Even the WHO has turned on China’s zero-Covid strategy

Covid infections are finally falling in Shanghai. The city reported just over 2,000 cases on Tuesday, down from over 27,000 at its peak a month ago. Yet instead of regaining their freedom, locals have been hit by tighter lockdown restrictions. Even the World Health Organisation, which typically shies away from criticising China, is urging Beijing to rethink its approach. Its director Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said he does not think China’s Covid policy is ‘sustainable considering the behaviour of the virus’. But President Xi Jinping is blocking his ears.

Over the weekend, reports emerged of people in Shanghai being taken into quarantine simply for living in the same building as positive cases. The hashtag ‘One person tests positive, whole block gets quarantined’ went viral on Weibo. In some areas, local authorities have reportedly started a so-called ‘quiet period’ where even delivery drivers are not allowed to drop off food, while others are breaking through doors to get to residents who refuse to budge.

But despite the growing anger in Shanghai – and the criticism from the WHO – China’s Politburo standing committee has doubled down on zero Covid. In a statement last week, it said: ‘Perseverance is victory’:

‘Practice has proved that our prevention and control policy is determined by the nature and purpose of the Party, our prevention and control policies can stand the test of history, and our prevention and control measures are scientific and effective.’

Politics, not science, now appears to be driving the mind-boggling tightening of Shanghai’s restrictions as infections fall. Xi cannot countenance a U-turn and ambitious apparatchiks lower down the rungs are keen to please him. Shanghai’s party secretary Li Qiang had been tipped to become the new Chinese premier this autumn (Xi Jinping’s de facto deputy), but that was before Shanghai’s Covid shambles made headlines around the world. Promotion is out of the question now. Li’s hope is that he might still save his career, only if he follows the Politburo’s instructions to the letter.

After Xi met the Politburo standing committee, the Shanghai party committee under Li Qiang held its own meeting just hours later, resolving to ‘transmit the spirit of the standing committee meeting’. A statement it released shortly afterwards made it clear that Papa Xi’s Covid strategy isn’t going away:

‘Under the firm leadership of the Chinese communist party with Comrade Xi Jinping at its core, with the support of the whole country, the whole city must grit our teeth, determine our target, keep pressing on, strike while the iron is hot, and we can definitely claim victory over the great defensive battle for Shanghai’. 

Barely two days later, ordinary citizens who’d never even come in contact with a positive case were being taken into quarantine. 

Even card-carrying members of the CCP are outraged. Professor Tong Zhiwei, a constitutional lawyer at a Shanghai university and a CCP member himself, went viral on Sunday when he published a letter calling for an end to ‘excessive pandemic prevention’ in order to avoid a ‘legal catastrophe’. It was signed by over 20 academics. The professor pointed out that it was illegal and unconstitutional to forcibly move people into quarantine when the country’s highest authorities had not declared a state of emergency. His Weibo account (400,000 followers) and the letter itself have now been censored.

Meanwhile in Beijing, which is facing its own battle with Omicron, there are growing signs of unease about zero Covid. Cases appear to be under control at the moment, but schools and some non-essential shops are already closed. CCP cheerleader Hu Xijin, who was editor of the nationalistic tabloid the Global Times until last year, took to Weibo to question this strategy:

‘I fervently hope that Beijing can be a breakthrough in pandemic control. Zero Covid is very important, but it will only be meaningful if we can afford the costs of zero Covid… If Beijing cannot control Omicron with this method, and the virus continues to spread, then I feel that Beijingers have to accept that cruel reality, and the country must also. We definitely cannot continue to use infinite lockdowns… to maintain the low transmission of Covid.’

Hu’s post was deleted. But the well-connected journalist’s post raises a question: how split is the CCP over Xi’s zero Covid agenda? Last week’s Standing Committee memo felt it necessary to explicitly warn: 

‘We must resolutely struggle against all words and deeds that distort, doubt and deny our epidemic prevention policies’. 

These words are aimed at the growing number of Chinese willing to speak out against zero Covid. But how long can the government continue to silence its critics? The absurdity of the situation has been unwittingly but perfectly summed up by one angry policeman. In a confrontation with residents in Shanghai who were refusing to be quarantined, the hazmat suited copper shouted: 

‘Stop asking me why. There is no why.’

What the Marxist Tariq Ali gets wrong about Winston Churchill

Tariq Ali, the Marxist writer and activist, believes that a ‘Churchill cult’ is ‘drowning all serious debate’ about the wartime leader, and that ‘an alternative was badly needed’. He has therefore written a book that parrots every earlier revisionist slur about Churchill – war criminal, evil imperialist, mass murderer, pro-fascist – from detractors such as Caroline Elkins, Priya Gopal, Richard Gott, David Irving, Madrushee Mukerji, Clive Ponting, Richard Toye and Geoffrey Wheatcroft. If there were indeed a Churchill cult, it has done a singularly bad job of drowning out criticism of its hero.

There’s a general rule in biography, as in journalism, that knocking copy ought to be better researched than ordinary writing, but it is not one that Ali observes. He makes so many basic factual errors that Churchill’s reputation emerges unscathed from this onslaught.

The book claims that Churchill ‘had been little more than a clever politician engaged in career building’ before he became prime minister in 1940. Not so. He had already helped create the welfare state, readied the Royal Navy for the Great War and warned the world about the rise of the Nazis, among many other significant achievements. Explaining Churchill’s supposed unpopularity during the second world war, Ali claims it was because ‘the men fleeing Dunkirk knew how unprepared and badly armed they were’. Yet Churchill had been demanding higher defence spending throughout his wilderness years.

Ali further claims that in 1943, a Gallup Poll ‘revealed that only one third of the population expressed satisfaction with the war cabinet, i.e. Churchill’. Yet Churchill was not the war cabinet, and Gallup actually recorded Churchill’s personal popularity remaining above 80 per cent throughout his wartime premiership – dipping briefly for a single month to 78 per cent – and on three occasions reaching 93 per cent. The statement that the Conservatives lost the 1945 election due to ‘anti-Churchill feeling’ is similarly wrong. The Tories would have done much worse if he had not been their leader. They lost because the electorate, while admiring Churchill personally, wanted the welfare state, nationalisation and the ‘New Jerusalem’ offered by Clement Attlee (whose name is consistently misspelt in this book).

Ali believes that General Kitchener was in command and responsible for Britain’s early defeats in the Boer War in 1899, even though Kitchener did not set foot in South Africa until January 1900, three months after the war broke out. He claims that Churchill sent troops against the miners at Tonypandy, when in fact he stopped the troops who were on the way there, leaving the police to engage the miners with rolled-up mackintoshes. He describes Churchill’s wartime ministry as ‘the Tory gang running the country’, whereas in fact Labour and the Liberals were included in Churchill’s coalition from the start. He also puts Enoch Powell in Churchill’s postwar cabinet, whereas he was not even a minister in the government.

Churchill is accused of being ‘exhilarated’ by the destruction of German cities. In fact he saw it as a ghastly necessity, and rhetorically asked: ‘Are we beasts?’ It’s further stated that Churchill did not admire the Pashtun tribesmen’s ‘fierceness on the North-West Frontier’, proving that Ali cannot have read The Story of the Malakand Field Force, which is full of examples of just that. Not reading books is something of a speciality of Ali’s. He claims that in my biography of Churchill, I ‘execute sleight of hand’ by not directly quoting Churchill’s statements of admiration for Mussolini, whereas I do on five occasions.

Ali argues that Churchill was ‘an advocate of Franco’s triumph in Spain’ and that his ‘support for the general was never in doubt’ because, ‘blinded by class and imperial prejudices, Churchill fully backed European fascism against its enemies on the left’. In fact Churchill advocated strict non-intervention during the Spanish civil war, wrote in the Daily Telegraph that a Franco victory would lead to ‘the same kind of brutal suppressions as are practised in the totalitarian states’, and in December 1938 told Lord Halifax, the foreign secretary: ‘Our interests are plainly served by a Franco defeat.’

The quality of Ali’s research is so execrable that he even cites the fictional TV series Peaky Blinders as a source for the (untrue) claim that Churchill ordered Special Branch to murder Sinn Feiners in Britain in the 1920s. Sinn Fein is, of course, deified in this book, whereas Evelyn Baring, the governor of Kenya in the 1950s, ‘would have easily slotted in as a Third Reich bureaucrat’. When Ali is not being gratuitously insulting, the seriousness of his argument may be judged by his remark: ‘Jomo Kenyatta became the official leader, had lots of children (like Boris Johnson) and was feted by the Queen.’

If someone is going to make the accusation that ‘Churchill was fully aware of, and supported, crimes being committed’ against Mau Mau guerrillas, they must back it up with documentary evidence; but Ali has merely surmised this (again, wrongly). He states that Churchill believed that the native peoples of the British Empire ‘must be oppressed to such an extent that the force used, the terror employed, the exploitation permanently embedded in the colonial situation, comes to appear normal to them’. This is an utterly warped view of the way that Churchill genuinely viewed the Empire, which was as an honourable institution, driven partly by noblesse oblige, which brought to many millions a happier, safer and more prosperous life through being part of the British family of peoples and races.

That aspiration was what actuated imperialists such as Churchill, Curzon, Cromer and Kitchener, as well as millions of decent Britons who would not otherwise have devoted their working lives to the Empire as doctors, missionaries, tea planters, magistrates and soldiers. To write off generations of Britons, often of strong Christian faith and high morals, as bloodstained exploiters and murderers is simply Marxist propaganda. Few, if any of them, would recognise as true Ali’s statement that in the Kenya in the 1950s ‘Africans were regarded as talking beasts who could not think like Europeans’.

In the Kenya section, Ali has swallowed the Harvard historian Caroline Elkins’s writings on the Mau Mau uprising, whose mortality figures were wildly out because of the way she used census data. But then Ali unquestioningly endorses the worst accusations of every Churchill detractor. Of one, Clive Ponting, who leaked military secrets while at the MoD during the Falklands war, he writes: ‘His fine mind was a loss to the English civil service.’

Ali’s accusation that the toppling of the supposedly ‘popular, liberal and democratic’ Iranian premier Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953 was done primarily by the CIA and MI6 has been exploded by the recent work of the Oxford historian Dr Ray Takeyh and others. They have pointed out that Mosaddegh was appointed by royal decree and crushed dissent despotically; and although western intelligence agencies certainly supported his ousting, it was actually a powerful coalition of Iranian clerics, generals and merchants who disposed of a petulant would-be dictator who was ruining the country and was neither popular nor liberal nor democratic.

‘The intentions of western imperialism were certainly genocidal from the very beginning of the process,’ Ali states, arguing that there was ‘no crime too nasty’ for Churchill to support. Yet although the Amritsar massacre is mentioned, Ali fails to note that Churchill denounced it in the House of Commons, calling it ‘an extraordinary event, a monstrous event’ and asserting that ‘frightfulness is not a remedy known to the British pharmacopaeia’. Ali’s remarks about the Bengal famine, the Greek civil war, the Combined Bomber Offensive and so on are consequently as predictable as they are under-researched and misleading. Over Iraq in the 1920s he fails to distinguish between the use of poison gas and non-lethal tear gas. Nor are his historical errors confined to Churchill. Napoleon is presented as having opposed the abolition of slavery, whereas it was one of the first things he decreed on returning from Elba in 1815.

Some of the imagery of this book is curiously scatological. Britain, which along with Australia is described as a ‘testicle-state’ of America, is apparently ‘destined to live in the capacious posterior of the White House’. In a long rant about Churchill’s Zionism and what he calls ‘settler racism’ and ‘Zionist war crimes’, Ali states that the Jews’ ‘long-denied crimes and atrocity’ against the Palestinians in 1948 is today ‘the common sense of Jewish Israel from top to bottom’. ‘There is no such thing as the historical right of Jews to Palestine,’ he explains, since Zionism is simply European colonisation, the result of Theodore Herzl’s ‘fanaticism’. There is nine pages more of this stuff in which Churchill isn’t even mentioned, but where Brooklyn Jews are described as ‘the most vicious, diehard representatives’ of American Jewish culture.

Ali believes that the spray-painting of Churchill’s statue in Parliament Square ‘is one of the mildest criticisms of Churchill that can be made’. I would suggest a much milder one is to write a book so full of factual inaccuracies that its bile and evident malice fail to persuade. Here endeth the lesson of a high priest of the Churchill cult.

Dilyn disrupts Downing Street (again)

After the pomp and circumstance of yesterday’s Queen’s Speech, Tory MPs were on their best behaviour last night as they trooped into Downing Street to attend evening drinks with the Prime Minister. Boris Johnson has instituted a series of these receptions in recent months, as part of a belated effort to ‘love bomb’ his restless backbenchers. Such invites are part of a broader strategy to make Conservative MPs feel more involved in government strategy, with Andrew Griffith and Steve Barclay both being given key Downing Street posts to try to reflect the priorities of their colleagues in the parliamentary party.

Around 200 MPs rocked up last night, for what one loyalist described as a ‘very enjoyable’ occasion. No Red Wall MPs were spotted dancing – unlike the Tories’ ‘away day’ dinner at the Westminster Park Plaza hotel in March. The evening was enlivened, however, when Boris Johnson tried to address the troops in the No. 10 garden – home of wine and cheese soirées and rose garden press conferences. For Dilyn the dog, the wayward whelp of Westminster, immediately began barking and yapping as the poor PM tried to speak. One backbencher said that ‘the dog was a great source of entertainment and got very excited when he went up to speak.’

A dissident heckler, perhaps? Another attendee remarked to Mr S that ‘Perhaps two years in No. 10 has given Dilyn Labour sympathies’ as the ‘out of control’ dog tore around the guests. It’s not the first time of course that the Johnson family pet has caused Boris problems – he’s previously been accused of damaging antiques at Chequers while a press report that he was about to leave No. 10 caused a minor storm in the middle of Covid.

Given all the other dramas in his life, perhaps the PM should have just stuck with poor old Larry the cat…

Is Britney Spears OK?

In a society obsessed with labels, we are surrounded by amateur psychologists at every turn. Low attention span? ADHD! Social awkwardness? You’re probably on the spectrum. Had an argument with your partner? Maybe he’s a gaslighting narcissist. You’d be lucky to have a mid-afternoon drink without whispers that you’re an alcoholic. The West’s obsession with diagnosing disorders reveals a need to blame someone, or something, for our actions.

And yet I can’t help but wonder whether we’re watching someone showing real signs of psychological distress and choosing to ignore it. Just look at Britney Spears. Her latest Instagram selfie shows her totally starkers, save for a small pulsating love heart emoji over her bits and pieces. ‘Britney Spears posted a full-frontal nude on Instagram – good for her’, purred the Independent.

It’s not just nudity (which there is a lot of). One video shows the 40-year old standing, hands awkwardly in pockets, reciting swearwords. Another has her pretending to be dead, handcuffed and covered in blood.

This behaviour, excused by her fans as ‘reclaiming her autonomy’, isn’t normal. It seems like the moral obligation to check whether people are OK simply disappears when their actions match the accepted narrative. The Free Britney Brigade campaigned to overturn her conservatorship – a legal constraint brought in by her father – which saw her personal, economic, and contractual decision-making powers handed over to others. It was a story of liberation.

But where is the Britney Brigade now her behaviour is becoming ever more erratic? Instead of concern, they claim outrage at suggestions that she might be anything other than fine.

Few seemed to care about the 13 years of the conservatorship until the final months. Maybe one or two friends raised an eyebrow and condemned her family’s actions, but it wasn’t until over a decade later that the #FreeBritney movement gained momentum. Enter grandstanding celebrities, who realised they could reap the rewards of ‘saving’ Britney. (Probably the same celebrities that have told 23 different media outlets that they plan on adopting a Ukrainian.) The truth is, now that Britney has been ‘saved’ – now that she has ‘spoken her truth’ and ‘gained autonomy’ – the Britney Brigade has moved on to something else. Their involvement no longer gives them gratification. It’s a label, I know, but isn’t there something of the hero complex in all this?

Britney’s undoing began years before her breakdown, which resulted in that infamous shaved head and the loss of custody of her two young children. Like other girls in the music industry, she was turned into a neat little product the second she walked into a recording studio. At 16 years old, her entire appeal was built on the image of a doe-eyed virgin with a sexy, southern accent. In hindsight, things would only get worse. The years that followed saw two failed marriages, drug and alcohol abuse, rehab stints and some of the most invasive paparazzi incidents the world has ever seen. Videos of a perinatal Britney with her young children, crying while running for shelter from swarms of photographers show what she was up against. And I feel ashamed to admit it, but I lapped it up too.

The conservatorship was agreed on soon after her public breakdown, and the next 13 years saw her day-to-day life, and the huge economic advantage that it brought to those around her, controlled in minute detail. Shake your moneymaker and shut up, she seems to have been told. Since those legal constraints were lifted, it’s emerged that Britney wasn’t able to do even the basics without permission: from ordering new clothes with her own considerable wealth to allegedly being drugged by her family. Britney Spears suffered years of trauma that most of us couldn’t imagine (and yes, this is real trauma) but to say that her current behaviour is normal seems wrong. Her outbursts aren’t quirky or sweet, they’re unsettling.

This conclusion isn’t an attack on a woman who is clearly suffering. It’s a recognition of what she endured for years. Yet worried fans who question whether Britney is anything other than compos mentis face a social media pile-on by her so-called supporters.

Her childhood was stolen from her and, like so many others caught in a similar situation, it seems as though she’s been trapped in perpetual adolescence. From her bizarre dance routines to her excessive use of emojis on every cryptic Instagram caption, her behaviour points to a lack of emotional development. I’m no therapist, and I know I’m falling into the same trap as those who bandy around pseudo-psychological terms and cod-Freudian pronouncements. But it really shouldn’t be wrong to ask: is Britney OK?

In defence of Liz Truss’s retro economics

One of the many curious things about Foreign Secretary Liz Truss is that she has the capacity to drive some people around the twist. There are the Trussites, hovering over her Instagram posts in political adoration, and then there are others who consider her a menace who is about to be made Prime Minister in a sinister conspiracy by Brexiteers.

At least she is willing to challenge the groupthink of the Bank of England and the Treasury, both of which are full of clever people who have manifestly failed to manage the inflationary shock currently knocking us all off our perches. At the weekend, it was reported that Ms Truss believes that the debts run up by the government during Covid ‘should be hived off into a separate pool and paid off more slowly, as Britain did with its war debts’.

This attracted the attention of the economics editor of the Financial Times, Chris Giles (who in fairness is usually happy to challenge the Treasury). ‘Sometimes I despair, if Liz Truss thinks that increasing the longevity of a portion of the UK debt makes it cheaper/disappear, we are in serious trouble.’

In fact, what Liz Truss is suggesting is perfectly respectable, as anyone with a passing knowledge of financial history would be able to tell you. And if it didn’t make the national debt disappear, it would certainly make it cheaper and more manageable.

As part of the wholesale reform of British institutions after the Glorious Revolution of 1688, there was also a financial revolution. This began with the importing of so-called ‘Dutch finance’, in other words a Stock Exchange and a Central Bank, with the founding of the Bank of England in 1694.

The financial revolution progressively put the national debt on a more trustworthy footing. The hotch-potch of lotteries, short term loans and annuities, which the Crown relied upon to borrow, was progressively replaced with bonds, or gilts, with the interest to be paid by tax, ring-fenced by parliament for specific purposes. Investors were delighted. In 1751, the Consolidate Loan Fund and National Debt Redemption Act created a new innovation. Not only did this consolidate all borrowing into one fund, but it also created a new type of bond, consols, which was effectively perpetual.

In other words, the Bank of England could issue £100 nominal on behalf of the Treasury, paying interest of say 3 per cent or £3. These amounts were fixed. And the brilliance of consols was twofold. First, economic growth and inflation made the cost of funding them effectively cheaper over time, relative to the size of the economy. And second, paying them back or redeeming them was entirely at the discretion of the government.

This process is explained in a handy paper called I Owe You, A Churchillian Solution to the National Debt by Eamonn Butler and Gabriel Stein for the Adam Smith Institute (indeed it was this paper specifically which caught Liz Truss’s attention). But you can read about it in dozens of economic history books, notably The Cash Nexus by Niall Ferguson.

Consols were the ideal instrument for funding emergencies such as wars or pandemics. They explain why the British state was able to cope with debts of over 250 per cent of GDP after the Napoleonic wars, the first and the second world war (more than twice the current level of 95.5 per cent). It was the British financial system, raising money at low rates of interest, which prevailed over Napoleon, the Kaiser and Hitler, not simply force of arms.

In 2015, George Osborne took the questionable decision to stop issuing consols and to pay the remaining issues back, thereby bringing the shutters down on the consol market. This should be reversed. States don’t take out insurance policies to fund crises, they are too big. Instead, they should insure themselves through perpetual or long term bonds, spreading the cost of one-in-a-hundred years events over decades. Far from being shouldered with the cost of today’s spending, future generations benefit from wars, emergencies, disasters and pandemics being successfully resolved and the subsequent economic growth that success brings. The costs to later citizens are trivial relative to the gains; winning wars and weathering pandemics makes them better off than they otherwise would be.

It is the failure to treat Covid and the consequent costs as a one-off which is Rishi Sunak’s founding error. Instead of doing that, he has embarked on a crazy dash to balance the budget within five years and reduce the national debt to a modest 80 per cent by raising taxes to the highest level for 70 years. No attempt has been made to differentiate emergency Covid spending from the other, more frivolous demands of the Prime Minister. We really don’t need to worry about the public finances nor be subjected to the current levels of taxation, as long as we are sensible, controlling and accounting for spending properly and keeping some historical perspective.

Meghan Markle’s presidential run appears inevitable

Meghan Markle has starred in a Netflix show and married into the Royal Family, but has she got her eyes on even loftier ambitions? Since quitting the UK and moving to the United States, the Duchess of Sussex has involved herself in various soft-political campaigns. She’s asked Congress to legislate paid family leave. She has also placed herself in the company of the Obamas and the Bidens. Is this all serving as a prelude to a presidential bid for the Democratic nomination? 

If so, Joe Biden’s sister appears to have given the game away. While Meghan has kept schtum about her political aspirations, Valerie Biden Owens has suggested president Markle might not be such a far-fetched prospect. In an interview with Good Morning Britain, Owens suggested that ‘of course’ the Duchess of Sussex would be a viable candidate for president one day. 

‘It’s wonderful to have women in politics,’ she added: ‘The more women we have the better our democratic system will work. We welcome her to come in and join the Democratic party.’ 

Is Owens just freelancing here? That seems unlikely: Biden’s sister is a seasoned political operator who played a key role in her brother’s successful 2020 presidential campaign. She also worked with him on his Senate campaigns and his 2008 presidential bid, which saw him bow out and grant his support to Obama in exchange for the vice-presidency. Everything that she says or does publicly, especially to a journalist during a sit-down broadcast interview, is likely to have been carefully considered. It isn’t an exaggeration to say that this interview might be seen as a formal overture to Meghan from the Democratic party establishment. The message is simple: ‘Do you want to lend us your celebrity if we’re defeated by the Republicans at the next election?’

Many Democrats in America are currently resigned to the likelihood of Biden being a one-term head of state. The prospects of his defeat at the hands of a resurgent Trump, or similar populist Republican in 2024, are quite high. It’s also fairly likely that Biden, who will be 82 at the end of his first term, might decide he is unable to continue as president, given the perpetual rumours of incipient senility that surround him. 

Should he step down, Kamala Harris would at least have to be offered the chance to run as president. But a growing number of Democrats are likely to resist the coronation of a hapless and gaffe-prone vice-president who hardly comes across as a strong candidate. 

Under such a scenario, the appeal of a starry, glamorous figure willing to stand for the nomination come 2028 becomes clear. Owens is not alone in thinking that the Duchess would have an excellent chance of winning the nomination, and perhaps even the presidency.

President Meghan. The words will send a chill down the spine of those like me who are sceptical of Markle’s ladder climbing. The bland press release-led initiatives detailing her and Prince Harry’s Archewell foundation are a worrying indication of the missives a Meghan-led White House would fire out. Do we really want Meghan leading the Free World? 

And how would Meghan handle the negative publicity that would inevitably follow any bid she makes for the top job in American politics? If she runs for public office, the media will feel licensed to pursue avenues that have previously been considered off limits, such as her first husband Trevor Engelson, who has kept a remarkably low profile since their divorce in 2013. The controversy and news stories that will inevitably emerge could make the tales involving previous presidential candidates look mild by comparison.

Still, if she does decide to go for it, Meghan can draw comfort from one particular precedent. When Donald Trump ran for president, he was by far the best-known and most controversial candidate the Republican party had ever put forward. Should Meghan become the Democratic version of Trump – a high-profile, divisive figure with enormous newsworthiness, for good or ill – then only a fool would bet against her (and her cavaliere servente Prince Harry) taking up residence in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue before the decade is out.

In praise of British strawberries

Ask a foreigner to name the fruit that above all others epitomises their image of Britain, and it will surely be the strawberry. It is less a fruit than an icon. Redolent of royalty: not just for its role jam sandwiching together a Victoria Sponge but for its colour too, as patriotically red as the tunics of The Queen’s Guards. To eat bowls of strawberries and cream at Wimbledon. To partake of a punnet on a park picnic. These things are as quintessentially British as tea and queuing.

What is it that is so evocative about strawberries? They are of course synonymous with summer, and they have about them something of the match tea, of outdoor eating and of holidays. There is nostalgia too: growing up without strawberry jam sandwiches was surely no childhood at all. They feel like a very egalitarian fruit: while a few posh kids might grow up with a taste for blueberries and loganberries, everyone knows what a strawberry tastes like. The timing of their arrival adds to the anticipation: the appearance of home-grown strawberries on shelves heralds the proper start of the British fruit season after so many months of cold and wet and dreaded kiwis.

Even setting aside the food miles, I find there is something particularly deplorable about getting a non-British strawberry, when the home-grown ones are so superior. Wait until May for the early season British fruit, grown under cover. They will often get better as the season goes on and they have had time enough to soak up the sun. Thanks largely to the breeding of new cultivars by the East Malling Research centre in Kent – the epicentre of strawberry production – the traditional six-week UK strawberry season is now far longer, so we can gorge with abandon throughout the summer: on Symphony and Sweet Eve, on Sallybright and Judibell, or – as the special bank holiday weekend approaches – on Jubilee (first released in 2002 for HM’s Golden Jubilee) or on any of the other 30-odd varieties grown in this country.

The horticulturalist George M. Darrow was the world’s foremost authority on strawberries (a life well lived). He notes in his 447-page magnum opus on the strawberry that cultivation of the fruit began in Europe in the 1300s. The French were enthusiasts, though the plant was considered more ornamental for its flowers than useful for its fruit. King Charles V had his gardener plant no less than 1,200 strawberry plants in the royal gardens of the Louvre in Paris. But the species looked different back then – more akin to the teeny wild strawberries which continue to grow in English hedgerows and woodlands. It was not until the Virginia strawberry was brought to England from across the pond and cross bred with a larger South American variety that the strawberry that we are accustomed to today was born. The first such ‘modern’ strawberry arrived on the English – and European – market in 1821. As Jane Grisgon tells, it was a sensation, with the grower awarded a silver cup by the Royal Horticultural Society. The notable strawberry successes thereafter read as a reassuringly, gloriously English roll-call: ‘the next major strawberry was Downton…And so it went on. The culmination came in 1891 with Scarlet Queen and 1892 with Royal Sovereign.’

How to eat them? Strawberries are perfect with pastry, such as in these simple little tartlets. For a teatime option, try this strawberry and Earl Grey roulade, a twist on a Swiss roll. For pudding, it is hard to better this strawberry trifle. You will often see recipes suggesting you marinate your strawbs in balsamic vinegar to bring out the flavour. It does work so long as you use best-quality aged balsamic. A little pile thus prepared goes perfectly with a vanilla panacotta or with ice cream.

Do not be scared of using them in savoury dishes too; they work very well paired with feta and thyme in this tart. And they can be used to great effect in vinaigrettes where they provide a little acidity in place of vinegar. Simply blend strawberries together with half olive oil and half flavourless oil, add seasoning and a little sugar, and serve drizzled atop sliced avocado for a Prue Leith classic.

And of course eat them, in great quantity, with cream. A poll earlier this month saw strawberries and cream voted by almost three quarters of Brits as the ‘most iconic British flavour’, comfortably ahead of rhubarb and custard in second place. The classic pairing is often attributed to Cardinal Wolsey, who indulged frequently on the combo as he lorded it up in Hampton Court Palace. Strawberries and cream was served at the very first Wimbledon tournament in 1877. And chefs have sought their own twists on the dream pairing: Escoffier provides a number of variations on the combination in his Le Guide Culinair, including a recipe for Strawberries Romanov where the fruit is marinated in curaçao and served with Chantilly cream. For a British take, try this recipe where the strawberries are infused with Pimms and then flambéed.

Strawberries have long been associated in literature with temptation and fittingly so, for who can resist them? They are a universal crowd pleaser – not for nothing is the strawberry the only fruit to sit amongst such greats as vanilla and chocolate at the top table of classic ice creams. To make your own, follow Nigella’s recipe for homemade strawberry ice cream: as she says, it is the taste of blue skies.

If you have any that are past their best, try this quick pickle with mint and pink peppercorns, or oven-dry them to create gummy fruits you can use in salads or eat as a snack. And their use in libations is not limited to a flavouring in Pimms: they can be the main event too, such as in this homemade strawberry gin or in this frozen strawberry daiquiri. And chef Asimakis Chaniotis advises that strawberries are “incredible macerated in Cognac”. Try serving the macerated fruit with ice cream and, as Asimakis says, after three days macerating the liquor is a treat to sip.

Strawberries are a national treasure. Opining on the fruit, the seventeenth century physician Dr. William Butler declared ‘Doubtless God could have made a better berry, but doubtless God never did’. Never was a truer word spoken.

The coastal boltholes that rival Cornwall

May Day is behind us, the summer season approaching, and already the tensions between second homeowners and locals in Cornish seaside towns have been gleefully reported by the tabloid press. Visit Cornwall is considering a register of second homes while councils are proposing a tax on empty properties. House prices have gone up by an average of 28 per cent across Cornwall since the pandemic began, according to the Land Registry, so is it time to look elsewhere for a coastal bolt hole?

The British coastline is at least 1,200km long so there are some great alternatives, although the perennial favourites can get just as ‘overrun’ as the likes of St Ives. According to Rightmove the most searched-for seaside towns this month are big-hitters like Bournemouth, Southampton, Eastbourne, Worthing and Brighton, but perhaps you fancy somewhere a little more off the beaten track?

Pembrokeshire has proved a popular alternative to Cornwall, sharing the same craggy coastline dotted with fishing villages and pristine beaches but with fewer crowds and lower prices. The average price in Pembrokeshire is £230,640, according to Hamptons using Land Registry figures, a third lower than Cornwall’s £341,590. Newport, Tenby and Narberth are three of the priciest locations in Pembrokeshire, but for even greater value look to the Fishguard and Pembroke areas.

Pembroke Dock sits near the mouth of the Cleddau river – the tidal creeks and salt marshes are heaven to explore by boat or kayak – and the average price is £163,870, but this four-bedroom architect designed house is for sale at £550,000 through Fine & Country. Holiday home buyers should know that, as of April 2022, they will need to pay double the rate of council tax on a secondary property in Pembrokeshire – on top of the extra Land Transaction Tax, the Welsh equivalent of stamp duty.

North Norfolk can be as blissfully crowd-free as West Wales – take a kayak out to the Scolt Head barrier island from Burnham Overy Staithe or roam the salt marshes around Cley-next-the-Sea and Blakeney. In Heacham, a beach village famed for its lavender near Sandringham, this four-bedroom stone cottage is £650,000.

A lack of properties for sale has been pushing up prices in the most fashionable coastal villages – and those around the market town of Holt – where delis selling crab pate and artisan sourdough have begun to proliferate but look inland or east of Cromer to see your money go further.

Close to Great Yarmouth, Gorleston-on-Sea is tipped for potential price growth by local estate agent, William H Brown. With its vast sweeping sandy beach it’s also handy for the further watery pursuits of the Norfolk Broads, but the average price is only £211,570 (Hamptons).

Boating types also love the Isle of Wight, a much under-rated 23-mile-wide natural playground of bays, promenades and clifftop walks. Charmingly slow paced and full of great local food producers, the island is also broadly affordable – the average property price is £296,197, according to Rightmove. But you can pay much more for something special or super views, and this five-bedroom manor house at £895,000 is located in Cowes, the focus of the sailing scene and the newly revamped North House whose restaurant is being run by Robert Thompson, the youngest British chef to receive a Michelin star.

Some of Devon’s coastal hot spots – especially Salcombe and Dartmouth – are as highly priced as their Cornish counterparts, but Tom Bedford of Savills’ Exeter office tips Exmouth as one to watch, with its two miles of golden sand and the Exe estuary a twitchers’ paradise. ‘It’s going up in value, much investment is going into improving the seafront and a trainline into Exeter [it can be three hours to London].’ According to Rightmove, the average price was £322,501 over the last year, and this deceptively large four-bedroom townhouse comes with a home office, ideal for that summer of flexible working.

Another one to watch is the East Sussex town of Hastings and its next-door neighbour, St Leonards-on-Sea. Over the last 10 years prices have gone up by 79 and 89 per cent respectively, two of the heftiest increases amongst Sussex coastal towns, according to Hamptons. Average prices still hover around £300,000 in both – is there still room to grow? Eastbourne’s £325,140 and Brighton’s £481,370 would suggest so.

Increasingly the choice for bohemian south Londoners, these two traditional towns are now full of great eateries, craft beer shops and even concept stores. Apartments in the faded Regency townhouses overlooking the seafront are being smartened up by AirBnB investors or second-home owners. In Hastings you can find a whole seven-bedroom townhouse for £670,000, or a five-bedroom 19^th-century property overlooking the English Channel for £1m.

Is Boris Johnson planning an emergency Budget?

Boris Johnson is running out of time to produce things the Tories can show the voters at the next election. The theme of his Queen’s Speech – if there was one – was an attempt to fix that. That next election campaign was countered by Keir Starmer in the chamber this afternoon. The main focus was on the cost-of-living crisis and how much worse things are going to get.

The Labour leader repeatedly accused this government of not being ‘up to the challenge’, with the Tories producing only a ‘thin address bereft of ideas or purpose, without a guiding principle or a roadmap for delivery’. Funnily enough, he didn’t mention the members of the government who’d broken Covid rules and couldn’t be trusted. Starmer instead described the Tories as ‘out of touch’ and ‘tired’, attacking Rishi Sunak on this front as much as Johnson.

The narrative that Sunak in particular has tried to construct is that the government simply doesn’t have control over many of the drivers of the cost-of-living crisis, like supply chain issues or global pressures such as the war in Ukraine and China’s zero-Covid policies. Starmer tried to counter this today by claiming that there were warning signs long ago that were ignored. He said:

This government’s failure to grow the economy over a decade, combined with its inertia in the face of spiralling bills, means we are staring down the barrel of something we haven’t seen in decades. A stagflation crisis. It is a truly shocking legacy for this government. It should humble those on the benches opposite who have ignored the red lights on the our economy, even whilst wages were frozen over a decade, and whose complacency is best summed up by a Prime Minister whose response to this crisis was to make fun of those worrying about inflation.

Johnson was no longer keen to make fun of anyone worrying about inflation when he responded. Instead, he managed to set hares running with a line that ‘the Chancellor and I will be saying more about this in the days to come’, suggesting that there might be an emergency Budget in the offing. The Treasury has since clarified that there won’t be one, so it isn’t clear what is planned on the cost of living or indeed whether Sunak signed off on what Johnson said.

A great deal could change in both parties before the next general election, or even before the end of this year. But what does seem certain is that Boris Johnson and his Chancellor are going to continue on different political pages. That will be an issue for the rest of the time that these two men are in office. Perhaps one will be hoping the other isn’t around for much longer.

Germany’s wilful ignorance is hurting Ukraine

Germans have a complex relationship with their Erinnerungskultur, or ‘culture of memory’. Whenever the word appears, it almost invariably refers to how the country thinks about its difficult past. Determined never to forget the horrors of the Nazis, Germans have spent decades reflecting on the evil that their forbears unleashed upon the world.

And yet this process isn’t helping us understand our present. As a German-Canadian whose grandparents spent their childhoods in bomb shelters, I’ve long respected German memory culture. But events in Berlin on VE Day this past Sunday have shaken my faith. Today, Ukraine is revealing how little we actually understand about our history in Germany.

Victory in Europe Day is typically sombre in Germany. There tend to be fewer flags than one might see at a British commemoration. Wreaths bearing understated German flags appear alongside a few flags of the allied powers. At the giant Soviet War Memorial in the eastern district of Treptow, some leave Russian flags. 

This year’s commemoration started with Berlin’s mayor banning Russian flags from being displayed at these memorials. Then city authorities reasoned that Ukrainian flags could also provoke unrest. Perhaps violent pro-Russian activists might disrupt commemoration events. And so the Ukrainian flag was also banned. A video of Berlin Police confiscating a huge Ukrainian flag went viral on social media. Ukrainian foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba called it a mistake. ‘Taking a Ukrainian flag away from peaceful protestors is an attack on everyone who now defends Europe and Germany from Russian aggression with this flag in hands,’ he tweeted.

I spent Sunday both depressed and aghast. How could my city ban a flag that now stands for the defence of freedom and democracy – on the very anniversary of Europe’s liberation from another genocidal dictator? How could the mayor of a city that once sat at the centre of the struggle for democracy exhibit such a lack of awareness? It got worse.

Hours later, a German commentator lectured the Ukrainian ambassador on a popular Sunday night talk show. German social psychologist Harald Welzer ‘explained’ that the 45 per cent of Germans currently against delivering heavy weapons to Ukraine may have family members who experienced war and thus want a negotiated ceasefire. Weapon deliveries would only prolong the war and increase casualties, he argued. I watched it again. Did a German intellectual really just use the liberation of Europe to argue for a ceasefire with a modern-day dictator – to the ambassador of the country currently under attack? ‘I’m not a student,’ Melnyk replied tersely.  

This kind of argument, one that is not uncommon in Germany, makes no sense. I grew up listening to my grandmother’s accounts of world war two and its aftermath. Many Germans experienced horrors at the hands of the Nazis along with their fellow Europeans. Many too did not escape the subsequent Soviet occupation unscathed either. 

My Oma Elsie turned 15 just two days before 8 May 1945. Where they lived, in Soviet-occupied Chemnitz, Russian soldiers would sometimes stop and board trains, taking the prettiest girls and raping them. Elsie’s mother would scoop some dirt off the floor and rub her daughter’s face with it. She thought that if Elsie looked dirty, they might leave her alone. On another occasion, she ran from a predatory Russian soldier and hid with a friend in a nearby forest until long after dark. 

Nearly two million German women were raped by Soviet soldiers. Although it’s difficult to know exactly how many because the topic has never been widely studied or discussed in German society. It hasn’t entered our debates – possibly because it challenges a German narrative that Russian soldiers helped liberate Europe from fascism. In reality, the Soviet Union simply replaced one brutal regime with another. In a country that espouses the virtues of its memory culture, why are certain traumas left forgotten?

If our thinking about history could adapt accordingly, we might view the systematic rape of Ukrainian women in more visceral, emotional terms. Perhaps, instead of endlessly debating the relative virtues of weapons versus diplomacy, we might be more motivated to act. Following decades of prosperity in Germany, Ukraine’s valiant defence reminds us that freedom comes at a cost. That’s a part of our European history that few of our allies need much help remembering. So why are so many of us still forgetting?

Having fled Chemnitz for West Germany at 16 before later emigrating to Canada, Oma Elsie Gasch also understood that freedom isn’t guaranteed. She knew there were times when it would have to be defended. Neville Chamberlain’s Munich Agreement didn’t defeat Hitler. A military victory did. Diplomacy didn’t end the Berlin blockade. The Berlin airlift did. And the Berlin Wall didn’t fall because Nato countries drew down their military spending. It fell because enough East Germans demanded their freedoms.

If we truly remembered those things, we might have a much clearer view of our present.

Why the new Anglo-Swedish pact matters

Boris Johnson has travelled to Stockholm to sign a mutual defence pact with Sweden to tide the country over until it enters Nato. He’ll then travel to Finland to agree similar terms. This is quite significant for a few reasons. To the Prime Minister, the ‘global Britain’ post-Brexit strategy means signing global new trade and defence relationships: with European and global partners. In other words, showing that Brexit Britain has not turned in on itself but is keen to make new and global alliances – stepping up as an ally at times when even America is reluctant. This is one of those times.

In theory, the European Union has a mutual defence clause (Article 42.7 of the Lisbon Treaty)  – so if Sweden was attacked, the rest of the EU would come to its aid. But this does not seem to assure the Swedes any more than it assures the Poles or the Baltics. Sweden has sought, and will tomorrow be offered, a place under Britain’s nuclear umbrella – with the UK offering interim protection that has (so far) been denied to Sweden by the US. Britain’s promise to Sweden goes beyond EU members promise to each other: the EU’s article 42.7 is a loosely-worded “obligation of aid” whereas the Anglo-Swedish/Finnish agreement is a firm Nato-style defence pact.

Talks have been conducted in secret in Stockholm for the last few days. Members of the Swedish parliament’s defence and foreign affairs committees have held classified meetings where they were banned from taking their mobile phones in and sworn to silence. Rumours swirled about a secret bilateral cooperation deal with another country. There were not really any prizes for guessing who. In his visit to Finland last week, Ben Wallace said it was ‘inconceivable that Britain would not come to the support of Finland or Sweden if it was ever attacked’ thereby offering the assurance which will be formalised now.

David Cameron spoke about a ‘Northern alliance’ with the UK, the Netherlands and Scandinavia: liberal states that like free trade and take a globalist view of defence obligations. Britain and Sweden have long had a special relationship. Our soldiers undergo winter training in Arvidsjaur in Lapland and join the Swedish military’s exercises. Peter Hultqvist, Sweden’s defence minister, was saying recently that ‘part of the Swedish strategy is to deepen cooperation with neighbours and countries that have similar values ​​as us, and the United Kingdom is one of them.’ So a values-based alliance, rather than an EU-style geography-based alliance that Macron has favoured.

Last week, Wallace said that Britain, Finland and Sweden ‘are European countries who share the same values, who have deep, long histories. A significant number of the British population seem to be descended from Vikings anyhow.’ Let’s set aside how much Finland was really into Vikings: the overall theory holds. Britain is an ally worth having because we have the world’s fifth-largest military and a track record of coming to the aid of our allies. A Royal Navy presence is understood to have been part of the UK’s talks with Sweden.

There are plenty of nerves in Sweden and Finland about Nato membership – they’re both expected to apply later this month. Both fear they may be vulnerable until Nato membership arrives: there has been talk that the ratification process could take months or even years. While Germany and the US have also offered support, Britain will be the first country to offer a formal pact for pre-Nato protection.

This underlines a broader point behind Brexit: that the new alliances needed to manage new challenges will be global, not just European. The Ukraine crisis has strengthened the idea of a global alliance of democracies, with Australia, Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore and Japan all acting together. Even talking about ‘The West’ seems very 20th century. 

In theory, EU membership does not prevent countries acting independently on defence and other issues. But in practice, the EU has been trying to encourage its members to act cohesively on areas (like vaccine procurement) where Brussels would like the EU to speak as one. Ministers argue that being outside of the EU made it easier for the UK to break from Europe’s position on Ukraine and start to send arms to Zelensky at a time when no one else was – just as being in the EU made it easier to set up a national Vaccine Taskforce, which EU member state could have done, but no one did.

Making the EU into security and defence union has been one of the priorities of the von der Leyen Commission. A European Defence Fund was launched in 2017: there’s now an EU foreign minister and talk of an EU army,

This was part of the pre-Brexit tension. Britain always thought all this was a non-starter – arguing that the EU, whose diverse member states take such different views on the world, could not and should not be expected to speak with one voice on diplomatic or military affairs. Macron and von der Leyen have a different vision. To Macron, the Ukraine crisis shows how the EU needs to look after its own defence without Nato (‘we cannot depend on others to defend us’) and makes his case for what he has called a ‘true European army’.  While Britain is keen on Nato, Macron dismisses it as ‘brain dead’. Both respectable positions, but they’re incompatible positions. Sweden and Finland certainly seem to think Nato has life in it yet.

So no one would blame Sweden and Finland for deciding not to hedge their bets on the EU becoming a reliable security alliance. Posters have started appearing in Russia portraying certain Swedes (from authors to Ikea’s founder) as Nazi sympathisers: the kind of language used by Putin about Ukraine. Britain’s defence pact will make the point that Finland and Sweden will not stand alone should war reach their borders. The Stockholm pact is intended to show that Britain after Brexit is keener than ever to renew and refresh global alliances. Japan last week, Sweden this week – and doubtless more to come.

Boris is gearing up for a new round of the Brexit wars

As prime minister, Boris Johnson does not follow the normal rules. To put it mildly. And this year’s Queen’s Speech, announcing his legislative programme for the coming parliamentary session, is no exception. That’s because probably the most important piece of planned legislation, a new law to waive parts of the contentious Northern Ireland Protocol, is not mentioned, even though it almost certainly will be announced at the end of this week (and by the Prime Minister).

The reason this matters is because there is a constitutional crisis in Northern Ireland following last week’s elections to its Assembly. The runners up in the election, the unionist DUP, won’t allow the NI executive or government to be formed unless and until the Protocol is binned.

Johnson is planning to say, as I understand it, that the UK government will use powers in legislation to breach its treaty obligations under the NI Protocol. It will suspend all those border checks on goods flowing from Great Britain to Northern Ireland which were such an important part of its Brexit deal with the EU. But he’ll announce all of that on Friday, not today.

He knows that the moment he makes the announcement, there’ll be an almighty row with Brussels, Dublin and Washington, and presumably he’d rather it didn’t overshadow today’s unveiling of all the other laws that he plans. But the mega row is coming. For the nostalgic among you, it’ll feel like Brexit wars all over again. Gawd love us. As for what Prince Charles – standing in for the Queen – does presage, it’s all pretty much the programme that has been prepared and trailed in the Tory manifesto and subsequently.

There are no surprises in it all, though (perhaps it’s me) I didn’t expect a bill to facilitate genetic engineering of crops and livestock. This disproves the conceit that somehow the PM’s spouse, Carrie Johnson, is the real power in the government. Environmentalists like her don’t tend to approve of what used to be called Frankenstein food (and the ban she allegedly favoured on cruelly produced foods like Foie Gras is nowhere to be seen).

It is also striking that there is nothing that provides immediate relief from two clear and present dangers, namely the soaring cost of living and the threat from Putin. To be clear, there are measures which the PM hopes will help with his cherished ambitions of ‘levelling up’ – reducing inequalities – and creating more ‘high-wage, high-skill’ jobs.

But most of these can’t yield benefits for many years, because they’re structural: investment in skills and infrastructure, improving school standards, modernising the rules of public sector broadcasting, using Brexit freedoms to tailor regulation more to the UK’s needs, reforming data protection, and so on.

There’ll be rows in coming months, over whether plans to speed up the scrapping of EU rules deprives MPs of proper scrutiny over the replacement regulations or whether the privatisation of Channel 4 will damage the creative industries. Rows over whether it’s really appropriate to extend the life of the energy price-cap system rather than scrap it, whether the police really need powers to stop protestors gluing themselves to roads or whether levelling-up funds for local communities are pork barrel politics and de facto bribes to red-wall Tory MPs and voters will also ensue.

So there’s meat, or substance, or whatever you wish to call it. And there’s a Johnsonian flavour, with ammunition for culture wars – such as restrictions on public bodies like universities adopting boycotts on countries such as Israel – and for restarting Brexit battles.

But there’s no programme as radical or powerful as the Thatcher or Blair/Brown structural reforms that seems likely to jolt the UK out of the anticipated economic stagnation of the next few years. Or if such a Johnsonian programme exists, it’s been cleverly disguised.

Watch: Starmer’s Beergate burn

It’s Queen’s Speech day in parliament today and in traditional style, two lucky government MPs have been chosen to propose and second the Loyal Address to Her Majesty. This involves two backbenchers – one typically older, the other a newly-elected type – delivering a humorous speech ostensibly on the government’s legislative agenda but which actually riffs on various issues of the day. 

And so it fell to Graham Stuart, a 17-year parliamentary veteran, to kick things off this afternoon with a well-received performance poking fun at Sir Keir Starmer’s difficulties over ‘Beergate.’ He began by joking that ‘never has so much karma come from a korma’ before referencing the Tories’ past gains in Labour’s traditional Red Wall, quipping that, for Sir Keir ‘the only thing opening up for him in the north of England is a police investigation.’

Then it was the turn of Fay Jones, a member of the 2019 intake who hails from the Welsh constituency of Brecon and Radnorshire. She gave a worthy speech, dedicated in large part to her support for more female MPs and local farmers in her area. This gave her an excuse to make a quip at the expense of Neil Parish, who quit the Commons after being caught watching porn in parliament – despite claiming he was looking for images of tractors. 

Listing the government’s achievements on farming, Jones concluded with praise of the Online Safety Bill because it will ‘protect the unsuspecting farmer from nefarious internet videos.’ Winding up her speech, she also included another jibe at Starmer’s decision to duck an engagement yesterday as he tried to work out his story on Beergate: ‘I give way to the Leader of the Opposition – I know we are all delighted he hasn’t cancelled this afternoon’s speech.’

Sir Keir’s turn at the despatch box also started with a decent quip, referencing other events of the past week. Leaping up, he noted Labour’s capture of Westminster city council for the first time ever: ‘I want to congratulate the Prime Minister – he has achieved a first. The first member of Downing Street to be served by a Labour council!’ Cue cheers and groans all round.

Why I’m not falling for Prince Harry’s latest eco-venture

Just when you thought Prince Harry’s post-royal career couldn’t get any more absurd, he manages to make it so. His latest venture is a service which supposedly tells you how many carbon emissions will be emitted as a result of an airline passenger’s journey by various airlines and routes – helping travellers choose the most ‘sustainable’ option. He launched it this week on a Maori television channel in which he appears with a couple of ‘ratings agents’ which pretend to assess his environmental impact as a tourist in New Zealand. 

Why use Maoris to push it? Harry is presumably hoping that the viewer will draw some kind of association between a traditional Maori lifestyle, with low environmental impact, and his airline ratings service. Indeed, in an accompanying podcast, he asserts that: ‘the Maori culture inherently understands sustainable practices and taking better care of our life-giving land, which are critical lessons we can all learn.’

If any corporation attempted to draw a parallel between its products and traditional Maori culture it would, quite deservedly so, be attacked for ‘greenwashing’. It is pretty obnoxious to try to imply that tourists flying halfway around the world to visit New Zealand can have a carbon footprint which remotely compares with that of indigenous people. All Harry really succeeds in doing is to draw attention to his own Yeti-like carbon footprint – while trying, once again, to preach to the rest of us about climate change.

There is nothing novel about Harry’s new airline ratings service, which I am choosing not to name. There are plenty of places you can go to find out the environmental impact of an airline journey – and all of them point to the same thing: that anyone who regularly flies long-haul would be best-advised to keep quiet and stop lecturing the rest of us on our greenhouse gas emissions. 

One website, for example, estimates the emissions of a return journey from Los Angeles to Auckland at as much as four tonnes per passenger. This, it says, is more than the annual per capita carbon emissions of 102 of the world’s countries, approximately 56.2 per cent of the world’s population. It isn’t clear when and where Harry’s Maori TV video was shot, but if it involved him making a trip to New Zealand, that single journey will have been responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions than most people emit in an entire year. Of course, Harry’s travels don’t end there. In a couple of weeks he says he will travel to London for the Queen’s Jubilee celebrations. At a stroke, that could be around another 3.3 tonnes of emissions.

This all assumes, of course, that he travels by commercial airliner and not by private jet, as he and Meghan have done on many occasions previously. According to the consultancy Transport and Environment, private jet passengers are responsible for between five and 14 times as many emissions per mile as are commercial airline passengers. Harry may think he is saving the planet; others might judge he is merely opening himself to ridicule.

Will Lord Frost stand as an MP?

With two looming by-elections, a selection dilemma is facing local Tories in both Wakefield and Tiverton: who do they choose to be their parliamentary candidates? A variety of names have been bandied about but one above all is the commentariat’s choice: David Frost, Boris Johnson’s former Brexit chief, now languishing on the backbenches in the House of Lords after quitting the Cabinet in December. The Telegraph has been loudly banging the drum for Frost – unsurprising, perhaps, given he is the paper’s new star columnist – while the onetime boss of Scottish whisky has given a round of high-profile interviews, including on GB News last night with longtime admirer Nigel Farage.

On last night’s programme, Frost indulged such a notion, suggesting he would indeed be willing to go into ‘real politics’ in his words. There is just one slight problem of course: Frost is a member of the Upper House, meaning he would have to resign his seat in the Lords in order to sit in the Commons. There is an intriguing constitutional novelty here: under the existing legislation, it’s not sure whether the noble lord would need to resign before or after he was elected to the Commons. In other words, can he stand and then, if he loses, still sit in the Upper House. 

One thing’s for sure – Frost is certainly doing little to quell such speculation. Following his comments last night, he subsequently retweeted a thread by the House of Lords’ head of research services discussing whether or not the staunch Brexiteer would have to resign. Ironically the last peer who threatened to quit the Lords and stand for the Commons was none other than arch-Remainer Andrew Adonis.

Just one more headache to keep Boris up at night…

Is Channel 4’s sex obsession really a ‘public service’?

Is Channel 4 a public service broadcaster that should be saved from privatisation? Today’s Queen’s Speech, which lays the groundwork for the sale of the channel, is set to reignite that debate once again. But Channel 4’s increasingly dire output – and its obsession with shows about sex – shows privatisation might not be such a bad idea.

Yes, Channel 4 produces some worthy stuff, but much less than in the past – I can’t recall a really good recent documentary on the channel. Its news is useful enough, especially if you can tolerate the smug air of its main presenters. But these positives are outweighed by a massive negative that enlightened people pretend not to notice. In recent years it has broadcast various shows that go beyond crass titillation and present morally repugnant behaviour as liberated, even healthy. In a sense they are more insidious that anything that exists on the dark web, because they come with a stamp of approval, with an air of public service authority.

In the past I have complained about Love Island, Naked Attraction and My First Threesome. My current gripe is called Open House: The Great Sex Experiment. I saw less than a minute of this show the other day, as I channel-hopped. But I got the gist. A young couple were on a sofa talking to a psychologist, or therapist, or relationships expert, or whatever they call her. The young woman was tearfully apologising for her reluctance, the previous night, to swing, or join in an orgy or something. It wasn’t spelled out, but I don’t think it was a game of charades that she ducked out of. She blamed her own insecurities for getting in the way, letting everyone down. The therapist was saddened by her self-doubt, shaking her head in pious disbelief, reminding her that she was a gorgeous young woman. 

I felt physically sick at the thought that this young woman was being pressured to behave in a way that she was uncomfortable with, rightly uncomfortable with I’d say. It was suggested to her that she should distrust her discomfort, see it as neurotic. It was one of the nastiest things I’ve ever seen on television: someone being undermined by a nasty consensus.

In a free country this sort of thing should be tolerated, I suppose, as long as there is plenty of contrary content. But to give it the authority of ‘public service broadcasting’ is utterly messed up. The channel has consistently failed to treat sex in a serious and balanced way. It’s all too one-sided. No platform would be given to someone like me, saying something something like this.

Channel 4 used to air such stuff once or twice a year. Now there is a constant flow. Hot on the heels of Open House, which has finished (for now), is Let’s Make a Love Scene, which starts this Friday. It’s billed as a fun dating reality TV show in which contestants re-stage famous sex scenes from movies, then see if they might want to date each other. Brief Encounter, you could call it.

Why do enlightened people, including cultural commentators and TV critics, fail to notice the moral harm in all this? Because the sort of people who appear on reality TV are the sort they are wary of judging. They don’t want to seem prudish or snobbish.

The key line in Prince Charles’s Queen’s Speech

Today’s Queen’s Speech will mostly be remembered as Prince Charles’ first. His delivery was strikingly flat; it would be hard to discern what he thought of any measure as his tone remained the same throughout, as it should do. Given how much we know of Charles’s views on various issues – too much given his constitutional position – people will always be looking for clues as to his view on this or that issue. 

The speech was mostly as expected. The problem for the government is that the biggest issue facing the country is the cost of living crisis, but you can’t solve that through legislation: parliament can’t just pass a bill to return inflation to its two per cent target.

There are a slew of bills to do with crime – both offline and online – and protest. This suggests that the Tories know they need to be able to pass a basic hygiene test on crime before the next election. But perhaps the most significant line in the speech was this: 

‘My Government will prioritise support for the Belfast (Good Friday) Agreement and its institutions’. 

This is code for saying that the government wants changes to the Northern Ireland protocol, and is ultimately prepared to act unilaterally to get them. How this brinksmanship plays out is one of the big political questions of the next 12 months.

Why progressives can’t tolerate Christians

For decades, Christians have talked about feeling persecuted in advanced secular and liberal democracies. They’ve often sounded a bit hysterical. It’s true that governments and societies have moved towards a kind of post-Christianity. The world in which we live has adopted some of the gentler stuff about love and ignored the challenging stuff about sex. Devout Catholics, Anglicans and Evangelicals can therefore be made to feel a bit weird and out of place. But persecuted? Not really. Christians are on the whole free to live according to their faith without harassment, which is very unlike the situation in some Muslim counties — or China.

Look at the vicious reaction to the big Supreme Court news about Roe v. Wade in America, however, and you see something changing. Enraged by what they perceive as a dastardly plot by the religious right to take back control of women’s bodies, American progressives have turned aggressively on Christian groups.

Masses and services have been disrupted and churches graffitied. A tabernacle has been stolen from a church in Texas. In Wisconsin, Antifa protestors threw Molotov cocktails into a Christian counselling centre. ‘If abortions aren’t safe then you aren’t either.’ Those words were scrawled on the side of the building.

There’s also the very angry group called Ruth Sent Us, named in a curiously quasi-religious way after the late feminist Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Ruth Sent Us published the GPS coordinates for the homes of Supreme Court justices.

The idea, surely, was to encourage pro-abortion activists to harass and intimidate the justices. Intimidating judges is a crime. Last week there were protests outside the homes of Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

Ruth Sent Us declared on Twitter: ‘Stuff your rosaries and your weaponised prayer… We will be burning the Eucharist to show our disgust for the abuse Catholic churches have condoned for centuries.’

The use of the word ‘weaponised’ there is interesting. If organised religion is just a load of cobblers, how can the act of prayer be a weapon? If the Eucharist is just superstition, why burn it? But the pro-abortion movement is increasingly defined by its rage and militant sense of righteousness. That rage is not deployed to ‘defend women’, whatever pro-abortion protestors may say. It is, as we can see, aimed directly at the many people who still believe in God and the sanctity of life. There’s almost a palpable frustration that Christian views still have any sway in the public square at all.

Of course, abortion is controversial. The issue arouses strong feelings. But almost no reasonable person who has looked closely at the matter agrees that Roe v. Wade is an ideal way of settling a difficult question. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s draft verdict is not an assault on female rights. Even Bader Ginsberg, the patron saint of Ruth Sent Us, agreed that Roe v. Wade was bad law, and countless other pro-abortion legal scholars agree.

The Mississippi case, which Alito was responding to in his leaked draft opinion, doesn’t even ban abortions. It merely proposes to make most abortions illegal after 15 weeks, which means Mississippi abortion law would still be more liberal than, say, the law in France, Germany, Italy or Greece. As the bill for the law states, ‘fully 75 per cent of all nations do not permit abortion after 12 weeks’ gestation, except (in most instances) to save the life and preserve the physical health of the mother.’

The vehemence of the reaction to the Supreme Court leak, however, and the violent targeting of Christians as enemies of progress, suggests that America’s pro-abortion movement is not just for women’s rights, it’s against Christian ones. For progressives, democracies should move away from tolerance if it means that religious people can have power. That’s not liberalism. It’s revolutionary secularism. And it’s frightening.

This isn’t the beginning of the Charles Regency

One of the cruellest and most accurate remarks made about Prince Charles is that he is less king-in-waiting and more the perennial prince, forever hanging about in his mother’s shadow and increasingly desperate to assume the throne.

Yet he is now 73 years old, and will be the oldest monarch to ascend the throne since William IV, who became king aged 64 in 1830. This is a source of endless frustration to Charles. Newspaper briefings by well-placed courtiers have suggested he longs for greater involvement in the day-to-day running of ‘the Firm’, perhaps even culminating in an official Regency, given his mother’s declining health.

Today he has perhaps his most high-profile opportunity yet, with his delivery of the Queen’s speech at the state opening of parliament following his mother’s indisposition. It has been suggested that the Queen suffers from ‘episodic mobility issues’ – which is why she needed the support of Prince Andrew to walk to Prince Philip’s recent memorial service. There is also the undeniable fact that a long, formal speech is a gruelling ordeal for a 96-year old woman.

It has therefore fallen to her eldest son and heir to take over the responsibility. You cannot imagine that he hesitated too long before accepting.

Seeing Charles in a symbolic position of monarchical pomp is something that he has wanted for a considerable time. There has been a great deal of behind-the-scenes debate about whether it would be irresponsible to formally announce that he is taking over all royal responsibilities from his mother to allow her to enjoy her remaining years in peace, but this seems unlikely.

Not only is the Queen’s adherence to duty legendary – she will not have wished to shirk her responsibilities today – but there is the sense that this could establish an unwelcome precedent that could then be used against Charles himself in turn.

While there is no suggestion that Prince William wishes to take over the throne for decades – not least because of the strains and pressures that it would place on his young family – the Duke of Cambridge has put himself at the centre of the Royal Family’s decision-making. William promises to be a more interventionist and publicly forthright Prince of Wales than his father, raising the possibility of two rival courts in public opposition to one another.

Prince Charles is still not the most popular member of the royal family. He has skilfully rebranded himself from the spoilt adulterous husband of the Diana era into a gentler, calmer ‘father of the nation’ figure. His marriage to Camilla has helped him to be seen as a more family-oriented man. But if he wishes to be loved, rather than merely accepted, he has a considerable task ahead of him. He will not command as much public affection as his mother. Charles fears, reasonably, that he will be seen as an interim monarch between two greater and more dynamic figures.

Charles’ presence in parliament today, then, should be regarded as a cautious attempt to prepare the groundwork for King Charles III. But any over-excitable talk that this suggests the beginning of an actual Regency should be taken with suitable scepticism. The perennial prince has teetered on the age of national acceptance for decades. Trying to force the issue now, ahead of time, would be both foolish and profoundly unnecessary.

Full list: every bill in the Queen’s Speech

After 73 years of waiting, Prince Charles today delivered his first speech from the throne in the House of Lords to mark the State Opening of Parliament – watched on by Her Majesty in Windsor via television. Charles was escorted by Prince William, after the Yeoman Warders concluded their traditional search of the Palace of Westminster.

The Palace of Westminster was fully owned by the sovereign until 1965 when the Queen agreed to hand over control of the Commons and the Lords. The Crown still retains technical ownership of some parts, such as the robing room, with the last monarch to live there being Henry VIII.

Some 21 bills were announced by Prince Charles. These were the following:

1.  Levelling Up and Regeneration Bill – ’empowering local leaders to regenerate their areas’

2. Transport Bill – ‘to modernise rail services and improve reliability for passengers’

3. Energy Security Bill – ‘to deliver the transition to cheaper, cleaner and more secure energy’

4. Draft Digital Markets, Competition and Consumer Bill – ‘to promote competition, strengthen consumer rights and protect households and businesses’

5. UK Infrastructure Bank Bill – ‘to support economic growth and the delivery of net zero’

6. Schools Bill – to ‘help every child fulfil their potential’

7. Higher Education Bill – ‘raising standards and improving the quality of higher education’

8. Draft Mental Health Act Reform Bill

9. Brexit Freedoms Bill  – ‘regulations on businesses will be repealed and reformed’ and ‘a bill will enable law inherited from the European Union to be more easily amended’

10. Procurement Bill – ‘to provide new opportunities for small businesses’

11. Financial Services and Markets Bill – ensuring that the UK’s financial services industry ‘continues to act in the interest of all people and communities’

12. Data Reform Bill – to reform the UK’s data protection regime

13. Trade (Australia and New Zealand) Bill – to enable the UK’s Free Trade Agreement with these two countries

14. Public Order Bill – to ‘ensure the police have the powers to make the streets safer’

15. Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Bill – ‘to tackle illicit finance, reduce economic crime and help businesses grow’

16. National Security Bill – ‘to support the security services and help them protect the United Kingdom’

17. Northern Ireland Troubles (Legacy and Reconciliation) Bill – to prioritise support for the Good Friday Agreement and ‘to address the legacy of the past’

18. Bill of Rights – to ‘restore the balance of power between the legislature and the courts’

19. Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions Bill – to ‘prevent public bodies engaging in boycotts that undermine community cohesion’

20. Social Housing Regulation Bill – ‘to improve the regulation of social housing, to strengthen the rights of tenants and ensure better quality, safer homes

21. Conversion Therapy Bill – to ban gay conversion therapy