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Struggling Brits need help, not free theatre tickets

Lurking in the background of the Tory leadership contest, the cost of living crisis rumbles on. With Autumn round the corner, fears over the sharp rise in the energy price cap have once again hit the headlines, inflation continues to soar and ever more people are wondering how they’re going to pay their bills.

In recent days, to the sound of muted trumpets, the government launched its latest initiative to tackle the crisis: Help for Households. Billed as a partnership scheme with businesses such as supermarkets and entertainment venues, the scheme boasts a variety of deals over the summer period designed to help out struggling households.


Announcing the scheme, outgoing Prime Minister Boris Johnson seemed to be patting himself on the back: ‘We’re facing incredibly tough global economic headwinds and families across the country are feeling the pinch. That’s why this government is providing an unprecedented £37 billion worth of support to help households through the storm.

Genuine solutions to keep more money in people’s pockets are needed. A bunch of high street discounts quite frankly won’t cut it

‘Both the public and private sector have a role to play here – and that’s why it’s great to see so many leading UK businesses are now coming forward to offer new deals and discounts that will provide much needed respite at the checkout.’

Candidly he added: ‘This won’t solve the issue overnight but it’s yet another weapon in our arsenal as we fight back against the scourge of rising prices and inflation.’

But hang on a minute. None of the £37 billion Johnson mentions is going towards this scheme – indeed, while welcome, it is instead financing measures such as the energy bill and council tax rebates announced in May.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s laudable that businesses are stepping in to do their bit to help and ease the financial burden for families, particularly during the school holidays when support such as free school meals ceases. But for the government to take credit for the contributions of the private sector is disingenuous to say the least.

Notwithstanding the fact this makes the government’s role in this nothing more than some sort of savings comparison site, it exposes the glaring disconnect that so blatantly exists between the government and those who are worst off, and even those who aren’t.

For one, many of these deals already existed: Morrison’s offer allowing kids to eat for free in their cafes alongside any adult meal over £4.50 also ran last summer; Sainsbury’s ‘Feed Your Family For a Fiver’ launched in 2008.

Secondly, when an increasing number of households will be forced into fuel poverty and faced with decisions such as whether to eat or heat their homes in the coming months, does the government genuinely believe that, even if theatres are offering free child tickets, those most in need of help could afford to prance off to the West End for a show?

As the cost of living crisis becomes progressively acute, serious government intervention is needed. Genuine solutions to keep more money in people’s pockets are needed. Heralding a bunch of high street discounts as the answer quite frankly won’t cut it.

Of course, with Johnson out the No.10 door by early September at the latest, this will no longer be his problem, but that of whoever becomes his successor. The next PM and their government will have a gargantuan, unenviable task ahead of them. But whatever they choose to do, they must do better than this.



Christopher Meyer, a tribute

Sir Christopher Meyer, the former UK ambassador to Washington, has died at the age of 78. Here Tony Blair pays tribute to him:

Sir Christopher Meyer was a distinguished diplomat who played an essential role building relationships for the new Labour government, first in Germany and then later with the USA. This became particularly important following the attacks on America on 9/11 when thousands of Americans lost their lives to terrorism. He was crucial during this time in keeping strong bonds between the UK and the USA. My deep condolences and sympathy to Catherine and his family.

Truss tells Tories: copy Don Revie

Liz Truss was widely perceived to have won last night’s LBC hustings with Rishi Sunak. The Foreign Secretary impressed with her tough talk on Putin, China and defeating Labour’s Keir Starmer. And she certainly knew how to play to the Leeds crowd, making the most of her upbringing in the area and dropping in plenty of local references. But it was her praise for the city’s most famous football manager which raised some eyebrows among the commentariat.

Truss told activists that: ‘I do want us to channel the spirit of Don Revie because we need to win.’ Revie, of course, presided over the all-conquering Leeds side of the 1960s and 1970s, winning trophies but earning criticism for his team’s perceived ‘dirty’ style of play. The Tory MP’s reference therefore sparked some surprise, with Foreign Office grandee Lord Fraser remarking on Revie’s unsuccessful subsequent career as head of the England football team: ‘Liz Truss perhaps forgets that Don Revie was not a successful national manager..’

Comedian Matt Forde asked whether the Tories will ‘do it by cheating’ while others wondered ‘when Liz Truss says she wants to channel Don Revie, does she mean take a load of money from Middle East billionaires?’ or by being ‘out of depth in the top job?’ But Steerpike’s favourite response was by Labour MP Chris Evans, who wrote a well-received biography of Revie late last year. He told Mr S:

As much as I love Don, he had a reputation for playing dirty, and had a disastrous time when put in charge of the country. So yes, I can see why Liz Truss thinks Revie is a good comparison to the Tories!

An own goal by Truss, perhaps?

How dare Macron lecture African leaders about ‘hypocrisy’

What must Africans think when they observe the shameless hypocrisy of Western leaders? In Cameroon this morning incredulity must be the prevailing emotion. Three days ago, dignitaries there were subjected to one of Emmanuel Macron’s insufferable bouts of moralising. Do not do business with Vladimir Putin, warned the French president, speaking shortly after Russia’s foreign minister Sergei Lavrov had visited various African countries, some of which are heavily dependent on Russian grain and energy.

He alluded to Russia as an ‘authoritarian regime’ and praised Europe for its response to the war in Ukraine. Unfortunately on the African continent, continued Macron: ‘I too often see hypocrisy…in not knowing how to qualify a war.’

He also promised to help tackle corruption, labelling it ‘a scourge for the African continent’. Macron presides over a country that knows a thing or two about political corruption; two of his three most recent predecessors have been convicted of corruption in office. One of them, Nicolas Sarkozy (the other, Jacques Chirac), supported Macron during April’s presidential campaign for which he said he was ‘honoured’

Sermon over, Macron flew back to France to fulfil an important social engagement on Thursday evening at the Elysée Palace. His guest at the lavish dinner? None other than Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia.

Macron prides himself on being a progressive

MSB hasn’t been seen much in Europe of late; indeed, this will be his first visit to the Continent since Saudi agents murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018 in the Kingdom’s consulate in Istanbul.

That death probably wasn’t discussed last night over the hors-d’œuvre. And it would be a surprise if Macron used the dessert course to broach the tricky subject of the 24,000 Yemens – including 9,000 civilians – killed by Saudi-led coalition airstrikes; what the Washington Post recently described as ‘war crimes’.

But why shouldn’t Macron court MSB? The leader of the free world did earlier this month. US president Joe Biden and the Crown Prince shared a ‘fist-bump’ in Jeddah.

This is the same Biden who, during campaigning for the 2020 presidential campaign called Saudi Arabia a ‘pariah’ state with ‘no redeeming social value’. But needs must.

One subject that was discussed over dinner was the energy crisis, and, according to the French media, Macron would like the Saudis to increase their oil production from 10 million barrels a day to 13 million.

Macron and the Crown Prince go back a few years. They first dined together in the Louvre Museum in 2018 when they discussed their nations’ burgeoning ‘strategic partnership’, and last December in Jeddah, Macron became the first western leader to meet MSB since the killing of Khashoggi.

From energy transition to military hardware to cultural projects, France and Saudi Arabia have been working closely for years. In 2015, for example, they signed defence deals worth $12 billion (£10 billion) and, as a puff piece in an Arab newspaper said this week: ‘Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s visit to France is expected to cement ties in all areas of the two countries’ diplomatic relations’.

The visit of the Crown Prince to Paris has been condemned by Human Rights organisations. Amnesty International secretary general Agnes Callamard said she was ‘profoundly troubled by the visit, because of what it means for our world’. Khashoggi’s fiancé, Hatice Cengiz, said she was ‘scandalised and outraged that Emmanuel Macron is receiving with all honour the executioner of my fiancé’.

Welcome to realpolitik, counters the president. One of Macron’s entourage told reporters that a dialogue with the Saudis is ‘necessary’ but it ‘does not mean complacency’.

Macron is desperate to alleviate a gathering energy crisis that could bring Europe to its knees this winter. But if realpolitik is acceptable for the West, why isn’t it for Africa? The continent is facing a looming food shortage far worse than Europe’s, so dialogue with Russia is also necessary. But Macron appears to assume that in Africa’s case dialogue does mean complacency.

Macron prides himself on being a progressive but judging by his sanctimonious and paternalist attitude towards Africa this week he is anything but. He behaves like a neo-colonialist, dispensing morality like a 19th century missionary.

African leaders should ignore him and all other Western leaders who do not practise what they preach. If Macron is prepared to break bread with leaders from illiberal democracies or authoritarian regimes, why shouldn’t they?

On the front line at Drag Queen Story Hour

Henleaze, a suburb in the north of Bristol, is an unlikely place for a protest. This is a well-to-do area where the houses sit behind neatly-clipped hedges and cost over half-a-million pounds. But across the road from the local Waitrose yesterday morning, Henleaze’s library was surrounded by at least a dozen police officers and two angry groups of demonstrators. A gaggle of toddlers and their mums had also gathered. Drag Queen Story Hour was about to begin.

Those protesting against the appearance of Sab Samuel, a drag queen who goes by the stage name Aida H Dee, were clear what they thought. ‘It’s wrong. This is aimed at toddlers and these kids don’t understand,’ a man in his 50s said. 

In relative silence, a dozen or so woman huddled with their children. Three and four year-olds stood with eyes wide open looking at the astonishing scenes outside their library.

It was harder to engage with the other group. They were younger and angrier. Masks were almost ubiquitous; many were also hooded and hid their faces behind dark glasses. But their feelings were equally clear as they chanted: ‘Say it loud, say it clear, drag queens are welcome here.’

Bristol City Council insist that Drag Queen Story Hour ‘offers children a rich experience in story telling’

Supporting them three paces behind the front line, two teachers waving flags of the National Education Union did talk to me. ‘I think it’s shocking’, said one as she looked across the divide, ‘we have LGBTQ+ on the curriculum and kids as young as six know about transgenderism’.

Eventually the library admitted those with tickets. Everyone else was kept outside, including a regular stream of library users. But this was a Thursday like no other. 

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Drag Queen Story Hour was eventually called off in Henleaze as a result of the ugly scenes outside the library. Instead, the children enjoyed a normal session of ‘Rhyme Time’ led by library staff. But outside, tensions were still rising. As the younger demonstrators chanted: ‘I’d rather be a drag queen than a fash’, their parents’ generation responded with the megaphone. This time a blast of the Jim’ll Fix It theme tune.

Aida H Dee is on a nationwide tour and the next gig was imminent: 1.00 p.m., across the city in Hillfields. Both groups headed for their vehicles and battled the lunchtime traffic to the next library where the drag performer was already holed up.

This part of the city is not so well off, but the ticket holders were a similar demographic: women with young children. Again library staff stood across the door: no ticket, no entry. A second battalion of police were on hand in the wings. But here, the inspector in charge let the two groups mingle, and some common ground was found. Being a very British protest, two women found an interest in each other’s dogs. There was also a shared concern for children. This, after all, was why everyone was here.

But their arguments were poles apart. Mark Nelson had come all the way from Cornwall, and he was worried. Nelson told me that he had seen Drag Queen Story Hour start up in America, ‘and now it’s come here,’ he added ominously.

Nelson probably spoke for many when he remembered his own school days: ‘When I was a child we had police officers and fire fighters come and speak to us; I grew up wanting to be a fireman.’ The parents’ and grandparents’ view was clear: drag queens are for nightclubs, not toddler groups.

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Over at the front line, tensions were rising fast. One young protestor moaned about a hate crime: it seemed that someone had been misgendered, and she promptly reported it to police. Expect that she was a they. ‘I’m not a woman’, she asserted. 

She didn’t need to look far for a police officer – the pavement was heaving with them – but neither did she get far when she refused to give her details. On one hand these were menacing youths – with masked faces and concealed identities – but at the same time they were little more than confused teenagers. When a flag waver hit me with a flag, an apology followed. Behind the bravado some of these protestors were naïve youngsters who have yet to learn the facts of life. 

Suddenly a car containing Aida H Dee zipped out of the back entrance and signalled another dash – this time to Stockwood Library in the south of the city. More women with more children, more police. Another fee collected by the performer; another library closed to the public.

Inside, the drag queen performed to toddlers, with the ever expanding Pride flag hanging alongside them. Who thought that it might be a good idea to replace Rhyme Time with this? And why on earth did they think it?

Bristol City Council insist that Drag Queen Story Hour ‘offers children a rich experience in story telling in an interactive way as well as an understanding of different communities’. 

‘Lessons like this are how we can create a more inclusive society, and educate children about tolerance and difference. Unfortunately it seems some adults need these lessons too,’ a spokesman for the council said.

Meanwhile, the Drag Queen Story Hour tour continues: today Aida H Dee is back in Bristol. It won’t be long before the protestors gather.

The James Bond gadgets going under the hammer

In a 1965 issue of Playboy magazine, the late Sean Connery said: ‘Bond is the invincible figure every man would like to be.’

If you’re such a man (or woman) you’ve probably left it too late to step into the Crockett & Jones chukka boots worn by outgoing Bond Daniel Craig in No Time to Die – but you could buy his Barton Perreira sunglasses from the film, or even that grey Tom Ford suit he made such a mess of during the motorbike and train chase sequences.

Both are up for grabs in a forthcoming charity auction organised by Christie’s and EON Productions that could prove to be the highest-grossing sale of Bond memorabilia ever staged.

Each of the six stars who have played Bond in the ‘official’ films will be represented by the last six lots being offered in the live auction with the rest of the sale set to include watches, clothes and other significant props that have appeared on screen as well as artwork, behind-the-scenes photographs – and even a five-night stay at GoldenEye, Bond author Ian Fleming’s Jamaican villa.

The star lot, which is expected to fetch £1.5 – 2m, is the actual Aston Martin DB5 stunt car that makes a dramatic entrance in No Time to Die during the opening chase sequence through the Italian town of Matera.

Lot 7, The Aston Martin DB5 stunt car from No Time to Die (Christie’s)

Although eight stunt DB5s were built for the film, this is the only one being offered for sale and, although it looks indistinguishable from a real DB5, it is actually a high-tech mock-up built by Aston’s Special projects Department using a space-frame chassis, rally-type suspension, race brakes, carbon bodywork and a BMW engine.

Proceeds from the sale of the car will go to The Prince’s Trust and Prince of Wales’s Charitable Fund. Other vehicles up for grabs include the 1981 AM V8 that Bond retrieves from a London lock-up before driving to the Norwegian childhood home of love interest Madeleine Swann (Lea Seydoux) via the spectacular Atlantic Road. A carbon copy of the car from 1987’sThe Living Daylights, it is estimated at £500,000 – 700,000 with that money being earmarked for refugee charity UNHCR.

One of 25 DBS No Time to Die special editions based on the car driven in ‘NTTD’ by Agent Nomi (Lashana Lynch) and signed by her and producers Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli could raise up to £400,000 for the Royal Foundation, while a trio of Jaguar Land Rover stunt cars from the film film comprise a pre-production Defender 110 (£300,000 – 500,000); a Range Rover Sport SVR (£80,000 – 120,000) and an XF saloon (£50,000 – 70,000).

Another quirky memento available from The Living Daylights is the cello case which Timothy Dalton used to sled down a Bratislava mountain with Soviet assassin Kara Milovy (Maryam d’Abo).

Other lots on offer include the aforementioned Barton Perreira sunglasses and Tom Ford suit (each estimated to fetch £10,000 – 15,000); the Jet Boat seen in the opening scenes of 1999’sThe World is Not Enough starring Pierce Brosnan (£20,000 – 30,000) and a gold-plated, crystal-encrusted prop egg from the 1983 Roger Moore film Octopussy. Any interested bidders should count themselves lucky they know they are bidding on a prop and not the real deal. Moore’s Bond famously swaps the expensive Fabergé egg for a replica in order to trick an Afghan Prince at an auction.

If you like your black tie attire to come with a dinner party story, Timothy Dalton’s tuxedo from Licence to Kill is also up for auction. The trousers are annotated in pen, ‘Timothy Dalton W 33¾, L 33½’, and the jacket’s lining is signed by Dalton himself.

Lot 24 from The World is Not Enough (Christie’s)

Props from more recent Bond films include the titanium Omega Seamaster 300m ‘007 Edition’ watch which was worn by Bond to ‘eye-watering’ effect in No Time to Die and could fetch up to £20,000 for gender equality group Time’s Up UK.

Designed with Craig’s input, the watch is and seen on several occasions in the film, most prominently in the so-called ‘third act’ when 007 gadget man Q (Ben Wishaw) and Agent Nomi ( Lashana Lynch) are heading towards the island lair of villain Lyutsifer Safin (Rami Malek) ‘somewhere in the sea of Japan’ in a Boeing Globemaster transport plane.

During the flight Q presents Bond with the new watch, explaining that he has fitted it with a coiled device capable of emitting  a ‘limited radius electro-magnetic pulse’ that will ‘short any circuit in a hard-wired network – if you get close enough.’

 Bond subsequently uses the gadget to explode the electronic eye worn by nemesis Luytsifer Safin’s henchman Primo (Dali Benssalam) during a dramatic fight scene in Safin’s chemical works, killing Primo in the process.

Comprising 60 lots to represent the 60 years since Connery first brought Bond to the silver screen in 1962’s ‘Dr No’, the sale will take the form of a 25-lot live, invitation-only event being held at Christie’s London HQ on 28 September and a further, online-only sale of 35 lots that will run from 15 September until ‘James Bond Day’ on 5 October.

To see everything on offer, visit Christie’s

The best places to eat in Brighton

I moved down to Sussex over 25 years ago from South London. My family viewed living by the sea as a dream goal. I still remember the day when we packed up and cavalcaded down to Worthing, a charming seaside town in West Sussex.

After the amazing experience of winning MasterChef, we opened our first restaurant Pitch in 2019 serving beautiful British inspired food from both the sea and the land. There has been a significant boom of food and café culture all around Sussex, and many areas such as Brighton and Worthing have flourished into destinations for those in search of culinary delights. Our second restaurant Bayside Social has capitalised on this foodie reputation. It’s a beachside restaurant focusing on fresh small plates mainly inspired by the coast. 

You really are spoilt for choice but here are a few places in and around Brighton that keep me coming back.

Bincho Yakitori, Brighton

Brighton’s worst kept secret, this Japanese style yakitori bar is as authentic as you’re going to get outside of Tokyo. Such delights as quail eggs wrapped in bacon, sweet potato draped in miso butter and grilled chicken hearts all cooked over authentic binchotan coals make for an epic meal and of course don’t forget to try the copious amounts of very good sake on offer.

https://www.binchoyakitori.com

South By West, West Worthing

It’s on my doorstep and on my route into Brighton whenever I head there. It’s a community led café that does two things really really well. Great coffee and homemade cinnamon rolls made fresh daily. Get there early enough to get one straight from the oven. It’s the simple things in life; fresh cinnamon rolls and great coffee are just that.

https://south-by-west.com

The Strand Fish & Chips, Durrington, Worthing

Another Worthing favourite, this place is totally unassuming and always busy for a reason. The Strand Fish and Chips is run by chef and owner team, Nasser and Fahmy. Both lovely guys who understand the importance of great fish, crispy golden batter, and the perfect chippy chip. If you’re lucky, Nasser occasionally puts up some incredible Middle Eastern specials like homemade falafel and tahini sauce and probably the best tabbouleh salad I’ve had the pleasure of trying.

https://www.thestrandfishandchips.com

The Gorilla Kitchen, Various locations (Brighton every Friday)

I love this street-food kitchen. Roberto and Fiona make some of the finest pizzas I’ve tried, sourcing artisan produce from Calabria in Italy, as well as Sussex. There’s always a big queue so be sure to get there early.

https://thegorillakitchen.com

Plateau, Brighton

Plateau has a superb wine list especially focusing on natural wine and a very well stocked cocktail bar in Brighton’s South Lanes. Serving seasonal small plates using fresh Sussex produce. This place is so real and does what it does consistently well.

https://www.plateaubrighton.co.uk

Lickle More, Hove

Lickle More sells unreal Caribbean food at the bottom of Haddington Street, behind St Andrews Church in Hove. This really is some of the best jerk chicken and curried goat I’ve ever had. Make sure to grab a few beef patties and a good dosing of hot sauce on your jerk.

https://www.facebook.com/Licklemore/

Murmur, Brighton Seafront

My mate Michael (Michael Bremner- Great British Menu Winner) has such a vast understanding and passion for food. The menu changes daily with a big focus on fresh fish. I love seeing the big ever changing black board which screams locality and seasonality. The lobster croquettes are always a winner.

https://murmur-restaurant.co.uk

Shelter Hall, Brighton

I am cheating a little with this recommendation as I’ve now started two of my restaurants here, Ox Block and, most recently, Patty Guy in 2022. I just love Shelter Hall though and think it’s a fantastic addition to the seafront – it’s relaxed, and you can pop by for a drink or choose from an exciting selection of restaurants too. Right now, I’m enjoying bagels from Bross Bagels, which is here for a summer residency.

And why Patty Guy? I’ve always been mad about a burger, and it would be my go-to treat. Patty Guy is my vision of what a burger should be, and is inspired by some of the greatest burger joints around the world. The best meat which is simply seasoned and cooked to order with the freshest garnish. I struggle to leave Brighton without a Green Chilli Cheeseburger and Jammie Dodger shake these days.

https://shelterhall.co.uk

How to turn your pineapple into a showstopper

You can’t please me: the grass is always greener. I spend the summer months longing for a time when crumbles and stew, cardigans and the big duvet, are not only welcome but required. Then as soon as we hit the autumn and the weather changes, I’m trying to hold onto the last vestiges of sunshine. This, I suppose, is as close as I can get to a compromise, a middle ground: pineapple, peeled but whole, still sporting its Sideshow Bob haircut, roasted until cooked all the way through, and caramelised on the outside. Served hot with ice cream, or boozy cream, and drizzled with the spicy, dark glaze that drips off during cooking, it captures all the flavours of summer and yet still delivers warmth.

Vanilla and pineapple were made for each other: the fragrant seeds bring out the natural complexities in the sweetness of the fruit, and the smokiness of the vanilla pairs well with a little chilli pepper, giving a gentle hum of spice to the dish. Use proper vanilla paste, rather than an extract or essence: apart from a better, more intense flavour, the speckling of the black beans across the roasted fruit is beautiful.

Prepping a pineapple is a little bit fiddly the first time you do it, but worth it for the visual impact, and to make sure you lose as little of the golden flesh as possible. Once you’ve removed the skin of the pineapple (I find this easiest using a bread knife, cutting the peel off in vertical strips while the pineapple stands on a chopping board – but make sure you do not do what my father did, holding the pineapple in his hand and cutting towards hi, unless you too also want to lose all nerve endings in one of your fingers), you’ll be left with a series of ‘eyes’ all over the fruit, the spots where the spikes grow from. If you try to carve deeply enough to remove them with the skin, you’ll lose a large proportion of the fruit. The eyes may appear random, but they sit on a series of diagonals, spiralling round the fruit. Using a sharp knife to cut shallow trenches on each side of a diagonal row of eyes means that you can remove them without forfeiting too much of the good stuff.

If you like pina coladas (and getting caught in the rain), try this with ice cream – or double cream whipped up with a little rum.

Whole roasted pineapple

Makes: Enough for four

Takes: Fifteen minutes

Bakes: 40 minutes

1 pineapple

50g dark brown sugar

25g butter

½ teaspoon chilli flakes

½ teaspoon vanilla paste

  1. Preheat the oven to 160°C. Prep the pineapple: cut off the bottom of the fruit so that it can stand upright without wobbling. Remove the skin using a knife; I find this easiest using a bread knife, and carving vertical strips of skin from the pineapple. The eyes, that will be left in the flesh, sit on a spiral. Remove them by making shallow v-shaped trench cuts on the diagonal, rotating the pineapple as you work, lifting the eyes away from the remaining flesh.
  2. Melt the butter in a small pan with the sugar, chilli flakes and vanilla paste. If the mixture is still very thick when melted, add a little splash of hot water to loosen.
  3. Place the prepared pineapple in a roasting tray. Paint or spoon the sugar-butter mixture onto the pineapple, turning it, to ensure it is all fully coated.
  4. Roast for 40 minutes, removing at the half way point to turn and baste with any glaze sitting in the roasting tray.
  5. Allow to cool a little before slicing into rounds, and drizzling with any glaze that has dripped from the fruit into the tray.

Sunak still has it all to do

Tonight’s membership hustings in the Tory leadership contest showed both candidates – but particularly Liz Truss – relaxing and even enjoying themselves a fair bit. But they also underlined what the two of them feel they have to say in order to get a hearing with their selectorate. 

Both had to commit to more grammar schools because this is a policy that – in spite of abundant evidence suggesting it does not improve social mobility or educational excellence in the way the two claimed tonight – the membership and indeed many Conservative MPs get misty-eyed about.

Both will also have been very aware of quite how angry many members in the audience were about Boris Johnson being forced out of office, as they see it. There was one heckle tonight, which was of Sunak as he talked about his decision to resign. He was accused of ‘stabbing Johnson in the back’. There were many cheers and applause for mentions of Johnson and of the campaign to have him on the ballot paper. The outgoing prime minister will be taking great satisfaction from the way in which his ongoing popularity with members has constricted this contest so much. 

Sunak and Truss both continue to revere Margaret Thatcher as the Tories’ leader, citing how she changed this country. Labourites often roll their eyes at this, but the reality is that it is far weirder the the left does not have the same nostalgia about its own multi-election winning leader.

One questioner in Truss’s half of the hustings complained about inter-generational unfairness, claiming that retired people were getting too much support through the triple lock to stay at home ‘watching daytime TV’. The host Nick Ferrari drily observed that this was not a universally popular opinion in the room, and Truss was careful to pay tribute to the contribution that older people can make to society rather than offering unqualified agreement.

The Foreign Secretary enjoyed herself more than the former Chancellor, moving away from some of her earlier performances where some of her answers appeared automated. Sunak had moments where he was clearly a bit nervous about getting the audience to like him, jabbering on a bit about being a Southampton fan and trying to talk over someone who was asking a question in an attempt to make a joke. 

Tonight showed that Sunak has two major hurdles to overcome: the bitterness of many Tory members at what they see as being his role in the unseating of Johnson, and his refusal to back ‘unfunded tax cuts’, as he calls them. For Truss, the challenge is to reassure those who do have lingering doubts about whether her tax pledges really do add up. But as her ease tonight showed, she clearly thinks she has the lesser job to do.

Ben Wallace backs Liz Truss

It was the endorsement that they were all after. Ben Wallace, the most popular member of Boris Johnson’s cabinet has finally named his preferred candidate to be Britain’s next Prime Minister: Liz Truss. The current Defence Secretary, who has won plaudits for his handling of the Ukraine crisis, has given an interview to the Sun in which he extols Truss’s virtues. Wallace, who has worked closely with Truss to counter Russia’s aggression, told the newspaper that:

What you see is what you get with Liz and that is what the public wants more than ever at this moment. She’s authentic. She’s honest. And she’s experienced. I’ve sat next to Liz in the Cabinet for two and a half years. I’ve sat next to her in National Security Councils. I’ve sat next to her at Nato and international summits. I’ve seen her in action.

But perhaps more noticeable than the endorsement for Truss were Wallace’s criticisms of her rival Rishi Sunak, who opted to quit Johnson’s cabinet three weeks ago. He claims that:

I don’t have the luxury as Defence Secretary of just walking out the door — I have roles in keeping this country safe. And the guardian of the markets, you know, the guardian of our economy, is the Chancellor. I mean, what would have happened that day if the markets had crashed?

Asked if Sunak was guilty of a dereliction of duty, Wallace replied: ‘We each had our own considerations. I have a duty until I’m replaced.’ He also took another swipe at Sunak when he acknowledged criticisms of Truss’s past public performances. Wallace says that:

I get that she is not the slickest salesperson on the planet, right? She’s not running a highly polished Hollywood production leadership campaign, but that’s reflective of who she is. She knows how to govern.

Wallace’s endorsement was one of the most prized in this leadership race, given that his lead at the top of the Conservative Home cabinet table suggests he holds significant sway among the Conservative grassroots. His interview can perhaps be seen in the same light as the behaviour of Lord Frost, another well-respected Tory who has swung behind Truss.

Frost played something of a ‘wrecker’ role earlier in the campaign, lambasting Penny Mordaunt’s work ethic on TalkTV and then using his Telegraph column to urge Kemi Badenoch to stand aside for Truss. Wallace’s interview is similarly more about damning Sunak than it is praising Truss. The Defence Secretary claims that the former Chancellor tried to deny his department much-needed funds, with Treasury intransigence only defeated on Boris Johnson’s instruction:

The Prime Minister intervened, overruled, and insisted that defence got a multi year settlement. I’m keen that whoever is the next prime minister invest in defence. But the Treasury resisted the PM’s ambition for it to be 2.5 per cent.

Earlier tonight at the first membership hustings, Sunak sounded coy when asked if he’d keep Ben Wallace on in his current post if he wins: in retrospect it’s not hard to see why. Given the pair’s previous clashes, Wallace’s preference is hardly a surprise but team Truss will present the endorsement as yet another sign that their candidate’s campaign has momentum, just as Rishi Sunak’s appears to be faltering.

Elsewhere in the interview, Wallace warned that more funding is needed to prevent the UK missing Nato defence targets in 2026 and gave a hint as to his own future plans. Long-believed to covet the role of Nato General-Secretary, Wallace was coy when asked, saying: ‘Who knows? It’s a fantastic opportunity’ before adding: ‘You have to get support from every nation. It’s a big ask.’ And as for speculation that Boris Johnson himself could get the job, Wallace quipped: ‘He’d have to get Mr Macron’s support. Now I’m not a bookie…’

Why Falklanders are the ones to watch at the Commonwealth Games

Stanley, Falkland Islands

I’m not saying the Falklands is a tiny place, but last month, over the course of just a few hours, I had my hair cut by one international athlete and then my passport processed by another. Soon-to-be international athletes, anyway. They’re both part of the Islands’ team for this year’s Commonwealth Games, which is taking place in Birmingham this week.

The Falklands has despatched 16 competitors across four sports: badminton, table tennis, cycling and bowls. For many participants, this is their first Commonwealth Games. For some, thanks largely to Covid, it will be their debut international appearance.

The youngest, 15-year-old Ben Chater, has not only never competed internationally before, but has only ever played badminton in one place: Stanley leisure centre. (I taught him English for a chunk of last year, so shall be making much of this connection if he ‘podiums’.)

For the same proportion of the population to compete, England would need a team of 275,000

Javier Sotomayor (table tennis – and my barber), moved here more than a decade ago, and has been the Islands’ table tennis champion for four years running. It’s fair to say the Falklands whiff-whaff scene is not enormous – he qualified through the ‘Americas’ (!) regional wildcard system – and 36-year-old Javier’s our solitary men’s player (the same number as produced by Jersey, Kenya and Papua New Guinea).

At 46, the head of the Immigration Dept. Jim Horton (time trial and road race) is not merely making his international debut but is the first cyclist ever to race for the Falkland Islands, which given that there’s maybe 40 miles of tarmac road outside of Stanley is not entirely surprising. Jim actually comes from the Black Country, but now his main fear is that he’ll be spotted riding round his former neighbourhood leaning manically into stiff (but totally imaginary) winds. I taught his son, too, now I think of it.

Ben’s aunt Vicky Chater (badminton again) is the co-owner and manager of my daughter’s nursery, and had a (second) child a little over eight months ago. She’ll be competing in the clean sweep of women’s singles, women’s doubles and mixed doubles. Another badminton player, Doug Clark (fresh in from training camp in Denmark), is the son of one of my most venerable DJing colleagues, a Royal Marine who served here back in 1982. Doug is on his seventh Commonwealth Games, and in his spare time spent eight years as captain of the national football team. 

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Badminton player Mike Brownlee carries the Falkland Islands flag at the 2014 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow [Getty]

Daphne Arthur-Almond (lawn bowls) was one of the first people I met in the Falklands, singing at a one-off evensong in February last year. She’s competed internationally on two occasions: at the World Indoor Bowls Championships in Bristol three months ago, and in 1985, at the Asian Games – for netball.

Garry Tyrell is on his third international sport – after cricket and football – and his claim to fame (until now) is to have been the oldest cup-winning goal-scorer (>40) in the Falklands, after the goalie saved his airborne boot instead of the ball. Primary teacher and team junior Andrea Stanworth had not yet joined them, last I heard (term time). She was a bit concerned about RAF flight delays: there are no ‘lawns’ here in the Falklands – even the Governor’s is inches deep in snow just now – so bowls is played exclusively indoors, on carpet. Andrea may bowl her first ball on grass in the opening round of one of the world’s largest sporting events.

Given the proportion of the population which they represent, what’s perhaps more surprising about the Falklands Commonwealth contingent is how many of them I don’t know. I wonder if 16 competitors out of a civilian population of 3,000 might not itself be notable? By comparison, England would need to send a team of about 275,000. (It’s sending 440.)

Also noteworthy is the diverse make-up of the Islands’ contingent. Javier’s originally from Chile, and the March family (badminton x 3) from Saint Helena. Laura Harada (also badminton) has, as she puts it, ‘a Japanese surname and Chinese family heritage’. The backroom staff can add South Africa and Pakistan into the mix.

For the next couple of weeks, though, all of them will be 8,000 miles from the place they now call home. As I write, the team have begun to check in at the athletes’ villages, to be welcomed by their ‘mayor’, champion javelin thrower Tessa Sanderson, and letters of support sent over from the Infant Junior School in Stanley.

In his Christmas message last year, Boris Johnson congratulated the Falklands on being recognised as a full member of the International Table Tennis Federation. But every silver lining has its cloud, and these remarks were met with a torrent of complaints from Buenos Aires, which had – with wearying inevitability – tried to prevent the membership. ‘It says an awful lot,’ remarks the Falklands Chef de Mission, Andrew Brownlee, ‘that the rest of the world are not politicising sport.’

In the run-up to the recent 40th anniversary of the Falklands War, I interviewed a handful of veterans of the Falkland Islands Defence Force. Gerald Cheek, a sergeant on the night of the Argentinian invasion who was subsequently interned by the occupying forces, told me how, in late 1982, he travelled to Australia as the Islands’ joint-first Commonwealth Games competitor (in full-bore rifle shooting – somewhat fittingly). They were surprised to find, after the tournament, that they had been under the watchful eye of close protection details throughout – in case, Gerald presumes, our South American neighbours attempted some kind of insane reprisal. But not half as surprised as when they walked into the Brisbane stadium, bearing the Falklands sheep-and-ship flag, to hear the crowd erupt in international, comradely support.

Is the US in recession or not?

There’s an almighty debate ongoing in the US about what exactly a ‘recession’ is. Treasury secretary Janet Yellen said the US economy is not shrinking, saying it is in a state of ‘transition’, not recession. But in a clip from 2000 being circulated on Twitter that is comically apt, Bill Clinton said ‘a recession is two quarters in a row of negative growth’.

Regardless of who’s right, the US is currently in Bill Clinton’s definition of a recession. Figures show that the economy shrank by 0.2 per cent in the second quarter of this year, following a 1.6 per cent fall in the first quarter. Over the year, the US economy is now 0.9 per cent smaller than it was a year ago. Remarkably, the news comes just a day after the Federal Reserve raised interest rates by 0.75 per cent – the second such rise in as many months. 

It is more confirmation, as if any were needed, that we have moved into another economic era. For the past three decades it has been taken for granted that at the first sign of economic trouble central banks would rush to cut rates, in order to stimulate markets and consumer demand. The Fed has done it so often that it created an expectation that it would always rush in and prop up the market and the economy, even at the cost of provoking the economy, for example by creating asset bubbles. It was the so-called ‘Greenspan put’, and gave investors the confidence that government and its monetary infrastructure was on their side. No longer. We are back to the early 1980s, when inflation was the prime concern of central banks, and investors would just have to live with their decisions.

Does that mean that markets are in for a rough ride? Not necessarily. To stay in the early 1980s for a moment, the fight against inflation sparked off a long-running bull market which, with blips in 1987 and 1994, lasted pretty well until the end of the 20th century. Sound money itself turned out to be a great boon for stock markets.

On the other hand, how serious is the Fed, and other central banks, about fighting inflation? We are still a long, long way from the high interest rates which were employed to calm inflation in the early 1980s. Real interest rates remain deeply in negative territory. The Bank of England base rate is currently 1.25 per cent, and retiring rate-setter Michael Saunders recently suggested that it might have to be raised to 2 per cent next year. Yet the Consumer Prices Index (CPI) for inflation shows 9.4 per cent and the Retail Prices Index (RPI) 11.1 percent. The last time the RPI was this high was in January 1982. And the Bank of England base rate then? It was 14.3 per cent. Those are the kind of rates which brought inflation under control in the early 1980s, and no one can say for sure that we won’t need such a hammer blow again.

It is interesting that the US should be the first large western economy to have sustained shrinking – given that it seemed to be the first economy to lead the world out of the pandemic slump. Germany is almost certain to follow, and Britain, too once we have figures for the third quarter. I wouldn’t want to bet against the US once again leading the recovery when it happens.

Why the Tavistock clinic had to be shut down

There are many reasons why what is sometimes crudely called ‘the trans issue’ is important. One is the political failure that left the legitimate views of many women (and men) ignored by decision-making individuals and bodies, who instead prioritised the views of interest groups and campaigners. Another is the multiple failures of governance that have seen numerous public bodies fail to deal properly and responsibly with questions of real public interest, because of their enthusiasm to follow the subjective agenda of interest groups rather than amass and act on objective evidence.

Simply put, organisations that are supposed to make decisions on the basis of facts have sometimes chosen to proceed on the basis of feelings and claims. Wishful thinking has come before harsh reality. Individuals who have questioned such things have sometimes been discouraged and even punished by organisations that priortise adherence to the campaigners’ agenda above the public interest. 

Nowhere is this more painful than in the area of clinical treatment for children who may be experiencing trouble relating to their gender identity. In recent years, the number of such children seen and treated by the NHS has risen sharply, and the number waiting for such treatment is up too. The main English clinic for such treatment is the Gender Identity Development Service at the Tavistock and Portman Trust in London. Or rather, was, because NHS England has just effectively shut down the GIDS. 

The closure comes after the latest report from Hilary Cass, a senior paediatrician who has been reviewing NHS gender services for children. To say her findings have been damning is an understatement. GIDS is being dismantled because over several years it administered potentially life-changing treatments to often vulnerable children, sometimes involving drugs whose effects it did not understand and often without adequate record-keeping to track the welfare of those children. Not that Cass is the first to find such things. The Care Quality Commission, a series of whistleblowers and the High Court have all raised serious concerns about the service. So too have some journalists.

Is there any other context in which the responsible authorities – medical, governmental and political – would have been so slow to intervene?

Compared to pioneering reporters such as Hannah Barnes at the BBC and Deb Cohen now of ITV, I am a latecomer to this story and have only dabbled in this issue. But I’ve paid enough attention to understand and argue repeatedly that GIDS and its treatments needed more scrutiny. More than three years ago, following more important reporting by Lucy Bannerman of the Times, I argued that the weight of evidence about troubling failures around GIDS was such that a parliamentary investigation was justified. 

That hasn’t happened yet but Dr Cass’s review has done a good job of examining the often troubling facts around gender treatment for young children. I continue to hope that parliament will eventually play its part and provide the necessary scrutiny here.

One aspect of the latest publication from Cass today is particularly worthy of note. It’s about puberty blockers, drugs sometimes given to gender-questioning children to ‘pause’ the onset of puberty. The rationale for using these drugs has been that doing so buys time for children experiencing distress and confusion relating to their body’s sexed characteristics to reflect on their gender identity and make decisions about gender transition. 

This treatment has been intensely controversial. For several years, some observers – academics, campaigners, journalists – have suggested that giving puberty blockers to children is ‘experimental’ and could have unknown harmful long-term effects. Those concerns were frequently brushed off by the GIDS and by the campaigning charities that have worked closely with the clinic over the years. They have argued that puberty-blockers are safe and reversible and deliver significant benefit to recipients’ mental health and wellbeing. Some of them have suggested that those of us who raise questions about puberty blockers are motivated by bigotry or ideology. (Perhaps one day I’ll say more about these slurs, including the ones spread by people employed by the Tavistock. But not today.) In the context of that controversy, the latest letter from Hilary Cass is worth quoting at length:

As already highlighted in my interim report, the most significant knowledge gaps are in relation to treatment with puberty blockers, and the lack of clarity about whether the rationale for prescription is as an initial part of a transition pathway or as a ‘pause’ to allow more time for decision making…

We do not fully understand the role of adolescent sex hormones in driving the development of both sexuality and gender identity through the early teen years, so by extension we cannot be sure about the impact of stopping these hormone surges on psychosexual and gender maturation. We therefore have no way of knowing whether, rather than buying time to make a decision, puberty blockers may disrupt that decision-making process.

My emphasis added. In other words, the NHS has been treating vulnerable children distressed and uncertain about their gender with potentially life-changing drugs, without knowing whether those drugs delivered the intended results, or actually made it harder for them to resolve their distress and uncertainty. Puberty blockers might have had precisely the opposite effect to the one that was so strenuously claimed. That’s bad enough, but Cass has more to say:

A further concern is that adolescent sex hormone surges may trigger the opening of a critical period for experience-dependent rewiring of neural circuits underlying executive function (i.e. maturation of the part of the brain concerned with planning, decision making and judgement). If this is the case, brain maturation may be temporarily or permanently disrupted by puberty blockers, which could have significant impact on the ability to make complex risk-laden decisions, as well as possible longer-term neuropsychological consequences. To date, there has been very limited research on the short-, medium- or longer-term impact of puberty blockers on neurocognitive development.

Yes, an NHS review has found that the drugs that the NHS has been giving to some children may disrupt their brain development and leave them less able to make complex decisions. Those drugs might have long-term consequences for the mental functioning of the children who were given them.

Now, years after their use began, Cass proposes that the NHS undertake serious and systematic research into the use of puberty blockers. Put another way, now that the horse has left the stable and has run headlong into a brick wall, we’re starting to think about whether bolting the stable door might be a good idea.

This all raises many grim questions. Here are just two. Given the lack of evidence supporting the use of puberty blockers and the volume of concerns raised about their use, why has it taken so long for the uncertainties and risks around their use to be officially recognised? And is there any other context in which the responsible authorities – medical, governmental and political – would have been so slow to intervene over such scandalous disregard for the welfare of children?

Could Boris return?

Asked recently whether Boris Johnson, Britain’s soon-to-be-ex-Prime Minister, would ever return to the highest elected office in the land, super-loyalist Nadine Dorries enigmatically replied: ‘Who knows what the future will hold?’

With Johnson allies reportedly looking to trade a safe Conservative seat in return for a peerage with any elderly MP hoping to secure a retirement in ermine, it looks like the hero of 2019 is, at the very least, thinking of making a come-back before he has even gone. Indeed, most polls suggest the next general election will be disastrous for the Conservatives and predict Johnson’s constituency of Uxbridge will fall to Labour. With being an MP a prerequisite to standing in any leadership contest, Johnson is keeping his options open.

But, while like Dorries, we do not know the future, we do know the past. And if that is any guide, Johnson is unlikely to make a return to the party leadership and No. 10. For in modern times only one politician has accomplished that double trick: William Gladstone. After losing the 1874 election, Gladstone stepped down as Liberal leader but – and here Johnson’s ears might prick up – at the end of the decade led a popular crusade against Conservative foreign policy. Notably, his campaign focussed on its failure to punish the Ottoman Turks for brutally suppressing an uprising of Bulgarians seeking independence from their rule. The series of speeches Gladstone delivered to mass audiences, all faithfully reported in the press, constituted what historians now regard as the first modern political campaign. Gladstone’s highly personal pitch was aimed as much at the government of Benjamin Disraeli as those lesser mortals who replaced him as Liberal leader, and it catapulted him back into the leadership of his party and country in 1880.

Polls suggest the next general election will be disastrous for the Tories and Johnson’s constituency of Uxbridge will fall to Labour

Since those distant Victorian times only two former party leaders and prime ministers – Arthur Balfour and Alec Douglas Home – have returned to the cabinet, both as Foreign Secretary, a role Johnson has already performed and at that pretty poorly. In any case, even his likely successor Liz Truss, currently selling herself to Conservative members as a Johnson loyalist, has publicly rejected welcoming his over-powering presence in her cabinet.

The experience of other ex-leaders and premiers looks even less encouraging. Edward Heath’s great sulk on the backbenches after being deposed by Margaret Thatcher in 1975 saw him make frequent attacks on his successor. Heath imagined Conservatives would turn to him after what he hoped would be his successor’s brief and disastrous tenure. Perhaps that is Johnson’s fantasy too. But Thatcher’s prolonged electoral success meant Heath instead became an increasingly isolated figure in his own party.

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Margaret Thatcher, watched by Edward Heath, speaking as she launches the Conservative party pro-market campaign, 17 April 1975 (Wesley/Keystone/Getty Images)

It is unclear how seriously Margaret Thatcher or Tony Blair ever wanted to return to power. But each certainly sought to be back seat drivers and attempted to keep their parties on the policy path with which they were most associated. Blair however failed in that regard: indeed, Jeremy Corbyn won the Labour leadership in 2015 on the basis that he was the only non-Blairite in the field. Keir Starmer has recently praised his predecessor but every time he does, he is met by a fusillade of hateful tweets from party members claiming Blair is a neo-liberal war criminal.

Perhaps Blair will enjoy a more positive influence once he has made his final journey. Death certainly enhanced Thatcher’s influence in her party. She made her immediate successor John Major’s life a misery when he failed to live up to expectations; but while she let her displeasure be known she could do little to overthrow him. In today’s Conservative leadership campaign however both candidates claim the mantle of ‘Thatcherite’. Rishi Sunak has made a pilgrimage to Grantham, Thatcher’s birthplace, while Liz Truss dresses in strikingly similar ways to the late leader. More seriously, both adhere to something close to her core vision: a deregulated market, a small state and tax cuts, even if the timing of achieving those ambitions is different.

Thatcher, like Winston Churchill, has reached the statue-erecting stage of influence. Like him she has become a mythical figure which the passage of time – and poor historical memories – means she can be mobilised for a variety of different causes. During the Brexit referendum Churchill was famously claimed by both Leave and Remain. One of those who indulged in this practice most egregiously was Johnson himself. He was also all too happy to encourage supporters to project onto him various Churchillian characteristics, however factually bogus they might have been. It helped him become party leader.

Churchill’s mythic status derived from his role in helping save Britain from losing to Hitler in 1940 while Thatcher is the woman some believe saved Britain from the unions and an ever-expanding state in the 1980s. 

Johnson might achieve a similar legendary status for Getting Brexit Done: to some he already has it. Just now, though, how far Brexit is ‘done’ and what its impact on the economy is remains uncertain. But, let us say, in five decades, the length of time Jacob Rees-Mogg once said it would take for the benefits of Brexit to become fully apparent, there may be Johnson statues adorning London, Henley and Uxbridge. With partygate and the other reasons for his downfall long forgotten there might be Conservative leaders falling over themselves to claim his mantle. But by then Johnson will probably be past caring. As he might himself say: them’s the breaks.

Scotland’s drug deaths scandal is a problem no one seems able to solve

Scotland has a high amount of drugs deaths. But it’s not just that. It’s that Scotland suffers drugs deaths at levels unknown anywhere else in the UK or Europe – nearly four times worse than any other country for which records exist. This scandalous figure has been updated today, showing that – although it fell one per cent this year – it has trebled since the SNP came to power. It speaks to a wider collapse of public policy. And one that requires urgent attention.

The new figures published show drug-related deaths have fallen to 1,330 – just nine fewer than the year before and the second-highest ever recorded. As a share of the population this is the worst recorded by any European country – and by some margin. It is a problem that no one seems able to solve, and speaks to the way in which Scotland seems to have incubated some of the worst deprivation in the Western world.

Drugs deaths were, once, seen as a Glasgow problem. But even though things in Glasgow have become (much) worse it is Dundee that has now emerged as the drugs deaths capital of the developed world.

Drugs deaths are a problem that speaks to Scotland’s incubation of some of the worst deprivation in the Western world

Sturgeon’s government says the situation is ‘unacceptable’ but this is no new trend. This year was the first year deaths haven’t increased since 2013. More people died from drugs in Scotland in 2021 than the number that died of Aids in Gambia, deaths were nearly twice as high as those killed on the US/Mexico border and in the whole of Britain there were just 60 more deaths from car accidents than from drugs in Scotland alone.

Compared with the rest of Europe, deaths in Scotland were nearly five times higher than Sweden and nearly four times higher than Norway – the countries with the next highest death rates and places Sturgeon is keen to model an independent Scotland on. The deaths were also far worse than any other UK nation or region: two and a half times higher than the north east of England – the second worst afflicted part of the UK.

What can be done? Given so many years of so little progress, a sense of defeat has engulfed many. Sturgeon does not care because frankly she does not have to. Scotland’s electoral maths ensures that. But funding has been highlighted as crucial. A report from Scotland’s drugs deaths task force last week said: ‘The Scottish Government must focus on what can be done within [their] powers.’ Yet in the first 12 years the SNP were in power, funding for treatment more than halved.

But the UK should step up too. The SNP’s preferred route, in contrast to its usual public health method of banning things, is to decriminalise drug use and treat it as a health problem. This has already happened in all but name with the Lord Advocate announcing to parliament last September that Class A drug users would not be prosecuted. It’s possible this approach can work. The British government gains nothing by standing in the way.

There are cautionary tales though. Take Peter Krykant, an activist from Falkirk. Frustrated by inaction and indifference north and south of the border he took matters into his own hands and set up a ‘safe consumption van’. After running the van for a few weeks – and standing for election at Holyrood – he himself relapsed and began taking heroin again. But he never should have been put in that position. The state failed him.

What drugs are killing people? America, another one of the worst countries for drug deaths, has a particular problem with Fentanyl, an opioid considered stronger than heroin. But the same isn’t true for Scotland. Here, one of the biggest killers by far is Benzodiazepines or ‘street benzos’. They are responsible for some 69 per cent of drug deaths in Scotland. They’re prescribed by GPs.

The drugs deaths figures could be having an effect on male life expectancy too. Look at the below graph showing how long people expect to live internationally. While the length of time men can expect to live in most developed countries has continued to grow (up to 2019 – the latest Scottish data), Scotland and America have stagnated and even declined. It’s near impossible to prove a link, but record high drugs deaths is certainly something they have in common.

The Nobel laureate Angus Deaton (himself Scottish-born) has written a book about America’s life expectancy problem in which he refers to ‘deaths of despair’ – due to drink, drugs and (to a far smaller extent) suicide. If someone of his calibre were to focus on Scotland we might have a better understanding of why things are going so wrong there.

Devolution was supposed to focus attention on these Scottish problems. Scotland’s drugs problem was made world famous by Trainspotting – filmed in my native Edinburgh – but since then drugs deaths have risen five-fold. The ‘drugs death capital of Europe’ shows no signs of going away anytime soon. Action is required at all levels of government, reserved and devolved. Scotland is not lacking in resources. Nearly £100 per head more is spent on the health of Scots compared with in England. It’s the will to really change that’s lacking.

The surprising tricks that can cut your energy bills

We are all facing months of rising bills, with warnings that there may even be blackouts ahead. But all is not lost. Here are ten ways you can cut your energy consumption – and some of them will surprise you…

Fact check: would nationalised energy help UK taxpayers?

Soaring prices have again reignited one of the long-running debates in British politics: should the energy companies be re-nationalised? The Trades Union Congress (TUC) certainly seem to think so, having produced a pithy film which purportedly compares the two sectors in the UK and France. It features a rather baffled looking Brit and a smug looking French girl.

The former claims ‘in Britain, billions in profits go to private energy companies’; the latter that ‘in France, the profits go back to EDF, which is publicly owned by the French people so the profits go back to us and keep the bills lower.’ They contrast the 54 per cent increase in bills in the UK this spring with the 4 per cent with that in France. On this basis, it is argued, Britain should re-nationalise the energy sector to pass such ‘profits’ back to the people.

Yet this comparison with the French system does not in fact tell the full story. For the decision to increase bills in France by just 4 per cent came at a cost; a cost of £7 billion, which is incurred by EDF and, indirectly, the French taxpayer. The price cap announcement by the French government caused EDF to lose a fifth of its market value over the course of a single day, a move that will cost the everyday French citizen, even if they do enjoy lower energy bills.

The cap forced EDF to sell power to rivals at a discount to try to shield French consumers from sharp increases occurring elsewhere around the world. This was a major strain on EDF’s finances because the group sells forward its estimated nuclear output before the end of the budget year and has to buy back sold electricity in a volatile market with prices at historic highs.

Moreover, for all the TUC’s talk of ‘profits’, EDF debts are projected to rise 40 per cent this year to more than £51 billion, all of which is now a taxpayer liability. And, rather than being some kind of magic cash cow for the state to milk, EDF is, in the words of Reuters, ‘a major headache owing to years of delays on new nuclear plants in France and Britain.’

Taxpayers are even going to have shell out a further £5 billion to buy the 16 per cent of EDF not already owned by the state to try to fix its issues, which have seen the value of EDF slump from 33 euros a share in 2005 to close to 11 euros today.
Nationalisation of the British energy industry might have its benefits but the TUC and others making this case ought to be honest about the costs it involves too.

Stupendously good: Much Ado About Nothing, at the Lyttelton Theatre, reviewed

Simon Godwin’s Much Ado About Nothing is set in a steamy Italian holiday resort, the Hotel Messina, in the 1920s. A smart move, design-wise. The jazz age was one of those rare moments in history when every member of society, from the lowliest chambermaid to the richest aristocrat, dressed with impeccable style and flair. The show is stupendously good to look at it and it kicks off with a thrilling blast of rumba music from a jazz quartet on the hotel balcony. Even sceptics of jazz need not fear these players. The musical score is a triumph for one simple reason: there are no jazz solos.

The comic passages of the play are performed imaginatively enough although some of the stunts – the collapsing hammock and the dodgy ice-cream trolley – become a bit repetitive. Hero’s rejection at the altar and the plot to fake her death are done with real, heart-rending emotion. It’s unusual to see such deep passions emerging from these melodramatic scenes.

You’ll wait years to see a better Benedick

John Heffernan plays Benedick with a wonderfully relaxed informality. He’s strange to look at. Geeky, weak-kneed at times, but he happens to be tall and handsome too, with a nimble physicality. He strikes a perfect balance between the hero’s virile swagger and his melancholy, ruminative nature. You’ll wait years to see a better Benedick. Katherine Parkinson delivers Beatrice’s verbal bullets with impish drawling aggression – but she’s not always fully audible.

David Judge plays Don John as a taut, wound-up gangster with strong hints of Salford in his voice. Which is fine on its own, but it doesn’t suit the setting. How many Mancunian bad boys would you meet on the Italian Riviera in the days of Hemingway and Fitzgerald?

Eben Figueiredo plays the shifty, preening Claudio with a London ‘roadman’ accent. Perhaps he wants to make teenagers from south London feel involved. Two snags there: the NT is unlikely to attract droves of youngsters. And it’s Shakespeare: he makes everyone feel involved. Relax. He’ll do the work for you – if you let him.

The outstanding performance comes from Phoebe Horn, as Margaret, who draws the eye instantly whenever she appears. It’s rare to find a youngster attempting to upstage the entire cast of a mega-budget Shakespeare production. And it’s even rarer to see the ploy come off so beautifully. Horn shares long scenes with seasoned thesps and she dominates the action from a minor position. It’s a bit naughty pilfering the limelight like this but she earns every bit of the applause she wins. Nature has blessed her with the looks of Susan Hampshire and the comedy skills of Sarah Crowe. A star on the rise.

Freud’s Last Session, by Mark St Germain, is about a meeting between C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud on 3 September 1939. The date puts the characters under lots of pressure. They listen to Chamberlain’s radio broadcasts about Hitler. Freud makes anxious phone calls to his daughter, Anna. And the first air-raid siren causes them to panic as they realise they have nowhere to shelter.

But these external influences are artistically unsatisfying. A good drama should find conflict from within the characters and their relationships. The dominant theme is God. As a child, Lewis paid no more attention to Christianity than a ‘gibbon pays to Beethoven’. Freud’s broad-minded Jewish father allowed their Catholic nanny to take young Sigmund to Mass and to receive the sacraments. But with little effect. Freud wasn’t the first worshipper to be converted to atheism by Catholic priests. But he retained a lifelong fascination with religion, and his desk is crowded with effigies of gods from the Greek, Egyptian and Hindu traditions.

Lewis (Sean Browne) believes the Christian God wants us to perfect ourselves through suffering. To Freud (Julian Bird), that’s offensive. A child’s death or a terminal illness are surely evidence of God’s antipathy to mankind. And with Hitler on the march across Europe, the commandment of Christ to ‘love they neighbour’ is an instruction to support the aggressor. By turning the other cheek we enable the triumph of evil. How can that be good?

The script doesn’t flinch from the grisly realities of Freud’s terminal condition. The tumour growing in his jaw makes his pet dog scamper away in horror. He wears a prosthetic steel plate that causes him agony and he refuses to let anyone adjust it but his daughter. The pain increases and Lewis offers to improvise an emergency operation as Freud sits on his famous couch. So the couch becomes a dentist’s chair and Lewis turns into a nurse or even a surrogate child, like Anna.

This is an excellent drama of ideas. It’s deliberately discursive and lacking in spectacle or physical action. Well worth 90 minutes of anyone’s time.

Alienatingly sweet and warm: BBC2’s The Newsreader reviewed

When TV makes shows about TV, it rarely has a good word to say for itself. In the likes of W1A, The Day Today and, savagest of all, Victoria Wood: As Seen on TV, the industry has looked in the mirror and ripped itself to shreds. What all these comedies say, in their own way, is that most TV is bombastic, brain-dead, two-star crap put together in a blind panic and a moral vacuum by idiots and monsters. Second only to politics, it’s the satirists’ biggest sitting duck, the gift that can’t stop giving.

The Newsreader, a new newsroom drama, turns out to be cut from different cloth. It’s set in Australia and the 1980s, for one, which means it’s about neither here nor now. Prepare for niche references to Allan Border, or Allan Broader as he’s called by a debut anchorman nervously misreading the autocue. (For context, that’s a cricketing misnomer on a par with, say, Ben Strokes.) But you won’t actually need to know your baggy green captains to feel at home, or remember who crocodile-wrangling Paul Hogan is or was.

The most alienating thing about The Newsreader is that it’s actually quite sweet and warm

If time and place put The Newsreader at a double distance, the most alienating thing is that it’s actually quite sweet and warm. It would be easy to make fun of news bulletins in the pre-digital age, but that would be punching down. In the opening scene a chewed-up VHS tape establishes that we have travelled back to the past. Everything else still feels familiar. The boss is a shouty old bully. The senior newsreader is an ageing alpha male who conspires to keeps his ambitious female co-presenter down. Television still lives in a version of this world, what with women until recently denied equal pay by the BBC.

At the heart of the story is preppy young producer Dale Jennings (Sam Reid), a news nerd who practises his bulletin voice in the car and the bathroom. When his chance to read the news eventually comes it’s a train wreck, but he’s soon coached to do better by Helen Norville (Anna Torv), the firecracker female newsreader with whom he forms an uplifting, patriarchy-undermining alliance.

While there’s plenty of levity, there is seriousness too. The big news event in the first episode is the mid-air explosion of the USS Challenger, which is unflinchingly shown on screen – twice. The final episode (of six) will bring Chernobyl. Aids also lurks in the wings. Amazingly, The Newsreader was filmed in Melbourne in and among Australia’s super-restrictive lockdowns. That it’s being aired at Sunday primetime on BBC2 is, at a guess, down to the interrupted supply line of homegrown drama since the pandemic. It deserves it. It’s old news, but good news.

In other ways the media landscape has mutated beyond recognition. Take the cautionary parable told in the absorbing documentary My Insta Scammer Friend. Its anti-heroine was Caroline Calloway, a young American who joined Instagram in its infancy and began posting images of her wonderful life as a Cambridge student swanning around Europe. With long oversharing captions she had soon hooked a vast young female following. ‘She was kind of like me but better,’ explained one repentant woman who had sucked it all up. The relationship bloomed into full co-dependency: they rejoiced in the illusion of friendship while she landed a fat book deal.

Hubris came about only when Calloway started marketing herself in real life as a hostess of so-called creativity workshops. Hosting, it turns out, requires more effort and organisation than posting. Fans twigged that they had been gulled, though efforts to cancel their fallen idol failed when she simply rebranded herself as a scammer. She gets full marks for brass neck.

Teenage girls discovering their icons have feet of clay is a modern rite of passage. Formerly it might be revealed that their fave boy-band mannikins were actually into LSD and orgies. Nowadays too-good-to-be-true influencers are exposed for monetising fantasy. In this tale of mutual enablement, each needy party was the other’s Frankenstein’s monster. The interviewees, several filmed doing their make-up, are wise and articulate about their false prophetess only after the event.

Alas it was a no-show from the belle of the ball. A complex character who got in too deep and has since gone to ground like a cryptoqueen of Instagram, she did submit a self-exculpating statement. More revealingly, in a podcast she bragged about ‘how hard it is to conjure money, fame and power out of thin air’. Perhaps someone could find work for her and her magic money tree at the Treasury.

In defence of country-pop

I am aware that the music I enjoy is widely considered to be the worst ever produced in human history. Worse than a roomful of children with recorders, cymbals and malice; worse than a poultry abattoir. Every so often, someone will ask me what I listen to, and I’m forced to tell them the truth. ‘These days,’ I’ll say, ‘it’s mostly country.’ Their nose will wrinkle, as if I’ve just let out a stealthy fart in their direction. ‘But old country, right?’ they’ll say, almost pleading. ‘Classic country?’ No, not classic country. I like Johnny Cash fine, I appreciate Merle Haggard and Dolly Parton and Waylon Jennings and all the other respectable stalwarts you’re allowed to enjoy as a vaguely bookish Jew from north London. But the stuff that really hits me right in the chest cavity is the ugly, overproduced industry trash released somewhere between 2000 and 2016, in which there’s no storytelling, no ‘three chords and the truth’, no poignancy, no heartbreak, and in which the primary object of erotic fascination is a truck.

I am not even slightly kidding about the trucks. Probably the most utterly perfect example of the genre is Brad Paisley’s 2003 masterpiece, ‘Mud on the Tires’. He croons, over fiddles and banjo: ‘I’ve got some big news/ The bank finally came through/ And I’m holding the keys to/ A brand new Chevrolet…’ The person he’s singing to is presumably a woman, a wife or girlfriend, and he tries to spin his purchase into a romantic opportunity. With this thing, we can go anywhere; we can go past where the dirt roads end, take a trip out into the back country, just the two of us…

Tell you what we need to do Is grab a sleeping bag or two Build us a little campfire And then with a little luck We might just get stuck Let’s get a little mud on the tires.

Some people have attempted to interpret this song as an elaborate metaphor for sex. It is not. It’s about a truck: about getting your truck stuck in a slick of liquid mud, pushing down hard on the accelerator, the wheels spinning faster, going nowhere, but spraying mud all over the place. The faint image of Paisley’s silent interlocutor, sitting frustrated in the passenger seat: she expected sex, but instead she’s the witness to a far more sacred union. Man, mud, tyres, truck; the sheer ecstasy of it, the panting engine, the wet sounds of the mire underneath…

As it happens, there’s a reason Paisley refers specifically to a Chevy. The company paid him.

The stuff that hits me right in the chest cavity is the ugly, overproduced trash between 2000 and 2016

There are more of these, infinitely more. Kip Moore’s 2011 ‘Somethin’ ’Bout a Truck’ again tries to gesture towards some kind of ordinary human sexuality – a girl in a red sundress, a beer, a kiss – but keeps on diverting itself back to the truck, that holy symbol standing in its farmer’s field. Jason Aldean goes further; his 2014 track ‘If My Truck Could Talk’ dispenses with the girl entirely. It’s not, as you might expect, a love song to the truck, not entirely. Instead, the gimmick is that Aldean’s truck has been through so many scrapes with him that if it could talk, he’d have to kill the thing.

If my truck could talk, I’d have to yank out all the wires Pour on the gas, set it on fire, anything to shut it up It’s been good to me, but it knows too much, he’d sing it all I’d have to find a riverbank and roll it off If my truck could talk

Sixty years ago, country music was basically about murdering your wife. Love and violence; heartbreak, regret. Somehow, by the 2010s, the same energies were funnelled into music about murdering your car. People still tend to associate country with some notion of rural backwardness, Southern swamps, trailer incest – but this is music from a J.G. Ballard nightmare-future. A cyberpunk world of machine sexuality, machine sadism, sex-death in the bowels of the machine. Country-pop is the most utterly modern music there is.

Trucks are not the only fetish-objects, of course. The holy trinity of the golden age of objectively awful bro-country is the truck, the pair of blue jeans, and the cold beer. There are endless songs devoted to each, but the really special ones are those, like the Zac Brown Band’s ‘Chicken Fried’ from 2003, that manage to run through all of them. Less an actually coherent narrative, and more a sort of ritual prayer, naming the totems in turn:

You know I like my chicken-fried Cold beer on a Friday night A pair of jeans that fit just right And the radio up…

About midway through the song, the music quietens down for a moment, and the tone turns solemn: military drums roll for Zac Brown’s tribute to the men and women of the US Armed Forces. ‘Salute the ones who died,/ the ones who gave their lives, so we don’t have to sacrifice/ all the things we love…/ like our chicken fried.’ Every kid whose brains were splattered against the floor of a defoliated jungle, everyone incinerated by a roadside IED in the Hindu Kush: it was all worth it, for the greater good of blue jeans and beer.

What you have to understand is that country music does not, strictly speaking, exist. A century ago, white and black Americans in Appalachia and the South were creating broadly the same kind of music, mongrel string-band tunes thrown together from blues and Celtic folk. With the emergence of commercial radio, though, a wall was thrown up. Anything produced by white artists was sold as ‘hillbilly music’, and later as country. Anything produced by black artists was sold as ‘race music’. Racially mixed string bands – of which there had once been quite a few – couldn’t find a footing; they died out. And eventually, black artists stopped making the music that had once been theirs; it was hard to sell race records that sounded too hillbilly. They moved on, and invented all of 20th-century pop culture instead.

What defines country isn’t so much a musical style as a set of symbolic markers. The genre has repeatedly poached from the inheritors of ‘race music’ – first rock, and more recently hip-hop; there are plenty of country songs that feature drum loops and even rapping – but what counts are the totems. They conjure an image that bears about as much relation to the actual lives of its listener base as it does to mine. Only 1.4 per cent of the US workforce is engaged in direct agricultural production, and a good chunk of those are impoverished Central American migrants, forced from their own farms by Nafta, reduced to picking fruit in the deadly heat for nakedly exploitative wages. A huge portion of American farmland is owned by massive agribusinesses – increasingly, massive agribusinesses owned by the Chinese state. The independent farmers that remain are squeezed by the demands of big business. Tractor manufacturers, for instance: if the air conditioner on your John Deere breaks down, you can’t fix it yourself; you have to take it to an approved mechanic for a wildly inflated price. Otherwise, the tractor’s software will simply shut the whole thing down. None of these indignities of rural life make it into mainstream country music; most of its listeners are in the suburbs. Instead of telling meaningful stories, it parades the cultural signifiers of a type of person who, for the most part, no longer exists. Its ire is saved for sneering big-city liberals, but mostly it just frots itself against a truck.

All this sounds like a critique, but it’s not. I genuinely do love this music. ‘Mud on the Tires’ is an almost perfect song. I love the twanging vocals; I love the skittery banjo and the rasp of the strings. In a few notes it conjures up the great myth of an imaginary rural America: not a place where anyone actually lives, but a place we do get to visit. Every second of this mad hologram is intoxicating: the Oklahoma rodeos, the Texas honky-tonks, the Carolina BBQs, the Nashville bars where they play songs about trucks for people who just flew in from Boston for an insurance conference. This whole genre is dedicated to propping up a fantasy, but it’s a beautiful and enchanting fantasy. Purer, because it’s not real. I can’t even drive, but I want the truck. I am here in grey old Europe, but I want a deep-fried steak, a Coors Light, a barefoot girl in blue jeans, and a vast open sky. I want dirt on my boots. I’m beyond help. I love it.

That hologram is fading, though. Mockery works: Don Quixote embarrassed centuries of Arthurian romance into silence; when Merlin and co. popped up again in Hollywood, Monty Python shut them down just as fast. Bro-country’s Quixote was ‘Girl in a Country Song’, a 2014 single by the duo Maddie & Tae. It’s a brilliant, pitch-perfect satire of every dumb-jock trope in every dumb-jock anthem:

We used to get a little respect Now we’re lucky if we even get To climb up in your truck Keep our mouths shut, and ride along Down some old dirt road we don’t even want to be on And be the girl in a country song

They got to the heart of it: this stuff was never about the girl, and always about the truck. The girl was just an elaborate hood ornament. It took a few years to stop thrashing, but now that genre is basically dead. These days, the dominant mode in Nashville is what’s been called ‘boyfriend country’: soulful, sensitive, schmaltzy songs about love, sonically identical to any other kind of pop music, but delivered in the ghost of a Southern twang. Its main platform isn’t the Grand Ole Opry, but The Bachelor. Backing tracks produced by Scandinavians. There’s hardly a banjo or a haystack in sight.

Yes, there are interesting developments happening elsewhere. Top 40 country radio has finally caved in and started playing music by Tyler Childers, currently the great hope for people who like to talk about what real country used to mean. This is absolutely a positive step. Sturgill Simpson has returned to country after a few years flitting around with disco beats and synths. Kelsey Waldon’s voice still trembles with suffering. The Turnpike Troubadours are back together, and if you don’t think Evan Felker is the greatest American songwriter of the 21st century it can only be because you haven’t been paying attention. All these people make music that really does reflect life in the fields and the hollers; the good country music is, well, good. But it’s not the same. I still miss the bright insistence of the caricature, that pure, blinding image. A field of corn. A cowboy hat. A truck. A truck. A truck.