Has the true crime genre reached its peak?

Veteran comic Steve Martin has returned to our screens, this time taking aim at that most prolific of podcast genres: the true crime documentary. In his new Hulu show, Only Murders in the Building, the former star of The Jerk plays a washed-up TV actor and true crime obsessive who, along with two other misfits, sets out to turn a neighbourhood homicide into the new great American podcast a la Serial.

The first episodes of Martin’s sitcom are funny enough, managing to skew the pretentiousness and ego of the wannabe sleuths. But they do beg one question: which is why it’s taken this long for someone to fire a shot at true crime podcasts – a genre which, for all its role in turning podcasting into a ten-billion-dollar industry, has been more than ripe for a takedown for several years now.

Because, for all their success, the truth about most true crime podcasts is quite simple: they’re pretty rubbish. Predictable, drawn-out, exploitative, brain-numbingly repetitive and – despite being showered with hundreds of millions in production cash – poorly made to boot. Yet they’re still popping up at a rate of knots, and drawing in tens of millions of listeners as they go. Why?

True crime podcasts tend to fall into two broad categories. The first – of the kind sent up by Only Murders in the Building – are perhaps the most irritating: the immersive documentary podcasts. They’re the ones where a host records themselves trying to get to the bottom of some mystery or other, giving you a running commentary of every turn and twist in the case.

Listen to five minutes of these kinds of detective podcasts and you’ll soon get a good idea of how their creators see themselves: as fearless and dogged investigators determined to crack even the trickiest of cases. Is this messianic egotism handy when it comes to solving mysteries? Maybe (unless of course a generation of police dramas have lied to us). But one thing’s for sure: it makes for very irritating radio.

For a start, detective podcasters routinely break that most basic of journalistic rules: they put themselves at the centre of the story. The documentaries end up becoming less about the crime itself, and more about the process of making a podcast. Whole sub-plots develop in which the host tries desperately to track down a potential lead only for the whole thing to turn into a wild goose chase. Yet it all ends up filling an episode anyway.

I have another gripe with these mystery podcasts, which is just how few of them actually end up solving the very case they’re discussing – something which, in a fairer world, should probably be flagged up in advance. Time and again, they use a big, tantalising premise to reel us in, before performing a shameless bait and switch.

Was a Hollywood actress actually murdered by her husband? Did the CIA write the song Wind of Change as an anti-Soviet psy-op? Was Woody Harrelson’s dad hired by the government as a contract killer? All three were questions posed by recent hit podcasts – and all three went unanswered. (Incidentally, for a podcast that actually does manage to solve the mystery, try Neil Strauss’s To Live and Die in LA).

The second type of true crime podcast is even worse. They’re the ones which take a historic murder, look it up on Wikipedia, and then milk it for as much as they can. Like much of the podcasting world, these magazine-style serials aren’t exactly a new idea (American networks have been pumping out cheap ‘reconstruction’ shows for decades now) but that hasn’t stopped them from racing up the podcast charts.

Given the commercial incentives to spread out these podcasts for as long as possible, the serials are usually full of deliberate padding. One favourite method is to hire a writer to turn the source material into snippets of faux-literary radio drama, which can fill more time.

Take this random excerpt from the hit podcast, The Dating Game Killer, which describes how the eventual murderer follows his young victim across town: ‘He spots her through the wind-shield from half a block away. Seven, maybe eight. She’s carrying books, no doubt on her way to school. With the slow-moving morning traffic, it’s easy to keep pace with her. As he angles closer to the sidewalk, he can see her lips moving in an improvised little tune.’

Are we really supposed to believe this kind of needless verbiage serves any purpose beyond generating more advertising revenue for the production company? Or that it wouldn’t end up being slashed to the bone by a competent editor if it was written for any other medium other than true crime podcasts? And yet we lap it up regardless.

Perhaps we should be grateful, then, that one of America’s great comics has finally arrived to take the world of true crime down a peg or two. Fingers crossed he doesn’t hold back while he’s at it.

Curry can be guilt-free (if you know how to make it)

Two of the misconceptions surrounding curry that it consistently struggles to shrug off are one, that it is unhealthy, and two, that it is difficult to make at home. I’ve always found both perplexing.

Turks and Persians must be similarly bemused given the reputation of their archetypal food, the kebab. Yes the late night version, carved from a rotating trunk of greasy lamb with a mini chainsaw and then covered in garlic mayo, is a calorific car crash. But kebab as it was meant to be – meat simply grilled over charcoal and served with rice and salad – is perfectly healthy every day food. And yes a curry house korma is fattening, even before you add in the three poppadoms and pints. But curry made at home can be one of the healthiest of meals: heavy on vegetables, and usually with a tomato-based as opposed to cream-based sauce.

As for being tricky to make, this reputation owes to the long lists of ingredients and obscure sounding spices that can make for daunting reading for the home cook. But, once you have stocked up on the basic larder essentials, curry really is one of the quickest and easiest things to make. An endless repertoire is at your fingertips by following the same basic process and using the same half a dozen spices. All Indian households will have a stainless steel ‘dabba’ (container) with little metal bowls inside containing the most frequently used spices. Tearful mothers will wave off their kids at the start of uni with a dabba packed in their suitcase. So get your own, – and make a habit of buying your garlic and ginger by the bowlful rather than as cellophane wrapped specimens in the supermarket.

Here is a typical recipe for a Gujarati-style curry to get you started. It was a favourite at my pop-up restaurant in Pimlico. Unlike most curries which get better the longer you leave them to simmer away, this one is best cooked only for fifteen minutes or so as it should be fresh-tasting and full of the vibrant taste of slightly raw ginger and coriander. It is both extremely economical and fully vegan, though you can follow the same process using chicken or fish, amending the cooking time as appropriate.

Serves 2

What you need

1.5 tablespoons of light olive oil, or sunflower oil

1 teaspoon cumin seeds

1 teaspoon mustard seeds

2 dried red chillies, whole

4 cloves garlic, finely chopped

Thumb (about 2 inches) of fresh ginger, finely chopped

Half a bottle of good quality passata, around 350g

1 x 400g tin of normal chickpeas

1 x 400g tin of dark brown chickpeas

Half a bag of spinach (130g)

½ teaspoon each of salt, red chilli, turmeric, cumin and coriander powders

A small mug of basmati rice (about 125g)

¾ teaspoon salt

1 tablespoon of butter, or olive oil

3 bay leaves

Two big handfuls of finely chopped coriander (stalks and leaves kept separate)

What to do

1. In a saucepan warm the oil over a medium heat for a few seconds. Add the cumin seeds, mustard seeds and dried red chillies, and fry for a minute until the seeds start to sizzle and pop, then add the finely chopped garlic and ginger (you may find it easiest to whizz them up together in a little food processor – just ensure you end up with small pieces as opposed to a paste). Fry for a couple of minutes.
2. Add in the finely chopped coriander stalks. Soften for another couple of minutes, stirring regularly so nothing burns.
3. Add the passata (it’s important to use good quality stuff – something like Cirio).
4. Add the powdered spices. Let the sauce base simmer away gently on a low heat for 5 minutes to cook out any raw favour in the spice, stirring regularly.
5. Add the chickpeas, including all the water they’re in. I use half normal white chickpeas and half brown chickpeas which are smaller and nuttier, to give variation in both texture and taste. Add ¾ of a tin of fresh water too (300 ml).
6. Meanwhile make your rice. Take a mug of rice and wash off the excess starch (the easiest way to do this is to put the rice in your saucepan, and give it a little massage with your fingers under running water before draining.) Add two mugs of boiling water (i.e. one part rice to two parts water). Add a teaspoon of salt, the butter (or olive oil if you want to keep the whole dish vegan) and the bay leaves, scrunched up to release their flavour. Put on a lid and cook on a very low heat for 10-11 minutes until fluffy.
7. When the rice is 2 minutes from being done, add the spinach to the curry and stir. Check the seasoning – you may need a touch more salt depending on how salty the chickpea water is.
8. When the spinach is just wilted but still vibrant green, throw in the chopped coriander leaves (keeping back a little for garnishing) and take off the heat. Serve in individual bowls, with the fluffy rice underneath and the curry on top, finished with a sprinkling of coriander.

Sturgeon is indulging her conspiratorial supporters

Nicola Sturgeon’s speech to the SNP’s conference earlier this afternoon was mostly standard fare (Covid, climate, coalition with the Greens, Universal Credit) but towards the end, a section on Brexit and independence stood out. She told the faithful:

Westminster will use all that damage that they have inflicted as an argument for yet more Westminster control.By making us poorer, they’ll say we can’t afford to be independent. By cutting our trade with the EU, they’ll say we are too dependent on the rest of the UK. By causing our working population to fall, they’ll say the country is ageing too fast.They want us to believe we are powerless in the face of the disastrous decisions they have taken for us and the damage those decisions are doing. They want us to look inwards not outwards.And the reason? They know — and are terrified by the prospect — that when we look outwards we see all around us the evidence right there in front of our eyes. The evidence that independence works.

These weren’t the ravings of a letter writer to the National. This was the First Minister of Scotland and she sounded like a cross between McGlashan and Alex Jones.

Now, Sturgeon is not explicitly charging that the UK government is intentionally making Scotland poorer in order to undermine any economic rationale for independence, but she is serving up incendiary language for an audience — the membership and supporter base of the SNP — that she knows contains more than its fair share of people who do believe these sorts of things. She is flirting with the fringes of her own party, right down to the liberal use of ‘they’, the ubiquitous bogeyman of political paranoids.

Sturgeon isn’t paranoid, just pandering. The nationalist leader continues to string along her grassroots, many of whom joined the party in the wake of the no campaign’s victory in the 2014 referendum. Ever since, Sturgeon has been assuring them another plebiscite lies over the next hill if only they’ll be patient a little longer. She has managed to keep up the act for seven years now and, honestly, fair play to her. It’s not easy to fool most of the people all of the time and it would be churlish not to acknowledge feats of misdirection that would stump David Copperfield. Even so, this latest effort was hackneyed and obvious and just a little desperate.

Still, at least now we can finally bid farewell to all those opinion pieces in Scotland’s left-leaning press and among the distance-learning Sturgeonistas of the London commentariat. They can hardly keep up the pretence that Sturgeon is a great progressive and Scottish nationalism different from bad (i.e. English) nationalism when Sturgeon’s argument for independence has been reduced to ‘them over yonder are keeping you down’.

The truth about Extinction Rebellion’s ‘climate warfare’

What have environmentalists got against commuters? Not for the first time a group of bedraggled climate nuts have taken their argument for ‘radical’ action on global warming not to Downing Street or to Parliament Square, but to ordinary people just trying to go about their business.

Junctions have been blocked along the M25 near Kings Langley, Heathrow, Swanley, Godstone and Lakeside. This is the work of Insulate Britain, a single-issue Extinction Rebellion offshoot demanding action on home insulation. So far 42 have been arrested.

The protesters tweeted that they were ‘disrupting the M25’ to ‘demand the government insulate Britain’. And yet so far their primary achievement has been to infuriate people trying to get to work and potentially blocking emergency vehicles. Some drivers tried to drag protesters away as tempers flared.

One of the protesters this morning held up a placard bearing the words ‘Sorry To Stop You’. But they’re not, are they? Otherwise they wouldn’t be doing all this again. Indeed, obstructing ordinary people trying to get to work or do their jobs now appears to be an indispensable part of the eco-protester playbook.

Remember when Extinction Rebellion glued themselves to the DLR? Remember the Battle of Canning Town, where two XR types were ripped down from the top of a Jubilee Line train by enraged commuters? Or the occupation of Smithfield Market? These are actions targeted at workers rather than the powerful.

Insulate Britain, which wants all homes ‘decarbonised’ by 2030, says today is ‘just the start’ of its campaign. It says it is blocking the M25 to send a message to Boris Johnson and the government. One protester told LBC that they wouldn’t move until Boris gave them a pledge ‘that we can trust and is meaningful’.

During XR’s most recent amdram revolt across London, journalists would often ask protesters some version of the same question: aren’t these tactics going to alienate people, aren’t you going to lose the argument with the public? What is now crystal clear is that groups like this really couldn’t give a monkeys.

And why would they? The green policies these middle class deodorant-dodgers want to usher in would make working people’s lives harder and more expensive, while leaving their own businesses entirely untouched. How can you convince ordinary people of the wisdom of making their lives worse?

Housing insulation isn’t the half of it. Extinction Rebellion wants net zero carbon emissions by 2025, an even crazier deadline than the government’s own one of 2050. Given we still lack viable, cheap alternatives to fossil fuels, the costs of such policies will be enormous and paid disproportionately by the working class.

What we have here is a section of the upper middle classes trying to shame the political classes into ushering in eco-austerity faster than the current timetable. These groups aren’t trying to convince ordinary people – ordinary people are just collateral damage in their pressure campaign against an already pretty green government.

Ruining someone’s journey to work is the least of these protesters’ worries. Theirs is a class war, masquerading as a climate war. The sooner we acknowledge that, the better.

Hidalgo has trashed Paris. Can she do the same for France?

Anne Hidalgo, the socialist mayor of Paris, whose reign has submerged the city in debt and rubbish, is the latest no-hoper to declare her candidacy for the 2022 presidential election. She’s in fifth place in the polls, although these are rarely credible at this stage and currently ignore several candidates for reasons that seem obscure.

Hidalgo, the daughter of Spanish immigrants, is to run on a platform of social justice. She says she is doing so with humility, although this is not a characteristic that has so far been evident in her personality. Ruthless ambition comes closer. 

It is rather obvious that Hidalgo has zero chance of finishing in the top two of the first round of voting next April. There are no conceivable circumstances in which she will become president of France. That hasn’t inhibited the usual left-wing soup-servers from bigging her up, however.

She’s ranked behind the ultra-leftist Jean-Luc Mélenchon. Her national popularity of 8 per cent hasn’t moved in two years. The left vote combined is still behind that of either President Emmanuel Macron or his main rival, Rassemblement National’s Marine Le Pen. Those two are level pegging at between 23 to 25 per cent each.

Le Pen confirmed her own candidacy on Sunday, to the despair of even her own rightist supporters who know she can never win. She was crushed by Macron five years ago and against François Hollande five years before that. President Macron is still playing coy, claiming improbably that he is entirely focused on Covid, economic revival and European renaissance, although there’s no question he’s running. There are many reasons to run for president in France, other than any expectation of becoming president: vanity; desire to raise political profile; auditioning for another job.

It’s easy to see vanity as Hidalgo’s motive. But raising her political profile from Paris to the national stage might not be wise. Her latest gimmick, imposing a blanket 30 kph (roughly 20 mph) speed limit within Paris, might endear her to the car-hating greens with whom she’s in municipal coalition, but it’s made her loathed by suburbanites who need to bring vehicles into the city, to be confronted by traffic that’s worse than ever. And it’s hard to see her left-green politics gaining much traction in la France profonde.

Someone who is, more surprisingly, not running for president is former prime minister Édouard Philippe. He said over the weekend that he will support Macron unconditionally in 2022, despite having been sacked by him last year for being more popular than his boss. Perhaps he wants his old job back when Macron gets bored of Jean Castex, the incumbent premier who has risen and will doubtless fall with nary a trace.

Otherwise, there is not much detectable momentum in the presidential peloton. Michel Barnier, who fascinates British journalists because of his role as the EU’s Brexit negotiator, has attracted some attention by promising a referendum on stopping immigration for five years and restricting the influence of the EU legal system. One can only admire the naked opportunism. I assume he’s angling to be prime minister as a reward for weakening Marine Le Pen.

The centre-right Républicains are atomised and their leading light, Xavier Bertrand, has officially walked out and stated he won’t even participate in the party’s primary. It’s rather difficult to know what any of them is offering.

An exception to the undistinguished field of secondary competitors might be the assumed but undeclared candidacy of the silver-tongued polemicist Éric Zemmour, ignored by the mainstream polls and loathed by the bien pensants for his nationalism. He has just been ordered to stop presenting his popular nightly television show on CNews by the media regulator on the basis that it offers him exposure unavailable to competitors.

Zemmour has been attacked by both Le Pen and Macron’s own spokesman, suggesting that he is taken more seriously than admitted. He’s starting a national media tour to promote his new book, already the number one best seller on French Amazon.

This is likely to attract a lot of attention. He has a talent for tapping into the ennui of French voters, even if he’s still to present a rounded political vision. Perhaps his book might remedy that.

My focus group at the Café de la Paix in my bellwether village can be said to be completely indifferent to Hidalgo, Barnier, Bertrand and indeed to almost all of the candidates, although with a trace of curiosity about Zemmour. The boar are abundant this year and, roasted with garlic, currently look more appetising than anything on offer from the politicians.

Donald Tusk is playing a dangerous game in dismissing Polexit

‘The British showed that the dictatorship of the Brussels bureaucracy did not suit them and turned around and left.’ That’s the verdict of the parliamentary head of Poland’s ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party, Ryszard Terlecki, who has once again brought discussions of ‘Polexit’ to the foreground of Polish politics. Donald Tusk, Poland’s new leader of the opposition, has responded by suggesting this is party politics at work. But he is making a dangerous mistake to dismiss the prospect of a Polish exit from the EU.

‘If things go the way they are likely to go, we will have to search for drastic solutions,’ said Terlecki on Friday, citing Brexit as an example of a country breaking the mould of EU authority. PiS MP Marek Suski meanwhile compared the EU to twentieth-century totalitarian forces: ‘Poland fought against one occupier during world war two, it then fought against the Soviet occupier, and we are now going to fight the Brussels occupier,’ he said.

This fiery talk was sparked by a request from the European Commission to the European Court of Justice that daily fines be levied against Poland as long as the country fails to follow the ECJ’s orders on legal reforms – in particular, the dismantling of a disciplinary chamber for judges which Brussels says is incompatible with EU law. The bloc’s justice commissioner Didier Reynders has meanwhile made it clear that Poland will not receive money due to it from the EU’s pandemic recovery budget until ‘real change’ is made to the disciplinary chamber.

The Commission’s hard-line stance has come as a shock in Warsaw. The activities of the disciplinary chamber were partially frozen weeks ago; in August, PiS party leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski said the chamber would be disbanded so that ‘the source of the dispute will disappear’.

This wasn’t enough for Brussels. Now, the EU’s refusal to compromise is leading to increasingly hostile rhetoric from more eurosceptic members of Poland’s ruling United Right coalition. Hawkish justice minister Zbigniew Ziobro – the ruler of the United Poland party propping up the coalition – said the Commission is entering a ‘legal hybrid war‘ with Poland.

This confrontational stance is being encouraged by fellow EU rebel nation Hungary. ‘Brussels attacked Poland,’ exclaimed Hungarian justice minister Judit Varga on Facebook, adding that ‘national justice should not become a victim of Brussels’ empire building.’

Such open hostility towards the European Commission from ministers in EU nations – making explicit use of the language of war and empire – marks a remarkable deterioration in the bloc’s internal cohesion. Donald Tusk isn’t exaggerating when he warns that ‘Poland may cease to be a member of the European Union faster than anyone thinks.’

For Tusk, the spectre of ‘Polexit’ is being raised as a result of ‘unnecessary’ government brinksmanship which lacks ideological conviction. ‘Disasters such as Brexit, or the possible exit of Poland from the EU, happen not because someone planned them, but because nobody knew how to plan an alternative,’ he said.

When Tusk returned to Polish politics it looked unlikely that ‘Polexit’ would become a major topic of debate. Polls continue to show a large majority of Poles supporting EU membership: results published earlier this month by the Slovak Institute for Public Affairs showed that Poles are far and away the most pro-EU people of any Visegrád Four nation, with over two-thirds seeing EU membership as a positive for the country.

Such public support for the EU emboldens figures like Tusk to dismiss the government’s increasingly eurosceptic stance out of hand. ‘Sometimes I have the impression that Poland is ruled by such unbearable brats, who can afford to pronounce every possible political heresy,’ he raged in a TV interview.

But this approach could backfire. By suggesting the Polish government is driven not by ideology, but simply by a wish to watch the world burn, Tusk is trying to invalidate complaints about sovereignty. Brexit shows the danger of doing so.

Portraying the dispute in these terms may be an easy way for Tusk’s struggling Civic Coalition party to score political points against PiS without entering into serious debate over the thornier issues of EU membership. But this ignores the reality that Poland’s issues with Brussels run deep. They touch on a range of delicate questions from the appropriate response of a strongly Catholic country to the LGBT+ culture celebrated in the EU’s western nations, to the implications of EU climate dictates on a country heavily dependent on fossil fuel energy.

Whether Tusk likes it or not, confrontational statements from the government show that a real debate over Poland’s EU membership is slowly emerging. The echoes of Brexit are unmistakeable: a ruling political party shifting towards the ideological standpoint of a small but influential eurosceptic group; an EU intransigent on matters of sovereignty; and a tone of debate becoming more divisive, dismissive, and even downright ugly.

The Polish opposition may feel confident portraying the government’s stance on the current legal dispute as irresponsible given the high regard which many Poles still feel for EU membership. But with discussions of ‘Polexit’ now entering the political mainstream, the time may be coming for a more serious examination of the nation’s commitment to Brussels.

Kerry-Anne Mendoza leaves the Canary

In the heady days of 2017, all seemed rosy for left-wing news website like the Canary. Founded in 2015 to ‘diversify the media’ the hyper-partisan outfit rode the wave of Corbynism to its height just after Theresa May’s snap election. Its editor Kerry-Anne Mendoza appeared on Newsnight; revenues hit £250,000 while staff boasted of 3.5 million unique users.

Fast forward just four years and a very different picture emerges. After Corbyn’s electoral humiliation and the election of Keir Starmer in response, the Canary has lost its privileged perch among sections of the Labour party. By June 2020, with revenues falling, the site tumbled out of the top 1,000 online websites with just over 600,000 page views amid allegations about antisemitism, fake news and conspiracy theories.

Now even Kerry-Ann Mendoza has chosen to leave the building. In a little-noticed personal video statement released earlier this summer she said she will be leaving the Canary ‘in order to continue her mental health recovery.’ She has stepped down as Editor-at-large and director, handing her shares in parent company Canary Media Limited over to colleagues and resigning as a director on Companies House at the end of July.

With Labour conference less than a fortnight away, Steerpike wonders what, if any, impact once-influential sites like the Canary, Skwawkbox or Novara will have on party proceedings in the future.

Why the NHS needs more bureaucrats

If the NHS’s cheerleaders and detractors can agree on one thing, it’s this: we need fewer backroom staff. If the health service’s doctors, nurses and cleaners are heroes, the pen-pushers, middle-men and legions of drab men in drab suits are sucking the vital lifeblood out of the NHS, while droning on about synergies in management. All this while claiming a salary that could have paid for another two nurses.

This debate has re-emerged after it was reported that almost half of all NHS staff are managers, administrators or unqualified assistants. Helen Whately, the care minister, spoke for many when she said she feels ‘strongly that the money we put into the NHS needs to go to frontline’. But she’s wrong: if there is one thing that would help make the NHS better, it’s more bureaucrats.

In fact, the health service needs far more back office staff. So do our police forces, and other vital public services. If you suggested to a supermarket that in order to improve service it let go of its logistics specialists in favour of more floor workers, you would get exceptionally short shrift once the laughing stopped. And you certainly wouldn’t blame the empty shelves on the staff in the store.

With policing and healthcare, there’s no good visual shorthand showing you that something’s gone wrong up the chain of production. All there is to see is a crowded waiting room, and clinical staff rushed off their feet. Assuming the issue is a shortage of frontline workers is a natural logical step. In reality, the problem is more often one of management.

The point that ‘fund the frontline’ misses is that the number of frontline staff hired isn’t the number of frontline workers available; if your police officers or doctors are spending four or five hours of their day managing the burden of administration, they aren’t available to respond to a burglary or treat a new patient.

A lack of administrative staff means that police officers who should be out on the beat find themselves putting together files for the CPS, or entering reports onto parallel computer systems that still aren’t integrated. Meanwhile, doctors find themselves spending hours of their day phoning to chase results, copying drug charts word for word, printing blood stickers, or handling the administration involved with following up on discharged patients.

The burden of this lack of administrative firepower doesn’t just end up with doctors, but with patients who end up having to coordinate their own treatments; making sure doctors have the results of their scans, booking follow-ups, and generally taking on responsibilities that by definition they may not be capable of meeting.

The fix for this isn’t reducing paperwork. We need this administrative work to be done so that we can track outcomes, make sure people are given the right drugs, get the right treatment, get moved from department from department, or are given a fair trial. We just don’t need it to be done by frontline workers.

The confusion arises because people equate frontline staff with services, when frontline workers are just one part of the production process for these things. Being treated in a hospital isn’t just a matter of getting to see a doctor or a nurse, it’s a function of everything that goes into that; your medical records being up to date and available, different departments handling your treatment and the results of your scans over to one-another, bloodwork being correctly labelled, medicine being ordered and administered, and the machine generally ticking along as best it can.

When frontline availability is low because frontline staff spend their time on administration, hiring more doctors so that they can do their own paperwork is clearly an insane use of resources when you could hire specialist administrators at vastly lower cost. Doing so would free up time across the organisation, improve working conditions, and often fix gaps in management that arise when people are left to improvise for themselves.

But an obsessive focus on frontline services and staff ratios makes it hard for politicians to put in place the support staff doctors and police officers actually need to do their jobs. Pointing out that non-frontline staff effectively work for frontline staff – taking busy work and drudgery off their hands to allow them to focus on patients – seems to fall on deaf ears.

When the problem is a lack of administrative support, hiring more doctors or police officers won’t fix it. In fact, it might make it worse. If an organisation builds frontline capacity without the right support in place, things start to slip through the cracks. You wouldn’t open a supermarket without making sure supply chain capacity was in place; why would you hire more doctors without making sure they had the support they need to do their work?

How the Tories can redeem themselves in the eyes of the self-employed

Private members’ bills don’t normally make for exciting reading. They give MPs and peers a chance to let off steam if they have a bee in their bonnet, and more importantly to lay down fairly cheap political markers. Most sink without trace, since the government through its control of the Commons legislative timetable has an effective veto. But some are worth a second look. One such is Lord Hendy’s Status of Workers Bill, which got its second reading in the Lords last Friday.

Currently, businesses love the idea of designating as much of their payroll as possible as self-employed independent contractors rather than employees. And not surprisingly: it saves them the problems of PAYE, providing such things as sick and holiday pay, following employment laws and looking after such people as employees expect. Workers might of course see things differently. But that’s the gig economy for you: now, do you want the job or not?

Earlier this year the Supreme Court made life a tad more difficult for such employers when it told Uber that if the nitty-gritty of its drivers’ obligations smacked of employment, then the relation between them and Uber could not be morphed into self-employment by the flick of a well-paid lawyer’s pen. But the reverse was only partial: by judicious draftsmanship companies can still introduce just enough flexibility to push the relationship over the line away from employment.

That is what Lord Hendy’s bill would stop. Under it, essentially anyone in regular work who was not obviously working on his own account, like a jobbing window-cleaner or gardener, would be an employee. It wouldn’t matter what his contract said; he would be a worker automatically entitled to all the protections that entailed. As you might imagine, this is a Labour peer’s bill, and most of its support is Labour or cross-bench. Interestingly, however, three Tory backbenchers (Lords Blencathra, Holmes and Balfe) have also spoken powerfully in its favour.

They are to be commended. Although its official spokesman in the Lords, Lord Callanan, was less enthusiastic, the government should give serious thought to backing this bill, either by taking it over or by undertaking to introduce their own version.

Why? For one thing, it does the right thing by workers. True, government has every reason to promote self-employment and setting up in business on one’s own. But these are undeniably risky matters, and by no means everyone is fitted for them. When delivery and other companies whose employees are not natural entrepreneurs try to penny-pinch on the payroll by dressing up their workforce as a gang of enterprising sub-contractors when in plain English they are nothing of the sort, any decent government, whether Labour or Tory, is under a duty to frustrate their efforts.

Secondly, the government needs to send voters an unambiguous signal about the direction of its post-Brexit employment policy now we have broken free from the coagulated mass of sclerotic European labour laws. This is a perfect opportunity to promote the prospect of a respected, well-paid, well-trained workforce in the tradition of, say, Switzerland or Norway. This is why people voted for Brexit: they did not choose to leave the EU to give a licence to employers to fleece their workforce by treating it as a collection of contractors whose services could be dispensed with when not required.

Thirdly, many of the the benefits of this bill would flow where the Tories need them to go. Many better paid white-collar workers in the south have not suffered too much during the pandemic. By contrast, precarious gig economy employment has disproportionately affected younger, less established and more ill-paid workers, many of therm in the much less prosperous red wall seats in the North. Recently there have been backbench murmurs, especially from a number of the new Tory MP intake of 2019, that the north has been missing out on the economic recovery after Covid. This is a golden opportunity to get in some genuine levelling-up.

Swinging behind the Status of Workers Bill would also help the Tories alleviate a number of other difficulties. It would do them immense good to be seen to come out fighting as the supporters of the ordinary worker against over-mighty and at times dodgy employers, while decently burying the disaster of their long-term care proposals, which have come across seen as a tax on the jobs of the not-so-well-off to fund the lifestyles of the comfortable.

They would also get the chance to deal with some serious instances of reputational unfinished business. One is their supposed doctrinaire attachment to the free market, which is more widely believed and corrosive than many MPs realise. An open preparedness to override contracts of employment where they clearly aim to deprive workers of protections other workers get would work wonders in dispelling this myth. It would promote the party as it should be: pragmatically supportive of non-interference, but neither atavistic nor doctrinaire about it. Another is the still widespread view of the Tories as the party that can always be nobbled by a murmur from big business in a minister’s ear. A firm but polite statement to employers that the abuse of self-employment to the detriment of their workers is unfair and unacceptable will do a lot to get rid of it.

And this is all without the added bonus of a chance to beat Labour at its own game and disappear over the horizon with an embarrassingly large part of its wardrobe, leaving the opposition looking around for ideas about what in fact it does stand for.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the Conservatives were past masters at seeing what the country demanded and then doing it before someone else did, without too much worry about what earlier Tory grandees might have thought. This was why it was the Tories who produced the Second Reform Act in 1867, the notable line of factory legislation in the 1880s improving the lot of both young and female workers, and, of course, full female suffrage in 1928. If the government plays it right, it now has a chance to show that it hasn’t lost the ability to see what has to be done in the twenty-first.

The secret to restoring old records

It’s a kind of alchemy, transforming worthless clutter into pleasing and valuable collectors’ items, a slow but gratifying process all but forgotten in the modern age.

I first learned it from the woman who ran a second-hand record store in my hometown, Tunbridge Wells, from the late seventies to the early nineties, where I misspent much of my youth and most of my pocket money.

Fiona, a hangover from the hippie era, with her whispered husky voice and the endless extraordinarily-thin hand-rolled cigarettes that perhaps explained it, first imparted this lesson in around 1982.

I speak of the lost art of fixing warped records.

Anyone who has vinyl albums in any number will have them: those discs so wonky that the outer edge sends the phono arm jumping so that if you want to play them at all you have to put the stylus down closer to the centre than the outer edge. And as well as being audibly ruined they are also visually displeasing: one’s eye is drawn to the imperfection as it revolves unevenly, rising and falling drunkenly, and can’t look away.

For me the problem was particularly grave. When we were packing to move to our current house five years ago I made a point of explaining to the removal firm’s advanced guard as he started to box my record collection that albums must always be stored vertically, never horizontally. But I realise now that when he nodded in apparent affirmation he was just being polite and had not understood a thing I’d said.

After he’d packed them, those boxes of records were then stacked in an airless and often very warm garage for storage for 12 months until new shelves were ready. The result, when I finally got to unpack them, was that hundreds were warped. In fairness he had inexplicably packed some the right way up, some flat, in a proportion of about 50/50. So it could have been better, it could have been worse, my glass was half full, he’d ruined half my record collection. Because ruined they were, most in those flat-packed boxes had warped like frisbees, some so badly they were more like fruit bowls.

I was bereft. But then I remembered the early eighties, Talisman Records, Fiona, her roll-up fags – and her vinyl solution.

Her alchemic process is remarkably simple: acquire two sheets of glass cut 12.5 inches square. Sandwich damaged disc between them – still in its paper sleeve to minimise the risk of collateral scratching – and bake at a low temperature. If this was a cook book I’d say: “for eight to 12 hours or overnight”.

They come out of the oven still pleasingly warm to the touch and they are pristine again, beautifully, beautifully flat. It’s like baking perfect cakes, every time. This even works on those pre-1950s 78s that are an eighth of an inch thick and made of Bakelite.

The process also produces a faint warm record aroma that evokes memories of Talisman Records 40 years ago. If I was a prog rock fan I could do a joke about Proustian Rush here – but I never warmed to the nerdy Canadians: there are no Rush albums in my stack.

Anyway it’s a joy. And it’s become a daily joy, as I bake my way back to having a working record collection, doing two at a time, four every 24 hours.

Some among the small cognoscenti out there who know about this repair technique insist you can speed up the process by significantly increasing the temperature and reducing the cooking time. But knowing how easy it is to ruin a steak or a fillet of fish by misjudging the timing even slightly, I’m loath to risk it. Particularly since my only disaster so far: my wife, wishing to bake some actual cakes last weekend removed my half-baked vinyl stack and somehow contrived to place it on a burning hob. Within 30 seconds that pleasant warm record smell had become an acrid smoke, and I needed new glass sheets and a new copy of my now-melted Upsetters’ album Eastwood Rides Again.

This was admittedly a setback but what is one casualty compared to dozens of vinyl lives saved?

So I press on. And every day there are little delights and oddities in those boxes, memories and reminders: oh look, my Sergeant Pepper has all the photo inserts, I’d forgotten. Or Scott Walker Sings Jacques Brel – what proto hipster tracked down this neglected gem? Well it turns out I did.

What’s surprised me as I’ve rhapsodised about the pleasure this new hobby has brought me is how few other people seem to have heard of it, even among my nerdiest muso acquaintances.

My friend Luke has just written a book with the rather clever conceit of comparing the innovations of the Beatles, the Beach Boys and Dylan as they unfolded in real timeline. Or there’s Mark who has DJ’d one of London’s most fondly regarded club nights for nearly 30 years and whose record collection dwarfs mine. But did either know how to salvage a buggered old copy of Surf’s Up or a 12” of You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)? They did not.

If I was a younger man I’d do a ‘you won’t believe this incredible life hack’ instructional video on TikTok rather than an article for The Spectator but there you are, horses for courses.

As a footnote, I should mention Fiona’s other trademark trick: if you need to clean a record don’t put water anywhere near it. Instead squirt some of the fluid they sell in tobacco kiosks to fill those old Zippo lighters onto a dust cloth and wipe with care.

Fiona died some years ago. A great number of these records I’m restoring still have a trace of her on them: she would hand-write a price in biro on the grey card inside of the album sleeve to stop chancers swapping the price stickers while she wasn’t looking. She remains in my thoughts almost daily lately because of all this.

I just wish she’d told me what brand of glue to use to refix album sleeves that have come apart. That’s my next project.

Why Venice and little-known Trieste are the perfect holiday pairing

Italy’s relaxation of its travel restrictions for double-vaccinated Brits has many of us eyeing up the options for an autumn getaway. And why not? Come September, cities like Venice are no longer tourist traps (Dolce & Gabbana fashion shows aside) and yet the balmy weather remains. Many visitors head to Italy for Venice alone but they miss a trick by foregoing the beautiful nearby port town of Trieste – beloved by Italian holiday makers and yet untouched by Brits. With the Venetian authorities rumoured to be considering turnstiles on the periphery of Venice, Italy’s most iconic city increasingly feels like a museum. And so, for those left hankering for a slice of living, breathing Italian culture, Trieste is the perfect tonic. 

 As soon as Italy first scrapped quarantine for UK visitors, I booked a trip to Venice, where I planned to roam the squares great and small, dive down passages and nip into churches and museums with novel ease. After my onslaught of Venetian culture, I would jump on a regionale veloce and, two hours later, step out in a more off-piste but still wondrous corner of Italy: the former Habsburg port of Trieste, where the sights of a fascinating history combine with some of the best sunbathing and swimming in Europe.

Venice is hot in June, so after checking into the extraordinary Belmond Cipriani, a 1950s luxury hotel at the far end of the Giudecca, with vast gardens and vineyards, and rooms overlooking its own quiet, turquoise inlet, I went straight down to the swimming pool – the largest on the lagoon. Slightly heated and filled with sea water, it formed a blissful expanse, and I very much enjoyed paddling about in the quiet under the eye of the San Giorgio church cupola. Once dry, I nipped onto the hotel’s private shuttle boat to San Marco square, keen to reacquaint myself with the city and desperate for a perfect Venetian sunset.

Too late for churches, I traipsed about in circles for a while, finally making it to the beautiful quay at Fondamente Nove, which overlooks the mysterious San Michele cemetery, where Ezra Pound and Stravinsky are buried. Most bars and restaurants of note are closed on Mondays (it was a Monday), and though my old favourite, alla Vedova, famous for its smashing meatballs and other cichetti, was open, its lovely indoors bar area was still closed, so I grabbed some meatballs and wine in a cup to-go. I headed off on a vaporetto to Dorsoduro for dinner at Ca del Vento, a beloved Puglian osteria with good pasta and seafood, but a terrible burrata and vegetables main course – my attempts to find veg in Italy are always, to the astonishment of friends, totally doomed.

Venice, like London, is a web of infinite complexities, and also like London, while dazzling pearls are in abundance, it is also easy to go far wrong and I wanted my remaining two days to be perfect. So I enlisted the help of Giada Falchetto, a beautiful, accomplished guide fluent in Russian as well as English, who knows the city’s food and history like the back of her (29 year old) hand. I’d met her on a previous visit at the bar at al Vedova while she was showing around a chic Dutch couple and kept her card.

She met me at my new digs, the breathtakingly elegant seat of hushed luxury that is the Aman, converted from a 16^th century palazzo on the Grand Canal. Giada’s romantic and business partner Loris, met us and as we wove our way through San Polo, deep into Dorsoduro, Giada pointing out the best fried fish vendors, wine bars and pasticceria along the way (Pasticceria Rizzardini, the oldest in Venice and right on the Aman’s doorstep, was my favourite spot, though Rosa Salvo in St Marco has the best custard creams, apparently).

We nipped into the San Pantalon church, which quietly has the biggest ceiling canvas painting in the world, and then manoeuvred to the Pugni Bridge, where Venetians from competing clans used to fight it out with punching bouts, and now the site of a floating market. We had ombre (small thimblefuls of cheap sweet wine) and seafood-topped cichetti at the iconic Al Botegon, before continuing on to the insider’s favourite district of Canareggio. We wove past a hidden gem, the Mendicolo church, dark and vaulted with gold, on the edge of Dorsoduro, and then surfaced on Canareggio’s Fondamenta de la Sense, an epicentre of lively refreshment.

The next night to thank her, I invited Giada to dinner at the Aman, which – despite its extremely high nightly price – serves simple, excellent food at genuinely affordable prices. But the draw is the setting: although we weren’t in the private room with a Tiepolo on the ceiling (George Clooney likes it when he’s in town), we had dinner in one of the vast 18^th century chambers impeccably restored in high baroque opulence, with intricate marble fireplaces, Venetian mosaic wallpaper, gold brocade and a view onto the Grand Canal. With Americans still staying away, the Aman right now is a unique oasis, rather like staying in a wonderful museum. 

The next morning, after coffee and fresh juice on the Aman’s private dock, I caught the two hour train to Trieste. The former sole port of the Habsburg Monarchy, to which it belonged from 1382 to 1918, the city is a beautiful, culturally diverse intersection between Europe’s East and Western blocs, in a crook of terrain near Slovenia and Austria. Its treasures are evenly divided between the ancient (the Roman Theatre in the centre is one impressive instance) and the more modern, with particularly strong 18^th, 19^th and early 20^th century gems, including the palace-laden Piazza Unita D’Italia, Europe’s largest seaside square; the enormous, beautiful synagogue (built in 1908); the stunning, pillared commodity exchange, founded by Empress Maria Teresa in 1755, and the world-class Revoltella art gallery.

But if you have time for nothing else – or prefer to spend your waking hours sunning yourself off one of the most beautiful coasts in Europe – then go to the Miramare castle. Built in an idiosycratic fashion in the 1850s for Austrian Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian and his wife, Charlotte of Belgium, the Miramare is a Disneyland castle of opulence and strangeness that forms a mesmerising feature of the coast, between the tree-studded sea terraces of Barcola and the marine reserve and harbour of Grignano. The Archduke himself designed the castle’s 54 acres of grounds which features a French formal garden and Middle Eastern Cyprus groves. The interiors are fascinating too. Maximilian was Commander of the Navy and circumnavigated the world between 1857 and 1859, and the couple’s bedroom and the archduke’s office are done up as the cabin and the stern wardroom respectively of the Novara, his warship. Maximilian oversaw work on the castle until 1864 when he set off for Mexico; he reigned briefly as emperor before being shot. An Aztec eagle and other Mexican motifs can be found around the castle.

From the Miramare, on a hot day, you can wind your way down on foot to Grignano, where to the right there are free swimming terraces, as well as two excellent paid-for ones: my favourite is the Riviera Hotel’s beach, with comfy chairs, plenty of pine trees for shade, several ladders down to the clear lagoon, and a good, if pricey bar. Another prime spot for a free swim and sunbathe is in front of the Miramare hotel, a bend in the coast that offers a beautiful view of both the castle and Trieste harbor. And ladies should not miss a chance to go to the Lanterna Pedicin, the women and children’s half of a gender-divided swimming complex, which has a charming, completely unique atmosphere.

Food in Trieste reveals its Austrian and Italian heritage: the go-to buffets for Germanic ham and potato salad are Da Pepe and Trattoria da Giovanni, but my favourite way to spend an evening was at Al Ciketo, for ham, cheese and little mini breads topped with dainties, and a wonderful assortment of wine by the glass, followed by seafood at Al Sorgente, where you need to book in advance.

Trieste hotels are grand but relatively inexpensive: the ritziest is the Savoia Exelsior Palace, a 19^th century behemoth with balconies overlooking the harbour; those who want the best access for swimming might prefer the modern Miramare or Riviera, five or so km out of the centre. I stayed in Palazzo Talents 1907, a nifty apartment hotel that was sparkling clean and central (about €80 per night in high season). Pairing high luxury in Venice with the lower-key dazzle of Trieste is a perfect way to experience the best of the Adriatic this autumn.

Jam Roly Poly: why it’s time to revive this retro pudding

More than new pencil cases, name tapes, and the smell of school halls, back to school season always makes me think of proper puddings. There’s a category of pudding that seems reserved for properly old cookbooks, a handful of old-fashioned pubs, and dinner ladies. Spotted dick, cornflake tart, and jam roly poly.

Perhaps its ubiquity at school lunches accounts for its ghoulish alias: dead man’s leg or dead man’s arm. School children have a taste for the macabre, but to be fair to them when the pudding is unwrapped and before it is sliced, it does look fairly uninspiring, and not a hundred miles away from a pallid limb. This probably wasn’t helped by the fact that, before baking parchment and foil were widespread, the pudding would be steamed in a shirtsleeve. For those children for whom even these visuals aren’t sufficiently horrifying, there is Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Samuel Whiskers or The Roly-Poly Pudding which sees Tom Kitten covered with butter and dough by the rats Samuel Whiskers and his wife Anna Maria, who plan to turn him into a roly poly, no doubt traumatising children for years to come.

Roly poly tends to be steamed in the oven, which is, I think, a simpler and less intensive way of steaming. Suspended over a roasting pan of water, wrapped up in baking paper and foil, the low oven is filled with steam from the water, which cooks the pudding gently, letting it expand without forming a tough crust. It means that, unlike steaming on the hob, you’re not simultaneously steaming your whole kitchen – and it’s much quicker in the oven too.

It’s a pretty easy pudding to make: a suet pastry – you can use standard suet or vegetarian, both are fine – is the basis for a jam roly poly. Suet has a lower water content that butter, so the pastry you make with it is even shorter than the buttery stuff. The ingredients for this are brought together into a soft but rollable dough, which is then spread with jam. The whole thing is rolled up from one end, which creates the distinctive swirl of jam throughout the pudding, then secured inside its protective wrapping. Cutting that first slice, revealing the spiral within, is distinctly satisfying.

This isn’t the place for an insipid or (frankly) cheap jam: it’s the dominant flavour here.

Darker jams are more striking against the pale sponge, so raspberry, blackberry, and blackcurrant are obvious choices. But if you’re happy to choose flavour over aesthetic, then this is a great place to showcase your favourite jam, perhaps even a homemade one. Or if you like the bittersweet (and I do) you can channel Mrs Beaver from C.S.Lewis’ The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe and swap out the jam for marmalade, to make a ‘great and gloriously sticky marmalade roll’.

Like all the best puds – and I feel like something of a broken record, here – it is best served steaming hot, with very thick, cold custard.

Jam Roly Poly

Makes: Serves 8

Takes: 10 minutes

Bakes: 1 hour

200g self raising flour

75g shredded suet

50g salted butter

100ml whole milk

1 tbsp caster sugar

200g jam of your choice

1. Preheat your oven to 180°C. Cut a piece of baking parchment about 30x30cm and a piece of foil about 30x40cm. Place the baking parchment on top of the foil.
2. Rub the butter into the flour until it resembles breadcrumbs. Stir through the suet and sugar, followed by the milk. Use a knife to bring the dough together then use your hands to briefly knead it until it is pliable.
3. Turn the dough out onto a floured work surface, and roll out into a 25x25cm square. Spoon the jam onto the dough, leaving a centimetre border around the edge of the dough. Roll up the dough until the edges meet: gently squeeze the seams and ends closed, and carefully lift onto the baking paper and foil, seam-side down.
4. Roll the baking paper and foil snugly (but not too tightly; the pudding will expand as it cooks) around the roll, twisting the ends of the roll to secure.
5. Fill a large roasting tin ⅔ full with boiling water, and carefully transfer to the oven. If your roasting tin has a rack suspended above it, place the wrapped roll, seam-side down; if it doesn’t, place it on an oven rack just above the tin.
6. Cook the pudding for one hour in the oven. Carefully remove from the oven, and leave to stand for ten minutes before unwrapping, slicing thickly, and serving with lots of custard.

Let’s not politicise Emma Raducanu’s triumph

It didn’t take long for the open-borders brigade to try and politicise the magnificent feat of British teenager Emma Raducanu in winning the US Open women’s singles.

Rather than just revelling in the general outbreak of joy in the country, or praising the astonishing maturity of Emma’s performance, the usual blue-tick suspects piled onto Twitter within minutes of her victory to argue, or imply, that the fact Emma was born in another country (she moved here from Canada aged two) proved that immigration in all its guises is always a good thing.

Times columnist Sathnam Sanghera stated the case plainly: ‘Half Romanian, half Chinese. Born in Canada, brought up in the UK. Immigration enriches us, and always has done.’

For Actor Adil Ray the teen prodigy’s win was a victory against mysterious and unspecified ‘haters’. He tweeted: ‘Emma Raducanu the immigrant from a Romanian, Chinese, Canadian family grand slams the haters. This is the Britain we love.’

Then there was David Schneider, taking a moment’s respite from his Brexit rants to note: ‘Bloody immigrants! Coming over here, making it from qualifying to win the US Open without dropping a set.’

Our old friend Alastair Campbell took things even further, suggesting that Emma’s win ought to lead to the Government abandoning attempts to bolster border controls and using it to attack Home Secretary Priti Patel – herself a daughter of immigrants who has made a career in high-level UK public service.

Campbell tweeted: ‘Isn’t it great to be from a country where a child born in Canada to Romanian and Chinese parents can come to Britain aged two and become a GB national heroine within 16 years? Let’s try and keep the country that way shall we @pritipatel ?’

This degree of oversimplification would be laughable coming from self-righteous sixth-formers. To see it emanating from the mouths of a supposed intellectual elite is frankly bizarre, though not surprising seeing as the very same thing happened when Somalia-born Sir Mo Farah was winning Olympic gold medals for Britain. Even to gently point out that Sir Mo’s achievement trajectory was hardly typical of the cohort of Somalian migrants as a whole was to invite opprobrium.

It should not need stating that immigrants are just people. Some go on to do great things for their adopted countries, some do terrible damage. Most, like most of the rest of us, just get by and generally do their best. As a phenomenon mass migration needs managing and controlling, impacting as it does on a wide range of public policy issues from social and cultural cohesion to pressure on public services and labour market conditions.

No doubt Ms Patel does want to keep the talent stream Campbell referred to open. But she also has to worry about a country where a child born in Libya can come to Britain aged 17, get permission to stay having claimed asylum, be convicted six times for 15 crimes as a young man and then go on to commit mass murder in a park in Reading aged 25.

As Home Secretary she must give due weight to findings such as those of the House of Commons Library in July last year about the number of foreign nationals doing time in prisons in England and Wales.

As of March 2020, there were more than 9,000 foreign nationals accounting for 11 per cent of the entire prison population, including almost 1,000 Albanians, 835 Poles and 806 Romanians. None of these guys had been put away for making a positive contribution to Britain, but instead for victimising law-abiding citizens. Yet whenever Ms Patel attempts to deport foreign national prisoners, left-wing campaigners and liberal human rights lawyers do their utmost to thwart her.

So no, Ms Raducanu’s amazing triumph does not make a case for the Government attempting to stop illegal entry into the UK via the south coast dinghies or even to restore the free movement that led to wage compression in working class jobs after EU enlargement 15 years ago.

It certainly does, however, make a case for the merits of our multi-racial society where anyone from any ethnic background can make the most of their talents on national or international stages. Almost all of us support that ideal.

Isn’t it curious that under the Left’s definition of who counts as a foreigner, encompassing British citizens who arrived in the UK as toddlers, there is another amazing success story to be celebrated? But I predict that Hell will freeze over before Mr Campbell ever tweets: ‘Isn’t it great to be from a country where a child with Turkish heritage born in America to liberal intellectuals can come to Britain, aged three months, and become a Brexit hero and UK prime minister half a century later?”

How stable is the Taliban government?

Some western governments and media have been involved in a collective act of wishful thinking in recent months over the Taliban—believing them somehow to be ‘moderate’ and on the way to forming an inclusive government. The idea began with their elevation of status as a partner in negotiations with the US in Doha. They were legitimised, so some believed they had changed.

The last remnants of that belief must have been burnt out by the appointment of the Taliban cabinet this week, which was not inclusive in any sense, but was the result of three weeks of bartering between different Taliban factions, only resolved by the intervention of the head of Pakistani intelligence, the ISI, General Faiz Hameed.

More than half of the members of the new government face international sanctions as terrorists. The list includes four of the five men released from Guantanamo in a prisoner swap in 2014 and four members of the Haqqani family, whose terrorist network was responsible for the largest attacks in Kabul in recent years, and who have US bounties on their heads.

In announcing this line-up the Taliban proved once again how out of touch they are with the outside world and any sense that Afghanistan is a different country from the one they governed until 2001. Some of those appointed are even filling the same role they played in the first Taliban government. The only real change from 2001 is the entrenchment of the Haqqani network at the heart of the Taliban, with Sirajuddin Haqqani as interior minister now responsible for the security of people he once terrorised. The son of the founder of the movement, Jalaluddin Haqqani, who fought against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, Sirajuddin has a fearsome personal reputation. He held a meeting of tribal elders this week incongruously in what was until three weeks ago the State Ministry for Peace, equipped this year with American funding. Dressed all in white, draped in a webbing harness of ammunition pouches, and bearing an American-supplied M-16 rifle, Haqqani praised the work of suicide bombers, who had made this victory possible. Meanwhile the new minister for higher education, Abdul Baqi Haqqani, questioned the value of getting a degree. If the Taliban have changed at all it is only to have become more intractable and hard line.

As the full consequences of the defeat of the American-led coalition sinks in, the prominence of this terror network at the heart of the Afghan government is one of the most visible signs of failure. International jihadi violence emanating from Afghanistan is far more likely with the Haqqani network in the ascendance, given their closeness with groups such as Jaish-e-Muhammad and Lashkar-e-Tayeba developed by Pakistan to carry out attacks in India. It was this nexus that carried out the most ghastly act even by Afghan standards, the attack on a maternity ward in May 2020. The Haqqani network is implicated in illicit trade, not just in opium, but other Afghan resources, including timber, coal, gems and talc. It is hard to imagine that opium will be suppressed and other trade taxed and brought under state regulation now they are in government.

As the history of the Afghan war begins to be written, America’s failure to counter Pakistan’s support for Haqqani is emerging as one of the biggest strategic errors. America has known for years of the international aspirations of the Haqqani group, and how close they were to the ISI. Karzai would often tell visiting Americans that they were fighting the war in the wrong place. ‘You’re fighting the war in the homes of the Afghans, you ought to be fighting the war in Pakistan.’ Some in the four US administrations that dealt with the Afghan conflict shared this analysis. In 2011, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, called them a ‘veritable arm’ of the ISI. President Obama’s envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke used the formulation that they were fighting ‘the wrong enemy in the wrong country.’ But America never grappled with this threat, unwilling to destabilise a nuclear-armed state.

Pakistan’s influence in the formation of the Taliban government can be seen in a number of appointments, in particular the demotion of Mullah Baradar to a deputy prime minister role.

But the compromises made in putting the government together makes the Taliban administration inherently unstable. They have less than 100,000 fighters, not enough to provide effective security across the country as the police have gone.

There was only the token presence of two Tajiks and one Uzbek among the 33 cabinet posts, with all other jobs going to Pashtuns, Afghanistan’s largest tribe. The absence of Hazaras, who have been growing in influence and wealth in recent years, was a particular aberration. They profess the Shia faith and have faced persecution by the Taliban in the past. Only 8 of the cabinet appointees are from the north, with the remaining 25 from the two largest Pashtun tribal areas, 15 from the east and 10 from the south. But each appointment leaves someone with a grievance who was not appointed. The prominence of the Haqqanis has limited the influence of other more traditionally powerful eastern tribal groups. And those from the south, in particular Kandahar and Helmand, are from minority tribes. Most of those who actually fought the war, including the Mansur network, named for the leader killed in a US drone strike in 2016, have been excluded.

And while even in its own terms the formation of the Taliban government is inherently unstable, it also showed a lack of imagination and knowledge of the society that Afghanistan has become. There was never any intention in the minds of the Taliban that this would be ‘inclusive.’ There was no role for senior figures from previous administrations, including the former president Hamid Karzai and Abdullah Abdullah, who have both remained in Kabul and have been promoting a more broadly-based government.

The most glaring absence of course was of any women. Women in leadership roles across Afghan society, and qualified for many different jobs, has been a significant social change of the last twenty years, but Taliban spokesmen have shown no recognition of this, instead restricting women to the home and some roles in health and education.

The failure to form an inclusive administration means that the Taliban will have to rule by force as they do not have wide consent. The bravery of those who have demonstrated on the streets, almost daily since the arrival of the Taliban, will be tested now that the Taliban have banned further demonstrations.

Government scraps mandatory vaccine passports

On BBC One’s Andrew Marr show Sajid Javid confirmed that plans for domestic vaccine passports in England were on the way out, even before they were formally brought in: ‘We should keep it in reserve,’ he said of the government’s plans to link vaccine status to entry into nightclubs, but ‘I’m pleased to say we will not be going ahead with plans for vaccine passports.’

Vaccine passports have been a roller-coaster policy for months now, with claims made by members of the Cabinet at the start of the year that they weren’t being considered: that nothing so ‘discriminatory’, in the words of vaccine minister Nadhim Zahawi, would be implemented. Since then, plans to introduce them have been announced, an NHS app has been rolled out that downloads the passport onto your phone.

Now the government has backtracked. This morning the health secretary made the case for scrapping Covid certification. With such a successful vaccine rollout, Javid argued, passports are a tool no longer needed. Better, instead, to focus resources towards getting more people jabbed and a booster programme, if approved.

But Javid made a more fundamental case against passports too:

‘We just shouldn’t be doing things for the sake of it, or because others are doing it. We should look at every possible intervention properly…I think it’s fair to say most people instinctively don’t like the idea. I’ve never liked the idea of saying to people “you must show your papers” or something to do what is just an everyday activity.’

This was a theme in Javid’s interview with Nick Robinson. On domestic restrictions, as well as travel, he often took the arguments back to basics: that such power over people’s lives should be temporary, not a mechanism to usher in a new normal. ‘We should only keep measures in place if they are absolutely, totally necessary,’ said Javid. ‘Now that might sound obvious to most people, but that’s not always how government works. Sometimes governments do things, and they get a bit too used to it.’ To this end, Javid hinted that the government may only be looking to renew certain parts of the Coronavirus Act next week, rather than campaign to keep hold of all sweeping emergency powers for another six months.

Javid’s rebuke of vaccine passports today reflects the arguments Boris Johnson used to make against ID cards and state overreach. Despite the PM being very well-placed to make them again, this torch, it seems, has been passed to Javid.

So what to make the government’s most recent U-turn? Was the threat of passports a cynical ploy to get young people to take up the vaccine, with no real plans to follow through? Just this week Zahawi was still arguing that Covid certification was the ‘right thing to do.’ Despite Javid’s insistence this morning that passports were only being considered, they were indeed a flagship part of Boris Johnson’s reopening announcement on 19 July.

But it became increasingly clear over the summer that Boris Johnson had a fight on his hands with his backbenchers, many of whom were vocally hostile to the idea of passports. The widespread opposition to the policy amongst Tory MPs became increasingly clear this week, when Zahawi had to field fierce criticism in the House of Commons from his own party. Meanwhile, Scottish Labour refused to support their introduction last week, which was ushered through by the SNP. Labour in Whitehall have been wavering over the policy, and may have gone the same way. Had the government pushed ahead, it’s not obvious passports would have gone through.

Plenty of businesses will be cheering the announcement today: UK Hospitality estimated that, had vaccine passports been introduced, business profitability could have dropped by a quarter. But there are still outstanding questions on passports. Javid made no mention of the many venues that have already ushered in passports: will this be a decision left to business, or does the government plan to intervene? What about ‘no jab, no job?’ Are we still looking at a wave of care home staff losing their job, if they don’t get their first Covid jab within the next few weeks?

No doubt pressure is still on the government to make more of its ideological leanings on these delicate issues known. But for now, mandatory domestic passports have been shelved, and arguments for liberty, not just practicality, are being used for doing so.

Sunday shows round-up: ‘I’m not anticipating any more lockdowns’ says Javid

Sajid Javid – I’m not anticipating any more lockdowns

The Health Secretary was the main guest of the day on BBC One’s Andrew Marr show, hosted this morning by Nick Robinson. Robinson asked Javid about the likelihood that Christmas could be threatened once again by lockdown. Javid responded by saying that it was highly unlikely that the UK would see itself in a similar position to last year, even with an expected surge of the virus over this winter:

Vaccine passports will not go ahead

Last week, the Vaccines Minister Nadhim Zahawi appeared to confirm government plans to introduce vaccine passports. A difficult vote had been anticipated towards the end of September, but Javid went back on the previous announcement, and suggested that the passports would only be kept ‘in reserve’: 

SJ: We just shouldn’t be doing things for the sake of it… We’ve looked at it properly… and I’m pleased to say that we will not be going ahead with plans for vaccine passports.

Government will end £20 universal credit rise in October

Trevor Phillips sought a direct response to the government’s approach to universal credit. The benefit was raised by £20 a week as a response to the pandemic, but it is due to end on October 6th. Opposition parties have called for the uplift to be made permanent, raising concerns about recipients finding themselves in debt once it is removed. Javid said this would not be happening: 

SJ: We’re going to end the temporary increase in universal credit… at the end of this month.

Government aims to scrap PCR tests for travellers

Javid also argued that having to take costly PCR tests, which are required when travellers return from abroad, should be abolished as soon as possible:

SJ: The PCR test that is required upon your return to the UK from certain countries – I want to get rid of that as soon as I possibly can.

Jonathan Ashworth – National Insurance hike is ‘punishing’ and ‘unfair’

The Shadow Health Secretary was also ready to weigh in with his two cents, and attacked the government’s new national insurance levy, aimed at bolstering health and social care. Ashworth critiqued the tax rise as unjustly punishing people who would never see the benefits of it, and suggested that there would still need to be increases to council tax bills over and above the new charge:

JA: It is a punishing and unfair tax rise, that won’t deliver the health care that is needed… There will still be thousands… who don’t get access to the social care they need.

‘Our social care system is broken’

Ashworth went on to detail the problems with social care in the UK as things stand. Robinson pressed him on Labour’s plans to reform the sector: 

JA: Our social care system is broken… We will have a reform programme to rebuild our broken care services… [to] allow people to stay in their home longer [and] raise quality.

Nicola Sturgeon – Indyref 2 in 2023 ‘right for the country’

Phillips interviewed Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon. He inquired about Sturgeon’s plans to hold a new independence referendum in 2023:

NS: I think it’s right for the country… I’m very confident that when this question is next put, people in Scotland will vote ‘Yes’.

Gender Recognition Bill will not remove women’s protections

And finally, Sturgeon pledged that Scotland’s Gender Recognition Bill, intended to make the process of transitioning one’s gender easier, would not impact the rights of women, such as their rights to receive refuge from abusive partners in female-only spaces: 

NS: It does not in any way, shape or form, remove the legal protections of women, and that’s important to me as a feminist.

Emma Raducanu’s victory is being spoiled by the usual suspects

How do you take the pleasure out of something so marvellous and joyful as Emma Raducanu’s US open victory last night? Easy — turn on Twitter, which spoils everything including sport.

Raducanu’s victory is truly a great triumph; the most breathtaking sporting feat by a female British athlete in our lifetimes. Emma is 18 and beautiful, just did her A-levels and got A* marks, had been 400/1 to win the tournament, never dropped a set — all these facts make her achievement even more delightful. I’ll stop the adulation there, because an entire industry of sports commentators already exists to make these points over and over. We don’t all need to join in. Yet for some reason it’s expected that we do.

Remember the Euros — it was only two months ago — when every Twitter blue-tick decided his or her online status demanded endless pronouncements on England and other matches? It’s the same deal. Politicians started posing online as serious tactical analysts. Lifeless corporate accounts lectured us about passion, the Three Lions and racism. People who don’t usually follow sport at all pretended to be fanatical about it.

Idiocy is memetic and social media has created that most awful of creatures: the blue-check omnipundit, who has to have their say about absolutely everything. Some sports people pronounce incessantly about politics, too, you may have noticed.

Even weirder is the habit of clueless media addicts to issue formal statesman-like congratulatory tweets to victors, or commiseration to the losers, as if they were some dignitary presiding over the closing ceremony.

The retweet-junkies of the world know that major sporting events are great opportunities to generate online engagement and improve your profile. The more vapid the better. (Confessing to being ‘too tense to watch’ while still endlessly tweeting is a good one).

The worst part is that, because even on social media everybody gets tired of making the same point, the political-cum-culture wars come crashing in.

That’s why Alastair Campbell, who should probably be having a break from the internet after his performance on Wednesday, felt compelled to tweet-lecture Priti Patel, the Home Secretary whose family come from Uganda and India, on what Emma’s story teaches us about the blessings of immigration. Other Labour figures did the same.

Idiocy is memetic, did I say that already?

There’s already been a mental health row over Emma. Piers Morgan was vilified for suggesting ‘she couldn’t handle the pressure’ after she withdrew from Wimbledon suffering from anxiety on court. Morgan is now being attacked for ‘backpedalling’ because he too has now applauded her victory.

No doubt a sexism row will now follow — about whether it’s creepy or patronising for men to thrill at female tennis stars. You can’t like Emma if you are a cis white male. Online, the fun is often all about ruining other people’s enjoyment.

On a brighter note, Jamie Carragher the retired footballer tweeted something genuinely funny about Larry David in the crowd at the Arthur Ashe stadium. And Raducanu’s own social media profile is endearingly amiable, restrained and professional. If only the political class and the rest of us could do the same.

China’s war on effeminate men

A rectification notice from China’s state censor earlier this month included a peculiar admonition to ‘resolutely oppose’ effeminate men on television. The note stood out in the otherwise dry document. Its other targets — people with ‘poor morals’ or ‘lacking solidarity with the party and nation’ — make sense within Beijing’s authoritarian logic. But it’s hard to conceive of pretty boys in eyeliner joining the party’s long lists of revolutionary enemies.

The term used for effeminate men in the notice — niangpao — is vague, but the National Radio and Television Administration is counting on its broadcast partners to know what it means. An example of the sort of effeminate men Beijing feels threatened by is hard to locate in Western pop culture. The problem for regulators is not sexuality. The Chinese state is not always friendly to its gay and transgender communities but the uneasy sexual relaxations of the last decade do not seem in any danger of being undone. The problem for censors is that, like grumpy old people shouting at their TV screens, men just don’t look like men anymore.

One of the first signs of a potential assault on effeminate men came when English-language news reported on a social media post titled, ‘Do you know how hard the CIA is working to get you to love effeminate stars?’. The short essay was published by an account called Torch of Thought, which is linked to the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. The article introduced the figure of Johnny Kitagawa, a Japanese-American impresario who was plugged into the American occupation’s efforts to rebuild pop culture in vanquished Japan. Torch of Thought paints this now-dead talent manager as a paedophile Svengali determined to end warlike masculinity and turn Japanese men into kittens.

When Japan’s economy imploded in the 1990s, South Korea took up where they had left off. South Korea left Japan far behind in the androgyny arms race. When androgynous Korean boyband Super Junior broke into China in the early 2000s, the trend was established. The niangpao were here to stay. But now the National Radio and Television Administration wants them gone.

The decision by a Chinese censor to address the issue may seem uniquely bizarre, but it comes after both Japan and Korea went through their own debates about masculinity in crisis. In those countries, the counterweight to androgynous idols had been the strong, silent salaryman. He put on a tie every morning, as solid and reliable as the firm where he worked. Even if his daughter liked boys with floofy hair, she was going to marry a man like her daddy, get pregnant, quit her job, and pop out the demographically required number of children.

But as both countries did away with the idea of employment for life, cajoled women into the workforce and made dual incomes a necessity, the lone male breadwinner was no longer a workable notion. The result of all this has been cratering birth rates, an epidemic of men reaching middle-age without losing their virginities and a society trapped in an enervating permanent adolescence.

Figures within the Chinese leadership can see what’s on the horizon. At this point, there have been a few levers pulled beyond the liberalisation of family planning rules. It seems there is little stomach for changing the economic game which underlies the demographic crisis. The main fix for fertility, although certainly not an easy one, would be to aggressively cool off the real estate market. Rearing a family is predicated on being able to afford one. As overseas financial markets have been restricted, the flats and duplexes of China’s booming cities have transformed into assets. Beijing recognises the problem. Shortly after taking office, Xi Jinping issued an admonition: ‘Housing is for living in and not for speculation’. Recognition is one thing, fixing the problem is quite another.

Cultural levers are easier and cheaper to pull. The one-child policy is long gone. But reforming the economic structures that have enriched party allies is far less attractive. Instead, the CCP has put out a tersely worded notice resolutely opposing effeminate men. Without concrete support to boost the fertility rate, they hope that people can be convinced to have children by promoting a more well-groomed, Norman Rockwell-esque vision of masculinity and family. Xi Jinping’s ‘China dream’ looks awfully like the American one he hopes to overthrow. 

Was the US involved in neo-fascist Italian terrorism?

Last month, Italy’s Prime Minister Mario Draghi promised to declassify government documents involving two organisations: Gladio, an anti-communist paramilitary group linked to Nato and the CIA, and a masonic lodge known as P2. These two groups are believed by some to have been involved in the darkest moments of post-war Italian history.

For much of the latter half of the 20th century, Italy had the unenviable position of being the epicentre of European terrorism. The blast at the Bologna train station in 1980, which left 76 people dead and more than 200 wounded, was at the time the bloodiest terrorist attack ever suffered by a European country. The bombing was pinned on a small neo-fascist militia called Armed Revolutionary Nucleus. But many Italians remain convinced that the attack emerged from a wider far-right network. Draghi’s decision to declassify the papers came on the 41st anniversary of the Bologna killings.

Post-war fascism in Italy was predicated on a ‘strategy of tension’. The term, coined by British journalist Neal Ascherson in the Observer in 1972, describes all sorts of plots, including assassinations and false flag terrorist acts, carried out with the aim — not of destabilising the country — but of consolidating power and justifying emergency laws. When I asked Senator Felice Casson, the prosecutor who headed the investigation into Gladio, what his opinion was of Draghi’s decision, he replied ‘Fuffa!’ — ‘just crap’. Casson explained: ‘It’s just an announcement. There is not the courage nor the will to disclose the involvement of foreign powers.’ In 2001, Guido Salvini, a judge involved in the Massacres Commission, claimed: ‘The role of the Americans was ambiguous, halfway between knowing and not preventing and actually inducing people to commit atrocities.’

The truth of such claims — denied by the US State Department — remain unverified. Perhaps Draghi’s new documents will point to greater American involvement. Certainly in the immediate aftermath of world war two, the US took exceptional interest in Italy’s politics. The CIA has admitted giving the equivalent of over $11 million to centrist parties at the 1948 election, while there is evidence that the Americans faked letters in order to incriminate left-wing candidates. Italy was a special case among Nato countries. For one thing, it had the largest and most powerful communists party outside the Eastern Bloc, the Partito Comunista Italiano. This was intolerable to the Americans for whom Italy was strategically too important to lose. 

Italian psychology at the time was shaped by the overwhelming forces of the USSR stationed just a couple of hours drive from the north eastern border. Part of the plan for an armed resistance against a Soviet invasion was Gladio, a kind of Dad’s Army of willing anti-Soviets. These so-called ‘stay behind’ units were trained in guerilla warfare and existed throughout much of Europe. In 1991, it was revealed that Swiss Gladio members had been given combat training by the British army without the Swiss government’s knowledge or approval. Some of Gladio’s Italian members were indeed members of far-right terror groups, according to the Massacres Commission judge Guido Salvini. As in post-war Germany, where former Nazis were recruited by the Americans to fight in the Cold War, the post-war Italian government also signed up former fascists, who were the most ideologically motivated to fight communism.

This explains the role of the masonic P2 lodge, short for Propaganda 2 (Propaganda 1 was founded in 1877 and shut down by the Mussolini regime). P2 was a secret freemason organisation consisting of prominent politicians, businessmen, members of the secret service, the armed forces and influential journalists. P2’s goal was to infiltrate the state and make it impossible for the communist party to take power by democratic means. Its existence became public in 1980 and was then declared illegal shortly after in 1982. The lodge has been linked to the failed coup of the Roman prince Junio Valerio Borghese and the bombing of the Italicus train of 1974.

By the 1980s numerous corruption scandals began to surface. First came an investigation into P2 and its members, then in 1990 the existence of Gladio was formally recognised. The investigation into Gladio — first exposed at the 1984 trial of a neo-fascist terrorist — provoked outrage, but its existence proved to be of little real consequences. The Berlin Wall was crumbling and the scandal provided a useful smokescreen for the crimes perpetrated by high ranking members of the communist party. They were fearful that revelations could spill out from the disintegrating Soviet archives, revealing how the Italian communist party had been illegally sponsored by the USSR up until the late 1980s. To be subsidised by your enemy, a power hostile to the alliance to which Italy belonged, with nuclear rockets pointed at your territory, constituted a much higher treason than belonging to Nato’s secret Gladio organisation. 

Evocations of the fascist peril have become an effective tool in post-war Italian politics to silence adversaries. As much as he might want to get to the truth of Italy’s strange history of neo-fascism and international intrigue, there are domestic reasons for Mario Draghi’s initiative: an attempt to keep the Fratelli d’Italia at bay. Fratelli, according to some polls now the most popular party in Italy, is the successor of post-war Mussolinist tendencies. Now, however, Fratelli is attempting to present itself as a normal conservative party. Nailing it to its past, to its post-fascist roots, is good politics for Draghi. 

Rosie Duffield’s treatment brings shame on the Labour party

News that Rosie Duffield will be missing the Labour Party conference over threats to her personal security brings to a head an appalling situation where a female Labour MP cannot stand up for the rights of women without triggering opprobrium. Keir Starmer cannot and must not sit on the fence any longer. Maybe he is trying to sit tight and hope that this goes away? This seems unlikely: Duffield’s opponents are motivated by an evangelistic zeal to silence those who dare to disagree with them.

Thankfully, Duffield isn’t taking the hint On Friday, she spoke more sense into the debate:

No doubt there will be yet more calls for the whip to be withdrawn from her. The bullying and harassment of Duffield has been ongoing since she expressed her view that ‘only women have a cervix’, and it has become a stain on the party. Let’s be clear, Duffield is neither homophobic nor transphobic; she just doesn’t believe that men can become women by signing a piece of paper.

As a trans person myself, I agree with her: men cannot become women under any circumstances, whatever the LGBTQIA+ lobby might have us all believe. Women are female, men are male, and sex in humans is immutable. Duffield is also correct to be concerned about the right of women to protect single-sex spaces based on biology. Make-believe is no substitute for reality.

Karl Marx knew that. He rejected the idealism of fellow German philosopher Georg Hegel; he also said, ‘social progress can be measured by the social position of the female sex.’ But shockingly, it seems that in today’s Labour party, the female sex cannot protest this new idealism.

Four thousand miles away in Kabul, women are being forced to stay home by a misogynist regime that has seized power in Afghanistan. No doubt this situation will be protested vociferously at the Labour party conference. But it will ring hollow if one of their own MPs – a woman whose harrowing account of domestic abuse shocked the House of Commons – finds herself staying home during the party conference.

Starmer has a little over two weeks to sort out this mess. The party claims that its Brighton shindig will be ‘a real opportunity to be a part of democracy in action.’ That will be open to interpretation if they cannot guarantee the safety of women accused of wrongthink by the transgender lobby.

Duffield might be the lightning rod, but the problem is much wider. The party has drifted far from the electorate they once took for granted. While self-identification of legal sex might excite young political activists within the party, the voters on the red wall have other concerns, not least jobs, health, education and public services. They also know the difference between men and women.

The people going after Duffield are certainly devoted to their own opinions, creeds and dogmas. Starmer needs to find his backbone and stand up to them before they consign the Labour party to the political wilderness for years to come.