmist in his rhetoric. He suggested that perfectly reasonable state reforms in Georgia to make ballots more secure amounted to ‘Jim Crow 2.0’ – a racist attempt to suppress black voters. 

It’s easy to forget that, after winning the White House, he presented himself as the ‘Uniter-in-Chief’. ‘We can join forces, stop the shouting and lower the temperature,’ he said at his inauguration on 20 January last year. ‘For without unity there is no peace, only bitterness and fury. No progress, only exhausting outrage. No nation, only a state of chaos.’ 

Where did that Joe go? The Biden of 2022 has spent what little energy he has suggesting that his political opponents, Trump and his Make America Great Again movement, are extremists and mortal enemies of the republic. In other words, vote Republican or you’re anti-republic. 

‘The Republican party today is dominated, driven and intimidated by Donald Trump and the Maga Republicans,’ he declared in a now infamous speech in Philadelphia on 1 September. ‘Maga Republicans do not respect the constitution. They do not believe in the rule of law. They do not recognise the will of the people.’ In his better moments, Biden insists that he doesn’t mean all Republican voters. It just sounds a lot like he does. 

The Democrats’ House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn took things further last week and reached for the Reductio ad Hitlerum. ‘This country is on track to repeat what happened in Germany when it was the greatest democracy going, elected a chancellor who then co-opted their media… and that’s what’s going on in this country,’ he said. The really scary news is that such ludicrous propaganda appears to some extent to have achieved its desired effect.

And watch carefully now as the party which spent the last few months knocking Republicans for 2020 conspiracy theories start spreading half-baked stories about ‘voter suppression’ in districts they lost. Look out for Stacey Abrams, the part-time erotic novelist and one-time contender to be vice president, who has been saying that she was unfairly robbed of the governorship of Georgia for four years. She got beaten in the same race again last night, and easily, but it’s safe to assume she’ll still be crying foul in 2048. In fact, she’s gotten her quibbles in early. When asked why she seemed to be underperforming with black voters, Abrams suggested that, actually, her black supporters are ‘often discounted’ and that ‘this year black men have been a very targeted population for misinformation’. The difference between her and Trump is that the media doesn’t tend to put the word ‘baseless’ in front of the word ‘claims’ when reporting what she’s saying.

The muddled monster of American democracy lurches on to the next presidential cycle in 2024. Trump is expected to announce his candidacy any day now, and his party will continue to wrestle with the electoral conundrum he poses. Trump is the Republicans’ greatest asset at the ballot – with his extraordinary talent for rallying the base. He’s also their greatest weakness – with his unique ability to put off independent voters. They can’t win, with or without him. Following his success this week, Ron DeSantis will come under renewed pressure to challenge Trump for the nomination. That will be very difficult. 

Meanwhile, Biden, who turns 80 this month, has emerged once more as a hapless winner, even though like Trump he just lost the House. Everybody knows the President is a bit of disaster and too old to go on. But on he goes. The Trump vs Biden contest of 2020 depressed almost everyone – two septuagenarians insulting each other in the middle of the pandemic. In the current economic climate, round two is unlikely to provide more cheer. The safest bet is that the result will be bitterly contested. 

Wine Club: mix and match, magnums and more from Tanners

Robert Boutflower of Tanners is a good, kind, generous man. All he and we want is your happiness and so, mindful of the wretched economic situation the twits in charge have landed us in and the ghastly spectre of dread Christmas on the horizon (my words, not his), he put up a deliciously varied selection for me to taste, offered 15 per cent off all the RRPs and suggests you mix your own case rather than take a pre-packed assortment. What a gent.

The 2021 Kumeu Village Chardonnay (1) is a cast-iron favourite of mine from Mike Brajkovich, one of New Zealand’s most highly regarded producers. About as perfect an entry-level Chardonnay as you will find anywhere, it’s marked by an enviable lightness of touch with hints of peach, lemon, cream and the subtlest whisper of oak. Gosh it’s good! £12.24 down from £14.40.

The 2020 Müller-Grossman Kremstal ‘Satz Viertal’ Grüner Veltliner (2) is an equally fine example of Austria’s ‘own’ grape, from vineyards run by mother and daughter Helma Muller-Grossman and Marlies Hanke, west of Vienna. Fresh and inviting with lemon ’n’ lime, a touch of peppery spice and a long, satisfying finish, it’s deliciously food-friendly. £11.73 down from £13.80.

The 2021 Bonnet-Huteau ‘Les Gautronnières’ Muscadet (3) is that vinous phenomenon: gluggably drinkable new wave Muscadet. The wines from this part of the Loire Valley were once notoriously bland and dull and this is anything but. An organic/biodynamic gem, produced by the Bonnet brothers, it’s crisp, clean and dry, with weight and body thanks to six months on the lees. £13.09 down from £15.40.

The 2019 Abbé Rous ‘Réserve des Peintres’ Collioure (4) from Matisse country in deepest south-west of France (it’s almost in Spain) is perfect winter fare, being crammed with ripe, juicy red fruit. A blend of oak-aged, old vine Grenache, Mourvèdre and Syrah, it’s rich, soft and suitably warming. £13.56 down from £15.95.

The 2017 Ch. La Pervenche (5) from Lalande-de-Pomerol is ideal festive claret. Rich, dark and generous with plenty of succulent Merlot to the fore, it would suit rib of beef or saddle of lamb perfectly and, at under £15, it’s a steal. £14.37 down from £16.90.

The 2020 Churton Marlborough Pinot Noir (6), from an estate I’ve followed ever since it was founded 30-plus years ago by my old Oddbins mate Sam Weaver, is top-notch as always. With fine red burgundy in ridiculously short supply, this is just the wine to fill the gap. Soft, smooth, mellow, textured and full of rich, ripe raspberry/blueberry/cherry fruit, it’s in glorious form and will get even better. £22.95 down from £27.

As I say, all RB and I crave is your continued contentment, so herewith offer three magnificent magnums, ideal for hearty Sunday lunches or festive feasts. The 2017 Piedra Negra Reserve Malbec (7) produced by visionary winemaker François Lurton in Mendoza, Argentina, is full-flavoured and powerful. There’s a freshness to the concentrated plum/damson fruit, though, and it’s beautifully balanced. £28.05 down from £33.

The 2016 Domaines Barons de Rothschild (Lafite) Médoc Réserve Spéciale (8) has impeccable credentials, produced as it is by one of the most famous Bordeaux estates of all. A fine balance of Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot, it’s full of enticingly juicy cassis fruit wrapped in gentle tannins. £33.96 down from £39.95.

The 2019 Sutil ‘Acrux’ (9), is a gloriously complex blend of six different grape varieties from Chile’s Colchagua Valley. It deserves a fine decanter in which to show off, so sophisticated and stylish is it. Your guests will think it a claret twice the price. £41.65 down from £49.

All wines are offered with 15 per cent discount as shown. To take advantage of this offer, visit tanners-wines.co.uk/spectator and enter discount code SPECTATOR at checkout. You can buy by the single bottle or you can mix the wines in any combination, with free delivery on 12 bottles (or equivalent) or more. Offer applies until Monday 28 November 2022, while stocks last.

Made.com is a dotcom parable from an earlier era

‘Reparations’, much bandied about at Cop27, is a dangerous word. It speaks of an admission of historic guilt, which no one can deny has a place in public discourse. But its intention is to put a punitive price on guilt itself, rather than to advance collaborative work needed to rectify damage that can be traced back to bad acts, whether committed through greed, prejudice, aggression or ignorance. It says, in short: ‘Don’t send us your supposedly superior expertise and your lectures about how to improve ourselves. Just send cash. And keep sending it until your tortured conscience is assuaged.’

But in relation to climate impacts, the argument over who pays, who receives and how much would rage for decades while the damage gets worse and the repair costs rise. And do you imagine China would ever pay a single cent? Boris Johnson was right when he said at Sharm El Sheikh that no country has the resources to pay in full for past carbon emissions, but ‘what we can do is help with the technology that can help fix the problem’. And of course that technology will come far more from entrepreneurship and private-sector industry than from the interventions of governments, whose role should be prodder and catalyst.

This theme has been in my mind since my recent visit to Minneapolis, where I was startled when a black activist, having catalogued the many ways the white majority had disadvantaged his community, replied to the well-intentioned question ‘What should happen next?’ with the single word, ‘Reparations’. Not better schools, better housing, more help for small businesses, more cross-community co-operation; not better oversight of local policing. I don’t suggest for a moment he had no reason to feel bitter about history, but bitterness rather than willingness to rebuild was what I took from his answer. And so we keep hearing that word.

But in the long history of reparations there can be few cases in which recipients felt wholly satisfied. By contrast, we have the very different example of the post-second world war Marshall Plan of US aid for bombed-out Europe which – alongside Germany’s own recovery effort – set the continent on a positive new path. A cliché this may be, but every global issue from climate change to postwar reconstruction and mass migration is surely better addressed by seeking a new multilateral Marshall Plan than by repeatedly asking: ‘Who’ll pay for history?’

Hands off our Innovators

This week sees the grand finale of this year’s Spectator Economic Innovator of the Year Awards – and next week I’ll reveal our glittering line-up of winners. What I’m hoping I won’t also have to tell you is that their prospects have been blighted by Jeremy Hunt’s forthcoming statement: pre-Budget spin has suggested higher capital gains and dividend taxes, a squeeze on entrepreneur relief and even a hike in the cost of registering a new company. Given the role of innovative high-growth businesses in economic recovery, those moves would be ill-aimed for no obvious political gain. Big targets await you, Chancellor, which few voters will defend – banks, energy companies and private equity funds, for starters – but please keep your sticky mitts off our Innovator entrants.

Unmade

Made.com may have been ‘the millennials’ favourite online furniture store’ but it never entered my shopping universe and has now become the first significant retailer knocked out by the cost-of-living crisis. I can see that its off-white Isadora sofa whose ‘curved cocoon shape will hug you in and make a statement while it’s at it’ might have suited my late golden retriever, but at £1,100 I can’t imagine buying it for myself whatever it had to say. Style apart, this boom-bust story feels like a dotcom parable from an earlier era, not least because Made’s chairman until 2016 (working with the founder, Ning Li) was Brent Hoberman – himself co-founder of lastminute.com, one of the few British ventures to achieve fame in the dotcom bubble of the late 1990s.

Made claimed to be disrupting the furniture sector by using crowdsourcing to identify popular product lines, but it never came close to making a profit. On the strength of a lockdown sales surge, it floated in June last year with a valuation of  £775 million, three times 2020 revenues, only for investors to watch the share price evaporate to next to nothing as cash ran out.

Ning Li has rejected several low bids that might have kept the business alive, and Made this week went into administration – the brand name may be bought by Next or Frasers Group, the bargain-hunting pirate ship now captained by Michael Murray, the son-in-law of our old friend Mike Ashley. As for where to find furniture online for your first-time flat, my millennial chums tell me Wayfair is the way to go.

For the chop

City veterans will share my sadness at the fate of Simpson’s Tavern, the chophouse off Cornhill that dates from 1757 but has been locked out by its Bermudan-registered landlord in a dispute over rent unpaid during the pandemic. A reader who lunched there shortly before the closure tells me the place was ‘full of history but could have done with a jolly good clean’ – which I suppose is one way to maintain an authentic 18th-century ambience.

It’s 40 years since I last tucked into a bloody Barnsley chop among pinstriped Simpson’s regulars who liked to while away lunchtime by gambling on banknote serial numbers. The management has launched a crowdfunding appeal for the £385,000 rent deficit and had attracted £71,000 by last Tuesday from 1,700 donors, with 41 days to go. But I’m sure the shortfall could be less laboriously raised from the annual bonuses of a single lunch table of today’s forex traders and hedge-fund players who have won big this year in a newer version of banknote poker, namely shorting the pound.

Kamala’s blagging it

We throw around pejoratives such as ‘Idiot!’ a bit too carelessly, because then when we need to flag up genuinely subpar intelligence, the slag doesn’t land. I sometimes resort to the distinction ‘medically stupid’. As in, ‘Kamala Harris is medically stupid’.

As I write this, next year’s Congressional balance of power is uncertain. What is certain: after the midterms, the same terrifyingly unfit politician will remain one cardiac arrest away from the American presidency.

The press characterises the Vice President’s missteps as ‘gaffes’, but a proclivity for making embarrassing mistakes in public doesn’t capture the scale of the problem. In a Florida interview about the clean-up after Hurricane Ian, Kamala blithered: ‘Giving resources based on equity, understanding that we fight for equality, but we also have to fight for equity, understanding that not everyone starts out in the same place, and if we want people to be in an equal place, sometimes we have to take into account those disparities.’

Clearly, just like Covid financial relief, the administration wished to reserve disaster relief for favoured races. In the service of ‘equity’, the flattened homes of evil white people should rot in place. Thus the director of the federal relief agency was obliged to clarify that ‘our programmes support everybody… I commit to you right here that all Floridians are going to be able to get the help that is available to them throughour programmes’.

On their visits to South Korea, we might not expect busy American politicians to bone up on recipes for beef bulgogi bibimbap. Only one minor detail can they not get wrong. Yet speaking on a trip to the demilitarised zone in September, Kamala asserted forcefully: ‘The United States shares a very important relationship, which is an alliance with the Republic of North Korea. And it is an alliance that is strong and enduring.’ Here I thought it was Donald Trump accused of cosying up to the Dear Leader.

A comfort to Pennsylvania’s new senator John Fetterman: Kamala can’t talk, either, and she hasn’t had a stroke. Let’s sample a Thorntons assortment from 2022.

On mental health: ‘When we talk about our children – I know for this group, we all believe that when we talk about the children of the community, they are a children of the community.’

On internet access: ‘I’m talking about the significance of the passage of time. Right? The significance of the passage of time. So when you think about it, there is great significance to the passage of time.’

On transportation policy: ‘You need to get to go. You need to be able to get where you need to go. To do the work. And to get home.’

On the Highland Park school shooting: ‘We got to take this stuff seriously, as seriously as you are, because you’re forced to have to take it seriously.’

On why Democrats haven’t codified Roe vs Wade for 50 years: ‘I think that – to be very honest with you, I do believe that we should have rightly believed what we certainly believe – that certain issues are just settled. Certain issues are just settled.’

Interviewer: ‘Clearly, they’re not.’

‘No, that’s right,’ Kamala agrees. ‘And I do believe that we are living, sadly, in real…  unsettled… times.’

Most telling? Her appearance celebrating $1 billion funding for electric buses thanks to Joe Biden’s infrastructure bill. Mind, she was speaking to grown-ups. ‘So, here’s the thing. Who doesn’t love a yellow school bus? Right? Can you raise your hand if you love a yellow school bus? Right?’ (Raises her own hand.)

‘There’s something about the, and… Well, most of us, many of us, went to school on the yellow school bus, right? And it’s part of, it’s part of, our, our experience growing up. It’s part of, you know, a nostalgia, a memory of the excitement and joy of going to school to be with your favourite teacher, to be with your best friends, and to learn.’ Beaming smile. She delivered this patronising blather with the puerile exaggeration one might employ with a rather dim reception class.

Why telling? Kamala is not merely an atrocious speaker. She’s not merely dense. She’s lazy. Any student would recognise that she was blagging it. She assumed she could seat-of-the-pants this presentation with no preparation. A woman signally incapable of extemporising should be mindful of the shortcoming and arrive – on camera, representing her administration – with a few notes. Her most ghastly speeches appear the result of not having bothered even to think about them ahead of time.

I read our friend Kamala as chronically self-impressed. Mommy told her she was special. In adulthood, she retains the vain affect of someone long allowed to believe she’s more physically attractive, personally charming and intellectually discerning than external reality could possibly justify. During an extended American era when being female and non-white has furnished many a mediocrity with elevator shoes, the outside world has failed to adjust Kamala’s flattering fun-house mirror. Instead, she’s busted through the Peter Principle’s natural level of incompetence, at which she should have stalled, and now this work-shy ineptitude is a whisker away from the presidency of the United States.

America’s capricious, anti-democratic selection of VP is a procedural weak link. A nominee’s pick is often selected for appealing to a particular voting bloc – formerly, a region or class; nowadays, a sex and/or race. Though voters so scorned Kamala as a presidential candidate that she quit before the primaries, it seems any old non-white female on the ticket sufficed. Kamala is an icon of the category that dare not speak its name: the feckless diversity hire.

Now the joke is on the Dems. For 2024, the party’s pressure on Biden to bow out is bound to be immense. But no one else is lined up to run other than their widely pilloried box-ticker – who’d be demolished at the polls. There’s poetic justice in the Dems being annihilated by their own identity politics. Yet if Trump capitalises on a medically stupid veep, the country will pay the price.

The enduring power of war memorials

This Sunday, in my village of Etchingham, East Sussex, we will gather around our war memorial. It is a fine monument, designed by Sir Herbert Baker, with the names of the dead inscribed around an octagonal base. There are no famous names upon it: indeed, there is only one commissioned officer, a Second Lieutenant (who had once been a commercial clerk, working from the age of 14). The rest were mostly young farm labourers: the oldest, aged 44, had been a ‘domestic chauffeur’.

The rural working classes leave little in the way of records. These men left no ‘voices of the Great War’. But though mute, they are not inglorious; and one of the most eloquent writers of the era spoke on their behalf.  On 28 April 1920, in ‘rain, sleet and bitter wind’, Rudyard Kipling made the speech at the unveiling of the memorial.

It seems fitting to read the speech out again this year, to mark the restoration of the memorial with money from the War Memorials Trust. The Clipsham stonework has been cleaned and repaired and is golden again, as it was on that rainy day in 1920. The work was done by Gordon Newton: war memorials, old and new, have been his life’s calling.

The passion of men such as Newton for these silent stones may seem strange to a modern generation. Nowadays, museums and exhibits are expected to be ‘interactive’, ‘immersive’ and ‘hands-on’. Labels bombard visitors with information and exhortations, preach and jabber.

Kipling knew the strength and importance of silences. As a master-craftsman of words, he urged the importance of cutting back, deleting and cutting back again. His speech for the unveiling is moving partly because of what it does not say, and his awareness of what words cannot do. ‘We all know that grief cannot be cheated,’ he begins, starting with a bleak negative. And behind the words that follow, unspoken, are the dark reservoirs of his own grief.

‘I have just come back from the invaded areas of France,’ he says, and evokes the devastation – remnants of woods and forests ‘burnt and gassed and shelled into fringes of a few withered sticks like twisted hop-poles’ – from which England has been saved. What he does not say aloud is that his son, Jack, had been killed in that part of France, aged 18, in his first action.

Jack’s body was not found in Kipling’s lifetime. The man who could have no gravestone for his own son understood the importance of a physical memorial. It underlay his tireless work for the War Graves Commission (‘You see, we shall never have any grave to go to…’). Kipling was responsible for the epitaph ‘Known unto God’, inscribed upon the tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

Kipling urges his hearers of 1920 to probe the silence: such reticence was ‘natural during the war’, but there is a danger that in peace ‘we may neglect to learn and understand the full stretch of their heroism’. Etchingham, he says ‘has done wisely in making speed to erect her memorial… while the tales are fresh and undimmed, that it may serve as a witness to the dread reality of them’.

A hundred years later, the tales are dimmer; but the memorial stands. The silence of these stones may now be deeper; but silence has its own power.

Letters: The triple lock must be saved

Running the asylum

Sir: The interview with Robert Buckland must be the most depressing article I have read for a long time (‘Let them contribute’, 5 November). He notes that the many months of lockdown when no one came into the country presented the perfect opportunity to cut the asylum backlog. Instead it got bigger. He suggests reforming the system so that all information material to a case must be presented upfront, instead of cases being subject to endless appeals. (There’s also the fact that many asylum claimants have confused matters by tossing their passports in the sea during their transit.) One wonders how the Tories allowed this mess to develop, and why they can’t take commonsense steps (including his own suggestions) to resolve it.

The spectacle Buckland offers is of a government without ideas or resolve, and a Britain in which immigration is permanently at the mercy of a Home Office which has gone native.

Richard North

Hayling Island, Hampshire

Triple jump

Sir: I am concerned about the tendency for comfortably off pensioners to say that the triple lock should be abolished, as it illustrates a worrying disconnect between the ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’ in society. I was disappointed to read Charles Moore’s comments on the subject (Notes, 5 November), as he no doubt enjoys a substantial private pension from his past employment together with ongoing earnings. The state pension therefore will be a minor component of his monthly income. 

There are millions of OAPs who have worked for small businesses on low wages all their lives, whose employers did not have a pension scheme. For them, private pension schemes would have been unaffordable. To these people, the old age pension is the major, if not the only, component of their monthly income: roughly £1,500 a month for a married couple. The triple lock is needed to protect them. And even hinting at dropping the triple could be electorally catastrophic for the Conservatives, as Theresa May discovered to her cost in 2017.

David Norris

Quorn, Leicestershire

A debt delayed

Sir: Douglas Murray asks: ‘Why should our descendants be forced into a worse situation because of the selfishness of your own actions?’ (‘The negligence of “not in my lifetime”’, 5 November). The vast costs of the Covid debacle have yet to be properly calculated but the monetary loss alone has been estimated to be roughly £130 billion. And this sum fails to include the cost of the setback to our economy and the social cost to healthcare and education. 

This is the first time in the history of the UK that the cost of an illness – which mainly afflicted the elderly and infirm of today’s generation – has been put on the national credit card to be paid by future generations. Murray claims that ‘almost nobody… appears to see (this) as a moral issue’. I have 11 grandchildren, and I do.

Tom Benyon

Bladon, Oxford

Stirling effort

Sir: I was touched by Taki’s tribute to the Grand Prix heroes of the 1950s (High life, 5 November). Sir Stirling Moss was a lucky survivor and remained an iconic figure in the sport for the rest of his life, able to provide commentary on the most apparently trivial aspects of his career, from lap times at obscure races to dinner dates and haircuts, having kept diaries throughout. He narrowly missed out on the World Championship crown in 1958, losing to Mike Hawthorne by just one point – Moss having won four Grand Prix to Hawthorne’s single victory. When Hawthorne’s Ferrari spun during the Oporto Grand Prix and returned to the circuit via the Boavista road circuit’s pavement, race stewards threatened him with disqualification for going against the direction of the race. But Moss sportingly spoke up for him, enabling Hawthorne to keep his Portuguese points, and thus eclipse Moss in the championship standings by that single point. Different days, for sure.

Johnny Tipler

Cromer, Norfolk

Natural born thrillers

Sir: Katja Hoyer’s tacit linking of the bizarre practice of biodynamic agriculture with political extremism (‘Long live the Kaiser’, 5 November) ignores the fact that many of the best wines in the world are produced by biodynamics. Some of the practices do seem nutty, but the proof of the pudding (wine) is in the drinking. They are clearly doing something right. I have met only a very few extreme characters on my wine travels, and none of them dangerous so far as I know.

Edward Ash WSETdip

London SW20

Russia’s affliction

Sir: I strongly endorse James Delingpole’s review of the BBC’s TraumaZone (Arts, 29 October). All the seeds of the chronic insecurity that afflict Russia today are laid bare in this superb series, among them violence, incompetence, grinding poverty and rapacious corruption, all delivered with a mendacity that only a communist system can manage. As a student who spent a year in the Soviet Union from 1985-86 and as a regular visitor until 2014, it is a tragedy that so very little has changed.

James Butterwick

Burnham Market, Norfolk

Joining the Dots

Sir: I’m surprised at Dot Wordsworth’s account of her memory loss (‘Multiple’, 4 November). Did she not attend one of the Oxford women’s colleges? Plurimi pertransibunt et multiplex erit scientia is unmissably inscribed above the south staircase of the (Old) Bodleian Library. I’m grateful to her, however, for revealing the origin of the sentence in the Vulgate, ambivalent though it seems.

Brigid Allen

Charlbury, Oxfordshire

My pilgrimage on the Western Front Way

Daunt Books in Marylebone was full last Tuesday evening for the launch of The Path of Peace, my book about walking from Switzerland to the North Sea, to help realise the vision of a young subaltern, Douglas Gillespie, killed in September 1915 shortly after unveiling his idea in a letter to his headmaster at Winchester College. He envisaged after the war a ‘via sacra’ being created along the entire Western Front and he wanted every man, woman and child to walk the trail as a reminder of where war leads ‘from the silent witnesses’ on both sides. A ‘brilliant idea’ was how The Spectator described the suggestion during the war. But the vision lay buried for 100 years. My walk last summer was 1,000 km and took one million steps through soil where ten million bled to death or were severely wounded in body or mind. The walk, perhaps the best idea to have emerged from the war, is now being marked out with signposts across northern France and Belgium, called the ‘Western Front Way’. Pilgrimages on foot or cycle can revive purpose and zest for life, as Gillespie intended. I recommend it!

My much loved father, Arthur Seldon, co-founder of the Institute of Economic Affairs, was one month old when the Somme battle opened in July 1916, but his parents, both immigrants from Ukraine, were soon ailing with the Spanish flu. I researched their lives in the wartime Jewish East End for the book, learning how my father was passed unwanted from family to family after his parents died until he was adopted by a cobbler from Russia. A lifelong and passionate champion of the free market, he would have recoiled at the insensitive application of its principles by Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng.

I reached the halfway point this week in writing Johnson at 10, an analysis of his three years at No. 10 to be published in the spring. My co-author Raymond Newell and I are focusing on the key decisions, turning points and lost opportunities in Boris Johnson’s unruly premiership. Was it the most consequential short premiership in British history – up there with Lord Grey, whose three years saw the 1832 Reform Act and the abolition of slavery? History might judge Brexit, Covid and Britain’s decisive lead on the Ukraine war as of comparable historic importance. Fascinating too to weigh the roles of Dominic Cummings and Carrie Johnson, the most commanding aide and spouse in the past 100 years. Johnson’s premiership throws up so many paradoxes, none greater than why, after getting Brexit done so clearly and decisively, there was neither decisiveness nor clarity about what to do with Brexit – a puzzle all the greater given the political capital won in the 2019 landslide. And the answer? Because the principals – Johnson, Michael Gove, Cummings and David Frost – had very different and often inchoate ambitions for Brexit.

Brexit could have been a once-in-a-generation chance to renew the state and public services. Creating a government and No. 10 fit for the 21st century was Cummings’s passion, yet to be realised. He had similarities with Richard Haldane, who transformed the British state at the start of the last century. But while Haldane had 20 years, Cummings had 20 months at the centre. We need a commission, to report before the next general election and drawing inspiration from innovative thinking abroad, on modernising our government.

Misplaced negativity was another reason why opportunities to mobilise the country were squandered at this huge potential reset moment in British history. Business? Get stuffed. Whitehall? Utterly useless. Universities? Irredeemably woke. With imagination, universities could have powered the post-Brexit economy and been at the heart of levelling up. But instead of dynamic strategy, there was nitpicking which achieved nothing, not even sorting out free speech, so badly needed.

Back at Wellington College for the memorial to my former colleague Andrew Wilkinson, so alike in spirit to Douglas Gillespie. ‘He came back from Afghanistan, the North Face of the Eiger and Everest,’ we heard in chapel. But not this time from his beloved Alps. Teacher, soldier, adventurer, he left the comfort of Wellington to set up the charity Dynamis Adventures, to help underprivileged children develop and flourish through outdoor adventure. Magnificently brave and tirelessly loving, his Christian faith was his core. Most saw his selfless service, but few its wellspring – any more than they did with the Queen. As I stand at the Cenotaph for the service at 11 a.m. on 11 November, I will remember them.