Why do we only care about American abortion rights?

In the week since Roe vs Wade was overturned, you’ve hardly been able to switch on the news or open a paper without hearing British politicians and commentators decrying the decision. Almost every woman I know was furious after hearing the news; I’m sure I wasn’t alone in failing to hold back a few tears of frustration at this eroding of established rights. But while we might feel – deeply, viscerally – for our cousins across the pond, we often forget about the difficulties women in our own country still face.

Until October 2019, women in Northern Ireland who needed abortions were either forced to travel outside the province or to go to an underground provider. Only in cases of serious mental or physical harm was the procedure allowed. Those who were found to have illegally aborted a child faced prison. And yet even with the law change, imposed by Westminster after years of Stormont inaction, women in Northern Ireland are still facing far greater difficulties than those in mainland Britain.

Boris Johnson said last week that the revocation of Roe vs Wade was ‘a big step backwards’ for America. But MPs in this country have, for years, been rather less vocal about ensuring abortion access in the whole United Kingdom. The procedure remains patchy at best, with Northern Ireland’s health minister, Robin Swann, saying repeatedly that he is not compelled to set up a central service, despite the change in the law. 

Meanwhile the devolved legislature, Stormont, is still stuck in a state of inertia. Some local authorities offer abortion access, but not all, with healthcare providers offering services on an ad hoc basis, often by overworked and undertrained staff. During the pandemic, while women in the rest of the United Kingdom were given access to at-home abortion pills following a telephone consultation, Northern Irish women were limited to ten weeks (and they had to take the first pill at a clinic); after that, they would have to travel across borders for a surgical procedure. Last year, 161 women had to travel to Britain to terminate a pregnancy; 371 the year before. This is a procedure they should have been able to access locally. Where was the outpouring of rage then?

MPs last week formally approved moves to allow the Westminster government to directly commission abortion services in Northern Ireland. But there was no vote recorded for Johnson on the matter – and none on the vote in 2019 to decriminalise abortion in Northern Ireland, held just days before he became Prime Minister. If he feels so strongly that repealing Roe vs Wade was wrong, surely he should have applied the same logic to this country at a time when Northern Irish women were being treated as second-class citizens in terms of healthcare?

Equally, Poland and Malta have some of the strictest laws on abortion in Europe. Malta bans abortion in all cases (the only EU country to do so) while Poland recently introduced legislation to make abortion harder to access – overwhelmingly against the will of the people. There are, by the way, four times as many Poles living in Britain as there are Americans. So where is the outrage at our close neighbours and friends losing their rights? Malta, meanwhile, only became independent of the UK in 1964  after serious discussions about it becoming a constituent part of the United Kingdom. Again, why is it only America that seems to matter? Only this week, 135 Maltese doctors called for a review of the country’s strict laws, filing a case in court after a tourist was denied an abortion when she began to lose her baby at 16 weeks. Yet we hear almost nothing at all.

The Isle of Man, a British Crown Dependency, only legalised abortion in May 2019 – and even then, only up to 14 weeks for most (up to 24, the maximum term in the rest of the UK, only in exceptional circumstances). In Jersey, there’s a 12-week cut-off point. Before the reforms, Manx women were only permitted abortions in cases of rape or where mental health was a risk: but stone me if I ever heard of Westminster MPs demanding change from Douglas. So why is it that we are obsessed with what’s happening in America? Are European women’s rights not as important?

Perhaps because so much of American culture has seeped into Britain, when the rights of women in the states are impinged upon, it feels closer to home. Perhaps MPs are in thrall to the ‘special relationship’. Or perhaps Westminster needs to look at what’s happening in its own backyard before it condemns as barbaric something it has turned a blind eye to here and closer afield. 

How the BBC was captured by trans ideology

During Pride month this year a banner has been emblazoned across the BBC’s internal staff website used by every single employee. It features the following text: ‘BBC Pride 2022: Bringing together LGBTQ+ people of all genders, sexualities and identities at the BBC.’

Most people who work at the BBC aren’t concerned about this. But the slogan really should ring alarm bells, because behind its seemingly benign message of inclusivity is a latent political message about trans rights that is undermining the corporation’s impartiality.

As a BBC employee I am proud and delighted that the corporation is striving to be a welcoming employer for people from all walks of life, whatever their colour, creed or whoever they choose to sleep with. But the problem is that ‘Pride’ is no longer a movement that is simply fighting for the rights and liberties of people who have faced prejudice and discrimination because they don’t happen to be straight. It has morphed into something altogether more controversial and political – it is promoting a trans agenda that undermines longstanding concepts of sex and gender. Rather than treading carefully, however, the BBC is once again becoming an unthinking conduit for the dominant ‘progressive’ theology bouncing around the social media echo chambers of its Guardian reading bosses.

Part of the problem is the fevered obsession of senior figures at the BBC who are convinced the broadcaster must do more to attract younger audiences and reach ‘underserved communities’. As a result, the BBC has become caught in the swamp of identity politics. News coverage is contaminated with editorialising and a disproportionate amount of the BBC’s output is being devoted to an issue the average ‘cisgender’ licence-fee payer doesn’t give a fig about. On the BBC Newsround section alone, there are currently 22 stories about Pride featured on the site’s homepage.

Last year a BBC ‘educational’ film had to be quietly ‘retired’ from the Corporation’s Teach website. The film, which has survived on YouTube, features a pupil asking: ‘What are the different gender identities?’ A teacher responds: ‘That is a really, really exciting question to ask.’ A woman is then shown telling a couple of baffled youngsters who look about ten years old: ‘There are over 100 if not more gender identities now.’ The poor kids look rather incredulous, which is at least encouraging.

Another egregious example was reported earlier this year when it emerged the BBC had changed the pronouns of a male-born transgender rapist to ‘they’ or ‘them’, despite the accuser using male pronouns to describe her assailant. The victim’s feelings, and the fundamental duty of a journalist to quote her correctly, were somehow deemed less valuable than the perpetrator’s wellbeing. In a shamelessly disingenuous statement, a spokesperson for the BBC told the Mail: ‘Our only intention when deciding on language is to make things as clear as possible for audiences.’ But giving a plural pronoun to a male rapist is the very opposite of making things clear for readers. In this instance, it was also brutally insensitive.

The article was presumably following the BBC’s style guide, which now states: ‘Where possible, use the term/s and pronoun/s preferred by people themselves, when they have made their preferences clear.’ A tiny but vocal group of people have decided that traditional English grammar doesn’t apply to them and the BBC has simply caved in.

Elsewhere the BBC has struggled to act as an impartial arbiter of debate. Take its treatment of JK Rowling, who has been at the forefront of highlighting the unintended consequences, and very real dangers for women and young people, of an unquestioning acceptance of self-ID. But has the BBC treated Rowling in a balanced way? After a broadcast of Front Row on Radio 4 in March, the BBC had to admit it had misled listeners by allowing the author’s views to be described by presenter Tom Sutcliffe as ‘very unpopular opinions’. Unpopular where, exactly? Doncaster? Hull? Birmingham? Or the counter of Café Nero outside New Broadcasting House?

Sutcliffe’s perspective is, regrettably, not an outlier at the Corporation. Among some of my co-workers, Rowling’s name elicits a similar reaction to hearing about a notorious war criminal. Yet I’d be willing to wager my youngest child’s substantial collection of Harry Potter merchandise that most BBC journalists haven’t bothered to read Rowling’s detailed and well-argued essay setting out her position on trans rights.

Often the BBC’s output is characterised by a willingness to tolerate guests because their views are fashionable inside the corporation. In April, for example, Woman’s Hour listeners were treated to a tortuous 20 minute transmission from an academic who seems to believe that women’s rights should not be sex-based. Grace Lavery sounds exactly like you’d expect an Associate Professor of English, Critical Theory, and Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Berkley to sound: pretentious, self-satisfied and totally out-of-touch with reality.

After perplexing listeners with a stream of sophistry, Lavery breezily said that she had no regrets about saying on Twitter that she hoped the Queen would die, days after the monarch had contracted Covid. And Woman’s Hour was happy for her to expand on this spiteful invective. Lavery suggested the royal family was ‘a grotesque and disgusting relic of privilege that makes a mockery of British democratic procedure’. She went on: ‘If we were living through the French Revolution, regicide was very much on the table.’

There is little doubt that if the BBC was not in thrall to the trans activist lobby, Lavery wouldn’t have been allowed anywhere near a Radio 4 microphone. But it now appears that all it takes for an opinionated narcissist to preach to the largely female audience of Woman’s Hour about womanhood is to ‘identify’ as a woman. As a Two Ronnies sketch, this would be funny. Somehow, it has become reality.

The BBC says that, ‘Impartiality is the bedrock of the BBC. As we have said many times before, the BBC’s Editorial Guidelines are sacrosanct, our staff know this and they understand their responsibilities.’ But listeners can’t escape the BBC’s identity fixation. Shuffling bleary-eyed across my kitchen to make a coffee, I switched on the Today programme recently to hear a trailer for a 6Music show ahead of the news headlines. A cheery voice invited me and other listeners to ‘take a deep dive into queer country’ and hear about the new music acts who were ‘continuing the legacy of past queer and trans country artists.’

What is particularly strange about the BBC’s alignment with the ‘sex is not immutable; gender is a choice’ brigade is that it undermines one of the Corporation’s key goals: to put female employees on an equal footing with their male counterparts. The BBC Diversity and Inclusion Plan 2020-23 says a staff diversity census will for the first time ‘capture non-binary or non-conforming identities’. The results will make for interesting reading.

I observed my fellow journalists collectively lose the plot during the Covid pandemic, when once questioning colleagues abandoned all scepticism and acted as propagandists for lockdown, promoting measures that were ineffective, cruel and predictably damaging in the longer-term. They would endlessly bang on about ‘following the science’ during this period. Many of these same colleagues are now staying stubbornly silent when it comes to the science regarding sex and gender and the realities of biology.

The key lesson from the BBC’s slanted coverage of the pandemic should have been that we betray the public when we present assumptions as truths and take sides. We should be guided as best we can by facts, and the facts are that the human species is largely made up of two distinct sexes: male and female.

Sure, there are other individuals who feel more comfortable living as the opposite sex to the one they were born into for a range of complex reasons. Some decide they wish to live as the opposite sex and subsequently change their minds. All should be viewed with compassion but that doesn’t mean we should ignore the facts of life or forget scientific realities to suit our sensibilities.

Increasingly, I find myself wondering: am I the only BBC journalist who still believes in two genders? Am I the only BBC journalist who thinks that when it comes to sexuality people are straight, gay or bisexual, and those options really should suffice? Am I the only BBC journalist who thinks there are far more urgent problems facing our country and the world than the supposedly terrible plight of a vanishingly small number of people who aren’t happy with their sex, gender or identity generally?

I fear I may be. But in a small sign of hope that other organisations aren’t as supine when it comes to noisy pressure groups and political correctness as the BBC, Fina, swimming’s world governing body, voted in June to stop most transgender athletes from competing in women’s elite races. The ex-GB swimmer Karen Pickering pointed out that ‘inclusivity and fairness cannot be compatible’.

With this remark, Pickering cut right to the heart of the issue. There is a trade-off to be made and a line has to be drawn somewhere. Just as inclusivity and fairness are not always compatible, scientific facts and liberal worldviews do not always match up. And while the swimming authorities have shown leadership on the vexed issue of trans rights, BBC management is once again finding itself way out of its depth and floundering badly.

Why the Met Police keeps failing

Much has been made of the decision to place the Metropolitan Police in what is often referred to as special measures, where it joins five other forces from England and Wales. The many ways in which the Met has fallen short have also been amply aired, from the murder of Sarah Everard by a serving officer to the botched investigation of serial killer Stephen Port, to the racist and sexist mindset laid bare at some London police stations. Many crime rates in the capital have been rising sharply, as – naturally – has public dissatisfaction.

Nor should the blame game that has broken out between the Home Office and the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, come as much of a surprise. With the search for a new Commissioner to replace Dame Cressida Dick now in its final stages, this is becoming an argument about how to remedy the Met’s very evident failings and what its priorities should be in the immediate future.

The antagonism is nonetheless striking, with the policing minister accusing Khan of being ‘asleep at the wheel’ and Khan’s retort that he had long called for changes, only to be blocked by Patel herself and the Prime Minister. Such recriminations hardly bode well for administrative harmony, once a new Commissioner is in place.

But this latest quarrel should also suggest something else: that much of the very public agonising about what is required in a new Commissioner, including a determination to introduce radical reform, may be barking up the wrong tree. Is it really, or only, about the character of the new appointee? Might it not be at least as much about structures and responsibility? Because London has been here before, hasn’t it? And not so long ago. In the past decade, relations between the then Home Secretary Theresa May and the then-mayor of London – none other than Boris Johnson – were at times as tempestuous as they currently appear to be between Priti Patel and Sadiq Khan.

They got off to an acrimonious start, over – guess what – the appointment of a new Commissioner, with Johnson unhappy with the original list and wanting the right of veto. The technical position is that the Commissioner is appointed by the Queen on the recommendation of the Home Secretary, who is supposed to have ‘regard’ for the mayor’s opinion. But it is not hard to see in this formula a recipe for strife. Four years later, in 2015, Home Office-City Hall relations became, if anything, worse, over Johnson’s pre-emptive purchase of water cannon for use in the event of a re-run of the 2011 London riots. In the end, the mayor had to concede defeat, even though he had the support of the then Commissioner, Bernard Hogan-Howe. National policy, as decided by the government, apparently overrode what the mayor judged necessary for London.

Now that it is his Home Secretary facing off against his successor as mayor, the irony can hardly be lost on Johnson. Even if the details of the disputes are different, the essence is the same: who is ultimately responsible for the force that polices London? Where does the buck stop; who has the final say? It is never good for the answers to such questions to be blurred in any power structure, but particularly not when the subject is policing.

Surely, it should be obvious by now that the division of responsibility for the Metropolitan Police, between the Home Secretary and the Mayor of London, only invites discord. As does the dual role of the Met, as a quasi-national police force and the force whose job it is also to keep Londoners safe.

Among police forces in England and Wales, the Met is unique in that it is one institution, but its officers and Commissioner must serve two masters. I happen to think that Boris Johnson was right to consider the same methods of crowd control for London as are standard in many European capitals. I also happen to think that if the elected mayor is responsible, as he is, for the policing of the capital, the choice of who heads the London police belongs squarely at City Hall, and the mayor should not be able to pass on, or even share, the blame for mistakes.

The government probably has too much on its plate just now, what with inflation, the cost of living, NHS waiting lists, and the war in Ukraine, even to think about restructuring the Met, or – even better – overhauling the whole way the police service in England and Wales is organised. But the lines of any reform should be clear.

It is high time that England and Wales, if not the whole of the UK, had a genuinely national police force on the one hand, and a separate service responsible for day-to-day local policing on the other. The national force would have responsibility for dealing with the most serious crimes, including terrorism, other major investigations and all large-scale and international financial crime. Organised crime is currently the preserve of no fewer than three different agencies, including the City of London Police and the Serious Fraud Office and the National Crime Agency, and we wonder why we haven’t cracked money laundering.

This is how most European countries and even the United States organise themselves, and we should follow suit. With so much serious crime now having a national and international aspect, it is absurd that the closest England and Wales come to having a centralised police force is when the Met is summoned to help out one of the 43 regional police forces after a particularly heinous crime (the Soham murders in Cambridgeshire, or the Skripal poisonings in Salisbury).

The rising tide of public dissatisfaction, especially in London, and the scandalously low clear-up rate for so many crimes should be treated as an opportunity to look at structures and lines of responsibility again.

P.S. Let me add a personal footnote. I live within a ten minutes walk of parliament. Quite rightly, there are dozens of officers stationed in and around its precinct, and the same for Whitehall. They come out in impressive numbers to police protests, with their vans lining every side street. But the impression of plenty of police is deceptive.

The residential streets in the area must be among the least patrolled of any in the capital. Neighbourhood officers are few and far between, after all, there are plenty of police around, aren’t there? But the officers who are on duty are not there to police drug dealing or muggings or anti-social behaviour or shop theft. They are not there for us. Something similar can be sensed – though perhaps less acutely – in many parts of London, where the majority of police stations have closed. And it is one of the first things that anyone who is serious about improving not just the image, but the actual performance of the Met, has to change. Separating national from local policing duties would be a start.

Chris Pincher loses the whip

In the last few minutes, Chris Pincher has had the Conservative whip suspended after he resigned this morning over allegations he groped two men earlier this week. The Tory chief whip has announced that the former deputy chief whip will now lose the whip while an investigation into his behaviour takes place. A spokesman said: 

Having heard that a formal complaint has been made to the ICGS [the Independent Complaints and Grievence Scheme], the Prime Minister has agreed with the Chief Whip that the whip should be suspended from Chris Pincher while the investigation is ongoing. We will not prejudge that investigation.

There had been noticeable disquiet in the cabinet at Pincher’s retention of the whip today, with Welsh Secretary Simon Hart refusing to say he thought this should continue as a Tory MP, and instead saying he knew ‘what I would like to see happen’, and that ‘I think we might be having a very different conversation as the day goes on’. 

There had also been complaints from another name on the roll of shame. Neil Parish lost his party whip and then resigned as an MP in May after admitting that he watched pornography in the Commons chamber. He feels that there have been ‘double standards’ at play here, given he was unceremoniously ejected from his party while Pincher retains the whip. ‘I just feel it is double standards. But I suspect by this evening or tomorrow the whip will be withdrawn. I can’t believe they can treat us in such different ways.’ 

Parish had a point, but it shows what sort of a low the Tory party has sunk that it is now getting lectures on how to handle discipline from someone who was booted out for watching porn in parliament.

Pincher has already been replaced as the deputy chief whip by Kelly Tolhurst. The deputy tends to be the figure who deals with pastoral issues within the party, which was what made Pincher’s position particularly difficult for the Prime Minister who appointed them. With Tolhurst’s appointment should come a change in the way pastoral issues within the party are dealt with, rather than leaving them to the office that is also responsible for twisting the arms of MPs.

Ben Wallace’s weird war of words

Just what is up with Ben Wallace? The Defence Secretary is widely thought to have had a ‘good war’ in Ukraine, receiving much praise within parliament and outside it for the way he’s handled Britain’s response. Yet Mr S can’t help but wonder about some of the Lancashire MP’s recent rhetoric. Just this week he publicly claimed that Vladimir Putin is a ‘lunatic’ suffering from ‘small man syndrome’: hardly diplomatic, given Britain’s stated position is explicitly not regime change in Russia.

In April of course he also said it would be ‘legitimate under international law’ for Ukraine to hit logistics targets in Russia, even though this would, er, significantly escalate the conflict. The previous month he rambled for nearly ten minutes to a prankster in a recording that was subsequently released by the Russians as propaganda (whoops!). Before that he’d also boasted that ‘the Scots Guards kicked the backside of Tsar Nicholas I in 1853 in Crimea: we can always do it again’ and described Putin as having ‘gone full tonoto.’

In fairness to Flashheart, he’s not the only member of the cabinet prone to verbal excess. His colleague Liz Truss suggested that Brits should sign up to join Kyiv’s struggle while Boris Johnson, who once proclaimed that ‘voting Tory will cause your wife to have bigger breasts’ is now singing a somewhat different tune. He told German broadcasters that the war was a ‘perfect example of toxic masculinity’ and that ‘if Putin was a woman’ he wouldn’t have invaded Ukraine: news, of course, to Catherine the Great who did just that.

Still, Wallace’s pitch for higher office (be that in Westminster or Nato HQ in Brussels) has always been that he’s the sensible grown-up who just gets on with the job. He might therefore want to perhaps consider some of his recent public musings, given his own aspirations for advancement.

Tory staffers’ fury over Pincher

Another glorious day for our great democracy. Chris Pincher’s resignation has unleashed a deluge of anger, despair and frustration in the Tory WhatsApp groups today. One backbencher texted Mr S to remark darkly of Dowden and Pincher that ‘at least they’re freeing up jobs for the reshuffle.’ Another asks ‘How on earth was he put in the Whips’ Office in charge of MPs’ welfare?’ The mood among their staff is little better too, as shown by the liberal use of the phrase ‘shit-show’ in current conversation.

Now, though, some are standing up and demanding change. Five weeks ago, several parliamentary assistants came together to launch the ‘Conservative staffers for change.’ They penned a letter to the Prime Minster and the (now former) party chairman, Oliver Dowden, demanding change and improved vetting in the selection protest.

In the wake of David Warburton’s immediate suspension after allegations of sexual impropriety, there was some optimism that things would improve. Dowden claimed that changes have been made to the candidate selection process to ensure it is more rigorous and that the partnership between Tory MPs, their staffers and CCHQ would be strengthened. Now though he is gone and the failure to similarly suspend Chris Pincher has led those involved to conclude that their concerns are just not being taken seriously.

With the Westminster rumour-mill in overdrive, the group claims that:

The story concerning Chris Pincher has not come as a surprise. The whip should have been withdrawn immediately. There are serious questions surrounding the Prime Minister’s prior knowledge of Pincher’s misconduct. This case is an example of why felt we had to write the letter.

Jolly good luck to them.

Neil Parish attacks Chris Pincher

The Tories are in crisis, standards are in peril. So who do you turn to for ethical advice? Step forward Neil Parish, the tractor-loving, porn-perusing former MP for Tiverton. Parish, whose constituency is now, er, represented by a Liberal Democrat thanks to his resignation, was asked for his views this afternoon on Christopher Pincher.

Barely concealing his resentment, Parish piled in on the former deputy chief whip who, incidentally, was part of the team which took the decision to suspend him from the Tories in April. Asked if the whip should now be removed Pincher too, Parish replied:

Definitely from Christopher Pincher. The first thing they did to me, and I made a huge mistake, is they withdrew the whip. There cannot be double standards: my belief is that, you know, Christopher Pincher has things to be answered for. The whip must be withdrawn, he’s got the opportunity then to go before the Parliamentary Standards Board to see what his conduct actually was. Those that were affected can also give evidence… I can’t believe why they haven’t done it because that was the first thing they did for me even though I asked for it to be sorted out privately and I just feel that it’s double standards.

Makes you wonder just what Pincher said to Parish when the latter was kicked out of the parliamentary party…

Tony Blair is too good for British politics

Tony Blair was the headline act at his day-long talking-shop in London yesterday. The crowds attending the Future of Britain Conference had to sit through hours of speeches and panel discussions before the old groover himself popped up at 4pm for a 30-minute chat with Jon Sopel.

‘I’m so grateful to everyone for hanging about to wait for me,’ he quipped. And he admitted that he’d suffered a wobble the previous night:

‘There was a time in the early hours when I thought, God, another of your bright ideas.’ 

Who did he mean by God? Not himself, surely. Sopel raised the issue that obsesses many fretful centrists: Will Blair rescue the country by starting a new party?

‘There are two main parties in Britain,’ he said, ‘I don’t see that changing.’

He ducked the chance to clobber the Tory government. ‘Not everything they do is wrong. There’s no harm in admitting that.’ He described the Chancellor’s attempts to soften the cost-of-living crisis as ‘a reasonable package…but getting households to switch to renewables, to insulate, to move to a cleaner, greener future – there’s no plan in place.’

He was similarly mild in his criticism of Sir Keir Starmer. He reminded us that when he took charge of Labour, in 1994, his predecessors had been John Smith and Neil Kinnock. ‘Keir has had a tougher time of it, mentioning no names.’

Perhaps he made a Freudian slip when he said: ‘Keir has done an amazing job, pulling the party back from where it is.’ He probably meant ‘from where it was’. The present tense suggests that Labour remains shackled by the arid and introspective wars over identity politics. He repeated this concern, again in code, when he said, ‘sometimes it’s not just about going with the flow, it’s about resisting it as well.’ And he warned of a ‘massive gap’ between what ordinary people are thinking and ‘what politics is debating.’

This has implications for Labour. To ‘seal the deal’ at the next election the party must ‘get a policy agenda where you’re making changes and where people think, yeah, that’s going to make my life better.’ To turn those policies into ‘a message of hope and optimism should not be beyond the wit of politicians.’ Yet it seems to be beyond the wit of Labour’s current leadership. 

Blair put the same point in different terms. ‘The art of politics is to make the arguments sing.’ If he believes Sir Keir is a choirboy of genius, he kept that to himself. He hinted at a looming danger for Labour. Having seen the Conservatives suffer two thumping by-election defeats, the party may embrace the goalhanger strategy. It’s not enough, said Blair, to hope that an anti-Tory alliance will sweep Sir Keir to power. To win, even as part of a coalition, ‘the Labour party has to be electable in its own right.’

Blair showed little appetite for a personal return to Westminster. He seems to be enjoying himself too much. ‘One thing that’s shocking to me is how much I’ve learned since leaving office’. He used a homely metaphor to describe the eccentric nature of democracy:

‘Politics is weird because it’s the only business where you give a really important position to someone with no qualifications. Imagine choosing a new Liverpool coach: you wouldn’t wander into the Kop and say, I want the most enthusiastic fan. That’s insane. But that’s what we do in politics.’

In other words, we may be desperate for him to come back and save us but it won’t happen. He’s just too good for politics.

Why the Chris Pincher scandal will keep running

The Chris Pincher situation is much worse for the government than the Neil Parish one was. Parish was a backbencher, Pincher was – until his resignation – the deputy chief whip and had played a key role in the shadow whipping operation which shored up Boris Johnson at the start of the year.

Given the nature of the allegations against Pincher, it is hard to imagine that he will not have to give up the Conservative whip. Already, senior Tory MPs are publicly calling for him to lose the whip while this matter is investigated. No. 10 is making a mistake by sticking to its line that Pincher’s resignation is a sufficient response to the matter.

The other difficulty for the government is whether Pincher should have been given a job, and particularly one involving discipline, given that, as Tom notes, he had resigned from the whips office in 2017 over allegations about unwanted advances. At the time of the last reshuffle, there was sufficient concern over the appointment that it was referred to the Cabinet Office’s ethics and propriety team. The decision to proceed with the appointment now looks unwise.

Pincher’s resignation adds to the 1990s feel of present events. Much more of this and a 1997-style electoral result will become a distinct possibility. At the moment, all that is standing between the Tories and that situation is the fact that the opposition has not captured the public’s imagination in the way that Tony Blair did in the run-up to that election.

Pity the doctors fighting for their £1 million pensions

As inflation rips into living standards, everyone is feeling the pinch and many are looking for help. Some people are asking for more from the state. That really means help from their fellow taxpayers, because sooner or later, that’s where public money comes from.

We all have our own views about which groups merit that help: working-age parents in the lowest income bracket are at the top of my list. Readers will doubtless have their own thoughts on which marginalised and disadvantaged people are most deserving.

Amid the tumultuous national conversation about the cost of living, there’s always a danger that some unfortunate souls might be overlooked. So, I’d like to use this article to draw attention to the plight of people whose economic struggle and case for more support from the Exchequer might have escaped your attention as you wonder if you can afford to pay the gas bill and go on holiday this year.

The people I’m talking about are struggling too. Economic circumstance and austere public policy mean some feel driven to just give up. They face the grim prospect of retiring in their 50s and trying to eke out their remaining years trying to get by with pensions worth little more than £1 million.

I know this is difficult and potentially upsetting, dear reader, but try to imagine what it must be like to be 50-something with a pension pot worth close to £1,073,100. That pot is likely to yield a lump-sum payment of more than £150,000 on retirement, followed by an annual income of close to £50,000 for the rest of your days.

Now, it’s possible that some of you might be thinking ‘that doesn’t sound too bad, actually’. Perhaps you’re aware that the typical private pension pot is worth barely £50,000 and will deliver an annual income of a few hundred quid a month at best. Maybe you even know that barely 42,000 people a year hit that £1,073,100 level, which is the ‘lifetime allowance’ for what you can have in a pension before the Treasury impose super-high levels of tax.

So maybe those things mean you’re a bit short on sympathy for pension millionaires who are, relative to pretty much everyone else in the UK, doing quite nicely.

You probably wouldn’t expect those pension millionaires to put their hands out to ask for more from the state, especially at a time like this. Especially when you consider the socio-economic background of those pension millionaires, who are members of the most socially exclusive professional elite in Britain.

Really, imagine the howling outrage if a bunch of rich, posh people launched a campaign asking for the state to show more generosity towards them over their £1 million pensions.

Well, you don’t need to imagine, because such a campaign is indeed underway, launched recently by a trade union.

That union is the British Medical Association (BMA) and the pension millionaires it’s fighting for are doctors. The BMA has launched a low-key lobbying effort aimed at MPs, urging them to put pressure on ministers to allow doctors to amass even larger pensions. Doing so would, of course, impose a cost on the state and therefore the taxpayer, since it would entail the Exchequer forgoing the tax it would otherwise collect from doctors’ pensions.

Unless the Government eases the tax charges faced by doctors on pensions over £1,073,100, the union says, even more doctors will simply take their money and walk away into early retirement. The average age of retirement for medics is now 59 and falling.

To be clear, hitting the £1 million limit isn’t a rare thing for doctors: it’s a common concern for medics.

A BMA survey of doctors found that 72 per cent are more likely to retire because ministers have frozen the level of the lifetime allowance until 2026.

‘More and more senior NHS workers are being pushed to reduce their workloads or retire early,’ says a BMA invite to MPs to attend a pensions briefing in Parliament next week.

You might have thought the reason you can’t easily see a doctor is that medics are being driven out of the profession by intolerable workloads, or that not enough doctors are being recruited and trained. You might think that because the BMA is always vocal about such things, and rightly so, for those are indeed real issues that must be addressed.

But the union makes rather less effort to draw attention to the fact that shortages of senior doctors also arise because many of them quite literally have too much money in their pensions. The latest BMA lobbying campaign seems to have been launched without a press release or other public announcement.

Instead of bothering with the general public, the BMA is instead encouraging doctors to contact their MPs directly with a pre-written warning that the taxation of £1 million pensions will lead doctors to retire. If nothing else, such messages must add some variety to parliamentary inboxes overflowing with messages from constituents worried about paying their bills or feeding their children.

The tax treatment of large pensions is very complicated. The fundamental issues of the BMA lobbying campaign aren’t. People who have amassed pension wealth beyond the wildest dreams of most workers are asking the state to show greater generosity towards them over that wealth. If they don’t get it, they say they will give up treating patients and walk away with their £1 million pensions.

And don’t be surprised if this approach works. A government that wants to maximise the number of doctors at work realistically has few ways to address the early retirement of medics other than greater leniency on their pension bills. So, a country where real wages are falling, and growing numbers of people face real economic pain, may soon have to devote more of its resources to some of the richest members of its population. Truly, the cost-of-living crisis takes many forms.

Russia’s referendum weapon

Preparations for a ‘referendum’ have begun in Kherson Oblast, the Russian-occupied region north of Crimea, according to Kirill Stremousov, deputy head of the Kherson regional administration and one of Moscow’s puppet governors. ‘Kherson Oblast will never return to an environment of Nazism, debauchery, and cynicism,’ he said. A date for the referendum has not yet been announced, but Stremousov previously mentioned that it could take place in the autumn.


Russian troops went into the region at the beginning of March. Since then, the Kherson city has been under occupation. Ukrainian intelligence has warned that one of the goals of the referendum may be the forced mobilisation of Kherson’s residents into the Russian army. In February, five days before the invasion, the ‘Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics’ announced a mobilisation of men aged between 18 and 55. Later some of them surrendered to the Ukrainian army – before the war, they were teachers, ​​locksmiths and social workers. Men were taken into the army straight from the streets, put on buses and sent to military assembly points. 

A referendum on whether the so-called Kherson People’s Republic joins the Russian Federation will allow the Kremlin to replenish its army and continue its offensive. The residents of Kherson are currently forced to have Russian passports or their salaries and pensions will be cut off: the justification is that Vladimir Putin is ‘protecting Russian citizens living in Ukraine’. ‘Yes, we are preparing for the referendum, and we will hold it. And, oddly enough, the Kherson region will make a decision and join the Russian Federation,’ added Stremousov.

Boris’s awkward Erdogan encounter

Boris Johnson has never been afraid of expressing himself but he might well have regretted his verbosity yesterday when he had a rather awkward encounter at the Nato summit in Madrid. As Johnson sat at the summit table, a tall figure loomed over him and gripped the Prime Minister’s back. Johnson turned around to be greeted by Turkish President Recep Erdogan, with whom he, er, has some previous history.

For back in 2016 when Boris was a humble backbencher, The Spectator ran an offensive limerick competition. Its aim was to poke fun at Erdogan who, at the time, was trying to prosecute a German comedian over a rude poem. Johnson submitted his suggestion and won the £1,000 prize. His five line effort went as follows:

There was a young fellow from Ankara, Who was a terrific wankerer. Till he sowed his wild oats, With the help of a goat, But he didn’t even stop to thankera.

Judging by the subsequent back-slapping yesterday, looks like there wasn’t too much rancour-er from the wankerer of Ankara…

The glorious return of the England cricket team

Let civilisation fall apart if it must. I no longer care. The England men’s cricket team is suddenly playing with such swaggering magnificence that everything else – endless culture wars, inflation, even the threat of hypersonically delivered nuclear annihilation from Russia – pales into insignificance.

I just want to watch my heroes – Ben Stokes, Joe Root and the rest – play the game I love like deities. If Putin is going to press the big red button then so be it. As the temperature rises to a million degrees celsius here in Putney, I will console myself that at least I witnessed Jonny Bairstow’s transcendentally perfect innings at Trent Bridge earlier this month.

We deserve this, don’t we? We England cricket fans who over many decades have suffered so much.

Yes, there have been high points in recent years – I consider the Stokes-inspired 2019 Miracle of Headingley to be amongst the happiest moments of my life, and the Ashes glory in 2005 was likewise something I intend, Putin notwithstanding, to tell the grandchildren about – but we’ve never had anything like this.

We’ve never had a team so unabashedly committed to a style of play that seems almost post-coital in its exuberance – our batsmen playing throughout the recent series against New Zealand with the unfettered joy of young men recently relieved of their virginity. Something massive has very clearly changed for them, and with it the realisation that things never again have to be as they were.

After only one win in England’s last 17 test matches prior to June, evidently a new paradigm of possibility has opened – one in which all that is required to thrive seems to be willingness always to take the gung-ho option – to ‘run toward the danger’, as new coach Brendon McCullum is said to have put it.

In his last three innings for the national team, Bairstow has scored 369 runs off 293 balls, for wonderfully sustained periods seeming content to score only in sixes and fours. Likewise, the team have chased down previously terrifying fourth innings totals – the kind of scores that over generations have seen England teams capitulate hopelessly – as if they were nothing to worry about.

Can the secret to sport, and life, really just be to throw caution to the wind? Probably not. But suddenly I find myself wondering why the tennis players at Wimbledon hit second serves that are slower than their first. Why don’t they just trust their talent and let the devil take the hindmost? Surely it’s the way of the future.

Naturally it is Stokes first and then McCullum who are being feted for the miraculous turnaround of the test team, but for my money the lion’s share of the praise should be directed at Rob Key.

Appointed managing director of English cricket only as recently as April, the decisions he has made, particularly in recruiting McCullum, who had never previously coached a national team, have been every bit as thrilling as those his players are now making. Key has played nothing safe, and the results have been instantaneous.

Perhaps this shouldn’t be as surprising as it seems. His approach to life, and cricket, is spelled out unapologetically in his excellent autobiography Oi, Key: Tales of a Journeyman Cricketer, in which again and again he returns to the theme of his loathing for modern coaching methods that prioritise group bonding over the unleashing of individual talent, and his belief that sportsmen give themselves the best chance to thrive when they remember what they are doing is essentially pointless.

He writes: 

Jos Buttler has the right idea. On the end of his bat handle he’s written “f*** it”. Every player should do that. Before they do anything, bat, bowl, whatever, they should go back and think, “what is the worst that could happen?” Life will go on. Some people, nurses, doctors, soldiers, don’t have that luxury. In sport, we are fortunate to be able to switch that perspective. It’s a game of cricket. Remember that.

Of course it won’t last. How can it? Running toward danger at every opportunity can at best be described as a short-term strategy. Cricket is a tactical game – perhaps the most tactical after chess – and a one-dimensional approach of attack at all costs, as if consequences are imaginary, will soon enough be exposed by a better team than New Zealand. Perhaps that is what is happening as you read this, and India have us 73-9 in the first innings, and looking somewhat foolish.

If England repeatedly throw away potential series wins by disregarding lores of the game familiar to everyone who has ever picked up a bat, that demand batsmen play themselves in carefully and protect their wicket as they would their life, then the public will quickly grow annoyed and pressure to come up with a more traditional approach will become irresistible.

But please, not yet. Against a backdrop of relentlessly, and apocalyptically, bad headlines relating seemingly to every aspect of human endeavour, let us have for a few months at least more of this glorious, swashbuckling and romantic England cricket team. Thank you, Rob Key.

The rise and fall of R Kelly

It’s been an eventful week for celebrity justice, especially of the entirely predictable kind. First, Ghislaine Maxwell was sentenced to 20 years for recruiting and trafficking young girls. Now, the musician and paedophile R. Kelly has received a 30-year prison sentence for sexually abusing girls, boys and women.

He was convicted of the offence last September so a lengthy prison sentence has been inevitable ever since. Still, 30 years is a long, long time. Should Robert Sylvester Kelly make it to the end of his incarceration — and the odds against a high-profile convicted sex offender surviving unmolested are not high — then he will be 85 upon his release. A once-stellar music career is over. His name is now a byword for infamy.

None of Kelly’s troubles will come as a surprise to observers. Two decades ago, he was first charged on multiple counts of making DIY sex videos with underage girls. Yet after a long, sordid trial, he was acquitted of all charges in 2008. That left him free to resume what was by then a tainted career, consisting largely of his releasing instalments of his increasingly bizarre R&B ‘opera’ Trapped In The Closet. This was either a brave, boundary-pushing genre experiment or simply foolhardy, depending on your tastes.

Yet Kelly is not simply an arrogant multimillionaire with a taste for sexual deviance. Beginning with his 1992 debut album Born Into The 90s, and continuing with his far more successful 1993 release 12 Play, Kelly capitalised on a vogue for sexually explicit R&B music. His singles released included the megahit ‘Bump ‘n’ Grind’, as well as ‘Your Body’s Callin’ and ‘Sex Me’.

He was an enormous commercial smash, but also attracted critical recognition. Kelly seemed like a musically innovative figure in a genre that had too often embraced a kind of antic conservatism. The New York Times wrote approvingly: 

‘The reigning king of pop-soul sex talks a lot tougher than Barry White, the father of such fluffed-up pillow talk and along with Marvin Gaye and Donny Hathaway, (both) major influences for Kelly.’ 

Yet he could also tickle the God-fearing mainstream, too; his 1996 single, ‘I Believe I Can Fly’, eschewed sexual innuendo in favour of leaden, all-purpose inspiration. Unsurprisingly, it has been much covered in talent shows, at least until its creator’s disgrace.

Kelly continued an imperial phase of success, collaborating with Jay-Z (at least until Kelly was fired from a joint tour over assorted misdemeanours) and enjoying hit records, even as his legal troubles threatened to overwhelm him. In 2012, he released an autobiography, full of braggadocio and swagger, entitled Soulacoaster: The Diary of Me. It detailed, as is the way of these things, his impoverished and tough upbringing in Chicago as well as his rise to fame and then superstardom. There is unlikely to be a second edition dealing with his equally precipitous fall from grace.

Few will mourn the end of Kelly’s career. Even his most devoted fans had tired of him, not least because of his complete absence of anything resembling contrition for his crimes. His nicknames, ‘The Pied Piper of R&B’ and ‘The King of Pop-Soul,’ now seem grimly ironic rather than remotely appropriate.

Yet the music industry must shoulder its share of the blame, too. Blind eyes were turned so long as Kelly continued to produce hits. Now that those days are well and truly over, questions must be asked about complicity — both in Kelly’s case and others. A long, hard look must be taken at an industry that not just kept a dangerous man in the public eye but gave him the ability to embrace his sordid desires to his heart’s content.

This Pied Piper has well and truly left Hamelin. Let us hope that another one never arrives.

This article originally appeared on Spectator World

Will Chris Pincher remain a Tory MP?

Chris Pincher remains a Tory MP this morning, but how long will that be the case? The Conservative deputy chief whip resigned from the government last night, following allegations that he groped two men at a private members’ club on Wednesday evening. 

In a letter to Boris Johnson, Pincher said he ‘drank far too much’ and ’embarrassed myself and other people’. But while the Prime Minister accepted Pincher’s resignation from the whips’ office, it is believed that Downing Street is reluctant to kick Pincher out of the party because of the speed with which he admitted what he’d done.

Pincher is a firm ally of the Prime Minister and said in his resignation letter that Boris Johnson would continue to have his ‘full support from the back benches’. Yet it seems hard to see how the government can continue to resist calls to launch an investigation into what happened at the Carlton Club in St James.

Part of the problem for Boris Johnson is that this isn’t the first time Pincher has found himself in hot water. The Tory MP previously stood down from the whips’ office in 2017 after he was accused of making an unwanted pass at former Olympic rower and Conservative activist Alex Story. On that occasion, Pincher was cleared of any breach of the party’s code of conduct following an investigation involving a panel headed by an independent QC. That probe into what happened allowed Pincher – and the Tory party – to move on. 

This time, however, the Tories are keen to accept Pincher’s resignation and leave it at that. It’s safe to say that Labour is unwilling to allow that to happen. Shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper called what happened a ‘total disgrace’. While Labour’s deputy leader Angela Rayner said:

‘There cannot be any question of the Conservatives sweeping a potential sexual assault under the carpet. The Conservative party is so mired in sleaze and scandal that it is totally unable to tackle the challenges facing the British people.’

How long can Boris Johnson hold the line and avoid kicking Pincher out of the party?

Will Putin succeed where Stalin and Khrushchev failed in Ukraine?

A few weeks after Putin’s war against Ukraine began on 24 February, an infamous article was published in RIA Novosti, a leading Russian state mouthpiece. Written by Timofey Sergeytsev, it was entitled ‘What Russia should do with Ukraine’ and was full of ideas. These included ‘ideological repression’ and ‘strict censorship’ for their neighbour country, not only in the political sphere but in culture and education as well. The information space (the media) should become Russian, and all school materials containing ‘Nazi’ (i.e. pro-Ukraine) ‘ideologies’ be confiscated. The ‘Nazi’ government should be ‘liquidated’ while those not ‘subject to the death penalty or imprisonment’ for their ‘Nazi’ activities could, to rebuild an infrastructure damaged by the war, be involved in ‘forced labour’. The word ‘Nazi’ appeared in the piece with such numbing frequency, it was like a self-justifying mantra against the whispers of national guilt.

For those who think the columnist had gone rogue or was anything but ‘His Master’s Voice’, one might look at what has happened in occupied areas of the Donbas since. Quite apart from the forced deportations taking place and the conscription of residents into the Russian army, there have been mobile TV units broadcasting Russian propaganda on giant screens, and retraining camps for teachers who will be compelled, as of this autumn, to teach a Russian rather than Ukrainian curriculum. There are rouble salaries for government employees, fast-tracking of Russian-passport applications, and sim cards for mobile phones with a Russian +7 prefix, calls to Russia being seven times cheaper than within Ukraine. These are moves of which Timofey Sergeytsev, dwelling in his Nazi-infested dreamworld, would surely approve.

So, for that matter, might Joseph Stalin, the dictator who ruled the Soviet Empire from Lenin’s death to 1953. Stalin, like Putin, was determined that Ukraine would give up its dreams of independent nationhood and come to heel.

The man he tasked with the job was Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev, who died just over 50 years ago and was Stalin’s unlikely successor. It’s impossible to think of Khrushchev without thinking of Ukraine. Born in a Russian village a few miles from the border, he spent his teens and early manhood in the mining parts of the Donbas. He took his first steps in the communist party there too, serving as party secretary for his technical college, and later on the party committee for the town of Yuzovka (now Donetsk). Ukraine was where, in Mafia terms, little Nikita Khrushchev made his Soviet bones.

Yet offered the chance to lead the party there in 1938, Khrushchev was initially reluctant. It was a toxic posting, often the anteroom to doom. His predecessors had met grisly ends and so had members of their families. But Khrushchev’s resistance didn’t last long.

‘Sovietise Ukraine?’ Khrushchev would deliver – he always did. He would do it with a cocked pistol in his hand, bullying, deporting, persecuting, imprisoning, dispatching ‘enemies of the people’ to the next world until the country, something broken in its psyche, fell into line. It would be the most pitiless attitude to man-management, to the shaping of national borders and the ideologies those within them lived under. But Khrushchev’s words on the brutality of the local NKVD police also applied to him. ‘If I don’t do this to others, then others will do it to me. Better I do it than have it done to me,’ he said.

With the new man came a new policy. For the last 20 years in East Ukraine a pendulum had swung between Ukrainianisation and Russification. The first meant promoting Ukraine’s culture and language to keep the region happy under Communist rule. But with Khrushchev’s arrival, the pendulum swung sharply in the other direction. Ukrainian history was rewritten to emphasise the ‘historical and fraternal ties between the Ukrainian and Russian peoples.’ The Russian language was hammered home in schools, with Khrushchev thundering against the ‘bourgeois nationalists’, the ‘bastards’ who ‘did everything they could to exterminate the Russian language in Ukraine.’

He had also been sent to purge the Ukrainian communist party of those who Stalin deemed insufficiently pro-Soviet. Here Khrushchev got off to a flying start. All members but one of the Ukrainian politburo were arrested. The entire Ukrainian government was replaced, along with nearly all the Ukrainian Red Army corps. In 1938 alone, over 100,000 people are said to have been sent to jail, with thousands dispatched by shooting. Nationalists were rounded up and the intelligentsia made to fall quickly into line, its leading writers and poets bullied into penning panegyrics to the Great Leader in the Kremlin.

This was in the East of the country – West Ukraine had, until the late thirties, been under Polish rule. But with the Nazi Soviet non-aggression pact of 1939, as Hitler and Stalin divvied up Eastern Europe into their respective ‘zones of influence’, it passed to Soviet control, and Khrushchev had another task to complete. It was, in the words of his biographer William Taubman, ‘to conquer and Sovietise, to expropriate and collectivise, to organise new party and state institutions and make sure they opted ‘voluntarily’ to join the USSR.’

In practice, this meant several things: dodgy elections, sped on by bribery and coercion, to create national assemblies voting ‘unanimously’ for Stalin’s rule. A country swarming with leather-jacketed NKVD officers, to spread terror and compliance. It involved battles with nationalists, landowners, industrialists and priests, the disbanding of Ukrainian educational institutions and the effacement of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church. Lyes rubiat, shchepki letiat went the Russian proverb: ‘When you chop wood, the splinters fly’, and Khrushchev proved himself a master tree-feller. Visiting a village near Lviv where the NKVD were slacking, Khrushchev carpeted them: ‘You call this work? You haven’t carried out a single execution!’

The words seem to echo down the years over places like Bucha and Irpin, over towns and villages in the Donbas whose names we don’t yet know.

In time, Nikita Khrushchev – fundamentally a warm-hearted man, no matter the times he lived in or the deeds they drove him to – disappointed the Great Leader. Khrushchev in Ukraine showed worrying signs of going native. Returning to a Kyiv liberated from the Nazis in 1944, he bowed his head to the statue of Shevchenko, their national poet. Writers and film-makers were taken under Khrushchev’s wing, defended ferociously by him. In its worst post-war years, he sweated and fretted over feeding Ukraine and, deemed a ‘suspicious element’ by Stalin, risked his own hide to do so. Khrushchev, his granddaughter Nina L. Khrushcheva claimed, would never have supported Putin’s invasion of the country: ‘You can’t bomb a nation into loving you.’ K. had done that but attempted to redeem himself as well.

In 1954, as Stalin’s successor, Khrushchev gifted Crimea to Ukraine, setting another cycle in process. Exactly 60 years later in 2014, Putin wrenched it back again, his first step, one might argue, in the war of annexation which has broken out this year. The dreams of RIA journalists aside, it’s just another way Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev left his lasting stamp on the country he tortured and fell in love with, to which he was bound so tightly, and to whom he brought as much bitter suffering as success.

My sister Ghislaine was denied justice

There is a cartoon doing the rounds this week that shows two women having a drink. One says to the other ‘My dream is to travel back in time’. Her friend replies ‘Just book a ticket to the USA’. No doubt the cartoonist had in mind the topical issues of the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe vs Wade and its striking down New York’s law requiring ‘proper cause’ to carry guns in public.

But it could equally apply to a federal court’s decision this week to impose a 20-year sentence of imprisonment on a 60-year-old woman, my sister Ghislaine. This cruel sentence arises from her conviction at trial six months ago and follows two years of incarceration in the medieval Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn.

Based on a manifestly flawed judicial process, the sentence is a genuflection by a politically appointed judge to a mob whipped up by an embarrassed attorney general, William Barr, who was denied Epstein when he died on his watch. Following his death, Ghislaine became a replacement for Epstein.

The conviction and sentence will be the subject of appeal to an independent tribunal where it can only be hoped that a more dispassionate consideration of the many legal issues the defence has contested throughout this case will find a more sympathetic ear. The evidence is clear that Ghislaine believed herself to be free of guilt. Had she even suspected that she might be arrested she would have fled beyond the reach of the US legal system to France, of which she is a citizen, from where she would have fought to clear her name.

Her good reputation was eviscerated following her arrest in a TV spectacular, a press conference organised by the FBI and Barr’s Department of Justice. Denied bail, it left my sister guilty in the eyes of the world months before the trial itself began.

The judicial process that followed had one objective and that was to convict her. Professional accusers, who have made millions of dollars, were allowed free rein to make vicious statements that would have been struck down for contempt of court in the UK. Significant exculpatory evidence was excluded from presentation to the jury as one pre-trial defence motion after another was denied. Highly contentious judicial directions to the jury during the trial itself were proceeded with despite strenuous defence objections. We also know of course that at least one juror, by his own admission, lied on the jury form and improperly swayed a hung jury in favour of conviction. Granted immunity from prosecution in the subsequent inquiry, he could say whatever he wanted to paint his unworthy actions in a favourable light.

The whole process stinks from beginning to end; Barr’s victimisation of Ghislaine would not be tolerated in Britain. Huge sums of money are involved. Victims of Epstein have shared more than $125 million (£100 million), herded along by a connected coterie of lawyers who have scooped at least $60 million (£50 million). The accusers who appeared at Ghislaine’s trial received $13.5 million (£11 million) but her principal accuser Virginia Giuffre, who did so much to sway global public opinion against Ghislaine, has never had her credibility nor her unsubstantiated accusations tested in court.

What Ghislaine said about Jeffery Epstein in her statement at her sentencing applies equally to my sister: ‘the impact on all those who were close to him has been devastating. And today, those who even knew him briefly or never met him but were associated with someone who did have lost relationships, jobs, and had their lives derailed’. We, her family, will never stop fighting for justice and I believe that eventually Ghislaine will get her life back through proper due process that so far she has been denied.

Horse racing’s dark secret

Royal Ascot has come and gone: 300,000 racegoers, men in top hats and tails, women in chic outfits and beautiful, or bizarre, millinery, gathered for the highlight of the racing calendar. But beneath the pageantry, all is not well in the world of horse racing.

The sport’s leadership is in disarray. Day-to-day racecourse attendance is plummeting; gambling restrictions are looming; animal rights activists are piling on pressure; funding and prize-money are woeful; some of the best horses are being sold overseas; and the sport is at an increasing competitive disadvantage compared to Australia, the Gulf, Hong Kong and Japan.

For one man in particular, Joe Saumarez Smith, three weeks into his tenure as chair of the British Horseracing Authority (BHA), the sport’s governing body, the next few months are critical. After Ascot, his in-tray is overflowing. The imminent publication of the Gambling Act review, ongoing relations with the government’s Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport and betting levy reform are just some of the thorny issues he must tackle.

But there are deeper problems going right to the heart of the sport’s relevance. Samaurez Smith has already served as a board member for nearly eight years, so his latest appointment is only for 18 months. It is vital in his first 100 days as chair that clarity emerges on the BHA’s strategic imperatives and how it intends to correct fundamental weaknesses in the sport’s governance. Will he be a caretaker or a change agent?

Unfortunately Samaurez Smith’s honeymoon period lasted barely a few days. In his first week, he attended an archaic all-male Derby Club dinner with 350 attendees of the sport’s ‘great and good’ (excluding all the women, of course). So much for racing’s pledge to improve diversity and inclusion. Then in week two the executive committee of the BHA, under his chairmanship, didn’t even support its own proposal to cull low-runner races. Kicking the can down the road hardly inspires confidence.

The sport’s labyrinthine structure and glacial decision-making hardly helps matters. Bitter in-fighting among representative groups, and the closing of ranks on sensitive issues such as corruption endanger the sustainability of horse racing. Low morale and a revolving door of top executive departures has made things worse. Some of those who have departed are sorely missed, others less so. But leadership strength in the sport is weak.

Overhaul is long overdue. The operating model of racing is totally unfit for purpose, and requires radical surgery, not incremental tinkering. There is widespread recognition that the 2015 formation of a tripartite structure involving three groups – the BHA, the Racecourse Association and the Horseman’s Group (now rebranded the Thoroughbred Group), a fragile coalition of owners, trainers, breeders, jockeys and agents – has completely failed. It promised a united approach but became dysfunctional through in-fighting and brazen factionalism, and has now collapsed into rancour and leadership by veto. Strategy, governance, structure and decision-making desperately need to be redefined; in parallel, racing’s relevance, sustainability and social licence to operate have to be strengthened.

To add to the woes, a widely-held belief persists that dishonesty, self interest and lack of transparency still plague the equine supply chain, despite the comprehensive findings contained in an independent review commissioned by the BHA in 2017 and published in 2019. Yet even now, three years on since the report saw the light of day, investigations into alleged breaches of the bloodstock industry’s self-regulated code of practice drag on and on.

A key recommendation from the review was that agents acting in the buying and selling of bloodstock in the UK should be licensed, as they are in football, cricket and rugby. Last year, the BHA published a new code of practice but licensing was not included. Justin Felice OBE, the retired senior police officer who conducted the review, warned at the time his report was published that it would be ‘too easy’ for racing to suffer another high-profile ‘Panorama Moment’, as occurred in 2002 when Jockey Club failings were exposed, without stronger regulatory enforcement. It would be a cruel irony if racing suffered government intervention with the regulatory role of the sport being passed to the Financial Conduct Authority as envisaged for football.

For the racing fan on the Clapham omnibus, it is clear that the arrival of much-needed radical solutions for the sport is more a 100/1 outsider bet than an odds-on certainty. The future of horse racing is in Samaurez Smith’s hands.

The British villages that will soon be lost to the sea

On the Welsh coast, surrounded by Snowdonia, the village of Fairbourne sits on a low, flat stretch of land. With sea on one side and mountain on the other, it seems perfectly situated. It is also doomed. Defended by high banks, the village is already substantially beneath sea level during storm tides. As sea levels rise, the government has decided to abandon it to the waves. Funding for sea defences is set to end by 2054.

Fairbourne is far from the only community to face this fate. Over the next 28 years, some 200,000 buildings in Britain are set to end up below sea level. In some places, sea walls and embankments will hold the line. In others, nature will be left to take its course. People have been living in Happisburgh, Norfolk, for a very long time. The village church is grade 1 listed, the pub dates back to the 16th century, and in 2013 archaeologists examining a site exposed by coastal erosion found footprints dating back 850,000-950,000 years – the earliest found outside of Africa.

The same erosion that exposed these footprints destroyed them shortly after. Happisburgh is falling into the sea. The cliffs which hold the town lose three metres a year, crumbling away into the water below, taking with them houses, roads, and – eventually – the village entire. These risks aren’t confined to small villages; major adaptation will be needed in Sunderland, London, Cardiff, Hull, and other cities. Even where safe from erosion or the new average sea level, we can expect to be at greater risk from floods and storms. This is new and frightening to us. To our ancestors, it might have sounded more familiar than you’d think. 

Britain is surrounded by the ghosts of its sunken cities, both real and imagined. Dunwich – not to be confused with H.P. Lovecraft’s fictional Massachusetts setting of the same name – is a small village in Suffolk, with a population a little under 200 people. In 1086 the Domesday book lists it as a town of 500 households, with a population thought to be around 3,000. In the 13th century it was a prosperous town with a Royal Charter, five royal ships anchored in port, and two Members of Parliament, capable of providing Henry III with thirty ships ‘well equipped with all kinds of armament, good steersmen, and mariners’. And just as Dunwich’s prosperity came from the sea, so did its end. A series of storms and tides swept Dunwich away, eroding the land it stood on. Fishermen from the modern village still encounter the old town when their nets snag on its stones.

The delightfully named Ravenser Odd sat between the North Sea and the Humber, perched on a long promontory named ‘the Raven’s Tongue’ (Hrafn’s Eyr), and reached by a road ‘no broader than an arrow’s flight’. A little way from the original site of Ravenser – mentioned in Icelandic literature about the battle of Stamford Bridge – Ravenser Odd was built on sands and stone ‘cast up’ by the sea. By the 13th century it was a prosperous town, bustling with merchants and fishermen. By the end of the 14th, it was gone entirely. Storms eroded the sandbanks it stood on, until the great flood of 1362 finally destroyed it, sending it tumbling into the water. It would lie undisturbed for more than 650 years.

At the Sullom Voe inlet in the Shetland Islands, peat banks rise above the water. Cut open to the outside world, nine metres above the high tide mark, the dark soil gives way to a layer of light sand, marked by fragments of wood. Across the east coast of Scotland similar sand layers are found, reaching as far as 50 miles inland, and dating back thousands of years. It’s not uncommon for land to be made of ancient seabed; the badlands of Kansas are home to chalk pillars left behind when prehistoric seas retreated. But the sand on the Shetlands is different. It was left behind when sea levels were lower – when the soil was 20 metres above the coast. In other words, it was left behind by a gigantic wave.

In the Norwegian sea, at the edge of the continental shelf, a thousand mile scar is carved into the seabed; the remains of a tremendous underwater landslide. In 1931 fishermen in the North Sea dredged up a barbed harpoon, carved from the antler of a red deer. Fifty years later, radiocarbon dating produced our best guess at its origin: 11,000 BC. Dogger Bank is best known today through the nightly litany of the shipping forecast, sandwiched between Tyne and Fisher. Ten thousand years ago, it was forest and meadow populated by hunter gatherers, home to a lake where the Thames met with the Rhine to feed the Channel River. As the last ice age ended, rising sea levels began to drown the low-lying land, creating a chain of low-lying islands. The Storegga landslides, and the gigantic waves they created, spelled the end for any people left on them, and for many around the coast of Britain. The rising sea levels of this century are unlikely to be so dramatic as the drowning of Dunwich or flooding of Doggerland, scant consolation as that will be to those who lose their homes to the water.

But it is fascinating to think how these lost villages will feed into local tales centuries in the future. You can, if you want to, see glimpses of Britain’s long history in myths and stories. In Wales, storms in 2019 uncovered the petrified remains of a prehistoric forest buried under sand and water. People drew the link to the myth of a kingdom defended by complex sea walls, drowned when a drunkard neglected his duty and let the storm waters run in. No such kingdom existed, but give people glimpses of distant human inhabitation, and stories naturally grow. Similarly, old Manx myths talking of submerged islands cursed by Finn MacCool, or which claim that the sandbanks which stranded King William used to be part of the island until ‘a furious wind’ tore them away, are exactly the sort of thing you might dream up watching the waves erode the coast. That the Island was, thousands of years ago, much larger – connected by a land bridge to Cumbria – is just an added bonus. 

The highs and lows of Brad Pitt

This December Brad Pitt will hit the grand old age of 59. Hard to believe, considering that he has retained much of his youthful appeal, despite a well-documented penchant for cigarettes, weed and booze, habits apparently now finally kicked to the kerb.

As he approaches his seventh decade, Pitt has discussed his desire to transition from acting to a production-focused role, which has already long been a feature of his career.

Pitt’s impressive production credits include many pictures where he didn’t appear onscreen, including Running with Scissors (2006), The Departed (2006), Kick-Ass (2010), Selma (2014), Moonlight (2016) and The King (2019). He has also branched out into television, executive producing an array of prestige projects such as The OA (Netflix, 2016-19), The Third Day (Sky Atlantic, 2020) and The Underground Railroad (Amazon Prime, 2021).

Pitt was 28 when he made it big, playing roguish drifter J.D. in Ridley Scott’s Thelma & Louise (1991). Starring roles followed thick and fast, with commercial fare (Legends of the Fall, The Devil’s Own) astutely balanced by more left field choices (Babel, The Tree of Life).

Of his own films, Pitt has said box office flop The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007) is his favourite.

Pitt played the titular gunslinger in a movie he stated was: ‘a statement on celebrity and wanting to make a name for yourself without any substance under that. It’s a beautiful film. It really is. That was near and dear to me, as well as the ten other people who’ve seen it.’

The worst? The actor was unequivocal in naming 2004’s Troy, where he played Homeric hero Achilles: ‘It’s no slight on Wolfgang Petersen. Das Boot is one of the all-time great films. But somewhere in it, Troy became a commercial kind of thing. Every shot was like, ‘Here’s the hero!’ There was no mystery.’

Pitt is not calling time on acting just yet though – fans can look forward to seeing the star in David Leitch’s (Atomic Blonde) upcoming action-comedy Bullet Train and as tragic silent star John Gilbert in Babylon, directed by Damien Chazelle (Whiplash).

Incidentally, Bullet Train’s Leitch was also the stunt double for Brad Pitt in six motion pictures – Fight Club, The Mexican, Spy Game, Troy, Ocean’s 11 and Mr. and Mrs. Smith.

Here’s my personal selection of Pitt’s ten best movies:

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood(2019) Amazon Rent/Buy

Pitt is superb in Tarantino’s love letter to late 1969s Hollywood playing aging stuntman (and suspected wife killer) Cliff Booth.

He is at ease in the role, boasting an impressive physique at 56, demonstrating a laconic way with QT’s dialogue, much better than his cornpone delivery in the director’s overrated Inglorious Basterds (2009).

Tarantino’s weird foot fetish intrudes (Dr Scholl should have been a sponsor) and some scenes play way too long, but the picture perks up every time Pitt is onscreen.

True Romance (1993), Amazon Rent/Buy

Pitt’s flair for comedy came to the fore in Tony Scott’s movie, written again by Tarantino. Knowing of Brad’s professed (former) enjoyment of weed, it wasn’t too much of a stretch for him to play affably addled stoner Floyd, but boy did he do it well.

Mr & Mrs Smith (2005), Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney+

The movie that sundered the Pitt/Aniston marriage and saw the actor begin his eventually troubled relationship with Angelina Jolie.

It’s Spy vs Spy time in Doug Liman’s(The Bourne Identity) hit movie when mutually dissatisfied married couple John (Pitt) and Jane (Jolie) Smith don’t realise that each other are secret agents.

An action comedy of errors naturally follows when they do. The pair certainly had chemistry at the time, but it’s difficult not to watch through the lens of their later increasingly bitter personal and legal dustups.

Although a sequel reteaming the couple would certainly be interesting, it’s extremely unlikely, so viewers will have to settle for the upcoming Amazon Prime series with Donald Glover and Maya Erskine, who took over from Glover’s Solo co-star Phoebe Waller-Bridge who left due to that old excuse ‘creative differences.’

Seven (1997) Netflix, Amazon Rent/Buy

Some may find Pitt’s overwrought histrionics during Seven’s final ‘what’s in the box?’ scene a tad OTT, but he’s otherwise exceptionally good in David Fincher’s seminal noir thriller, an atmospheric trek through the Seven Deadly Sins essayed by Kevin Spacey’s creepy serial killer John Doe.

A shame them that the picture spawned a host of inferior imitators, including The Little Things, Solace, Kiss the Girls, Suspect Zero, Murder by Numbers, Untraceable, Jennifer 8, The Bone Collector and far too many others to mention.

Spy Game (2001)

The actor teams up with Tony Scott for this highly enjoyable espionage thriller where Pitt plays CIA operative Tom Bishop, mentored by superficially cynical Case Officer Nathan D. Muir (Robert Redford).

Redford had previously directed Pitt in A River Runs Through It (1992); the pair obviously got on as they have a natural onscreen relationship, which could easily pass for father and son. Redford was 65 at the time, Pitt 38.

The older actor gets the best lines. Redford displays some great underplayed humour as the foxy spy who effortlessly outwits his pen-pushing bosses.

Snatch (2000), Amazon Prime, Netflix, Amazon Rent/Buy

Pitt is easily the best thing in Guy Ritchie’s cringingly titled cockneys vs travellers vs gangsters movie, which has aged badly since its release back in 2000, suffering as it does from the director’s contrived public school take on the London crime world.

Pitt is on form as bare-knuckler boxer Mickey O’Neil, leader of an Irish traveller clan.

Speaking in a deliberately impenetrable brogue, the wily O’Neil is one step ahead of both erstwhile ally Turkish (Jason Statham) and nasty crime boss Brick Top (a genuinely menacing Alan Ford).

Snatch was pointlessly made into a two season TV series (2017-18) starring Rupert ‘Ron Weasley’ Grint. The best that can be said for the show was that it wasn’t as bad as Channel 4’s 2000 series Lock Stock, a riff on the 1998 movie co-produced by Ritchie, then collaborator Matthew Vaughn and tiresome DJ Chris Evans. The series is notable in giving early roles to Martin Freeman (Sherlock) and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (Jamie Lannister).

Ad Astra (2019, Amazon Rent/Buy

James Gray’s (The Lost City of Z), brooding sci-fi picture sees careworn astronaut Roy McBride (Pitt) on an Oedipal quest (minus the incest) to confront his father Clifford (Tommy Lee Jones), who in a Colonel Kurtz (Apocalypse Now) fashion has gone rogue on deep space facility Project Lima.

Gray wanted his film to have ‘the most realistic depiction of space travel that’s been put in a movie’ which may or may not be the case, but he certainly gives it the old college try.

The pace is slow, and Pitt dials his performance way down (as required for the role), but there are also some extremely well-handled action sequences, including a lunar skirmish with rebel scavengers and a terrifying encounter with killer baboons on a space station.

For non-classical scholars Ad Astra is Latin for ‘To the stars’.

World War Z (2013), Amazon Rent/Buy

Summer scarf sporting former United Nations investigator Gerry Lan (Pitt) takes on the Zombie Apocalypse in Marc Forster’s (The Kite Runner) enjoyably breakneck action horror.

Pitt holds the film together with an underplayed performance in a plot that throws the viewer a few curveballs, including the WTF self-inflicted death of a brilliant young virologist, and when overly loud religious chanting leads to the noise-sensitive zombies breaking into Jerusalem.

The picture’s climax occurs in a Cardiff WHO facility, which, as the saying goes ‘isn’t something you see every day.’

At least in Hollywood blockbusters, that is.

A couple of months before the release of World War Z sources claimed nervous distributor Paramount altered a scene in which the characters hypothesize that the zombie infection began in mainland China.

George Clooney paid tribute to his pal Pitt’s behind the scenes efforts on turning the troubled, over-budget production around: ‘I saw him in London when he was doing the World War Z reshoot…He just said, “This one’s going to kill me, man.” It was a huge reshoot and Brad was putting it on his shoulders. He picked it up and put it on his shoulders and took it away from all the people who were screwing it up. Carried it over the finish line. Got it made into a film that was well reviewed and made a lot of money…’

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, (2007)Amazon Rent/Buy

Chopper director Andrew Dominik helmed this revisionist Western depicting the events leading to the betrayal and murder of the folk hero bank robber (Pitt) by weaselly fame-seeker Robert Ford (Casey Affleck) and his brother Charley (Sam Rockwell).

Reviews were mostly favourable, with Mark Kermode going as far as to say that the picture was ‘one of the most wrongly neglected masterpieces of its era.’

Nay-sayers objected to the length, lethargic tempo and what some saw as superfluous third-person narration (using the original temp track by assistant editor Hugh Ross) which literally described what was happening on screen.

Dominik (who also directed Pitt in 2012’s Killing Them Softly) joked that notoriously snail-paced auteur Terrence Malick (Badlands) said Jesse James was ‘too slow.’

Pitt is the co-producer of Dominik’s upcoming Marilyn Monroe biopic Blonde, starringAna de Armas (Knives Out) as the disturbed screen siren.

The Mexican (2001), Amazon Rent/Buy

Director Gore Verbinski helmed this agreeably easy-going romantic crime comedy, where Pitt’s mob-indebted goofball Jerry Welbach travels to Mexico to collect a cursed antique pistol.

The Mexican echoes the shaggy dog road movies of the 1970s (Slither, Harry & Tonto, The Sugarland Express, Two-Lane Blacktop etc) where character is more important than the plot.

Welbach and girlfriend Samantha (Julia Roberts) encounter a gallery of rogues on their journey, including oddly sympathetic gay hitman Winston Baldry, played by the late James Gandolfini.

The Mexican made its nut at the box office, raking in $147.8 million on a $57m budget. Verbinski later found even greater financial success when he teamed up with Johnny Depp for the first three Pirates of the Caribbean pictures but came a cropper when they later reteamed for 2013’s bloated Lone Ranger, where Depp was Tonto to also later scandal-hit Armie Hammer as the Ranger of the movie’s title.