Sunak snubs Truss

Oh dear. It appears the blue-on-blue warfare that has dominated the Tory leadership campaign is taking its toll. After reports last week that members of Liz Truss’s team hope Rishi Sunak will decline any job she offers him should she win, it appears the former chancellor has taken such briefings to heart.

When a Radio 2 interviewer asked Rishi Sunak today whether he would serve as Liz Truss’ Health Secretary, Sunak reacted with an amused laugh and answered: ‘you really need to agree with the big things because it’s tough… and I wouldn’t want to end up in a situation like that again.’

Sunak is following in the footsteps of Jeremy Hunt. After the 2019 leadership contest, the former foreign secretary declined Boris Johnson’s offer of defence secretary – concluding he would rather spend time with his children.

Of course, Team Sunak insist the race is not over. But presuming the polls are correct and Truss is far ahead, how many foes will she face on the backbenches? She can already count Sunak and Michael Gove. Perhaps she should remember the old adage: keep your friends close and your enemies closer.

Could inflation hit 18.6 per cent?

When last month’s headline inflation figure was released, showing a rise to 10.1 per cent on the year, a little bit of optimism broke through the general discourse of outrage and horror: despite hitting double digits, might inflation be close to its peak? The main source of this optimism came from falling oil prices, which recently have been on a downward trajectory.

But that narrative is by no means the consensus. This morning, investment bank Citi reports its most recent inflation forecast – which it estimates will hit 18.6 per cent on the year in January. This is more than 5 percentage points higher than the Bank of England’s most current forecast of 13.3 per cent for October.

Citi’s figure, reported by the Financial Times, comes from its predictions around the energy price cap rises in the new year: it expects the cap to rise to £4,567 in January and then by a further £1,000 in April. These rises, Citi claims, will see inflation ‘entering the stratosphere’.

While Citi’s number is on the high end of the forecast spectrum, it is by no means alone in exceeding the BoE’s estimates, as both EY and Goldman Sachs expect inflation to peak at least 3 percentage points higher than the Bank. But the numbers this morning build up even more concern around the next energy price cap this Friday, which is expected to hit around £3,500. As Katy Balls writes, this puts leadership candidates Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak under far greater pressure to make public the relief packages they are considering to help struggling households. But if inflation comes anywhere close to Citi’s predictions, our understanding of the economic pain to come is going to shift radically once again.

Sanna Marin and the rise of fake controversy

With an honourable exception for the Beastie Boys, I can’t stand the use of ‘party’ as a verb. It immediately reminds me of ‘Party, party, party, oikies!’ – the war cry of the drunken potbellied Afrikaaners who once roared in their bakkiesonto our Namibian campsite at about 2 a.m. and proceeded to be, well, Boerish. It’s a usage that smacks of creepy men in movies inviting young women into their cars, or footballers in search of questionably consensual sex. It has passed from a frat-boy Americanism into a tabloid euphemism for illegal drug use and sexual sleaze without ever quite passing through a phase of meaning, actually, having a party.

Yet ‘partying’ is what the Finnish Prime Minister stands accused of. Video has leaked of 36-year-old Sanna Marin dancing and lip-syncing to pop music with her friends, drink having evidently been taken. One is said to show her dancing ‘hip-to-hip’ with a male pop star to a hip-hop track. Another, according to a bluenose quoted in a Finnish tabloid, depicts an evening in which the married premier ‘danced intimately with at least three different men’ and ‘sat on the laps of two different men’. Intimately, eh?

More than that – and this is what has those seekers-after-truth with the curiously Russian-tinged syntax excited – the tapes contain reference to ‘flour’, which is claimed to be a slang reference to illicit substances. Never mind that we seem to be struggling to find Finnish speakers who can attest to hearing the word used in this way. Flour is the principal ingredient in cake; and cake, as students of Chris Morris will know, is a ‘made-up drug’.

This is, then, a made-up story. It has roared through the mainstream media, as far as I can see, even though not a single detail in it attains to being both true and consequential. The true bits – Finnish PM gets squiffy on her day off; doesn’t mind looking a bit silly when dancing; likes to flirt – aren’t consequential. And the consequential bits – Finnish PM takes illegal drugs, tries to seduce random men for adulterous sex – aren’t true.

You’d really have to work at climbing aboard your high horse to make the case that getting tipsy or, for that matter, outright plastered now and again on her day off would render Marin unfit for office. The social use of alcohol is hardly unprecedented in politics, and it’s only relatively recently that its use in professional contexts has come to be frowned on. Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher were both drinkers. Pitt the Younger would put away a bottle of port before he addressed the House. There’s no suggestion that Marin is an alcoholic; just that she’s prone to the occasional drink as many sociable women in their thirties are.

Yet since enough trolls are pushing it through social media, we’re licensed to report the fact of the ‘controversy’; and besides, everyone loves an embarrassing leaked video and the Finnish PM is an attractive woman so the story illustrates well. It has legs mainly because the Finnish PM has legs. Yet just to calm this nonsense down, Sanna Marin has had to take a drug test – which itself becomes news.

This, then, is how a particular sort of fake controversy spreads. Parallels present themselves – and, to knock that one on the head early, our own ‘partygate’ is not one of them: the outgoing PM wasn’t being persecuted for eating cake or drinking wine; the complaint was that he did so in defiance of virus-containment rules he put in place himself. Strikes me, rather, that there are shades here of the baseless row all those years ago about Barack Obama’s US citizenship. That story was given fuel by nativist doubts about Obama’s ‘loyalty’; this one by the prurient modesty-policing of female behaviour.

As in that case, a sewage dump of innuendo with a pretty clear political agenda contaminated the public conversation. Obama was finally forced to release his long-form birth certificate to see it off (in the process, of course, giving the story still more play); while Marin has had to submit to a drug test. Some of the same interests, it’s safe to say, will have been satisfied by both things. Some of the same interests, it may not be too much to suppose, will have been cheerfully stirring the pot.

So the story, here, does seem to me to be significant; but not in a way that has the first thing to do with our interest in how Finland’s Prime Minister chooses to let her hair down of an evening. It has to do, rather, with how easy it is to let nonsense pollute our information ecosystem. That’s down to the way we as individuals let it propagate through social media, and the ease with which the sort of legacy media that can legitimate and amplify it are seduced into doing so. Nonsense like that isn’t cost-free. It muddies the waters. It smears. It distracts. As Philip K. Dick put it, kipple (i.e. nonsense) drives out nonkipple.

Now Philip K. Dick, since we mention him: there was a man who knew how to party.

Truss and Sunak reach crunch week on the energy crisis

There’s still two weeks of the Tory leadership contest to go but by Friday the scale of the energy crisis that awaits the next prime minister will be clear for all to see. This is when Ofgem is due to announce the new level at which energy bills will be capped. After the price cap hit £1,971 in April, the forecasts point to trouble ahead. Cornwall Insight predicts the October rise could see bills go up to £3,582 a year. This could go up to £4,266 by January with suggestions it could even reach £6,000 by April next year.

It means the terms of the debate are once again on the economy. In advance of the announcement, the Sunak camp is out on the attack – with a campaign spokesman saying Truss must choose between tax cuts or cost of living support. His supporter Lord Griffiths – who served as Margaret Thatcher’s Head of Policy – has jumped on a report in the Sunday Times suggesting that prime minister Truss would proceed with an emergency Budget without receiving an official OBR forecast. He’s claimed this suggests a ‘complete loss of confidence in the policy she is advocating’. Truss would – by law – have to have one this autumn.

Both candidates will come under greater pressure to spell out what relief they would offer struggling households. Figures in the Leader’s Office feel that Labour is on the front foot in the conversation after Keir Starmer last week set out his policy of freezing the energy price cap and funding it in large through an extended windfall tax. This has since been criticised by both for its feasibility and the fact it would apply to the most wealthy.

So how are the Tory leadership candidates likely to respond? Both Sunak and Truss have been tight-lipped on the issue – pointing to the fact there are no definite figures yet. An ally of Sunak suggests he would be minded to look at something similar to the targeted help he offered previously, so trying to match the price cap as much as possible to the most vulnerable. As for Truss, the frontrunner in the race is now spending half her time planning for government, including ministerial appointments (see my column in this week’s magazine for the current direction of travel). Both Truss and her likely pick for chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, have dropped hints over the weekend that help is coming.

Despite saying in a Financial Times interview a few weeks ago that she was not averse to handouts, there is an expectation that there will be targeted help. Truss’s method for dealing with the energy crisis is to cut taxes, reform the supply side so as to make the UK more self sufficient and then look at what extra help can be given. When the cost of energy this autumn becomes clear on Friday, it will be harder for the candidates to refuse to get into the detail of what response it calls for.

The funny truth about life as a diplomat’s wife

In the early 2000s my husband, a diplomat for the EU, was posted to Kazakhstan, a vast empty steppeland next to Siberia. It was winter and the place was covered with thick snow. My family were in England, my husband was mostly in the office; I was 61 and I didn’t know a soul.

Our previous posting had been to Damascus and I had occupied myself by writing a book about the old palaces there, but here there were no old buildings as the Kazakhs had been nomads. I had nothing to do. Everyone spoke Russian – I didn’t. As my husband was a senior diplomat we qualified for a cook, but she and I could only communicate using animal noises: chicken was cluck-cluck, beef was moo and lamb was baa. The main foods available seemed to be cabbage, onion and potatoes. The computer didn’t work. I was miserable and homesick, and our posting was for four years.

Then a sort of miracle happened. My husband took me to an official party to say goodbye to the Papal Nuncio in Almaty (at that time the capital of the country), and there I met another diplomatic wife. Cecilia, who was married to the Romanian ambassador, turned out to be even more miserable than I was. She was a doctor and couldn’t practice because she wasn’t qualified in Kazakhstan. ‘Tell me,’ she said after we had been talking for a minute or two. ‘Should I leave my husband now and go back to my job at home? You are old and have been doing this for years… is it worth it?’ I was going to laugh off her question, but suddenly I realised it was one I needed to ask of myself: is it worth it?

I had already thought of writing a book about our travels, and had got as far as sorting out a very disorganised diary I had kept over the years. Now I used it to try to answer Cecelia’s question. It took two years and the result was a book called Diplomatic Baggage: The Adventures of a Trailing Spouse (which is what we wives or partners of men – almost always men – who work abroad are called).

I meant it to be deadly serious, but somehow the funny side of everything kept inserting itself – because there always is a comic side to living as a foreigner abroad. I remembered the guests at a dinner party in Kazakhstan eating my flower arrangement – I thought they had all gone mad, but apparently they believed that a little lilac flower with an extra petal was lucky if you ate it.

In the Gambia I wondered why my husband’s rubber flip flops had been to a nailed to a tree. I asked the gardener; he shuffled about and mumbled that it was ‘good medicine’. In Damascus, at a dinner given by the charming Cypriot ambassador I was seated at a table that included the Indian ambassador. No one spoke, so I thought I’d start the ball rolling by introducing the subject of markets. I chatted about markets in the Caribbean, Africa, India etc. but no one joined in. Doggedly I continued – and then I realised that the Indian ambassador had actually fallen asleep. In desperation, I pretended that I hadn’t noticed and droned on. I had just got on to the subject of potatoes – sweet potatoes, new potatoes, big potatoes, small potatoes – when he woke up suddenly, said ‘Fascinating!’ in a loud voice, and then slumped back into sleep.

In India I used to feel guilty reading the newspapers in the morning – I had been brought up believing that it was decadent to read novels before lunch (you had to do chores first), yet here every news story was even better than fiction: ‘Man bites snake to death’; ‘Stray dog steals baby from hospital’; ‘Young girl kidnapped from her home turns up on her doorstep 12 years later as blind beggar and is recognised by old servant and saved’. With its vast population, events in India were always over the top – I once read a newspaper story about a car accident which said: ‘Of the 33 people travelling in the Jeep, 16 died immediately.’ Thirty-three people in a Jeep? How was this possible?

My book became a bestseller – I think it touched a nerve. Thousands of us give up our jobs to follow our husbands around the globe as they do theirs. (I was fashion editor of the Sunday Times before I married.) Some, like me, are wives of diplomats – the UK alone has 84 embassies and 49 consulates spread all over the world – but many more are attached to businessmen working for oil companies, airlines, IT, universities, schools and so on. I had fan letters from trailing spouses across the globe, including one from an American woman who wrote ‘Thank you for making it OK to cry’. (My book charts the 35 years I spent quietly sobbing my way from Brussels to Trinidad, India and West Africa, Syria and, of course, Kazakhstan.)

Another nerve must have been touched somewhere because a question was asked in parliament: who had given permission for me to publish the book? Margaret Beckett was acting Foreign Secretary at the time, and she replied that no one in the Foreign Office had ever heard of me or my husband and we didn’t come under its jurisdiction. (I received two letters from readers saying this proved that, just as they thought, I had made up the whole story.)

Now, almost two decades later, Diplomatic Baggage is hitting the book stands again, republished with an added epilogue, and a new generation of trailing spouses will feel able to cry – and, hopefully, laugh – when they read my story. As for ‘was it worth it?’ – well, you’ll have to read the book and come to your own conclusion.

Is Netflix losing the battle of the streaming giants?

From time to time, Netflix’s marketing brains like to get a bit cute with the company’s past. ‘Don’t give up on your dreams – we started with DVDs,’ read one recent viral post. But while the streaming giant happily references its most famous transition, it’s much more coy (and probably wisely) when it comes to its latest one.

It isn’t hard to see that 2022 Netflix is a very different beast to the one most of us signed up for. If you joined Netflix during its peak – e.g. somewhere in the long window between House of Cards and Tiger King – you would have likely bought into the idea of it being a one-stop shop for all things streaming. But has it really kept that promise?

Whereas Netflix once aimed to be like Spotify – an infinite vault of all the box sets and films you could possibly want – it now looks much more like a conventional broadcaster. Even worse, its once vast archive is quickly shrinking. Just this month, three of its more popular comedy series – 30 Rock, Friday Night Lights and Parks and Recreation – vanished from the service for good. So what’s going on?

The truth is that Netflix’s all-powerful model depended on maintaining a near monopoly on streaming. But what happens when other media conglomerates decide to get it on the game, and use their hefty cheque books to lure the big hitters away from Netflix? Or when the legacy players decide to launch their own streaming platforms?

We’re now seeing the answers to those questions – and it isn’t good news for Netflix. 30 Rock and Parks and Recreation didn’t disappear by accident: it’s because NBC wants them back for its own streaming service, Peacock (at least in the US). Although that’s small fry compared with NBC’s last move: retaking custody of The Office.

It may have ended almost a decade ago, but the Steve Carell version of The Office remains the great white whale of the streaming world, racking up enough viewing hours to power a whole platform. In its last year on US Netflix (2020), The Office was still topping the list of most watched shows – even though its final episode had been broadcast seven years earlier. Netflix still has some of the international rights to Dunder Mifflin (including in the UK), but for how long?

It isn’t just NBC laying claim to popular titles. Whichever way you turn, Netflix is facing a fight to keep the big names it once took for granted as rival companies look to beef up their own streaming offerings. From Hulu’s golden handcuffs deal with the Kardashians, to Disney taking back control of the likes of Modern Family, How I Met Your Mother and Sons of Anarchy, the streaming world is seeing an almighty scramble for content – and Netflix is losing out.

It makes for a particularly raw deal for UK viewers given that one of the companies that still licenses a lot of its content to Netflix is the BBC. That might be great for folks living in the States, but British viewers already have the entire back catalogues of Doctor Who and Peaky Blinders on iPlayer. They’re unlikely to want to pay for them again. According to Ofcom, out of Netflix’s 1.6 billion streams in the first three months of 2022, 513 million of them were for programmes that first aired on the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 or Channel 5. 

In its defence, Netflix hasn’t been standing still in recent years. While its archives have been shrinking, its executives have prioritised original content, ploughing billions of dollars into trying to make its own global franchises. It certainly has some hits on its books (just imagine how much Disney would pay for Stranger Things…) but does it necessarily add up to a killer subscription package?

Say you love The Crown, but couldn’t care for the likes of Umbrella Academy or Emily in Paris. Does it still make sense to maintain your Netflix subscription during those long waits between each season of royal intrigue? Particularly when there seems to be less content to browse every time you log on. 

Some subscribers appear to think not. In Britain, Netflix’s share of the streaming market dropped from 9.4 per cent to 4.5 per cent in the latest quarter. Last week, Disney edged past Netflix to become the world’s biggest subscription TV streaming company, with 221 million subscriptions across all of its streaming services – against 220.7 million for Netflix.

And let’s not gloss over the fact that a lot of that original content really isn’t that good. Look at documentaries. This season’s big release is an exposé about Woodstock 99: the ill-fated music festival regarded as a borderline humanitarian disaster (and not just because the Insane Clown Posse played the main stage). But the whole thing has previously been the subject of an HBO documentary and a hit podcast – making Netflix look rather late to the party. 

It all adds up to a tricky situation for Netflix – which is already among the worst-performing shares in the New York Stock Exchange’s S&P 500 index. As consumers look to tighten their belts ahead of a gloomy winter, more cancellations must surely be on the horizon. For Netflix executives, that sequel to Squid Game really can’t come soon enough.

What the Dugin assassination tells us about Russia

Car bombs used to be a fixture of gangland feuds in 1990s Russia but have since fallen out of fashion. This makes it all the more striking when, as happened on Saturday night, such a device rips through a car just outside Moscow, killing Darya Dugina, daughter of the controversial nationalist ideologue Alexander Dugin.

She was a prominent figure in her own right, a journalist working for an outfit Washington says is owned by Russian businessman Evgeny Prigozhin – under sanctions in the West for being the godfather of both the Wagner mercenary group and the infamous social media ‘troll farms’ – who had been a cheerleader for the war in Ukraine. Indeed, she was under sanctions, with the UK government describing her as a ‘frequent and high-profile contributor of disinformation in relation to Ukraine and the Russian invasion of Ukraine’.

Inevitably there is a widespread assumption that the real target was her father. The car was said to have been his, although other accounts say it was registered in her name. Either way, he would have been in it had he not at the last moment chosen to return home another way. No one has yet claimed responsibility, but in the charged political environment of the moment, everyone is blaming their favourite villain.

Already, Russian commentators are blaming Kyiv, without explaining either why Dugin would be their target of choice – there are much more rabid and influential commentators on Ukraine – or how they managed to pull off an attack in the very heart of the Russian security state. Likewise, others assume this was a Kremlin hit, either because they wanted to make Dugin a symbolic martyr or else because they feared ultra-nationalists like him would stir up protest were Russia to step back from its war in Ukraine. Finally, there are the inevitable suggestions that this was actually a contract killing driven not by politics but by business disputes. Dugin is, after all, a phenomenally productive writer – never mind the quality – and an energetic self-promoter. In other words, there’s apparently a fair amount of money in his brand of splenetic and mystical nationalism.

This murder will only add to the Dugin myth, one he himself has so assiduously developed. There are many in the West happy to take him at face value, as ‘Putin’s Brain’ or ‘Putin’s Rasputin’. He is not, though, and never has been especially influential. He has no personal connection to Putin, but rather is just one of a whole breed of ‘political entrepreneurs’ trying to pitch their plans and doctrines to the Kremlin. For a while, in 2014, he was in favour; his notions of Russia’s civilisational destiny and status as a Eurasian nation convenient to rationalise a land grab in Ukraine’s Donbas. Suddenly he was on every TV channel, his book Foundations of Geopolitics was on the syllabus at the Academy of the General Staff and he was offered a chair at MGU, Moscow State University, the country’s premier institute of higher learning.

But then the Kremlin decided against outright annexation of the Donetsk and Lugansk ‘People’s Republics’ and Dugin was no longer useful. The invitations began to dry up, MGU rescinded its offer, and he was back in the marketplace, hawking his books to the public and his ideas to the leadership. In the process, he mastered the art of retrospective thought-leading. In other words, of picking up on hints about what the Kremlin was about to do and loudly advocating just this move – and then claiming the credit. Overall, though, he has been more effective in selling himself to western alt-right circles – which to be sure, gives him some value to Moscow as an agent of influence – than to the Kremlin.

So this is the Dugin paradox, he is Schrödinger’s Ideologist, at once important and also not. He may not have real traction with the government, but his capacity to present himself as a profound thinker whose (often barking mad) ideas frame Kremlin thinking means he is considered important. And if people think him important, then to a degree he becomes important. Or rather, the myth of Dugin does.

It is that myth which will likely matter in the aftermath of his daughter’s killing. Already, Russian nationalist tub-thumpers are calling for retaliation, but given that the Kremlin already seems to recognise no limits on its operations in Ukraine, it is unlikely it can or will do anything beyond the symbolic. A dead Dugin would have been a malleable martyr, an angry living one could prove a wild card. The man who once called for a Russia stretching ‘from Dublin to Vladivostok’ is unlikely to be assuaged and nationalists who are already dissatisfied with Putin – they don’t have a problem with him invading Ukraine, just with him doing it so very badly – will feel all the more reason to be angry.

We likely will see some hurried arrests. No doubt there will be video footage of Federal Security Service officers bursting into a flat artfully staged with some bomb-making equipment, a gun, a teach-yourself-Ukrainian handbook, some US dollars and, maybe, a volume of Shakespeare (seriously: one was used as ‘evidence’ of the presence of British mercenaries fighting for Ukraine, as we all know squaddies are mad for a little King Lear). But we, and more to the point, the Russians, have seen it all before. This is unlikely to bring closure or reassurance. Instead, it is just one more hint of the subterranean instabilities and weaknesses of a regime that tries to look indomitable.

Whether it reflects a serious failure of the Russian security state or tensions and rivalries within it, it will convince the nationalists – who may be less numerous and visible than Putin’s liberal critics, but tend to be within the security services and have, to be blunt, the guns – that this is a regime that is not living up to its own rhetoric and may be weaker than it looks.

The depressing rise of the cathedral gimmick

They say that shopping centres are the cathedrals of late capitalism. It is amusing sometimes to think of future generations shuffling reverently around the monumental structures of glass, faux marble and strangely treated wood as if they were structures worthy of awe or wonder, perhaps pausing to peer at the tracery of a former Burger King. Westfield, London’s great temple that looms over Shepherd’s Bush, is an example of this genre I find particularly stressful. It is an endless cavalcade of stimuli: flashing adverts, muzak ricocheting off intensely polished surfaces, bright lights and endless, endless stuff to buy. We are not even spared olfactory assault, as the artificially intensified scents of everything from soaps to cinnamon buns are pumped into our nostrils.

The thing is, whilst Westfield is the most egregious example of modern commercial freneticism, it is by no means unique. Almost every part of our physical public sphere is given over to invasions of our space and pressures on our time and, most importantly, our wallets. Online is no better: using Instagram these days is like being digitally mugged by an advertising executive. The triumph of the mobile phone means that the general invasiveness and pressurisation of modern life can even enter our homes, carried on our very person. Now, even our most sacred spaces have begun the process of Westfield-isation.

The cathedral gimmick has become a feature of recent English summers – as reliable as Pimms in June or rain in August. As the holidaymakers descend on our cathedral cities, places dedicated to the majesty of the eternal briefly become shrines to temporary stimuli. Amidst the altars and alcoves there are exhibits designed to heighten engagement and bring people in, everything from bridges to minigolf to dinosaurs.

It is not that I don’t want people to come to cathedrals who perhaps might not, nor that I don’t want them to feel welcome there. I know full well that cathedrals have always been strange collations of monuments and tablets and the general collected debris marking lives lived. I am aware that in Medieval times they would have been great hives of activity – although as any historian worth their salt will tell you, the image of them as totally anarchic marketplaces is a caricature. I am, in short, sympathetic to the instincts that lead cathedrals to fill their naves and choirs with things designed to stimulate the modern commercial palate. I’m just still not sure the trade in that it requires is worth it.

We do ourselves no credit by the implication there is no room for public spaces that are given over exclusively to solemn reflection. The implication is that these spaces are not up to being attractions in their own terms. What is the root of this? A lack of confidence perhaps? The plasticky, gimmicky nature of the exhibits that invariably are chosen do cry ‘trying too hard’. The sight of our ancient cathedrals engaged in the equivalent of waving a hand recorded mixtape at a girl who doesn’t really fancy them. The clergy are – bizarrely given their stated vocation – haunted by the idea it is some sort of sin of exclusivity to suggest a space might be separated off for higher purposes. A rush is then made for the lowest common denominator of engagement. So we end up with enforced zaniness, perpetuating the untruth that the loud and marketable plastic of this world is of value, whilst the immortal and eternal is not worth worrying our pretty little heads about.

Therein is the crux: that the rush to fill our sacred spaces with the banal suggests that we fear what we might find after a period of reflection. I don’t mean that sort which comes from endless stimulation but rather that which comes from silent communion with the past and the eternal, even, God forbid, that which might truly be described as awe. Such reflection is scary, life changing even, but it is necessary. It is not exclusivist or debarring to point out that we all need those spaces to engage with the deeper side of our existence and that there are precious few places where it might be found. It should also be obvious that attempting that engagement in the midst of Dino hunts or mini golf is more difficult than amidst the silent echoes of prayed-in stone.

It is no coincidence that the rise of cathedrals as activity spaces has coincided with the rise of the entrance fee. It may be that deans and chapters have no economic choice other than to view these great edifices as simply a competing asset in a wider tourist market but I would wager that there would be a fair number of people who would consider donating to make up the difference in order to preserve their peace and tranquillity. And, in a world where sensory overload and endless, pointless activity are the norm in most of our lives, perhaps leaning back into the one thing that sets these places of worship apart – their holiness –might make some sense after all.

I, like too many, have been hurt by the Church and her clergy. To throw myself headlong back into the busyness of the life of a parish now would be intensely damaging to my faith – what I need from her buildings is space. Cathedrals, at their best, can provided that: well worn, healing, anonymised space, where men and women have sought a similar peace to me for centuries. To allow the circus of our present world to seep in – even with the very best of intentions – compromises that space and perversely makes it less accessible for those of us seek to reacquaint ourselves with the calming peace of God amidst those ancient stones.

It is not a peace we are likely to find in any other part of our increasingly busy and benighted public sphere. Westfield may have become a cathedral for many but, for the love – and the peace – of God, let our cathedrals not become Westfields.

Europe’s new migrant crisis

Earlier this month I spent a week in Sicily, driving south from Palermo to Agrigento and then east to Syracuse and Messina. It was my first visit to Sicily in 17 years and, given the media reports, I had expected to find the island crowded with migrants from Africa. In fact, I saw none, other than those I glimpsed in a fenced-off processing centre at the quayside in Agrigento, the first port of call for many migrants who arrive in Sicily.

Last week the local paper in Agrigento drew on official government figures to reveal that so far in 2022, 45,664 migrants have landed on Italian territory, an increase of 40 per cent on the same period last year. Just under half that number (46 per cent) were brought ashore by Italian naval vessels or NGO boats, like the Ocean Viking, which I saw at dock in Syracuse. The rest made their way to Italy by other means.

Of the migrants arriving on Italian soil, the largest proportion are from Tunisia (20.5 per cent), Egypt (19.3 per cent) and Bangladesh (16.7 per cent). The arrivals this year have swollen the number of migrants in what the Italians call the SAI network (system of accommodation and integration) to 95,184, a rise of 23.9 per cent on 2021.

One can only marvel at the compassion and forbearance of the Italians, who, as Nicholas Farrell stated in the magazine this week, have seen an estimated 750,000 migrants arrive on their shores since 2015. The same goodwill doesn’t extend to the EU, as Giorgia Meloni explained to Farrell. ‘Europe must strike a deal to stop the departures and open up hotspots in Libya to process asylum requests and distribute fairly across Europe only the genuine refugees,’ said the woman tipped to become Italy’s next prime minister. ‘Borders exist only if you defend them. Otherwise they do not exist.’

A similar argument is put forward by some politicians and commentators in Britain, exasperated at the growing number of migrants who are arriving in England from France. According to the BBC, around 20,000 have made the passage so far this year, an indication that 2022 will be a record year for people entering the country illegally. France bears the brunt of Britain’s anger at the situation; they counter that it is impossible to patrol hundreds of miles of coastline and that furthermore they themselves are struggling to control their border with Italy. It is estimated that there are between 736,000 and 900,000 illegal immigrants in France, depending on which figures you believe.

Earlier this month the centre-right Republican MP for the city of Nice, Eric Ciotti, told Le Figaro that in the previous week 1,000 migrants had been detained on the French-Italian border. ‘The situation is no longer supportable,’ said Ciotti, who links the migrant crisis to a deteriorating social situation in France. ‘There’s a rise in communitarianism and delinquency. Foreigners are over-represented in criminal acts. It is therefore necessary to limit the influx of foreigners and facilitate their expulsion.’

Such rhetoric enrages the left but government figures bear out Ciotti’s claim: in 2021 there were 17,198 foreign nationals in French prisons, 24.5 per cent of the total population, of which the largest proportion (9,793) come from Africa. Among the French population at large, 7 per cent are foreign. The left argue, with justification, that there is likely discrimination in policing and that immigrants are vital to the workforce, particularly when it comes to hard manual labour. Paris is increasingly becoming one giant building site as the city gears up to host the 2024 summer Olympics, and most of the men I see at work hail either from Africa or eastern Europe.

I wrote about a similar phenomenon in 2020 when France endured two oppressive lockdowns; a disproportionately high number of the people who kept Paris going by cleaning the streets, emptying the bins and manning the shop tills were immigrants, and increasingly France is turning to foreigners to fill the alarming shortage of medical staff.

Most French understand and appreciate this, which is why Eric Zemmour’s presidential campaign bombed so badly; he wanted to halt all immigration to France, legal or otherwise. A France deprived of its hard-working immigrant population would grind to a halt within a week. The right’s argument – Zemmour apart – is that immigration is necessary but in smaller numbers and with better regulation. This is the crux of the immigration bill that will be presented to parliament in the autumn by interior minister Gérald Darmanin. That it will encounter opposition from the left goes without saying; already the media that leans in that direction have labelled it as ‘controversial’.

The bill would make it easier to expel foreigners who commit crimes by accelerating the process and in particular scrapping some of the legal provisions that hitherto have made it hard to deport migrants who transgress. Furthermore, the bill would grant residence permits only to applicants who obtain a certificate ‘proving French language proficiency and acceptance of the values of the Republic’. Darmanin has also mooted the idea of introducing ‘quotas by profession or sectors suffering labour shortages’, an idea that Meloni also envisages implementing if she becomes PM of Italy in next month’s general election.

In June, interior ministers from five EU nations – Italy, Cyprus, Greece, Malta and Spain – voiced their concerns that in the coming months greater numbers of Africans will attempt to cross the Mediterranean, as the grain shortage caused by the war in Ukraine begins to bite.

Statistics from Frontex, the European border and coast guard agency, indicate that this is already happening: in the first six months of 2022, there were 114,720 irregular entries into the European Union, an increase of 84 per cent on the same period last year. Frontex said that people fleeing the war in Ukraine were not among these entries detected.

The migrants will be arriving on a continent in the grip of its own economic crisis with millions of Europeans struggling to eat and heat. The era of political procrastination is over, and if the current crop of presidents and prime ministers aren’t prepared to defend their countries’ borders, electorates will likely turn to those who are.

Will an Office for the Prime Minister work?

Boris Johnson now leads an interim administration. Within a fortnight, we will have a new occupant of No. 10. What will Rishi Sunak or Liz Truss find waiting for them in Downing Street? And what might the machinery of government mean for their ability to deliver on their campaign promises?

The first thing that will strike the new Prime Minister is Johnson’s internal reforms. The creation of an ‘Office of the Prime Minister’ is potentially the most significant, although it was announced late in Johnson’s premiership and it remains to be seen how seriously it has been taken. On arrival, the new Prime Minister may therefore be equally entitled to feel that No. 10 has been either slimmed-down or beefed-up. On one hand, there are reports that the new Downing Street Permanent Secretary the Samantha Jones will encourage much of the building’s staff to move into the Cabinet Office in an attempt to rationalise the building’s ever-expanding operation. But on the other hand, Jones’s appointment is connected to the creation of a Department for the Prime Minister’s Office, an expansionary move.

Sue Gray’s report found that No. 10 had grown such that ‘it is now more akin to a small government department’ and that structures ‘have not evolved sufficiently to meet the demands of this expansion’. The job title of Downing Street permanent secretary is not entirely new in itself, but could be significant if it is meant to address the resulting ‘blurred lines of accountability’ referred to in the report. A permanent secretary for No. 10, like those found in other departments, could differ from the cabinet secretary in focusing on the activities of No. 10 alone, and more explicitly serving the Prime Minister rather than the cabinet and the government as a whole.

While accountability within No. 10 may be cleared up, there is less clarity as to who would represent Downing Street externally. Much of constitutional government is exercised by the ‘golden triangle’, a triad of civil servants referred to by Lord Hennessy as the ‘continuity men and women of the entire system’: the cabinet secretary and the principal private secretaries to the Queen and the Prime Minister. These three connect their essential components of the constitution to ensure the smooth operation of government. Where does the new fourth role fit?

Much will depend on the approach taken by the new Prime Minister. The idea of such an office is not new. Successive prime ministers have repeatedly fiddled with the machinery of government, often after they pulled the levers of power and felt that nothing happened. Historians and academics have long debated whether a ‘Prime Minister’s Department’ already exists, albeit unofficially. Edward Heath and Margaret Thatcher both considered the establishment of a formal ‘PMD’, although neither implemented the idea, generally felt to symbolise a power grab on the part of the Prime Minister. The Cabinet Office, long an ill-defined adjunct to the Downing Street buildings, has been a repository for various prime ministerial projects. But past advisers, such as Harold Wilson’s economic adviser Thomas Balogh, and units such as Edward Heath’s Central Policy Review Staff, have suffered from a lack of influence when located next door in the Cabinet Office and away from the Prime Minister. An explicit Prime Minister’s Department could strengthen the premiership.

Apart from a new perm sec, there has been little else concrete on a Prime Minister’s Department so far. That will be up to the new PM. A more formalised or even expanded structure could improve accountability, but may reduce flexibility. It could increase bureaucracy and slow down government, or strengthen the Prime Minister’s ability to drive their agenda from the centre. Structures are important, but personalities and priorities matter too.

Getting stuff done is harder than it looks. Tony Blair’s former head of the Delivery Unit Sir Michael Barber was re-hired in January 2021 to conduct a ‘delivery review’ across Whitehall in a sign that ministers have been frustrated at how slow-moving government has been. Under Blair, Barber had the Prime Minister’s confidence and backing, enabling the unit to push ahead with ensuring key targets were delivered, even when the PM was distracted by crises. But this does not seem to have materialised under Johnson. A Prime Minister’s Department may help clear up who’s in charge of whom within No. 10, but it takes laser-like focus to see real change outside of No. 10 across the nation.

Johnson had a number of staffing and machinery revamps while in No. 10. Yet Herbert Asquith’s old claim that ‘the office of prime minister is what the holder chooses and is able to make of it’ remains just as true a century on. Appointments, advisers and machinery matter to a Prime Minister. But in a role so fixated on one individual, personality matters above all else.

How we fell for antidepressants

The French novelist, Michel Houellebecq, with his accustomed acuity about modern culture, titled his last novel but one Serotonin. By then, of course, this famous neurochemical had become the key to a perfect human existence, too little or too much of it resulting in all the little problems that continue to plague mankind. If only we could get the chemical balance in our brains right, all would be well, life would return to its normal bliss!

After the commercialisation of Prozac, people started talking about the chemical balance in their brains in much the same way as they talked about the ingredients of a recipe. As Peter D. Kramer put it in his book published in Britain in 1994, Listening to Prozac:

By now, asking about the virtue of Prozac… may seem like asking whether it was good thing for Freud to have discovered the unconscious… Like psychoanalysis, Prozac exerts influence not only in its interaction with individual patients, but through it influence on contemporary thought. 

You can say that again. Prozac and its competitors (known collectively as the SSRIs) soon drove unhappiness from the lexicon and replaced it with depression. A relatively rare condition became a common one, so common that up to a sixth, and a constantly increasing proportion, of adults in the western world are now taking antidepressants (prescriptions doubled in Britain between 2008 and 2017 alone). As Dr Colin Brewer once put it, misery increases to meet the means available for its alleviation. Or perhaps more accurately, the reputed means of its alleviation, for it is far from certain that antidepressants alleviate misery, if the question is regarded more broadly rather than on a case-by-case basis. I doubt that anyone has observed the world growing much happier since the introduction of these drugs.

One possible measure of general misery and prevalence of depression is the suicide rate. In Britain, at any rate, it has remained relatively stable, oscillating slightly at around a figure of ten per 100,000 of the population per year. In the United States, by contrast, it has risen almost by a third during the last 20 years in which antidepressant use has also increased. One can say that, at least, mass drugging has not altered the suicide rate very favourably.

Such broad statistics are always capable of more than one interpretation, of course. It might be argued that the rate of depression in the western world has really risen and that in Britain, for example, but for the increase in the rate of antidepressant prescriptions, the suicide rate would have risen rather than remained relatively constant, while in the United States depression may have increased by even more than antidepressant prescription, and therefore the response to the rise in suicide rate should be the prescription of even more antidepressants. Why, on this hypothesis, depression should have increased so greatly is a question that is not discussed as often as its importance would suggest that it should be.

The matter is further complicated by the suspicion that SSRIs themselves may provoke suicidal thoughts, by means of side-effects (and withdrawal effects) such as agitation and akathisia, an intense and deeply distressing feeling of restlessness that results in constant movement and that is associated statistically with suicide.

This is not quite the same as saying that the drugs never work; controlled trials show that they can, though not dramatically well. However, the results of such trials, conducted with a care impossible in everyday practice, are not automatically transferable to what we doctors sometimes call the real world, in contradistinction to the rarefied world of carefully conducted research, especially with an inherently vague (and, dare one say it, fashionable) diagnosis such as depression.

Nor does the variable effect of the drugs prove that the theory on which they marketed is necessarily false, though a recent review of the serotonin theory of depression suggests that it is far from firmly founded on scientific evidence.

This review, which has been itself criticised as incomplete, was published in Molecular Psychiatry, an important journal in the field of the biochemistry of psychiatric disorders. The authors examined the various strands of evidence put forward in favour of the serotonin hypothesis, that depression is the result of a morbid alteration of serotonin metabolism, and found them wanting in scientific conviction. For example, the measurement of serotonin metabolites in the cerebrospinal fluid of those who are depressed fails to show any difference from that in people who are not depressed. In summary, the authors conclude:

Our comprehensive review of the major strands of research on serotonin shows there is no convincing evidence that depression is associated with, or caused by, lower serotonin concentrations or activity… and methods to reduce serotonin availability… do not consistently lower mood in volunteers.

Here it is worth remembering that the first generation of effective antidepressants discovered were believed to alter noradrenaline rather than serotonin metabolism (imipramine was initially tried on patients with tuberculosis, some of whom were noticed to have grown cheerful on it), and in the experience of many psychiatrists they are more effective in preventing severe depression than the SSRIs. But the noradrenaline hypothesis was driven from the field by the serotonin hypothesis for some reason (possibly not unconnected with commercial propaganda) capturing the public imagination in the way that the noradrenaline hypothesis never had. As Einstein said, theories should be as simple as possible, but not simpler than possible.

It is worth reflecting also on the pressures on doctors to prescribe these drugs. Patients arrive in their consulting rooms who believe that their unhappiness is a deviation not only from normal but from health. The doctor has but a short time to expend on such a patient. The reasons for the patient’s misery cannot be gone into deeply and, if they exist, are in any case likely to prove refractory to the doctor’s ministrations.

The doctor has to draw a consultation to an end somehow, and a prescription is a natural way to do it, like the death of the heroine in a tragic romantic opera. He knows that placebos have a powerful effect in elevating patients’ moods, but he is no longer allowed to prescribe coloured water or some such as he once might have done.

In addition, it is probable that the antidepressant exerts an antidepressant effect on at least some patients, but so loose is the diagnosis now that he does not know which. For him, it is safer to prescribe than not to do so, for one untreated patient might cause him more problems than 99 patients treated unnecessarily, many of whom in any case will benefit from the placebo effect.

The patient also benefits in a certain way, even in the absence of that placebo effect. He is pleased that his misery is validated as an illness, thus removing some of the need for self-examination or the making of difficult decisions about his existence. He has successfully transferred some of the responsibility for his life from himself to the doctor and this is always gratifying.

Fortunately for the doctor, antidepressants are said to take some time to work. Moreover, there are various increased doses that can be given a try and that also requires a delay before they can be said not to have been effective. But this is not all: there are many antidepressants on the market, and some people respond to one and not the others. Thus trials of drugs can go on for months, by which time the feeling of depression may have evaporated, as it frequently does. The whole pas de deux between doctor and patient can last for months before drawing to a successful or unsuccessful conclusion as the case may be. At least everything has been tried.

A bonus for the drug companies is that patients often feel worse when stopping the antidepressants that they have been taking for a long time. This, of course, is an indication to stay on them for even longer. It is claimed that withdrawal effects after chronic use can last up to 18 months.

A fundamental problem is that there is no indisputable biological marker to distinguish trivial and fleeting unhappiness from serious depression, the kind that develops into the melancholia that has been described for centuries and which, once witnessed, is never forgotten. The first melancholic patient I ever saw suffered from Cotard’s syndrome, named for the French neurologist, Jules Cotard (1840 – 1889). The patient, a man of about 60, lay in his bed believing that he was already dead, the whole of his body having rotted away except for the tip of his nose, which mysteriously remained alive, though not, according to him, for very long. A successful businessman, he recovered with treatment with amitriptyline, one of the first-generation antidepressants of the noradrenaline hypothesis type.

Melancholia is varied in its manifestations, from near catatonia (patients may literally turn their faces to the wall) to unassuageable agitation. Such patients often believe themselves to be guilty of some terrible moral fault, though they may have lived exemplary lives – insofar as any human lives are exemplary. The cause that allegedly excites such melancholia is often grossly out of proportion to its supposed effects, and the successful in life are as susceptible to it as the failure.

Melancholia easily becomes a medical emergency, but is now rarely seen, possibly because of the widespread use of antidepressants. Electro-convulsive therapy (ECT) may produce dramatic effects. One patient I remember went straight from profound retarded depression to a state of mania, overactive, grandiose, and with unstoppable logorrhoea. His wife said to me, ‘Can’t you make him depressed again, doctor?’

Irrespective of the benefits of antidepressants in individual cases, which can be considerable, I suspect that their overall cultural effect, when prescribed almost in the way that hypochondriacs take vitamin supplements, has been, like that of psychoanalysis, negative or harmful. They have reinforced the facile hope that there is a technical or psychological solution to the problems of living, and that any deviation from a supposedly normal state of happiness is always pathological. The American psychiatrist, the late Thomas Szasz, once proposed that happiness should be considered an illness, on the grounds that it was rarely justified by circumstances and was usually based on delusion.

The widespread use of antidepressants encourages a curious form of alienation of patients’ thoughts and behaviour from themselves, insofar as they begin to describe themselves as objects rather than subjects, and as if they were merely an amalgam of chemicals even to themselves. They do not make decisions, their neurotransmitters make their decisions for them, at least when these decisions are bad (no one complains of his good behaviour or ascribes it to anything but himself). They thereby encourage a form of bad faith, special pleading and an avoidance of true self-reflection.

Thatcherism is a cult the Tories should not follow

Friedrich Nietzsche may not be the most fashionable member of the conservative canon, but doubtless he wouldn’t care much. He knew that one of the main symptoms of a civilisation in decline is ‘herd thinking’. Regardless of the victor, this summer’s Conservative leadership contest has been a case in point for Freud’s narcissism of small differences. None of the candidates have dared deviate from the dogma of Thatcherism.

Grant Shapps said it loudest: like Thatcher, he would confront union ‘Luddites’ to save an ailing economy. Liz Truss wants to to ‘crack down’ on trade union ‘militants’ by making it harder for them to call strikes. Truss didn’t even need to name Thatcher as for some time she has been cosplaying as the Iron Lady. Not to be left out, Truss’s rival for the leadership Rishi Sunak held a campaign meeting in Thatcher’s hometown of Grantham, where now resides a statue dedicated to her memory.

Sunak and Truss’s economic policies have not been judged by whether they are good, but by whether they can be deemed ‘Thatcherite’. Their differences are insignificant: they both agree that tax cuts, a smaller state and a more deregulated economy should be the party’s priority. Indeed, all candidates for the party leadership have sung this tune.

How healthy it this for a party facing the biggest economic crisis since the 1970s? Any anthropologist might point out however that invoking the departed in times of fear is historically never a good sign. Despite a diverse ethnic and cultural make-up, none of the Tory leadership candidates dared suggest that Thatcherism was anything other than perfect.

Truss was born the year Thatcher became leader and was still below the age of consent when she was deposed. In her mind, Thatcher has assumed a mythical status, one whose policies must be followed slavishly. This is despite the very different circumstances and challenges that Britain faces now compared to those which confronted Thatcher in 1979.

Just to take the example of the trade unions. In 1979, they accounted for almost half the workforce but today not much more than one-fifth. In the year before Thatcher became Prime Minister almost 30 million working days had been lost to strikes but the figure for 2018 was not much more than 250,000. While strikes could be called on a hand vote held on some spare ground in the pre-Thatcher period, now at least 50 per cent of all members have to vote in a strike ballot conducted by post before it can take place. This means that when a strike does occur it is has to be supported by the majority of members: the forthcoming postal strike led by the Communication Workers Union for example saw 99 per cent of its members vote in favour of taking action on a 72 per cent turnout.

Over the years, a few Conservatives have tried to reckon with the country they lead a little more honestly. In 2016 Theresa May reminded delegates at her first party conference as leader that:

Government can and should be a force for good; that the state exists to provide what individual people, communities and markets cannot; and that we should employ the power of government for the good of the people.

May’s agenda was blown off course by events, but she was not the first Conservative to see the state as an essential guarantor of security. In 1999 deputy leader Peter Lilley – someone most would see as a staunch Thatcherite – warned of the influence of ‘anarcho-capitalists’ in the party who ‘believe the model of autonomous individuals interacting by voluntary exchange without the intervention of the state can be applied to every aspect of human affairs’. There were great dangers of ‘equating Conservatism with free marketeering and nothing else’. Lilley was quickly consigned to the wilderness for such apostasy.

Despite Lilley, the ‘anarcho-capitalists’ now run the party and make up the majority of its membership. There is a deep irony that these herd thinkers invoke Thatcher to justify their by-now-hackneyed beliefs. For when she became – very unexpectedly – leader in 1975 it was partly because she stood against the mushy One Nation herd thinking of her day, one principally defined by Edward Heath’s attempt to make the post-war consensus work. Thatcher’s revolutionary zeal marked her as one of those exceptional individuals Nietzsche believed were vital to advancing civilisation and saving it from decadence. Such figures seem completely absent in today’s Conservative party, which for a party supposedly devoted to individualism, makes the irony all the more delicious.

The strange morality of sponsoring weapons

Forget fund-raising concerts donating spare clothes and offering your spare room to a refugee family. There’s a better way of showing your sympathy for Ukrainians: you can now sponsor weapons, and arm it with your very own message. For up to £2,500, Brits can send a personalised message to the crowdfunding site Sign My Rocket, who will then write it on a missile destined for the Russian army.

Sending hostile messages to the enemy, of course, is not new, and may be as old as war itself. Dropping black propaganda leaflets from planes for the benefit of the enemy beneath has long been standard practice. Nor was it unusual for those on the production line at armaments factories or even those loading the ammunition to add their own special something. Soldiers and production workers are reported to have inscribed rude words and darkly humorous jibes on ammunition since the first world war.

What is different with Ukraine is that many of those sending the messages are not combatants. Brits, Americans, Canadians, Poles and Balts are among those who have joined the effort, with Americans the most enthusiastic – and they are paying for the privilege.

Some of these organisations will you a photo of the weapon, duly inscribed as per your request. Sign My Rocket started offering $30 messages on Soviet-made mortar rounds, but has massively expanded its range since it took the decision to go seriously international.

‘London says hi,’ is among the tamer slogans ordered. But if you a really wanted to push the boat out, you could try sponsoring a tank for around $2,500. The Washington Post reported that ‘Sign My Rocket’ has recently added a Buk surface-to-air missile, bearing the message ‘not for use on Malaysian Airlines” – a bleak allusion to the downing of flight MH17 in eastern Ukraine, with the loss of 298 lives.

Personalised weapon furthers Ukraine’s war effort not just by raising morale, but by providing money to buy more weapons. Prominent individuals have been doing their bit. In June, Serhiy Prytula, a Ukrainian comedian and politician, launched a campaign to buy three Turkish-made Bayraktar drones for Ukraine’s army. He raised the necessary $20m within three days, at which point the company announced that it would donate the first three for free.

It shows once again the ingenuity, enterprise and flair of the Ukrainians – as exemplified by President Zelensky, who has toured the world virtually, making his country’s case and pleading for the means to combat the enemy. It also shows up another of Russia’s failings, given that its entrepreneurial people’s war effort seems limited to merely scrawling the letter Z – the letter that has become synonymous with support for the war – on military vehicles and other available surfaces.

And yet, would we be talking about how admirable, generous and noble this aspect of Ukraine’s war effort is, if we – the West – were not on their side? Hard to imagine, I know, but what if it had been Russians crowd-funding for drones, or inscribing missiles?

Would we be happy for people to sign rockets from Iran, or from a group such as Isis? I doubt it. And if private individuals can jump in with their weapons contributions, where does that leave war as a national cause? 

There’s a question of morality too. Even if the cause in Ukraine’s case is just, is it acceptable in any way for individuals to sponsor a weapon – which is by its nature destructive of livelihoods and life?

It suits everyone – governments, donors, top brass and soldiers alike – to leave sponsored weapons and personalised ammunition in an ill-defined area of unofficial, voluntary effort. To realise the perils of being too specific, you have only to recall the trouble that Liz Truss got into when she appeared to give her blessing to Britons volunteering to fight for Ukraine. That came back to bite her when some of those who did were captured by Russia’s proxy warriors in eastern Ukraine.

War is a murky business, and there are some things that may be better left unsaid. Whether that includes ‘London says hi’ inscribed on a missile intended to kill Russians, I leave to you to judge.

Don’t write off Michael Gove

No senior politician has ever possessed a talent for upsetting prime ministers to match that of Michael Gove’s.

David Cameron unfriended him after the EU referendum, having believed Gove had assured him he would campaign for Remain only to see him mastermind the triumphant Leave operation. While Boris Johnson was forgiven for his front-of-house Brexit role, Gove was forever damned.

Theresa May then left him out of her first cabinet as a calculated rebuke for his spectacular betrayal of Johnson during the 2016 leadership election by which time a ‘Game of Thrones’ mentality appeared to have completely overtaken him.

Johnson himself last month fired Gove from the cabinet before he could resign, with Downing Street sources describing him as ‘a snake’.

Now Gove has incurred the wrath of Liz Truss before she has even taken up residence in No. 10. After having in the past lined up against Truss in cabinet tussles over such matters as the impact of new trade deals on UK farming and animal welfare issues, he will have known that he was already in a tight spot with the PM-to-be.

His interview in the Times in which he lambasts her tax-cutting plans as favouring FTSE 100 executives over needy families and gives his belated backing to Rishi Sunak shows he had come to believe there was no way back for him in her eyes.

Perhaps the briefing given to The Spectator’s Katy Balls by one key Truss supporter this week that ‘Gove is done’ provoked his outburst.

He was already thought by some Truss followers to have backed Kemi Badenoch in the race not because he saw her as a possible winner, but simply as a ploy to hamper the Foreign Secretary’s campaign, with the objective of eliminating her in an early round. Some Trussites believe that had this plot come to fruition he would then have switched to openly supporting Rishi Sunak.

Now he has decided to support Sunak anyway and be rude about Truss, describing her campaign as a ‘holiday from reality’ and saying he doesn’t believe he will serve in ministerial office again, there is a strong temptation to think he really is finished.

But will it turn out like that? Will he really be consigned long-term to an under-employed future enlivened mainly by leisure pursuits such as manic dancing in Scottish nightclubs, hanging out at the Garrick Club and being spotted clapping oddly in the stands at Queen’s Park Rangers home matches?

One doubts it for several reasons. For starters, while May began her premiership by exiling Gove, it was not terribly long before she recalled him, summoning him back to the top table a year in –immediately after her disastrous 2017 general election campaign left her fighting for survival.

And Johnson, despite Gove having torpedoed his 2016 leadership tilt and having campaigned fairly viciously against him during the 2019 contest, decided to retain him in cabinet, gradually coming to rely on him more and more to inject life into a Levelling-Up agenda that had proved electorally potent but hard to promote across Whitehall.

Michael Gove’s saving grace is that he appears to be one of few Conservative MPs with the ability to make the civil service get things done. His Rolls Royce brain is not only capable of analysing problems and identifying solutions, but perhaps it is his very talent for machination that has enabled him to come up with strategies for getting around Whitehall roadblocks.

When the Home Office was struggling to put together a plan for housing Ukrainian refugees this spring, it was Gove who came up with the novel solution of paying British families to offer their spare bedrooms. For good or ill that simple idea has resulted in almost 100,000 arrivals from Ukraine being accommodated here.

Genuine top-level political talent is always in short supply in Westminster. For all the fury he has ignited in successive Tory leaders, Gove has never faced quite the level of vitriol that Peter Mandelson did from supporters of Gordon Brown within the Labour party after he promoted the rival leadership ambitions of Tony Blair.

Yet who was it that Brown, engulfed by crises in 2009, ended up begging to join his Cabinet in the all-encompassing role of ‘First Secretary of State’, but the masterful Machiavelli, Mandelson?

Anyone who believes that Liz Truss will sail serenely towards victory at the next election without being buffeted by terrible, gut-wrenching storms along the way should feel free to believe that Michael Gove could not possibly serve in her administration.

But never say never. If Truss at any stage finds herself facing more first order crises than she can possibly deal with alone and if her chosen lieutenants come up short against them, do not be surprised if the call goes out to summon Gove back to the cabinet table or if he decides that the lure of high office is once more too strong to resist.

Sunak and Truss are wrong about solar

Rishi Sunak has joined Liz Truss in grumbling about solar panels in fields. This is all rather dismaying, and revealing. It suggests that Conservative leadership contenders – and the party faithful they’re appealing to – lack faith in the transformative power of markets and free enterprise.

Those solar panels that Sunak and Truss deplore are nothing less than an economic miracle, delivered by private companies seeking profit. Anyone who proclaims themselves supporters of markets should be shouting from the rooftops about this miracle, since it shows how people and organisations freely allocating capital makes our world better, fast.

Private enterprise works because the incentive to make a profit by selling stuff spurs people and organisations to make or provide that stuff better and/cheaper. They can sell that better/cheaper stuff for higher prices and/or in greater volumes, and thus get more money for themselves. This leads people and organisations to specialise and innovate, eternally seeking to make their stuff even better and/or even cheaper, to preserve/increase their sales.

Many of the transformational improvements delivered by private enterprise are very visible and tangible: chances are, you’re reading this on a smartphone, a product that’s barely 15 years old (the first iPhone was sold in June 2007) and was the stuff of sci-fi a generation back. It is the genius of private enterprise that rendered the countless components of a smartphone small enough, reliable enough and cheap enough to be combined into the computer-camera-television-communication hub we still call a ‘phone’.

But while everyone knows about miracles of innovation like the smartphone, a lot of people – especially at Westminster – seem to have missed comparable marvels taking place over renewable energy. The last decade or so has seen a stunning fall in the cost of extracting energy from wind, wave and sun – because the companies making the kit to do that and the companies selling the energy thus generated have repeatedly made their stuff better and cheaper.

When British politicians, especially on the right, debate renewable energy, they routinely overlook the fact that renewable energy is now, by and large, cheaper than either fossil fuel or nuclear power. (And yes, that’s without subsidy: see Lazard’s figures for ‘levelised’ costs here. And they’re from before the Ukraine spike in gas prices)

And as I wrote here last year, solar has led this charge. Those Lazard figures suggest that in the ten years to 2020, the cost of solar energy fell by almost 90%.

Max Roser at Our World in Data has calculated that the stunning falls in the cost of solar generation make solar the world’s cheapest source of energy today.

This is one reason why the cabinet of which both Sunak and Truss were members signed off an energy security plan seeking a five-fold increase in UK solar capacity by 2035. But it’s the reason for solar getting cheaper that should really interest Tories.

That reason, in Roser’s phrase, is a ‘virtuous cycle of increasing demand and falling prices’. As people, encouraged by government policies in some cases, have bought more solar energy, the solar industry has had an incentive to make its stuff better/cheaper so it can sell more of it. That innovation allows industry to generate solar power even more cheaply, making it more attractive to customers, who buy more of it.

In other words, the market has worked its magic. People and organisations allocating their own capital and efforts have made something useful into something that’s also cheap.

And ‘useful’ is an understatement for solar power. The 15 gigawatts of power the UK can generate from the sun is energy we don’t need to get from other sources. More panels means less reliance on expensive fossil fuels. There is a problem with solar panels in fields: there aren’t enough of them.

For context here, solar panels cover less than 0.1 per cent of U.K. land. Golf courses cover 2 per cent. A country where those two numbers matched would be a better place.

And yes those extra panels might be in fields – as a result of private decisions made by people in markets. Farmers are running businesses, remember: they don’t host solar panels for fun, they do it for money. And this again makes the Tory contenders’ enthusiasm to meddle surprising. Why do Conservatives think they should be telling agricultural businesses how to use their own resources and find revenue? It seems unlikely that they would ever tell the owners and operators of golf courses to use their resources in another way.

It’s also hard to reconcile Tory solar-bashing with years of encouragement to farmers to diversify their incomes – encouragement from governments that included Truss (a former agriculture secretary) and Sunak.

The solar panels in British fields are there because markets work and because people in markets make smart decisions that are good for them and good for others. That’s a story you might expect potential Conservative leaders to keen to tell.

That Truss and Sunak have chosen to tell a very different story says a lot about Conservative thinking on markets.

It’s time to lift the medical student cap

Gaining a place in medical school has always been a lottery, made even more difficult for aspiring doctors this year. For those who failed to achieve their A level conditional offer grades, this will come as a hard blow and may seem grossly unfair.

Some students are entitled to feel victims of the A level grade inflation in 2020 and 2021 when exams were cancelled due to the Covid pandemic and acceptance to medical school was determined by over-generous teacher-assessed predicted grades. As the government returns the cap on the number of medical school places to approaching pre-pandemic levels, fewer places have been offered to students for 2022 entry and examination boards have been directed to reduce the number of top grades. For England, Wales and Northern Ireland, A and A* grades have been reduced from 45 to 36 per cent. This year’s students are no less bright than those in the previous two years but will achieve poorer grades and fewer opportunities as a result of these manipulations. Meanwhile, medical schools are still demanding top grades.

During the acceptance bulges of 2020 and 2021, some medical schools invited students to defer their starting date by one year because they could not cope with the unexpectedly high number of students. Some even offered financial incentives either to delay or to move to other medical schools.

The cap on medical school places is now back to 7,500 in England. The government has even refused to extend the cap to accommodate students deferred from 2021 thus reducing the number of training places available for 2021/2022 applicants. These students have received no compensation for the reduced A level teaching provided as a result of school closures during the pandemic and variably efficient online learning.

Meanwhile most medical schools continue to offer 7.5 per cent of their places to international students because they pay higher fees than UK students.

The medical student cap exists only because of the cost of teaching more students, despite the fact that the NHS is desperately short of doctors. The government was quoted this week as saying that ‘the cap is regularly reviewed to ensure it meets the needs of our NHS.’ This comment amounts to hypocrisy of the highest order because the government knows that for the past decade the UK has been forced to recruit an ever-increasing number of doctors from abroad to meet the needs of the NHS. In 2021, a staggering 63 per cent of doctors registering with the General Medical Council for the first time qualified abroad. There were 7,377 UK graduates, 2,591 from EEA schools and 10,009 International Medical Graduates from countries outside Europe. Between 2016 and 2021, the GMC has recruited 53,296 doctors from abroad.

The good and the great who run our medical schools, the medical Royal Colleges and the governing Medical School Council are perfectly aware of this data. They pay lip service to the need for more UK medical schools but never, as supporting evidence, mention that since 2018, we have imported more doctors than we have trained. They are self-constrained by political correctness as they promote each other around the circuit of influential jobs. They form an elite club, some of whom have not worked at the bedside for years. The few who see themselves in line for a gong definitely won’t challenge government policy. The golden rule for promotion is to make small waves to remind others of your presence but never rock the boat.

Successive governments with their short-termist views have long realised that it is cheaper to import medical graduates from abroad than to train our own. The only exception in the recent past are the five new medical schools commissioned in 2018 by Jeremy Hunt, then Secretary of State for Health. These new schools will graduate a total of 1,500 doctors annually, the first in 2023/4. They will form a drop in the ocean of the needs of the NHS.

Meanwhile the GMC continues at pace to recruit doctors from low-income counties to plug gaps in the NHS. They come mostly from countries with patient/doctor ratios well below World Health Organisation recommendations. These doctors are desperately needed in their home countries to provide essential services. This raises serious moral and ethical issues.

The UK is a signatory and therefore in breach of the WHO code of practice on international recruitment of health workers which states that ‘member states should discourage active recruitment from developing countries facing critical shortages of health workers.’

Not creating more UK medical schools amounts to a tragedy for students, the NHS and for patients. We have a wealth of home-grown talent desperate for the opportunity to train as doctors. One way or another, medical education and staffing of the NHS are a disaster and no one seems to care enough to plan the changes necessary. We need more UK trained doctors and more UK medical schools.

How Ukraine is sabotaging Russia’s army

Ukrainian Special Operations Forces (SOF) or possibly partisan fighters have conducted successfully attacks on three significant targets in occupied Crimea since 10 August. An initial attack on the Saki airbase caused a fire that quickly spread to stored ammunition and fuel, resulting in multiple huge secondary explosions. These destroyed at least nine Russian fast jets and inflicted extensive damage to the base’s facilities and surrounding buildings. On 16 August further attacks were carried out on a large ammunition and equipment depot at the strategic railroad junction town of Dzhankoiskyi and another Russian airbase at Gvardeyskoye causing further fires and secondary explosions.

All three attacks were initially blamed on accidents and then sabotage by the Russian Ministry of Defence and Russian media, often in wildly conflicting reports. Dzhankoiskyi is over 160 km from the nearest Ukrainian frontline positions, and Gvardeyskoye and Saki are both over 210 km away. As such, they sit well beyond the range of the famous HIMARS rocket artillery system that has been used so successfully by the Ukrainian army to hit Russian ammunition dumps and other key logistical and headquarters targets in the immediate Russian rear areas since mid-June. This led some western and Ukrainian commentators to conclude that Ukraine was fielding powerful new long-range missile systems such as the US-made ATACMS, modified Neptune anti-ship missiles or the developmental Ukrainian HRIM-2 short-range ballistic missile system. However, based on the observable pattern of fire and secondary explosions, these attacks and much more likely to have been the work of SOF teams and saboteurs, probably using small drones to drop grenades onto ammunition and fuel storage sites.

This would fit an established but seldom-discussed pattern of daring deep-penetration raids by Ukrainian special forces since the invasion in February – against railway bridges and other key logistics targets, including at times across the borders into Russia itself. Since 2014, Russia has itself carried out several highly destructive special forces attacks using munitions-equipped small drones against Ukrainian ammunition depots.

For Ukraine during its current existential defensive war, these sabotage operations have a dual purpose. They allow small, elite forces to inflict disproportionate damage on Russian frontline capabilities by disrupting or destroying key logistics bottlenecks to starve Russian troops and artillery of critical ammunition and other supplies. Perhaps more importantly, however, they present the Russian military with a very difficult choice. Because these raids are being conducted in some cases more than 200 km from Ukrainian lines, and the front stretches over 1,000 km from Kharkiv in the north down to Kherson in the south, the potential area where Russian assets are vulnerable to attack is vast.

Russian forces have suffered around 80,000 troops killed, wounded and captured and lost a staggering 5,200 vehicles, including almost 1,000 main battle tanks during the first six months of the invasion. Consequently, the Russian army is badly overstretched. It does not have enough forces to simultaneously accomplish President Putin’s stated short term political goal of capturing the rest of Donetsk Oblast to conquer the remaining cities in the Donbas, while also blocking a long-telegraphed Ukrainian counter-offensive in Kherson. The belated Russian stealth-mobilisation efforts underway since late June have successfully generated significant numbers of new conscripts and ‘volunteers’ but it will be many months before they can be given sufficient training to be even slightly useful as reinforcements for the frontline. As such, the offensive in Donbas has largely petered out and Russian forces have been forced to retreat around the key city of Izyum in the north of the Donbas sector following the large scale transfer of Russian units south to Kherson in the past week.

With large scale partisan pro-Ukrainian activities reported in occupied Melitopol, non-cooperation in the destroyed remains of Mariupol, and now a pattern of Ukrainian attacks on key Russian airbases and logistics facilities deep behind the lines, the Russian army now faces another pressing draw on its overstretched manpower. It takes very large numbers of regular troops or security forces to seriously limit the freedom of action of small, well-trained SOF teams operating on familiar territory and among a largely sympathetic population. Such forces must also be widely distributed to provide security effectively, which makes providing logistic support and command and control more difficult than when forces are concentrated.

The large-scale transfer of Russian forces from the Donbas to the southern front in recent weeks has made it harder for a possible Ukrainian counter-offensive to achieve significant breakthroughs using traditional frontal assault and armoured manoeuvre tactics. However, they have left the Russian front elsewhere thinly manned and supported, and increased the demand for supplies of fuel, food, medicine and ammunition in the south.

The Ukrainian strategy for the coming months may well be to use the threat of a major offensive, coupled with a concerted SOF campaign and continued HIMARS strikes behind the lines to fix most Russian forces in Kherson at the end of bottlenecked supply lines. Meanwhile, probing attacks around Izyum and potentially towards Melitopol from Zaporizhzhia, or in the Donbas itself can be mounted on a smaller scale, to hopefully give Ukraine the initiative and present Russian commanders with an impossible set of concurrent demands for their battered forces.

Cultural appropriation has killed modern music

It’s a rule of life that adults shouldn’t understand young people’s music, ever since Little Richard made the old folk fume with his incessant and enigmatic cries of ‘A-wop-bop-a-loo-bop-a-lop-bam-boom!’ I bitterly recall when during my adolescence my father – a highly respectable Communist factory-hand who would rather have voted Tory than sworn in front of a woman – took a mysterious liking to all the outrageous acts I was crazy for, from Roxy Music to Sparks. Having been driven to find ever more unwholesome combos, the final straw came when, one Sunday morning, I was lying in bed when I heard the strains of my precious Velvet Underground album – WITH THE ANDY WARHOL BANANA COVER! – floating up the stairs. I’d never moved so fast in my lazy little life.

‘It’s about drugs! And male prostitutes! And a thing called SADO-MASOCHISM!’ I squealed at my dad.

The dog looked sad.

‘I don’t care what it’s about,’ my dad shrugged with magnificent insouciance. ‘I just likes the tunes…’

Mute with frustration, I marched from the room and back upstairs, only for my father’s jolly Wurzel-type voice to follow me mercilessly: ‘Oi’m…waitin’ for me man!’

He was ahead of his time; in subsequent decades, the rise of the ‘Kidult’ saw men, especially, unwilling to put away childish things. Though Oasis and Blur might have squabbled, they had one thing in common – they were liked equally by teenage girls (‘Liam!’ ‘Damon!’) and middle-aged men (‘Noel!’ ‘Graham!’). But things have changed, according to the Guardian, where 36-years-young Daniel Dylan Wray wrote: ’A 2015 study of people’s listening habits on Spotify found that most people stop listening to new music at 33; a 2018 report by Deezer had it at 30… in my 20s, the idea that people’s appetite to consume new music regularly would be switched off like some kind of tap was ludicrous. However, now I’m 36, it’s difficult to argue with. Most people don’t stop discovering new books, films, podcasts or TV. Yet music seems to be something that more commonly slips away.’

I can tell Mr Wray why; it’s because modern music is (to almost borrow a Blur title) rubbish. And this isn’t a pensioner peeve – it’s a fact. Think about it. In the decade of my teens, the 1970s, I was lucky enough to experience the glory days of – deep breath – glam rock, Philly, Motown, disco and punk. The biggest male and female acts of the 1970s – if you combined sales, cred and sheer star quality – were probably David Bowie and Diana Ross. Now? Adele and Ed Sheeran.

Of course music goes through the doldrums, like anything else – but the crucial element of woke-scolding is what makes this slump different. For the first time, young people are having less sex and consuming less stimulants than their elders, instead spending long periods of time crouched over their keyboards, glumly interfering with themselves; woke and Covid between them have created Generation Killjoy. Punk, disco and glam would all be problematic in some way now – too white, not the ‘right’ kind of black, too light-hearted about gender-bending – but when I think about the pop music from past that the youth of today would approve of least, I think of ZE.

ZE Records was started up in New York City in 1978 by Michael Zilkha and Michel Esteban, Zilkha a 24-year-old entrepreneur (his father, an Iraqi-Jewish immigrant to Britain, was Mothercare) and Esteban a 27-year-old French artist, mentored by the legendary John Cale, and the boyfriend of a young Anna Wintour. This combination of dirty cash tangling with both avant-garde and haute couture would add up to an awful lot of well-bred young Americans pretending to be French – and a lot of brilliant music, a fearless fusion of punk and disco. Their best acts were ‘Was (Not Was)’, Cristina Monet (the Zelda Fitzgerald of pop) and Suicide (with the most terrifying music ever recorded, Nick Hornby writing of ‘Frankie Teardrop’ that you would listen to it ‘only once’). You’d never heard anything like ZE – but you knew you’d been waiting all your life to listen to it.

’Mutant Disco’ was what they named their disparate stable; today, it would be slammed as cultural appropriation by the woke-scolds. ZE’s chief hit-maker was Kid Creole who with his wildly culturally inappropriate backing singers the Coconuts – generally dressed in grass skirts – became a regular on Top of the Pops in 1982, his run of luck ending with the prophetically-named ‘There’s Something Wrong In Paradise’. Born August Darnell, of Caribbean and Italian heritage, in the Bronx. ‘It was a great place to grow up’ he told the Quietus in 2011, ‘because it was full of every ethnic group known to mankind… I learnt at an early age that one ethnic group is not better than another… you won’t ever find any pure music in Kid Creole – I call it mongrel music. That’s what makes it exciting’. He was a former English teacher who in 1974, with his half-brother Stony Browder, formed Dr. Buzzard’s Original Savannah Band, which combined swing, Latin and disco to great effect. He was also a producer of Don Armando’s Second Avenue Rhumba Band, fronted by the best female voice of the era, Fonda Rae, an incandescently beautiful blonde black woman. Though ZE had flashier and more successful acts, for me it’s Rae (who never recorded for them but was briefly a Coconut) who sums up the era’s best, with songs like ‘Deputy Of Love’ and ‘I’m An Indian Too’ – her voice, effortless and egotistic, takes endless delight in itself, like a kitten on a keyboard or a baby finding its feet. These were the great colour-blind years of music – the sheer exhilarating freedom to choose life lived in any shade before the closing of the minds and the wagging of the fingers and the warnings to stay in your own lane. A time of curiosity and confidence, when rules were made to be broken and scolds were made to be shocked.

ZE closed in 1984 – it was only active for six years, which makes its reach all the more remarkable. Suicide’s icy genius now soundtracks a perfume ad; Cristina died of Covid. Many on the left now espouse ideas of cultural purity that would shock the Aryan Brotherhood. And if you Google ‘Ze’ you’ll find the likes of this on dictionary.com:

‘pronoun (occasionally used with a singular indefinite pronoun or singular noun antecedent in place of the definite masculine he or the definite feminine she): “My friend didn’t want to go to the party, but ze ended up having a great time!”’

Did ze, though? What was the music like? Did ze approve, or should ze have had a trigger warning before Fonda Rae started singing ‘Touch Me’? Was it so beautiful and bad that it made ze sad? Never mind – in five years’ time, pronouns will have gone the way of the antimacassar. But the magnificent music of the mutant disco will play on forever.

Gove says Truss’s plans are a ‘holiday from reality’

Is the Tory leadership race already over? That’s the narrative among Conservative MPs with two weeks of the leadership contest to go. The Sunak camp dispute this version of events – and tonight they have an endorsement which works in their favour.

After several Tory MPs switched their allegiance from Rishi Sunak to Liz Truss, this evening Michael Gove has endorsed the former Chancellor. Writing for the Times, the former Minister for the Cabinet Office has argued Truss’s plans for immediate tax cuts are a ‘holiday from reality’ that would put ‘the stock options of FTSE 100 executives’ before the poorest.

He says that Sunak is best placed to prioritise the most vulnerable. A pitch for a job? Unlikely. Given the latest leadership polls give Truss a lead of more than 30 points, any endorsement of Sunak at this point can hardly be described as careerist. Instead Gove says he does not expect to be in government again. It’s worth noting – as I reported in the magazine this week – that Team Truss would be unlikely to give him a job.

Truss and Gove had several cabinet disputes under Boris Johnson, particularly regarding trade. What’s more, his decision to back Kemi Badenoch early on in the race was viewed with suspicion by the Truss camp. Supporters of Truss speculated that it was an attempt to split the right of the party, thereby helping Sunak’s attempt to be leader.

Will the endorsement make a difference? Both Gove and the Sunak camp question the polls and insist he can still win. At the very least, this endorsement points to how hard it will be to unite the party when this contest comes to a close.

The gender debate is getting nastier

Elaine Miller is one of the grown-ups. She is a Fellow of the Chartered Society of Physiotherapy, with a specialism in pelvic health. She also jokes about it. Her comedy show, Viva Your Vulva: The Hole Story is currently playing at the Edinburgh Fringe. It’s a good one: the production has won awards and a five-star review. Miller is forthright – her audiences are warned about ‘strong language and swearing’ – but her performance is more than mere entertainment. In Miller’s words,

The aim of the show is that the audience leave knowing what a pelvic floor is, what it does and where to take theirs if they think it is a bit broken. It is evidence based, and so counts as CPD – possibly the funniest thing about it.

The aim of the show is that the audience leave knowing what a pelvic floor is, what it does and where to take theirs if they think it is a bit broken. It is evidence based, and so counts as CPD – possibly the funniest thing about it.

Surely her ‘laugh while you learn’ approach is something we could all support, even if her comedy is not our style? Not according to the LGBTQIA+ brigade, apparently. Miller claims that she has been subjected to abuse – even ‘spat at on the street’ – while her posters have been obscured by rainbow stickers, presumably to limit attendance.

Miller’s crime, it seems, is to promote women’s health. That is the health of human people with female bodies. While she has been clear that includes trans men and (certain) non-binary individuals, she does not mention trans women like me because we are ‘not relevant to the topic of female biological anatomy’. Quite right! We have male anatomy, even those of us who have had surgery to modify it.

But to the gender identity ideologues, this is heresy. To them trans women are women, and those who think differently can be subjected to all kinds of abuse, presumably in an attempt to shut them up. It is juvenile behaviour; Miller described it as ‘very like high school’, and she is right. She told The Spectator

I am a mother and I have dealt with toddlers and teenagers, and this is very familiar. It is intolerant, bad behaviour.

Children can and do behave badly. As a teacher, my job is to educate young people to listen to other opinions and respect them even if they personally disagree with them.

What is shocking is that other adults have caved into this bullying, even perpetuating it themselves. Miller reported that she has been shunned by fellow comics and staff, some of whom she has worked with for years. This is far more than social media defriending. As Miller told the Scottish Daily Express, ‘It’s the strangest thing for grown… adults. I go into a room and they turn their back on me. This is not appropriate behaviour from an adult.’

It isn’t. But, sadly, exposing the behaviour does not make it stop. It will only stop when those adults become sufficiently self-aware to recognise it and do better. Perhaps it is mere coincidence that Miller’s experience has happened in Edinburgh, but Scotland is home to an SNP government that seems to have made a habit of avoiding inconvenient truths about biology.

It was Nicola Sturgeon’s government that passed the Gender Representation on Public Boards Bill, that enshrined in law the concept of processes that people can undergo, ‘for the purpose of becoming female.’ The country of a government that seems determined to reform the Gender Recognition Act to allow anyone over the age of 16 to self-identify as a woman, whatever the impact on women’s sex-based rights and boundaries.

Joanna Cherry, the SNP MP for Edinburgh South West plans to be in the audience on Sunday evening. If Sturgeon is genuinely clueless about what it means to be female, then maybe she should also book a seat and listen to what Miller has to say.