-
AAPL
213.43 (+0.29%)
-
BARC-LN
1205.7 (-1.46%)
-
NKE
94.05 (+0.39%)
-
CVX
152.67 (-1.00%)
-
CRM
230.27 (-2.34%)
-
INTC
30.5 (-0.87%)
-
DIS
100.16 (-0.67%)
-
DOW
55.79 (-0.82%)
Want to understand a conductor? Listen to their Haydn
Grade: B
When a music-lover is tired of Haydn’s London symphonies, they’re tired of life. It’s not just the sheer creative verve of these 12 symphonies by a composer in his sixties. It’s the generosity of spirit. Beethoven demands a battle of wills; Mozart a near-impossible grace. But a conductor can run straight at a London symphony and Haydn will show us, with a smile, exactly who they are. Beecham is urbane, Bernstein camps it up; Abbado is trim and impeccably turned out. Eugen Jochum (a belated discovery) is just very, very German. Haydn’s still bigger than all of them.
Paavo Jarvi has reached the second volume of his London symphonies with the Bremen-based Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie, and he’s surely never been anyone’s idea of a ray of sunshine. First impressions suggest a historically informed approach: bracing tempi, lean low-vibrato string-playing and what sounds like a pair of 18th-century timpani. They’re certainly explosive enough. Jarvi clearly enjoys extreme dynamic contrasts – this is one performance of the Surprise symphony that does exactly what it says on the tin.
But you can’t be cynical for long when Haydn’s in the room. Jarvi initially feels impatient, but there’s an insistence – a physicality – to his performances that overpowers your reservations and pulls you into the dance. Haydn famously hankered after a ‘really new minuet’ and Jarvi delivers: oom-pah band schwung and priapic bassoons in No.94, menace in No.95 (the darkest and most neglected of the London symphonies) and Austen-like flirtations in the trio of No.98. I never thought I’d say this, but I think he’s having fun.
The art of war
Nina Power has narrated this article for you to listen to.
On his deathbed, the Austrian writer Karl Kraus remarked of the Japanese attack on Manchuria: ‘None of this would have happened if people had only been more strict about the use of the comma.’ The implication being that by channelling rage into the ordering of small things, we might stay away from violence on a colossal scale. Unable to restrict ourselves to matters of punctuation, alas, humanity is often at war: with itself, and others, however hallucinatory.
Two current exhibitions come at rage from very different starting points. War and the Mind demonstrates the devastating psychological impact of war on those who fight it and those who have no choice but to suffer it. To this end, it encompasses everything from the physical and mental impact of fighting – ‘shell shock’, now more commonly described as post-traumatic stress disorder – to the psychological war for hearts and minds and the creation of an othered enemy who must be destroyed at all costs.
Along the way we encounter Lady Baden Powell cautioning young people in a letter in 1934 not to become ‘war minded’; Freud describing humanity’s ‘instinctive craving’ for violence; and Winnie-the-Pooh author, A.A. Milne, a dedicated pacifist, nevertheless changing his mind in the face of Hitler’s aggression. Of the 150 or so artefacts on display some are familiar – recruitment and anti-war posters particularly so – but others are more striking: a soldier’s dog-tags, a comforting reminder that one’s remains will hopefully be identifiable; an ashtray fashioned into the shape of a sinking combatant made of world-war-one shell cases, an example of ‘trench art’.
It becomes clear just how difficult it is to convince random civilians – no matter how enthusiastically they want to defend their country – to sustain hatred for any long period of time. Little bribes play a role: beautiful first world war packages of tobacco from Princess Mary: ‘very soothing, a cigarette’ recalls one private. Humour becomes crucial to surviving the constant threat of death: ‘Suicide Corner’ reads one trench sign, indicating a dangerous spot. Unused equipment – such as the unopened gloves of a weapons inspector in Iraq in 2002 – also provokes reflection. One archive video shows soldiers from the 41 Royal Marine Commando being experimented upon with LSD. After a short while, the exercise is called off, not least because one man has climbed a tree to feed the birds and the commander has collapsed into a heap of laughter.
But what of today’s peacetime soldiers, fighting battles against great abstractions such as capitalism, racism and climate change? Artworks, statues and heritage sites have suffered a spate of iconoclastic attacks in recent years. While the connection between throwing soup at a Van Gogh and fossil fuels is not perhaps obvious, groups such as Just Stop Oil have managed to generate several media spectacles and bag a couple of jail sentences from such activity.
In Safety Curtain Alex Margo Arden latches on to the targeted artefacts and their targeting. The show offers nine replicas of various paintings that were attacked by climate groups between 2022 and 2024, with the wounds of each assault on full display: these include Monet’s ‘Spring’, Van Gogh’s ‘Sunflowers’, Velazquez’s Rokeby Venus and three Mona Lisas with different cream-cake smears. The Venus was famously slashed in 1914 by suffragette Mary Richardson (‘I care more for justice than I do for art,’ she said at her trial), and then attacked with hammers by Just Stop Oil in 2023, leaving little bullet-like holes in the glass.
Thus the work and its ‘symbolic damage’, painted in great detail by Arden, are put on the same plane, and the activist and artist find themselves on an equal footing.
A politicisation of production is the theme of the show. In ‘Backstage Campaign’ we’re greeted with the sight of the handling crates of the Royal Academy of Arts. The question being posed is something like: ‘What about all those people and processes that work to make the art that we see?’ – with iconoclastic protestors playing the role of the hyperactive critic, perhaps.
The art here is the visual equivalent of Kraus’s comma: a channelling of rage into the smaller things of life. In a sense we should be relieved. But the lamentations of today’s protestors are put in stark contrast by the reality of war. If we forget how far the mind and body can be made to suffer, we perhaps imagine our pain is greater than it is. And we mistake which battles are worth fighting for.
The ancient art of making friends in high places
‘I get along with him well. I like him a lot,’ Donald Trump has said of Sir Keir Starmer. ‘He’s liberal, which is a bit different from me, but I think he’s a very good person and I think he’s done a very good job thus far. I may not agree with his philosophy, but I have a very good relationship with him.’ Sir Keir must be thrilled – how wonderful to be praised by the most powerful man in the world, joining Nigel Farage as teacher’s pet!
There were many Romans too who prided themselves as being amici principis, ‘friends of the emperor’. These were an inner ring of advisers, many of them immediate family, agreed to be influential; but in what way was never quite clear. The philosopher Epictetus (once a slave of Nero’s secretary) drew attention to the dangers that faced an amicus. Invited to dinner, he would fawn like a slave, fearful of making the slightest faux pas. But not invited, he felt humiliated.
For the emperor’s amici, it was that fear of losing out that kept them in line. Epictetus made the point: ‘No one loves the emperor – we love riches, a tribunate, a praetorship, a consulship. Anyone who has these things at his disposal [and especially a good trade deal for Britain] must necessarily be our master.’ But the price was a high one, with no guarantee of success. As he said: ‘You must stay up at night, run back and forth, kiss hands, wait on other people’s doors, and say and do many slavish things… like children at parties scrambling for nuts and figs.’
Greek statesman Solon (c. 590 bc) put it more trenchantly: ‘Those who had influence with monarchs were like pebbles used in calculations: for, depending on their place on the board, they could one moment represent a very large number, the next a very small one. So a monarch treats each of his advisers now as important and famous, now as valueless.’
Now turn the spotlight on to Lord Mandelson as the UK’s ambassador to Washington. Since one suspects that Trump-Mandelson might not be a match made in heaven, Epictetus’s advice would be to forget it: ‘Restore yourself to decency, to self-respect, to freedom.’
The dark heart of South Africa’s Expropriation Act
Cape Town
Andrew Kenny has narrated this article for you to listen to.
How damaging will South Africa’s Expropriation Act be? The legislation, which allows the state to seize private property without compensation, was signed late last month by President Cyril Ramaphosa. The act is consistent with the Marxist ideology of the South African Communist party, an ally of the ruling African National Congress (ANC). It’s claimed it will ‘redress the results of past racial discrimination’ and ‘undo the legacy of apartheid’ (among other platitudes). The reality, however, is that this legislation will likely do nothing to help the country’s majority black population who live in grinding poverty. There is nothing in the act to stop it instead being used by the small ruling elite to enrich themselves, just as happened in Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe.
The ANC argues that the act, like the innumerable racial laws it has passed (South Africa now has more racial laws than it did under apartheid), is to rectify the historical injustices of white rule. Politicians and the commentariat in South Africa seem to have blindly bought into this narrative. With few exceptions, the consensus is that the act is nothing to worry about and there are adequate safeguards. Anyone who believes this must not have read the details. The act gives some bland examples of when property can be seized without compensation – but it makes it very clear that it is not limited to these examples. The truth is that the act’s reach is unlimited and there are no safeguards. Any private property can be seized without compensation, provided only that it is ‘in the public interest’. What does that mean? Well, anything the ANC wants it to.
Mugabe would have similarly justified his land reforms as ‘in the public interest’ when, a little over two decades ago, he seized thousands of Zimbabwean farms and in the process took the homes and jobs of some 780,000 black workers and their families, leaving them destitute. It was only a couple of years after this that the ANC gave Mugabe a standing ovation when he visited South Africa. Indeed, judging by the ANC’s history, words and deeds, and those of their political allies – and the countries they admire, such as Zimbabwe, Russia, Venezuela and Cuba – one fears for the powers this act will give them.
Ramaphosa and his pals are sumptuously rich – they have mansions, expensive cars and large tracts of prime land. For the black masses, whom the ANC proclaims to represent, its 30-year rule has overseen utter poverty – including mass unemployment (which stands at 42 per cent) and a quarter of children so malnourished as to be at risk of permanent brain damage.
Donald Trump, having likely listened to the South African-born Elon Musk, mistakenly suggested that the intention of the act is to take property from rich whites and give it to poor blacks. Trump said that Afrikaans farmers are the main victims of ANC abuse, and there was previous talk of ‘white genocide’. This is nonsense. So, too, is Trump’s offer of refugee status for Afrikaners. But there are some ominous signs. Thousands of Afrikaans farmers and their families have been murdered since the end of apartheid. The motives are not clear, but they are certainly not only financial. Old people have been tortured; infants have been chopped to pieces. Julius Malema, the leader of Marxist opposition party Economic Freedom Fighters, chanted two years ago at a public rally: ‘Kill the farmer! Kill the Boer!’ He was met with applause. A South African court found that this chant was perfectly acceptable.
Any private property can be seized without compensation provided only that it is ‘in the public interest’
On 26 September 2018, after Trump tweeted about South African farm murders, Ramaphosa told Bloomberg: ‘Whoever gave him that information was completely wrong. There are no killings of farmers or white farmers in South Africa.’ At that time, the South African police had recorded more than 1,700 farm murders.
All of these things, especially Ramaphosa’s callous lie, might give outsiders the impression that Afrikaners specifically are under threat. Although no farms have been confiscated outright, in some areas they have been attacked by criminals (stealing livestock, cutting fences, intimidating workers), making it increasingly difficult to farm and reducing the value of the land. Eventually, the farmer will give up and try to sell the farm for whatever he can get. Now, under the Expropriation Act, the state will be able to just seize the farm for nothing.
Ramaphosa was shocked by last year’s election. Under his leadership, the ANC slumped to its worst result ever, getting only 40 per cent of the total vote (it got nearly 70 per cent in 2004). To stay in power, it had to form a coalition – or Government of National Unity (GNU) – with the liberal Democratic Alliance (DA), much to the dismay of the ‘radical’ parties (‘radical’ in the sense of Mercedes-driving Marxists and plump African traditionalists). Ramaphosa was accused of selling out to counter-revolutionary forces and felt compelled to polish his revolutionary credentials by signing three awful laws increasing the powers of the state, including this act. The DA has yet to pull out of the government but has launched a legal challenge.
In his vacuous State of the Nation address last week, Ramaphosa said: ‘We will not be bullied.’ A few days earlier, China forced him to move the Taiwanese embassy out of Pretoria. China had also bullied the ANC into refusing entry to the Dalai Lama. South Africa has been bullied by Russia and Zimbabwe. What he really meant was: ‘We will not be bullied by the West, especially America.’
South Africa, which is sympathetic towards Hamas, charged Israel with ‘genocide’ at the International Court of Justice after its retaliation for 7 October. But South Africa took no action over actual genocide in Africa – over the slaughter of about 300,000 black people in Sudan – when it had the opportunity to do so. The ANC believed, rightly until Trump’s re-election, that it could mock and condemn the West, side with enemies such as Russia and Iran and still be assured of an endless flow of foreign aid and favourable trade.
Trump has now threatened to reduce American aid to South Africa and end special trade favours. The ANC doesn’t know how to respond. Its usual tactic of blaming everything on white racists who want to preserve their privilege worked in the past. It won’t wash with Trump. The USA has already withdrawn its secretary of state from the first meeting of the G20 in South Africa, hosted by Ramaphosa. As seen with Trump’s tariff developments of recent weeks, further measures are likely to follow.
Will ‘The Seeker’ find the truth about the Covid lab leaks?
At the Royal Calcutta Turf Club, where ghosts of British nabobs look out over the racecourse, my neuroscientist wife spoke to an audience of businessmen in support of Robin Sengupta, a pioneering Newcastle neurosurgeon. He has founded a world-leading Institute of Neurosciences in Kolkata where richer patients subsidise poorer ones. After a morning meeting doctors and patients, he showed us the land where an ambitious new medical school will soon emerge from the rice paddies and crayfish farms.
At the Jaipur Literature Festival, debating innovation with the economist Shailendra Mehta, I told the audience that the job of being the world’s most innovative nation in the decades ahead is vacant and India could apply: America’s slinking behind a tariff wall, Europe’s regulating itself to death, Britain’s deindustrialising fast, Japan’s stagnating and China’s going Ming-Mao dirigiste again. As Dr Mehta reminded me, India was the world’s economic superpower, far more than China and Rome, 2,000 years ago – why not again?
Near Jodhpur in Rajasthan, our naturalist guide, Shakti, showed us a blackbuck ‘lek’, a special spot where smart black and white male antelopes with corkscrew horns gather to compete for the attention of pale does. My new book, Birds, Sex and Beauty, published next month, is mostly about the very similar lek of the black grouse in the Pennines. From blackbuck to blackcock, it’s an enigmatic way of arranging sex.
The last time I was in these parts, in 1982, I was doing a census of a rare bustard, the lesser florican. We found 69 displaying males and urged the government to preserve its grassland breeding habitat. Sadly, the bird flirts with extinction. On one occasion we also saw its much larger cousin, the Great Indian bustard, the third heaviest flying bird. This species is now down to 150 individuals in the wild. The new threat to its survival comes from the blades of wind turbines. Thus wind power may be about to directly achieve something coal, oil and gas never managed: the global extinction in the wild of an entire species. Fortunately, there are about 45 Great Indian bustard in captivity.
Unlike chaotic Kolkata, New Delhi gives the appearance of a wealthy city – its buildings, roads, trees and flowers all bright and fresh. With the expansive Lutyens-Baker layout, it beats even Washington as a successfully custom-built capital. As the great-grandson of Edwin Lutyens, I was fortunate to get a private tour of the Rashtrapati Bhavan, the presidential palace. Perhaps I am biased, but in its scale, style and extraordinary detail (who knew there were so many different ways of making geometric patterns in marble floors?), it is surely more of a masterpiece than Buckingham or Westminster Palaces. And though built in the expectation that the British Empire would endure for centuries, it has nevertheless found a place in the hearts of Indians. After considering turning it into a museum after independence, they have maintained and Indianised it skilfully as the country’s ceremonial centre.
As we arrived, the mounted presidential bodyguard was rehearsing, their maroon turbans, flag-bearing lances and khaki shirts merging East with West, just as Lutyens’s building itself does: a long neoclassical façade of columns but with Jain-temple capitals, shaded by a Mughal chuja, topped with Rajasthani chattris and dominated by a massive Buddhist stupa dome. The sole statue of a Briton that remains in the palace – facing Gandhi – is a bust of Lutyens by Reid Dick, the only copy of which looks down on me in my study as I write this.
We went to dinner with Tejbir and Rahul Singh, two grandsons of the contractor who built much of Delhi, Sir Sobha Singh. Rahul’s father, the politician and historian Khushwant Singh, once told me over lunch in Washington that the English language’s rudest word was much the same in ancient Sanskrit. (I think he made it up.) Over dinner Tejbir’s wife Malvika, the author of New Delhi: Making of a Capital, regaled us with stories of trying to keep Trevor Howard off the vodka (by watering down the bottle) while Howard and Celia Johnson were filming the Paul Scott book Staying On at her house.
On my last day in Delhi, I met ‘The Seeker’, the mysterious figure who did more than anybody to uncover the truth of how Shi Zhengli’s laboratory in Wuhan gathered bat viruses from southern Yunnan and experimented with them. Exactly how the virus leaked from that lab we still don’t know, and he outlines the three documents he needs to find next. Where richly funded journalists, scientists and spies failed, this young Indian (real name Prasenjit Ray) and a few other amateurs uncovered vital information on their own time. It’s an extraordinary story that will make a great movie one day.
Je suis Andrew Gwynne
How do you like your members of parliament? Do you prefer them to be vacuous automatons devoid of wit, humour and anything one might call emotion? Or do you actually prefer them to be people, a little like yourself? Prone to human frailties from time to time, rather than being a deracinated good Boy Scout who would be as interesting, conversationally, as a pamphlet from your local health authority trust?
This question occurred to me when I read of the sacking of the junior minister Andrew Gwynne, the Labour MP for somewhere awful called Gorton and Denton. Not just sacked, mind, but suspended from the Labour party. A similar fate befell a man I had hitherto been unaware existed – Oliver Ryan, the MP for the diverse and vibrant community we know as ‘Burnley’. A bunch of Lancashire Labour councillors have been suspended too, all for what they said to each other on a WhatsApp messaging group called ‘Trigger Me Timbers’.
The comments made by Gwynne have routinely attracted that very au courant and perhaps overused epithet ‘vile’. Gwynne has done that equally au courant thing and issued a grovelling apology, which somehow people think is more commendable than standing up for yourself and fighting your corner.
Gwynne’s remarks on that private messaging group were not what I would call ‘vile’. They were simply a few slivers of black humour regarding people who had got on his nerves. So, for example, he said of one constituent: ‘Dear resident, Fuck your bins. I’m re-elected and without your vote. Screw you. P.S. Hopefully you’ll have croaked it by the all-outs.’ He also expressed a wish that another constituent, a cyclist, would be ‘mown down’ by a lorry, made ‘sexualised’ comments about the Deputy Prime Minister (any port in a storm, I suppose) and referred to Diane Abbott as a ‘joke’, which I think we have all done on a fairly regular basis these past 30 years.
As ever, his biggest mistake was to apologise. He said: ‘I deeply regret my badly misjudged comments and apologise for any offence I’ve caused… I entirely understand the decisions the PM and the party have taken and, while very sad to have been suspended, will support them in any way I can.’ He rather lost my sympathy with that cringing, emetic outburst, but it is what everyone has to do these days so I suppose it’s hardly surprising.
Gwynne’s comments were simply a few slivers of black humour regarding people who had got on his nerves
But for anyone about to find themselves in similar trouble for having done nothing particularly wicked, here’s my tip: never apologise, but rage, rage against the dying of the light, and take as many of the bastards with you as you can manage.
I don’t believe many people really took offence at those comments made on a messaging app that was intended to be entirely private. I think, instead, that there has been a spot of opportunism at work, largely on the part of people who hate the Labour party. ‘Look – that’s what they really think of the people they represent! They even wish death upon them! Typical Labour! They are… vile.’
But the people who say that are lying to us and lying to themselves. Gwynne did not wish death upon those constituents – he was making a joke, along the lines of ‘Hey, how funny would it be if I sent this bloke the following…?’ OK, if you have never uttered a similar sentiment about a colleague or a customer or a mutual enemy, then I suppose you have the right to wallow in sanctimony and castigate Gwynne. But my guess is that pretty much all of you have done exactly that, in which case what we are seeing is double standards. Or for the truly amoral of you, an argument that the rights and wrongs do not matter one bit – when it comes to clobbering the government, everything must be weaponised, even when we know it’s a load of rubbish. Gwynne is guilty not because he made those comments, but because he is a Labour MP – and that’s an end to it. I have no time for the government either, but I still find that argument rancid. Much as I did that silly confection of demanding another general election because some people didn’t like the outcome of the original one.
There is another point to be made. That WhatsApp group was supposed to be private. In other words the various comments made were the equivalent of chatting with a mate, after work, and letting off a little steam. I think MPs of all parties should be afforded that right – and I don’t think WhatsApp messages should be sequestered and used in evidence against the people who send them, unless they have advocated criminality.
I do not wish to tug at your heartstrings too feverishly, but our MPs have, in the main, miserable lives in which they are constantly subjected to abuse and threats of violence. They have dysfunctional home lives (especially those from the north of the country) and are afforded very few opportunities to display either humour or anger, lest some idiot take offence. They are constrained in what they can say by the whipping system and the party line and of course the knowledge that even the most innocent remark is capable of being regarded as ‘vile’ by someone, and thus meriting a sacking.
They are beset by opponents from across the political divide who will use everything they possibly can against them – and, perhaps worse, even more implacable enemies from their own side. No newspaper was more outraged by Gwynne’s ‘vile’ comments than the Guardian, which noticed that the chief purpose of Trigger Me Timbers was to allow local moderate Labour politicians to take the piss out of the far left, whom the paper (in appalled tones) noted that Gwynne and his friends referred to as ‘trots’.
In short, Gwynne should not be hung out to dry for what he said in private to mates. Je suis Andrew Gwynne.
The mysterious life of John R. Bradley
Lara Prendergast has narrated this article for you to listen to.
Working at The Spectator brings you into contact with intriguing people. One who stands out is John R. Bradley. He started writing for this magazine in 2011 in the wake of the Arab Spring, having accurately predicted the Egyptian uprising three years earlier in his 2008 book Inside Egypt: The Road to Revolution in the Land of the Pharaohs.
If the West had assumed that democracy would follow the revolution, John believed otherwise, and instead suggested that Islamism would triumph across the Middle East. He quickly became an invaluable contributor to The Spectator. ‘The situation has developed almost exactly along the lines that John R. Bradley predicted,’ wrote Fraser Nelson in 2011.
John’s knowledge of the Middle East was impressive. He was fluent in Arabic and seemed prepared to write on matters others might feel were best avoided. In 2010, he published Behind the Veil of Vice: The Business and Culture of Sex in the Middle East, challenging the post-9/11 narrative that sexual repression was fuelling Islamist extremism. ‘I offer a more nuanced account than is usually presented of the social world that shapes Arabs’ sex lives,’ John wrote. ‘Rent boys are to be found everywhere in the Middle East, and homosexuality and prostitution are very much two sides of the same coin,’ he told Salon magazine in 2010. ‘Gay sex is as ubiquitous as the call to prayer, and for many men, of course, bedding a boy is a far more appealing prospect than bending over in the mosque.’
His insights into Saudi Arabia were particularly sharp. From June 2001, he had worked for the English-language daily newspaper Arab News in Saudi Arabia and was one of the few western journalists with access to the kingdom. His experience culminated in his 2005 book Saudi Arabia Exposed: Inside a Kingdom in Crisis, which offered a comprehensive look into the nation’s internal dynamics. The book is dedicated to a man called Nicolas Buchele, who had also worked at Arab News. It was well-received. The New York Times called it ‘a highly informed, temperate, and understanding account of a country’, in which he mapped ‘the regional tensions and cultural distinctions that make Saudi Arabia much more diverse and complicated than the smooth propaganda of its government would allow’. John was explicit in his criticism of the ruling elite.
That criticism came to a head in 2018, following the murder of Jamal Khashoggi on 2 October. A week later, John wrote the cover piece for The Spectator: ‘Kingdom of blood: the truth about Jamal Khashoggi and Saudi Arabia.’ In it, he wrote: ‘The Saudi dissident and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi knew he was taking a huge risk in entering the Saudi consulate in Istanbul last week to try to obtain a document certifying he had divorced his ex-wife… Would the Saudis dare to cause him harm? It turns out that the answer to that question was “You betcha”.’
He was fluent in Arabic and seemed prepared to write on matters others might feel were best avoided
John had taken over from Khashoggi as managing editor at Arab News, so knew him well. He argued that Khashoggi, a longtime member of the Muslim Brotherhood, was a political Islamist until the end. The Saudi regime, seeing the Brotherhood as its greatest existential threat, had acted decisively. His piece was among the first to blame the Saudi leadership explicitly, but he also suggested that Khashoggi was no angel.
John wrote: ‘How now to overlook what seems to be a brazen Mafia-style murder? “I don’t like hearing about it,” Donald Trump said. “Nobody knows anything about it, but there’s some pretty bad stories going around. I do not like it.” Well, there are plenty more stories where that came from, stories about a ruthless prince whose opponents have a habit of disappearing. The West has been fawning over bin Salman… The fate of Khashoggi is the latest sign of what’s really happening inside Saudi Arabia. For how much longer will our leaders look the other way?’
In early 2019, John’s email address became defunct, as did his phone number, and he seemed to go off the radar until he contacted us from two new email addresses.‘Have been bogged down with problems with my son and all was quiet on the Middle Eastern front,’ he wrote. When it was suggested somewhat in jest that we were concerned he might have ended up like Khashoggi, he wrote back: ‘They gave up on that plan about ten years ago.’
In one of John’s last few articles for The Spectator, published on 25 January 2020, he reiterated his belief that the Arab Spring had only benefited the Islamists, but his tone seemed to have softened. ‘Ongoing calls for cultural and economic sanctions over the killing of Muslim Brotherhood operative Jamal Khashoggi are an abomination… Amid widespread regional despair, bin Salman is the last great Arab hope. In his bold modernisation drive he has the support of an overwhelming majority of the Saudi population. It’s high time we gave him ours too.’ John wrote a few more times for us until May 2020. Then he went quiet again, and we heard no more.
On 27 November 2020, our deputy editor Freddy Gray and I received an unexpected email from a man in Mexico called Adolfo, who rented a house to John. He was writing to inform us that John had died. Adolfo explained that John had fallen ill in early 2020 with dengue fever. He had lost weight and, by June, had developed kidney problems. His death was recorded as a heart attack.
What had happened in those final years of John’s life? At the time we were told of his death, with the world caught up in the turmoil of the pandemic, I hesitated to probe into the affairs of a man I had only ever known by email. He had cut contact with his family and was clearly very private.
John had, however, mentioned a paranoia about the enemies he might have made. In November 2015, he emailed me: ‘Sincere apologies for troubling you yesterday out of office hours. I have been saying that the moderates are not moderates for five years and in my paranoia feared my enemies were about to pounce!’
In 2019, his phone was cut off and he went off the radar until he contacted us from two new email addresses
I have thought about John in the years since his death and the mystery that surrounds his life. Seeking clarity, I wrote to Adolfo. I also contacted Nicolas Buchele, to whom John had dedicated his book.
John arrived in Tlaquepaque, Jalisco – a small town near Guadalajara in western Mexico – sometime around 2016. Adolfo, who ran a shop selling cleaning supplies, recalled their first encounter: ‘John came in, asking if I knew of anywhere discreet to rent.’
John gave no indication as to where he had been before Mexico, although Nicolas suggested it was Medellin in Colombia. John’s Mexican visa for permanent residency was dated 24 October 2014. ‘The one good thing about my life is that I can avoid absolutely everyone, all of the time, which given my now complete lack of tolerance for absolutely everything is, I’ve decided, even preferable to the crushing loneliness it results in,’ John wrote to Nicolas in 2014. Nicolas says that at the time John was also considering changing his name by deed poll.
John lived a life of solitude in Mexico with his two dogs, Patch and Goldie. He would occasionally message Adolfo. ‘He was a good guy,’ Adolfo says. ‘He was quiet about his business, though he would sometimes mention writing for The Spectator. He told me he had been in Saudi Arabia, and I don’t know what happened, but he said he didn’t want anyone to know where he was. I guess he was quite concerned. He was very reserved, very conservative. All the doors in his house were always closed. The house itself was secure, but he also built a fence at the entrance. He was always alone.’
John was alone when he died, and it was at least a week before his body was discovered. On 8 October 2020, authorities found him locked in a bathroom. The last reported sighting of him had been in mid-September. ‘The neighbours had been complaining about the smell. The police and firefighters had to break the door down. The dogs were found in a separate room, still alive,’ Adolfo recounted.
The certificate from San Pedro crematorium confirms that John was cremated on 13 November 2020. Adolfo arranged a small funeral at a local church, attended by only a handful of people, including a couple of neighbours. ‘I know John was not religious, but I am, so I wanted to hold a ceremony for him,’ Adolfo explained.
None of John’s family could attend due to pandemic travel restrictions. British embassy officials contacted them, seeking authorisation for the cremation. Adolfo recorded a video of the ceremony for John’s family.
‘He was an immensely talented man from a humble background who had done brilliantly well’
Despite the family’s request for a post-mortem examination, none was conducted. The British embassy facilitated the paperwork, and according to Adolfo, officials took possession of John’s laptop and phone. The Foreign and Commonwealth Office confirmed it had ‘assisted the family of a British man who died in Mexico in 2020 and were in contact with local authorities’, but declined to comment on the absence of a post-mortem examination or whether some of John’s belongings were removed from the house.
Adolfo wrote to us at The Spectator because it was one of the few details John had shared. Adolfo’s son tracked down John’s family through a YouTube video, where a former schoolmate had left a comment: ‘I went to school with John – nice guy. He was always interesting as a young man, quite cool too. I know you suffered me as a young man – sorry I was so annoying.’
John’s older brother (whom Adolfo introduced me to) is Phil Bradley KC, who specialises in homicide and serious crime. Phil had made repeated efforts to contact John over the years. ‘I attempted to get in touch and never succeeded. Then, out of nowhere, I was contacted and told John had died. We were told it was a heart attack, and we just couldn’t believe it… He was about 50. I was really surprised to hear that John was in Mexico, because I thought he was based in the Middle East, though I didn’t know where.’ On reflection, Phil wonders whether John’s work may have made him enemies but adds: ‘I don’t know if that would be strong enough for someone to want to kill him. But it did strike me as a strange way for him to die.’
Despite years of separation, Phil read much of his brother’s reporting on the Middle East. ‘He was an immensely talented man from a humble background who had done brilliantly well. We were so close as kids. I just thought it would be lovely to see him again and share our successes, given how difficult things were when we were young.’ The brothers, along with three other siblings, had grown up in a council house in Lichfield, Staffordshire. Family life had been tough at times. After school, John had become estranged.
Nicolas provided more detail about John’s life thereafter. As well as working together at Arab News, John and Nicolas were fellow undergraduates at University College London. ‘John was always carrying round a huge stack of books… He had found some kind of benefactor, a middle-aged, middle-class lady. During his time at UCL, John lived in an all-male hall in Russell Square, which was said to be “haunted by homosexuals”.’ On his interest in the Middle East, Nicolas believes John was inspired by ‘a very gay tradition where all the stately queens of England in the 20th century went to Marrakech’. John moved to Oxford to undertake a PhD on Henry James but ‘threw it in in a fit of rage. He fell out with everyone.’
John’s talent did not go unnoticed, however. Karl Miller, The Spectator’s former literary editor, founder of the London Review of Books and a professor at UCL, mentioned him in his literary memoir, Dark Horses. The two met when John, as Miller put it, ‘submitted himself for a scholarship interview with the air of a man about to make a citizen’s arrest… More will be heard, I think, of the arresting John Bradley from Samuel Johnson’s Lichfield.’
As it turns out, John also played a pivotal role in encouraging Jeremy Clarke, The Spectator’s late Low Life columnist, to take up writing. In 2014, Jeremy recalled: ‘I used to sneak into English lectures at UCL. One day, an English student called John Bradley asked me to contribute to the London Review – a student literary magazine. I chose to review a handbook of ferret husbandry by the artisan hunter D. Brian Plummer… I’d never written anything other than school or college essays before, let alone had anything printed.’ John told Jeremy that a UCL professor had enjoyed his piece and wanted to meet him. ‘Don’t be intimidated by his dour Scot persona,’ John advised. ‘He’s actually quite funny.’ John arranged the meeting, and the professor turned out to be Karl Miller himself, who, like John, encouraged Jeremy to write.
Miller, in turn, had encouraged John’s own writing. In his late twenties, John wrote the preface to a collection of essays on Henry James and homoerotic desire. ‘It should be made clear at the outset that there is no intention to claim James as a “gay novelist” or to see his fiction as “gay fiction”,’ John wrote. ‘Nor is there any suggestion that James was somehow psychologically distressed about his homosexuality… he understandably did not wish to be compartmentalised.’
Similarly, I do not wish to compartmentalise John. However, elements of his life and his writing suggest that he was gay and, perhaps counterintuitively, found greater acceptance of his sexuality in the Middle and Far East. At one point, he was in a long-term relationship with a Singaporean man. In Saudi Arabia, he lived in the compound of a local Saudi man in a building that, as Nicolas puts it, ‘had the feeling of a knocking shop or where one took one’s mistresses… He had one friend, a very boring man called Samir, who would sometimes come round to his house. He liked the fact that in Saudi Arabia, there were “no women, no women”’. The revelation that John may have had a son was unexpected news for Adolfo. ‘It’s highly implausible,’ says Nicolas. ‘Perhaps he adopted a young lad, in the way that gay men sometimes do.’
John also severed communication with Nicolas. In one of their last emails from 2014, John wrote that ‘people grow to hate you in direct proportion to the accolades you receive or the wisdom you spout. That’s the one eternal universal truth’. Nicolas, much like Phil, continued to read John’s writing for The Spectator, and noticed a shift in John’s tone on the Saudi elite in his final pieces. ‘He wasn’t the kind of man who felt he needed to personally apologise, unless either he changed his mind or had other reasons… maybe they got to him.’
John also played a pivotal role in encouraging Jeremy Clarke to take up writing
There are a few details that suggest John was still looking to the future around the time of his death. In July 2020, he discussed rent payments with Adolfo: ‘Shall I pay you six months’ rent next week and we sign another one-year contract from July? That would be good for me, but if you want to wait until February (2021), that is also fine.’
He also revealed to Adolfo that he planned to go to Thailand once the dogs had died. The dogs now live with Adolfo, who has also kept John’s collection of books intact. ‘Everything else was destroyed by the authorities. The house was in a very bad way,’ explained Adolfo. John’s collection included Edward Gibbon’s The Christians and the Fall of Rome, Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, On Friendship by Michel de Montaigne, Niccolo Machiavelli’s The Prince and Friedrich Nietzsche’s Why I Am So Wise, and the first line on the cover reads: ‘I know my fate.’
Whether John was aware of the direction his own fate was taking, we may never know. The Wikipedia page about John R. Bradley gives the impression that he is still alive. It feels important to note here that he is not. We miss his contributions to The Spectator. As for his enemies, are they relieved he is no longer writing? You betcha.
Does Trump deserve the Nobel Peace Prize?
Donald Trump told reporters this week that he deserved the Nobel Peace Prize for helping to free some of the Israeli hostages in Gaza. But, he went on, ‘they’ll never give it to me’. Trump’s chances of putting on white tie and tails in Oslo have receded to a distant speck with his plan to Make Gaza Great Again – by removing the Palestinians.
This proposal may have doomed the brittle ceasefire and jeopardised further hostage releases. It has made the prospect of a deal between Saudi Arabia and Israel vanishingly small. It might also end up destabilising Jordan and Egypt. But the agent of chaos in the Oval Office is doubling down and no one, least of all Trump, knows how this will end. The greatest uncertainty of all surrounds the question of Trump’s intentions towards Iran.
Although Trump read from a script when announcing the US Gaza takeover, it did not look like much forethought had gone into the idea. Trump’s own senior staff seemed to be taken by surprise. For a few days it appeared this might be another crazy Trump idea that is quickly forgotten. Officials began a tentative walk-back, but all week Trump has continued to publicly muse about Gaza: ‘We’re going to take it, we’re going to hold it, we’re going to cherish it.’ In response to a reporter’s question – almost, it seemed, on the spur of the moment – he said Egypt and Jordan would have to take the Gaza refugees, and could lose American aid if they refused. ‘They say they’re not going to accept them. I say they will.’
King Abdullah of Jordan tells a story about when his father, King Hussein, first took him to meet an American president at the White House. In the limo on the way over,the old King did an impression of Dr Evil from the Austin Powers films and, little finger touching his mouth, proposed they demand ‘ONE MILLION DOLLARS’. No doubt King Abdullah’s mood was less jolly this week. He has to persuade Trump to keep paying $1.5 billion a year in aid. But the King can’t add to the millions of Palestinian refugees already in Jordan. It would upset the delicate balance with the tribes that keep him in power. One well-connected observer in Amman told me the pain of losing US aid would be severe but the Jordanian economy could survive. It was unthinkable for Abdullah to capitulate to Trump. He was right: this is an existential issue for the Hashemite throne.
Egypt gets $1.7 billion a year in US aid. In the classic way of Arab strongmen, Egypt’s president, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, has deflected anger about rising prices and falling wages by attacking Israel. He couldn’t now be seen to help in the ‘ethnic cleansing’ of Gaza. Nor could he accept hundreds of thousands of refugees who would include Hamas allies of the Muslim Brotherhood (overthrown by Sisi in what the US still refuses to call a coup). For Israel’s cheerleaders, there’s delicious irony in the leaders of Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia refusing to welcome Gazans to what Trump implausibly says would be ‘nice homes… where they can live a beautiful life’. But it can be tough being a US ally at the moment – ask Canada and Denmark – and so far Trump is giving friendly Arab states nothing to work with.
Trump was asked by reporters at the White House if the Saudis were demanding a Palestinian state. He replied simply, directly and untruthfully: ‘No, they’re not. No.’ The response from Riyadh was swift – issued in just 45 minutes – and icy. Mohammed bin Salman said the kingdom would continue its ‘relentless’ efforts to create an independent Palestinian state and ‘will not establish relations with Israel without that’. The foreign ministry said this was ‘non-negotiable’ and ‘not subject to compromise’. The position had been ‘previously clarified’ to US governments many times.
For a few days it appeared this might be another crazy Trump idea that is quickly forgotten
Perhaps the Saudis were irked that Trump expects them to pay to clear up the rubble in Gaza, before Israel hands over a pristine beachfront to the US. Perhaps, like the rulers of Jordan and Egypt, MBS fears the reaction of the Arab Street. Before 7 October, Saudi Arabia was getting ready to agree formal diplomatic ties with Israel; now the Saudis are reverting to the Arab nationalism of generations past. MBS may feel that with Iran and their Lebanese militia, Hezbollah, weakened by Israeli attacks, he no longer needs a deal to normalise relations. A handshake with Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, on the White House lawn is currently inconceivable. Egypt has convened an emergency summit of Arab states to oppose the Gaza ‘plan’.
I spoke to one Gazan who likes the idea of being able to leave, even if that meant never coming back. Waleed – as he asked to be called – is an anti-Hamas activist in his twenties. He posts on X in Arabic using his real name and photograph, but is afraid that openly criticising Hamas in the western media would be too dangerous. He told me that Hamas had committed ‘suicide’ with the 7 October massacre, taking the whole of Gaza with them. He is angry at Israel, too: he and his family went back to their home in northern Gaza recently to find the whole neighbourhood flattened. ‘All we saw [in northern Gaza] was destruction. It is not possible to live there, just as President Trump is saying.’
For Waleed, leaving Gaza would be a ‘hard, hard’ decision to take, but he believes his life is worth more than land. He thinks a great many other Gazans want to go too, but he also acknowledged that many would stay, whatever the golden future elsewhere promised by an American president. That being so, only a brutal forced evacuation – a war crime – could create the Gaza ‘Riviera’ that Trump imagines. The idea is a fantasy. On some level Trump knows this. In familiar fashion, he is trolling people, or as his supporters would have it, playing 4D chess, a bit of creative destruction to upset the board and reset the pieces.
Trump’s new deputy special envoy for the Middle East, Morgan Ortagus, explained this in a TV interview. The President wanted to overturn ‘50 years of war and chaos in the Middle East,’ she said. Ortagus has the big hair and glossy lips of the Fox News talking head, and ‘Miss Florida Orange Blossom’ she once was. But her path into the White House was harder than this resume would suggest. In some ways, she’s a conventional figure from the US foreign policy establishment – the same establishment that loves the foreign wars Trump says he hates.
Trump announced her appointment in a lukewarm post on his Truth Social. Ortagus had once opposed him, he said, ‘but hopefully has learned her lesson’. He went on to say that he’d given her the job because she had strong Republican support. ‘These things usually don’t work out… Let’s see what happens.’
How could a foreign policy interventionist serve so happily in the Trump White House, apart from careerism? Ortagus tweeted to Trump that ‘under your leadership, our enemies will fear us again… Iran will be in a box again’.
Trump himself told Fox News this week that Iran was very nervous (‘I think they’re scared’). He went on: ‘I would love to make a deal with them without bombing them.’ If the mullahs find this less than reassuring, they are right to be worried. A book by Peter Bergen, Trump and his Generals: the Cost of Chaos, reveals that in his first term Trump asked for ‘military options’ to attack Iran, to stop them getting a nuclear weapon. Bergen writes that Trump’s defence secretary at the time, General James Mattis – the designated grown-up in the room – ‘simply ignored’ the President’s directive.
The book has other revealing stories. Gaza is not the first population transfer Trump has proposed. During that first presidency, he reportedly said he wanted to move the ten million people of Seoul because they were ‘too close’ to North Korea. He wasn’t joking. And Trump blindsided his senior officials when he backed the Saudi blockade of Qatar, home to the largest US military base in the Middle East. According to a source for the book, Mattis – again – and also the secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, reacted to say: ‘Holy fuck. This can’t last. This is literally insane.’ That could stand as the epitaph for the Gaza plan, too.
With ideas like his Gaza ‘Riviera’, Trump is letting off fireworks in a building full of nitroglycerine
Will Trump bomb Iran now because they – allegedly – tried to kill him? The US government has charged an Afghan man with preparing to assassinate Trump during the election campaign, on orders from Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. The story was curiously under-reported, perhaps because the plot seemed a bit half-arsed, the man supposedly being given just a week to surveil and kill Trump. The alleged assassin is back in Iran now and the Iranians say the claims are ‘completely baseless’. However, Axios reports that the threat was far more serious than previously thought. It says Trump was told that Tehran had operatives in the US with surface-to-air missiles. His team were so worried that he flew on a decoy plane. (This ‘infuriated’ the staffers who were left to be sacrificed on ‘Trump Force One’.)
Trump has publicly stated that he has left orders for Iran to be ‘obliterated’ if he comes to any harm. He could simply be trying to push Iran into a new agreement not to build a nuclear bomb. Just the same, the Gaza ‘plan’ could be a provocation designed to set up negotiations that would achieve a lasting settlement in the Middle East. That really could give Trump a shot at the Nobel Peace Prize. The Arab leaders certainly hope the Gaza ‘plan’ will simply fade away, like so many of Trump’s pronouncements. But with ideas for the Middle East like his Gaza ‘Riviera’, Trump is letting off fireworks in a building full of nitroglycerine. It’s not clear who, in this administration, are the designated grown-ups in the room to stop him.
Goodbye Grenfell: what became of other notorious addresses?
Addressing the past
Angela Rayner announced that Grenfell Tower will be demolished. What happened to Britain’s other notorious addresses?
— 10 Rillington Place: scene of the murders for which Timothy Evans and John Christie were hanged in the 1950s (although many believe that Evans was innocent of the murder of his wife). The street was initially renamed Ruston Close and the house was pulled down in the 1970s. Now a memorial garden, not far from Grenfell Tower.
— Ronan Point: east London tower block which partially collapsed in 1968 after a gas explosion. Was rebuilt but demolished in 1986 after continuing safety concerns.
— 25 Cromwell Street, Gloucester: Fred and Rosemary West’s house was demolished in 1996 and turned into a memorial garden.
Baby steps
Is the pandemic affecting child development? Percentage of two- to two-and-a-half-year-olds at or above expected skill levels:
Q3 19/20 | Q3 23/24
Communication 88.2 | 86.7
Gross motor 93.7 | 93.5
Fine motor 93.6 | 93.2
Problem solving 93.6 | 91.2
Personal/social 92.7 | 91.2
All five skills 82.8 | 80.6
Source: Public Health England
Pitch battles
What do people get arrested for at football matches? Of 2,043 arrests in 23/24 season:
Public disorder 727
Violent disorder 423
Possession of class A drug 334
Alcohol offences 139
Throwing missiles 137
Possession of a pyrotechnic 113
Entering pitch 100
Criminal damage 27
Breaching ban 17
Ticket touting 14
Racist or indecent chanting 8
Possession of a weapon 4
Source: Home Office
Stripped back
What are Gaza’s vital statistics?
— Area: 139 sqm with 25-mile coastline.
— Highest point: 344ft above sea level.
— Population (2023): 2.14m, with 39% under 15 and only 3% over 65. Its median age of 19.5 makes it one of the world’s youngest countries/territories.
— GDP: $5,300 per capita on purchasing parity basis, 177th out of 222 countries and territories. 19% of GDP comes in the form of remittances from overseas.
— 22% of its energy is from solar power.
Source: CIA World Factbook
The Spectator fights back against government excess
Britons used to be able to rely on their parliament to safeguard liberty and their wallets. Those who were sent to the House of Commons came not as petitioners for a larger government and greater state expenditure but as guardians of individual freedom and defenders of private property. It was self-evident to them that those who spent their own money would always spend it more wisely than those who took others’ money and spent it to please whom they may.
During those times MPs, including even ministers, regarded restraint on executive power and tight control on public spending as unquestioned virtues, and the nation prospered. The United Kingdom was seldom better governed, more respected or faster-growing than when the great Liberal William Gladstone was – successively – chancellor and prime minister. His economic doctrine was simple: ‘All excess in the public expenditure beyond the legitimate wants of the country is not only a pecuniary waste but a great political and a great moral evil.’
A waste because bureaucracies are money- and power-aggrandising organisms which allocate resources more inefficiently the larger they grow. And a political and moral evil because the more individuals and institutions rely on the state for their income, the less initiative, enterprise and effort they display and the more they compete to outbid others in an auction of inadequacy in which their claim upon others is predicated on the injustices they can advertise. Industry is penalised, thrift punished, growth squashed. The incentives are all to divide society on the basis of whose grievances are most deserving of the salve of subsidy.
Today, Gladstone is less than a ghost. His spirit is practically extinguished. As Michael Simmons and Theodore Agnew record on pages 12-14, in unsparing detail, government is spending at a level and in a fashion which is, in every way, unsustainable. The state takes 45 per cent of the nation’s income and borrows like a gambling addict to spend more. Our level of debt requires us to pay almost twice in much on interest as we do on defence.
In those areas of government which are considered essential to national welfare – most notably the NHS – expenditure is set to rise ahead of both inflation and our currently anaemic growth rate, but with no evidence of greater productivity. However, it is not just inefficiency in the management of basic public services that burns through our national income. As we report, there are vanishingly few effective safeguards against fraud, especially in welfare spending. The approach of departments towards public procurement is at best naive, at worst criminally negligent. And billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money is directed towards projects which Jonathan Swift would be incapable of satirising and Brass Eye scriptwriters would have rejected as too implausible.
Bureaucracies are money- and power-aggrandising organisms which become more inefficient the larger they grow
The British state, to take just a few examples, pays thousands of pounds to an Irish Republican rap group whose name celebrates punishment beatings and whose lyrics celebrate drug-taking, violence and the break-up of the UK. The government also lavishes cash on diversity, equity and inclusion training for builders and has purchased Porsches for Albanian prisons, e-bikes for welfare claimants and Teslas for lighthouse keepers.
The relentless pressure to expand state spending is not restricted to the UK. Every advanced democracy has its lobby groups proclaiming that historic injustices can only be addressed with generous grant funding; its rent-seeking corporations exploiting poor procurement practices; its bureaucratic establishments intent on expanding their remit. But in the US there is a determined effort to control the appetite of the ever-expanding administrative state. Donald Trump has established the Department of Government Efficiency, given the acronym Doge in a nod to Elon Musk’s favourite crypto-currency. Under Musk’s leadership, Doge has set about highlighting government expenditure which, subject to full scrutiny, becomes impossible to defend to the public.
President Trump may have faults of character, Musk’s social media posts may not be the most restrained of interventions in public debate, and the knowing references to online culture might seem to cast Doge in the light of an adolescent troll of serious statecraft. But whatever criticisms might be directed at the pair and their project, there is no denying that the energetic unveiling of waste and uncontrolled profligacy in public spending is an undiluted good for the US taxpayer. If democracy dies in darkness, then so too does taxpayers’ money vanish if no one shines a light on where it goes.
That is why we are making available our own online tool (www.spectator.co.uk/spaff) to help readers to identify where their money goes. We want to deploy the wisdom of crowds to highlight folly in the public finances. We will campaign for greater transparency, efficiency and economy in how your money is spent. This country will only enjoy growth, preserve liberty and enable human flourishing if we bind the leviathan tighter. And unleash our inner Gladstone.
How do we stop Britain’s bureaucratic bloat? Michael Simmons and Lord Agnew joined the latest Edition podcast to discuss:
Portrait of the week: Andrew Gwynne sacked, Trump saves Prince Harry and a £30m refund over moths
Home
Andrew Gwynne was sacked as a health minister and suspended from the Labour party for making jokes about a constituent’s hoped-for death, and about Diane Abbott and Angela Rayner. Oliver Ryan, a member of the WhatsApp group where the jokes were shared, had the Labour whip removed and 11 councillors were suspended from the party. Asked about 16,913 of 28,564 medics registering to practise medicine in Britain last year having qualified abroad, Wes Streeting, the Health Secretary, said there was ‘no doubt’ that ‘the NHS has become too reliant’ on immigration. The government issued guidance saying that anyone who enters Britain by means of a dangerous journey will normally be refused citizenship. In the week to 10 February, 210 migrants arrived in small boats. Grenfell Tower, ruined by a fire in 2017 that killed 72 people, will be demolished, the government said.
Ed Miliband, the Energy Security and Net Zero Secretary, when asked about the government’s support for a third runway at Heathrow, as announced by Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, said: ‘I am part of the government and I abide by collective responsibility.’ But he added: ‘We have carbon budgets in which any of those plans have to sit.’ The Bank of England reduced interest rates from 4.75 to 4.5 per cent but also halved its growth forecast for 2025 to just 0.75 per cent, with inflation forecast to rise to 3.75 per cent. The bank’s Governor, Andrew Bailey, said: ‘We have seen an increase in public-sector employment. We haven’t seen a commensurate increase in measured public-sector output.’
Kim Leadbeater MP, who sponsored the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, suggested that each killing would not have to be approved by a High Court judge after all, but by some panel appointed by a Voluntary Assisted Dying Commission. The High Court ruled that the Metropolitan Police could not dismiss officers simply by removing their vetting clearance, which denied them a chance to defend themselves. Hundreds of tractors blocked Whitehall as farmers protested against changes to inheritance tax. A car crashed from a bridge on to two tracks of railway in Salford, blocking the line between Liverpool Lime Street and Manchester Piccadilly. The High Court ruled that a couple who bought a house in Ladbroke Grove, west London, for £32.5 million can have almost all of their money back because it was infested with moths.
Abroad
Benjamin Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel, issued a statement saying: ‘If Hamas does not return our hostages by Saturday noon – the ceasefire will be terminated, and the IDF will return to intense fighting.’ He was taking a cue from President Donald Trump of the United States, who had said he thought the ceasefire should end if the hostages were not returned by 15 February. After 21 hostages had been released under the ceasefire, Hamas had said it was postponing the next scheduled release. The last three released had been shockingly emaciated. Mr Trump had earlier said that ‘the Gaza Strip would be turned over to the United States by Israel at the conclusion of fighting’.
Mr Trump ordered a 25 per cent tariff on all imports of steel and aluminium. He signed an executive order imposing sanctions on individuals who assist International Criminal Court investigations of American citizens or allies. He signed regulations against transgender women competing in women’s sports. Asked if he would have the Duke of Sussex deported, he said: ‘I’ll leave him alone. He’s got enough problems with his wife. She’s terrible.’ Lord Mandelson presented his credentials as the new British ambassador to Washington and said that his past criticisms of Mr Trump were ‘ill-judged and wrong’. A consortium led by Elon Musk offered $97.4 billion for OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT. Neither the United States nor Britain signed an international agreement on artificial intelligence at a Paris summit.
Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania disconnected their electricity networks from the Russian power grid; Russia’s exclave of Kaliningrad was left cut off from the main Russian grid. President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said that the Russian army had ‘brought back North Korean soldiers’ to combat in Kursk. In Dhaka, Bangladesh, protestors set fire to the former family home of Sheikh Hasina, the deposed prime minister. A Bryan Adams concert in Perth, Australia, was cancelled because a fatberg had blocked a main sewer. CSH
How to stop the government splurging our cash
All too often, the Prime Minister recently lamented, Britain’s public servants are happy languishing in the ‘tepid bath of managed decline’. There is, however, one area in which Britain’s public servants are dynamic, innovative and world–leading: at spaffing gazillions of pounds of taxpayers’ money on wasteful projects which are variously inane, insane and indefensible.
The British state makes the average drunken sailor look like a model of frugality. When William Gladstone was Chancellor of the Exchequer, he earned notoriety for his pursuit of ‘candle end’ economies – no saving was too trivial if he could leave money to ‘fructify in the pockets of the people’. His contemporary equivalents in the Treasury seem to delight in emptying those same pockets and taking lit torches to taxpayers’ cash as though it were so much kindling.
Of course, all modern states are afflicted by bureaucratic bloat to some extent. But in the US, the Donald Trump administration has set about a modern Gladstonian revolution by going line by line through government expenditure and identifying scope for savings. The initiative, named the Department of Government Efficiency (Doge), is led by Elon Musk. ‘Doge’ is a play on an internet meme, the cryptocurrency Dogecoin. But while the name may sound like trolling, the intention is deadly serious. Musk is taking the same remorseless approach to cutting out waste that he did at Tesla, SpaceX and, latterly, Twitter/X, where he got rid of four-fifths of the staff. His zero-tolerance campaign has already identified countless examples of unnecessary spending – especially in the field of foreign aid.
Inspired by his example, we at The Spectator are launching our own war on wasteful spending. We’ve established a search engine to help Spectator readers join us in hunting down areas that are in need of the axe. Where the US has Doge, we can have the Spectator Project Against Frivolous Funding (Spaff). Our online database allows readers to browse the wastelands of government procurement contracts, credit card splurges and laughable research grants. Spoiler alert: there’s no shortage of material.
Take the foreign aid budget, currently standing at more than £13 billion, and often benefiting parts of the world richer than many UK regions. Our Overseas Development Assistance (ODA) seems focused on the raising of taxes by other countries. Projects include £21.5 million to transform Ethiopia’s tax system, £26 million to ‘build tax capacity’ in the developing world, and £23 million to ‘improve financial management’ in Rwanda.
We also fund projects to solve problems in the third world that we can’t handle ourselves. When The Spectator highlighted how hopeless Britain is at counting its own population, some called for ID cards and digital verification. It turns out that we’re already spending hundreds of millions of pounds building such systems in Malawi, Bosnia and 30 other countries, because as what was then DfID put it: ‘proving one’s identity is essential to accessing core services’.
Back home, our government likes to spend money on the arts. The Arts Council (total budget: £446 million) dishes out grants to support ‘the arts, museums and libraries in the UK’. Its funding database includes £30,000 to a ‘movement lecturer’ so she could put on Miss Brexit, a musical about out-of-work migrant actors; £650,000 to the ‘festival of thrift’; and £34,000 to a ‘socially engaged practitioner’ tomake a film in response to her anger about another producer being awarded an MBE. It also gave £90,000 to a group that aims to ‘decolonise’ pole dancing. Losing the will to fight, the government recently dropped its defence against Kneecap, a Belfast-based Republican rap group, which had had its £14,000 art grant blocked.
The Arts Council dished out a grant of £90,000 to a group that aims to ‘decolonise’ pole dancing
Government departments waste millions in uncontrolled day-to-day spending too. Analyse the Cabinet Office’s procurement card spend and you find a £136,000 LinkedIn subscription and millions in rent payments to the hot-desking company WeWork. Meanwhile, the Department for Education bought a hard drive for £524 for an ‘Ethnography film’ (there are 747 options on Amazon for less than £100) and has spent thousands on ChatGPT subscriptions. Some citizens benefit though: the Department for Work and Pensions bought one Universal Credit claimant a £1,500 e-bike after he persuaded his MP it would help him find self-employment, and job centre staff bought a laptop for a ‘neurodiverse’ man who wanted to be a games designer. Last March His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, presumably not trusting their own IT team, bought a £1,000 subscription to the website haveibeenpwned.com, which tells you if your email addresses have been found in data breaches. Dig into Home Office spending and you find a trip to an escape room in Kent for Border Force staff and bus tickets for illegal migrants to make sure they can report to police stations while on immigration bail.
The UK government’s ‘commitment to transparency’ reveals these spending sprees through procurement card records – though they often leave much to the imagination. Some of them are revealingly descriptive– the MP and the e-bike or the autistic games designer – but other civil servants simply omit all detail. For instance, another look at the last month’s DWP procurement card spend reveals an £859 payment to John Lewis, £4,758 of payments to Screwfix and a grand spent at Argos, all with no explanation given in the ‘transparency data’. Some spending records accidentally include a ‘comments (not to be published)’ column revealing that the rationale behind each spend is being deliberately hidden.
There seems no part of the state that isn’t beset with inefficiencies and wasteful spending. Local councils, not to be outdone, have taken creative expenditure to new levels. Leaving aside bus tickets for those who are about to be deported, some authorities are using grant cash on driving lessons and theory tests for refugees. Croydon council spent £7,000 on DJ lessons, while others have splashed out on games consoles and football stadium tours to keep asylum seekers occupied. What’s more, upcoming analysis from the TaxPayers’ Alliance, seen by The Spectator, reveals that councils across the UK have wasted more than £1.7 million on cancelled events since 2020: 624 events have been cancelled, at an average cost of £2,821 each. Barnsley council – which has a £25 million overspend – spent £9,000 preparing for a Barnsley FC promotion party. The team lost the playoffs.
While local councils do their best to waste taxpayers’ cash, the private sector is raking it in through bloated government contracts. The government’s contracts finder is another gold mine. Search through this database of procurement opportunities and you’ll discover the DCMS has just spent more than £150,000 subscribing to LinkedIn. The Foreign Office paid half a million pounds to buy 15 electric Porsches to be ‘donated to Albanian prisons’ by the embassy in Tirana, while Trinity House (the official lighthouse authority) bought four of Elon Musk’s Teslas in December – though electric cars are not known for their seafaring capabilities. Meanwhile, the Construction Industry Training Board – funded by a tax on construction companies and managed by the Department for Education – has just paid £857,000 for a company to deliver diversity, equality and inclusion (DEI) training for builders.
The Cabinet Office has spent millions in rent payments to the hot-desking company WeWork
DEI has become a black hole for public money. Research by Conservative Way Forward reveals that £427 million is spent every year employing 10,000 people in DEI roles across the public sector, on an average salary of £42,000 per annum. DEI training is taking up one million working days every single year, at a cost of £150 million. The Environment Department, meanwhile, has contributed £3.6 million to foreign aid spending on a project called ‘Championing Inclusivity in Plastic Pollution’, to ensure that negotiations for an international agreement on plastic waste are suitably ‘inclusive’.
There are staggering wastes of money as a result of human error too. In the past five years, the DWP managed to pay more than half a billion pounds in state pension and pension credit payments to dead people.
Another rich source of frivolous funding is UK Research and Innovation, funded by the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology. The department funds many important studies and research projects that no taxpayer would argue with. Yet there’s also a fair amount of spending that seems frankly ludicrous. The Birmingham School of Media successfully applied for £841,830 of funding up to 2027 to enable ‘The Europe that Gay Porn Built, 1945-2000’, to answer the question of how ‘erotic citizenship echoes or complicates narratives of cosmopolitanism, human rights, equality, social justice, and pluralism’. Leeds University managed to wangle half a million pounds from UKRI to study ‘pregnant men’, Northumbria University secured £186,000 of funding for their project ‘Glitching Cisgenderism’; while Royal Holloway got funding to examine whether ‘screened depictions of love between robots and humans legitimately contribute to debates regarding the socioethical implications of human-robot interactions’.
Public inquiries generate their fair share of questionable costs too. The Covid Inquiry (£150,000 per day) has so far shelled out £13 million on the ‘Every Story Matters’ project, which asks everyone in the country to submit their ‘Covid story’. It has spent £6.9 million on communications, private polling and £75,000 on ‘commemorative’ artworks.
Taxpayer-funded quangos and NGOs have become sprawling contradictions that often undermine the government which sustains them. These arms-length bodies spent £33 billion last year, with 176 employees who earn more than Keir Starmer, according to the Telegraph. Some of the charities and organisations receiving public funds openly oppose government policies. Refugee Action, which received £18 million, condemned the Rwanda asylum plan as ‘racist at its core’. The Refugee Council, which called the same policy ‘cruel and unworkable’, was granted £27 million. Meanwhile, Stonewall – which has criticised nearly every government initiative on gender policy – has received millions from public bodies over the past five years.
As is so often the case, things are even worse north of the border. Creative Scotland dished out £110,000 for a ‘hardcore sex-show’ to be staged in a ‘sex cave’ starring ‘leather-clad Daddies’. During Holyrood’s inquiry into Alex Salmond, £55,000 of taxpayer cash was spent on training civil servant witnesses. And over a three-year period Scottish government officials managed to rack up £14 million of credit card spending including on yoga classes, a driving theory test and a VIP airport service for the then first minister Nicola Sturgeon and her staff, which aimed to treat them ‘like royalty’. Smaller transactions incurred by the SNP government included a ‘home disco’ bought from eBay and six copies of Sturgeon’s book Women Hold Up Half the Sky.
Across the UK, healthcare is staggeringly inefficient. In the roughly ten minutes it will take you to read this article, our NHS will have spent around £4 million; every day it spends £500 million. Despite health service productivity being 19 per cent lower than at its pre-pandemic level, as the ONS revealed this week, the NHS is still advertising DEI roles on salaries of up to £123,000 a year at a total cost of nearly £14 million. Right now a search for ‘inclusion’ on the NHS jobs site yields 2,484 results, while typing in ‘equality’ returns nearly 3,000 postings. Between 2020 and 2023 more than £3 million was spent replacing nearly 7,000 iPads lost by ambulance staff.
Private contractors on government projects speak of hundreds of thousands being spent on a single report for the MoD and a lax ‘here’s the money, do what you want’ attitude with little to no oversight on value for money once contracts are awarded. Insiders express frustration at procurement rules that force them to buy overpriced equipment from pre-approved suppliers instead of buying items locally. Meanwhile, one Whitehall official explains how new spending descriptions like ‘surge outsourcing’ and ‘professional services’ may already be being used to bypass controls on consultancy fees brought in at the end of last year.
The National Audit Office is perhaps the only arm of the British state putting up a fight. Gareth Davies, Britain’s auditor general, said last week that the country’s public services are ‘too expensive and not good enough’. That’s a bit of an understatement. In the past few years, his organisation has found that £3.2 billion was wasted on faulty defence vehicles, £4.9 billion was lost to Covid loan fraud and £8 billion blown on ineffective NHS IT upgrades. The NAO is meant to work a bit like Doge. It makes important findings, but these are too infrequent to tackle the scale of the state’s wasteful spending.
Taxpayers are left footing the bill for spending that ranges from the baffling to the downright absurd
It’s not just that we waste money; it’s also unfortunately the case that the return on what we spend is shrinking fast. The Bank of England dropped a bombshell last week, revealing that they’d overestimated Britain’s already weak productivity. Since March, the number of workers has grown by 450,000, but there has been no economic growth, forcing the Bank to slash its productivity growth estimate by two-thirds.
The Bank blames the growing state, pointing out that an increasing share of Britain’s jobs are now in areas where the government is the dominant employer: education, health and public administration. In the past five years, employment in these industries has soared by almost a million, but productivity per worker has fallen. In other words, the more people the state hires, the worse it gets at doing anything. And because public-sector employment keeps expanding, the drag on overall productivity grows with it.
The largest spending increases recently have been in health and welfare. Yet NHS productivity remains below pre-Covid levels, because record public spending is keeping interest rates higher for longer, according to the Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey. One economic estimate suggests that an efficient and trimmed-down British state could produce the same level of output for its citizens for £200 billion less each year. Enough to reinstate the winter fuel allowance 154 times over, build three HS2s or pay off a tenth of the national debt.
So the problem isn’t only profligacy – it’s stupidity. Britain’s bloated public economy is no longer just a concern for auditors and thinktank wonks. Public services are groaning under their own inefficiencies, growth has flatlined, and taxpayers are left footing the bill for spending that ranges from the baffling to the downright absurd. Their pounds are stretched thinner than ever, often to fund projects that defy logic and value. Reform isn’t a polite idea any more – it’s a national necessity. Our nation can no longer afford to spaff it all away.
How do we stop Britain’s bureaucratic bloat? Michael Simmons and Lord Agnew joined the latest Edition podcast to discuss:
My impossible task as ‘minister for efficiency’
I am delighted that The Spectator is launching a campaign to highlight the grotesque levels of financial waste in government. Of course public sectors worldwide have always defaulted towards profligacy – but we are in different territory now.
Our GDP per capita is declining: through immigration, the population is growing faster than the real economy is growing. We have no more capacity to borrow – we are already paying 25 per cent more than the Italian government for ten-year debt. Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves love to talk bullishly about growth, but they don’t understand that taxing the productive sector more and more and discouraging employment through onerous new regulations will stifle the economy.
That leaves public waste – £200 billion of unproductive spending. Britain’s wealth is leaking away as we borrow yet more money to then waste it.
In 2020 I was given the Pythonesque title of ‘minister for efficiency and transformation’. It was like turning up to a blazing building with a seaside bucket. On my first day in office, I met the then Permanent Secretary to the Treasury. He told me that his most difficult problem was finding me an office. (He never did.) That set the tone of the Treasury’s approach to confronting waste.
I did manage to cancel 33 government property leases in London, which saved about £1 billion (only £199 billion to go!). But the biggest termination of all, signed and sealed by two cabinet ministers and myself, was overturned after I left (102 Petty France, overlooking St James’s Park). Why? Simply because the civil servants didn’t want to lose the lovely view.
Last week the government answered a written parliamentary question on the amount of overpayments made through Universal Credit, which amounts to nearly £6 billion a year. And yet at the same time they have introduced a controversial death tax on farmers which might generate a tenth of that. The truth is, it is much easier for the administrative machine to slam in a new tax than do the difficult work of running the state more effectively. Another ministerial role I held was countering fraud in government. I discovered that during the Covid pandemic, the Department for Work and Pensions was allowing new Universal Credit claimants on to the system without checking how many children they had or how much rent they paid – the two biggest determinants in the amount of benefits received and the two conditions most easily lied about. In 2020, when I tried to tackle that department, I was told that not until 2027, at the earliest, would they have reorganised themselves.
To run the DWP properly would involve training thousands of claims-processing clerks, investing in computer analytics and – crucially – removing those who are consistently incompetent. The civil service has no appetite for this. When did you last hear of a senior civil servant being sacked? The last one I recall was a permanent secretary to the Treasury in 2022 (coincidentally the one I referred to above), who was given the boot by Liz Truss. His golden goodbye consisted of a £457,000 payoff and being awarded a Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath, one of the highest honours available.
What people don’t understand is that the civil service only answers to itself. I could no more sack anyone than aquaplane across the Thames. If I ordered a recruitment freeze, civil servants hired contractors. And if I put a stop to that, I was told the whole of government IT would collapse. I asked how much was spent on training civil servants. I asked the question once a month for 18 months. The only answer they could give me – after 18 requests – was ‘it’s somewhere between £150 million and £500 million a year. We don’t really know more precisely than that and we don’t know what it’s spent on’.
Do we need a British Doge? Damn right we do. So well done to The Spectator. It is only when taxpayers get angry that slothful governments will act.
How do we stop Britain’s bureaucratic bloat? Michael Simmons and Lord Agnew joined the latest Edition podcast to discuss:
Luck of the draw
‘Praggnanandhaa rallied to win the playoff’ is what I wrote last week, as though there were nothing more to say. That came after a humdinger of a final round at the Tata Steel Masters in Wijk aan Zee, in which ‘Pragg’ and world champion Gukesh Dommaraju both lost their final games but nevertheless shared first place with 8.5/13. That magnificent tragedy would have been a fitting conclusion to the tournament, but the modern way is to favour a playoff which determines a single winner. Fans want blood and sponsors want gold, so the thinking goes.
A few weeks ago, Magnus Carlsen and Ian Nepomniachtchi were widely pilloried when they agreed (with the organiser’s blessing) to split the title at the World Blitz Championship. The critics had a point, of course, and playing a few more blitz games is evidently a fitting way to determine the winner of a blitz tournament.
But the situation in Wijk aan Zee is different. The tournament upholds the tradition of classical chess, in which each day’s play is measured in hours and the slow burn of the tournament lasts for more than a fortnight. Settling the whole thing over a couple of blitz games makes about as much sense as playing rock-paper-scissors.
Of course, even silliness can be exciting. Four years ago, I wrote that the blitz playoff at the end of Tata Steel Masters, in which Jorden Van Foreest defeated Anish Giri, was ‘as riveting as it was vulgar’. But this year’s playoff struck me as more of a turn-off.
The first blitz game was well contested, until Praggnanandhaa’s clock ran down to his final second and the game was decided by a bad blunder. (See the puzzle below.) He got revenge in the second, a decent strategical game, but Gukesh offered little resistance. From there it was on to sudden death games, in which Black had time odds (three minutes against 2.5 minutes, with a two-second increment at each move), but a win for either side would be decisive. The position they reached after 27 moves is shown in this diagram.
R. Praggnanandhaa–G. Dommaraju
Tata Steel Masters, Wijk aan Zee 2025
With a clean extra pawn, a loss for Gukesh looked inconceivable. Ten moves later his extra pawn was gone, but the endgame was dead equal. Fifteen moves after that, with both players under ten seconds, he fluffed it and lost. I mean no insult to the players, who must have been exhausted, but this was awful to watch, and anticlimactic at that. I’ve played better games of chess while sitting on a bus.
The German grandmaster Dr Robert Hübner died in January at the age of 76. He was a brilliant polyglot and academic papyrologist, as well as a meticulous analyst of chess games, and I remember the pleasure of discussing a game we played 20 years ago. At his peak in 1980, he ranked third in the world. In 1983, he suffered the disappointment of losing a match to Vasily Smyslov in the quarter-final of the Candidates’ matches for the world championship. The match itself was tied, but in that context it was essential to determine who would progress to the next stage of the knockout. The winner was decided by a spin of the roulette wheel, and Hübner lost. It was monstrously arbitrary, but when I see tiebreaks play out as they did in Wijk aan Zee, I wonder – is this really what we want instead?
No. 837
White to play. Gukesh-Praggnanandhaa, Tata Steel Masters tiebreak, 2025. Black’s last move, 35…Qd3-d6 was a blunder. Which move did Gukesh play to exploit it? Email answers to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 17 February. There is a prize of a £20 John Lewis voucher for the first correct answer out of a hat. Please include a postal address.
Last week’s solution 1…Rxf4+ 2 Kxf4 stalemate. Not 1…Rd5+ 2 Be5 Rb5 3 Ra4+! Kh3 4 Ra2 and White wins.
Last week’s winner Alex Newman, Shalford, Surrey
Spectator Competition: The big move
Competition 3386 invited you to submit poems about the domestic arrangements at the White House. The idea was to inspire some visions of what goes on behind the official scenes – oh to be a fly on the East Wing wall. MAGA hats off to Frank McDonald, Elizabeth Kay, Daniel Pukkila, Nicholas Lee, Tom Adam, Paul Freeman and others, and Basil Ransome-Davies’s final verse seems apt:
It’s hard to read a mind in disrepair
Or one as shiny and airtight as chrome:
Two four-year tenants, signally aware
That an official house is not a home.
The £25 vouchers go to the winners below.
Clean, baby, clean. That place is full of germs
and foreign little microbe-alien things.
I want it pure for all my future terms,
bright as the hope my MAGA-presence brings.
Bleach, baby, bleach. Destroy the nasty stains,
the dirty dirt, their legacy of lies.
They let in Covid – make sure none remains.
Kill anything that looks they might be spies.
Scour, baby, scour. Banish the vermin, rats.
Helluva job but worth the hands-on slog.
Get rid of every trace of Democrats.
Those Bidens! Christ! They even had a dog!
Scrub, baby, scrub – down on your knees for God.
Make sure your Marigolds are good and tight.
Flush every non-American off our sod,
Let’s get the White House super-MAGA white.
D.A. Prince
’Tis the night before Donald, and through the White House
Security staff prowl and gun down a mouse,
Melania’s wardrobe is laid out with care,
With crates of fake tan and a toupee of hair,
New flags deck the office: ‘America First’,
The orders of Biden rescinded, reversed,
Republican colours hang over the beds,
For visions of MAGA-land dance in their heads,
Golf clubs in the hallway and photos of cronies,
Bezos and Zuckerberg, flunkeys and phonies,
Fastness and fortress, the warning signs spread,
For unwanted guests are the things they most dread,
The welcome mat flipped and the armoured guards standing,
In case of those terrible Sussexes landing,
They’ve tripwired the front door and muffled the bell,
For even the Trumps find them scary as hell.
Janine Beacham
The golden age starts now, today!
It’s time to sweep the past away
So let’s begin by being bold
And overpaint the White House gold.
Let’s ditch the heat pumps, drill for oil
And heat the rooms until they boil.
We’ll set some sumptuous rooms aside
For Trump’s canoodles with his bride
And keep one plain and bare for guests
Like foreign folk whom Trump detests.
Let’s change Joe Biden’s favourite busts
For those of wealthy men Trump trusts
And make the White House fit for one
Whose golden age has just begun,
Who, saved by God from being slain,
Will make his country great again!
Alan Millard
The Tyrant and his Lady
Will dine apart tonight.
He will not stand her silence
Nor she admit his might –
Each spouse loathing the other
To blot their common plight.
The Tyrant and his Lady
To separate wings withdrawn,
Attending to their banquets
Furious and forlorn,
Look up and gaze with longing
Upon the White House lawn.
The Tyrant and his Lady
Retire to sleep alone.
Dreaming, she finds a freedom
Awake, he craves a throne.
Adrian Fry
In parades Donald, so sure that he’s clever,
And Melania too, enigmatic as ever.
Here come the crackpots, with all the authority
Of an unquestioned and stonking majority,
And Donald is dancing!
Pardoned the Jan the 6th jiggery-pokery –
Any objections are labelled as wokery.
Former foes now are polite and gemütlich;
Ambassador Mandelson’s coming to bootlick,
And Donald is dancing!
Executive orders are flung like confetti;
Gordian red-tape is sliced by machete;
Democrat voters are in deep depression
While Barron is being lined up for succession,
And Donald is dancing!
George Simmers
In my bestseller book it say (so they tell me)
That self-care most important so I eat healthy,
Spinach, kale, flotus seed smoothies, not American junk
But my husband eat garbage, breath smell like a skunk,
Is why I wear big hat, big brim, so he not kiss me,
I not dumb, have high IQ, speak six language fluidly,
Slovakian, Slovenian, Masivstashian
Kashczechin, Morblingian, Serbo-Kardashian.
People say I distant person, enematic, unscrutable
Is because my husband he rich but very unsuitable,
He say we have beautiful relationship, is fake news,
He make me ill, baby, ill and so I refuse
To go to White House though he say we stay there forever
And he call it Trump House, bad idea, very unclever,
So I stay in New York with my up-growing son
And my enema will be even bigger one.
Sue Pickard
No. 3389: Surreal estate
You are invited to submit an estate agent’s blurb advertising a luxury property development on Mars (150 words max). Please email entries to competition@spectator.co.uk by 26 February. Please note that Comp. 3388, ‘Stockpiling’, asked for a poem and should have requested 16 lines, not 150 words.
2690: Resignation
A quotation (in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations) runs clockwise around the perimeter of the grid, beginning with the last letter of 20. The apostrophe has to be included where it appears. Five unclued lights are of a kind; one is directly linked to the quotation, the others indirectly.
Across
9 Dangerous atmosphere in outskirts of Hackney (5)
10 Criticise extremely burdensome tariff (6)
11 Careless ironworker losing wok by mistake (2,5)
13 Auntie putting end of thumb on buzzer (4)
15 Idiot and old spies regularly billed as ‘potentially connected’ (10)
16 Reportedly joined model, 33, in bath? (8)
20 Footballing great from Lazio once collared by detective (7)
21 Hard work exhausted industrious Native Americans (5)
26 Start to put axes in box (3)
30 Authorisation of e.g. standing order (3-2)
32 Thief in cathedral grubbing about (7)
33 Dismal English music genre (5)
34 I’m rated ‘fantastic’ as hotel manager (6,2)
35 Enthusiastically start distributing inoculant around hospital (6,4)
37 Stimulant leaves couple of codgers agitated at first (4)
38 Secure information about drying hay (7)
39 Convert put to death in church (6)
40 ‘Goodbye’, said advisor, oddly dismissed (5)
Down
2 Ex-PM ignoring that US singer (4)
3 Rockets unfortunately scaring pet (10)
4 Dull experts are initially in charge (7)
5 Tsarinas desperate for skilled workers (8)
6 Old malaria drug consumed by Google’s co-founder (7)
8 Blue diamonds concealed by Jones the Architect (6)
12 Quantity of mescal affects part of inner ear (5)
14 Antelope dash over middle of meadows (5)
17 Musicians briefly run Post Office (3)
18 Old-fashioned broadcaster acting as mediator (5,5)
22 Last of lackadaisical dons perking up and marrying (8)
24 Puny half-cut Asian making Indian scoff (5)
28 Naked heathen military commander (3)
29 Iodine and deuterium found in common compound (7)
31 Appeal for help interrupted by total losers (6)
34 One’s upset about Slough (4)
36 Communist cobblers holding up introduction of technology (4)
Download a printable version here.
A first prize of a £30 John Lewis voucher and two runners-up prizes of £20 vouchers for the first correct solutions opened on 3 March. Please scan or photograph entries and email them (including the crossword number in the subject field) to crosswords@spectator.co.uk, or post to: Crossword 2690, The Spectator, 22 Old Queen Street, London SW1H 9HP.
2687: Up in arms – solution
The unclued lights are terms in heraldry.
First prize A.J. Mott, Haslemere, Surrey
Runners-up Edward Hossack, London SW17; Elizabeth Feinberg, Rancho Mirage, CA
The magic of early radio days
Ysenda Maxtone-Graham has narrated this article for you to listen to.
‘Is it necessary to have the window open when listening to the new device?’ asked Edith Davidson, the wife of the Archbishop of Canterbury, in 1923, referring to the latest fashionable contraption, the wireless. We might laugh – but it does take time for the older generation to catch up with new technology. To this day I instinctively roll down my car window (unnecessarily, I’m pretty sure) to point my phone towards the sensor that will grant me access to my local club.
In her joyous, richly illustrated book about the early years of radio from the listeners’ point of view, the BBC radio producer Beaty Rubens takes us inside the British home. The period covers wireless’s inception in 1896, with the exciting Electrophone (its advertisement showed ‘Pulpit – politics – drama – general news – opera’ all going into a Victorian housewife’s ear via headphones), to the mass audiences of 1939. By that time, loudspeakers had replaced headphones and listener numbers had grown from less than 150,000 in 1922 to 34 million.
For anyone curious about how British families lived in the first half of the 20th century, the book is full of gems. There’s a glorious photograph of a cantankerous old man, born in about 1850, with headphones clamped round his craggy head as he listens to bulletins about George V’s approaching death in 1936. The inherent comedy of the British being dragged into their own century is a rich vein.
The enchantment on the faces of a gaggle of girls listening to The Children’s Hour in 1923 is an antidote to the frowning Victorian. Radio was glamorous and exciting. Rubens’s parents had a cloth cover for their weekly Radio Times, hand-embroidered with a dainty image of a cottage at the end of a garden path. Such was the centrality to family life of the wireless and the Radio Times (trumpeted in its first editorial in 1923 as ‘the Bradshaw of broadcasting’), dictating how afternoons and evenings would be spent.
Not that, at first, a great many could listen. In the 1920s, a top-end wireless cost the annual salary of a male schoolteacher. And it needed an outside aerial. In Warrington, wires were strung along back alleyways, propped up with washing-line poles and brooms. But then, as the first Radio Times asked, ‘What are the Wild Waves Saying?’ Often listeners had no idea, because the noise that came out sounded like the pounding of the sea. It was hard to tell whether you were hearing a bassoon solo or, as one person put it, ‘an insurrection in Hell’. There was also the problem of ‘oscillation’ – a strange, high-pitched howling. Rubens tells us: ‘A single owner could cause oscillation to neighbours in a 30-mile radius simply by incorrectly tuning their own homemade device.’
In the 1920s, a top-end wireless cost the annual salary of a male schoolteacher
Yet through the crackle, if you were lucky, magic came. Imagine the moment when the British premiere of Gershwin’s ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ wafted into your parlour. In the course of her investigations, Rubens found a treasure trove in a 1936 survey of listener habits and reactions conducted in the Barton Hill area of Bristol by two women, Winifred Gill and Hilda Jennings. A Mrs Pugley said she’d attended her first concert because of what she’d heard on the wireless. It was the Berlin Philharmonic, and ‘newspaper boys were there, with bags of papers on their shoulders, in the cheapest seats’. Like her, those boys had been introduced to classical music through the wireless. The BBC founder Lord Reith’s philosophy was: ‘It is better to over-estimate the mentality of the public than to underestimate it.’
Did the wireless bring liberation or a new kind of tyranny to the British housewife? Single women and widows reported feeling less lonely, entertained by improving programmes of music, literature and talks. A Mrs Privett said: ‘I bring the potatoes to the table to peel, to listen to the services [the religious programmes broadcast daily]. I couldn’t hear them from the sink.’ Another was pleased to be taught how to pronounce words: ‘I notice how they say it on the radio, and I judge people accordingly.’
But husbands had a way of retaining control. Many demanded total silence. One wife said: ‘You couldn’t even peel the potatoes, because he used to say he could hear the droppings in the sink above what was coming through the headphones.’ A grocer, Mr James, said: ‘I’m gifted, if you can call it gifted, with a dominant personality, and wherever I am, if I want to listen, everyone has to be quiet.’ Of his news addiction, he declared: ‘I wouldn’t miss the news. I’ve even neglected the bacon machine for the news.’
There was a mismatch between how producers and presenters imagined the public lived and how they did live. ‘Nobody dines before eight,’ declared one manager, when the vast majority of the population had finished eating well before 7p.m. The BBC’s expectation was that by the evening children had been bathed and put to bed. In fact in working-class families it was more likely that the father had dropped off to sleep and at 10 p.m. his son would say: ‘Wake up, Dad. Time for the fight.’
It’s a Miss Vile’s summing up, from the 1936 Bristol survey, that I will treasure most. What wireless gives you, she said, ‘may not be substantial knowledge, but it beautifies your life’.
Reversing our economic decline is not easy, but it is simple
Our immiseration came swiftly and stealthily. At the start of the 21st century, Britain was a prosperous country. Ambitious people fought to come here. We trusted that, over time, we would become wealthier – an expectation that had been accurate for most of the previous two centuries.
Since the millennium, Britain and western Europe have pretty much stopped growing – especially if we ignore the impact of immigration and calculate GDP per head. Reversing this slowdown should be the top issue at every election, but it is surprisingly under-discussed. In theory, almost all our politicians want growth. Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves keep describing it, nasally and tautologically, as their ‘number one priority’. Yet so far they have doled out more of the medicine that sickened the patient under the last government.
What medicine? Jon Moynihan spells it out in pitiless detail. We became poor because we enlarged the government, raised taxes and over-regulated. Well duh, you might say: there needs no ghost, my Lord, come from the grave to tell us this. But, although the diagnosis might strike you as obvious, the treatment is so unpalatable that many turn in desperation to quack cures. Rather than cutting spending, freeing markets, abolishing quangos, scrapping monopolies, lowering taxes and protecting the value of the currency, politicians pretend that our problems can be solved by some witchdoctor alternative. Crack down on fraud! Use more AI! Join the customs union!
What makes this book so valuable is its relentless empiricism. Moynihan is an entrepreneur who came relatively late to politics via chairing Vote Leave – something he did with the same unfussy efficiency that helped him to succeed in business. He is not peddling a cleverdick new theory. He is taking the best data out there, and using them to construct a calm and comprehensive case. His arguments are aimed at the intelligent but ignorant reader. He assumes no knowledge of economics. The style is reminiscent of a leader in the Economist. The result is a definitive statement of the case for growth. Originally planned as a pamphlet, the work has run to two volumes.
We are spending around £25 billion more than a country with our level of GDP should on the NHS
Volume I, published last year, set out the three big negatives. First, the state has gone from taking 34 per cent of GDP at the turn of the century to 45 per cent, leaving fewer people creating wealth and more consuming it. Second, taxes have risen to the point where investment becomes unattractive. Third, a profusion of quangos and regulators means that businesses spend more and more time doing things other than generating a profit.
Now Volume II suggests three potential positives: open competition, free trade and sound money. Again, you might be thinking et alors? But that is because you have not seen the terrifying figures compiled in these books. If you had, you would grasp the urgency of our situation.
We are becoming poorer not because our population is ageing, nor because we are admitting unproductive migrants, nor even because of lockdown – though God knows that was expensive enough. No, we are becoming poorer because we keep choosing to increase spending, taxes and debt rather than incur any short-term discomfort. The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves, that we are underlings. ‘We all know what to do,’ said the bibulous Jean-Claude Juncker after the financial crisis. ‘We just don’t know how to get re-elected after we’ve done it.’ Quite. Candidates offering sweet delusions generally beat those peddling hard truths.
Rightists pretend that huge sums can be squeezed from the foreign aid budget, leftists from defence. But, as Moynihan shows, the relentless rise in spending is largely in social security and healthcare (we are spending around £25 billion a year more than a country with our level of GDP should on the NHS). Politicians who won’t cut these budgets don’t really want to cut spending. Given the depressing response of both the Tories and Reform to Labour’s removal of the winter fuel allowance, we are still nowhere near recognising the scale of the problem.
Perhaps we must collapse completely before we pick ourselves up. It took a century of decline to persuade Argentines to vote for Javier Milei. Ireland had to make deep cuts in public sector pay and benefits during the euro crisis – cuts which paved the way for a decade of strong growth. Then again we could reverse much of our economic decline simply by returning public spending to where it stood during the early Blair years. Most of us can remember that time well enough. We were hardly a Dickensian sweatshop. The way to growth is not easy, but it is simple.