Peers go to polls in hereditary by-election

It’s by-election day in Parliament. No, not another chance for voters to give Boris Johnson a bloody nose over ‘partygate’; but rather the opportunity for one of Britain’s blue-blooded families to take their place in the Upper House. For this contest is fought in the Lords, not the Commons, with votes limited to Tory peers choosing amongst themselves which of them should take Matt Ridley’s seat, following his retirement from the chamber in December. Ridley was one of 42 hereditary peers elected by the Conservative hereditary peers, as part of the total 92 agreed as a compromise by Tony Blair in 1999.

Voting is taking place on the parliamentary estate until 5 p.m today, with Steerpike’s spies telling him this contest is one of the more keenly-fought in recent years. Results will be declared tomorrow, with just 46 men (and they are all men!) eligible to vote, in what has been dubbed ‘the world’s most exclusive electorate.’ Some ten candidates are standing, each of whom are allowed a ‘personal statement’ of up to 75 words. It’s a bit like filling out UCAS university applications except the winning entry gets to join the institution for life, not just three years. Mr S has therefore been sifting through the candidates putting themselves forward to see which of our aristocratic families will soon see its scion in the House of Lords once more.

Undoubtedly the most eye-catching nominee is the septuagenarian Earl Dudley, whose biography simply reads: ‘Herewith presenting my credentials’ and a YouTube link. Upon clicking it, the reader is, er, directed to a search page for the word ‘technodemic.’ How very modern. Former Ukip deputy leader Viscount Monckton of Brenchley has meanwhile quoted Justinian’s advice to law students: ‘Let this be thine: to live a life upright, Do harm to none, and give to each his due’ while echoing Viscount Ridley’s criticisms of climate change. Monckton argues: 

The notion of large global warming arose from an elementary scientific error. The crippling abatement cost extravagantly exceeds any legitimately-quantifiable benefit. Through spinning reserves, adding renewables to electricity grids increases CO2 emissions.

Punchy! Other peers are more conventional in their approach. Lord Biddulph opts for pithy honesty, writing: 

‘I have always felt that in the House of Lords an honest opinion is the best one. I am always happy to be called on to serve.’ 

Earl De La Warr weighs in with this sage wisdom: 

‘The media claim the Conservative party is in dire straits. I do not agree but nonetheless some changes of direction may be necessary’. 

While Viscount Camrose offers advice ‘as a management consultant, business-founder and investor’ on advising clients ‘how to adapt themselves to a changing world.’ Useful stuff perhaps for the noble lords?

The remaining five all prefer to offer potted biographies of themselves. Lord Ashcombe lists his passions for ‘racing on the Solent and garden[ing] enthusiastically’; Earl Limerick goes for the hipster vote by referencing the MicroBrewery he runs. Lord Strathcarron details his many achievements in the creative industries and urges voters to read up on his background on ‘my Wikipedia page’ with  Lords Dormer and Windlesham referencing their membership of local Tory associations.

Which lord will be a-leaping come results day tomorrow? Steerpike looks forward to finding out

The real reason culture warriors want to take down Joe Rogan

Joe Rogan is wildly popular with men because his podcast most closely approximates the way the majority of us speak, think and interact with one another. By turns funny, clever, stupid, thoughtful and irreverent, there is nothing else like it in the media.

This means it needs to be cancelled. If you’re trying to organise a cultural revolution and bring down the patriarchy, the existence of The Joe Rogan Experience – a bastion of relatively guiltless masculinity that draws an audience of tens of millions of men three times a week – is unhelpful in the extreme.

It is surely now clear to everyone that fundamental to the enormous gains made over the last decade by the culture terrorists who would have us completely reconfigure our societies is the element of surprise. People who are surprised cede ground.

For men, lately the surprises come increasingly thick and fast. Constantly, we are now told – by the media, mainly, but also by corporations and educators throughout the Western world – that we are oppressors born into a legacy of guilt and shame, would-be rapists and abusers responsible for wreaking havoc on the planet generally and on women particularly.

Our every urge and inclination, from the desire to work hard and succeed to the pursuit of romance must, we are informed, be checked or restrained lest we somehow disadvantage or dominate people who don’t identify as male. Confusingly, we’re also impelled simultaneously to recognise and own our inherent beastliness while accepting that perceived differences between the sexes are nothing more than social constructs.

As a result, the defining question of our time for men is no longer about finding purpose or meaning in our existence, as it was for our forebears, but instead an effort of understanding whether it is us, or what is going on around us, that is insane. It’s bewildering.

Against this backdrop, then, unsurprisingly The Joe Rogan Experience until about a week ago was an enormously reassuring podcast – a place where people, not always men, talk in a way that is familiar to most men.

No one on the podcast seems, for example, to spend much time discussing pronouns, or identifying as something they’re very clearly not, or validating a ludicrous argument on a pretext as flimsy as their ‘lived experience’. Instead, the show features interesting people, men mostly – from scientists and writers to cage fighters and comedians – expounding within a pleasingly non-corporate and permissive setting on their area of expertise.

For his part, Rogan – the archetypal man’s man – is a superb host. Politically impartial and quick to laugh, he never hectors or seeks to elicit the gotcha moments so beloved by modern news media. Instead he keeps the conversation ticking over by asking questions that are usually well informed, and, when he senses his guest needs a rest, talking at length about cars or martial arts or stand-up comedy. If the mood takes him, he will offer a drink or a joint.

The conversations last about three hours and Rogan doesn’t try to influence the perception of the listener. Even when he seems to suspect he is being lied to, all he will do is get his guest to repeat whatever it is they’ve said and say ‘really? Wow, that’s interesting.’ This is the way non-confrontational men tend to communicate when they socialise in groups.

Over the last two years I’ve listened to hundreds of hours of the Joe Rogan Experience, usually while jogging, or doing something even more manly. As a result, I feel able to say confidently that he is not by any stretch of the imagination a racist, which is the latest allegation against him, made after last week’s allegation, that he was spreading misinformation about vaccines, seemed to be losing traction.

Videos have appeared on social media showing Rogan saying the dreaded n-word repeatedly and seeming to compare Africa to the Planet of the Apes. In each instance, all context has been stripped by whoever made the video – all we see is Rogan saying the forbidden words in different settings.

No doubt someone out there possesses technology capable of wading through thousands of hours of audio to identify each instance and to provide the missing context, but until we have it Rogan and Spotify, which paid $100m only two years ago to acquire exclusive rights to his podcast, are clearly in a difficult position.

It is for this reason, presumably, the streaming giant seems suddenly less resolute in its support of Rogan than last week, when it was Neil Young and Joni Mitchell making demands. Over the weekend, Spotify deleted 113 episodes from Rogan’s back catalogue it deemed to contain more content that could be presented as ‘problematic’.

For his part, Rogan has apologised for his comments and defended himself by saying that for several years he used to use the actual n-word in conversation, rather than saying ‘the n-word’. He said: ‘I thought that as long as it was in context, people would understand what I was doing’.

A second video has also appeared showing a young Rogan laughing as tough-guy comedian Joey Diaz tells an unpleasant story about getting aspiring female comedians to fellate him in return for the opportunity to perform on stage. Again, that’s hard for Spotify to defend, even if it wasn’t Rogan telling the story.

Could we be about to see the cancellation of Rogan, now one of the biggest male stars in the world? At the start of the year, such an idea would have appeared unthinkable – his position on the modern cultural firmament seemed so large as to be unassailable. Now, suddenly, he appears vulnerable.

What a seismic victory in the culture wars that would be for those who take issue with masculinity: an unequivocal statement that there is no longer a place in the mainstream discourse for people who talk and think like Rogan.

Most men, in other words. Say it ain’t so, Joe.

Boris’s reshuffle reveals his weakness

Boris Johnson’s attempted reset is underway, with a mini-reshuffle announced this afternoon. The Prime Minister has made a number of changes to his top team as part of his efforts to signal to Tory MPs that he has taken on board criticism of his operation and will improve it.  

As part of the changes, Mark Spencer has been moved from his role as chief whip to leader of the house — with Chris Heaton Harris brought in as his replacement. Jacob Rees-Mogg has been moved from leader of the house to minister for Brexit opportunities and government efficiency — in this role he will attend cabinet. Other appointments include Stuart Andrew moving from the whips’ office to minister of state for housing.

So, what do the appointments reveal? Ultimately this reshuffle has come from a place of weakness. Given Johnson’s recent turmoils began not with partygate but instead the botched handling of the Owen Paterson affair, the Prime Minister has been under pressure ever since then to move Spencer and Rees-Mogg from their positions. The duo played key roles in hatching the bid to stop Paterson’s suspension which spectacularly backfired and led to the Tories losing the formerly safe seat of North Shropshire in the by-election that followed. 

There has also been a general frustration building within No. 10 and the party towards the whips’ office — with Johnson’s aides blaming decisions that have backfired on bad intelligence. The hope is that Heaton Harris will be able to adopt a carrot and stick approach — bringing some MPs bruised by recent weeks back into the fold. 

But perhaps the most striking aspect of this reshuffle is Johnson’s apparent reluctance to upset anyone. New roles have been found for Spencer, Rees-Mogg and Andrew. Does Johnson have the authority to sack a minister without risking a letter going in? This reshuffle shows that Johnson knows that right now he needs all the friends he can get. 

The Starmer mob moral panic

In the long history of British democracy, politicians have from time to time been heckled and abused by rowdy loons on their way to the House of Commons. It was Keir Starmer’s turn yesterday, again, as a gaggle of hooligans shouted unpleasant remarks at him. When these things happen, it’s seldom an edifying spectacle. But it is probably a price worth paying for having a parliament in the middle of London which MPs travel to in open streets – rather than shuttling in and out of some hyper-secure and dystopian administrative bubble.

What happened to Starmer yesterday is no worse than what anybody who has been with away fans to a football match in England will have experienced. But from the way the incident is being written up – and the way politicians are fulminating about it – you could be forgiven for thinking that something truly awful had happened.

In fact, it was just a minor crowd-control incident. Actually, crowd might be pushing it: aerial photos suggest no more than 20 people were there. ‘Traitor!’ they shouted at Starmer. ‘What happened to the working man, Mr Starmer? Why did you go after Julian Assange?’

You know the thing — the jumbled thoughts of the Covid radicalised. One of them flew an England flag; another wore a Canada cap, presumably in solidarity with the anti-lockdown truckers of Ottawa. Somebody threw a traffic cone and was duly arrested. But the ones doing the ‘jostling’ were mostly the police.

It is not pleasant. It’s ugly. But those suggesting that there is something fundamentally unBritish about such protests clearly haven’t been paying much attention to British society in the last 400 years or so. It is, I’m afraid, how some angry protesters express themselves, and some people are very angry after two years of lockdowns.

What is new is the hysterical reaction of the political class. Among the incoherent abuse hurled at Starmer (‘traitor’, ‘arrest him’, ‘don’t take the vaccine,’ ‘do you enjoy working for the new world order?’, ‘why did you go after Julian Assange’) someone shouted out ‘Jimmy Savile’ and someone else ‘protecting paedophiles’. These two remarks were used to trace the whole thing back to Boris Johnson, and make out as if the whole protest was inspired by a joke made at PMQs. Politicians, sensing an opportunity to bash the Prime Minister further over his now notorious jibe about Starmer and Savile, were all too quick to seize on these two heckles for maximum political effect.

Julian Smith, a Tory MP, suggested that the foundations of democracy have been shaken: ‘It is really important for our democracy and for his security that the false Savile slurs made against him are withdrawn in full,’ he said.

Tobias Ellwood, another Tory MP, tweeted: ‘We claim to be the Mother of all Parliaments. Let’s stop this drift towards a Trumpian style of politics from becoming the norm. We are better than this.’

Labour MP Chris Bryant squarely blamed the Prime Minister for the abuse Starmer had suffered. He said Johnson’s Savile remark was ‘an attempt to incite the mob. We know how this plays out when politicians go down this deeply cynical route because we’ve seen it in the United States of America. It’s exactly the same as Donald Trump’s playbook. It’s not the way we do politics in this country.’

Trump, Trump, Trump: the point of reference for all political disapproval. What used to be called ‘the paranoid style in American politics’ — a term invented by Richard Hofstadter — has become the Trumpian style in global politics. It’s now what the establishment says, down its nose, every time it is confronted by the great unwashed.

This idea – that democracy is falling apart because a politician is heckled – is a moral panic. It is Trumpian only in the way it calls to mind the deranged way in which America’s media and its politicians whip each other up into a frenzy — usually over Twitter — over almost any and every infraction of political ‘norms’. That, if anything, is the American import.

A windfall tax on oil giants would harm – not help – pensioners

Look up this year’s performance of the shares and bonds which make up your pension fund and you will see that BP and Shell are the rare chinks of light. BP is up 15 per cent and Shell up 20 per cent, with both enjoying bumper profits on the back of high oil and gas prices.

Cue, then, for Labour and the Lib Dems to demand a windfall tax in order to confiscate some of these profits. The money ought to be used, Eds Miliband and Davey have said this morning, to help people pay their heating bills. In both their minds ‘dividends’ and ‘shareholders’ are rude words – whereas in reality the people with a stake in BP and Shell are in many cases exactly the same people who are struggling to pay their heating bills. Both companies form the backbone of many pension schemes. 

What’s more, this year’s bounce in their share prices is a small compensation for years in which they have performed poorly. The collapse in oil prices in 2014 took a huge chunk out of returns for many pension funds heavily invested in the sector. Again, in 2020 both Shell and BP suffered huge losses as demand for oil collapsed during the pandemic. I don’t remember Labour or the Lib Dems calling for either company to be bailed out on those occasions – they just want the state to snatch a punitive share of their profits during the good times.

The question is this then: do Miliband and Davey even appreciate how the retirement plans of many millions of ordinary workers depend on dividends and share values of public companies? Both are beneficiaries of gold-plated, index-linked pensions which will continue to be paid whatever happens to the value of shares, bonds and other investments. The taxpayer will pick up the tab to keep both Eds in the lifestyles to which they have become accustomed, throughout their retirements. It isn’t BP and Shell shareholders who are the entitled ones, who stand aloof from the everyday concerns of ordinary people; it is Miliband and Davey.

Their intervention exposes a growing divide in British society: between workers who are signed up for final salary public sector pensions and those who must rely on private sector pension schemes. The former are almost completely insulated from the performance of markets; the latter are utterly dependent on them for their retirement income. The problem is that the former group can afford to have a hostile attitude towards private enterprise, and so can the Labour party, given the dominance of public sector workers in its voter base. This is a problem which will not be resolved until final salary pensions – which have been reduced in the public sector in recent years – are finally abolished and all workers are given a stake in a healthy economy.

There is, of course, another undercurrent to this story. BP and Shell are the biggest villains for the divestment lobby – the fantasists who believe that if only oil companies could be driven to extinction we would magically and painlessly transform to a zero carbon economy. The current surge in gas prices is a sign of that folly: it reminds us how, in spite of huge investment in renewables in recent years, we are still heavily dependent on fossil fuels and will be for the foreseeable future. Divest if you like, but oil and gas companies are doing well at the moment because they are providing a vital public service, and we would be in serious trouble if they stopped providing it.

The cost of online safety

Few people in Britain will have heard of the draft Online Safety Bill. Fewer still will oppose it. Protecting children against harm and exploitation online is an entirely rational goal in modern-day society. And when the Culture Secretary is boldly promising, as Nadine Dorries did at the weekend, to ‘bring order to the online world’ and ‘force social media companies to take responsibility for the toxic abuse that floods their platforms,’ it can be quite convincing: painting the web as a virtual Wild West that governments urgently need to regulate.

Doubtless, the internet is home to abhorrent abuse that isn’t acceptable in any circumstance. Beyond that, there are instances of unlawful behaviour and serious crime — and anyone who sees it should alert the police. Many do. Companies also have automated systems that pick up on abuses and file reports. But governments across the globe are increasingly worried about what they consider to be ‘harmful’ content, and measures are being pursued to counter them.

Here in the UK, we are tying ourselves in knots over a draft Bill so complex that its core aims are unclear. It will substantially reimagine the role of the state with respect to ‘safety’, handing extraordinary powers to Ofcom, yet will require censorship of online speech that would be lawful offline. Today, it was announced that the Porn Law — abandoned by Boris Johnson just a few years ago — is back in the draft Bill.

In truth there aren’t any obvious policy solutions that can make the internet (or real life) entirely safe from bad actors. In the offline world, we expect adults to drive safely and reliably oversee children in public spaces. We don’t install surveillance equipment in every home, or CCTV in every playground. There is no reason why we cannot apply the same logic around individual responsibility or good old-fashioned parenting online as we do in the real world.

We’ve lost sight of how online communications, especially in social media, have long been home to liberal principles of toleration and voluntary association. Free speech and (virtual) assembly have flourished and opinions have been expressed, unrestricted by state-sanctioned views of decency or suitability. As a result, knowledge has been advanced, providing a bulwark against tyranny.

Of all the deplorable aspects in the draft Bill, the cost and impact on innovation receive least attention. The government’s impact assessment sets the former at £2.1 billion, with a whopping £1.7 billion being put towards content moderators. But these estimates typically involve vast amounts of guesswork, and governments tend to undershoot by some margin, meaning we can reasonably assume the true costs will be significantly greater.

For a start, the assessment suggests the new legislation impacts 24,000 firms. Subsequent Freedom of Information requests revealed researchers essentially browsed a list of businesses manually and ‘guessed’ if they would be likely to be in scope because the government was unable to confirm the parameters at the time. And now, the Draft Online Safety Bill Joint Committee has recommended the scope of the Bill be expanded to apply to ‘Internet Society Services likely to be accessed by children, as defined by the Age Appropriate Design Code’. The start-up trade body Coadec has warned the number of businesses that would be covered would be 290,000: more than ten times the impact assessment figure.

And as the government’s own research has acknowledged, the burden of implementing online safety measures will not be spread equally across all firms. The cost per user ranged from 25p to 50p for large platforms — but could be materially lower for the largest sites. By contrast, small platforms will be spending over £45 per user.

Many start-ups, therefore, simply won’t engage in this legislation. They’ll either ‘age gate’, massively restricting content that is in no way harmful to under-18s, or fundamentally change their business models. The position of large incumbents will be further cemented, threatening innovation and limiting consumer choice. The UK’s status as a market for start-ups will diminish as companies are discouraged from operating in the UK, further reducing access to growth potential and perhaps even online services.

Politicians cannot continue to hamstring businesses or threaten our standing as Europe’s largest digital economy in the name of virtue signalling. If they’re not over-regulating the energy market, they’re demonising food retailers who dare to produce meals people want to eat, or introducing employment laws that will disincentivise job creation. When it comes to the Online Safety Bill the truth is, as ministers well know, that the only way to ensure the internet is entirely ‘safe’ would be for the Internet to be abolished.

Brexit-bashing bishops could ruin the Church of England

When politicians take to preaching, we feel uncomfortable. When bishops take to politics and managerialism, the sinking feeling gets worse. Now it seems we should brace ourselves for more pulpit politics: a Church of England proposal suggests that church leaders could be appointed to full-time cabinet-style roles such as ‘Brexit bishop’ or ‘Covid bishop’. These plans should seriously concern any Anglican well-wisher.

After all, why would the appointments stop at Brexit and the pandemic? Knowing the C of E, it seems a racing certainty that if these proposals come to anything others would include matters like climate change and anti-racism. What about preaching the Gospel? 

Hidden within proposals for political bishops is a drastic rewriting of what bishops stand for. At present, as his crook symbolises, a bishop’s responsibility is to shepherd souls. He may of course express views on theology, or morals, or even politics: but this is part of his functions as a pastor, and cannot be separated from it. The Anglican church may choose to change this and instead pay a cleric to pontificate on Brexit, or climate change, or whatever. But such a person will be not so much a pastor as a pundit: an activist, or a corporate spokesperson. Neither of these is in the least in accordance with the tradition of the Church of England.

There is also a direct threat to the political neutrality, at least in name, of Anglicanism. True, the C of E’s hierarchy, and many of its urban congregations, have long since ceased to be the Tory party at prayer and now largely comprise a congeries of well-meaning Greens, Lib Dems and metropolitan Labourites. But at least any political and social views these people express are personal. 

The church itself has so far respected Jesus’ reminder in St John’s gospel that his kingdom is ‘not of this world’ – words spoken, remember, in direct reproof of direct action in his name against the forces of government. This discretion has served it well: as conservative churchman Edward Norman remarked over 40 years ago in his Reith lectures Christianity and the World Order, once a church approximates its religious teachings to adherence to a secular political creed, it undermines much of its authority as a church. This is exactly what threatens the C of E as soon as it takes an official line on such things as Covid or Brexit, or sets up a cleric as some kind of ecclesiastical shadow minister for climate change.

As if this was not enough, another idea floated involves requiring all bishops, territorial or otherwise, to be appointed for a fixed seven years, with a need to seek reappointment after that time. In Victorian times a parish priest was essentially left to attend to parishioners’ spiritual needs as he thought fit, subject only to the occasional nudge from his archdeacon and ultimate supervision from his bishop. Under these proposals he, or increasingly often she, will resemble more and more a junior employee carrying out orders under the demanding eyes of layer after layer of line management.

The church may be cash-strapped and unable to pay its priests properly or maintain its buildings. However, like other managers of ailing corporations who happily fill flip charts with complex chains of command but never seem to reduce the number of commanders, it appears to have no plans to reduce the episcopal head count. On the contrary: the new ecclesiastical administration team flowchart seems to envisage a four-layer bureaucracy: diocesans reporting to regional bishops, who would in turn report to archbishops, with suffragans under the diocesans tending ever smaller constituencies.

But the fact that this document is a missed opportunity to clear out the layers of management and focus on tending the needs of those in parishes, isn’t the worst thing about it. The biggest and most insidious threat it contains is to conscience. 

Until now, the strength of the Anglican church has been its fierce tolerance of independent thought. This is defended not only in theory by the Thirty-Nine Articles, but as a matter of practice by the position of bishops as independent officers with unbreakable tenure: until 1975 for life; now until 70. This allows them freely to express their views, however awkward, and makes Anglicanism the broad and welcoming confession it is. But for how much longer? 

What is being suggested to the bishops is a very different arrangement: a church where bishops report to a management hierarchy, and after a time have to seek reappointment. A diocesan with unfashionable views might well feel a need for caution if coming up for renewal; and even more so a bishop appointed as a spokesman on, say, Covid whose views had ceased to reflect those of their line manager. 

There is a very present danger that if these proposals become law, the C of E will wither away as a broad church with a home for varied political and theological views. Instead it could become simply a prescriptive sect: an organisation with an official line which its prelates are expected to toe. If ever there was an effective way to make a church unattractive to all but the dreariest of zealots and and empty its pews still further, this is it.

Mandarins troll exiting No. 10 staff

Clashes between special advisers and civil servants have become a fixture of the Whitehall landscape in recent years. Who can forget the Cabinet Office tweeter who fired off the ‘arrogant and offensive’ message in the middle of Barnard Castle-gate? But now it seems the Sir Humphreys of SW1 are content to leave direct confrontation aside and confine their expressions of discontent to veiled digs at those in No. 10.

For Mr S couldn’t help but notice that among the documents uploaded yesterday to the official gov.uk website included a handy guide to seminars on ‘How to stand out in an interview and get the job you want’ with promised ‘tips on how to get ahead in an interview and secure a new job.’ How convenient that such a list of advice be uploaded a mere four days after Boris Johnson’s clear-out of No. 10 staff! Where better place for Munira Mirza, Jack Doyle et al to look for advice on how to secure post-government employment?

A list of times and places for interview-prep classes is listed online, with the website noting that a face-to-face is ‘your opportunity to shine’ with ‘our expert careers advisers’ ensuring ‘you make a positive impact and arrive with confidence, fully prepared and ready for success.’ It adds that ‘preparation is really important’ – words worth remembering for those left in Downing Street, perhaps.

Still, not all those leaving the No.10 circus will be in need of such a helpful guide. Martin Reynolds, the PM’s Principal Private Secretary, has no need for new work as he will be returning to the Foreign Office. Reynolds was the only one of the departing five who was a civil servant; now he’s the only one with a guaranteed job at the end of it. Sir Humphrey wins again!

Boris Johnson is running out of options

The No. 10 operation’s decision to double down on the Starmer/Savile row after the Labour leader was accosted in the street by anti-vaxxers shows us how limited the options are for Boris Johnson as he tries to recover from the turmoil of the past few weeks.

The line from his allies and aides is that these protesters were shouting all manner of things, including about Savile but also about Julian Assange. In other words, they were wrong’uns before Johnson offered the slur in the Commons last week, and they would have threatened the Labour leader regardless.

This may or may not be true but as a line of argument it hardly gives Boris Johnson a statesmanlike demeanour. There wasn’t much else in the diatribe of allegations yelled at Starmer that you’d want to hear repeated by the leader of your country.

This line of defence essentially admits that the Savile line is the sort of thing that only conspiracy theorists who try to intimidate politicians in the street espouse. This is something that most people knew before Johnson dropped it into the Commons Chamber last Monday.

So his allies are, in effect, having to concede that the Prime Minister thinks it is OK to talk like those protesters. Even if Boris Johnson had been unaware of the inaccuracy of what he was saying, he has had ample time to correct that and apologise. His extremely partial clarification last week wasn’t enough for his loyal head of policy Munira Mirza. The gymnastics being performed by his lieutenants this morning aren’t enough, either

Chatty MPs fuel podcast boom

Whether it’s online, print, radio or broadcast, it seems we can’t get enough of politics these days. And not content with traditional forms of media, an ever-expanding number of MPs are branching out into podcasts to share their thoughts with the wider world. Around half-a-dozen have launched their own shows in recent months, following in the footsteps of perhaps the most high-profile parliamentary podcaster: Jacob Rees-Mogg, who has hosted his fortnightly Moggcast show for ConservativeHome since 2018, often providing news lines which Mr S is only too keen to follow up.

The latest ambitious MP to launch such a project is the chisel-jawed Luke Evans, whose career reads like a Tory mother’s dream: a qualified GP who married a fellow doctor, he was selected for a Conservative safe seat at 36 and now lives in Bosworth happily with his two dogs, having been elected there in 2019. In Parliament he’s devoted most of his efforts to body image, with Evans calling for digitally altered body proportions to be labelled in advertising. To further this goal, he launched his own, podcast last month – titled, unsurprisingly, ‘Dr in the House’ – in which he discusses ‘mental health, body image and life as an MP’ with ‘fellow MPs, famous faces, and just some of the extraordinary people he comes across in his job.’ Worthy stuff.

Evans is just following in the footsteps of other members of the 2019-intake. Jo Gideon, the Stoke-on-Trent MP, runs one called ‘People before Politics’ in which she simply lists her various achievements that month in the style of a local newsletter. Fellow backbencher Dean Russell hosts a regular podcast titled, originally, ‘Watford Matters with Dean Russell’ where he ‘interviews local leaders from across our community’ while Jack Brereton has one based around ‘fantastic Stoke South.’  

Across the House, others getting in on the act include SNP Drew Hendry with (quelle surprise) ‘Scotland’s Choice’ which mostly consists of leading Scottish nationalists embarrassing themselves on the pensions question. And no self-promoting platform would be complete without Jess Phillips whose ‘Yours Sincerely’ podcast gives her guests a chance to ‘celebrate three people that mean the world to them.’ Presumably ‘me, myself and I’ were the chosen three for the Have I Got News For You host?

As for those MPs without a platform, not to worry: there will likely soon be a taxpayer-funded alternative run by the Houses of Parliament themselves. For a Freedom of Information request by Mr S found that there will shortly be a parliamentary archives-themed series while ‘two potential podcast pilots… are still at concept’ with one focussing on parliamentary procedure and the other looking at Select Committee business. And of course, there’s already the House of Lords show for anyone who needs a fix.

Who needs Joe Rogan’s shows when such podcast gold is in abundance elsewhere?

Swindled daters aren’t the only ones cynical about Tinder

Elliot, 28: ‘My greatest achievements in life are: drinking a bottle of Listerine in 10 seconds, beating my laptop at chess on easy difficult and surviving till the age of 28’. 

Frank, 40: ‘Professional career, into extreme sports and stay fit, yet also enjoy the finer things in life like diner [sic] and a glass of champagne.’

These were the first two Tinder profiles I saw when I opened the app after watching Netflix’s The Tinder Swindler. They capture the fairly gormless but harmless nature of most male Tinder profiles, with fairly gormless but harmless men attached. Well, not just gormless: I’ve been on enough Tinder dates to know that there are plenty of unreliable, sometimes cruel, often inconsiderate and flakey (or angry) men on there. And Tinder certainly has its share of bad apples – reports of romance fraud went up by 40 per cent in the year to 2021, a period in which people were conned out of an eye-watering £73.9m, according to Action Fraud UK. But you’d have to be very unlucky to encounter anyone in remotely in the same league as Israeli fraudster Simon Hayut, whose gobsmacking deceptions are the subject of the documentary.

Hayut went by, among others, the name of Simon Leviev, pretending to be the scion of the Israeli Leviev diamond dynasty. He defrauded his pretty, loving female dupes of hundreds of thousands of dollars that they are still paying back. The son of a rabbi father and hunchback mother (whom we briefly glimpse in front of her flat when journalists go in search of clues to his whereabouts), Hayut is from B’nei Brak, a poor, ultra-orthodox city near Tel Aviv, and a far cry from the life of private jets and champagne her disappeared in search of. He lured women with sophisticated forms of emotional manipulation and then, pretending to be in mortal danger from ruthless enemies that required him to get rid of all his credit cards lest be traceable, he got them to take out cards in their names. The extravagant loans from the cards he then used to wow and build trust with his next victim.

Still, what hits home about the story isn’t the existence of bad apples – there have always been those, even if Tinder has enabled them in new ways. Rather, it’s that Hayut’s particular way of reeling in his victims eerily reflects, and could only function within, the slippery cadences of intimacy in app-land. In other words, it’s the communication culture spawned by Tinder itself that is the biggest menace: it is fundamentally untrustworthy, a cascade of shifting sands, behind which lie a range of unsettling but characteristic behaviours. There is ghosting (suddenly cutting contact), benching (keeping several options going at once to offset uncertainty about your main squeeze), breadcrumbing (sending out flirtatious, non-committal signals), cushioning (checking out other options while in a relationship), half-night stands (leaving straight after sex) and so on – almost all ways of treating people like low-value, fungible commodities worth keeping at screen’s end only for their minor ego-boosting services.

These behaviours keep dating incredibly suspenseful. It’s a suspense that unfolds in the nuances, often the micro-nuances of instant messaging and social media, while you wait to find out what you’re really dealing with, and whether it matches what, in rare cases, you so desperately hope it is. The Tinder Swindler excellently and stressfully captures the visual and aural experience of this: the notification, always pulsingly alive, that someone is online, the mystery about whether they really are staring at their screen and if so, what it means if a message is not sent, especially after it looks like they’ve begun writing. The terrible wait while it says ‘typing’ on Whatsapp or as that ripple of dots unfurls on SMS. What is coming? Will it light your world up with the effervescence of a heart or kiss emoji, fall flat with a deadening full-stop or unanswerable piece of whimsy, or ask for something not quite right, as Hayut did, again and again, more and more pressingly? The documentary captures the building pressure on the victims as the tsunami of notifications accelerates: the frantic messages on SMS and Whatsapp, the voice calls, the Facebook messages and Messenger calls, hearts and kisses and desperate pleas – and finally, anger and threats. It is all smoke and mirrors, of course, an effect made possible at blistering speed and intensity by the technology to hand.

Within this communicational sphere, Hayut’s relationship-building style is eerily familiar too: there’s the rapid acceleration from almost nothing to ‘I miss you’, the use of ‘baby’, the excessive use of heart emojis, the ‘good morning’ messages. I still hear from a youngster I met on Tinder in Italy a few years ago, who talks to me like we’re the oldest, closest of lovers, suggesting saucy weekend breaks in Paris or Milan. But we met only twice and had an unremarkable bond; after the second meeting, he went silent for months. Then there are the ones who leave repeated voicenotes asking about your life, demanding minute-by-minute updates of what you’re up to, as if every detail is suddenly of the utmost importance – all this before you’ve even met. With these ones, the lines tend to go abruptly dead after the meeting – if you even manage to get to that stage. Forms of emotional fraud from the subtle to the heartbreaking are Tinder’s currency; frauds like Hayut’s are merely a starkly materialised version of it.

Audiences mocked the swindled women for having got their just desserts for being ‘gold-diggers’, which is apparently what you are if you delight in being offered a ride on a private jet by a handsome, dashing date. Such accusations should be rejected as simple misogyny, and the victims’ initial delight in Hayut’s luxurious offerings seen rather in terms of yet another weird Tinder dynamic: that of open possibility, that in meeting anyone, anything could happen, wonderful or terrible; the tenacity of the hope that perhaps a Prince Charming really will come to wipe away the bad taste left by all the frogs and make it all worth it. These women were not greedy: they were just unlucky enough to come up against a nightmare masquerading as a fantasy.

The affordable SUV that gets mistaken for a Bentley

Readers of a certain age might remember when some car marques were the butt of relentless derogatory jokes. Czech brand Skoda – which has since been brought up-market under VW ownership – was an especially popular victim (Q: ‘What do you call a Skoda with a sunroof?’ A. ‘A skip..’) as were Lada (Q. ‘How do you avoid a speeding ticket?’ A. ‘Buy a Lada’) and Malaysia’s Proton (Q: ‘How do you double the value of a Proton?’ A. ‘Just add petrol.’).

But even makers of famously good, solid, reliable cars can be coy about their original brand names when they decide to up their game by trying to penetrate the luxury market – which is why Toyota created Lexus, Nissan invented Infiniti, Honda coined ‘Acura’ and, more than 100 years ago, Ford adopted the Lincoln nameplate.

The importance of a ‘premium’ vehicle being given the right name was perhaps best demonstrated 20 years ago when VW introduced its beautifully appointed Phaeton with an ambition to build 20,000 units annually at its factory in Dresden – only to find that slack sales meant it took four years to reach 25,000, despite the car having the same chassis as a Bentley and being available with the engine of an Audi A8. The problem? The ‘people’s car’ badge on the grille simply didn’t cut the mustard.
And it’s to avoid such a flop that South Korean maker Hyundai created its ‘Genesis’ sub-brand in 2017.

Genesis cars became available in the UK a little more than six months ago and, if the reaction to the GV80 SUV version I’ve had for a week is anything to go buy, BMW, Audi and Mercedes-Benz could be looking at some serious competition – not least because the brand’s chief creative officer is none other than Luc Donckerwolke, the Belgian-Peruvian designer whose pen was behind automotive hits such as the Audi R8 Le Mans racer, Lamborghini’s Murciélago and Gallardo models and the Bentley Flying Spur.

It’s perhaps not surprising, then, that I became used to passers-by looking admiringly at the Genesis before confidently asking: ‘How do you like your Bentley?’ And when informed that it was actually a Genesis, every one of them replied: ‘What’s a Genesis?’

The discovery that it was a Hyundai in disguise invariably came as a surprise, as did the quality of its interior to those sufficiently inquisitive to ask for a peek inside. It’s got all the leather and veneer that have come to be regarded as traditional benchmarks of ‘luxury’ motoring, along with the mod cons of a 14.5-inch touchscreen/ voice activated infotainment system offering ‘augmented reality’ navigation and hand writing recognition.

You also get split climate controls front and rear, so-called ‘Ergo Motion’ air filled massage seats, electric window blinds and a really superb, 18-speaker Lexicon sound system.

The GV80’s interior is relaxing, too, largely due to a minimalist approach which has resulted in fewer switches, narrow air vents and an almost complete absence of clutter – and folding down the rear seats reveals the car to be practical as well as luxurious thanks to a huge load area, more storage space beneath the floor and the option of a seven-seat configuration.

It’s also appropriately quiet for a luxury SUV – but if there’s one area in which it fails to match more established, more expensive rivals from marques such as Bentley, Audi, BMW and Mercedes-Benz it’s that of refinement.

Inevitably, building the car down to a competitive price has left room for improvement both in the engine and suspension departments, both of which expose the GV80 as being a luxury car created by a parent manufacturer that majors on affordability.

That said, the cosseting interiors and whisper-quiet powertrains at the ultra high-end have left us spoiled and, some might say, disconnected from the actual experience of driving. The GV80 certainly certainly doesn’t do that and, in some ways, provides a refreshing reminder that a car with a little bit of character and soul can be preferable to one that attempts near perfection.

And the fact that the GV80 starts at £57,000 compared with £146,000 for a Bentley Bentayga surely cancels out its shortcomings.

After all, far better to have a Hyundai that people mistake for a Bentley than a Bentley that people mistake for a Hyundai, don’t you think?

How to combine skiing and wine tasting in the Dolomites

When planning a food and wine tour to Italy, the first ideas that spring to mind might be a road trip through the Tuscan hills or feasting at a sun-soaked villa in Puglia. Few would imagine themselves hurtling down a red slope amid rugged snow-capped scenery.

And yet, unbeknownst to many, the Dolomites is arguably the gastronomic (and viticultural) capital of Italy.

South Tyrol, the local region, has 19 Michelin-starred restaurants (24 stars in total) – making it the most decorated province in Italy. In the small resort of Alta Badia alone, there are four Michelin stars –all attached to one restaurant, the St. Hubertus. Up till recently it had another two star-studded eateries. Not bad for a resort with a population half the size of the Isle of Skye’s.

‘The region’s climate also provides the best of both worlds in wine terms,’ says Charlie Young, co-founder of Vinoteca, a London-based wine company. ‘There’s plenty of sunshine and enclosed valleys providing the heat needed to ripen, and the cooling winds from the mountains extend the growing season allowing the grapes to burst with flavour and character.’

Although previously people didn’t really know the region for its food and wine, says Nicole Dorigo, of the Alta Badia tourist board, that is changing fast – thanks in particular to two events that have sprung up celebrating the gastronomy of South Tyrol.

The first is the annual ‘A taste for skiing’ festival, where Michelin-starred chefs take over the local üties – ‘mountain huts’ in the Ladin language – to serve up a signature dish. Prices are reasonable too, starting from around €15 a dish (suddenly the memories of paying €30 in Val Thorens for a sloppy pizza become all the more painful).

Some of the stand-out dishes this season include: whiskey-marinated venison with Jerusalem artichokes and dark chocolate, and a woodland mushroom pasta with mountain cheese, smoked ham and a gloopy red grape reduction.

The second event is the regularly occurring ‘Sommelier on the slopes’, where you ski from mountain hut to mountain hut with a guide and expert sommelier – tasting a different local wine at each stop. The experience costs €40 per person and includes six stop offs.

‘Many of the wines are not available outside of the Alta Badia region. So it’s an amazing opportunity to try them,’ says Simon Meeke of Powder Byrne, a ski tour operator who has been running trips to the area for more than a decade.

Young recommends trying South Tyrol’s premium Pinot Grigios and the local red grape Teroldego from Trentino, as well as the Kerner from Alto Adige. The combination of skiing with such decadent gourmandise is smart, too, as on a typical day on the slopes you can burn between 300 and 600 calories an hour.

It’s not just high-end food on offer either. The region’s traditional Ladin cuisine – known for its fried dumplings and hearty barley soups – is increasingly drawing visitors, says Dorigo.

Many locals have started opening up their masi (farmsteads) as b&bs, restaurants or cookery schools.

For oenophile, food-o-phile skiers, Ciasa Salares, just outside San Cassiano, is an ideal base. The hotel has its own cheese room (housing 65 different raw-milk cheeses from every corner of Italy’s Boot) and a chocolate room (with 120 varieties ranging from 30-100% cocoa). Oh three different restaurants – one of which used to hold a Michelin star before the chef moved on.

The 24,000 bottle wine cellar isn’t bad either – with the option to dine by candlelight within its cavernous vaults.

The bedrooms have Alpine wood panelling, charming carved beds and balconies with views over the surrounding UNESCO World Heritage listed landscape.

It’s ski-in-ski-out (or more like roll out after the generous breakfasts), with a lift just across the road. The pool, spa, sauna, Turkish bath and hot tub will wash away any post-piste aches and pains and detox the body after indulgent dining.

Prices for a seven-night stay at Ciasa Salares, based on two sharing on a half board basis and including private airport transfers, start from £3,373 per person (booked via Powder Byrne). Alta Badia Ski passes cost from €46 per day.

‘The skiing in the area is fantastically varied,’ says Meeke. ‘San Cassiano is great for intermediate skiers: there’s lovely rolling scenery and great restaurants. More advanced skiers like the fact that the resort is connected to a much wider ski area.’ The principal attraction is the sella ronda – one of the most famous ski carousels in the world. It links up more than 200 lifts and 500km of slopes to form a circular route which allows you to ski all around the mountain (if you’re fit you can do it in a day).

And whereas previously travelling to the Dolomites felt like an arduous trek compared with pootling over in the car to other food/wine destinations such as the Loire, it is about to get much easier. A new airline and airport are creating a super-fast gateway to the Dolomites, allowing you to get from London Gatwick to Bolzano, in the heart of the mountains, in just two hours 20 rather than flying two hours to Venice then driving another three hours from there.

Sky Alps, the new airline, is running twice weekly services on Wednesdays and Saturdays/Sundays from December to March (from £116 each way).

Mob hound Starmer outside parliament

An uneventful Monday was enlivened this evening by some rather unappealing scenes outside parliament. Walking back from a Ministry of Defence briefing, Sir Keir Starmer was surrounded by a group of foul-mouthed anti-lockdown protesters who yelled he was a ‘traitor,’ forcing the Labour leader to leave with a police escort. 

Starmer had to be bundled away into a police car after numerous insults were aggressively hurled at him. Several demonstrators claimed the former top lawyer was guilty of ‘protecting paedophiles’ while other shouted  ‘Jimmy Savile’ — a presumed reference to Boris Johnson’s comments last week about the reviled TV personality. 

Johnson claimed last Monday that Starmer, when he was director of public prosecutions, spent the majority of his time ‘prosecuting journalists and failing to prosecute Jimmy Savile, as far as I can make out.’ The comment sparked a furore on both sides of the House, with many claiming the Prime Minister had failed to adequately distinguish between Starmer’s personal responsibility (none) and his departmental responsibility as the head of the Crown Prosecution Service at the time the decision was taken not to prosecute Savile.

The fact that a number of the protestors this evening referenced the ‘Jim’ll Fix It’ host has already raised questions again about the Prime Minister’s rhetoric and whether it stoked the mob which swarmed Starmer. Already Labour MP Chris Bryant has accused Johnson of ‘inciting’ violence against Starmer amid much talk about the actions being a consequence of the PM’s words.

And it’s not just Labour MPs queuing up to attack Johnson. Former Tory chief whip Julian Smith has weighed in, writing on Twitter that: ‘What happened to Keir Starmer tonight outside parliament is appalling. It is really important for our democracy & for his security that the false Savile slurs made against him are withdrawn in full.’

Whatever happens, the incident is yet another indication of how hard it will be for the Johnson administration to try and draw a line under the shambles of the last few weeks.

Le Pen, Zemmour and the two French far rights

Just about two months ahead of the French elections, a first poll for Le Parisién suggests that Marine Le Pen and Eric Zemmour are at the same level: 14 per cent.

This is one out of many polls, most of which still show Le Pen ahead. But polls have been bad predictors in the past, and they can create their own momentum.

Both Le Pen and Zemmour held big rallies this weekend. We now see two different economic visions emerging: one social, one liberal. The only economic point that the two have in common is that they both want social services to be accessible only to the French, not to immigrants.

On everything else, the candidates are miles apart. Le Pen’s vision is aimed at the electorate of Jean-Luc Mélenchon. Zemmour’s appeals to conservative France. A far right, spit between social and liberal? This is about whether to target an alliance of the right or embrace protective policies from the left.

Marine Le Pen doubles down on where Zemmour showed no mercy, promising funds for handicapped and single parents. Zemmour revives Nicolas Sarkozy’s concept of merit-based work payment and anti-dependency. Public money is your money, Zemmour insists.

Both avoided directly addressing each other, perhaps a strategic choice in case one wants to back the other if one of them ends up in the second round. Instead, both turn against other contenders.

Le Pen focused on attacking Emmanuel Macron, in particular his vanity and cynicism. Zemmour, with his embrace of Sarkozy’s make-work-pay proposal, is clearly targeting the electorate of Valérie Pécresse.

Zemmour-Pécresse is the match to watch out for this month. He accuses Pécresse and Les Républicains of complacency when it comes to immigration. Zemmour also shows up where Pécresse is naturally weak, in the countryside.

He suggests a grant of €10,000 for births in rural areas. His discourse, liberal at the national level and protective towards the outside world, could well find supporters among the conservatives.

It is a bundle of economic ideas that Zemmour put together to create a wave. Will it succeed? Since the autumn, his themes flopped, notably on education. Will Zemmour be able to outstrip Les Républicains on Sarkozy’s make-work-pay theme? This battle will test what Pécresse is made of.

Zemmour’s team counts on Generation Z, its youth wing, to use social media to maximum effect. Le Monde analysed thousands of Twitter activities in the autumn and concluded that Zemmour content was pushed by robots, an illegal practice. Hashtags such as #femmesavecZemmour with photos of beautiful young women flooded Twitter.

So what we see may be a result of a campaign that was created out of thin air, yet it resonated with enough people to become real. Will there be legal consequences? And if so, will they matter? It’s hard to tell if Zemmour will get close to the second round. His journey is unlikely to end in April though, whatever happens, while Le Pen will be finished if she fails to qualify for the second round.

Cambridge’s Jesus College is guilty of double standards

An event took place in Cambridge last week that was rare enough to reach the national press: a public hearing by the Diocese of Ely Consistorial Court in Jesus College chapel. It was brought about by a group of alumni who were opposing a move by the Master and Fellows of the College to remove a commemorative plaque to one of their greatest benefactors, the 17^th century courtier and financier Tobias Rustat. His financial bequest was equivalent to over £4 million in present values, and his munificence is – or rather, was – celebrated in an annual College feast.

I attended much of the hearing, spread over three days. It was calm, exquisitely courteous, decorous in wigs and gowns, and occasionally enlivened by the sort of ponderous legal repartee that readers of Rumpole of the Bailey would have savoured. Both sides presented their arguments in detail, with care, and at considerable length. Some might have thought it much ado (and much expense) about nothing. But as the hearing proceeded the points at issue, which at first sight appear arcane, became increasingly clear and significant. Sometimes embarrassingly so.

Undeniably the College have a substantial case, which revolves round one simple point. Rustat was an investor in a slave trading company. For that reason, his memorial – a unique and artistically important three-and-a-half ton marble carving from the workshop of Grinling Gibbons – is now offensive to students, Fellows and not least the Master, Sonita Alleyne (the first black female head of a Cambridge college). They want it gone. They are supported by the Bishop of Ely himself, the Rt Revd Stephen Conway, and the Dean and Chaplain of the College. The case is now to be determined by the Deputy Chancellor of the diocese, sitting as judge.

Perhaps the College will get their way. But I do not think they emerge from the process with credit. So convinced were they of their moral probity and intellectual self-sufficiency that they were not really interested in anyone else’s opinion or expertise. Having made up their collective mind, they were not inclined to confuse it by facts. Alumni who wrote reasoned counter-arguments (including a distinguished black academic) or offered detailed information about the sources of Rustat’s fortune, were ignored or brushed off. Requests for information about the College’s own research into the subject were denied on a variety of pretexts.

Was Rustat truly a ‘slave trader’? Was his fortune derived from the trade? Did any of the money he gave to the College come from trading in human beings? That last possibility, said one witness, was ‘vanishingly small’. 

What about the rest of his long and respectable life? Was it all tarnished by his investments in the Royal African Company, and association with a trade that was then almost universal? Were the emotions expressed by some students whipped up by misinformation circulated by the College itself? Should students not be informed of the complexities of the issue, rather than being fed what one of them called ‘inflammatory language’?

Such considerations were swept aside by the College. Was the Master not concerned, she was asked, that students who had written to support the removal of the memorial had used identical phraseology, and that this phraseology was fallacious? It didn’t appear so. ‘I’m talking as a person of colour with lived experience’, Sonita Alleyne told the hearing. 

When Professor Lawrence Goldman, speaking as an opposing alumnus, mildly suggested she was not the only person with such lived experience (he is Jewish), she replied that this was not at all the same thing. A Whoopi Goldberg moment? Anyway, as the College’s barrister put it, any association with slavery, however slight, was ‘sufficient of itself’ to make a memorial ‘problematic’, if not ‘an abomination’. If this is accepted as a precedent, ecclesiastical lawyers may look forward to much profitable employment.

Behind the sometimes tedious legal pedantry lie several significant issues. One, as the Bishop of Ely put it with admirable directness, is ‘who owns our history?’ For him and Jesus College, the answer seems clear: those who can stake the loudest claim to victimhood – in this case, some Cambridge students and academics who to most people lead highly privileged lives. Thus is decided, in the words of the Bishop (who is chair of the Church of England’s National Board of Education), what is suitable for ‘celebration’ in our history. This in a nutshell is what our present culture wars are about. They who control the past control the future.

Another issue is what university education, including religious education, should involve. Should it provide reassurance, a safe space in which students are not expected to face uncomfortable views? Or should it confront them with moral and intellectual complexities, and encourage them to examine their own presuppositions? Cambridge students, said the Master, would not accept the latter, nor should they: the Chapel should be ‘an uncontested space’ which students ‘look at with the morality they have now.’ To this, Professor Goldman, an Oxford historian with many years of teaching students, responded that the College pleaded the priority of ‘pastoral care’, but that the real failing of pastoral care was not to educate.

Looming behind all this is the grubby question of double standards. As is now well known, Jesus College has a close relationship with the People’s Republic of China, from which it has received substantial funds. If Rustat’s money was ‘tainted’, is not this money tainted too? If 17^th century slavery was an abomination, what about 21^st century slavery in China? 

Dr Véronique Mottier, chair of the College’s legacy of slavery working party pleaded ignorance on this. ‘I’m not an expert,’ she said. As it happens, she is not an expert on 17^th century slavery either, being a social scientist specialising in theory, gender and sexuality – adequate, apparently, for judging Tobias Rustat, though not for judging Xi Jinping. 

How much money had the College received from China? ‘Ask the Master’, replied Dr Mottier. The barrister duly did, and the Master replied that the College had an ethics committee and followed University policy. This was not a reassuring answer. When asked whether she would denounce human rights abuses today with the same energy as those three centuries ago, she ventured that violations in China ‘should concern us’.

But all this, declared the College’s barrister impatiently, was ‘tilting at windmills’. The issue was a very narrow one: moving a commemorative plaque. Talk of cancel culture, tainted money and relations with China were a ‘complete irrelevance’. So there we have it. The College hopes to win its case by excluding wider ethical considerations. If I were a member of Jesus College, I would not be feeling very proud. ‘Hypocrisy is not a Christian virtue,’ observed the opposing barrister in his closing remarks. Many eminent authorities seem to disagree.

Why Queen Elizabeth’s accession matters

This week, the United Kingdom is celebrating 70 years of Queen Elizabeth II on the throne. The Spectator has come across this fascinating article, written by a young Margaret Thatcher, celebrating her accession. It was published in the Sunday Graphic on 17 February 1952. Thatcher just a few months older than the Queen. As Margaret Roberts, she had already been the youngest woman candidate in the last two general elections and had just married Denis Thatcher in December of 1951. At the time of writing, she was studying for the bar.

A young Queen, the loveliest ever to reign over us, now occupies the highest position in the land. If, as many earnestly pray, the accession of Elizabeth II can help to remove the last shreds of prejudice against women aspiring to the highest places, then a new era for women will indeed be at hand. We owe it to the Queen — and to the memory of her father who set her such a wonderful example throughout his life — to play our part with increasing enterprise in the years ahead.

I hope we shall see more and more women combining marriage and a career. Prejudice against this dual role is not confined to men. Far too often, I regret to say, it comes from our own sex. But the happy management of home and career can and is being achieved. 

The name of Mrs Norman Harper, wife of a Liverpool surgeon and mother of a three-year-old daughter, may mean little to many of you. But the name of Miss Rose Heilbron QC whose moving advocacy in recent trials has been so widely praised is known throughout the land. Unless Britain, in the new age to come, can produce more Rose Heilbrons — not only in the field of law, of course — we shall have betrayed the tremendous work of those who fought for equal rights against such misguided opposition.

The term ‘career woman’ has unfortunately come to imply in many minds a ‘hard’ woman, devoid of all feminine characteristics. But Rose Heilbron and many more have shown only too well that capability and charm can go together. Why have so few women in recent years risen to the top of the professions?

One reason may be that so many have cut short their careers when they marry. In my view this is a great pity. For it is possible to carry on working, taking a short leave of absence when families arrive, and returning later.In this way, gifts and talents that would otherwise be wasted are developed to the benefit of the community.

The idea that the family suffers is, I believe, quite mistaken. To carry on with a career stimulates the mind, provides a refreshing contact with the world outside — and so means that a wife can be a much better companion at home. Moreover, when her children themselves marry, she is not left with a gap in her life which so often seems impossible to fill.

Women can — and must — play a leading part in the creation of a glorious Elizabethan era. The opportunities are there in abundance — in almost every sphere of British endeavour.

We must emulate the example of such women as Barbara Ward, at 37 one of our leading economists and an expert on foreign affairs. Dr Janet Vaughan, mother of two children and principal of Somerville College; Mary Field who, as president of the 90,000-strong British Federation of Business and Professional Women, is one of our most successful ‘career women’; and Dame Caroline Haslett, Britain’s No. 1 woman engineer and founder more than a quarter of a century ago of the Electrical Association for Women.

That there is a place for women at the top of the tree has been proved beyond question by these and very many others. And if there are those who would say: ‘It couldn’t happen to me.’ They would do well to remember that Dame Caroline Haslett herself started as a 10s-a-week apprentice in a London boiler works more than 30 years ago.

I have heard it said that American women have far more influence over the nation’s affairs than do the women of Britain. Yet American women have only six out of 435 members in the House of Representatives. We have 17 out of 625 in the House of Commons. But it is still not good enough. If we are to have better representation in parliament, the women of England must fight harder for it.

Should a woman arise equal to the task, I say let her have an equal chance with the men for the leading cabinet posts. Why not a woman chancellor — or foreign secretary? Why not? And if they made mistakes they would not be the first to do so in those jobs!

To sum up, I should like to see the woman with a career holding down her responsibility with easy assurance during the Elizabethan age. I should like to see married women carrying on with their jobs. If so inclined after their children are born. I should like to see every woman trying to overcome ignorance of day-to-day affairs; and every woman taking an acting part in local life.

And, above all, I should like to see more and more women at Westminster, and in the highest places too. It would certainly be a good thing for the women of Britain, and I’m sure it would be a good thing for the men too.

Boris’s new No. 10 team can’t save him from himself

Boris Johnson’s new No. 10 hires have given him a chance to catch his breath, very briefly, from the turmoil of the past week. But it’s worth noting that the plot has always thickened as a result of something the Prime Minister himself has done, rather than the mistakes or otherwise of his team. 

Guto Harri, Andrew Griffith and Steve Barclay now have the unenviable and – many Conservative MPs think – impossible task of encouraging the party to feel more forgiving towards the Prime Minister whenever he next makes a mistake. They cannot, though, stop him from making mistakes, and this is why he is still in a great deal of trouble.

Munira Mirza’s departure showed that even people who have stuck by Johnson for many years are struggling to keep patience with him now. When I interviewed Rachel Wolf, who co-wrote the majority-winning 2019 manifesto with Mirza, on Times Radio yesterday, she underlined what many formerly pro-Boris MPs are also feeling. She said: 

‘There are two different questions there, which is – Is it possible a priori to turn this around and then is it possible for Boris Johnson to turn it around and I think the former maybe, I think the challenge with the latter is that it would require him to be able to set an unbelievably clear direction across the whole of government, stick to it, prioritise it, have a Treasury that is behind it, and keep focusing on delivery day-to-day. Because I am still of the view that this does come down to what you do as well as how you talk and what you sound like and how you say things, and it’s not something he’s ever done…’

She also called Johnson’s Savile comments ‘stupid’ and said she thought he ‘should apologise’. Those comments upset a number of MPs, not just for their content but because they confirmed what critics of Johnson have long been pointing to: that he has a pattern of behaviour he cannot change, even when he’s fighting for his political life. 

The reaction to both of those things was what drove more MPs either to send their letters calling for a vote of no confidence, or to decide that while they weren’t ready to send them yet, the conclusion of the Metropolitan Police investigation into lockdown parties in Downing Street is now too far off for them to wait. The next big mistake might be sooner, and finally decisive.

That’s why Harri’s interview in which he reveals Boris Johnson sang Gloria Gaynor to him when he asked him, having accepted the job with him, whether he would survive, is likely to rile up the many unhappy MPs again. It may have been a mistake for Harri to reveal it, but the greater mistake is the Prime Minister’s own attitude to his predicament and the wider political context of a delayed plan to tackle the NHS backlog and a cost of living crisis that is about to get very serious and painful indeed. 

His main audience is Tory MPs, not the voters most affected by those two things. But backbenchers do want to know that he is treating the situation with some gravity, rather than joking, as I hear he does when among those he believes are on his side, about ‘how f***ed are we today?’

SNP councillor: ‘Prosecute Jimmy Carr’s audience’

Oh dear. It seems that the most illiberal party in Great Britain is at it again. In the nationwide haste to condemn the comedian Jimmy Carr for his remarks about the Gypsy, Roma and Traveller community in his Netflix special, an elected councillor from (who else?) the SNP has called for prosecutions. Not just for Carr himself, mind you; Julie McKenzie, who sits on Argyll and Bute council, wants the many members of Carr’s audience prosecuted too for ‘applauding’ the remarks. 

The show, called His Dark Material, was released on Christmas Day but received widespread attention last Friday after a clip was posted and shared online. Carr said: 

When people talk about the Holocaust, they talk about the tragedy and horror of 6 million Jewish lives being lost to the Nazi war machine. But they never mention the thousands of Gypsies that were killed by the Nazis. No one ever wants to talk about that, because no one ever wants to talk about the positives.

Such comments have, unsurprisingly, been roundly condemned across the spectrum, with anti-hate groups including the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, the Auschwitz Memorial and Hope Not Hate all weighing in. As distasteful as they were, is a self-proclaimed ‘edgy’ comedian delivering a set enough to warrant prosecution under hate crime laws? 

Steerpike will leave that to others to decide. Certainly though, there seems to be little clamour to prosecute the audience of those who heard Carr’s comments – some of whom will no doubt have clapped or laughed out of pained awkwardness. McKenzie though argues:

Jimmy Carr and his Netflix hate speech and his applauding audience should be prosecuted.

But what else can you expect from the representatives of the same party which introduced the Hate Crime Act and criminalised the questionably-named act of ‘stirring up’ hatred? Still, if we’re going to start prosecuting comedians for offensive things said on stage, let’s hope the SNP start with their foul-mouthed supporter Jane Godley.

Carrie Johnson and the problem with anonymous sources

The publication of extracts from a biography of Carrie Johnson this weekend is another stark reminder that we need a serious look at the over-use of anonymous sources in journalism. I first began to worry about the problem when extracts from another Lord Ashcroft biography – this time of David Cameron – were published. When I was told it included the claim that he once performed a sex act on a pig, I was sure it was a complete fabrication, not least because it was based on a single, anonymous source with nothing else to substantiate it. Seeing the prime minister’s sickened reaction confirmed this view.

The claim was deeply cynical, because those behind it knew that even though there was no proof, it would be toxic anyway. Any attempt to say the story wasn’t true would result in ‘PM denies pig sex claim’ headlines, leading some to believe there is no smoke without fire. In the end, all I could advise was that we say nothing, starving the story of any extra energy. The anonymous source did not have to account for their claims.

Used well, anonymous sources are vital to good journalism. They allow the publication of important stories that would damage or even endanger the source if their identity was revealed. But in political journalism they have become almost ubiquitous. Reading extracts from Lord Ashcroft’s biography of Carrie Johnson, I was struck by how few of the sources were on the record. Not only are many of the people not identified, their allegations appear to be based on little more than a hunch.

There are many examples, but let’s take the claim that Carrie Johnson took Boris’s phone and impersonated him to get her way. It’s a very serious allegation completely denied by Carrie. It’s attributed to a ‘campaign insider’, who could be anyone, saying:

”We’d spot the different ways (texts) were written, because the style would change…We realised Boris couldn’t have written the message because, the next day, Boris would contradict this.’

In short, the anonymous source is merely guessing about what had gone on, with no solid evidence to back up their assertion. As to the claim Boris contradicted the texts, love him or loathe him, no one would say he is known for his consistency. We don’t know if he was ever challenged by the ‘campaign insider’ about if his wife had commandeered his phone. I doubt it. 

I have no idea if the story is true or not – but readers deserve higher standards of proof than this for it to be simply thrown into the public domain. Worse, the anonymous quotes were then used as the foundation of further claims to suggest Carrie is a Lady Macbeth style figure, whose scheming has stopped Boris Johnson from being a truly great Prime Minister. Others have already pointed out how ridiculous it is to defend the most powerful person in the country by saying they are a poor soul, controlled by their spouse; but more needs to be said about how these stories are sourced and the subsequent commentary is framed.

I once spoke to a leading political editor about the use of anonymous sources being out of control when I was at No. 10. They told me:

‘We just listen to what people say, write it down and put it in the paper.’

This struck me as being deeply cynical, as if the journalist was an innocent bystander, with no responsibility for ensuring comments were put in their proper context.

Some long pieces contain nothing but anonymous sources, often with no sense of the identity, seniority, or agenda of the person behind them. Those whose real purpose is often character assassination and score-settling are allowed to wear the cloak of anonymity, never being properly questioned about their motives or the truth of what they say.

In many media organisations in the United States anonymous quotes are more unusual, with journalists expected to justify to a senior editorial figure if they use one. It’s true American print journalism can be flavourless and po-faced, but we could do with applying more of that standard in this country when serious allegations are being made.

The reason is clear: public figures deserve to be held accountable; but they also deserve to be treated fairly. Allowing allegations to be made against them, with little in the way of proof makes them ingredients for the giant sausage machine of modern media, sometimes left surveying the wreckage of their lives or career for years after everyone else has moved on.

To put it another way, Carrie Johnson – and many others – are human beings who deserve more than to face unsubstantiated accusations made by those too cowardly to identify themselves. A proper debate about the over-use and credence given to anonymous sources in journalism is long overdue.