Has the past decade blunted our sense of the duty of care?

Modern British history can be divided into two parts: before Covid and after. That is the central pillar of this at times arid but ultimately compelling account of British social policy since 1945. We recovered in the aftermath of the second world war. Can we do it again, post-pandemic?

Peter Hennessy, a crossbench peer, starts with the observation that government has a duty of care to the people, a conviction that emerged in the aftermath of the war and underpinned the creation of the welfare state. At the centre of it all was William Beveridge – ‘dry, prickly and difficult, but a genius when it came to the social arithmetic of welfare’. His aim was to attack the five great social evils of the time: want, disease, ignorance, idleness and squalor.

Post-war conditions were pretty tough. In 1947-8, less than half of homes had a bathroom. Even by 1951, 15 per cent of households shared a WC with the neighbours. Britain eventually got its much needed welfare state with the help of vast subventions from the US. It worked. Life improved. The duty of care was upheld.

Yet by the 1960s, although education and livelihoods were improving, ‘a shared sense of “no satisfaction” increased’. It seemed that government had pressed every button on the political-economic dashboard, but it still hadn’t led to the social improvements that Whitehall had expected. Edward Heath recognised this, and in 1973 warned his party that

the alternative to expansion is not… an England of quiet market towns linked only by trains puffing slowly and peacefully through green meadows. The alternative is slums, dangerous roads, old factories, cramped schools and stunted lives.

Beveridge’s assault on social ills ran through the manifestoes of all post-war governments. John Major was appalled by the grimness of public services and the grinding indignity of homelessness, both of which he was resolved to change. Tony Blair’s great ambition was to eradicate child poverty within a generation. He didn’t get there, but the ambition itself marked him out as Beveridge’s direct political descendant.

But Brexit changed everything. According to Hennessy, ‘its searing and unsettling effects helped to diminish our sense of the duty of care’. The cabinet chosen by Boris Johnson was specifically composed of individuals ready to accept no deal with the EU. This kind of extreme Brexit focus has led to the ‘coarsening of political conduct and political language’. Unless we can shift it, ‘a jet stream of acrimony and recrimination will dominate our political climate’.

Hennessy’s point is that a nation can only make substantial social improvements through political consensus. When you have a liberal free market party up against a social democratic party, as has traditionally been the case in Britain, you get a lot of arguments and shouting – but consensus is possible. When the central questions in political culture concern identity – ‘who are we?’, ‘what is our place in the world?’ – then consensus becomes much harder. The cogs begin to jam. This is what Brexit has done.

If Britain is beached on the problem of Brexit, can we ever hope to address our current social problems? And if not, how can we fully recover from Covid? Hennessy takes the example of social care, and the recent decision by government to hike National Insurance to pay for it. Everyone in British politics knows that social care is a huge problem and needs to be solved. In Hennessy’s view it offered a prime opportunity to build political – and therefore social – unity. But the government failed. Instead it imposed a tax increase that will weigh heaviest on the least well off.

That doesn’t bode well, especially in a time of rising public debt and inflation. Covid has already cost Britain far more than the global financial crisis of 2008. The need now is for a strong, unifying government, like that of 1945. But the pursuit of sectional political ends, such as the government’s decision to meddle in culture-war bickering, suggests that things are heading in a very different direction.

This is an unsettling book. There’s no doubt Brexit changed something in the character of our politics. Perhaps we are still too close to say precisely what that is. But Hennessy is convincing when he argues that the injection of Brexit into the national bloodstream has made consensual politics harder to achieve. The new sourness, he says, will check our ability to deal not only with the complications arising from Brexit, but also with the deep social problems that existed long beforehand.

Britain, he writes, risks becoming ‘a nation that no longer inspires itself’. If that happens, then our admirable post-war recovery, based on the notion that government has a duty of care to the people, will start to feel like another country.

Pitch-black satire drenched in an atmosphere of compelling unease: ETO’s Golden Cockerel reviewed

Blame it on Serge Diaghilev. Rimsky-Korsakov died in 1908 and never saw the première of his last opera, The Golden Cockerel. When the great showman finally presented it in Paris in 1914, it was as Le Coq d’Or: a spectacular opera-ballet hybrid, with colourful, folk-inspired designs by Natalia Goncharova that came to define the Ballets Russes in its imperial phase. That was the form in which it came to Britain, where the Evening Standard described it as a ‘farrago of love-making, black magic and ingenuous inconsequence’ before turning to the real news – the costumes. And that’s the basic impression – a fabulous but flimsy slice of Slavic exotica – that has lodged itself in western memory, reinforced more recently by the Mariinsky company and Valery Gergiev. (We don’t talk about him any more.)

James Conway’s new production for English Touring Opera pulls away the tinsel and gives us the opera Rimsky wrote: a playful, pitch-black satire drenched in an atmosphere of compelling unease. Who knew? It’s no secret that Rimsky was prompted to write the opera by the bungled Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5, or that he took the side of the reforming liberals. It’s just that nothing in The Golden Cockerel’s performance history leads you to expect something as pointed, as economical, and as outright funny as this Pushkin-based fairy tale of a paranoid autocrat who entrusts the safety of his kingdom to a magic chicken before launching a catastrophic invasion of a neighbouring state. No one in tsarist Russia needed to have it spelled out, and no one needs it now – though of course ETO planned this staging long before the current news cycle.

Anyway, it’s another win for ETO’s long-established virtues of lucid storytelling and resourceful casting. Tsar Dodon’s onion-domed throne transforms into a silken love-tent for the Queen of Shemakha, and the Cockerel, in a nod to Diaghilev, wears a shining, stylised yellow crest and costume – though it’s performed not by a dancer but by a soprano (Alys Mererid Roberts) whose movements are as graceful as her singing is brilliant. The costumes (by Neil Irish) are a mixture of toytown tsarist and streamlined Ballets Russes, and the Astrologer – a very unreliable narrator – repeatedly intervenes, tugging a curtain painted with one of those apocalyptic early-Soviet modernist visions. As a warning of horrors ahead, it chimes perfectly with the slip-sliding chromaticism of Rimsky’s score. He never wrote anything more ominous or insinuating, and under Gerry Cornelius, the 27-piece ETO orchestra makes it swirl, and on occasion sting, without placing undue pressure upon the singers.

They’re good, by the way. In Buxton, Aidan Edwards stood in at short notice as Dodon, though you wouldn’t have guessed it – unmistakably a buffoon, but singing with such clarity that you actually felt a stab of sympathy when he finds his imbecile sons dead on the battlefield. (The rhyming English translation dates from a 1940s US revival; it’s quirky but serviceable.) Robert Lewis, as the Astrologer, delivers his warnings in a fierce, nasal tenor – entirely in keeping with the absurdist atmosphere – and Paula Sides’s Queen melted from icy hauteur to languishing sensuality, throwing out bejewelled sprays of coloratura as she went. You sort-of knew she would have the last laugh, and there’s something unnerving about the way a fairy tale opera from 1908 anticipates precisely what we’re thinking and feeling in the spring of 2022. It’s touring nationally; something to bear in mind next time you encounter any clickbait-y rubbish about Russian music being cancelled.

The Czech Philharmonic played two (mostly) home-grown programmes at the Barbican under its music director Semyon Bychkov. This was the first major overseas orchestra at the Barbican since Covid and I went to the first night, on the principle that everyone should hear the Czech Philharmonic play Smetana’s Má vlast at least once in their life. It was everything you’d hope: strings with the burnished sheen of antique silver, and an authentic, down-the-spine shiver as Smetana brought his ‘Vysehrad’ chorale back at the end of the final movement. Earlier, Yuja Wang had played Rachmaninov’s First Piano Concerto, and seemed to dial back her usual flamboyance out of respect for Bychkov and his orchestra. She glowed rather than dazzled; the result was oddly touching.

At the Southbank, meanwhile, Vasily Petrenko conducted the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in Walton’s First Symphony, and if the strings sounded polished but underweight, the RPO horns almost matched the Czechs for billowy richness. Petrenko chose to blur Walton’s edges, and as a strategy it didn’t really work: this, of all British symphonies, relies upon the precise and highly localised application of brute force. Still, Petrenko’s command was impressive, and it’s possible that in a couple of seasons’ time the RPO might find that it has the most interesting chief conductor of any ‘big four’ London orchestra.

2546: Picture book – solution

NICOLAS POUSSIN painted ET IN ARCADIA EGO and A DANCE TO THE MUSIC OF TIME. The latter inspired ANTHONY POWELL, whose novel sequence of the same name introduced the egregious Kenneth WIDMERPOOL.

First prize Gill Wayne, London SW9

Runners-up Storm Hutchinson, Dulas, Anglesey; Alison Latham, Pinkneys Green, Berkshire

2549: Obscurity

Doc writes: This is Columba’s last puzzle for The Spectator which we are pleased to publish now, three years after he retired from the series.

One unclued light is the surname of the author of a novel whose title (two words) is hidden in the grid. Each word of this title has two synonyms among the unclued lights. Two unclued lights are surnames of characters in the novel, one of which can be divided into two words, each being defined by an unclued light; the other name is defined by an unclued light, which constitutes an instruction to solvers on how to treat the concealed title.

Across

4 Plundered item operations officer returned (9)

10 Language in broadcast upset rogue (10)

11 South wind endlessly severe (6)

12 Sorry for retiring American musician (7)

14 Stand in front of buyer with audio player (5)

16 Proceed and set about conversation in America (6)

22 Study absorbing information brought back by English traitor (8)

23 Sailor who’s experienced lots, lad, sadly (7, two words)

24 Check name in advance (4)

25 Trees in mass stopping golfer (4)

29 Lacking knowledge since sadly getting into difficulty (8)

32 Like seaweed I found, not new, drifting round about (6)

34 Going around in trilby, strangely aesthetic (5)

35 Chiefly wanting one to be dignified (5)

38 Like some spectacles horrid men arranged, entertaining millions (4-6)

39 Transport in case site’s changed (9)

40 Area with points of intersection, not over range (5)

Down

1 Tolerate particular angle (10)

2 Time on island for nymph (5)

3 Silly person in Scotland getting a plug (6)

4 Scraper in street with equipment one left (7)

5 Seeming well-informed, rising before opening in arena (10)

6 Dull people, nasty and surly, not unknown (7)

8 Explain convoluted clue, beginning to imperil engagement (9)

9 Portion put out, not acceptable (4)

13 Most obvious part of tribal destiny (7)

15 Pub, first off, taken in by lavish old stranger (6)

17 Game with nice end, oddly involving knight and last of pawns (10, two words)

19 Fabulists for example aim to break boundaries (10)

20 Period occupied by learner with support, I see, about some maths (9)

26 Lectures from master among boring events coming up (7)

31 Fool, once in class, runs away (5)

33 Long supporting popular record company (5)

34 Take off around start of summer recess (4)

A first prize of £30 for the first correct solution opened on 18 April. There are two runners-up prizes of £20. Please scan or photograph entries and email them (including the crossword number in the subject field) to crosswords@spectator.co.uk – the dictionary prize is not available. We will accept postal entries again at some point.

Download a printable version here.

Spectator competition winners: The polar bear who came to tea

In Competition No. 3242, you were asked to submit a short story that is a mash-up of cli-fi with a genre of your choice.

In his 2016 book The Great Derangement, the Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh questioned why ‘climate change cast a much smaller shadow on literature than it does on the world’. Six years on, though, cli-fi, like the thermometer, is inexorably on the rise and you were invited to jump on the bandwagon.

I was taken with J.C.H. Mounsey’s Conan Doyle-inflected ‘The Swedish Cassandra’, and with Joe Houlihan’s poignant tale of Pooh and friends in the Hundred Acre Desert: ‘We need honey. Piglet, did you bring the honey jar?… Piglet shuffled his little feet. “All the bees are dead,” he said.’

A commendation also goes to Brian Murdoch, who just missed out on a spot in the winning line-up. He was edged out by the entries below, which net their authors £30.

Sophie was having tea with her mummy when there was a knock at the door. ‘Who could that be?’ said Mummy. ‘It can’t be the milkman or the postman because we are the last remaining humans on the planet. And it can’t be Daddy, because he is on the Wall, repelling marauding mutant invaders! When Mummy opened the door, in swam a giant polar bear. ‘Excuse me,’ said the polar bear, ‘but I’m very hungry. It’s a bloody long swim from Svalbard to Kettering-on-Sea. Could I have some tea?’ ‘Of course!’ said Mummy. ‘Would you like some grasshopper and seaweed soup?’ But the polar bear didn’t just eat one bowl of soup, he ate all the soup, and all the acorns, all the lab-grown microalgae, then he ate Sophie, then her mummy. But he was still hungry! So he sat, waiting for Daddy to come home. But he never did. David Silverman

At the top of the rise, Cecily found herself looking out over the silent uproar of the ocean, the listless wind plucking at her kirtle while the wheeling gulls mocked her. Beneath that sea lay the busy, wealthy, dirty town that had nurtured her. She recalled the words of Father Ambrosius, who had cursed her even as she lay inviting his lust. Was her indulgent wickedness, and that of others, the cause of the wintry weather, the hungry harvests, the savage storms and the rising, raging sea? Was it the Lord’s chastening, or had the Old Gods of Earth raised the rod of punishment over mankind? Had her dear brother Wilkin perished beneath the greedy waves because of her sin? The new life fretted within her. What kind of world would she bequeath to her child? Would he even witness the dawn of the 15th century? Frank Upton

The family convened for the dénouement in the highest attic, both drawing-rooms having already flooded. Inspector Doggerel, competing with the roar of the monsoon outside and intermittent cries from drowning peacocks, felt they were paying insufficient attention to his unravelling of Lord Climedown’s murder. Everyone was perspiring horribly except Lady Climedown, whose aristocratic glow merely intensified. Doggerel was outlining the havoc Gloucestershire’s newfound humidity wreaked on establishing reliable times of death when Dickie Climedown squawked ‘I say!’ at the realisation his spats were sopping. Instantly, everyone noted a heavy dampness about their own ankles, hardly requiring Doggerel’s deductive powers to recognise it was time to adjourn. Minutes later, they were out through the skylight and clinging gamely to the roof. Din increasing, visibility almost nil, further speechifying obviously futile, Doggerel mouthed the murderer’s name – Lady Climedown – into the torrential gloom and, when she did, counted it a spectacular confession. Adrian Fry

It was a bright cold day in July, and the mercury was showing minus thirteen. Winston Smith unclipped his skis outside the Ministry of Wind. A poster of an icy woman stared at him: GREAT GRETA IS WATCHING YOU. In the foyer, Parsons bumbled over, wearing the balaclava, goose-down parka and green sash of the Party. ‘Good news for Heat Week, Smith! The Chiltern glacier has advanced another mile. Five years and we can get average global temperatures down to pre-industrial levels.’ The telescreen flared into life: it was the only device that could be on stand-by. ‘What a scorcher! In the blazing hell of Tropicana people have been reduced to bikinis and iced tea.’ Winston tried to remember. Had Frigidia always been at war with Tropicana? He suppressed the heatcrime and mumbled his Party mantras. COLD IS HOT. ICE IS FIRE. PENGUINS ARE INDIGENOUS. He loved Great Greta. Nick MacKinnon

Returning from the corner shop with a selection of insects for lunch, Dr Watson removed the thickly veiled, wide-brimmed hat protecting him from the burning rays of the sun. On the stairs a strange, bearded man pushed past him. Holmes was gazing out of the window at the North Sea. ‘Who’d believe it could have reached Baker Street already?’ he muttered. ‘We’ll have to move, advertise this place as a bijou seaside residence.’ ‘Who was that fellow I saw on the stairs, Holmes?’ ‘Ah. A denier.’ ‘How do you know that?’  ‘Elementary, my dear Watson. Beneath the false beard, his face was horribly blistered by the sun.’ ‘False?’ Holmes lifted a small fibre from the edge of a cup. ‘Horse-hair,’ he said. ‘And furthermore, his hat…’ Watson interrupted. ‘Did you discover whether he can swim, Holmes?’ ‘That’s hardly relevant, Watson.’ ‘I think it is, Holmes. He’s just floated past the window.’ Sylvia Fairley

No. 3245: French connection

You are invited to take a passage from a classic of French literature (please specify)and recast it in Franglais. Please email entries of up to 16 lines/150 words to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 13 April.

No. 696

White to play and mate in two. Philip Hamilton Williams, Birmingham News, 1897. Answers should be emailed to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 4 April. There is a prize of £20 for the first correct answer out of a hat. Please include a postal address and allow six weeks for prize delivery.

Last week’s solution 1 Rd4+! e.g. 1…Ka5 2 Re5#, or 1…Kc5 2 Qd6# or 1…Kc3 2 Qd3#

Last week’s winner N. Kitchen, Bury, Lancashire

Varsity battle

The 140th edition of the Varsity Match took place last month at the Royal Automobile Club in London’s Pall Mall. This one was as tense as they come: Cambridge grabbed an early point, but Oxford built a significant lead by winning the next three. On the four boards which remained, Oxford’s situation looked precarious, so Cambridge could still entertain hopes of victory. In the end, Cambridge pulled back a single win, but the remaining games fizzled into draws. That made for a 4.5-3.5 win in Oxford’s favour. The overall series now stands at 60-58 to Cambridge, with 22 matches drawn.

The RAC Chess Circle which organises the event has a generous custom of awarding both a best game prize and a brilliancy prize. Oxford’s Tom O’Gorman won the best game prize for his win against Matthew Wadsworth on top board. The epic battle in the game below deservedly earned both players a share of the brilliancy prize. The game spirals out of control after 11 e5, and in the ensuing chaos it is often hard to fathom which side holds the advantage. Both players rise to the challenge, repeatedly finding inventive ideas in irrational situations.

Victor Vasiesiu (Oxford)–Koby Kalavannan (Cambridge)

Varsity Chess March 2022

1 e4 c5 2 Nf3 Nc6 3 Bb5 Nf6 4 Bxc6 dxc6 5 d3 Bg4 6 Nbd2 Qc7 7 h3 Bh5 8 g4 Bg6 9 Nc4 Nd7 10 Bd2 f6 11 e5 This ambitious move obstructs the natural advance e7-e5, which justifies an urgent response. b5 12 Ba5 Qc8 13 Ncd2 Now 13…Nxe5 14 Nxe5 fxe5 15 Qe2 followed by Ba5-c3 grants White a clear positional edge, so Kalavannan creates a tactical diversion. Qa6 14 Nb3 fxe5 But not 14…c4 15 dxc4 bxc4 16 Qxd7+! 15 Bc3 b4 16 Bxe5 c4 17 Nbd4 c5 18 Nf5 Qe6 19 O-O! Inviting 19…Nxe5, since 20 Re1 Nxf3+ 21 Qxf3 Qc8 22 Nd6+ picks up the queen. Bxf5 20 gxf5 Qxf5 21 Bg3 Rd8 22 dxc4 Nf6 22…Ne5 was perhaps a better bet when White could choose between 23 Nh4 and 23 Qxd8+ Kxd8 24 Nxe5 with interesting compensation. 23 Qe2 Qxh3 24 Rad1 Rc8 25 Rfe1 h5! An essential bid for counterplay. 26 Nh4 g5 27 Qd3 Rg8 28 Nf5 Kf7 29 Nxe7 A clever shot, based on the idea 29…Bxe7 30 Rxe7+ Kxe7 31 Bd6+ which wins the queen on h3. But 29 Nh6+! was more forcing and after 29…Bxh6 30 Rxe7+ White should win. h4! Coolly played. The counterplay lands just in time to avert disaster. 30 Nxg8 hxg3 31 fxg3 Kxg8 32 Qg6+ Bg7 33 Qxg5 Ng4 34 Qd5+ 34 Rd8+ Rxd8 35 Qxd8+ Kh7 36 Qd3+ Kh6 37 Qd2+ would secure a draw. Kh8 35 Re2 Qxg3+ 36 Rg2 Qe3+ 37 Kh1 Qh3+ 38 Kg1 (see diagram) Ne3 This tempting move meets with a powerful counter. Jon Speelman noted that there was a forced win with 38…Bd4+ 39 Rxd4 Qe3+ 40 Kh1 Qe1+ 41 Rg1 Qh4+ 42 Kg2 Qh2+ 43 Kf3 Rf8+ 44 Kxg4 Qxg1 45 Kh5 Qxd4 39 Qd8+! Yet again, the only chance! Rxd8 40 Rxd8+ Kh7 41 Rh2 Qxh2+ 42 Kxh2 Bxb2 43 Kg3 Kg6 44 Kf4 Nxc4 45 Rc8 Bd4 46 Rc6+! Keeping Black’s king to a passive position is a key part of White defence. Kf7 47 Ra6 Na3 48 Ke4 Nxc2 49 Rxa7+ Ke6 50 Ra6+ Kd7 51 Kd5 Ne3+ 52 Ke4 Kc7 53 Kd3 Kb7 54 Rd6 Nd1 Setting a trap, which White avoids: if 55 Rxd4 Nb2+! 55 Kc4 Ne3+ 56 Kb5 Nc2 57 Rb6+ Kc7 58 Rc6+ Kb7 59 Rb6+ Ka7 60 Ra6+ Kb8 61 Rb6+ Kc7 62 Rc6+ Kd7 63 Rxc5 Bxc5 64 Kxc5 Kc7 65 Kc4 Kc6 66 Kb3 Kb5 67 Kxc2 Ka4 68 Kb2 Ka5 69 a3 bxa3+ 70 Kxa3 Draw agreed

Homage to Joseph Johnson, the radical 18th-century publisher

There’s no excuse for dullness, especially when writing about a life as eventful as Joseph Johnson’s, the publisher and bookseller who worked with Mary Wollstonecraft, Joseph Priestley, William Cowper, Erasmus Darwin and Wordsworth and Coleridge, among others. I opened this book expecting it to lift the veil on dinner with Joseph Johnson, but the title’s a misnomer. (Other than a brief introductory passage, Johnson’s weekly dinners are mentioned only in passing.) Descriptions of his relationships with Wollstonecraft and Cowper are perhaps the most successful parts of Daisy Hay’s book, but elsewhere it is under-researched and under-written.

This becomes evident early on when she writes about the Gordon Riots. Among the crowds, William Blake watched with mounting horror the incineration of Newgate gaol and all those inside. Scholars suggest the experience led him to associate fire with revolution, and so left its mark on his psyche and poetry. But Hay omits all mention of Blake, despite his being a principal actor in her story – a shame, because he could have brought her account to life.

Again, Hay says that Richard Lovell Edgeworth ‘narrowly escaped being lynched by a loyalist crowd after he was accused of aiding the rebels’ and that Edgeworthstown, in Co. Longford, was nearly destroyed by ‘rebels’, but with no explanation of who they were. That is to say, she makes no mention of the United Irishmen and therefore cannot refer to their uprising in 1798, let alone the subsequent French invasion expected in August that year.

Such derelictions are hard to forgive. However shameful it may have been, that chapter is an important one in our colonial history, and many readers won’t know about it. The arbitrary executions of those ‘rebels’ have no place in the curriculum of English schools, though there can be few people in Ireland who have forgotten the truth of it.

Johnson’s dealings with the Romantic poets ought to take a starring role, but Hay’s account of Coleridge’s Fears in Solitude volume focuses on the title poem rather than ‘France: An Ode’ or ‘Frost at Midnight’. This is like thinking you can do justice to Lyrical Ballads by writing about ‘The Convict’ when the real star is ‘Tintern Abbey’. ‘Frost at Midnight’ is one of the greatest of Coleridge’s conversation poems. That Johnson was its publisher is a significant part in Hay’s narrative, more so than she believes.

Part of the problem is that her characterisation is limited. She describes Wordsworth’s encounter with Johnson in 1793 with no sense of what the young Lake poet was like. At this stage his political views were similar to those of Robespierre: he thought regicide a fine idea, especially in the cases of Louis XVI and George III. If, as she suggests, Wordsworth was Johnson’s dinner guest, such convictions would have made for fiery exchanges, but she gives no hint of that.

Reading this book one senses that the drudgery of assembling fact after fact has been enough for Hay, without the forlorn challenge of bringing that swaying edifice to life. Of course there is also a problem of scale. Johnson was born in 1738 and died in 1809 – a life spanning decades of history and involving many writers. To do justice to the subject would require much time, and perhaps lack of it may explain Hay’s omissions.

There’s little here, for instance, about the Bluestockings. They are mentioned on page 78, but the term goes unglossed – as if everyone knows who Mrs Montagu, Hannah More and Ann Yearsley were. Nor is there any reference to ‘The Recluse’, the poem Coleridge had designed to precipitate Christ’s 1,000-year rule on Earth, which he would certainly have spoken about had he dined with Johnson in the summer of 1798. Nor does Hay mention the execution of Louis XVI and the arrival of the news in London – an event that changed the lives of everyone in Johnson’s circle, not least Johnson himself.

These aren’t minor details but elements fundamental to Hay’s project, and without them, it lacks definition, licensing the kind of narrowness that precludes imaginative truth and allowing the book to wander from one episode to another – unpersuasive, hollow and fuzzy.

You’d never guess from her art how passionate Gwen John was

‘Dearest Gwen,’ writes Celia Paul, born 1959, to Gwen John, died 1939, ‘I know this letter to you is an artifice. I know you are dead and that I’m alive… But I do feel mysteriously connected to you.’ And well she might, because the parallels between the lives of the two painters are legion. To take the most obvious: both were students at the Slade, both had relationships with much older artists and both came to be seen, for a time at least, through the prism of their association with men. Gwen John was the older sister of the once more famous Augustus and model and lover of the French sculptor Auguste Rodin; Celia Paul, the lover, model and mother of a son of the painter Lucian Freud.

Paul stepped into the limelight three years ago with her first book, Self-portrait, a devastatingly honest account of a painter’s life. The current volume is written around a series of 26 letters she has written to Gwen John, and is at once diary and confessional, biography and autobiography and something between the two. It maps the landmarks of the two artists’ lives, exploring their motivation through the tenuously imagined dialogue of two kindred minds.

Although some of the emotional traumas here will be familiar to readers of Paul’s previous volume, it is Gwen John’s life as much as her own that is the focus of this book. The intense stillness, calm and beautifully modulated tones of John’s painting give little clue to a life of roiling emotion and fiercely driven passion. After a childhood in Wales and student years in London, she escaped to Paris and spent the rest of her life in France. In her later years in Meudon she lived in an abandoned hangar, often sleeping in the garden. ‘She wasn’t chaste or subdued,’ Augustus wrote of her, ‘but amorous and proud. She didn’t steal through life, but preserved a haughty independence which people mistook for humility.’ Celia Paul is probably rightly wary of Augustus’s pronouncements, but they cast a useful light on a life which might easily be seen as a series of violent attachments – Rodin being the most significant – and painful rejections.

In all of this Paul finds echoes in her own life, as she does in the sense of compulsion that lies behind both vocations. ‘I tell you,’ Gwen John wrote to her close friend Véra Oumançoff, ‘that sometimes my work tires me. It isn’t often a pleasure. It has always been tiring and difficult, I do it as I do my housework because it has to be done.’ In the same spirit, Paul would lie on her studio floor planning her next work until she had gathered the strength to begin. And when it comes to describing the genesis and construction of her own paintings she renders the art historian of the future redundant. ‘Words don’t come easily to me,’ she says, but in writing of the world around her, about portraits of herself, her mother and sisters, seascapes, the view from her flat opposite the British Museum, paintings of trees, streams and clouds, you would never know it.

Her painting of a copper beech was ‘torn out of me like a demon being exorcised’. To her the finished painting resembles ‘a controlled explosion’ and she is filled with ‘such uplifting joy I can’t even begin to describe the happiness’. A fortnight later she looks at it again and decides it’s not right, scolding herself for trusting the ecstasy she had felt. Back onto the easel it goes, ‘weighted down and suffocated by its own darkness’. The artist lets in air and light in the interstices of its branches and leaves and it is ‘alive and breathing’. And here it is, reproduced in the book, in all its surging energy, a tree electrified and sparking with light all the way up its trunk to the ends of its branches.

More tellingly still, she writes about a portrait of herself with Lucian Freud and his daughter Bella. This was started after Freud’s death and is based on a photograph of the three taken in 1983. The painting comes easily at first, but for days she tries and fails to capture his head. ‘I feel sick. I work into the night and early hours,’ but to no avail. She gives up and paints it all out. Then some three weeks later she begins again and – the achieve of, the mastery of the thing as Hopkins put it – ‘this time Lucian is alive. I’ve captured him alive.’

This book lets the reader into a world of sadness, loneliness and isolation. At its heart, however, is that unexpected kernel of confidence and self-belief that the author shared with Gwen John. Celia Paul felt that the world censured her for not being a better mother. ‘But my desire,’ she writes, ‘was for the shadowy crime of painting. I longed to be alone and free to create my secret unsettling art.’ Not a comfortable thought, but then this doesn’t set out to be a comfortable book.

Is the Virgin Mary being sidelined by Rome?

The Catholic church has always venerated Mary (‘Mother of God’) above other saints. But in recent years there has been a slight (a very slight) cooling in the church with regard to the inclusion of Mary in the liturgy of the mass. It’s been an English custom since medieval times to recite a Hail Mary (a verse of the rosary – the traditional Marian prayer) at the end of the ‘Prayers of the Faithful’ – the sequence of introductory prayers in the main body of the service.

But just over a decade ago Rome decided to gently discourage this practice. It still continues in many churches (old habits die hard) and in some senses represents a small disjunction in the English church’s relationship with Rome. Okay, not small – tiny. Infinitesimal. Even so, as a practising Catholic, albeit not a particularly well-behaved one, I have observed at first hand how enthusiastic Marian devotion is perceived as a vaguely unsettling and slightly eccentric fringe activity in the modern church. It can be greeted at best by incomprehension, at worst by polite derision; and this alone makes painstakingly scholarly and well-researched works such as Chris Maunder’s Mary, Founder of Christianity so piquant and so timely.

To say that Maunder is walking gingerly into a minefield in the book’s opening chapters is no exaggeration. This isn’t simply because of how traditional and fundamentalist Christians might be expected to feel about a work whose main agenda is to place Mary unapologetically centre stage in their faith narrative (Maunder is a Catholic, although his book is determinedly ecumenical in tone), but because he is also tentatively engaging with a whole gamut of other modern social, sexual, political and cultural niceties. If you are familiar with the exquisite (and unabashedly homoerotic) Antonello painting of Saint Sebastian tied to a stake and stuck full of arrows, then this may give you some flavour of how limited Maunder’s room for intellectual manoeuvre is. It’s painful! He is bound! And a significant portion of the book represents Maunder’s heroically measured and utterly meticulous attempts to position himself on sure moral/scriptural ground. It doesn’t always make for easy reading to observe how careful he needs to be – how he must perpetually validate and self-justify.

Faith is, of course, a contentious subject, and it’s definitely no bad thing for an author to strive to operate within strictly defined boundaries. If the moral and intellectual violations of Trump and Putin have taught us anything, then surely it is this. Have not some of our greatest (and most radical) cultural artefacts been made by artists and thinkers apparently operating within the powerful confines of a strict hegemony?

At the heart of Maunder’s work is a desire to explain, challenge and re-contextualise the apparent patriarchy of the Christian tradition. He pores over the four Gospels and teases the historical away from the mythological. He looks for clues and inconsistencies. He makes some tentative leaps of faith. He deals with (among other subjects) the Virgin birth, the resurrection, Mary’s role as the first intercessor (and the originator of Jesus’s active mission) and goes on to argue cogently that there is scriptural evidence that Jesus’s family, led by Mary and his brother James, were powerful, central figures in the early church.

‘Mother’ church as we find her today is at some level the product of a 2,000-year-old struggle between Mary and St Paul. St Paul, perhaps the church’s greatest evangeliser, made the Christian message available to all (Mary and James, Maunder contends, were more attached to the traditions of Judaism). But at what cost? In moving away from the influence of Jesus’s family, did Paul not also distance this fledgling faith from its powerful feminine core?

On paper this may seem like relatively small beer, but it isn’t. Maunder’s book actually touches on one of the most critical issues of our time: the ongoing struggle between the forces of tradition and patriarchy (the tethered, the ‘masculine’, the ‘thought’) against those of the untethered, instinctual, the felt (or ‘feminine’). If there is one power shift that might be said to define our modern age (certainly to divide generations) then surely it involves a conversation around gender.

This isn’t so much a binary division between the sexes (aren’t we moving beyond all that, now?); it’s about what some call the ‘warrior’ and ‘goddess’ aspects of our individual human psyches – the first identified with reason and masculinity, the second with intuition and femininity. A natural and productive power struggle within us all. Faith and psychology have become inextricably interwoven at this point in history. Linear ideas (progress, science, the spirit) must jostle against cyclical ones (the natural, the bodily, the soulful, the intuitive). Both serve a purpose. Both are essential. Mary, unbound, within the Christian narrative, is both powerful and radical. As such she is (and has always been) a potentially game-changing figure. The Church needs her in order to evolve, to grow and to flourish – to find a new and richer meaning without losing what is valuable and already known. Mary is a signpost both to the past and to the future. She is important. All credit to Chris Maunder for fighting so heroically, inch by passionate inch, to try and allow some extra room for her.

From hearts of oak to hulls of steel: centuries of the British at sea

An ocean of clichés surrounds Britain’s maritime history, from Chaucer’s Shipman to the ‘little ships’ at Dunkirk. Tom Nancollas, whose 2019 Seashaken Houses treated lambently of lighthouses, now navigates debris-strewn territorial waters, sounding their depths.

He examines 11 craft, from Bronze Age boats to ironclads, that epitomise Britain’s complex compact with the sea. Ships, so sturdily island nation-shaping, are themselves evanescent, exposed to danger and decay, and discarded once defunct. But their traces can be found almost anywhere. Even those that are now only names (the Conqueror’s flagship Mora, Cabot’s Matthew or Grenville’s Revenge) are ‘ensouled’ to this author – ‘lost characters of British history’, as worthy of salvage as the Mary Rose.

The sunken cargoes he seeks are not necessarily treasure. He emphasises the uses of British ships in oppressions, from imperial conquests to slavery. Lloyds’ Lutine Bell, rung to warn that a vessel was missing, should sound out now, he says, to signify national complicity in old cruelties.

He begins in Dover, England’s entrepôt from prehistory to today’s immigrant dinghies, with a 3,500-year-old prow, found in 1992, from one of the earliest vessels known in northern Europe. Prows have always been talismanic: Romans capturing an enemy ship would destroy everything except its prow, then stand at this rostrum to give orations.

We hear about the Billingsgate Trumpet – a two metre-long flaring brass tube used by 14th-century captains to send signals to crews or fleets. This ‘buisine’ looks landlubberly – but then the medieval British were not quite at home on the sea, something suggested by the castle-like superstructures of their craft. Nancollas notes that rare representations of buisines being blown afloat have ‘a simple, dream-like quality’, as archetypal tars haul eternally aboard ships of state beneath a panoply of stars.

English sea-longing was first embodied in Francis Drake, and Nancollas dutifully takes us to Plymouth and thence to Deptford, where Drake was knighted and the Golden Hind slowly rotted – except for some planks which ended up in the unlikely guise of a chair in the Bodleian Library. As Abraham Cowley’s verse on its back notes: ‘A Seate of endless Rest is giv’n /To her in Oxford, and him in Heav’n.’

Though Drake is presently more in limbo, he launched an armada of emulators, not to mention a pleasantly vicarious literary genre from Hakluyt’s Voyages on. As David Mathews noted in The Naval Heritage (1944): ‘The sea has a satisfaction for leisured letter writers.’ Nancollas takes time considering often neglected marine accoutrements, from ropes such as those still made at Chatham to ships’ timbers repurposed ashore, lending creaking resonance to everyday interiors and Liberty’s in Regent Street.

On the Thames Embankment stands the Duke of Buckingham’s showy but stranded water gate – symbolic of Jacobean naval ineptitude – near the more modest memorial to Samuel Plimsoll, who devised the lines painted on hulls to show how low in the water a fully laden ship should be for safety. A museum in the Scilly Isles called Valhalla contains the figureheads of craft wrecked on local rocks, crude charms in antique style carved in propitiation of the vasty deep, now assembled surreally up close.

In the 19th century figureheads were forsaken, as ‘hearts of oak’ turned to hulls of steel, and the Deptford wharves that hosted the tiny Golden Hind were dwarfed by the ‘riveted cliff-face’ of Brunel’s Great Eastern. Turner’s painting of the Fighting Temeraire being steam-tugged to the breaker’s yard epitomised the ending of an old era and the beginning of a new, stressing safety, science and speed.

The Great Eastern is now itself history, its top mast a flagpole in Anfield stadium. The Lusitania, another marvel of its age, is equally almost lost, with one of its propellers flaking sadly on a plinth, also in Liverpool. The disjecta membra of the Newlyn trawler Rosebud are difficult to find, yet such craft sparked that town’s school of art, and Rosebud helped preserve its character by sailing to Westminster in 1937 to protest against the planned erasure of Newlyn’s historic fishing quarter.

Nancollas finally anchors at Portmeirion, Clough Williams-Ellis’s nostalgic confection on the Welsh coast, treading the ‘decks’ of a concrete ship, Amis Reunis. It seems a fitting place to end his frequently fascinating voyage of discovery: a faux ship in a fantastical port, cemented to the shore yet, like so many in these islands, always straining seawards.

Pablo Picasso in love and war

The decade 1933-43 was one of busy erotic multi-tasking by the deft and diminutive Pablo Picasso. It took him the best part of ten years to effect a separation from the reluctant Olga Khokhlova, his ex-ballerina wife, retired injured from the Diaghilev Ballets Russes. Legal proceedings were triggered by her discovery of Picasso’s affair with Marie-Thérèse Walter (aged 17 when Picasso picked her up in 1927 outside the Galeries Lafayette). On 5 October 1935, Marie-Thérèse gave birth to Picasso’s daughter, Maria de la Concepción, later known as Maya. By then Picasso was fornicating on many fronts: with Alice Paalen, the wife of an Austrian painter, and the 49-year-old Valentine Hugo, an ex of André Breton. Picasso disencumbered himself of both relationships when he took up with Dora Maar (Henriette Théodora Markovitch), the half-Croatian, half-French surrealist photographer.

But he persisted with Marie-Thérèse contentedly and comfortably, setting up her and her sister and mother in the Villa Gerbier de Jonc in Royan, where he spent homely weekend rustications – escaping Dora’s jealous hysteria and subsequent self-reproach. His continued relations with Marie-Thérèse destroyed Dora’s amour propre but piqued her sexual masochism. (Her masochism seems to have been refined and educated by Georges Bataille in a previous relationship lasting five months.) There was, too, the odd bonk with Nusch Éluard, the wife of the poet and Picasso satellite Paul Éluard, who was himself broadcasting his seed in several furrows. At the end of Volume IV of John Richardson’s biography, subtitled ‘The Minotaur Years’, Dora Maar is dumped after seven years – quite a long time – and takes her moodiness and tantrums for analysis with Jacques Lacan, later to be a famous theoretician of unmatched obscurity. Picasso then turned his attention to the 23-year-old Françoise Gilot, by whom he fathered two children, Paloma and Claude.

The interesting thing is that, although we know all this, we actually know very little. Picasso strove to keep his private life private. He took unsuccessful legal action against the memoirs of Fernande Olivier (his first love) and Françoise Gilot. He succeeded all the same – because of his own silence. He gave away very little, which means that Richardson and others are compelled to deduce his interior life from his self-portrait as minotaur – wounded, dying, domineering, mythic, various, enigmatic. Picasso said that his paintings were autobiographical, a diary of sorts, but they are a diary in disguise. They promise revelation yet don’t deliver it. They are a tease, an invitation, as it turns out, to invent your own narrative.

For example, his portrait of Dora Maar, ‘Weeping Woman’, tells us nothing about why she is weeping, nor what precisely Picasso felt about it. He gives us the drama of tears and the brilliant graphic detail of the chewed handkerchief – an index of her pained effort to stop crying. The worldly Heine said: ‘No matter how much you cry, in the end you have to blow your nose.’ Picasso’s depiction says nothing so comic or cynical or explicit or knowing. The woman is in the storm of feelings, buffeted, helpless, in a state of total immersion, unreachable. We have all been there – excluded by another’s pain. We assume that Picasso tired of these tantrums, but we can’t know that. She apologises, promises to reform. Picasso seems to have persevered patiently enough – seven years! – while equally persistently caring for Marie-Thérèse. Not quite the monster minotaur as advertised. He valued, it appears, Dora’s intelligence, her sophistication and her ability to speak Spanish, a skill from her childhood in Buenos Aires.

At the same time, these are the years of the Spanish Civil War and the second world war. Richardson, like others, cannot believe that such cataclysmic events do not leave traces in the art. Accordingly, pictures are pressed for private disclosures and public positions – unpersuasively because simultaneously. It’s a version of spreading your bets, of insurance. A painting of Charlotte Corday stabbing Marat in his bath is at once a depiction of Olga stabbing Marie-Thérèse and a reference to the Night of Long Knives in Nazi Germany.

Even the clearly public, overblown, bombastic, op-ed, engagé ‘Guernica’, with its urgent outraged banalities, is meted its quota of insider ‘personal’ touches. Dora Maar’s later commentary is mainly an exposition of her contributions to the painting – the reference to her photographic lighting equipment; her short vertical brush strokes to differentiate the horse’s body and legs. Richardson quotes Luis Buñuel’s jaundiced verdict: ‘I can’t stand “Guernica”, which I nevertheless helped to hang.’ Buñuel was uncomfortable with its ‘grandiloquent technique’ and ‘would be delighted to blow up the painting’. When Picasso was given the commission, he said he ‘had no idea what a bombed town looked like’. Which is why the painting chooses the mythical-classical ersatz substitute, a soft surrogate of cartoon emotion, lent the feel of reportage by the greys and blacks of newsprint. For Richardson, it is a masterpiece.

Although Richardson now and then expresses a few token blanket, non-specific dismissive verdicts, his default judgment is the gullible short cut of ‘masterpiece’. His attitude to Picasso’s ‘poetry’ can serve as a benchmark: ‘The ambivalence of his writing – the love and fear, tenderness and cruelty, laughter and tears – entitles the artist to be recognised as a formidable surrealist poet.’ Sample:

Cries of children cries of women cries of birds cries of flowers cries of wood and stones cries of bricks cries of furniture of beds of chairs of curtains of casseroles of cats and papers cries of smells that claw themselves of smoke that gnaws the neck of cries that boil in cauldron…

The template here is the Greek pastoral elegy, where the poetic fiction is that the whole of nature mourns the dead person. But Picasso’s poem is a travesty of pastoral hyperbole – dull, overstated, repetitive doggerel cognate with ‘Guernica’.

Compare the critical laxity passim:

A drawing as factual as a diary entry, made on 1 August, depicts Dora inserting a key in Picasso’s door, symbolically entering his life, suitably dressed in a coat and headscarf. Picasso awaits her in the guise of a Greek god, a stick in his right hand and a dog clutched in his left.

In fact he isn’t clutching a dog. It’s in his lap and he’s feeding it from his hand. Sub-standard work is over-praised. Richardson describes a perfunctory sketch of Éluard as ‘Ingresque’. He means only that it is conventionally realistic. It is a world away from Ingres’s meticulous conviction, his detailed, unerring accuracy of observation, the unhesitating certainty of his intricate line. There is a second-rate surreal Picasso etching, ‘Two Figures on a Beach’ (1933), which features disjecta membra: on the right, the replacement of a ribcage by the slats of a shutter; on the left, a door which may also be a guillotine. An effortless dud, given a free pass by Richardson.

The real criticism comes from Richardson’s personal role as a minor courtier, the handsome boyfriend of the collector Douglas Cooper, gradually but unmistakably irked by Picasso’s settled air of superiority. The Picasso he gives us is a cruel egotist, a man familiar with suppliant abasement, insufferably accustomed to a kneeling acquaintance. This was the painter who signed his early work ‘Yo el Rey’ (I the King). However, isn’t there an irony here, a self-deprecating allusion to the Havana cigar, ‘el Rey del Mundo’? There is a telling anecdote about Picasso in the Hotel Vaste Horizon at Mougins, where the toilet facilities were shared: ‘One morning [the Hungarian writer Joseph] Bard bumped into Picasso leaving the loo.’ He tried ‘to back away in order to return later’. Picasso wasn’t having it. He ushered him into the lavatory and wiped the seat with a large silk handkerchief – ‘laughing and bowing, he closed the door behind him’. This is the throne Picasso sits astride.

Long though it is, Richardson’s Life was never intended to be definitive since many important archives are still closed. Nevertheless, it is an anthology of memorable gossip from the margins of Picasso’s life. We learn that Misia Sert was a morphine addict, and that her treachery to friends resulted in the nickname ‘Aunt Brutus’. We learn, too, that Caresse Crosby invented the modern bra, and that Salvador Dalí almost asphyxiated himself while giving a lecture in a faulty deep-sea diving suit. In 1929, Michel Leiris, a fervent Picasso acolyte, was depressed by his expulsion from Breton’s circle of surrealists and medicated his sexual hang-ups with alcohol. He appeared on George Bataille’s doorstep intoxicated at 5 a.m. asking for a cut-throat razor to castrate himself. Bataille fobbed off his request with the excuse that he only used an electric shaver. We learn that Lee Miller, beauty and photographer, was ‘adored by her lovers but few others’; that Picasso loathed flowers but loved vegetables; that the bombing of Guernica was a birthday present for Hitler from Goering; that Picasso suffered from sciatica but was cured by a Dr Klotz, whose expertise involved the cauterisation of the nasal nerves ‘to alleviate pain elsewhere’. All welcome additions to the Picasso story.

Inside the Kremlin’s great lie machine

Believe it or not, it’s only 36 days since Vladimir Putin launched an unprovoked and premeditated attack on Ukraine. It’s been shocking in every sense of the word. But it wasn’t surprising. We’ve seen this strategy before. We saw the intelligence picture building. And we’re now seeing Putin trying to follow through on his plan. But it is failing. And his Plan B has been more barbarity against civilians and cities.

Clearly, he plays by different moral and legal rules. Far too many Ukrainians and Russians have already lost their lives. And beyond this toll, many, many more have had their lives shattered. The UN estimate that in just over a month, more than ten million people have already fled their homes. It’s a humanitarian crisis that need never have happened. And it’s not over yet.

That said, it increasingly looks like Putin has massively misjudged the situation. It’s clear he misjudged the resistance of the Ukrainian people. He underestimated the strength of the coalition his actions would galvanise. He under-played the economic consequences of the sanctions regime. He over-estimated the abilities of his military to secure a rapid victory. We’ve seen Russian soldiers – short of weapons and morale – refusing to carry out orders, sabotaging their own equipment and even accidentally shooting down their own aircraft.

And even though we believe Putin’s advisers are afraid to tell him the truth, what’s going on and the extent of these misjudgements must be crystal clear to the regime.

This week, the Russian MoD stated publicly that they will drastically reduce combat operations around Kyiv and a city in the North. It looked like they have been forced to make a significant change. But then they proceeded to launch attacks in both of those places. Mixed messages or deliberate misinformation – we’ll have to see how it unfolds.

It all adds up to the strategic miscalculation that our leaders warned Putin it would be. It’s become his personal war, with the cost being paid by innocent people in Ukraine and increasingly, by ordinary Russians too.

The great irony is, of course, that through his actions, Putin has brought upon himself exactly what he was trying to avoid – a Ukraine with a renewed sense of nationhood, a Nato that is more united than ever, and a global coalition of nations that condemn his actions.

Just over a month in, it is far too early to confidently draw out all the implications of this crisis. But I’m going to outline a few aspects that really stand out to me.

I’ll start with the prominence of the information front.

Russia wrote the hybrid warfare book. State media, on-line media and agents of influence are all used to obfuscate motivations and justify military actions. We’ve seen them use this playbook in Syria and many other theatres. Their aim is to promulgate disinformation. To sow mistrust in the evidence and to amplify false narratives. It’s also to make sure that the real picture of what’s going on doesn’t get exposed inside Russia.

And that’s where the most dangerous disinformation war is being waged. We know Putin’s campaign is beset by problems – low morale, logistical failures and high Russian casualty numbers. Their command and control is in chaos. We’ve seen Putin lie to his own people in an attempt to hide military incompetence.

And all of that means, he seeks brutal control of the media and access to the internet, he seeks the closing down of opposition voices, and he’s making heavy investment in their propaganda and covert agencies.

But here again, it’s clear that Putin has miscalculated. President Zelensky’s information operation has shown itself to be extremely effective. It’s agile, multi-platform, multi-media and extremely well-tailored to different audiences. One only has to look for Ukraine’s flag – a field of sunflowers under a sky of blue – to see it flying everywhere, including outside GCHQ, to see how well the message has landed.

And it’s a message supported by information campaigns all over the World. In the UK, it’s focused in a new Government Information Cell which identifies and counters Kremlin disinformation targeted at UK and international audiences. It brings together expertise from across government to challenge false narratives. It deals in facts, not falsehoods; making sure that the truth is told well.

And increasingly, many of those ‘truths’ come from intelligence. It is already a remarkable feature of this conflict just how much intelligence has been so quickly declassified to get ahead of Putin’s actions. 

From the warnings of the war. To the intelligence on false flag operations designed to provide a fake premise to the invasion. And more recently, to the Russian plans to falsely claim Ukrainian use of banned chemical weapons.

On this and many other subjects, deeply secret intelligence is being released to make sure the truth is heard. At this pace and scale, it really is unprecedented.

In my view, intelligence is only worth collecting if we use it, so I unreservedly welcome this development. Of course, other aspects of this confrontation play out in cyber space. There has been commentary expressing surprise that we haven’t seen the Russians deploy a major cyber-attack as part of their campaign.

I think a lot of this misses the point. Whilst some people look for cyber ‘Pearl Harbours’, it was never our understanding that a catastrophic cyber-attack was central to Russian’s use of offensive cyber or to their military doctrine. To think otherwise, misjudges how cyber has an effect in military campaigns.

That’s not to say that we haven’t seen cyber in this conflict. We have – and lots of it.

Through the National Cyber Security Centre, a part of GCHQ, we’ve seen sustained intent from Russia to disrupt Ukrainian government and military systems. We’ve seen what looks like some spill over of activity affecting surrounding countries. And we’ve certainly seen indications which suggests Russia’s cyber actors are looking for targets in the countries that oppose their actions.

So just as we pay tribute to the Ukrainian military’s brave actions, we should pay tribute to Ukrainian cyber security too. We and other allies will continue to support them in shoring up their defences. And at home, we are doing all we can to ensure sure that businesses and Government urgently follow through on plans to improve basic levels of cyber resilience. I know your ACSC is doing the same here in Australia.

Now my next observation of this conflict is the extent to which non-state actors are involved and have a say in its outcome.

Some of this is on the battlefields in Ukraine. It’s clear Russia is using mercenaries and foreign fighters to augment its forces. This includes the Wagner group which has been active in Ukraine since Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014.

The group works as a shadow branch of the Russian military, providing implausible deniability for riskier operations.

Recently, we have seen that Wagner is looking to move up a gear. We understand that the group is now prepared to send large numbers of personnel into Ukraine to fight alongside Russians.

They are looking at relocating forces from other conflicts and recruiting new fighters to bolster numbers. These soldiers are likely to be used as cannon fodder to try to limit Russian military losses.

But it’s not just in the military sphere that we see the influence and potential of other actors. We’ve seen cyber hacking and ransomware groups pledging allegiance to both sides. We’ve seen businesses all over the world distance themselves from the Russian economy. We’ve seen technology providers step up to make sure that Ukraine can stay connected, or to address disinformation.

It’s all making the space very complicated, and in some ways, way beyond the control of governments. It’s another reminder of the interconnectedness of the world today. And as no single entity holds the whole solution, it highlights a need for global institutions effectively working in coalition.

Putin’s aggression has certainly galvanised Nato. The war has triggered an unprecedented international response – 141 countries condemned it at the UN General Assembly. All over Europe countries are overturning decades long approaches to their defence policy; investing more too. And further afield, including in this region, countries like Australia and Japan are leaning in. It’s also showing, in stark relief, those countries that choose to either support Putin or abstain from making a choice.

And those choices will affect the global order and our national securities for decades to come.

And of course, here in this region, the most concerning issues relate to the choices China makes as it thinks about its interests in the longer term.

Now, Russia’s position on this is clear. It has made a strategic choice to align with China as China has become more powerful and in direct opposition to the United States. In the current crisis, Russia sees China as a supplier of weapons, as a provider of technology, a market for it’s hydro-carbons and as a means to circumvent sanctions.

We know both presidents Xi and Putin place great value on their personal relationships. But Xi’s calculus is more nuanced. He’s not publicly condemned the invasion, presumably calculating that it helps him oppose the US. And, with an eye on re-taking Taiwan, China doesn’t want to do anything which may constrain its ability to move in the future.

It’s also the case that China believes Russia will provide additional impetus and support to its digital markets and it’s technology plans. We can see China is seizing the opportunity to purchase cheap hydro-carbons from Russia at the moment, to meet its needs too.

But there are risks to them both (and arguably more for China) in being too closely aligned. Russia understands that long term, China will become increasingly strong militarily and economically. Some of their interests conflict; Russia could be squeezed out of the equation.

And it is equally clear that a China that wants to set the rules of the road – the norms for a new global governance – is not well served by close alliance with a regime that wilfully and illegally ignores them all.

Now this comes into particularly sharp focus when we think about the future of technology eco-systems and the norms and governance that guide their use. And for me, this as much about values as it is about technology. And both are vital to the competitive edge of a country. That’s why it’s also increasingly the focus for geopolitical competition.

Historically, technology development was largely driven and owned by the West. Shared values amongst involved nations meant industry standards for emerging technologies tended to be global. Investment in technology brought status, wealth and security.

Today, we are in a different era. We can see that significant technology leadership is moving East. It’s causing a conflict of interests. Of values. Where prosperity and security are at stake.

Now obviously, China is a sophisticated player in cyberspace. It has increasing ambition to project its influence beyond its borders and a proven interest in our commercial secrets.

It also has a competing vision for the future of cyberspace and it’s increasingly influential in the debate around international rules and standards. China’s bringing all elements of state power to control, influence design and dominate technology, if you like, the cyber and the fibre.

As I’ve said previously, without action it is increasingly apparent that the key technologies on which we all rely on for prosperity and security won’t be shaped and controlled by the West in the future.

If we don’t act – with our allies, with our partners and with the private sector – we will see undemocratic values as the default for vast swathes of future tech and the standards that govern it. There is no doubt that democratic nations are facing a moment of reckoning.

Now these are all pretty big themes. And they have big stakes.

Whether we’re building on the lessons from the pandemic, understanding the implications of Russia’s invasion, or grappling with the implications of China’s rise, it’s clear that we must step up.

There are many ways for us to do that, but it seems to me that two things are very important.

The first is that we have to find new ways to collaborate and cooperate with partners. For those of us in National Security, that’s about ensuring the health of existing relationships. It’s about securing our alliances, like the Five Eyes, Nato and in this region, ASEAN. And it’s about working with businesses in new and truly collaborative ways. And to do this we need to make sure that our counteroffer – to states who haven’t yet decided which way they should jump – is persuasive and coherent. Too often it’s not.

And the second is that in whatever we do, we must make sure that we stay true to our values, those that have made our systems and democracies so successful and will do so in the future too.

Against a backdrop of historic shifts, a new global security architecture was emerging. And all of this change will take decades to resolve. But what I can be clear on now is that how we approach these challenges will be as important as what our response is.

How can I deal with my embarrassing aphasia?

Q. I am in my mid-sixties and have started to suffer from nominal aphasia. At a recent wedding in the Highlands, two very familiar faces came towards me and I couldn’t put a name to either. Worse, at a wake following a funeral, one old friend was very upset when I failed to recognise her, she claimed wrongly that it must have been because she had aged since we’d last met. I seem to have the rest of my faculties intact, so I wouldn’t want it to get around that I am ‘losing it’.

— Name and address withheld

A. As a general rule, at large events you should always make a beeline for the seating plan and scan it thoroughly. You will then be more able to match the familiar names with faces. If you are still at sea when someone comes up to you, greet them warmly, then ask in conspiratorial manner: ‘What’s your news?’ Listen intently. This is such a common dilemma among all age groups that it makes a nonsense of the snobbery against name badges, which are so useful at corporate events and which could also bring huge confidence to a social event. All too often people complain afterwards that they had no idea X or Y was also there and would love to have talked to them had they known.

Q. When at the departure gate waiting to board a seven-hour flight, I was informed I had been upgraded for free to business class. Having just the previous day completed a 17-hour flight, I was delighted. Unfortunately, my wife, who had booked separately, (and had not endured the l7-hour flight) was not upgraded. She took the point of view that if she could not be upgraded, then I should not be either. I was given the option by the airline to (a) take the upgrade myself (thereby annoying my wife), (b) give the upgrade to my wife, or (c) for neither of us to take the upgrade and to let it go to a stranger. I was forced to choose the third option. Which was the right choice and how could I have got away with enjoying the upgrade myself?

— Michael, Dubai

A. In assuming that the airline would automatically upgrade the wife of someone who was being upgraded, your wife played her cards badly. Once it was established that only one business-class seat was available, common sense decreed that your wife — in recognition of your flight the day before — should have graciously waved you through the curtain. However, childish competitiveness plays a part in many marriages. Therefore what you should have opted to do was let it be decided by the toss of a coin. In that way at least one of you could have been better rested when you arrived at your destination.

Q. May I pass on a tip to readers who are still on holiday? When snoozing on a lounger, a sleep mask is more comfortable and safer than a pair of sunglasses.

— P.W., Santa Margherita, Italy

A. Thank you for sharing this tip.

Five things we learnt from Johnson’s evidence to MPs

Boris Johnson rocked up at the Liaison Committee today, fresh from last night’s bonding dinner with 250 Tory MPs. And the Prime Minister displayed no trace of a hangover as he produced a competent performance during his largely uneventful ninety-minute grilling. Select committee chairs are generally a fairly hostile bunch: because they’re elected by the whole House, Tory critics of the PM tend to be more successful than his defenders. Today’s session was a much more muted affair than last year’s outing, with Johnson’s interrogators mainly choosing to focus on Ukraine and the cost-of-living crisis. Even so, some news lines did emerge from Boris Johnson’s appearance.

1) His possible partygate defence

Pete Wishart, an arch critic of the PM, was first up at Liaison Committee. Unsurprisingly the SNP man opted to lead on partygate, asking Johnson whether he was one of the 20 people in No. 10 who has received a fixed-penalty notice from the Metropolitan police. Johnson replied that ‘I’m sure you would know if I were’. He added that he would refuse to give ‘a running commentary on an investigation which is under way’ – the same line that ministers have been deploying on the morning media rounds. The PM also hinted at his likely defence to accusations that he misled the Commons. He said ‘I think it’s very important you should be clear with the Commons. I’ve tried to be as clear as I can about my understanding of events’ – suggesting that he did not deliberately mislead MPs.

2) On-shore wind plans possibly shelved

Asked about rising energy costs, Johnson told MPs that ‘Offshore wind – I stress offshore wind – has massive potential.’ It suggests that the government will not be going ahead with Kwasi Kwarteng’s scheme to relax planning laws to increase onshore wind production by building new turbines, amid reports of Cabinet rift. Johnson also asked why the UK is not doing more on nuclear energy, asking the committee ‘Why have the French got 56 reactors and we’ve barely got six?’ He suggested that small nuclear reactors could be producing power for UK by end of decade.

3) Aid to Ukraine will be stepped up

Much of the questioning focused on Ukraine, with Tom Tugendhat asking if Johnson agrees with President Biden’s comments that Putin must go. Understandably, the Prime Minister chose to duck that one, saying he understands why Biden said that but that getting rid of Putin is not the UK’s objective. He also said that the UK is looking at ‘going up a gear’ by providing more military support to Ukraine including armoured vehicles. In a typically Johnsonian phrase, he said that Britain will offer Ukraine protection ‘based on the idea of deterrence by denial, so that Ukraine is so fortified, so protected with weaponry, the quills of the porcupine have become so stiffened so that it is indigestible to Putin.’ He added that sanctions must be increased until every ‘single one of Russia’s troops’ have left Ukraine.

4) News publications must have a UK address

Under questioning about the Online Safety Bill, Johnson revealed that there will be new restrictions on foreign news outlets in the UK. Earlier this month Ofcom revoked the licence of Russian state-funded news sites Sputnik and Russia Today, amid fears about their editorial content. There is however nothing to stop these organisations from simply relaunching under a new name and licence. The government intends to stop this happening by introducing new rules that would require media outlets to have a UK address. He said: ‘We need to make sure anyone publishing online in a systematic way, should be classified as a news publisher and it should be subject to the controls of the bill.’ Bad luck for overseas news sites like the Ireland-based Guido Fawkes.

5) Levelling up could target child poverty

Catherine McKinnell, chair of the Petitions Committee, chose to lead on child poverty. She said that that figures Johnson quoted at today’s PMQs session on the subject were outdated and it is in fact set to rise under this government. Asked simply, ‘Can you level up the country without reducing the number of children living in poverty?’ Johnson replied ‘No’. This metric is not part of current government levelling up targets: if Johnson’s word is taken at face value, it suggests it could be included in future assessments.

The NHS failing mothers is nothing new

Can Sajid Javid really say, as he did this afternoon in the Commons, that the government is taking action to ensure ‘that no families have to go through the same pain’ experienced by those affected by the biggest maternity scandal in the history of the NHS? The Ockenden inquiry into the maternity services at the Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust published its final report today, concluding that ‘repeated’ failures in care may have led to the deaths of more than 200 babies, and of nine mothers.

The individual stories of stillborn babies, infants severely and sometimes fatally harmed, and women’s pain being dismissed are deeply distressing. What is worse is the way the NHS Trust responded: as I have previously written, it was only down to two bereaved mothers that this scandal was investigated at all. The ‘repeated errors in care’ did not lead to proper reflection which was, the report said, ‘a lost opportunity to prevent further baby deaths from occurring at the trust’.

But what is even worse than the individual trust response is that this was not the NHS’s first maternity scandal. The Morecambe Bay inquiry investigated similar concerns and made similar discoveries to today’s report. Though the Shrewsbury and Telford cases stretch back to 2000, long before the deaths in Furness General, there were many years after the Morecambe Bay report when other trusts could have learned the lessons. Shrewsbury and Telford did not. In evidence submitted to Ockenden, one member of staff recalled senior staff responding to Kirkup by saying ‘We are not a Morecambe Bay’. Their reply was ‘we absolutely were a Morecambe Bay – a trust full of unhappy staff with ineffective poor leadership, looking to hide or ignore poor care and poor management’.

Will this really be the last maternity scandal? Ockenden’s national recommendations include ensuring safe staffing levels, proper training for teams and proper information to women at all stages of their pregnancies. But one aspect of the report which has got almost as much attention as the rest of its findings put together is the trust’s focus on ‘normal birth’ and a preoccupation with keeping Caesarean section rates down. One patient reported: ‘I felt that my concerns during labour were not addressed, that I was made to have a natural birth when an emergency C-section was more appropriate just so they didn’t dent their precious natural birth rate target. I felt like I was on a butcher’s slab.’ Similarly, a staff member said: ‘They were always very proud of their low caesarean rates… I personally found all the failed/attempted instrumental deliveries very difficult to deal with. I had never seen so many injuries/HIE/resuscitations from this. Nothing to be proud of.’

Sajid Javid today highlighted the ‘normal birth’ findings, saying:

It is right that both the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists and the Royal College of Midwives have said recently that they regret their campaign for so-called formal births. It’s vital that across maternity services that we focus on safe, personalised care where the voice of the mother is heard throughout.

The history of the NHS and maternity swings from one extreme to the other. When the health service was founded in 1948, home births were the norm, but that changed over the following three decades, with successive governments supporting more hospital births. By 1970, a committee examining maternity services led by gynaecologist Sir John Peel recommended that hospitals have the capacity for 100 per cent of all births taking place within a ward. It said that this was the safest option, but it never produced evidence for that claim. Labour itself was shrouded in mystery for everyone, right up to the point a woman gave birth, when she would often find herself in a brutal and highly medicalised environment, shaved, given an enema, and strapped into stirrups, despite this not being a position particularly conducive to the movement of a baby along the birth canal. Doctors would routinely perform episiotomies regardless of whether this cut was needed to help the baby’s head emerge more easily.

One woman horrified by what she went through was Prunella Briance. On her second labour, she had a ‘ghastly experience, where I was treated with idiocy and callousness’. She was dropped while being lifted onto a bed, administered castor oil at the insistence of a doctor even though it made her violently sick, and refused a pillow. Her baby was stillborn after getting ‘stuck’. Her response to this was to investigate what she saw as the problem of highly medicalised labour in which women were given little agency. She seized upon the work of a GP in Suffolk, Dr Grantly Dick-Read, who had developed a method of ‘childbirth without fear’. The National Childbirth Association that she set up in 1956 and renamed as the National Childbirth Trust became an important guide for women to what they might expect from labour, as well as a campaigning group for a more ‘natural birth’. In the decade that followed, some midwives themselves started to organise against over-medicalisation of birth through the Association of Radical Midwives.

There were warnings at the time that the pendulum was swinging too far away from medicalised birth and towards a ‘natural birth’ that itself carried huge risks. Briance, though, continued to stick to her guns and even in 2013 was arguing in a letter to the Times that her charity was:

based on the life-work of an English GP-obstetrician who proved that 97 per cent of mothers, accurately instructed, attended and encouraged, can give birth without any interference or medication whatsoever. The remaining 3 per cent are usually ill or damaged women who require skilled medical help and are grateful for it.

It was a highly controversial assertion based on contested statistics. It also continued to rely on assumptions that pain in labour was something a woman could control. Briance’s point about women being ‘instructed’ in part referred to breathing exercises developed by Dick-Read. He wanted to liberate women from the common use of chloroform in the final stages of labour when he was working in the early 20th century. But there were more sinister influences on the natural birth movement, including from the Soviet Union, where a shortage of pain relief for women in labour made breathing techniques attractive as a means of covering up failures of state. In her forceful assault on the natural birth movement Push Back: Guilt in the Age of Natural Parenting, American obstetrician Amy Tuteur notes one big problem with these techniques: the women who were forced to accept this instead of analgesia did not find that their pain lessened. This point was largely ignored, and these methods were lauded as a success in the western world, bleeding further into a movement that claimed to prioritise women’s needs, not ignore them.

The NCT itself has since changed its framework so that it covers ‘all ways of giving birth, reflecting the various options and outcomes that individuals may experience’. This week the charity said:

We welcomed the Royal College of Midwives’ recent statement on the unintended consequences of policies which aimed to reduce unnecessary over-medicalisation and over-intervention of labour and birth. We share their sadness and deep regret that practice in some Trusts swung too far the other way – from too much intervention too soon, to too little too late.

What hasn’t changed right up until the present day is that women themselves have largely been ignored, as Ockenden pointed out. Their wishes around the method of delivery were dismissed in Shrewsbury and Telford, their cries of pain sometimes even mocked. The 1960s and 1970s saw doctors deciding that a medicalised birth was best for them, despite their cries of pain and discomfort. The emphasis on natural birth led many mothers to feel guilty that they hadn’t been able to have a ‘proper’ delivery, as though they’d not tried hard enough or hadn’t listened to ‘instructions’ of people like Briance. Could the next correction see the needs of women and their babies trump ideology and wishful thinking? The alternative is more scandal, and more days like this.

PMQs: Boris let slip his election attack lines

Covid is ancient history. And Ukraine has ceased to dominate PMQs. Today, ideological warfare between the parties broke out again. The old politics is back. Sir Keir Starmer accused the Chancellor of fibbing during last week’s bogus budget. Tax hikes had been camouflaged as tax cuts.

Boris denied this and praised his Chancellor for delivering a historic bonanza of golden giveaways. ‘The biggest cut in fuel duty ever. And the biggest cut in tax for working people in the last 10 years.’ Sir Keir silenced him. ‘Cut the nonsense and treat the British people with a bit of respect.’ The tax burden is soaring, he said, and for every pound given away, six pounds were being taken back. His solution? A one-off tax grab from Big Oil whose profits are on the rise.

Boris said this would hurt inward investment, and he turned his guns on Labour’s disregard for energy security during their 13 years in power. He travelled back to 1997 when the Labour manifesto had claimed ‘there is no economic case for more nuclear power’. This ancient dividing line suited Sir Keir. ‘The Conservatives are the party of excess oil and gas profits. We are the party of working people.’

He waited till the end of his six questions to drop his bombshell. He reminded Boris of his claim that no one at Downing Street had broken the law during lockdown. And yet the cops are now issuing fines for ‘widespread criminality’.

‘Why is he still here?’ asked Sir Keir. Boris rode a wave of cries and catcalls from all sides of the house. He threw out his arms in mock outrage. ‘Hang on! Hang on a minute,’ he blustered. ‘He’s just changed his position. We do at least expect some consistency from this human weathervane. Only a week ago he said I shouldn’t resign.’ 

Hardly a robust defence. What followed was even feebler. ‘Of course the investigators must get on with their job. In the meantime we are getting on with our job.’ The body language was revealing. Boris’s guilty jowls trembled hesitantly and his posture seemed uncertain. He felt quicksand beneath him. A wobble, clearly. And Sir Keir will exploit this vulnerability in future if he has the sense to decipher Boris’s physical signals.

Class warrior Ian Blackford of the SNP has brought some new recruits into his team. He seems to employ a posse of spies who fan out each evening across Westminster to record evidence of Tories sipping champagne. Last night his fizz wardens spotted Conservatives sampling champers at a swanky hotel.

‘They partied during lockdown,’ thundered Blackford, ‘and they’re partying through the cost of living emergency.’ Boris was clearly amused to see the SNP’s chief pie-taster condemning others for enjoying hospitality. ‘He, like me, is a living testament to moderation in all things,’ said Boris, smirking at his fellow trencherman. Blackford blew his top. ‘What an absolute load of baloney,’ he yelled.

Labour backbenchers kept hammering the cost-of-living crisis. And Boris replied along tribal lines. Labour, he said, wants more taxes and increased benefits. And they’re plotting to take Britain back into the EU. A penitent Johnny Mercer, once a Boris foe, praised the PM for leading the international effort to clobber Putin with sanctions. This buoyed Boris up and he threw an accusing finger at Sir Keir.

‘Can anybody imagine that eight of his front bench voted to get rid of our nuclear deterrent? Yes, they did!’ These are the attack lines for the next election. Boris will accuse Labour of hating Britain, of loving the EU and of taxing businesses to fund benefits. He and Sir Keir were undergraduates in the 1980s. And both feel comfortable on this turf. We’re returning to the student politics of the Thatcher era.

Ukraine is witnessing the future of drone warfare

Russian forces have reportedly been ordered to watch last year’s state-funded propaganda film Sky. The Kremlin-funded drama follows the lives of Russian airmen in Syria, where an estimated 18,000 people are believed to have died in Moscow’s bombings. With jets soaring through the sky and explosive special effects, it tells the story of Oleg Peshkov, a pilot shot down by a Turkish fighter plane.

When Hollywood makes its own action flicks about the war in Ukraine, directors may settle for a different kind of hero. Instead of strapping military men jumping into cockpits, it is becoming increasingly clear that Kyiv owes much of the credit for its fierce defence to drones. While in the past, this would have made for a less than thrilling spectacle – operators sat safely sipping coffee and staring at monitors – it’s a tale that may prove nearly as gripping.

Just one week into the war, as a 40-mile column of Russian troops, tanks and artillery closed in on the capital, Ukrainian special forces set out on a daring mission to stop the invaders in their tracks. A handful of drone pilots on quad bikes were sent in to get close, send up miniature drones capable of dropping 1.5kg bombs, and race off before the enemy could track their electronic signatures. While they took out only two or three vehicles at the front of the convoy, they blocked the road and left the rest as easy targets. The resulting carnage, the smashed vehicles and shattered bodies, was beamed around the world as evidence the eastern European nation wasn’t going to give in easily.

This unlikely operation was just part of a radical shift in how wars are being fought, both in terms of technology and tactics. Over the past few years, unmanned aerial vehicles have come on rapidly, to the point where a country like Ukraine can wreak devastation from the air despite a lack of conventional warplanes.

Earlier this week, Washington confirmed that it would supply Ukraine with a hundred deadly ‘switchblades’, one of the most advanced weapons available. Weighing only 2.5kg, it can be carried by a soldier in a backpack and controlled from a smart tablet. Once in the air, the switchblade goes into a holding pattern for around 15 minutes, flying at 60 miles an hour and waiting for a hostiles to be identified. Once a target is selected, it virtually doubles its speed and ploughs downwards into the vehicle, encampment or group of troops, detonating on impact. Under the terms of the deal, Kyiv will receive 100 systems consisting of ten drones each, costing around £6 million per system.

Another model that has Russian forces watching the skies is the Turkish-made Bayraktar TB2, which can fly at altitudes of up to 25,000 ft for up to 30 hours. Despite its 12-meter wingspan, it keeps a low profile, helping it avoid radar detection and, crucially, can cost as little as £750,000 each, meaning operators aren’t as fearful about undertaking risky missions. This is just as well, given two appear to have been shot down by Russian anti-air defences in recent weeks. They have, however, become a fearsome part of Ukraine’s arsenal, laying waste to armour with their four laser-guided missiles.

The country isn’t just on the receiving end of the drone industry. Under the terms of a partnership deal with Ankara, the engine for the advanced new Akinci drone – made by the same firm as the TB2 – is being manufactured in Ukraine. Capable of carrying around 1,300 kg of payload, equivalent to as many as eight bombs, its giant fuselage resembles a warplane more than previous models.

Selçuk Bayraktar, the son in law of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the chief engineer behind the project, has said initial tests have proven successful. He has promised that it will be ‘the most powerful and combat-capable armed UAV in its class in the world’ because of its potential to carry powerful missiles and its stealth capabilities. Turkey is also known to have invested significant time and resources in developing ‘drone swarms’, in which large numbers group together to overwhelm a target.

However, Russia too is preparing to hit back. In January, Moscow’s military patented a new ‘anti-drone drone’ that sprays out a field of tiny metal fragments designed to take out incoming swarms, protecting slow-moving tanks and stationary targets. The as-yet-unnamed innovation is yet to see the light of day but exemplifies the ongoing arms race.

If the trend carries on and the face of conflict continues to change, the blockbusters of the future may end up looking less like Saving Private Ryan and more like Robot Wars.

Jamie Wallis’s trans statement leaves more questions than answers

Westminster has its first openly transgender Member of Parliament. In the early hours of this morning, Jamie Wallis, Conservative MP for Bridgend, announced: ‘I’m trans. Or to be more accurate, I want to be.’

‘I’ve been diagnosed with gender dysphoria and I’ve felt this way since I was a very young child,’ Wallis added. ‘I had no intention of ever sharing this with you. I always imagined I would leave politics well before I ever said this out loud.’

Wallis’s statement this morning was remarkable. In an earlier era, it might have filled the News of the World for weeks. Wallis reported having been blackmailed for £50,000: the perpetrator pled guilty and was sentenced to more than two years. The Tory MP also claims to have been raped in a separate incident. And Wallis admitted to having ‘fled the scene’ after a car crash in November. He was later fined £270 and issued with three penalty points.

Of course, it is not right that Wallis fled after crashing a car. But the trans revelation is a first for an MP. My surprise, however, is that it has taken so long. Before transgenderism became such a hot topic, the public might have been forgiven for supposing that trans people were vanishingly rare. The truth, however, is rather different.

In 2009, GIRES – a transgender advocacy charity that advised the Home Office – suggested that ‘the adults who present emerge from a large reservoir of transgender people, who experience some degree of gender variance.’ An earlier (2005) study by Långström and Zucker reported that ‘almost three per cent of men reported at least one episode of transvestic fetishism.’

Politicians are human like the rest of us, so it seems likely that there will be more MPs like Wallis. Perhaps Wallis will only end up being notable for being the first to come out as trans. 

But now for Wallis? The statement certainly leaves more questions than answers. For a start, why bring up the car crash? The simple answer is that we don’t know what else was happening in Wallis’s life at the time. But Wallis’s constituents are likely to have some questions. Less than two years out from the next general election campaign, I sense that this incident – rather than Wallis coming out as trans – might become rather pressing to voters in Bridgend. It also seems likely that voters will judge Wallis, not on his gender, but on whether he has delivered for his constituents in a wafer-thin marginal seat.

Whatever becomes of Wallis though a box has been ticked: Britain has its first trans MP. Or at least an MP who wants to be trans. And that might be the most interesting part of this whole saga. The LGBTQ+ community makes a lot of noise about inclusion and diversity; the reality is somewhat different. Trans people like me – who recognise the importance and primacy of biological sex – often find ourselves pushed out. Will the rainbow carpet denied to us now be rolled out for a Tory MP like Wallis? It would be exclusionary not to.

PMQs: Starmer’s attacks fail to land

Today’s Prime Minister’s Questions ran pretty much as expected. The session opened with Boris Johnson very pointedly congratulating his Conservative colleague Jamie Wallis, who has just come out as the UK’s first openly trans MP. Johnson said: ‘I stand with you and will give you the support that you need to live freely as yourself.’ Keir Starmer agreed with those comments but chose not to talk about trans issues, which is also as expected given his tendency to swerve the topic even when asked directly about it. Instead, he continued a theme he has used before, accusing Johnson of ‘taking the public for fools’.

Starmer’s first attack line was taxes, asking if Johnson ‘still thinks that he and the Chancellor are tax-cutting Conservatives?’ Johnson responded that ‘I certainly do’, listing the cut in fuel duty and the rise in the National Insurance threshold that the Chancellor announced last week. ‘Cut the nonsense,’ Starmer replied, ‘and treat the British people with a bit of respect. Let me take him through this slowly: 15 tax rises; the highest tax burden for 70 years; for every £6 they are taking in tax rises, they’re only handing £1 back. Prime Minister, is that cutting taxes, or is that raising taxes?’ Johnson’s riposte was that Labour had only voted against the ‘the health and care levy, to fund our NHS, that’s the one they oppose, every other tax rise, they’re all in favour of’.

Starmer then brought up the partygate investigation, joking that ‘I can only hope that his police questionnaire was a bit more convincing’ than Johnson’s answers. He continued on taxes and fraud for a few more questions, pressing once again the case for a windfall tax on oil and gas companies and accusing the Conservatives of being ‘the party of excess oil and gas profits’. He then returned to the lockdown parties, telling the chamber that Johnson’s handling of yesterday’s fines meant he was ‘either trashing the ministerial code or he was claiming he was repeatedly lied to by his own advisers’.

Johnson then ended up in the bizarre position of ridiculing Starmer over his changing stance on whether he, the Prime Minister, should resign. ‘He has zero consistency on any issue,’ he cried, memorably describing the Labour leader as a ‘human weathervane’.

None of these exchanges felt all that uncomfortable for either side. The spring statement landed poorly, but Starmer gave more of a running commentary, failing to create further tension for the Tories. On partygate, there is currently no groundswell in the Conservative ranks for removing Johnson, though that may change after the conclusion of the police investigation and the Sue Gray review. Both leaders will have left feeling they managed to build on their characterisation of the other, but will likely forget the session by the end of the day.