There’s nothing quite like Christmas on the Isle of Man

If two years away had left me in need of a reminder that home can be a peculiar place, waking this morning to the sound of air raid sirens would have done the job. Other places left with such equipment would probably not decide that they could fulfil the dual purposes of summoning volunteer firefighters for their shifts, and signalling the imminent end of days, if only because only one of the two is worth getting out of bed for. But then again, the point of the Isle of Man is that it is not quite like anywhere else.

Blocking traffic to and from the airport to make way for the annual festive tractor run is the sort of idiosyncratic decision that makes the island what it is. It goes without saying that farming implements decked out in lights are a relatively recent addition to the list of holiday traditions, added to the rota along with such jolly seasonal pleasantries as the Yuletide gouge, where merry flight booking websites happily inform you that the cost of a ticket a short way into the Irish Sea could probably get you halfway to Beijing.

Others are considerably longer lived. The North of the island faces off against the South at Cammag, a sporting game not unlike hurling. And in common with other places, the news that the White Boys are fighting to the death produces a sensible radius of aversion, but through theatrical taste rather than outright fear. A mummers play featuring fighting knights, a doctor with a bag of mysterious potions, carols, and, regrettably, sword-dancing, scripts exist from 1845 and are still acted out in altered form today.

Boxing day is for hunting the wren. Traditionally, this involved flushing the unfortunate bird out of a bush, chasing it from thicket to thicket, and killing it with stones. The wren would then be suspended in ribbons, carried from house to house, its feathers given away as wards against bad luck and witchcraft, and finally buried in a churchyard. Various backstories for this tradition propose an alliance with protestants, a disguised witch, and a rejection of pagan preferences as the origin of the unhappy business. The modern version dispenses with the hunting but retains the procession, songs, and dancing, in a compromise designed to avoid actively traumatising small children.

Older traditions have largely died out, some less mourned than others; the Mollag bands which would invade open houses and perform folk music until paid to leave are a menace society can do without.

The parts we’re left with are the cultural flotsam remaining after a century of emigration and immigration to and from Britain, the death of the Manx language, and a general unwillingness – to the immense frustration of folklorists – to ever actually write things down where outsiders might read them. Well-meaning attempts by newcomers around 1900 to persuade the population to tell their stories and traditions met with limited success; despite lingering beliefs in bugganes and charmers, any questions were met with ‘some sense of shame, and with a wish to keep them as secret as possible’. This was not helped by an unwillingness in a deeply religious population to set down secular or folkloric frippery, instead recording ‘hymns, scripture, or carvals’.

Carvals – ‘carols’ – were sung in churches on Christmas eve after the service. When the clergyman had left, the congregation stayed behind with candles, and took it in turns to light tapers and sing long compositions until their flame burned out. Their passing is less mysterious; ‘long and often gloomy’ pieces of sixty verses on the terrors of hell do not exactly fit the modern Christmas spirit, even if the pieces of music that remain are beautiful. My sympathies – and I suspect those of the reader – lie with the ‘giddy maidens’ who threw dried peas at the singers until they relented and packed up to the nearest pub.

That, at least, has definitely survived. Prominent among the new traditions is Black-Eye Friday, a movable feast falling on the final Friday before Christmas. As agricultural, building, and other manual workers receive their Christmas bonus, neither rain or cold or fear of covid can prevent their heading to the pub in order to create scenes the Island’s former viking owners would have found highly pleasing.

Cabinet blocks new restrictions – for now

When Boris Johnson held a cabinet call on Monday afternoon, the expectation was that an announcement on new restrictions would be imminent. But the meeting dragged on for three hours and the Prime Minister emerged afterwards announcing that nothing has changed. The situation is ‘extremely difficult’ and arguments both for and against restrictions are ‘finely balanced’ so the government would keep its eye on the data’. In a battle of Sage forecasts vs data realists, the latter had won. For now.

So what happened in that meeting? ‘Boris did a great job and encouraged a proper discussion and respected other views,’ says one minister. ‘He had quite a lot humility’. Michael Gove was, as usual, leading the arguments for more lockdown. But this was based on Sage forecasts of what might happen which have lost some credibility in the eyes of cabinet members who were — for the first time in a while — genuinely being consulted.

Johnson emerged keeping all options open. ‘We will have to reserve the possibility of taking further action to protect the public and our NHS.’

And he attempted to move the focus back to the booster programme, urging people to come forward and get vaccinated and to show caution when it comes to parties and social mixing. We may yet see a narrative emerging where boosters are credited for helping Britain avoid lockdown. 

Was this the update the Prime Minister had intended to give? The decision to convene a cabinet call suggests he had thought there was a decision to make that could lead to changes. The fact he ended up announcing no change whatsoever (and the length of the meeting) suggests that opposition from his own side prevented him from doing so.

Chris Whitty started off with a presentation making the case for restrictions (yet he stopped just short of calling for them directly). But several members of Johnson’s cabinet are vocally opposed to new restrictions. They argue that there needs to be clearer data before any restrictions are brought in — with whispers of resignations if Johnson pressed on without this. These members of government hope that more time (even a few more days) will offer clarity that could show Omicron is milder than previous variants. 

Behind the scenes, the Chancellor is understood to have played a key role in warning against rushing into decisions that could cost billions — although he was quieter in the meeting, only giving his thoughts when asked directly to by the Prime Minister. Other ministers keen to see more modelling include Kwasi Kwarteng, Commons leader Jacob Rees-Mogg (who highlighted how people can reduce their travel without being under lockdown orders) and Transport Secretary Grant Shapps (‘although it was never quite clear what he was saying,’ I’m told). Other ministers have been pressing on Johnson that any new measures are guidance, not law.

When Johnson emerged talking about the need to wait for the data to work out Omicron’s severity, he was using the language of those who opposed lockdown. They argue, in effect, that Sage models cannot be trusted as they are composed of hypotheticals with a negativity bias baked in. The next few days of hospital data, it’s argued, will tell us much about how severe Omicron is and if lockdown is needed. Data is emerging not just from South Africa (where cases now seem to be falling) but Denmark where Omicron has been found to be significantly less likely to put patients in hospital. 

Yet there remains a sense in government that, on the current direction of travel, restrictions are still more likely than not — it is just a question of when. Civil servants have been working on plans for a two week ‘circuit breaker’ after Christmas. The fact that Sajid Javid said on Sunday that any new measures would have to be put to parliament before being implemented suggests that Christmas day could avoid being affected by new measures. Instead, it’s more likely that the measures will be brought in from 28 December. 

Johnson faces a parliamentary party filled with MPs vehemently opposed to any new restrictions and who could question his ability to lead as a result. When the Whips Office sent a note around on Monday afternoon telling MPs that the parliamentary away day has been cancelled, one messaged me to say: ‘It’s probably for the best. If we were all in one place for a few days, we could work out a successor.’

But there are Tory MPs who believe action is required. One senior Tory concludes: ‘This is a Prime Minister paralysed between science and his backbenchers. It’s depressing.’ 

Harry Miller’s ‘transphobic tweets’ victory is a win for free speech

Court decisions don’t often call for three cheers, but today’s Court of Appeal determination in the Harry Miller case is an exception. Essentially the judges have told the police to rewrite the rules on recording what they see as hate incidents. 

However technical this looks, this is actually an enormous blow in favour of the freedom of ordinary people to say what they want. It is also an admirable Christmas present for anyone seriously concerned with protecting free speech, not to mention a high-profile triumph for the Free Speech Union, who stood squarely behind the appeal. Fighting cases like this needs moral and financial support: and in tandem with Fair Cop, the FSU has very commendably provided both.

In case you’ve forgotten the background, a guidance document issued to all police forces says the following: if someone says something which anyone else sees as embodying hostility based on race, religion, transgenderism or a number of other characteristics, then even if no crime whatever is indicated, police must record it as a so-called ‘non-crime hate incident’ (or NCHI). It matters little if the incident is trivial or its classification fairly obviously misguided, or if the complainant is a victim: it must still go down. There is little discretion, nor is it necessarily just a matter between the speaker and the police: NCHIs can feature in the enhanced criminal records certificate that anyone must produce to work with children or the vulnerable.

Harry Miller, a retired policeman with a habit of posting gender-critical (but entirely lawful) views online, fell foul of this system in 2019. One tweet he posted questioned whether transgender women were real women. Police subsequently turned up at Miller’s workplace after receiving a complaint and a NCHI was recorded against his name, seemingly on the basis that the guidance required it.

Armed with a healthy dose of bloody-mindedness, Miller objected to being labelled as a suspected hate-monger on evidence at best slender and at worst non-existent: and it was at his insistence that the Court of Appeal this morning said this was indeed unacceptable in law. Even if a person was not prosecuted for what they said, the prospect of having even lawful speech recorded as a matter of course merely because someone somewhere saw it as hateful had a gravely chilling effect on their exercise of robust free speech. It followed that it was contrary to the protection of free speech in Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights and unlawful.

This is pretty unalloyed good news. The protection of free speech under the Strasbourg convention is normally pretty patchy, because of the qualifications hedging it round: but here it has unusually come up trumps. Automatic recording of NCHIs, first introduced in an excess of zeal following some incautious recommendations emanating from the Stephen Lawrence inquiry, is a dead duck. To record what someone has said, the police will now need at least some rational connection with crime-fighting or keeping order rather than the mere say-so of a possibly misguided complainant. 

As a by-product, pressure groups and the easily-offended will find it more difficult to silence those they do not like by reporting them to the police. Instead of having to show excessive respect to a complainant just because they are a complainant (or in police-speak a ‘victim’), the latter will now have a great deal more reason to do what they should have done all along and tell complainants, tactfully but firmly, that they cannot become embroiled in the policing of political or social argument.

An attraction of the Court of Appeal’s decision today is that it protects the free speech of the ordinary tweeter or social media user, rather than only that of high-profile campaigners or journalists. But it may also go further. The idea rejected by the Court of Appeal as contrary to free speech, that hate speech is fundamentally a matter of victimhood, and hence that all that matters is how it is perceived by those affected, was not limited to the College of Policing. Many public authorities, not wishing to be left out, have embraced the idea wholeheartedly in their own codes of conduct and equality and diversity policies. They may now have to show some care in how they seek to moderate the speech of those who work for them if they are not to fall foul of the courts.

There is one other person who as a result of all this will, one suspects, be quietly happy: Priti Patel. The judges have incidentally got her out of an awkward bind. Instinctively pro-free speech, aware of the problems of NHCIs and heavily pressured by free speech advocates to do something about them, she has nevertheless had to do a careful balancing act. 

The police establishment, rightly or wrongly, support NCHIs, and wise Home Secretaries do not want to alienate the police or to take steps which could be seen as cramping their style in suppressing crime. But now that the difficult (and correct) decision has been taken for her, she could even be forgiven for discreetly cracking open a socially-distanced Christmas bottle with her officials somewhere in the Home Office out of the sight of malicious journalists.

Is Omicron now falling in South Africa?

Man makes Covid predictions and God laughs. Yet with the stakes this high in Britain, every bit of real-world data is useful. That’s why South Africa is so important: it’s a country with a well-digitised healthcare sector that we have to thank for sequencing the Omicron variant, and has been first to experience the impact. That’s why its figures, released daily, are being watched so eagerly world over. Right now, there are two questions: is Omicron now falling? And if so, what conclusions can we draw?

The epicentre is Gauteng province: home to Johannesburg, Pretoria and about a quarter of South Africans. The below chart adjusts for population and shows that Omicron seems to have peaked in Gauteng last week — with the same trend visible in the other big provinces.

The caveat is that in South Africa, as with the UK, the latest data can be revised upwards. But it has been quite a few days now with figures below that of the peak in Gauteng. In another few days, we’ll be better able to say if this is true for Western Cape (home of Cape Town) and KwaZulu-Natal (home of Durban).

Now let’s zoom out to put Omicron in perspective: it has brought overall cases beyond its July peak. So there, as here, it sends cases through the roof.

But how does this translate into hospital care? We need to bear in mind the time lag between infection, severe illness and death. In previous waves, the average time for a Covid death has been four weeks after infection and hospitalisation is ten days. So even if Omicron cases have peaked, the below graph might go up before it goes down. But interestingly, there are signs of an early fall in hospital admissions. So we see hospitalisations at 57 per cent of the July peak, with ICU numbers barely a fifth of that peak and daily deaths (so far) just 8 per cent of what they once were.

What about lethality? The below looks at the death rate amongst those admitted for Covid, but broken down by age. This isn’t my maths: it’s a replica of a study by South Africa’s National Institute For Communicable Diseases (Figure 15 of this report). It’s for the area around Pretoria.

This ‘fatality ratio’ is for people who’ve been admitted to hospital, so they’re already quite ill. The data suggests that the likelihood of patients dying from Omicron itself is less than half that of Delta — and in most cases, much less. Covid is often compared to flu which has a 0.1 per cent fatality ratio. We are pretty far from getting an equivalent figure for Omicron but flu is the obvious benchmark as it’s a risk we accept every winter, even though it kills around 25,000 annually in Britain.

Certainly if cases are falling in South Africa, Omicron’s death toll will not be anywhere near as bad as during previous waves. This would support suggestions from researchers that Omicron is more infectious — but less deadly — than the Delta variant.

So that’s the data. If you’d like to keep an eye on them, bookmark this page as the graphs will be updated daily, or visit the South Africa section of The Spectator‘s data hub here. There are caveats galore about the limitations of such studies and their relevance to Britain: South Africa is a younger, lower-vaxxed country going through summer right now. But if it does manage to beat Omicron without restrictions, that will be something to factor into the debate here. What real-world data we do have suggests there are limits to Omicron’s growth.

Every day, The Spectator sends out an email summary of the Covid-19 news, science and data. Sign up for free here.

Welby, Israel and the meaning of persecution

I arrived in Colombo the morning after the attack and went straight to the morgue to identify some of the 269 victims. The concrete building, with its pretty wooden roof, had been overwhelmed by the sheer number of Christian dead. Several bodies lay on the floor of the entrance, some only partially covered up. One had gone black. It was very hot and humid and the smell lingered in my clothes for weeks. Outside the morgue, a computer had been set up. Distraught relatives were encouraged to view a slideshow of body parts to see if they could recognise a clump of hair, a fragment of ear or a finger still wearing a ring.

This was the 2019 Easter Bombings in Sri Lanka, in which three packed churches and three hotels were targeted by Islamist suicide bombers. Forty-five foreign nationals, of whom nine were children, were among the dead. Eight were British, including brother and sister Daniel and Amelie Linsey, aged 19 and 15. Little Zayan Chowdhury, who was blown up while having breakfast with his father, was a relative of Labour MP Tulip Siddiq.

I recall this grim episode mainly for the benefit of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Take heed: this is what the persecution of Christians looks like.

Yesterday, Mr Welby and Hosam Naoum, an Anglican bishop in Jerusalem, jointly penned an article in the Sunday Times entitled: ‘Let us pray for the Christians being driven from the Holy Land’. In it, they drew readers’ attention to the ‘frequent and sustained attacks by fringe radical groups’ in Israel, arguing that this was behind the sharp decline in the Christian population in Jerusalem. Nowhere else in the region. Only the Jewish state.

About half way down, the clergymen did briefly say that ‘in Israel, the overall number of Christians has risen’. They also acknowledged that ‘Christians in Israel enjoy democratic and religious freedoms that are a beacon in the region’. But these comments — inserted, one presumes, for the sake of accuracy — were quickly pushed aside. The Archbishops took care to remind readers that the ‘first Christmas’ had taken place ‘against the backdrop of the genocide of infants’, carried out by King Herod. ‘There’s not much in there about lullabies and cuddly farm animals,’ they wrote. The negative parallels were hard to ignore.

Marie van der Zyl, the president of the Board of Deputies, British Jewry’s representative body, has already responded with a fiery letter to Mr Welby. ‘In the past century,’ she wrote, ‘both in Israel’s heartlands and the West Bank, the demographics show that the Palestinian population has increased significantly.’ She continued:

‘If the overall Palestinian population has greatly increased, but the Palestinian Christian population has significantly declined, then clearly there are more complex reasons than those raised in the article, which appeared to attribute this decline to Jewish settlers.

Quite. But such awkward conclusions, however obvious, were ignored.

It goes without saying that no ‘fringe radical group’ in Israel has ever carried out anything like the Easter Bombings in Sri Lanka. The Archbishops were curiously silent on who these ‘fringe radical groups’ are or what motivates them. Yet in the examples they pointed to, cases of arson and vandalism against church buildings, it is hardline Jews who have been blamed. These attacks must of course be condemned. But this does not detract from the fact that overall, Christians in Israel are flourishing.

The education figures alone tell their own story. More Christian Arabs leave school with grades that will get them into university than any other group in the country (71.2 per cent). More Christian women attend higher education than from any other background, excelling particularly in medicine, engineering, architecture and law. As a case in point, the first-ever Arab to hold a permanent appointment as a Supreme Court justice in Israel was Salim Jubran, a Christian — who sat in judgment over former prime minister Ehud Olmert. Much of this is thanks to schools run by the Christian community itself. But it should be noted that Christian schooling is a rarity in the Middle East. In Israel, they operate freely and with the full support of the state.

Compare this to the routine anti-Christian carnage across the region, which the Foreign Office has described as ‘coming close to genocide’. A government report stated that ‘the inconvenient truth is that the overwhelming majority (80 per cent) of persecuted religious believers are Christians’. This ranges from routine discrimination in education, the workplace and wider society all the way to kidnap, assassination and mass murder against Christian communities. It might not be the Holy Land, but surely such persecution deserves at least a mention by the Archbishops.

In countries like Syria, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Libya and Egypt, the anti-Christian oppression is carried out by Islamist terrorists; in Iran, Algeria and Qatar, it is the state that carries out systematic discrimination and persecution. The effects are depressing. The Christian population in the region has declined from 20 per cent a century ago to just 5 per cent today (echoing the almost total exodus of Jews that took place in the late 1940s and 1950s).

Islamist groups in Syria, Iraq and Egypt, as well as northeast Nigeria and the Philippines, seek to erase Christian civilisation by the sword, driving believers out and destroying churches. ‘The killing and abduction of clergy represented a direct attack on the church’s structure and leadership,’ the report said.

In Iran, Saudia Arabia and Egypt, arrest, detention and imprisonment are common. Christian festivals are often a target. In 2017, 99 Egyptian Christians were killed by Islamist militants, with 47 massacred on Palm Sunday in Tanta and Alexandra. A year later, in the six days leading up to Christmas, 114 Christians were arrested in Iran on trumped-up charges.

In Iraq, Iran and Turkey, anti-Christian state propaganda is commonplace. Ankara, for instance, often depicts followers of Christ as a ‘threat to the stability of the nation’, stereotyping them as western collaborators. In Saudi Arabia, the very school textbooks that are used to mould the minds of the next generation foster hatred of Christians and Jews.

Yet this Christmas, the Archbishop of Canterbury is ignoring all this to draw our attention to the Jewish state alone, which by his own admission is a ‘beacon in the region’, in the pages of the Sunday Times. Yes, Christians in the Holy Land deserve greater protection. Yes, attacks by Jewish hardliners are appalling, as is all sectarian violence. But by far the greater Christian persecution lies elsewhere in the Middle East.

Four times Boris said this Christmas would be better than last

‘It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas…’ Or it certainly was until Omicron intervened. For the latest Covid variant has raised fears the government will be forced into a Groundhog Day style re-run of the awful events of last December, when Boris Johnson ‘cancelled Christmas’ less than a week before the big day. What followed was somewhere between Planes, Trains and Automobiles and the evacuation of Saigon as thousands of desperate Londoners stampeded through stations to get home before restrictions took effect.

Twelve months on and with most of Britain double or triple jabbed, there were hopes such scenes could be avoided this year. But with case rates soaring, the Cabinet are meeting this afternoon to discuss the latest data amid fears that the Covid curbs of December 2020 could be reintroduced in December 2021. The current mood music coming out of Whitehall is a far cry from, er, just last month, when upbeat optimists within the government were insisting all would be well. 

For no-one was more enthused with Tiggerish enthusiasm than the optimist-in-chief Boris Johnson. The PM has, for weeks now, been insisting that this Christmas would be considerably better than the last, amid fears about the optics of cancelling two successive holiday seasons. Indeed Mr S has rounded up some of the occasions when the PM confidently predicted such a scenario – even as the case rate began to climb. Below are just four times when Johnson promised a better Christmas this year:

3 October to Beth Rigby of Sky News: ‘On Christmas, let me tell you this, Beth, I’ll make you a very confident prediction. This Christmas will be considerably better than last Christmas – I’m just telling you it’s going to be be much, much better.’

27 November at Covid press conference: ‘As for your question about Christmas, I think I’m going to stick with the formula I’ve used before which is that I’m pretty confident or absolutely confident this Christmas will be considerably better than last Christmas.’

30 November at Covid press conference: ‘I’m still confident that this Christmas will be considerably better than last Christmas, and that remains my view.’

15 December at Covid press conference: ‘I said many times that I thought that this Christmas will be considerably better than last Christmas, and I stick to that. We’re not cancelling events, we’re not closing hospitality, we’re not cancelling people’s parties or their ability to mix.’

With five days to go, will he still be saying the same thing come Christmas Eve?

Why is Quidditch snitching on JK Rowling over trans rights?

To those of us who know Quidditch from the fantasy world of the Harry Potter books, the idea of grown-ups running around a field with a broomstick clasped between their legs is a bit ridiculous. But make no mistake: this is serious stuff. The sport has its own governing body, the International Quidditch Association, that manages its rule book. And there’s also a World Cup, currently held by the United States, which has won the tournament three times. But now, there’s trouble brewing in the world of Quidditch.

As the sport has grown, a problem has emerged. The name Quidditch is trademarked by Warner Brothers. In a recent statement, US Quidditch explained that this had ‘limited the sport’s expansion, including but not limited to sponsorship and broadcast opportunities.’ As a result, a name change has been proposed. But this shake-up isn’t simply about seeking to avoid the attention of Warner Brothers’ lawyers. Once again, JK Rowling – the person who came up with the concept of Quidditch in the first place – has found herself in the firing line.

‘Additionally,’ the statement said, ‘the leagues are hoping a name change can help them continue to distance themselves from the works of J.K. Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter book series, who has increasingly come under scrutiny for her anti-trans positions in recent years.’

Quidditch, you see, considers itself to be ‘one of the most progressive sports in the world on gender equality and inclusivity’. Its gender maximum rule stipulates that a team may not have more than four players of the same gender on the field at a time. On the face of it, this appears to be a worthy aim: it protects the representation of women in a mixed-sex sport. However those in charge at US Quidditch have succumbed to gender identity ideology that elevates feelings above facts. According to the Quidditch rule book: 

‘The gender that a player identifies as is considered to be that player’s gender.’

Following that non-definition of gender, the rules add: 

‘US Quidditch accepts those who don’t identify within the gender binary, and acknowledge that not all of our players identify as male or female. We welcome people of all identities and genders into our league.’

So it seems that a full team of people who were born male is all fine and dandy, as long as no more than four of them actually identify as men.

Rowling may have created the magical world of Harry Potter, Hogwarts and Quidditch, but she has her feet on the ground when it comes to the reality of the difference between male and female, and the dangers to women if we ignore that truth.

Yet for holding to those views – which, indeed, are those shared by many people – Rowling has been abused and condemned. Now it seems even the sport that took for themselves the name she created is taking a similar approach.

While US Quidditch doesn’t spell it out, Rowling has not only defended her sex, but has made clear her support for trans people, including transwomen. ‘I believe the majority of trans-identified people not only pose zero threat to others, but are vulnerable for all the reasons I’ve outlined,’ she has said. ‘Trans people need and deserve protection,’ says Rowling. For these views, Rowling is again having her name dragged through the mud. 

If a change of name allows Quidditch to expand and develop the sport, then good luck to them. But the sport has no need to distance itself from JK Rowling. If she hadn’t written the Harry Potter books, their sport would not exist. If they want to be seen as a grown up sport – broomsticks not withstanding – then some gratitude to the woman who inspired it would be in order.

Five lockdown questions the cabinet must ask

The cabinet will meet this afternoon, with more restrictions and even a new lockdown on the agenda. But have ministers been given the information they need to make an informed decision? There are rumours of briefing documents being sent around over the weekend with a pro-lockdown bias (i.e., heavy on the worst-case scenarios and not much said about potential side-effects). But the Times today reports that this time around the cabinet wants a full discussion — with at least ten ministers demanding a better quality of briefing before decisions are made that affect the lives of millions. The below is a list of questions that ministers need answered:

1. What is Sage’s central scenario for Omicron — and what assumptions lie behind it?

The Sage documents from the weekend offer a staggeringly wide range of outcomes over different restriction scenarios: 600-6,000 deaths a day, for example, if Plan B continues throughout the winter. (and between 200-2,000 deaths a day if we go back to restricting who can and cannot sit on a park bench together). This is so wide-ranging that it’s meaningless unless probability is attached to the figures.

Interestingly, this time around Sage hasn’t attached probability to its estimates — or given a central scenario for what they think is most likely to happen — with none of the usual graphs included. Ministers should be asking now what the probability is attached to the most recent data drop and the assumptions behind it. Without this key information, worst-case scenarios get treated as likely probable outcomes.

2. Has Sage factored the hypothesis that Omicron is milder, as the South African data suggests?

Last weekend gave a red flag to ministers: the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) released an ‘optimistic’ and ‘pessimistic’ scenario, both of which took the pessimistic assumption that Omicron is as severe as Delta. In a note to clients, JP Morgan spotted the big flaw: ‘Evidence from South Africa suggests that Omicron infections are milder,’ it said. Adjust for this and Covid hospital numbers end up just a third of January peak. So this Omicron wave ‘would be manageable without further restrictions’.

Such a scenario looks increasingly plausible. Data from South Africa’s Gauteng province suggests Omicron is now in decline (squashing the theory that Omicron ‘doubles’ every few days without fail) and its hospitals are nowhere near being as busy as they were during previous waves. How sure are we that this could not be true for Britain, too? New data from Denmark, out yesterday, shows the hospitalisation rate for patients with Omicron is 60 per cent lower than it has been with other variants. Might waiting a few more days for UK data (Omicron hospital figures should be published this week) help make a better decision?

At the very least, this emerging, real-world data could be factored into at least one scenario to be presented to ministers, who may be asked to restrict people’s lives once again.

Despite Professor Chris Whitty relying heavily on data from South Africa a couple of weeks ago to usher in Plan B restrictions (the comparisons made at the time didn’t totally add up), focus on real-world data from South Africa seems to have faded to the background, just as the data is starting to tell a more positive story.

3. Who is modelling the economic and social effects of more restrictions?

‘Presumably others are modelling the harms caused by restrictions, including economic harms,’ says Professor Graham Medley, chairman of the Sage modelling committee. A good point. Who is doing this work? This is a question of basic government competence.

When it comes to lockdown and restrictions, there are always painful trade-offs. Businesses folding, school hours lost, missed milestone celebrations, etc. Throughout the pandemic, the impact of restriction — especially to the economy and schooling — has often been an afterthought in policymaking, if the effects have been modelled at all.

When estimates are made, the results are staggering: in April this year, it was estimated that 20,000 children had gone missing from the school roll altogether. In the autumn it was leaked that Plan B, if implemented and extended until March 2022, could cost the economy £800 million a week.

In an important lecture at the Institute for Fiscal Studies last year, the former cabinet secretary Sir Gus O’Donnell made this crucial point:

 All the attention was focussed on Sage as a group of scientists providing expert advice to allow ministers to say they were ‘following the science’… I hope we discover that there was a higher committee that gratefully received Sage’s work and then brought it together with the economic and social estimates to allow for sensible decision-making.

This is why today’s cabinet meeting matters. If there is no such committee, then the cabinet is the only forum to sense-check the Sage estimates and to demand a wider impact assessment. Or point out that, until a full impact report is commissioned, ‘sensible decision-making’ will not be possible.

4. Is this the start of permanent winter lockdowns?

Despite understandable emphasis on the unvaccinated heading into the winter months, Britain is a success story when it comes to vaccination. Around 90 per cent of over-12s are jabbed, with 95 per cent of adults estimated to have antibodies (97 per cent for the over-70s). Some 49 per cent are now boosted, with 900,000 jabs being distributed yesterday alone. Throughout the vaccine rollout, this was sold to the public as a way of avoiding future lockdowns. Are we so sure that it is time to abandon this logic?

It’s certainly starting to wobble: a country with excellent, voluntary vaccine take-up is at risk of being locked down once more, mainly due to issues of NHS capacity. Let’s remember that this problem comes around every year, long before Covid hit.

The difference now is, one, mass testing gives us the tech to track pathogens in real-time and, two, we have a new lever we can pull when things get dicey: lockdown. These two factors will be with us every winter from now on. What to do with them? No doubt, things will look dicey next year too, and for many years to come. Is the cabinet ready for the possible implications that another lockdown — or a harsh set of restrictions — might set for the winters to come?

5. What is the exit strategy for any new restrictions?

If the pro-lockdown faction inside cabinet carries the day — on assumptions about Omicron’s severity that soon turn out to be wrong — how quickly can new restrictions be dropped? Those urging caution want a few more days for the UK picture to be clear and for the mildness hypothesis to be explored. Britain, like Denmark, may soon find that Omicron is far milder than expected. The ‘road map’ out of lockdown turned out to be a massive extension to lockdown taking us up to July. How to make sure this does not happen again?

This all goes back to Professor Medley’s excellent point: Sage just looks at Covid. It’s one aspect of a massive picture. There needs to be a higher committee that looks at the whole country. Under the UK system of government, the cabinet is that committee. Let’s hope for a full and frank discussion later today, with as much of the evidence as possible shared with the public.

Every day, The Spectator sends out an email summary of the Covid-19 news, science and data. Sign up for free here.

Security fears over missing Whitehall kit

Whitehall has never been known to be at the cutting edge of technology. The mandarin masters of SW1 have had more than their fair share of tech blunders over the years, from accidentally uploading data about the nuclear subs to the failed NHS ‘super computer.’ And it seems that, for all the numerous headline-grabbing cock-ups, things are getting little better in the monolithic ministries which govern our lives.

For now it transpires that nearly 5,000 laptops, mobile phones, memory sticks and external hard drives have gone missing over the past five years by ten government department departments, according to a series of parliamentary questions tabled by Lib Dem MP Sarah Olney. Despite repeated warnings about the dangers of sensitive information, the overall number of reported lost or stolen such items rose by 20 per cent between 2018 and 2021, with some 1,023 such items lost in the past 12 months alone.

The majority of these departments did not break their figures down into those items which were stolen and others which were simply lost. One which did was the Department of International Trade, charged with the responsibility of bolstering Britain’s economic security. Its officials have admitted that more than half of its missing laptops – 30 out of 56 – since 2018 were stolen with a further 33 of its 207 mobile phones also having been nicked too, prompting fears as to the safety of such equipment. In the same period, the Treasury and Business Department reported 175 items stolen.

‘Stealing physical assets containing sensitive and secret information will always remain a key part of the foreign intelligence toolkit’ said Sam Armstrong, communications director of the Henry Jackson Society. ‘With one stolen laptop, the damage can be easily contained. With hundreds, it is literally impossible to say which have been lost through carelessness and which might have fallen into the wrong hands. Parliament now has a right to see what if any assessment has been made of the national security risks from this governmental clumsiness.’

The Ministry of Justice – charged with the administration of crime and punishment – has proved to be the worst department in this regard, with 126 laptops, 202 mobiles and six memory sticks all disappearing in 2021. Noticeably this figure applies to just the civil servants, with a further 4,140 low cost mobile phones being lost or stolen from the Covid-era National Probation/Community Rehabilitation Services scheme since March 2020. The Ministry of Defence meanwhile admitted that 25 hard drives and 79 memory sticks were among the 266 items that went walkabouts this year, bringing the total to 1,477 items since 2017.

Ministers refused to break down these figures for the Prime Minister’s Office, only telling Olney the figures for the overall Cabinet Office which includes No. 10. The 9,248 staff working here have had 553 items of kit lost or stolen since the 2017 snap election, with officials nevertheless insisting that ‘there has been no data loss or compromise as a result of these losses.’

Here’s hoping such disappearances aren’t related to all those mysterious pictures of Downing Street parties which keep popping up in the press.

Is this the real reason Lord Frost resigned?

In his resignation letter, the Brexit minister Lord Frost justified his decision to quit by pointing to tax rises and Covid restrictions. But there is another potential reason given the timing. Late last week, the UK conceded that the European Court of Justice could have the final say over the Brexit settlement in Northern Ireland.

Frost is a negotiator. It might be that he didn’t want to undermine his successor by over-emphasising the scale of the British retreat. Or it could be that he is holding back dissatisfaction with the negotiations for a second broadside at the Prime Minister.

But it is a critical development. ECJ oversight was always a red line for Brexiteers. Sovereignty demands that the final arbiter of British law resides in the United Kingdom. Where there must be an external mechanism due to an international agreement, there should be an impartial forum that treats both parties equally.

Having an EU institution police disputes between London and Brussels, which the EU wants, would be like having the Supreme Court as the final court of appeal for treaty disputes between the UK and the Republic of Ireland. They might be fine judges; Dublin would still be rightly furious at the suggestion.

Yet that is where things currently stand. Under the new proposals apparently floated by London, the ECJ would only be asked for its views if a politically-negotiated solution couldn’t be found in the first instance. But given that this is Northern Ireland, and one side actively wants to undermine British sovereignty, the odds of regularly finding such political solutions seem very slim indeed.

Whether Frost speaks out or not, this speaks to a deeper political problem for the government. Frost could only ever be as muscular as Johnson was prepared to allow him. Thus, over the past couple of months, we have gone from a very robust line about triggering Article 16 — the mechanism that allows either side to suspend the Protocol — to the most recent news that actually, maybe the government’s red line about the jurisdiction of the ECJ wasn’t quite so red after all.

According to Dominic Cummings, Frost and his team did have a proper strategy for invoking Article 16 and using it to secure the reforms required to safeguard the integrity of the British state. But they knew the government didn’t have the bottle for it. And following the departure of most of the rest of the Prime Minister’s original Vote Leave team, they were also isolated within government.

Even accepting that Cummings has an axe to grind, that seems perfectly plausible. Johnson’s overall approach to the Union has been wildly erratic. One might plausibly favour either a more conciliatory ‘four nations’ strategy or a more muscular approach to unionism. The government has instead lurched haphazardly between the two.

It’s the same story on pretty much every important area where the Tories should be pursuing structural change. Ambitious planning reform has been abandoned. Detailed proposals for reforming the courts have been sidelined in favour of disinterring David Cameron’s ‘British Bill of Rights’. I couldn’t even tell you if this ministry has an education reform policy.

Time and again, Johnson has proven that his ‘fight or flight’ instinct is stuck on ‘flight’. He’s a talented campaigner with an uncommon knack for connecting with voters, at least until recently. But he isn’t going to fight to the last for the things he believes in because neither fighting nor believing things are major parts of his political character.

Now Liz Truss has to try and pick up where Frost left off, securing the changes Britain needs while avoiding the many pitfalls that await an unprepared English politician in Ulster. It will give Unionist MPs, who may sooner rather than later have to choose Johnson’s successor, an opportunity to see what sort of metal this self-conscious heir to the Iron Lady is really made of.

Is Piers Corbyn really dangerous?

I thought the police statement — bureaucratic, anonymised, bone-dry – got the tone just right. In confirming the arrest of Piers Corbyn on suspicion of encouragement to commit arson, a spokesman confirmed only that ‘a man in his 70s’ had been arrested in Southwark, south London on Sunday morning.

This, for those who missed it, is understood to relate to Mr Corbyn’s fire-breathing (literally: he took his nylon-clad life in his hands with a stunt involving lighter-fluid) speech to an anti-vax rally in the capital. He told his audience, presumably once he’d had a Murray Mint to get the taste of the lighter fluid out of his mouth, that we needed to ‘get a bit more physical’ with those who support restrictions designed to reduce the number of people dying of Covid. He called on his supporters to ‘hammer to death those scum who have decided to go ahead with introducing new fascism’, adding: 

‘We’ve got to get a list of them … and if your MP is one of them, go to their offices and, well, I would recommend burning them down, OK. But I can’t say that on air. I hope we’re not on air.’

Needless to say that’s despicable – though it is; not least the creepily preening coda: 

‘But I can’t say that on air. I hope we’re not on air.’ 

And in an environment where MPs now routinely face death threats, and more than one has in recent memory been murdered, it is dangerous incitement. But it’s not exactly the speech of a terrorist mastermind. ‘I hope we’re not on air,’ says the man addressing a public meeting in the centre of London.

Piers Corbyn is your basic malign, flappy-trousered old loony, jumpy with conspiracies and self-aggrandising notions of resistance, of the sorry sort you can find in any given flat-roofed pub in the country, or handing out misspelt leaflets outside the offices of the local council after falling into dispute with them about the bin collections. Why were we ever paying any attention to him in the first place?

In truth, he has been raised to prominence not by his supporters but by those who, if they held him in less contempt, would qualify as his enemies. This is symptomatic of the wretched state of a public discourse in which we think it’s enough to straw-man positions we oppose by seeking out their most woebegone representatives. Piers Corbyn had two turns in the barrel here.

First, he was a convenient punchbag for those on the right who thought it might make the former Labour leader look, as if it were needed, more ridiculous by associating him with the antics of an embarrassing sibling. In this he joins a long tradition that included Terry Major-Ball, Roger Clinton and Barack Obama’s Trump-supporting half-brother Malik.

Then, once Covid got him all excited, he served his metonymic purpose for metropolitan liberal wear-your-mask-with-pride types. Look, we said: here’s the face of the anti-lockdown, anti-vax movement: a whiskery shouter in public places, a mutterer about Soros and a sharer of platforms with David Icke. Corbyn is a man who can be comically easily pranked by YouTubers into appearing to accept a bribe from big Pharma – in short, someone who can’t walk down the street without spilling the rancid contents of his mental picnic hamper onto the pavement, undercatered sandwich provision and all.

But even if, like me, you think the arguments against covid restrictions and vaccination are badly wrongheaded, basic intellectual self-respect compels you to admit that there’s more to them than Piers and his hangers-on shambling through a tube carriage chanting tunelessly about farts and trousers. It’s easy and fun to ridicule him, but Corbyn isn’t representative of any serious political argument so much as he is of a particular psychological deformation. And I dare say – since I think you can detect a private rage, a personal thwartedness, bubbling under the conspiratorial mindset — that that deformation is made worse by the public attention it craves.

Those vengeful ranting fantasies of violence — which will be bubbling in the minds of many like him – would have no real reach or seriousness were he not platformed in the way he has been. He’s dangerous in proportion to the attention he is paid. 

Piers Corbyn has done two rather different but equally cynical constituencies a favour just by being himself. We should do him, and public life, a reciprocal kindness now by leaving him to be himself in private. Needn’t be a jail cell, though many will think he might benefit from seeing the inside of one. If you’re Piers Corbyn I should think anywhere is a jail cell.

Thousands of NHS managers earning more than MPs

Throughout the pandemic there have been frequent demands for more investment in the NHS. In October, Rishi Sunak was forced to announce further investment of almost £6 billion  to tackle England’s record NHS waiting list. Between 2010 and 2025, the health budget is expected to have increased by 42 per cent; with NHS England’s resource budget set to rise to £162.6 billion over that period. But is all that money being spent wisely?

For new figures from the Department of Health show that, while the public is crying out for frontline services, the number of well-paid NHS managers now run into the thousands. According to health minster Edward Argar there are now some 7,018 managers with total earnings of between £80,000 to £129,999 in the NHS – more than many of his parliamentary colleagues who collect an MPs’ salary of £81,932. These are total earnings, which include non-basic-pay elements such as overtime, geographic allowances, or on-call payments and cover the 12 month period up until June 2021.

A further 1,071 NHS managers are earning between £130,000 to £199,999 – comparable to the Prime Minister’s annual salary of £161,401. Another 114 NHS managers take home between £22.8 and £28.5 million between them as they earn between £200,000 and £249,999 – sums that could pay for around a thousand nurses on a starting salary of  £25,655 per year. And finally some 36 NHS managers take home at least £250,000 a year. Good to see one part of the health service at least is in decent financial health.

Paul Bristow MP, who sits on the Commons health select committee, told Mr S: ‘I think most would agree that the NHS should receive the record investment the government have promised, but would insist that the money is spent well. That means on front line services, dealing with elective backlog and on the pandemic. 

‘Salaries of over £250k and thousands upon thousands of middle managers does not look like money well spent. NHS Trusts and CCGs should be given targets on saving money on management and sharing costs – and meeting these targets should be a major consideration when dishing out taxpayers cash.’

Danni Boxall of the Taxpayers’ Alliance added:  ‘We keep hearing the health service is facing a cash crisis, and it’s little wonder when some trusts give out generous pay packages like these. Taxpayers expect the money they put into the NHS to be spent on patients, not on pumped-up pay packets.’

Let’s hope with the new ‘record investment’ we don’t start seeing record salary bumps too.

The death of ‘Father Christmas’

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the F-word is vanishing.  It’s been insidious, but where once perhaps 20 or 30 years ago it was ubiquitous at this time of year, now – well – you can hardly find it. In fact, look carefully, and you’ll see that Father Christmas is disappearing quicker than an ice cap.

That’s because Father Christmas is being supplanted by a stronger, altogether better-resourced foreign invader: Santa Claus. Browse the shelves of Tesco, Morrisons, Asda and yes, my friends, even Waitrose, and you’ll find dozens of ‘Santa’ themed products – but hardly anything associated with Father Christmas. He is being airbrushed out of Christmas, one paper napkin or foiled chocolate facsimile at a time.

And just like another great American cultural export, the Terminator, Santa feels no pity and takes no prisoners. And so we Brits must join together and save Father Christmas from Santa. It’s nothing personal against Saint Nicholas – I’m sure the 4^th century bishop of Myra was a charming, devout Christian, and possibly even nice to children – but he’s no Father Christmas.

Father Christmas, emblazoned in green or red robes, has been the personification of the Yuletide season in these islands of ours for centuries. He loves to party and wants everyone to join in. ‘Santa’, meanwhile, was imported to America from Holland, where by tradition on his feast day (6 December), ‘Sinterklass’ would give gifts to children – all inspired by the actual Saint Nicholas’s reputation for secret gift-giving.

Since Southern Turkey is hardly renowned for its snows, the whole sleigh-and-chimney caboodle emerged much later from the pen of the American Clement Clarke Moore in his poem of 1823, A Visit from Saint Nicholas, (which kicks off with, ‘T’was the night before Christmas…’). And the modern depiction of a rotund Santa in red with rosy cheeks is credited to Thomas Nast, a German-born American cartoonist, who worked for Harper’s Weekly which circulated his illustrations in the 1880s, who was said to be inspired by German traditional depictions of Saint Nikolaus (His Santa also has holly in his hair and smokes a clay pipe, which, alas, would be frowned upon today). 

Thereafter the Coco Cola company, in the first days of mass market advertising, did the rest: in the 1930s it co-opted Santa to flog their pop, swapping the pipe for bottle of Coke, and also did away with the holly in his hair, giving him the matching hat. Crucially, the shade of red that Santa wears has since then appeared to follow the beverage maker’s own branding requirements.

Good old Father Christmas is a rather different kettle of fish.

Dickens gave us his take on the traditional Father Christmas in A Christmas Carol in 1843, personified – so to speak – in the Ghost of Christmas Present (no pun intended, I’m sure). Surrounded by piles of food, Dickens writes: ‘It was clothed in one simple deep green robe, or mantle, bordered in white fur. This garment hung loosely on the figure… its capacious breast was bare, on its head it wore no other covering than a holly wreath set here and there with shining icicles. It’s dark brown curls were long and free: free as its genial face, its sparkling eye, its open hand, its cheery voice, its unconstrained demeanour, and its joyful air.’

This points to Father Christmas’s origins in medieval society as the personification of the season – Old Christmas, Sir Christmas or the Christmas Lord leading one and all in the feasting and merriment. This was the figure whom the Puritans had in mind when they banned Christmas during the Interregnum.

It was only later during the Victorian era that he became a giver of gifts and – arguably – hybridised with St Nicholas.

Is our British Father Christmas perfect? No, he almost certainly drinks more than the recommended weekly limit, and the GP would doubtlessly categorise him as obese – but he is the archetypical symbol of festive indulgence and far closer to the reality of Christmas than Santa, whose name sounds suspiciously like a soft drink.

So this Christmas, make a stand. Boycott the office Secret Santa and do a Furtive Father Christmas instead. Call him by his proper name whenever the children are around. The indigenous embodiment of Christmas has endured for centuries: he survived the Puritans and two world wars; he even survived the homogenising effects of four decades in the European Union (but let’s not go there). So heaven forbid that this be the year when he finally bites the dust.

The strange solidarity of hill walking

On a gauzy wintery day I am half way up Scafell Pike in the Lake District in an effort to climb the tallest peaks of England, Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland and discover what so many seek up there.

I am not alone. Over a million people climbed one of the peaks this year, with 700,000 making for Snowdon, where summer saw 45-minute queues at the top. Scafell drew 250,000, Ben Nevis more than 160,000 and Slieve Donard in County Down is only relatively quiet, with an annual 100,000 people walking its granite trails.

Each mountain now requires constant tending by path builders, litter pickers, repair teams and rescuers who fret they are being overrun. No wonder. In these pandemic years we have come to worship a Trinity of nature, exercise and domestic travel. The result? Mass processions to such peaks. So where better to understand who we are and how we are than on these summits?

The surroundings of these mountains are as beautiful as they have been since the end of the last ice age. Wasdale below Scafell lies softly. The Snowdon range erupts between hills and roiling weather. Slieve Donard, named after a hermit said to have lived on its summit, still meditates over a green curve of Dundrum Bay. Ben Nevis rises, in vast and infinite detail, out of the tiniest curl of gorse flower at its foot.

‘What’s the race?’ I ask a jostle of scrabbling figures between Great Gable and Scafell. ‘Lakeland Four Passes!’ they cry. Further along Scafell’s flank it starts to rain as a platoon of Generation Z traverse a vertical ravine. The gleeful awe of the Romantic sublime rings out in laughter, squeals and swearing.

Above, the sound of migrating geese echoes through the mist. Gabbles of voices answer them ahead, and there is the main path — and there we all are, in our hundreds. We are so numerous that some are laughing giddily.

The same scene played out while climbing Ben Nevis. Lines and lines of us zig-zagging through the rain. We were all ages, backgrounds, creeds and colours — I exchanged greetings with children and pensioners, with couples gay and straight, with faces from all five continents and figures of every shape. Many of us were not in any kind of athletic form. Some of us were puffing, some heavy, many pained.

The dialect of our pageant was ‘Alright?’ ‘Hello!’ ‘Keep going!’ ‘Sorry! ‘Scuse me!’ and ‘Hi!’ in every accent and kind of English. We grinned through stitches and blisters, and mighty pilgrimages we made.

On Ben Nevis there was a veteran of HMS Sheffield, sunk during the Falklands war. Two friends were climbing to raise funds for MIND, the mental health charity. Many of us were retired, picking our ways ever so carefully, wary of any fall. Some coaxed or carried dogs, which made others pause and smile. One man walked his partner up as far as she wished to go, walked her down again, turned and came back up.

We were all aware that we were a quixotic parade, some prepared for mountain survival, others under-shod in trainers. One figure on Ben Nevis struck me particularly. She was not young, not old and not in company. She had walking poles and she went immensely slowly. I have hated heavy steps up big hills too, and made it up and down Munros only because I was with friends. She climbed the highest without anyone by her side.

At the top, for a moment, the mists cleared — not enough for us to gaze out over leagues of rolling peaks, but so that suddenly and starkly we saw the sky, a silvered sun, each other and ourselves. Now fog and rain came in again. We whooped and laughed and staggered about. Still slowly, so slowly, the stoic figure came.

Her purpose was surely mighty. Many of us walked in someone’s memory, some for charity, all in hope of the same achievement. I have rarely seen so many diverse people so identically uplifted as on those crowded tops. The range of our daily troubles was unimaginable, but atop Scafell, as on all four, our only evident fear was falling off. We were glad we were all there. Not even the virus could scare us.

Each peak provided this solidarity and each had its own surprise. On Snowdon it was Bwlch Main, ‘narrow pass’, an arête like a battlement ridge, a couple of metres wide, between two vast depths of space. On Slieve Donard it was the astounding proximity and fellowship between hills and coasts we call Scotland, England, Wales and Ireland. Knowing nothing of our flags and folderol, a matching archipelago of mountains, marine light and gentle bays echo and reflect one another across a common sea.

If I were going to paint a portrait of a shared spirit, something which transcends all passports and borders, all heritage and circumstance, something which links all of us who find ourselves in this crumble of islands on the edge of the Atlantic – well. I did not actually see her reach the summit of Ben Nevis. But I do know she was there.

Horatio Clare presents the Four Peaks Sound Walk on Radio 3, beginning on Christmas Day

Christmas cocktails to make at home

What better time to show of your cocktail making skills than this year’s rollover Christmas? The bold flavours offered by festive ingredients like Champagne, brandy, and rum offer lots of opportunities to get creative. These crowd-pleasing serves are packed with nostalgic Christmas flavours to help you celebrate straight through till Boxing Day.

French 125

Because it wouldn’t be Christmas without a little fizz.

The original French 75 arrived in Parisian cocktail bars shortly after the First World War. It’s essentially a Tom Collins – that’s gin, lemon juice, and soda – that drops the bubbly water and replaces it with Champagne. The name is said to derive from the 75mm field guns which formed the backbone of French artillery during the war and likewise packed quite a punch.

The French 125 takes things a step further, losing the gin and subbing in Cognac. We brits are partial to a drop of brandy come Christmas time so this extra decadent Champagne cocktail is perfect for the occasion. Using a youthful, fruity Cognac like Seignette VS (£31.95 – Master of Malt) makes for a drink with fresh notes of peach and wildflower honey.

Ingredients

25ml Seignette VS Cognac

15ml Fresh lemon juice

15ml 2:1 sugar syrup

Brut Champagne

Method

You can make the sugar syrup ahead of time by combining 2 parts sugar with one part boiling water, stirring until all the crystals are dissolved, and pouring into a clean container. Chilled down in the fridge, this 2:1 sugar syrup should last a couple of weeks.

Cut a few twists of lemon peel using a speed peeler or a small paring knife and set aside. Measure all the ingredients, except the Champagne, into a highball glass – fill the glass to the brim with ice and give everything a stir to chill and combine. Top carefully with Champagne, so as not to break the bubbles, and garnish with your lemon twist.

You can substitute other varieties of fizz for the Champagne but make sure they’re made using the traditional method and come with minimal added sugar. A nice brut crémant will work well, for instance, but prosecco will probably be too sweet.

Fancy Rum Flip

Flips are an ancient order of cocktails comprising eggs and spirit, that are well-worth bringing out of retirement when the occasion calls for luxury. This should be a treat for anyone who likes a White Russian, a Brandy Alexander, or a Baileys over ice. The only difference is that because flips contain no cream, they have more protein than fat, leaving them silky and decadent without being too cloying.

The trick with this recipe is using a good-quality aged Caribbean rum. Black Tot (£35.95 – the Whisky Exchange) contains a good slug of zesty Barbados rum, a generous helping of fruity pot still stuff from Jamaica, along with lots of other goodness besides. Temper that with a bit of Cognac-based Grand Marnier (£17 – Sainsbury’s) and you’ve got a richly flavoured cocktail that tastes of dried fruit, chocolate orange, vanilla, and baking spices.

Ingredients

50ml Black Tot Finest Caribbean Rum

15ml Grand Marnier

15ml Rich sugar syrup 2:1

1 Free Range Egg

Nutmeg for garnish

Method

Crack the egg into your shaker, being sure not to include any errant pieces of shell. Add your rum, liqueur, and sugar syrup and shake hard without ice until everything is nice a frothy. You’ll want to keep a good hold of your shaker while you do this to keep it popping open.

Next open up the shaker, fill it with ice cubes, and shake hard for at least 20 seconds. You may want to wrap it in a tea towel to protect your hand from the cold. Fine strain, through a tea strainer or similar, into a large cocktail glass and grate a little nutmeg over the top.

Obligatory note about eggs in cocktails: Use the best-quality eggs you can get, so your Flip will be a nice golden yellow. The fresher the better. Red-lion stamped is always good.

Delicious sour

Another historic drink that’s deserving of a revival this time of year. This aptly-named sour pits apple brandy – a criminally neglected cocktail ingredient – against peach liqueur for a soft, fruity aperitif. The oldest known recipe appears in the 1891 text The Flowing Bowl and calls for a new world apple brandy known as applejack. However, most modern examples of the spirit fail to stack up next to good old fashioned French Calvados. Here we’ve used Avallen (£35 – Ocado) a light and fresh style that works particularly well in cocktails. Crème de Peche should be available at any well-stocked supermarket but French producer Briottet makes a particularly good example (£19.95 – the Whisky Exchange) that will be a great addition to your cocktail cabinet.

Ingredients:

50ml Avallen

25ml lemon juice

20ml Crème de peche

10ml 2:1 sugar syrup

Egg white (one white should do two drinks)

1 dash orange bitters (optional but recommended)

Method:

Put a cocktail glass in the freezer, cut a twist of lemon peel, and pre-squeeze your lemon juice. Dry shake all your ingredients without ice – again, being careful to keep the various parts of your shaker together – and then shake a second time with plenty of ice. Fine strain into your icy cocktail glass, squeeze the lemon twist over the surface of the drink to give it a spritz of citrus oil, and serve.

Hot Apple Toddy

This rich winter warmer sits somewhere between a hot toddy, a mulled cider, and an Old Fashioned. It draws inspiration from the spiced ciders that have been a part of our celebrations for centuries and also one of the original American cocktails, the Stone Fence. In the days before commercial mixers, Stone Fences were made by lengthening whiskey with cider.

Pitting a spicy Bourbon like Four Roses Original (£25.70 – Master of Malt) against a medium-dry cider layers tart apples with American oak notes of vanilla, caramel and cinnamon. The method given here makes serving hot cocktails to a crowd consistent and manageable. By combining the warm cider and the Bourbon just prior to serving, you preserve the softer notes in the whiskey and make sure you don’t cook off all the alcohol.

Ingredients:

1 litre off-dry cider

(Per serving)

25ml Four Roses Original

15ml 2:1 sugar syrup

Dash Angostura Bitters

Orange twist

Grating of Nutmeg

Method

Start by slowly bringing your cider to a low simmer over a gentle heat and keep it there – you don’t want it to boil or it’ll start to taste stewed over time. It’s nice to add a cinnamon stick, a few allspice berries, or half a tangerine studded with cloves but it’s not essential – most of our spice flavours will come from the Bourbon and the bitters.

Next, add your Four Roses, sugar syrup, and bitters to pre-warmed cups and top with a couple of ladles of hot cider. Garnish with a little grating of nutmeg and a twist of orange zest. This should be sweet enough, but you can always pass around a little extra sugar syrup if your guests fancy it.

Boris Johnson appoints Frost’s successor

Who is David Frost’s successor as Brexit minister? That’s the question Boris Johnson has answered this evening following Frost’s surprise resignation — with the Foreign Secretary to takeover as the UK’s lead negotiator with the EU in post-Brexit talks. Liz Truss will retain all her Foreign Office responsibilities — with Chris Heaton Harris also to become minister of state for Europe.

So, what does this mean for the government’s direction of travel on the Northern Ireland protocol? There had been reports that Boris Johnson was considering appointing a Brexit ultra like Iain Duncan Smith to the position as a way of keeping his right flank on side. The MPs who make up the group have sounded alarm since Frost’s resignation — sharing concerns with one another that it could lean to a softer position when it comes to the protocol. It doesn’t help that Frost also criticised high taxes, restrictions and net zero. Frost had always been clear that Article 16 needed to remain on the table should talks to amend fail to lead to a breakthrough.

The fact that Frost’s responsibilities have moved to the Foreign Office means the protocol will be considered in a broader foreign policy context. Therefore an increasingly potent factor could be what falling out with the EU on the protocol means for other matters involving the European Union.

Through appointing Truss, Johnson has gone for continuity. He has also appointed someone who he knows is popular with the Tory grassroots which ought to calm nerves at a difficult moment for the Prime Minister. Truss has been at the top of the ConservativeHome Cabinet league table for a year.

Of course, Truss did vote and campaign for remain in the EU referendum. But since then, she has embraced Brexit and is regarded by many in the Cabinet now as a Leave voice. She was the first minister to back Johnson in the Tory leadership race. In the sub committee on the protocol — which Truss already sits on — it is Sunak who has spoken most openly about why triggering Article 16 would be a mistake. Truss is viewed as being in a similar camp to Frost.

It follows that Truss’s appointment to the role might not mean a change in direction. She has already shown a willingness in her current brief to talk tough on international relations. Yet the brief will test the new Foreign Secretary. With scepticism over a breakthrough anytime soon, there are no easy solutions to the protocol. Going into the new year, Truss will face her biggest foreign policy tests in the form of both the escalating situation in Ukraine and the NI protocol.

Another lockdown will only fuel the cancer crisis

One of the biggest mistakes made in previous lockdowns was to neglect non-Covid healthcare, cancer especially. As we prepare for an Omicron wave, might we be about to make the same mistake? Chris Whitty was asked this in a parliamentary inquiry recently and he was surprisingly dismissive. ‘This is sometimes said by people who have no understanding of health at all. But it’s not said by anyone serious, if I’m, honest,’ he said.

Contrary to what Professor Whitty suggests, several serious people are very worried about what might happen to cancer if there is too narrow a focus on Covid. Take Clive Dix, ex-head of the vaccine taskforce, he recently stressed how the current drive for boosters could have a distortive effect on general healthcare:

Given that young and healthy people not only have a very low chance of suffering severe Covid in the first place — but also already have substantial immunity from severe disease thanks to the first two jabs — I cannot see how boosting them is more valuable for public health than doubling our focus on the most vulnerable and cracking down on the backlog of chronically sick patients, such as those with hypertension, diabetes or even cancer. 

The National Audit Office has estimated there has been 740,000 less urgent cancer referrals since the start of lockdown — with as many as 60,000 people with missed cancers. Some of these patients may have sadly already died, but the majority remain undiagnosed and to give this some perspective, they would fill a large football stadium.

At the joint all-party parliamentary group cancer summit recently, we heard that the reduction in urgent cancer referrals may be closer to one million. The reduction in routine cancer referrals may be as high as nine million people. Such delays will lead to many patients being diagnosed with a later stage cancer that requires more extensive treatment and will mean many more avoidable deaths. For some patients, that delay will mean that their cancer is no longer operable or curable and their life expectancy will be severely curtailed. We simply cannot let this continue to happen.

As a former breast cancer surgeon, I know that disruption to cancer services during winter months is commonplace as hospital and intensive care beds come under pressure from increased admissions of patients with respiratory illnesses, leading to cancellation of surgical procedures including cancer operations.

Winter pressure on the NHS is not new — this is what you get if you have a health service operating at close to 100 per cent capacity with a shortage of beds and workforce and, a chronic lack of extra capacity to manage spikes in activity. Without ring-fenced funding and infrastructure for cancer diagnosis and treatment, our cancer services will always be undermined by other national healthcare emergencies — due to lack of beds and ITU beds and, redeployment of clinical staff. 

The current pressure on our cancer infrastructure is reflected in September’s cancer waiting time data that reported 32 per cent of patients not starting their initial cancer treatment within 62 days of urgent GP referral, the highest number for 12 years. Although the target for treating 85 per cent of patients within 62 days or urgent referral has been missed since 2014, there has been a steady decline during lockdown. Given that delay in diagnosis and lack of access to optimal treatment are the main reasons why the UK’s cancer survival is worse than many other high-income countries, a radical cancer recovery plan and a new national cancer strategy are now required to stop the current decline.

In a Joint all-party parliamentary group cancer summit report submitted to government last May, with contributions from many cancer specialists, cancer charities and clinical professional bodies, the government was asked to appoint a minister to oversee a cancer recovery plan and develop a future strategy with ring-fenced funding to provide investment in cancer infrastructure and workforce. That multi-professional advice has to date been ignored and at a further Cancer Summit meeting this week, the deterioration in cancer service delivery during lockdown was again presented to parliamentarians and Peers and a letter will be sent to the Health Minister asking for the backlog to be acknowledged and actively managed. 

A return to normal cancer services will not be enough — we have lost too much ground. A super-normal boost to activity is required. It is now clear that lockdown has caused the biggest cancer catastrophe in my lifetime and the UK government has been aware of this for the last seven months. I hope they listen to the cancer experts this time before they put us into another lockdown.

No, Steve Baker, voters don’t want Thatcher again

Steve Baker’s decision to boot Nadine Dorries out of a group chat of Conservative MPs has captured the attention of the Sunday papers, though it’s difficult to know where our sympathies are supposed to lie. Anyone who joins a group chat with either Baker or Dorries deserves all they get. 

The Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport got shown the door for defending the Prime Minister, a minority pursuit among Tory MPs these days. Her comments, which described Boris Johnson as a ‘hero’ who ‘won an 83 majority and delivered Brexit’, were spurred by an earlier post by Marcus Fysh, the MP for Yeovil and a staunch Brexiteer. Fysh wrote: 

The whole point of Brexit is radical supply side reform and moving away from the EU model, yet ministers are happy just to give hard won power put in their hands to achieve this to officials who will do the opposite.

The second part of that statement is reasonable enough. The first part underlines the continued failure of the Conservative party to understand the 2016 referendum result, the outcome of the 2019 election and the shifting demographics of the Tory vote. No doubt some Tories backed Brexit for economically liberal or Thatcherite reasons, but it is not why Leave won the referendum or what their party’s new voters want from British independence. 

Lord Ashcroft’s exit polling on referendum day found that 49 per cent of Leave voters ticked that box on the ballot paper because they believed ‘decisions about the UK should be taken in the UK’. A further third (33 per cent) cited as their main reason a belief that Brexit ‘offered the best chance for the UK to regain control over immigration and its own borders’, while 13 per cent were motivated by concerns about ‘how the EU expanded its membership or its powers in the years ahead’. Just six per cent gave trade or the economy as their deciding factor. 

In the 2019 election, the Conservatives enjoyed their highest level of support by social class among C2s, enjoying a 20-point advantage over Labour. These electors were not voting for supply side reform, radical or otherwise. Tories who have never got over their teenage crush on Margaret Thatcher have convinced themselves that it’s perpetually 1983 and the punters are gagging for talk about banishing from our land the dark divisive clouds of Marxist socialism. 

This misconception shines through all the leadership chatter emanating out of Westminster. Liz Truss is spoken of as a favourite of younger, free-market minded party members. Rishi Sunak is said to be the sensible, centre right choice for his scepticism about further spending on the pandemic and his desire to cut taxes. Neither should be anywhere near the running, let alone in it. 

Truss is the toast of the Adam Smith Institute and while they’re a good bunch of lads and the first people I’d turn to for Hayek memes, they are wholly unrepresentative of the average Red Wall voter. Sunak appears to be an ideological doppelgänger of George Osborne and his preference for controlling spending and lowering taxes, while all the rage in 2011, feels very dated in 2021. 

It was an extraordinary decision for many electors to vote Tory in December 2019 and they will not be convinced to do it again by a reversion to fusty old dogma about state-slashing and supply side economics. The Republican Party is learning a similar lesson across the pond, where conservative intellectuals mewl about the loss of their party and their conservatism. Principles matter, of course, but if you don’t go with the voters, you don’t go anywhere. The voters are not clamouring for quirky blonde Thatcherism or a suaver, dishier Osborneism. 

True-blue Tories might still see it as their duty to resist socialism but, to the extent the mode and scale of state intervention over the last two years has been socialism, then we are all socialists now. We still don’t know what impact 18 months of having wages paid and small businesses propped up by the government will have had on attitudes towards interventionism but it seems unlikely to have made the public more libertarian. 

If anything, a state which has proved it can finance much of the economy from Number 11 is one with fewer excuses for its failure to expand the housing stock, reduce clinical vacancies in the health service and step up the recruitment of additional police. This is before we even factor in those conservatives who see their primary foe nowadays not as a confiscatory tax regime but as authoritarian progressives marching through the institutions with sinister and intolerant ideas about race, gender and free speech. 

Depending on whether he is able to up his game in the next six months or so, Boris Johnson may prove an asset or a liability to the Tories’ reelection hopes. But one advantage he has over those who seek his replacement is that he understands what the Tory party is now, who it represents and what they want. If he has lost touch with the Britain of the 2020s, it will do no good replacing him with someone still talking to the Britain of the 1980s.

Big beasts build their war chests

Authority forgets a dying king. And with all of Boris Johnson’s current woes, it’s no surprise to read reports of would-be successors already on maneuvers. While few Tories think a leadership challenge is imminent, it’s no surprise that members of the Cabinet have been building up war chests that could come in handy were one to arise. For Mr Steerpike has been combing the Commons anti-sleaze registers to see which ‘big beasts’ of Johnson’s government have drummed up the biggest sums from wealthy donors since the beginning of the year.

Top of the pile is the great survivor Michael Gove, who heads the list with an impressive £167,000 worth of donations since January. Much of this came in the form of two separate £50,000 donations from Zachariasz ‘Zak’ Gertle, one of London’s top property moguls, with a further £10,000 in funds provided by David Cameron’s friend Lord Harris of Peckham. Rishi Sunak, often touted as the Tory heir apparent, came second with a single £50,000 sum received just three and a half weeks ago, as Boris Johnson wrestled with the post-Paterson fall out. The donor was Teesside millionaire Dean Benson, founder of Stockton e-commerce firm Visualsoft – the kind of ‘Northern powerhouse’ which ministers hope to replicate via ‘levelling up.’

Gove and Sunak are not the only two ministers who have raised much more money than the average Tory MP. Sajid Javid has raised £15,000 this year from three firms, including Sun Mark Ltd whose boss Lord Ranger, was given a peerage in Theresa May’s resignation honours. Being on the backbenches hasn’t stopped the 2019 runner-up Jeremy Hunt from registering £15,000 so far in 2021 while Penny Mordaunt received £10,000 at the beginning of the year from Terence Mordaunt’s First Corporate Consultants. It’s a better result than other potential candidates – both Priti Patel and Liz Truss are lagging behind in the fundraising stakes, having failed to raise a penny in donations this year.

Outside of the Cabinet, rising star Tom Tugendhat meanwhile raised £45,000 to pay for an additional adviser in his capacity as chairman of the powerful Commons Foreign Affairs Committee. And, undaunted by past humiliation, the ultimate long-shot candidate Matt Hancock has reportedly been telling others that he could still run for leader again. If he does so he’ll no doubt be helped by the £30,000 in sums he raised prior to his public defenestration in June. Unsurprisingly donations have been a bit harder to come by since then, with precisely, er, no funds declared since.

It was of course the infamous ‘donor strike’ by Tory millionaires refusing to donate further funds which eventually helped force Theresa May’s resignation in 2019. No. 10 will be hoping that dissatisfaction with the current regime doesn’t reach the point again.

Sajid Javid: More restrictions cannot be ruled out before Christmas

Sajid Javid – More restrictions cannot be ruled out before Christmas

With Sunday’s interview shows enjoying their last outing of the year, one might be forgiven for thinking that things would be wrapped up as neatly as presents under the tree on Christmas Eve. Instead, signs of the new year’s arguments and battles were laid bare. Leaked minutes from a recent meeting of the Sage advisory committee have fuelled rumours of a ‘circuit breaker’ lockdown to deal with Covid’s Omicron wave. The Prime Minister remains in a precarious position, and his lack of authority would make any such imposition difficult without sending the Conservative parliamentary party into full scale revolt. Andrew Marr was joined by the Health Secretary Sajid Javid, and Marr asked him if he could rule out a circuit breaker, or indeed anything else, before the year was out:

SJ: There are no guarantees in this pandemic. At this point we just have to keep everything under review.

Lord Frost ‘has resigned out of principle’

Last night, Boris Johnson’s position was rocked further by the resignation of Lord David Frost, the government’s chief Brexit minister. Frost cited concerns over the governments ‘current direction of travel’, and singled out uneasiness about further restrictions as a reason for his departure. Javid paid tribute to his former colleague:

SJ: I think he’s been an outstanding public servant… but he’s resigned out of principle… and I think we have to respect that.

North Shropshire result ‘was our fault’

Perhaps the outstanding moment which bought home the government’s woes was the loss of the North Shropshire by-election on Thursday. The seat is considered traditionally safe territory for the Conservative party, and outgoing MP Owen Paterson won it with a majority of almost 23,000 in 2019. The Liberal Democrats now hold it with a majority of nearly 6,000. Javid raised the way the government dealt with the lobbying scandal as one of the reasons for the defeat:

SJ: It was out fault… We got a number of things wrong… We now have to learn lessons.

Wes Streeting – Javid ‘looks like a hostage’

The new Shadow Health Secretary joined Trevor Phillips and sought to put pressure on his opposite number by setting him against his own backbenchers. Streeting told Phillips that he wanted to see action ‘sooner rather than later’ and that Labour was fully prepared to back tougher restrictions, giving Javid a free hand to do whatever he wished – though not without a cost:

WS: He looked like a hostage to his own party. That’s because he is… The good news is, the Labour party is here to rescue him from that situation.

Andrew Bridgen – Boris should ‘change or go’

As if to underline the dangers of jumping into Labour’s outstretched arms, Conservative backbencher Andrew Bridgen made an appearance on Times Radio with Kait Borsay, where he made his displeasure with the Prime Minister plain for all to hear. Bridgen said that he and many of his fellow MPs saw Lord Frost’s resignation as a ‘watershed moment’:

AB: The answer, for Boris Johnson, is to change or go… The Prime Minister needs to think very carefully… whether he wants to change.

Ed Davey – ‘The Conservatives can be beaten anywhere’

Phillips interviewed the Liberal Democrat leader, Sir Ed Davey. Davey was jubilant about the result of the North Shropshire by-election, with the addition of Helen Morgan providing his party with an early Christmas present:

ED: I’m really proud of our party… We’ve proven that the Conservatives can be beaten anywhere.

Andrew Marr – ‘You stay classy San Diego’

And finally, today marks the end of an era as Marr, who has been with the BBC since 2000, and on his Sunday morning show since 2005, bows out to join the New Statesman. Announcing that Sophie Raworth will be taking over next year, Marr signed off with the catchphrase of another legend of TV journalism, the ‘Channel 4 News Team’ anchorman Ron Burgundy:

AM: I have been so lucky and so privileged to share so many Sunday mornings with you… You stay classy San Diego.