Is Laura Kuenssberg leaving Westminster?

Is Laura Kuenssberg’s time as BBC political editor coming to an end? That’s the suggestion tonight after the Guardian reported she is in talks to step down from the role and move to a plum gig hosting the Today programme. 

Rumours of Kuenssberg’s impending departure have been circulating around Westminster for some time now to little avail. But this time it is being talked up as part of a wider shake up of the Beeb’s lead presenters, with Jon Sopel recently announcing he is ending his US beat and returning to the UK.

Kuenssberg’s time in the role has not exactly been smooth sailing. Covering one of the most turbulent periods in British politics, she has found herself subjected to abuse from Corbynites and slammed left and right for being a government shill – or a BBC leftie, depending on the time of day. 

So, if Kuenssberg is on the way out, who will replace her? The BBC’s political editor job matters not just to Westminster obsessives: they are the voice, above any other in the media, that translates political happenings to a mass audience. 

Journalists viewed as potential successors include Today presenter Amol Rajan (job swap anyone?), the BBC’s Chris Mason and Vicky Young or even Sopel. Of course they could also consider external candidates: would ITV’s Robert Peston consider a return to the Corporation? Then there’s Sky News’s political editor Beth Rigby, though her well-documented lockdown breach could put her at a disadvantage. 

Kuenssberg’s move would also bring the Today programme presenter cast to six: her, Amol Rajan (if still there), Justin Webb, Nick Robinson, Martha Kearney and Mishal Husain. Robinson is rumoured to be a little possessive over the 8.10 slot: what luck has he now with the number of cooks on the broth?

Rethinking MPs’ safety is not a victory for terrorism

Whenever a killing is investigated as an act of terror, there is always a tendency to think that any changes made are a victory for terrorism. While a few MPs have called for changes to how constituency surgeries are held, many more want them to carry on as they were. 

But as I say in the magazine this week, given the circumstances, the rethink of MPs’ safety should be a practical exercise, not a philosophical one. In response to IRA bombing campaigns, Margaret Thatcher put a gate across Downing Street. Without it, an IRA mortar would have killed the war cabinet in 1991. That was not a ‘victory’ for the terrorists but a wise security measure. The same applies to the protective cars for US presidents: open-top vehicles were ditched after John F. Kennedy’s assassination. 

Jo Cox and David Amess were killed either at a surgery or on the way to one. Stephen Timms, the Labour MP for East Ham, survived a stabbing at his constituency surgery in 2010. Privately, several police forces have advised MPs to move away from openly advertised events. In the modern era, when MPs are more contactable than ever before, such a move shouldn’t cut politicians off from the public. Constituents would still be able to see their MPs, but meetings would have to be arranged in advance. This change would be in all of our interests. If the current sense of danger persists, more and more good people will decide that they cannot subject their families to the risk that political service now incurs.

The void at the centre of Britain’s net zero strategy

Boris Johnson wants to turn your house green. This week, he published the plan for doing it. In fact, the strategy for delivering net zero carbon emissions is, in essence, to convert the whole economy — including your home — to electric power and then to deliver most of that power using offshore windfarms.

The fundamental problem with this approach, however, is what we will do when the wind isn’t blowing, or, just as importantly, when it unexpectedly stops blowing. The failure to address this issue upfront means that net zero is likely to fail, expensively. The stubborn refusal to do so, even now, means that failure may well be a catastrophic one.

As Steve Baker recently pointed out, successive governments have chosen to ‘wing it’ over the tricky details of net zero; energy storage is the trickiest detail of them all. Ministers sometimes mention batteries as part of the answer, but this is simple deception. The grid already uses batteries for stabilisation of grid frequency, but they are simply not plausible for bulk storage — Professors Peter Edwards and Peter Dobson of Oxford University recently noted that sufficient batteries to see us through a ten-day wind lull would cost around £160,000 per household. In reality, we’d need enough to get through lulls much longer than that.

Each and every new decarbonisation strategy, therefore, needs to be assessed by how it will work when the wind dies.

Electric heat pumps, which form the core of the UK’s strategy to decarbonise homes, are not going to be immune. Unless the electricity storage issue is solved, a lull in the wind will inevitably mean that demand from homes will need to be reduced. This could be done through smart meters, which an increasingly desperate government is trying to force every home in the country to install. These can encourage users to reduce their electricity demand ‘voluntarily’, through pricing mechanisms, but if that proves inadequate, they can also adjust the temperature on your thermostat (this is reported to have happened in the US already) and even cut the power to individual appliances — your heat pump or your electric vehicle charger — or to the home as a whole.

And if the wind lull coincides with cold weather — as is quite normal — things could get very ugly indeed. The cold will increase demand in its own right, but it will also cut heat pump efficiency, putting up the load on the grid still further (the Climate Change Committee itself has admitted that this could cause a major demand spike on the grid). If that happens, expect your power to be cut in very short order. You may well be very cold, and possibly for weeks at a time. Don’t even dream of charging your electric car.

If, after considering all of the above, a heat pump seems a less-than-ideal solution, it is also worth considering the costs involved. Not only are heat pumps more expensive to run, but the capital cost of installing them in every home in the land will be substantial (or even ruinous). A typical home may well require complete replumbing on top of the cost of the heat pump itself, so you are looking at £12,000 to start with. And then, because heat pumps deliver only very gentle heat, most homes will need expensive upgrades to their insulation. The bill here could be extraordinary: a Whitehall pilot project in 2009 implied a cost for decarbonising the nation’s homes of between £2 to £4 trillion, depending on how optimistic you were about future price reductions. To put that in perspective, we are talking up to £140,000 per household, about half the value of the average UK house.

Ministers and environmentalists tend to wave these problems away; when quizzed, they intone the names of technologies that they say will save us but are, in reality, either vastly too expensive (hydrogen), will only help at the margins (heat batteries and interconnectors), or are barely off the drawing board.

But we are rapidly approaching a time when wishful thinking collides with reality. The decarbonisation bills are going to start arriving in the post very soon, and then the truths will out: renewables are not getting that much cheaper, decarbonisation is very hard, and the price for trying to achieve it means real hardship. The public reaction is likely to be unforgiving.

Action must be taken and it must be taken now. I hope, particularly for the sake of the most disadvantaged and vulnerable in society, that Boris Johnson and his policy makers wake up to this impending crisis before it is too late.

Why is No. 10 snubbing the Commons?

The Speaker was annoyed again today when the government only offered the Commons a Covid update after the Health Secretary’s press briefing yesterday. Labour hauled vaccines minister Maggie Throup to the chamber for an urgent question. Before she had a chance to answer, Lindsay Hoyle scolded her superiors.

‘This is not acceptable and, as I have warned the government, in those circumstances, I will allow the House the earliest opportunity to hear from a minister: in this case by an urgent question,’ he said. He added that Sajid Javid should not have been speculating about whether MPs should wear masks without coming to talk to MPs themselves in the Commons: ‘I understand that yesterday the Secretary of State made an announcement, not just about important policy matters but he also set out his views about how members should behave in this Chamber — that is to say whether they should wear a mask. Don’t do it from Downing Street, do it to the members that he’s talking to!’

He added a further threat that while he would work with any minister who wanted to avoid this kind of ’embarrassing situation’ in the future, if it continues ‘we will see more urgent questions [and] the government’s business will get blocked. It’s not what I want, I want to work together, but I want due respect for the members who are elected to this chamber.’

Throup argued in response that the government had made its policy announcement about antivirals by written ministerial statement yesterday, but that the Secretary of State had wanted to appeal directly to people to come forward for their booster jab, and that’s why he held the press conference.

She then had to answer — or as it happened, not answer — a demand from Health Select Committee chair Jeremy Hunt that she be allowed to sit at the cabinet table in the same way as her predecessor Nadhim Zahawi did. Throup modestly declined the invitation to ask for a promotion. But Hunt did highlight a little-noted shift, which is that the vaccines minister isn’t considered important enough to attend cabinet anymore. 

There are two possible reasons for this. The first is that when the reshuffle took place, Downing Street was very much in pandemic demob happy mode, with the Prime Minister and his team focusing squarely on what life after Covid was going to be like. The second is that Sajid Javid is a health secretary who has a markedly better relationship with No. 10 than his predecessor Matt Hancock. Therefore the vaccines minister doesn’t need to be brought directly to cabinet so that the Prime Minister has a chance of finding out what’s going on.

Neither are particularly inspiring reasons, not least given that Throup was having to explain why people aren’t coming forward for their boosters. NHS bosses are keen to emphasise that they’re ready and waiting to jab arms and that the message needs to be clearer. Downing Street seems to have accepted that, too, hence last night’s press conference. If that briefing was a realisation that ministers have become too relaxed about another winter surge, then it would explain why they were in a rush to tell the public and let MPs wait. But that rush and the resulting trouble in parliament hardly suggest we’re in for a well-managed winter.

Mogg and The Saj face off on face masks

Tory backbenchers have had an uncomfortable relationship with face masks since they were brought in last year. Spectators in the Commons chamber are greeted by the sight of many more Labour MPs preferring to wear the coverings than their Conservative counterparts, with some of the latter relishing the divide as the fundamental difference between their two parties.

But that reluctance for masks gave Sajid Javid an awkward moment at yesterday’s No. 10 press conference. After Sebastian Payne of the Financial Times pointed out to the Health Secretary that Tory MPs not wearing mask risked undermining government messaging and risked leaving them open to charges of hypocrisy, a squirming Javid said:

I think that’s a very fair point. As I say, we’ve all got our role to play in this and we the people standing on this stage play our public roles as a secretary of state, as someone in the NHS, as the head of UKHSA (UK Health Security Agency). We also have a role to play to set an example as private individuals as well, I think that’s a very fair point and I’m sure a lot of people will have heard you.

And it seems that Javid’s words have had an effect on his colleagues, judging by the increased number of Tories who chose to wear masks in the chamber this morning – despite it not being packed. Deputy chief whip Stuart Andrew, health minister Gillian Keegan and trade minister Penny Mordaunt were among the Conservative frontbenchers to wear one. But Commons Leader Jacob Rees-Mogg did not – and had the quite rejoinder when grilled about it by SNP nemesis Pete Wishart

Rees-Mogg told the Commons that: ‘There is no advice to wear face masks in workplaces. The advice on crowded spaces is with crowded spaces with people that you don’t know. We on this side know each other.’ Responding to Wishart, he joked that ‘it may be that the honourable gentleman doesn’t like mixing with his own side’, adding ‘but we on this side have a more convivial, fraternal spirit, and therefore are following the guidance of Her Majesty’s Government.’

Mind you, if he keeps undermining the Health Secretary, for how will long that be the case?

Does ‘white privilege’ exist?

On Wednesday Radio 4 aired a programme called White Mischief, which promised to trace ‘where whiteness came from and how its power has remained elusive.’ It asked whether white privilege existed. Or rather it pretended to ask. It assumed that it does. Instead of directly admitting that it was putting forward one point of view, it was one of those annoying programmes that affects a sort of light-hearted neutrality, and vaguely claims to be moving away from the unhelpfully limited conversations we have been having so far.

So instead of soberly setting out the issue, it began with a jokey clip of Grayson Perry hooting with laughter at some wise brave insight he had just had, and then darting off sidewise into some sociology. It seemed to want to provoke the listener into complaining that it was muddled – and then maybe to wonder whether his complaint was rooted in a discredited rationalism. In short, I disliked its tone.

Robert Halfon MP was allowed to question the idea of white privilege, and he pointed out that working-class white kids faced serious obstacles and that calling them privileged on account of their race was counter-productive. On the other hand he was very clear that racism exists and can be a severe form of disadvantage. The presenter did not seriously comment on this point of view; he moved on to something else. This felt evasive and lazy. If there is a serious objection to the concept of white privilege it should be squarely considered. Instead it was quickly acknowledged for the sake of balance, and then ignored.

The programme annoyed me. But maybe fruitfully. For it spurred me into trying to express my objection to the idea of white privilege, and then, when I got thinking (dangerous, thinking) I admitted that the concept might have some validity. But this must be articulated with great care.

Isn’t it enough to say that everyone should be treated equally, and that discrimination against ethnic minorities is a bad thing? On one level, no. This standard liberal narrative subtly associates normality with the absence of racial discrimination, and so confers ‘normal’ status on the white majority as long as they are not overtly racist. It subtly affirms the white majority as already in tune with the ideal state of enlightened harmony. But if we see racial discord as an issue affecting society as a whole, then we have to think about the racial identity of the majority, even though we are accustomed to seeing it as merely normal and neutral.

So there is some validity in antiracists wanting to turn the tables on the white majority, and make them awkwardly racially self-conscious. I’m not quite saying that we whites should feel guilty for our whiteness. But we should feel involved in the problem of racial discord, and question the liberal assumption that as long as we are decent enough, then we are blamelessly waiting for racial harmony to unfold.

Our core secular liberal assumptions are too weak to express the fierce power of the issue. Maybe, as I’ve argued here before, we need a more religious language, capable of voicing notions of sin and hope. The new assertive antiracism should be seen in this light. It insists that the white majority is not morally neutral, but is involved in the fraught story of racism. It says that unless it repents of historic sin, and yearns for a truly harmonious society, it is complicit in a deep evil, and has the privilege of being able to ignore the fact.

Lindsay and Priti beef up MPs’ security

The death of Sir David Amess on Friday has led to an increased focus on MPs’ security. In the hours following the attack, some police forces sent officers to constituency surgeries, offering protection at MPs’ offices and checking in on both MPs and local councillors to assess their concerns. Now, in a joint statement, the Home Secretary Priti Patel and Commons Speaker Lindsay Hoyle have written to members across the House to set out their steps for keeping honourable members safe when they are undertaking local duties.

According to an email seen by Mr S, from this Friday a trained and accredited Security Operative will be available to come to MPs’ constituency surgeries to offer security advice. The letter – co-signed by both Patel and Hoyle –  tells MPs that ‘if you intend to hold a physical surgery, I urge you to take up this service’ by contacting the Members’ Security Support Service. 

This support however ‘is in addition to, and is not intended to replace any existing security arrangements you may have in place or the engagement that should occur with the police.’ Local and national police teams have been working together ‘at pace to review and build on existing structures’ and ensuring that ‘robust security measures’ including both private security and appropriate policing support will be available to members in the immediate term.

Hoyle and Patel told MPs that ‘we do not see any information or intelligence which points to any credible specific imminent threat’ but that ‘it is nonetheless sadly the case that attacks by terrorists upon members of this House are likely.’ The risk assessment level to MPs is now classed as ‘substantial’ which brings them into line with the national threat level. Security and intelligence agencies and counter-terror police have ensured this change is being ‘properly reflected in their operational posture.’

Advice is being released today on holding physical surgeries, with MPs told that ‘the choice of whether or not to hold a physical surgery is an entirely personal one based on our individual situations.’ There is ‘no suggestion of there being a right or wrong way to hold surgeries; the priority is for you to hold a safe surgery, if you choose to hold one.’

The media has a climate change blind spot

Are you someone who is delighted by the government’s eye-wateringly expensive commitment to deliver ‘net zero’ by 2035, or are you a dissenter on the grounds that its plans do not go far, or fast, enough?

According to the BBC and many other media organisations, you must surely belong to one of those two groups.

Somehow the widely held viewpoint to which I subscribe – that the weight of evidence suggests man-made climate change is a big problem but we should still scrutinise climate policies on grounds of proportionality, value for money and how they measure up against less idealistic alternatives – has been squeezed out.

Tuesday morning’s news bulletins on the Today programme provided a case study of how the debate is being framed. The top story concerned the government’s new net zero announcements, including a £450 million plan to subsidise folk getting rid of gas boilers and replacing them with heat pumps. The government, we were told, was aiming to end the sale of new gas boilers in 14 years.

An extraordinarily radical approach, one might think. But the only alternative view to the government’s position was that this was insufficient. ‘Some green groups have warned the total funding is not enough and that too few homes will benefit,’ listeners were told.

The BBC’s ‘Environment Analyst’, meanwhile, told listeners that while green groups applauded the phasing out of gas boilers, they had calculated that the government’s budget was ‘£10 billion short over three years.’ Labour’s Pat McFadden said the world had been waiting for Britain to take a lead in advance of COP26 and the government’s announcement ‘failed that test of leadership’.

Questions directed at Anne-Marie Trevelyan, the international trade secretary put up to defend the policy, included: ‘Why aren’t you going further?’, ‘If we’re leading it [the world] why aren’t we saying today that we will ban new gas boilers?’ and ‘Can you say today that we will in the year 2030 have achieved emissions being cut by at least 68 per cent compared to 1990 levels?’

Later that day in the Commons the shadow energy secretary Ed Miliband took the same line. ‘The plan falls short on delivery, and while there is modest short-term investment, there is nothing like the commitment that we believe is required,’ he said.

Miliband then sought to delegitimise any sceptical scrutiny of the escalating cost of net zero and its potentially intrusive impact on British families by adding: ‘The Chancellor’s fingerprints are all over these documents, and not in a good way.’

On no mainstream news bulletin did I hear anyone offering any perspective based on efficacy or value for money of the policies. Given that the UK now accounts for less than 1 per cent of global carbon emissions, is there not a case for believing that spending huge sums on further reducing our contribution will make no discernible difference to climate trends? In the absence of binding pledges by the big polluters, especially China, might it not make more sense for us to concentrate on investing instead in schemes to mitigate the harmful impacts of global warming, such as improved flood defences?

Why is the UK government apparently swallowing the idea that because Britain gave humanity the gift of the industrial revolution – and with it an escape route from grinding poverty – this makes us somehow culpable and under higher obligations to spend vast sums reducing future emissions than any other nation? How does this make sense when we are clearly a country that will suffer less than many others from the impact of global warming (which reminds me that I must put in another order for my favourite English sparkling wine)?

The absence of any discussion of questions such as these is not only a function of groupthink at the BBC and other London-based broadcasters. They can only get away with it because so many right-wing people remain wedded, almost as an article of faith, to the idea that man-made climate change is a total fiction. Those pitching their tents on this ideological terrain set themselves against not only David Attenborough, Greta Thunberg and the entire British royal family, but also against the 99.9 per cent of scientific studies finding that global warming is real and mainly caused by human activity.

This is not a stance which is going to cause a moment’s concern to even the most hard-line eco-zealot. The BBC and other media outlets consider themselves on very firm ground when seeking to banish it from public discourse altogether.

Perhaps a new lobby group is needed that can pose key questions about proportionality, mitigation and value for money while explicitly not offering any room to conspiracy theorists or outright deniers of man-made climate change. As of right now environmental policy is securely strapped to a one-way ratchet where any move by the government in favour of green policies is swallowed up and then derided as not being nearly sufficient.

It is possible, though not in my view likely, that for now green campaigners are right – and the size and urgency of the problem really does demand even bigger responses than the UK government has so far signed-up to. But at some point that will no longer be the case and we will find ourselves pouring taxpayers’ money down the drain and passing laws curtailing individual freedom that are not justified by a rational cost benefit analysis.

If we of a naturally sceptical disposition do not focus on framing our arguments more sensibly in future then we will only have ourselves to blame.

Banning anonymity creates more problems than it solves

There are growing calls to end internet anonymity in the wake of Sir David Amess’s death. The Tory MP Mark Francois argued in the Commons this week for a ‘David’s law’ to do this, to try and bring back civility into politics. Today, Matt Hancock and the Labour MP Rupa Huq have stated that the Online Harms Bill should tackle ‘anonymous abuse’. But outlawing internet anonymity would be a mistake. Two members of parliament have been killed in the past five years. This, one long-serving MP laments, is the kind of statistic you would expect in a failing state, as I write in the magazine this week.

At the moment, many MPs — even some who are normally quite libertarian — are sympathetic to ‘David’s law’. This is quite an understandable reaction given the abuse they receive from anonymous accounts on social media, but there are risks to ending anonymity. Many MPs argue that a person should be able to use social media accounts under a pseudonym but that the platform should keep a private record of who that person is. The problem with this approach is that any database of who is linked to what account could be hacked. The rocketing levels of online banking fraud are a reminder of how difficult it is to achieve failsafe online security.   

Then there is the question of whistleblowers. Genuine anonymity makes it far easier for people to alert others to malpractice in their own organisation. There is an international consideration too: if Britain were to ban online anonymity, the precedent would be seized on by repressive regimes around the world to justify their actions. 

COP26 hit by yet another strike

It’s just ten days to go before COP26, the green gathering described by Ed Miliband as ‘the most consequential summit that has ever taken place anywhere in the world.’ The eco-equivalent of Tehran, Yalta and Potsdam is set to begin in Glasgow next Sunday, with delegates jetting in from across the globe to hobnob, hector, hum and haw at the UN’s climate change conference. So, ahead of His Holiness, Joe Biden, various Western satraps and other panjandrums gracing us with their presence, Mr S thought he’d provide an update on how things are going in the host city.

It turns out all is not well in Dear Green Place, where local bosses seem to be intent on re-enacting the Winter of Discontent. The (political) dead have been left unburied, with Britain’s worst council leader Susan Aitken ineffectually presiding over a series of strikes which risk leaving the city at a standstill. There’s firstly the bin workers of the GMB trade union, who last week voted for industrial action as rubbish piled up on Glasgow’s streets, despite Aitken claiming the city merely needs a ‘spruce up.’ The garbage collectors have released a series of punchy social media clips fronted by charismatic local hype-man Chris Mitchell, a kind of Braveheart of the bins – they may take our lives, but they’ll never take our refuse. Cleansing, school caretaker and catering roles will also be affected.

Then there’s the transport unions who have timed a walkout to coincide with the beginning of the conference. The RMT’s spiritual successors to Bob Crowe last week confirmed that after months of disruption to Sunday services, members who work for both ScotRail and Caledonian Sleeper will go on strike, joining a separate series of stoppages by ScotRail engineers, organised by Unite. This means that throughout the biggest eco-fest the world has ever seen, attendees will be forced to take gas-guzzling taxis around the host city, given that so many of those hotels closest to the conference venues have been booked up by the thousands of delegates. Awkward.

And now, even the lawyers are going on strike. This week Scotland’s three principal bar associations voted to opt out of a duty solicitor scheme due to continued mistreatment of defence lawyers, despite numerous arrests being expected at COP26. Members of the Glasgow, Edinburgh and Aberdeen Bar Associations, are refusing to participate and have been joined by others including the Hamilton and Falkirk bars. Add to that the reluctance of so many world leaders to attend – Russia’s Putin is absent while Modi of India and Xi of China are yet to confirm – and it looks like the UN summit will be have to be re-dubbed ‘FLOP26.’

Still, what chance have they got to save the world when they can’t even sort the bins out?

Somewhere in this production lies Shakespeare’s tragedy: Almeida’s Macbeth reviewed

Yaël Farber’s Macbeth sets out to be a great work of art. The director crams the Almeida’s stage with suggestive props, glass panels, microphones, a wheelbarrow full of jackboots. The witches are not the usual vagrants or carbuncled mystics. These grim-looking ladies have expensive hairdos and nicely ironed shirts — like a panel of disgruntled academics at a tribunal.

William Gaunt is a decrepit Duncan who looks ready to receive his telegram from the Queen. He can barely rise from his NHS wheelchair. But one wonders why this frail old chap had to be knifed to death? Much easier to smother him with a pillow and claim he expired naturally. Gaunt speaks with an English accent but the rest of his court are ranting Scotsmen who wear beards and identical combat fatigues. It’s hard to distinguish one from another.

James McArdle (Macbeth) seems too nice to be a half-crazed warlord. Give him a little brewery to run in Shoreditch and he’d be fine. Saoirse Ronan (Lady Macbeth) wears a natty white catsuit and speaks her lines with a pleasant Irish brogue. At times she seems like a Ryanair stewardess stranded in a team-building exercise for angry Scottish dads. The production makes her role larger than Shakespeare intended and she witnesses the murder of Macduff’s family. This certainly helps to explain her mental collapse at the end but her death is presented as a glamorous and beautiful sacrifice. What for? She’s a bigger psycho than her husband.

The director believes that Scotland was suffering from climate change in the 11th century. There’s an electric fan to keep the castle cool as temperatures rise around the world. Meanwhile the melting ice-caps have caused the moat to flood, and a shallow pool of water spreads inexorably across the stage during the action. Important speeches are accompanied by the sound of boots sploshing.

And let’s not forget the music. It never stops. A soprano ululates into a microphone while a cellist saws at a wooden box. Banquo’s death wins the prize for the most over-produced scene of the year. The two murderers stab him in the guts while the singer moans and the cellist grinds. The three witches watch this atrocity from the rear of the stage, looking elegantly furious. To one side Macbeth and his wife canoodle in a shadowy castle corridor. The whole thing is as artful and antiseptic as a George Michael video.

So much effort has been lavished on these pictorial details that the basics have been overlooked. Scene after scene is ruined because the male actors simply bawl and shriek at each other. It’s like watching road-rage footage. The scene in which Macduff learns of his family’s murder is one of the most psychologically acute portraits of bereavement ever written. But it needs variety of tone. Emun Elliott begins the scene yelling at top volume so he has no higher pitch of emotion to reach for. Instead he collapses, like a stricken rock star, choking on streams of spume and snot. A wonderful opportunity ruined by saliva.

The play closes with an inexplicable gesture. An actress crosses the flooded stage and empties the wheelbarrow full of boots into the shallow water. Somewhere in this gallery of contrivances lies Shakespeare’s tragedy. But it’s hard to spot.

Naughty Ian McKellen. After his athletic triumph as Hamlet last summer he returns to the Theatre Royal, Windsor, to perform a lap of honour. He plays Firs in Sean Mathias’s Cherry Orchard. Who is Firs? He’s the dotty old servant who works for Ranyevskaya, a spendthrift matriarch who returns to Russia after years in exile following her young son’s sudden death.

The play is a beautiful meditation on grief and stoicism, and the script has been adjusted to give Firs additional prominence. But let’s be honest, it’s a cameo. McKellen, in a magnificent grey beard, gets plenty of laughs from Firs’s non-sequiturs and distracted ramblings. And he bulks out the role with improvisations. He snorts and frowns. He clears his throat meaningfully. He chunters and mutters to himself as he potters about the drawing-room.

The audience loves it. But Firs makes no demands on his talent. And if he steals the odd scene, he does so diplomatically. Perhaps he regrets not taking the meatier role of Lopakhin which Martin Shaw plays with gruff amiability. Francesca Annis finds there’s not much to be done with Ranyevskaya, the kindly aristocrat who can’t see bankruptcy staring her in the face.

Robert Daws’s plump and jovial Pishchik seems to have been drafted in from a Swedish fairy-tale. He delivers every line with an effusion of mirthful chortling. Alis Wyn Davies stands out as a charismatic Dunyasha. Better things lie ahead for her. And one hopes that when McKellen has enjoyed his break he’ll come back and put in a full shift.

Plan Z: the rise of Éric Zemmour

The fact that Éric Zemmour hasn’t yet declared himself a candidate in next year’s French presidential election is a bit of a joke. A Harris poll last week put him on 17 per cent, ahead of all other rivals to President Emmanuel Macron. And he’s holding rallies across France at which adoring fans in ‘Zemmour 2022’ T-shirts chant: ‘Zemmour! Président!’

He’s still pretending to be a TV personality on a big book promotion tour. But Mr Z is running and everybody knows it. He has a devoted and surprisingly professional campaign behind him, the nucleus of a political party, conceived with a clear mission: to restore la gloire de la France. His new book has the faintly ridiculous title La France n’a pas dit son dernier mot (France has not said its final word) and has already sold more than 150,000 copies. He’s insanely popular.

The Parisian establishment, and most foreign correspondents in France, are eager to dismiss him as a rabble-rouser and a show-off. He’s called ‘far-right’ and fascist. Stanford University’s Cécile Alduy, whom the Guardian calls ‘an expert on French political semantics’, says that ‘Zemmour uses a very old-fashioned, French far-right discourse… But what is new is the reception and acceptance of this discourse in the public conversation’. What drives the media really crazy is its inability to stop talking about Zemmour.

Bernard-Henri Lévy, another flamboyant public intello, has accused him of being a Jewish anti-Semite. The truth is Zemmour, the son of Algerian immigrants, says lots of things Lévy has said about Islam over the years, just more forcefully. He also says what a lot of French people know to be right: France has failed to assimilate large parts of its Muslim population and that is a problem.

Zemmour has often been compared to Trump and he does want to Make France Great Again. ‘We want to protect our language,’ he says, ‘the most beautiful in the world, the most clear, we want to protect it from American and North African influence and “inclusive writing”.’

A better comparison, though, might be with Boris Johnson. Like the British Prime Minister, Zemmour has a first-rate mind and is often mistaken for a clown. He is a patriotic thinker who writes his own books and has a back catalogue of offensive remarks and articles for critics to pore over. He’s also someone who seems to fail upwards.

Zemmour (the name derives from the Berber word for olive tree) is less of a classical liberal than Johnson. He calls himself a Gaullist, doesn’t like what he calls ‘the gay lobby’, and has spoken darkly of a coming war between races. He believes that unless immigration is checked France will become ‘an Islamic Republic’. He’s even been convicted for inciting racial hated after he said on television that most drug dealers were ‘blacks and Arabs’.

To his fans, however, Zemmour’s more provocative rhetoric is evidence of sincerity. Zemmour will at some stage soon announce a new political party (let’s hope for an amusing name). A 200-page manifesto is nearly finalised, and his advisers are quick to tell you that it dwells on much more than immigration. He wants to lower taxes, especially on inheritance and small businesses. While sensitive to the essential statism of the French system, he has ambitious plans to reduce France’s monstrous deficit by tackling widespread welfare fraud. As president, he would keep France in Nato, but remove his country from the organisation’s integrated command. That may seem a small gesture, involving only a few hundred French troops, but Zemmour intends to signal that under his leadership, France’s role in the world will not be decided in Washington, Brussels or Berlin. He also intends to reset France’s relationship with Russia and move away from the reflexive anti-Putinism of America and Britain.

Zemmour is no ‘Frexiteer’. ‘We need to have economic credibility,’ says one of his advisers. ‘So that excludes adventures such as leaving the euro or the [European] Union.’ Yet his team does talk about ‘taking back control’ from Europe and he is proposing another referendum in order to put French law above that of the EU.

What Zemmour threatens to do — and what makes him so terrifying to the existing political class — is unite the right in an essentially conservative country. For decades, French socialists have kept themselves in power by dividing their opposition, splitting off the centrist and socially acceptable Union Pour Un Mouvement Populaire (renamed Les Républicains in 2015) from the proletarian and quasi-fascist Front National (renamed Rassemblement National in 2018). Marine Le Pen, who took over her father’s genuinely extreme movement, has spent years trying to detoxify the family brand. She embraced gays and ditched the Holocaust denialism, which was sweet of her. Her efforts culminated in 2017, when she reached the last round of the presidential election. Still, she lost handsomely to Macron and now her support base is collapsing.

Zemmour is better positioned to sweep up the centre ground. With his culture war wizardry and his Trump/Johnson-like ability to render the media apoplectic, he can always annoy the snobs enough to keep the plebs happy. But he can also woo middle- and upper-middle-class French people, Catholics as well as small business owners and secular liberals.

Zemmour appeals to an older French conservatism, a nostalgia for France before the incestuous Soixante-Huitards came along and wrecked everything. He speaks often of Great French Men, among whom probably he counts himself. He likes to quote the opening of Jacques Bainville’s History of France: ‘France is neither an empire nor a race. It is better. It is a nation.’ His campaign believes his rousing appeals for French rejuvenation, mixed with his anger towards an out-of-control immigration system, will mobilise low-propensity voters.

At the same time, the Zemmour 2022 playbook may resemble nothing so much as Macron 2017. By founding En Marche, President Macron was able to turn on turned-off voters and repackage his Eurocentric centre-leftism as something radical and new. In doing so, he murdered the old-fashioned French left, just as Tony Blair destroyed old Labour in the 1990s. The Parti Socialiste is now dying: its candidate Anne Hidalgo is polling at 5 per cent. Meanwhile, the crepuscular radical Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the French Bernie Sanders, is on 11 per cent.

Zemmour is also an existential menace to Les Républicains, who can’t seem to settle on their best candidate for next year. Michel Barnier is the establishment choice, but he’s not much more loved in France than he is in Britain after the Brexit negotiations. Xavier Bertrand is more of a party bruiser type, and he’s polling at 14 per cent. Valérie Pécresse is admired in political circles but has so far failed to make much of an impression as a presidential contender. The problem for all these figures is that Zemmour sucks up all the airtime they might normally absorb. The rise of Z — a moniker he mischievously cultivates — is just a much better story.

Zemmour is shrewd. He spies an opportunity to offer a new ‘third way’ for the right. He can mix populist rhetoric about immigration and Macron’s ghastly vaccine passports with detailed plans for healthcare reform and a new corporate tax system.

He remains a wild insurgent and a very long shot for the presidency. He may just end up being another vote-splitter on the right. His campaign could have problems financing itself. Even if he manages to gazump Le Pen, eviscerate Les Républicains and finish in the top two in the first round of the election on 10 April, he will struggle to overcome Macron, who despite his unpopularity still has the advantages of the incumbency. But the prospect of those two dynamic, combative and eloquent politicians squaring off in televised debates is an exciting one. In the big discussion about what it means, fondamentalement, to be French, Mr Z may have the final word.

You’ll tire of the wackiness and the whimsy: The French Dispatch reviewed

The American filmmaker Wes Anderson has an apartment in Paris and has always yearned to make a French movie but also he has always yearned to make a film about the New Yorker, the magazine with subscribers all round the world, some of whom actually get round to reading it before binning it, and some of whom don’t. (She says, guiltily.) So The French Dispatch is, he has said, the ‘smooching’ of these two ideas, and it is, alas, a ‘smooch’ of a film. That is, not one thing or the other. I would further add it’s as if all the cast had been instructed to act wackily and off-kilter throughout because we won’t get tired of that. But I promise you we quickly do.

This is an anthology film set at The French Dispatch, a fictional magazine, as inspired by the New Yorker, and based in the fictional French town of Ennui-sur-Blasé. (The late critic Roger Ebert once criticised Anderson for his ‘terminal whimsy’; you can understand why.) It stars Bill Murray as the magazine’s editor, Arthur Howitzer Jr., who is based on Harold Ross, the New Yorker’s first editor. However, when I say it stars Bill Murray there isn’t much of Bill Murray. If you manage to cast Bill Murray, which is never easy — he does not have an agent or mobile; you have to leave a message on his answerphone — you would hope for Ghostbusters levels of Bill Murray, or Lost in Translation levels, or Broken Flowers levels, but he’s in just a few scenes. Still, he does better than a host of other stars — Saoirse Ronan, Willem Dafoe, Edward Norton, Elisabeth Moss, Christoph Waltz — where it’s a case of blink and you’ll miss them. That said, it is fun noting who you’d miss, if you did blink. I now realise I missed Henry Winkler, so must have blinked then.

The film focuses on this month’s edition of the magazine, which is to be the last, as Howitzer has just died. (A heart attack; Murray’s no more!) It’s set in the 1960s as we follow three of the stories being written. The first is the story of an imprisoned painter (Benicio del Toro), his prison guard (Léa Seydoux) and an art dealer (Adrien Brody), as told by the magazine’s art critic (Tilda Swinton). Then it’s the Paris student uprising (starring Timothée Chalamet and Frances McDormand) and finally a (muddled) crime mystery featuring the police commissar’s chef (Stephen Park), as recounted by the magazine’s food writer (Jeffrey Wright). The chef is called Nescafier, although it could have been Maxwell Maison, I suppose. Terminal whimsy, it can be catching.

This is all told at a frantic lick as the narrative switches from live action to graphics, colour to black and white, and other techniques that seem meretricious rather than useful. The characters might suddenly all stand stock-still during a fight, for example, which is arresting the first time, but do we need it again? And again? But most troublingly, the characters aren’t given any space to live and breathe. They’re cartoonish, as performed cartoonishly throughout, and if any one of them fell into the Blasé and drowned, you’d struggle to care. It’s as if too much time and attention has been given to the aesthetics — the sets are glorious — and almost none to putting some heart and soul into it.

A highly polished exercise in treading water: Season 3 of Succession reviewed

At one point in an early Simpsons, Homer comes across an old issue of TV Guide, and finds the listing for the sitcom Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C. ‘Gomer upsets Sergeant Carter,’ he reads — adding with a fond chuckle, ‘I’ll never forget that episode.’ Even for British viewers unfamiliar with the show, the joke is clear: that’s what happens in every episode.

Sad to say, this popped into my head while watching the first in the new series of Succession. The acting, script and direction are as brilliant as ever. Nonetheless, once Logan Roy began yet again to dangle the possibility of becoming the next CEO of his media empire before his rivalrous offspring, it was hard not to wonder if the iron law of diminishing returns might be in the process of claiming its latest victim.

The episode picked up the story just after the series two cliffhanger: instead of taking his pre-arranged fall for the cover-up of sexual abuse on the company’s cruise ships, Logan’s son Kendall had used a press conference to place the blame squarely on his old dad. Now, having refreshed himself with a brief breakdown, Kendall is making a bid (yes, another one) to take over the business.

Not, needless to say, that Logan is taking this lying down, threatening — give or take a few expletives — to ‘grind Kendall’s bones’. Meanwhile, he’ll step down as CEO and give the job to, well, someone else. Cue the traditional jostling for position among the traditional candidates.

Every individual scene on Monday was perfectly put together. Jeremy Strong is still miraculously good at simultaneously conveying — by the use of eyes alone — Kendall’s effortful belief that he can topple his father and his underlying fear that he can’t. Brian Cox’s Logan continues to radiate power, properly scary menace and, somewhere deep in the mix, a genuine if twisted love for his variously messed-up children.

Above all, Jesse Armstrong’s writing retains its ability to mix comedy, crunching family drama and an alarmingly persuasive picture of how the world really works — and all in such a way that they reinforce rather than ever undermine each other.

The perhaps inescapable trouble, though, is not only that the plotting is starting to seem like a theme with not quite enough variations. It’s also that while that picture of the world once felt revelatory, now that we’ve had the revelations, much of the shock value is lost.

Granted, it’s a long-standing rule of television that what you do with a much-loved and critically acclaimed programme is to keep making it. But, as Succession (like The West Wing and Killing Eve before it) is beginning to suggest, the rule isn’t necessarily a wise one.

I’m certainly going to keep watching series three: partly because below-par Succession is still well-above-par TV; but mostly in the hope that I’ll be proved wrong and that it can find a direction that rekindles our old sense of awed admiration. Even so, the uncomfortable sense remains that the opening instalment was a highly polished exercise in treading water.

After tackling O.J. Simpson and the killing of Gianni Versace, the latest American Crime Story has turned to a less murderous offence with Impeachment, a ten-part drama about the Monica Lewinsky affair that features Lewinsky herself among the producers. As played by Beanie Feldstein, she was first seen here in January 1998 emanating youth and sweetness as she prepared to meet her supposed friend and confidant Linda Tripp at the mall. But when she arrived she was met by the FBI agents Tripp had tipped off. As the scales fell from her over-trusting eyes, Monica asked that Tripp stay for the subsequent interview, so ‘that treacherous bitch can see what she’s done to me’. And from there, the episode flashed back over several years to prove just how accurate that description of Tripp was, with her emerging firmly as the villain of the piece.

American Crime Story, then, has another great tale to tell — but unlike in the previous series, it doesn’t seem sure how to tell it. Most obviously, the tone is all over the place. Poor old Paula Jones, for instance, was played almost entirely for laughs as she explained how Bill Clinton as governor of Arkansas had invited her to his hotel room and ‘pulled his business right out in the air’. Less jolly was the sheer malevolent glee with which the programme piled up the indignities suffered by Tripp, who died last year — a glee it was annoyingly difficult not to share.

As for Monica, she falls somewhere between the comically and the tragically naïve. Of course, some programmes (Succession, for one) might have managed to fuse the two things into a convincing whole. So far, however, Impeachment merely shuttles uneasily between them.

Letters: How to feed the world

Doom and gloom

Sir: The depressing article by Tom Woodman (‘You must be kidding’, 16 October) confirms my growing fears about the damage being wrought by the promoters of apocalyptic climate change, which has become a dangerous cult with alarming echoes of millenarian doom which has stretched through many previous centuries. While sensible care for the environment is a good thing, the descriptions of a frightening future of the imminent end of the world through drought, flood and fire now imbues every aspect of education and politics. Constantly bombarding young people with the news that the end of the world is nigh has led many of them into completely unnecessary visions of death and disaster.

Those convinced by the relentlessly gloomy outlook should try reading some of the opposite viewpoints instead, of which there are many. Those responsible for the propaganda should hang their heads in shame at what they have done and are doing to the mental welfare of younger generations.

Dr Angela Montford

St Andrews, Fife

Feeding the world

Sir: Tom Woodman writes: ‘There are just too many of us. It’s estimated that the world population could be too big to feed itself by 2050. More people, in summary, is not what we need.’ We respectfully disagree.

Between 1980 and 2020, the average nominal price of 24 basic food commodities (ranging from bananas to wheat) increased by 35 per cent. Over the same period, the average global nominal wage per hour rose by 412 per cent. That means that the amount of work required to buy one unit in the basket of 24 food commodities in 1980 bought 4.35 baskets in 2020. Put differently, the personal food abundance of the average inhabitant of the planet increased by 335 per cent.

Given that the ‘time price’ (nominal price divided by nominal hourly wage) of food fell by 77 per cent, while the global population rose by 76 per cent (from 4.4 billion to 7.8 billion), we conclude that every 1 per cent increase in global population corresponds to over 1 per cent decline in food prices. On average, every human being creates more than he or she consumes. Those who desire cheaper food should hope for more people.

Marian L. Tupy (Cato Institute)

Gale L. Pooley

(Brigham Young University, Hawaii)

Lovely clutter

Sir: Laura Freeman (‘Whatnots to like’, 16 October) should seek out the Spalding Gentlemen’s Society in Lincolnshire. Affectionately known to some of us as the Spalding Hoarders’ Society, it has been accumulating books and ‘stuff’ since 1710: every available drawer, cupboard, nook and cranny hides a map, magazine, book, doll, flag, poster, clock, medal, coin, manuscript, plate, uniform, assegai, sword… Want to see a Roman sandal found in a fen, browse a full run of original Spectator newspapers, look at a Tompion pocket watch? It’s here.
Jem Bowkett
Spalding, Lincolnshire

My mother the butcher

Sir: My mother, Margaret Western, qualified as the UK’s first woman master butcher in 1956 (‘Bone to pick’, 9 October). When she told her father that she wanted to join her brothers in our family butchers in Gloucestershire, he told her she would have to be twice as good as any man if she was going to succeed, so he sent her to study at the Paris School of Butchery. She was a very fine butcher, widely respected by her apprentices and all in the trade, including at Smithfield. Sadly, she discouraged me from following her more than 30 years later, so congratulations to Olivia Potts for learning butchery. It is wonderful to know that more women are entering the trade.

Philippa Thomas

Newnham on Severn, Gloucestershire

In defence of the defence

Sir: I was surprised to read Prue Leith (‘Letter from Gozo’, 16 October) accuse the Knights Hospitaller of making ‘a poor fist’ of defending Malta from the Turks. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Great Siege of Malta in 1565 — when the Ottoman Empire tried in vain for four months to capture the island — became one of the most celebrated events of 16th-century Europe. Ernle Bradford’s book The Great Siege: Malta 1565 is a must before holidaying on the island.

Admiral Lord West

House of Lords, London SW1

Against the tide

Sir: There are several drawbacks to tidal power (Letters, 16 October). Firstly, it is not as environmental as it seems, as it interferes with the coastal ecosystem, marine life that lives between low and high tides. Secondly, around much of our coast the tidal range is too small to generate much power, in return for the energy and cash input of constructing tidal power stations. Thirdly, many estuaries where there is a large tidal range are also major ports, and constructing new docks facilities would take more materials and energy. Fourthly, some tidal installations are vulnerable to storms by nature of their location. The best form of renewable energy is energy we don’t use, through forgoing unnecessary consumption.

Dr Hillary J. Shaw

Newport, Shropshire

Captive audience

Sir: Andrew Roberts (Diary, 16 October) invites historians to speak to prisoners for his History in Prisons project. Volunteers should beware the dilemma that faced Michael Howard when, as home secretary, he was about to give a speech at Wormwood Scrubs: how to address inmates? ‘Distinguished guests’ seemed inappropriate. Likewise ‘My lords, ladies and gentlemen’. Apparently he settled on: ‘May I say how delighted I am to see so many of you here today.’

Alasdair Riley

London W4

My advice to Dave Chappelle

I’m accustomed to a sense of urgency in relation to Netflix offerings because the streaming service often buys short-term rights that abruptly run out. But this time, I rushed to see Dave Chappelle’s new stand-up special The Closer lest Netflix’s own disgruntled employees succeed in getting the performance taken down. Strictly speaking, the affronted staff aren’t demanding the show’s withdrawal, but it’s hard to see what else the proposed employee walkout on Wednesday was designed to accomplish. After all, in the olden days if you didn’t like something on television you just didn’t watch it, but in our enlightened times you make damned sure no one else can watch it either.

Chappelle stoked the ire of trans activists with less than reverent jokes about gender swappers in his last Netflix show, Sticks & Stones. After being widely trashed as a ‘transphobe’, the comedian isn’t choosing to give such incendiary material a judicious wide berth, but in the new routine doubles down. In the interest of preserving his right to send up anyone he cares to, this is a sound stratagem: see, you can’t intimidate me. The show’s most trans-gressive lines — his calling surgically altered genitals ‘Impossible Pussy’, alluding to vegetarian fake meat — are also the funniest.

Where the performance sags is in its sincere bits. Particularly ill-judged is an over-long riff on a trans comedian who opened one of Chappelle’s acts, and who was subsequently lacerated on social media for supporting a notorious ‘transphobe’. Thereafter, Chappelle reveals dramatically, his colleague committed suicide. This is not funny, nor is it intended to be. The whole extended riff isn’t funny. Its purpose is to demonstrate that Chappelle cares deeply about trans people, that he knows and admires actual trans people, that he is not a transphobe.

In short, Chappelle sounds defensive, which has a lousy reputation for good reason. Defensiveness is a strategic mistake. It signals weakness. It betrays that your detractors got to you. And however weirdly, it also waves the red flag of guilt.

In an era of so much finger-pointing that the censorious will soon have to resort to making jabbing accusations with their toes, this is a commonplace quandary: when other people call you names and besmirch your reputation, how do you defend yourself without becoming fatally ‘defensive’? Whenever I denied having done something wrong as a kid, my father’s most exasperating rhetorical gambit was the misquotation of Hamlet: ‘Methinks thou dost protest too much.’ So I was guilty if I didn’t deny the misconduct, and guilty if I did deny it. Oh, swell. That’s why we have principles like ‘innocent until proven guilty’ — to counter the unfortunate fact that mere accusation imputes taint.

Thus the best way to convince the public that you’re a racist is to claim you’re not one — as Bright Sheng, a music professor at the University of Michigan, discovered last month. He’d shown his class a 1965 film of Laurence Olivier playing the role of Othello in blackface. Students were flamboyantly horrified and complained to the administration. Sheng apologised (error) and cited examples of his longstanding support for minorities — that is, he was defensive, an even bigger error, after which the professor was obliged to quit the class.

Many Spectator readers will be aware that your humble columnist here has been subject to more than one wholesale assault, in both social and legacy media. Reliably, something I’ve said or written has been maliciously, wilfully misrepresented. I’ve experimented with defending myself — or, as I saw it, explaining myself (‘Look, did any of you people actually read the column?’) — and sure enough, that approach backfires.

What works better is aggressive counterattack, coming out with guns blazing. Alternatively, there are merits to a Gandhi-esque refusal to be drawn. When you blithely ignore all manner of slanderous huffing and puffing, it’s miraculous how fast the opposition exhausts itself and all that slung mud evaporates to dust.

So long as you can keep your job — quite a caveat at present — the very best response to being vilified is not to speak directly to outlandish accusations, but to carry on doing what you’ve been doing. To refuse to be waylaid.

In my case, that means continuing to express what I think, even if I’m courting more trouble. In Chappelle’s case, that should have meant putting together a routine that includes only the snarkiest, most outrageous gags about trans people, the bits that are genuinely, scandalously funny, and then moving on to other targets, about whom he could also be funny, which too much of his latest material isn’t. The failings of The Closer aren’t political but artistic. Having tempted the comedian to damage the quality of his act with all that pleading that deep down he’s really a nice person, his traducers score a win.

I’m a huge Dave Chappelle fan. He’s done more to advance American race relations than all the unconscious-bias training courses put together. So, Dave! A little free advice: you can’t please people who don’t wish to be pleased. Like, a while back, I was approaching a red light on my bike. An older woman had just started into the crosswalk, scowling with a bitterness that looked habitual. Her mouth was already open when I stopped. She’d been poised to shout at me for jumping the light, and my compliance with traffic laws ruined her good time. Furious, she sputtered desperately instead: ‘You’re supposed to stop at that white line, you know!’ I couldn’t help but laugh. As she didn’t wish to be pleased, pleasing her only intensified her displeasure. Like the rest of the woke brigade, most trans activists by nature do not wish to be pleased. Ergo, appeasement is pointless. So just keep doing what you’d been doing, friend.

Thus far, Netflix is sticking by The Closer. Professional critics may have been incensed, and I may have been disappointed, but the show maintains a 96 per cent rating on Rotten Tomatoes. A thousand audience complaints are negligible among ten million views. A blessed iron rule is holding: at least black comedians can still make jokes.

My night in Béziers with Zemmour

Béziers is the ancient winemaking capital of the Occitanie region in the deep south of France and a stronghold of the French right. Its popular mayor, Robert Ménard, a former journalist, was elected as an independent, but with a strong endorsement from Marine Le Pen. Her political movement, the Rassemblement National, formerly the National Front, with historical roots in anti-Semitism, has been powerful here for decades.

So is it paradoxical, bizarre, or perhaps evidence of a more profound shift of social and political tectonic plates, that last Saturday night thousands of Biterrois turned out at the Zinga Zanga theatre to cheer Éric Zemmour, a Parisian Jewish intellectual, author and television and radio journalist?

I got there early and started talking to dozens of Zemmour’s fans as they lined up to enter the hall. Many had come hundreds of miles. There were scores of students. All were disillusioned with Le Pen. Many admitted they’d previously voted for Nicolas Sarkozy. This was not a traditional National Front crowd in their blue smocks, driving those battered Renault vans that look like garden sheds on wheels. The car park was filled with Audis, BMWs, top-line Peugeots and a Jaguar or two. The crowd was well-spoken and smartly dressed.

Zemmour, a Pied-Noir whose Berber parents fled Algeria during the war of independence, is labelled a racist, Islamophobe and right-wing extremist in much of the French media. Critics compare him with Trump and note his convictions for inciting racial hatred. This can sound shocking abroad — but in France, less so. Incitement to racial hatred can be a subjective crime, with prosecutions brought by politicised magistrates. If anything, his convictions seem to add to his insurgent appeal.

Zemmour is ready to confront taboo subjects. In his speech on Saturday, he insisted that immigrants assimilate or get out. He attacked the obsessive focus on racism and colonialism in the media, government, schools, universities and cultural institutions, saying it has undermined families, the relations between men and women, and religion. He called the state broadcasters ‘organs of propaganda’. He called for Christian, Jewish and Muslim families to unite at the damage being done to schools by imported anti-meritocratic American ideologies such as critical race theory.

He arrived at the stage an hour late, but still to thunderous applause and chants of ‘Zemmour Président’. The night before he had been in Nîmes, where he’d had an equally supercharged reaction. Versailles was next, to be followed by Rouen, Caen, Rennes and Nantes. He spoke for 25 minutes and took questions for another 25.

Zemmour has been physically attacked twice in Paris, yet in Béziers he vaulted a crowd control barrier and ran towards hundreds of his admirers to shake hands. When President Macron tried this in June, he was slapped in the face.

Afterwards Zemmour spent an hour signing copies of his book. I grabbed a moment with him and asked how he viewed the threats of Macron’s government to cut off electricity supplies to Britain in retaliation for the squabble over post-Brexit fishing rights.

Ever the intellectual, he noted that Anglo-French relations have been worse — a reference to the Napoleonic wars, doubtless — and then put the blame on Europe and particularly the negotiations led by Michel Barnier, who has recently declared that he’s a candidate for the presidency. ‘The French fishermen thought they could continue as always, the English that they would get everything back. This was the result of holes in Barnier’s dossier, the consequence of poor negotiation.’

It’s dangerous to extrapolate too much from one night in Béziers. Zemmour nevertheless seems to be offering something new and attractive to voters who have rapidly been losing faith in politics. French presidential elections have a reputation for producing unpredicted results. Macron is the most recent example. Zemmour may well be the next.

The government’s net zero strategy doesn’t add up

The commitment to reach ‘net zero’ emissions by 2050 is the most expensive government proposal in modern history. Yet it was rushed through parliament with minimal debate or scrutiny, thanks to a last-minute pledge by Theresa May in 2019, weeks before she left office. She had no credible plan, just a lofty ambition without costings. It has taken the government two-and-a-half years to come up with a proposal — and it is not convincing.

The Net Zero Strategy document published this week opens with the Prime Minister’s trademark optimism. ‘We can build back greener, without so much as a hair shirt in sight,’ he writes. ‘In 2050, we will still be driving cars, flying planes and heating our homes, but our cars will be electric, gliding silently around our cities, our planes will be zero emission, allowing us to fly guilt-free, and our homes will be heated by cheap reliable power drawn from the winds of the North Sea.’

This stands at odds with the Treasury’s Net Zero Review, published on the same day. The difference in tone between the two reviews underlines the chasm between 10 and 11 Downing Street over the likely cost of the transition. The Treasury review states, for example, that ‘policies to support the adoption of electric vehicles may disproportionately benefit higher-income groups, and the costs of any policies that affect the remaining drivers may fall disproportionately on low-income groups’.

While there is still no clear figure for the cost of achieving net zero (previous leaked estimates had put it at £1 trillion) the Treasury review includes a graph which suggests that the additional investment required will hit £60 billion a year by the next decade. Government estimates are notoriously in-accurate — just witness the spiralling costs of HS2. Given the state’s inability to deliver a train line on budget, it is hard to have much faith in its forecasts about developments for which we do not currently have the technology, such as decarbonised steel and cement industries or emission-free planes.

Even if we were to take the Treasury’s figures at face value, it is still far from clear where the burden of the extra costs will fall. The plans announced this week for installing heat pumps offer little guidance, with grants of £5,000 open to a maximum of 90,000 households. Because there are 28 million households in the UK, and the government wants every single one of them to be off the gas grid by 2050, there is a huge question mark over who will pay for this. At a cost of around £10,000, heat pumps remain prohibitively expensive for many households. While it is likely that prices will fall, there is no guarantee they will ever be as cheap and effective as gas boilers. Moreover, the Net Zero Strategy appears to retract some of the faith previously put into hydrogen as an alternative — a decision on whether to promote hydrogen boilers has been put off until 2026.

The legal commitment to net zero remains a huge hostage to fortune, a destination without a plausible roadmap. Unless the government is frank about the costs, it cannot claim to be serious about achieving it. Anyone can promise to abolish child poverty: the job of the politician is to say how it would be done, how much it costs and who pays. Only when this is clear (and approved by voters) can ministers claim to have a plan.

The Prime Minister claims that most of the world has followed Britain’s lead. In fact, only a handful of countries have made a legally binding commitment to net zero. China, which accounts for 27 per cent of global emissions, has set itself targets expressed in terms of per unit of GDP — making it clear that it will not sacrifice economic growth to meet them — and has set 2060 as the deadline. Unless China eliminates emissions, the UK will struggle to make a difference on its own, given we account for only 1 per cent of global emissions.

There is a serious danger that Britain’s carbon targets could have the perverse incentive of driving industry and jobs abroad, reducing our territorial emissions but leading to an increase in overall emissions. Is it really better to close gas-fuelled production here and switch to coal-powered production abroad? The Treasury appears to be aware of that risk, but there is little guidance in the Net Zero Strategy as to how the government intends to avert it. On the contrary, the government floats the idea that green investment will create 440,000 jobs — without even considering the number of existing industrial jobs which are already under threat from high energy prices and levies in the UK.

According to UK Steel, German producers are paying an average of £25 per MWh for their electricity, once taxes and levies are taken into account, compared with £29 in France and £46 in the UK. In coal-powered China, energy costs are lower still. Small wonder, then, that China rather than Britain has captured the market for supplying the UK with wind turbines — with seven out of ten of the world’s largest producers based there.

The legally binding commitment to reach net zero emissions was always a leap in the dark. This week’s Net Zero Strategy has not made matters any clearer.

The poor are too busy to care about the rich

‘The City of London is hiding the world’s stolen money’, screams a Bagel Times headline, as bogus a message as that caricature of a newspaper’s other examples of anti-white, anti-cop, anti-male and anti-Conservative platforms. (‘Bid the binary goodbye’ is another pearl.) Not that anyone any longer takes the Bagel Times seriously since it decided that whites are very bad people. Still, I found it amusing that London is responsible for the shame of the Pandora Papers, when most of the miscreants involved are Third World dictators and eastern oligarchs.

Never mind. A newspaper that consistently shades the facts to suit its agenda — even book reviews are assigned to well known haters of the subject reviewed — is not to be taken seriously, and it’s not, but as I’m travelling and feeling good, I will for the second week running defend the very rich. For starters, it’s only the very rich who are clobbered when investing in Silicon Valley start-ups that go belly-up. Those below a certain net worth are not allowed by law to invest. Mark one for the common man and woman. When a start-up implodes, as most of them do, the very rich take it with their chins up, while the media laugh like hyenas. But the working stiffs are safe by having been excluded from the start.

I am too bored to read the Pandora or Panama disclosures; suffice it to say that when a Central African nation’s leader and his sons such as the notorious Teodoro Obiang clan lord it over one of the world’s poorest nations but own yachts, private jets and mansions in Paris and Beverly Hills, something’s very wrong. The same applies to President Uhuru Kenyatta, whose name appears on many a list but is seen as a good guy by the West. Whereas I find nothing wrong with those who worked and took chances to make their money to legally minimise their taxes and obscure their assets. Let the hacks make up stories about ‘global anger’ over the rich-poor divide. Globally, the poor are too busy trying to make a living to be angry at the divide.

If the envious ones really wished to stop the rich hiding their money, they should go after the source. Places like Dubai, Monaco, the Cayman Islands and good old Panama, among other playgrounds less known to the poor little Greek boy. What I would like to know, however, is what is wrong with trying to shield one’s children and grandchildren from unscrupulous extortionist politicians who live off the taxes paid by the rich. I understand emotional resentment by those with less towards those with much, but it’s the latter who keep things really going, and that’s the awful truth, like it or not. Here in the Bagel, the New York Post revealed how 61 per cent of Americans will pay no taxes at all this year, the billions dished out by the government to the less fortunate coming largely from the less than 1 per cent of the very rich. No one seems to be complaining about this the last time I read about Pandora and Panama.

So, is there a global anger over the rich-poor divide, and are the very rich the bane or the salvation of humanity? I’d say neither, except in the minds of envious busybodies who remain fixated on equality as the highest ideal. Mind you, offshore trusts, tax loopholes and shell companies rig the system for the bad rich guys, but what about the good rich guys: why should they be lumped together with the crooks? Why can’t they legally shield their wealth from illegal seizure by politicians and public officials?

Over here in the Bagel most of the blame for Panama and Pandora is aimed at the Brits. ‘The global game of deceit played for decades by the wealthy and their functionaries in the City has eroded the rule of law and stripped away citizens’ trust in the system,’ said Nicholas Shaxson in the Bagel Times. Bad Brits. You should copy your American cousins who steal openly, then settle out of court. Stupid Brits! Again, never mind. There is a visceral hatred of the wealthy here in America led by the media and the Twitter mob, but I remember once upon a time when people actually looked upon those who were richer as a target to reach, not to disparage.

Hollywood has taken care of that: when was the last time you saw a film that showed a rich person as a good one? Most people today believe that the rich have an unfair advantage over the rest, and yes they do, they have more money, but that’s like saying that someone with more brains should be punished for it.

In order to lighten up a bit, here’s a female reviewer in the Bagel Times and her reaction to a book about Peter Thiel, a German–born entrepreneur who is a self-made billionaire but a Trump fan and a so-called political kingmaker: ‘As I read it, I grew colder and colder, until I found myself curled up under a blanket on a sunny day, icy and anxious. I tried to tell myself Thiel is just another rapacious solipsist, in it for the money.’ Are we being serious? Is this a book review or a revenge opus written by someone wearing resentment-coloured glasses? Someone better send her a fur coat, and soon.

Would you go to a naked dining club?

Why would anyone want to dine in the nude with other nude diners? Yes, I get being nude on a sunny beach. Swimming nude. Walking nude. But eating nude in public? What’s the appeal? Why leave your comfort zone for the Twilight Zone?

Yet nude dining is making a comeback — or at least it’s trying to. The food-in-the-nude movement was just taking off in Bristol — and various secret places in London — when Covid first struck. Now that things are going back to normal, the normal are going nude.

Ever curious, I went to an event billed as the ‘first in a new series of nude supper clubs’ to find out. It offered canapés, cocktails and a three-course dinner in a ‘safe’ sex-free zone that would leave me with a ‘positive, life-affirming experience’.

This ‘secret event’ — organised by ‘Emma and James’ in collaboration with the British Nudism Club — was held in a small village in West Sussex. It’s the sort of quiet place where you’d expect to find Miss Marples peeping through the net curtains. Little did I know that I’d find my very own Miss Marples in the nude, munching canapés and peeping at me.

The dinner was held in the local church hall. I watched as my fellow diners — men (it was mostly men) and women in their late fifties and sixties — arrived fully clothed. We non-nudists tend to think of nudists as a bit eccentric at best and a bit dodgy at worst. I confess I played the mental game of spot-the-perv and find-the-exhibitionist. Alas, they were all terribly normal and nice. Too normal. Too nice. Where’s a good old nutty nudist when you need one?

We sipped prosecco and made small talk. The room — warm and with drawn curtains — was divided between veteran nudists (the vast majority) and the nervous wrecks who had never done this sort of thing before.

Some came out of curiosity, some did it as a dare. But for veteran nudists, it was simply a chance to get nude. Nudists, I discovered, will take any opportunity to go nude. One nudist told me about going to the Royal Academy to see a special exhibition of nude paintings, in the nude.

Suddenly it was the moment I’d been dreading all week: show time. Going nude in public is like wild swimming. You can’t think about it. You just have to strip and leap straight in. I went off to a corner of the hall, took my clothes off, puffed out my chest, threw back my shoulders, sucked in my stomach and strolled towards the naked crowd with as much dignity as an older geezer with droopy genitals can manage.

Nobody was looking at me — but I was looking at them. We don’t see naked mature bodies in films or art or life — so I must confess that when I first looked at the crowd of naked diners I was shocked. On display were breasts that sagged, bottoms that flapped, stomachs that bulged, man boobs from outer space, teeny-weeny-penies, elephant thighs encrusted with cellulite and varicose veins that bulged out like telephone cables — and nobody gave a damn! That was the great thing. Here were real people with real bodies in all their saggy, flabby, wobbly, hairy and scary magnificence. It was a wonderful sight.

Back in the 1930s, nudism used to be all about health and getting back to nature; now it speaks the language of personal growth and social liberation. I spoke to a former aeroplane pilot, a former police super-intendant, a nurse, a mum, a university lecturer, a business analyst — and they all said pretty much the same thing about the appeal of the nudist way of life: you felt ‘freer’, ‘liberated’ and ‘empowered’.

As one man said: ‘When everyone is nude at an event like this, everyone is equal. You can’t judge people by their clothes or make assumptions about their class. Nudity is a great leveller.’

Actually, that’s not quite true. You could tell a lot about the person next to you by their accent, comment, occupation. But it was interesting hearing people who when dressed looked like Conservative voters — but when naked talked like communists.

Some of the women said that going nude boosted their self-confidence. A woman who had four children and had been ‘humiliated’ by her husband about her body for years had been left with crippling body issues. ‘I’m so glad I came here tonight,’ she told me. ‘I feel liberated. I’ve got more of a confidence boost in this one night than in years of therapy.’

You would think that with all these naked bodies there would be a little frisson of eroticism. But everyone played strictly by the rules: no staring, no glaring, no touching, no flirtation — which for me meant not much fun. Dinner without a bit of flirtation is like food without salt or pepper.

There’s a contradiction inherent in nude dining. After the first 20 minutes or so, you forget that everyone is in the nude. And that’s great. But take away the novelty of being nude, and you’re just having dinner with a bunch of strangers you’d normally not have dinner with.

I don’t think I’ll be having dinner naked again, but I’m glad I went. You do feel a sense of liberation. All that endless anxiety and self-flagellation about the imagined horrors and inadequacies of your body just stops. In place of that critical voice inside your head comes a new voice, calm and stoical, that says: ‘Yes, this is me, my body, so what? Get over it, world!’

Plus, you don’t have to worry about what to wear to dinner.