What are the Queen’s favourite tipples?

Drinks at the palace

The Queen was reported to have given up regular drinking. What do we know about her drinking habits (or what she likes to offer her guests) to judge by the royal warrants she has issued?

— These drinks firms currently hold warrants: Bacardi Martini; Berry Bros and Rudd; Britvic soft drinks; Bollinger; G.H. Mumm et Cie; Krug; Lanson Père et Fils; Laurent-Perrier; Moet & Chandon; Veuve Cliquot; James White drinks (tomato juice); Laphroaig distillery.

Testing, testing

From 24 October, travellers to Britain will no longer be required to present a negative PCR test for Covid, but will be able to use lateral flow tests. Will this mean extra cases of the disease getting into Britain?

— A study of surgeries in Austria by Queen Mary University, London, directly compared test results from 1,037 people suspected of having Covid. Some 826 of them tested positive on a PCR test, whilem 788 tested positive on a lateral flow test.

— A study by Porton Down and the University of Oxford last year found that lateral flow tests succeeded in picking up 77% of cases of Covid-19. However, they were much better at picking up people with high viral loads, who were more likely to be infectious, detecting 95% of these cases.

Covid blues

How did Covid affect our wellbeing (according to the government’s wellbeing index)? Scores on a scale of 1 to 10.

How satisfied are you with your life nowadays? 2019/20 – 7.66, 2020/21 – 7.39

To what extent do you feel the things you do are worthwhile? 2019/20 – 7.86, 2020/21 – 7.71

How happy did you feel yesterday? 2019/20 – 7.48, 2020/21 – 7.31

How anxious did you feel yesterday? 2019/20 – 3.05, 2020/21 – 3.31

This reverses a decade of improving scores.

Having babies

The Total Fertility Rate for women in Britain fell to 1.58, the lowest since 1938. It is even lower for British-born women:

Born in Britain 

2012 1.87

2013 1.77

2014 1.76

2015 1.77

2016 1.75

2017 1.71

2018 1.63

2019 1.57

2020 1.50

Born abroad

2012 2.22

2013 2.13

2014 2.10

2015 2.09

2016 2.08

2017 1.97

2018 1.99

2019 1.97

2020 1.98

Source: ONS

The case for road pricing

Thornton Wilder remarked that there are individuals who fall in love with an idea long before its appointed rendezvous with history. We hurl ourselves against the indifference of the age.

It is now four decades since one of my first columns was published in London’s Evening Standard. In it I proposed an idea of which (if you read on) you’ll hear more. I got no response. It’s nearly 20 years since I wrote essentially the same piece as a whimsical side column for the Times. Labour’s Alistair Darling had called for debate on the idea. It never happened and my column attracted little notice. Fifteen years later, excited by a competition the Wolfson Foundation ran for the best proposal for implementing the idea, I wrote a serious 1,000-word column for the Times. One could almost hear my readers yawn.

And here we go again, five years on. I have no high hopes that this time my argument will catch the wind, but, kind reader, I hurl myself against your indifference.

At least I’m in influential company now. In a leading article on Saturday, my newspaper suggested the Prime Minister take the idea to the COP26 climate change conference in Glasgow. And we pointed out that there’s now a strong fiscal case for a chancellor of the exchequer to be interested: revenue from fuel duty will nosedive as motorists switch to electric cars. This is starting to happen already, exacerbated by steep increases in modern vehicles’ fuel efficiency. One milch cow is dying. We must find another.

You must have guessed what I’m talking about. Road pricing: asking motorists to pay for the roads they drive on, the distance they drive, and the times of day they do it. Road pricing is coming. The only question is when.

Please don’t huff and puff about new-fangled ways of extracting money from road users. The concept of pricing is almost as old as the road itself. Long before cars were invented, the idea had occurred that roads and bridges cost money to build and maintain, and those who used them should pay.

Tolls, then, are anciently established. The concept was placed on a proper institutional footing in England, and later Scotland, in the 18th century. ‘Turnpike trusts’ were established, with the trustees responsible for road maintenance, and rewarded by tolls. But in the 19th century this model was wrecked by the arrival of the railways. Trusts’ responsibilities were taken on largely by local government, and a preference arose for financing roads from taxation — mostly the local rates — instead of charging those who used them. The theory was that roads were of universal economic and commercial benefit, so everyone should pay for them.

If a case can be made for this (and it can), it was kicked away in the early part of the 20th century as horse-drawn traffic fell, car ownership exploded and it struck ministers that fuel was easy to tax. The finally enormous revenues that this yielded were supplemented by vehicle excise duty — a tax on ownership, not use — and the proportion of national revenue raised from road users peaked at around 7 per cent in 1999. It is now about 5 per cent and set to dwindle towards zero in the years ahead.

How is this lost revenue to be replaced? The answer is obvious. Mere ownership of a car should not be taxed, as it imposes no costs on others until the car hits the road. When it does, motorists should be charged for the mileage they drive, just as we are charged for the phone calls we make, the electricity we consume and — increasingly, with the introduction of meters — the water we use. The beauty of paying for our roads in this way is that (unlike with fuel taxes) motorists can be charged according to whether they drive at peak times when roads are congested, or at quieter times. A good many of us can choose when we drive, so the effect will be to spread road usage more evenly across the day, reducing traffic jams and maximising the efficient use of an asset — the asset being tarmac.

This flexible application of charges will also allow us to favour motorists who use quieter roads; and because those parts of Britain where the car is often the only way of getting around are more or less coterminous with the rural-urban divide, we can favour the rural motorist. Congestion charges (such as we apply in London) are just an early, primitive and clumsy attempt to achieve the same end. Road pricing, infinitely variable, would supplant them. As a motorist you’d receive a monthly or quarterly bill for the roads you used, the distance you covered and the time you drove.

When, 40 years ago, I first argued for such ideas, the technology was challenging. It involved transmitters strapped to a vehicle’s underside and a system for transpondence with roadside detectors. Today all you’d require would be for your smartphone to talk to a central data-gathering system. In fact it already does. That’s how Google knows there’s congestion ahead. Where and when you’ve been driving is knowable already, and the only thing that’s needed is to charge you for it. Unlike our European neighbours we British have been slow to embrace road tolls, but we can now profit from our own impromptitude by skipping the lumbering intermediate system of forced halts at motorway toll booths, and moving straight to remote charging.

My argument was once put to a former prime minister. ‘Brilliant!’ he said. ‘But it won’t happen.’ Well it will. Or I’ll be back (d.v.) in five years to hurl myself, yet again, against indifference.

Many readers who saw my column last month about Lady Margaret Bullard’s memoir of a diplomatic wife, Endangered Species, have asked how it may be obtained. You can order it at st-hildas.ox.ac.uk/content/endangered-species

Britain’s fatal unwillingness to confront Islamic extremism

More than any other country in the West, Britain has become practised in the arts of self-deception and subject avoidance. If a politician in France had been butchered by a Muslim of Somali descent, the French media and political class would have gone through a cycle of debate about the ideology that propelled the killer. Government and security sources would have talked about the networks surrounding the suspect. And the whole society would have learned a little more about what might have led to such an outrage.

In Britain the situation is otherwise. David Amess was stabbed to death in a church while holding a surgery for his constituents. The man apprehended for his killing is a 25-year-old of Somali descent named Ali Harbi Ali. In the days since then we have learned that the suspect had been referred to the government’s Prevent programme seven years ago while still a sixth-former at Riddlesdown Collegiate school in Purley. Yet the political classes have once again shown themselves incapable of even being able to speak about the most likely source of the problem.

From the immediate aftermath of the murder politicians talked of the killing almost as though Sir David had died of natural causes. Sadiq Khan, among other senior politicians, tweeted his sorrow that Sir David had ‘passed away’. When the Commons met on Monday to commemorate Sir David, it was once again as though a colleague had merely died uncommonly suddenly and unnaturally early.

Compare this with the aftermath of the killing of Jo Cox in 2016 when the entire pro-Brexit movement seemed for a moment to be in the spotlight as anything from inspiration to actual co-conspirators. The UK knows what to do when a far-right maniac goes on a murder spree. But as reactions since last week have shown, even after all these years we remain utterly unsure of how to even speak about likely Islamic radicalism.

It is why Andrew Marr spent his Sunday morning show on the BBC questioning the Home Secretary about online anonymity. There is no evidence at all that the murderer of David Amess was bothered by questions of anonymity, either online or off. Abuse of MPs is said to have reached particularly high levels of late, and politicians of all parties have expressed growing concern about the matter. So perhaps it was inevitable that when the Commons reconvened earlier this week friends and colleagues of Sir David’s should have talked about the government’s online harms bill, and about increased abuse of MPs. The fact that some of that abuse comes from MPs’ own colleagues, such as Labour’s deputy leader Angela Rayner, went politely unmentioned. But missing from any of the obituaries or comment was the matter of why a young man might have butchered Sir David in the first place.

Of course at this point it is normal for excuse-makers to note that we have a principle of innocent until proven guilty in this country. But that did not prevent speculation about the killing of Jo Cox in the months before her murderer was tried and convicted. Besides, there is much evidence that in the case of Islamist extremists even the moments after a trial and conviction never bring the much-heralded ‘debate’ this country remains so reluctant to have.

For instance, how much debate or discussion was there in January when Khairi Saadallah was sentenced to life in prison for the murder of three gay men in a park in Reading in June last year? ‘Wait till the verdict,’ said the legal and sub-legal minds. But the trial came and went and nobody seemed to much care about Saadallah’s immigration status (he was a Libyan asylum-seeker), shouting of ‘Allahu akbar’, or boasting after the attack that he had killed ‘the right people’. People talked about the importance of coming together and demanded that the government stop such attacks from happening in the future. But because Britain never does get down to the details, there is no reason to think that this problem will go away.

It is not as though the apparatus is not there to at least try to address the problem. Six years ago the David Cameron government commissioned Dame Louise Casey to lead a review into how to tackle extremism in the UK, with a special emphasis on problems of integration. Casey did a good job at looking at a tough problem. The government of Theresa May finally published the review, the usual Muslim groups condemned it, and then the whole thing was shelved. Another problem pushed away to be dealt with at some later date.

And yet nothing demonstrates the British unwillingness to tackle extremism so much as the programme which picked up on Ali Harbi Ali and then lost sight of him.

The Prevent programme was set up by Tony Blair’s government in the aftermath of the London suicide bombings in 2005. Its aim was to tackle Islamic radicalism in the UK. From the outset it faced a set of wholly predictable challenges. A near entirety of the UK’s official Muslim organisations condemned Prevent from the outset. Many of them spent the ensuing years simply lying about the programme. In particular they performed the self-pitying trick of complaining that Prevent ‘targeted’ or ‘singled out’ British Muslims as a security threat. And so, as the years went on, Prevent went out of its way to prove that it was not what its obsessive Muslims detractors said it was. It did this, among other things, by spreading out its remit to take in other forms of extremism as well. In time Prevent boasted of the amount of work it was doing to tackle ‘right-wing extremism’, which it sometimes had the decency to remember to call ‘far-right extremism’. Over recent years it has expanded to take in every other form of extremism, including ‘incel’ terrorism.

Today Prevent is a vast sprawling blancmange of a programme. Nobody even seems sure how many people work for it. It is another great bureaucracy of lost purpose. A programme set up to tackle one form of extremism now ostensibly seeks to root out and tackle extremism wherever it finds it. So across the UK, tens of thousands of teachers, university lecturers, healthcare professionals and others have been put through Prevent training to help them identify signs of radicalisation. And because Prevent officials do not ever want to be seen to be singling out Islamic fundamentalism, there is an endless emphasis on the range of radicalisations towards which the average British person is allegedly vulnerable.

No prizes for guessing which of these subjects Home Office officials and others find it easiest to discuss. ‘Violence against women and girls’ is one of the latest more fashionable types of extremism to oppose, because strangely it is easier to talk about this, and does not bring the suspicion that might be accrued by anyone concerned about Islamic radicalism.

Nevertheless it is Islamic extremism that still constitutes the UK’s number one terrorist threat. Nobody could deny that there are other types of extremism. But Prevent was set up to tackle that one, and it long ago lost the desire or direction to keep its eye on that goal. Those who oppose its Islamist focus have in recent years been gleeful in telling people that most online referrals of people to the programme involve alleged far-right sympathies. Ergo, these people imply, the real threat comes from there. In fact, Prevent has simply created more casework for its own ever-expanding workforce. For if you look at the number of people put through to the next stage of Prevent — that is, the Channel programme — a disproportionate number are Islamists.

All that has happened is that in the past decade Prevent has told people to watch out for jihadis and also for people who might hold the wrong sort of views about immigration. In the process it has created not just an unlevel definition of extremism, but also a lot more hay for itself to forage in. The predominance of Islamic radicals in the Channel programme confirms this. But Prevent remains unbothered by the mission-creep that has defined it in recent years. And that has consequences. If your job is to find needles in the haystack but you spend your days making as much hay as possible, then finding the needles naturally becomes ever harder. That is the situation our alleged counter–extremism programme has found itself in.

When an Islamist carries out an attack in the UK, they almost always turn out to have been known to the Prevent authorities. One reason why they are not followed up on is because Prevent does not only encounter distractions — it creates them.

Perhaps a more focused counter–extremism strategy could have saved more lives. More likely it is impossible to ever have a state secure enough that a David Amess could have been protected from an individual such as the young man currently in custody. But we owe it to Sir David’s memory and the memory of the victims in the past, as well as those to come, to try not to divert ourselves. And trust ourselves as a country to have discussions that we are long past needing to have.

Why is it so hard to live without a mobile phone?

Last week, my mobile phone stopped working. No big deal you might think. If you can get emails on your computer, and you’ve got a landline and that old-fashioned thing, post, why, you’re not cut off, are you?

There are, of course, people who wilfully eschew their phones so as to be more in touch with the present moment… birds, clouds, flowers etc. And I’m hardly a junkie. I don’t do social media. I’m a grown-up, so I’m not on Snapchat. Not having a phone should have been fine. But as I discovered, I was quickly cut out of society.

First off, you can’t tell the time. Obviously, when you’ve got a phone you don’t need a watch. Or a clock. And it’s remarkable once you don’t have a phone how few places turn out to have clocks. I was on my way to a hospital appointment last week and I was, as ever, late; but it turns out that businesses don’t have prominent office clocks that passers-by can look at. I managed to see a clock only in a fashionable estate agent which had an enormous one. And if you ask people the time, well, it’s the well-known preliminary to a mugging.

When you do get to your appointment, your NHS digital wallet is on your phone. Just as well, really, that the Covid regulations have been relaxed and I’m not travelling anywhere. Because my Covid vaccination passport is on the phone too. When I was in Paris, so was the French equivalent which allows you to get into museums and cafés.

When I had my phone, I bought e-tickets for rail journeys which you swipe on readers. But it turns out that if you don’t have a printer, there’s no way you can get at your tickets. I called the company to ask whether I might get them from a station ticket machine instead but no, you’d have to buy new ones.

Naturally I did the sensible thing and bought a dear little travel clock and a perfectly lovely Timex wristwatch in a charity shop to solve the time problem. They were manual, so I felt a little smug and eco-friendly. In fact I was looking forward to hearing again that now-vanished sound of the passing of time… tick-tock. Trouble is, it turns out I have lost the knack of winding the stupid things up, and they’re now over-wound and not budging. I took them to Timpson, my favourite repair shop, and the man there looked at me pityingly. No love, can’t do these. Timex don’t do spare parts; it’s cheaper to buy a new watch. You’d pay £120-odd to have this done. As for the clock, that, apparently, has to go to a jeweller.

So, it was back to BT for my wake-up calls — do you remember that fun function on landlines, where you can get a reminder call by dialling *55*? I’m awaiting the bill for that with interest — supplemented by my daughter’s alarm on her phone.

Obviously, I wasn’t getting emails when I was on the move, nor receiving any texts, so I was missing out on work. But the most irritating practical effect was that I couldn’t pay for anything. I could still use my debit card in shops and draw out actual money if I could only find that rare facility, a cash machine. But any online purchases are out of bounds. My bank, the Allied Irish (GB), has a Verified by Visa function, which means you have to use a code to verify any online transactions. Except guess where the code gets sent to? I rang up the bank to ask them to verify my purchases some other way but it turns out that’s not possible. It’s all done by a computer and it must go to a mobile phone.

The transactions that I wasn’t able to make piled up: the fee for my son’s online university application (in desperation I sent cash to his tutor, which he thought was some kind of bribe) or credit for my daughter’s school lunches or her art supplies. ParentPay, a cashless payment system for schools, is Verified by Visa too.

There are advantages to not having a phone. There’s a curious sense of liberation about being unreachable. I’d forgotten how much the stupid phone had become an extension of me; how I jumped to attention when I got a text notification, how anxious I have become about the battery dying, about having it with me when I left the house. Now, between home and office, between one computer and another, I can’t be got at. That spares me being shouted at when people get angry. I haven’t missed that.

In old German fairy stories, giants were hard to kill because they kept their hearts away from their bodies, in trees and things. I get the impression our functions, our active selves, have been similarly delegated to a phone. Once you don’t have it, you fall off the social radar. Even toddlers in pushchairs know how to use a phone. It’s the universal childminder, companion, toy substitute, book substitute. Try taking one away from a two-year-old. Our phone really has become part of who we are. What happens when the whole system breaks down? One day, we may find out.

Portrait of the week: David Amess’s death, net-zero plans and contraceptives for hippos

Home

Sir David Amess, aged 69, the Conservative MP for Southend West, was stabbed to death while taking a constituency surgery at Leigh-on-Sea, Essex. Police stopped a priest reaching him to administer the last rites. They arrested Ali Harbi Ali, 25, a British man of Somali heritage, who was detained under the Terrorism Act. The Queen agreed that Southend should be granted the status of a city, which Sir David had long campaigned for. Dennis Hutchings, 80, a former soldier on trial in Belfast for the attempted murder of John Pat Cunningham, 27, in 1974, died after catching Covid.

In the seven days up to the beginning of this week, 830 people had died with coronavirus, bringing the total of deaths (within 28 days of testing positive) to 138,527. (In the previous week deaths had numbered 787.) Numbers remaining in hospital rose a little to about 7,086. Matthew Taylor, chief executive of the NHS Confederation, called for ‘Mask wearing in crowded places, avoiding unnecessary indoor gatherings, I think working from home if you can’. Sajid Javid, the Health Secretary, said there were shortages of NHS staff to answer 111 and 999 calls.

At least 806 migrants in three days crossed the Channel to England in small boats, bringing to 19,400 the number who had made the crossing this year. Sir Gerry Robinson, the Irish-born businessman and broadcaster, died aged 72. The government announced some plans to achieve net-zero carbon: £620 million in grants for electric vehicles and street charging points, and £120 million to develop small modular nuclear reactors. ‘We want to be the Qatar of hydrogen,’ declared Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister. People in England and Wales will be offered £5,000 from April to replace gas boilers with electric heat pumps; but the funds would only cover 90,000. Caught up in the gas-price crisis, Goto Energy went bust, following Pure Planet and Colorado Energy the previous week and nine suppliers in September. The annual rate of inflation fell from 3.2 to 3.1 per cent. The government took over the operation of Southeastern’s train services after the franchise was taken away from Govia. Subtitles on Channel 4, out of operation since a fire on 25 September, were unlikely to be restored before November.

Abroad

China denied a report in the Financial Times that it had tested a nuclear-capable hypersonic missile, insisting that it was a routine spacecraft check. North Korea fired a ballistic missile into waters off Japan. President Xi Jinping, the ruler of China, was unlikely to attend the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, the British Prime Minister was told. Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State from 2001 to 2005, died from complications of Covid, aged 84. About 50 container ships were waiting to unload at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach in California, because imports had risen but there were not enough lorry drivers or port staff to deal with them. Colombian authorities fed contraceptives to a herd of 80 hippopotamuses breeding in the wild descended from a pair imported by the drug baron Pablo Escobar.

The total in the world reported to have died with coronavirus reached 4,909,689 by the beginning of the week. Russia reported more than 1,000 deaths a day. In Damascus a bomb killed at least 13 on a military bus. Police in Melbourne seized 450kg of heroin, the largest shipment ever intercepted in Australia, said to be worth £76 million. A gang called 400 Mawozo was blamed for the abduction of five men, seven women and five children returning from a visit by North American missionaries to an orphanage near Port-au-Prince. Floods afflicted Kerala.

Mateusz Morawiecki, the Prime Minister of Poland, accused the EU of blackmail after Ursula von der Leyen, the head of the European Commission, said she would take action in the light of a Polish court ruling that EU law did not always have primacy over national legislation. Five people who were reported to have been killed by arrows in Kongsberg in Norway, after a Danish Muslim convert began shooting with a bow, were in fact killed by some other sharp object, police announced. Spain’s Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez announced that he would make prostitution illegal; it was decriminalised in 1995 under Socialist prime minister Felipe González. On the Canary island of La Palma 1,800 buildings had been destroyed in four weeks by lava from the erupting Cumbre Vieja volcano.

The horror of tank warfare brought vividly to life

If Joseph Stalin was right about one thing it was his assertion that ‘the death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic’. Numbers don’t inspire empathy. They don’t tell stories. Nothing exemplifies this principle better than the second world war. The deadliest armed conflict in human history killed an estimated 70 million people or 3 per cent of the world’s population, and yet these numbers will make few people weep. They are difficult to fathom without faces.

James Holland’s greatest strength as a military historian is that he brings humanity to his work — a rare trait in a field of research that can sometimes feel dominated by those obsessed with numbers. Where others recite regiment numbers and calibre sizes, Holland is interested in the men behind the faceless facts.

In Brothers in Arms he invites his readers to follow the Sherwood Rangers, a British tank regiment, on their way from the Normandy beaches into Germany as the second world war came to its bloody conclusion. Drawing on a wide range of sources, he paints a remarkably vivid picture of what his subjects endured and achieved in the closing stages of the conflict.

Like a fly on the white-painted interior wall of the Sherman tank, we observe the hot, fume-filled air that makes the crew choke as the extractor fan struggles to clear the smoke. When the tank is not moving or firing, the stale air reeks of ‘food, sweat and piss’, Holland informs us in his matter-of-fact tone. There was nothing glorious about the slow-moving targets in which his heroes were making their way to the Rhineland.

In the tanks sat men such as the 24-year-old Captain Keith Douglas, possibly the finest poet of the war but a somewhat volatile character. Although from an originally comfortable middle-class background, he harboured deep resentment about his upbringing. His father lost his chicken business, while his mother suffered badly from health problems. When Douglas’s parents divorced and his world fell apart with their marriage, it left a permanent mark on his sensitive soul. In the fires of war, however, he found a soulmate in John Bethell-Fox, with whom he served in North Africa. The army became a second family to the highly strung writer, and he looked forward to immortalising his pals in a superbly written account of their action together, for which he had already received a publishing deal.

Bethell-Fox would later write that a ‘burning tank is amazing to watch’, remembering the moment he saw two tanks being hit and lit up in blazing flames for a long time. When he hurried back to his own tank, he found that it too had been hit and the crew badly wounded. All he could do was cover the men and provide them with some morphine. ‘They just lay there bleeding and silent.’ When his wounded comrades were finally picked up by a jeep, he reported back to his superior officer. Fighting was still furious and mortar shells crashed around them as Bethell-Fox was told that his friend Keith Douglas had died from a shell burst. ‘I just stared,’ he wrote, ‘and I felt hot tears running down my cheek.’

Douglas was one of 148 Sherwood Rangers who were killed in action. The unit’s casualties amounted to some 40 per cent of the regiment, an enormous figure, but one that remains a cold statistic without the stories of the men behind it. Douglas was a complex man who found it difficult to get on with his fellow officers, whom he accused of snobbery. But he found solace in writing, as well as in his deep and real friendship with Bethell-Fox. He was only 24 when he was suddenly killed — alive and well one moment, gone the next.

Brothers in Arms does more than just tell the story of the Sherwood Rangers. Having interviewed veterans, spoken to their families, read their letters, seen their photographs and walked in their paths, Holland has delved into their world and brought their characters to life. Behind the 148 deaths were 148 lives with families, relationships, upheaval and joy. The book is a powerful and moving reminder that there is tragedy in statistics.

Has George III been seriously maligned?

Every British historian has a story about the witlessness of Americans when it comes to our Georgian kings. The fate of Alan Bennett’s play The Madness of George III is notorious — Hollywood turned it into a film entitled The Madness of King George, in part lest American audiences assume it a tertiary sequel to The Madness of George I. A few years ago I encountered a highly educated editor at a reputable American news outlet who was under the impression that George V and George VI were ‘Hanoverian’ sovereigns, for surely they had been the son and grandson of George IV.

I have deep sympathy, therefore, with the impulse behind Andrew Roberts’s biography of George III. The author sets out explicitly to rescue our third Hanoverian king from wilful American ignorance — and golly, is there plenty of that around. The claims Roberts makes for his hero are occasionally grandiose: in a subtitle evidently framed with one eye on the press release, George is billed as ‘Britain’s Most Misunderstood Monarch’. (The shades of Mary Tudor, Richard III of England, or even Macbeth of Scotland might have comments.) But Roberts begins his account of George’s life and legacy with a litany of quotations from contemporary American media, and reading this list of ultra-nationalist mendacities it is hard to deny that George has had an unfair press in his former colonies. Bennett’s play-turned-film offered a more sympathetic portrait, but America, it seems, still sees this ‘power-mad little petty tyrant’ as the personal embodiment of British authoritarianism, a totem against which the American rebellion in 1775 was both justified and inevitable. Roberts makes it his mission to prove them wrong.

Instead, the George III described by Roberts is a thoughtful, patrician defender of the British constitution and its exceptional liberties. (As with dogs and their owners, the subjects of biographies are notorious for growing to resemble their authors.) Most of this is convincing. George was the first Hanoverian born in England, passionately patriotic and fascinated by English political traditions — foremost among them the institutional balance of powers that American revolutionary theorists would later claim as their own founding principle.

Roberts has analysed 8,500 pages of George’s schoolboy essays, including appreciative tributes to John Locke and to Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws, which so many of the Founding Fathers would cite as their own lodestar. George’s failure to hold America owed more to his refusal to rule as a dictator than to tyranny: too liberal in allowing seditious ideas to circulate; too gentle to force from his parliament the taxes which might have paid for a harder British fight; too much excluded from military decisions by the charming Lord North and ghastly George Germain, 1st Viscount Sackville.

Roberts concedes that George took his eye off the American ball in the late 1760s and early 1770s. Warning bells should have sounded during the crisis surrounding the Stamp Act of 1765, which imposed unpopular new taxation — George was suffering a serious psychotic episode, a harbinger of the ‘madness’ to come, but he was soon functional enough to make plans for his son’s regency and, as Robert accepts, he had ‘plenty of sane and normal interludes’ in which he failed to query the Act.

Nonetheless, the American cry of ‘No taxation without representation’ was ‘essentially meaningless as a revolutionary slogan’, given that the self-styled representatives of the revolutionaries had themselves, at the Stamp Act Congress of 1765, affirmed that ‘from their local circumstances’ the American colonies could not and should not be represented in London’s House of Commons. In his own way, Roberts agrees with them: without a new centre of power on American soil, full American representation on the British model was always going to be impossible. American independence was the natural consequence of geographical reality. Perhaps it saved Britain from a hapless 19th-century fate as a satellite of its own colony, the dominant partner in name only. Whatever else, it was not the consequence of George’s supposed tyranny.

George earns our personal sympathy. He was pious, proper and faithful to his wife, beloved by the servants who knew him most closely, and a survivor of childhood horrors. When his father Frederick, Prince of Wales died at the age of 44, Frederick’s own father George II celebrated, and allowed the prince’s corpse to putrefy unburied until the stench reached the young boy’s bedroom. In George’s treatment of other men, Roberts praises him for ‘defying the vicious prejudices of the day against homosexuality and bisexuality’ although, curiously, he sidesteps any real engagement with the distinct 18th-century understanding of sexuality.

Roberts’s case that ‘Farmer George’ was also a great man of culture is perhaps less compelling. Caroline Herschel’s grateful thanks for gifting her brother William a telescope can hardly be considered a disinterested witness statement, as Roberts presents it, in its praise for George as ‘the best of kings, who is the liberal protector of every art and science’. It is far from the only moment where Roberts allows himself to stretch the reliability of historical testimony which affirms his heroes. In one early passage we are told that a ‘near-contemporary’ of Prince Frederick (1707-1751) had attested to his willingness to patronise ‘the cottages of the poor, listen with patience to their twice-told tales, and partake with relish of the[ir] humble fare’. This ‘near-contemporary’ was in fact the 19th-century John Doran (1807-1878).

If Prince Frederick and George III are the idealised heroes of this story, its true villains are not misguided Americans but British Whig historians. Roberts is the great Tory historian of our day. No surprise, therefore, that he blames George’s misrepresentation not only on American mythmakers — though the musical Hamilton comes in for affectionate chiding — but on the long tradition of historians ideologically committed to George’s Whig enemies. So eager is Roberts to rebut Whig propaganda that he reminds us, repeatedly, that George was far from a Tory stooge. Nonetheless, George’s grandfather had permitted the entrenchment of Whig hegemony, to which both George, and Frederick before his death, presented a more independent-minded challenge. It’s a delight to see the waspish misogynist Horace Walpole receive a well-deserved kicking for ‘compulsive mendacity’. But critiquing Whig historians is hardly counter-cultural today. Where Roberts attacks from the right, the lefty consensus of contemporary academia has long dismissed Whig history, with its own grand narrative of English exceptionalism, as ‘neo-liberal’ and ‘colonialist’. Are anyone’s alternative prejudices so appealing? The 18th-century Tory dream of a strong monarch safeguarding the interests of the ‘people’ against a bourgeois oligarchy, admiringly reflected by Roberts in his precis of Viscount Bolingbroke’s influential 1738 pamphlet, The Idea of a Patriot King, occasionally feels like a harbinger of Trumpism.

Roberts’s personal monarchism is also on show. He praises the Queen for releasing new material on George III which shows her ancestor in a favourable light — if only the Royal Archives could show the same transparency with Edward VIII’s papers -— and quotes insights by the current Prince of Wales.

Yet what will most infuriate many a left-wing academic about Roberts — and for this we should salute him — is that he does his scholarly homework. This is a compendious product of intricate investigation. Roberts has read everything, including the complex medical research which makes clear, in his careful synthesis, that George’s ‘madness’ was bipolar disorder rather than porphyria. The letters and diaries of delicious characters such as Fanny Burney and Lady Mary Coke are combed for colour and detail, and troop movements and economic fluctuations are carefully reconstructed. It is a magnificent achievement.

The ideology of madness

On the wooden jetty from which the ferry used to depart for the little island of Utoya, there stood for a while a small obelisk around which people deposited flowers. ‘If one man can show this much hate, imagine how much love we can show together’ was the marvellously trite inscription on the obelisk: vapid and close to meaningless, in either Norwegian or English. Utoya lies in the Tyrifjorden Lake about 45 minutes north of Oslo and it is where the Labour party’s ‘Workers’ Youth League’ once held its summer camps — until one afternoon in July 2011 when a man called Anders Breivik turned up, heavily armed.

Breivik murdered 69 people on Utoya, 33 of them under the age of 18. Hours previously he had killed eight people through a car bomb detonated beneath a government building in the capital. The consensus among Norway’s understandably shocked public and polity was that Breivik was insane, and this was indeed the first finding from a team of psychiatrists. But as time progressed this view was challenged for reasons which can only be described as political. The left argued, with some force, that Breivik was not mad, he was simply very right-wing. His murderous actions were the direct consequence of his own repulsive politics: that, said the left, is where a dislike of immigration leads you. The politics of hate — hence that dim-witted inscription on the obelisk. Breivik was re-examined and pronounced to be sane. He is now banged up for 21 years.

I thought of Breivik when I read about the latest outrage in Norway — the ‘bow and arrow’ killer, Espen Andersen Braathen, 37, who murdered five people at random in the town of Kongsberg, having shot them with his arrows and finished them off by stabbing them, it seems. Three more were injured. The immediate response to this appalling deed was very different to that which greeted Breivik’s carnage. It was revealed very quickly that Braathen, a Danish citizen, was a convert to Islam and the authorities immediately announced that they were treating the incident as a terrorist attack. That was little more than a week or so ago.

Now, however, the authorities have changed their minds. The latest statements from the Norwegian police suggest that they are playing down Braathen’s religious affiliations and are instead concentrating on the fact that he had mental health issues. In other words, the Norwegian establishment is doing precisely the reverse of what it did in the case of Anders Breivik.

Is Braathen mad? Well, he attacked random people with a bow and arrow before stabbing them. That seems to me an act which one might reasonably describe as occasioned by lunacy. But by the same token we have become somewhat used to the authorities — over here even more so than in Norway — explaining away what seem, on the face of it, to be acts of Islamic extremism by telling us that in fact they are merely the consequence of insanity. With Breivik, then, his right-wing beliefs led directly to the murders of 77 people. Braathen’s radical Islamic beliefs, however, were of vanishingly little significance in helping us to understand the murders he committed.

You will remember too that the grotesque murder of Labour MP Jo Cox by Thomas Mair in 2016 was immediately identified as an act of far-right terrorism, which led to our intelligence services increasing their monitoring of supposed right-wing extremists. Nobody suggested Mair was simply mad. In the Times, David Aaronovitch, in an unusually stupid piece of writing, even linked Cox’s murder to the language of pro-Brexit campaigners.

I have a problem with this patent inconsistency. The yearning on the part of the left to find what we might describe as ‘evil’ in right-of-centre opinions leads directly to the corrosive political divide we have now, where the deputy leader of the Labour party can describe Conservatives as ‘scum’ and be cheered to the rafters. At the same time the left will exculpate Islam because to do other-wise would be counter to its agenda.

My own analysis is perhaps simplistic. All of these murders, by the far right via Islamist jihadis to the Red Brigade and the Baader-Meinhof Gang, are committed by deeply disturbed individuals and sociopaths who should be in the booby hatch. I tend to cleave to the view expressed by one of the first psychiatrists who examined Breivik and later saw his reputation thoroughly trashed when the political tide turned the other way. Torgeir Husby told me, back in 2015: ‘My theory is that violence is the primary thought and that the political ideology comes along afterwards. His political world exists just to have a world to be psychotic in.’ That diagnosis at least has the benefit of a certain clarity. Ideology should not itself bear responsibility for acts of carnage and violence: the individual is to blame, not the world view to which he or she subscribes. But then that leaves us with a difficulty regarding the National Socialists in Germany and the more recent manifestation of unrestrained sociopathic violence by Isis.

There is one more twist to this conundrum. Another reason for the Norwegian authorities performing an abrupt volte-face on Breivik was the stunning leniency of Norway’s laws governing the incarceration of the mentally ill. As Breivik’s sanity was being reassessed, a chap dubbed ‘The Halloween Killer’ — real name kept secret to preserve his privacy, natch — was released on licence from a mental institution only months after he had murdered his best friend, wounded another and daubed religious slogans. He had, according to the doctors, ‘got better’. That is the law in Norway. What if Breivik suddenly got better, too? The way in which we react to these crimes is always contingent, then, and guided by our political beliefs — something we should remember as we grieve for poor David Amess.

The problem with ‘David’s law’

Two members of parliament have been killed in the past five and a half years. This, one long-serving MP laments, is the kind of statistic you would expect in a failing state.

One of the shocking things about Sir David Amess’s murder is that many MPs weren’t surprised by it. Parliamentarians are acutely aware that when they are away from the Palace of Westminster, with its armed guards and security scanners, they are a soft target. Their job requires them to mix with the public and that involves a certain level of risk. One senior Tory MP points to how during the Troubles in Northern Ireland, MPs who were thought to be in particular danger were offered a firearm for personal protection, and argues that an offer like this should be extended to all MPs today. Few would go this far, but the comment reveals how much concern there is about the situation.

Whenever a killing is investigated as an act of terror there is always a tendency to declare that any change to how things are done would be 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.

Given the circumstances, the rethink of safety procedures for MPs should be a practical exercise, not a philosophical one. When in response to the IRA bombing campaign Margaret Thatcher put a gate across Downing Street, without which an IRA mortar would have killed the war cabinet in 1991, it was not a ‘victory’ for the terrorists but a prudent security measure. The same applies to the protective cars for US presidents: open-top vehicles were ditched after 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.

Another change many MPs would like to see is an end to internet anonymity. The Tory MP Mark Francois argued in the Commons that this would be a fitting tribute to Amess, a ‘David’s law’ which would help restore some civility to politics. Francois suggested that the government’s forthcoming ‘online harms’ legislation provides an obvious vehicle for this.

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 the end of anonymity. Many MPs argue that a person should be able to use social media accounts under a pseudonym but the platform should have a 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 whistle-blowers. 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.

Online anonymity might mean people are more abusive than they would be if they had to use their own name, but the costs of ending anonymity are so high that MPs should not consider it. But there does need to be a cultural change. Online threats of violence need to be taken more seriously by both the police and technology companies.

The biggest online issue is how the internet speeds up the process of radicalisation, taking people further and faster down the path of extremism than they might otherwise have gone. One former minister who has examined the question of online regulation argues that ‘the root cause of the problem is the algorithm’. Social media companies use algorithms which attempt to serve people more content that they might like. In most cases, this process is harmless. But in some cases, it can lead people to dark places.

The security services have warned that lockdown means that they worry that more people will have been radicalised online in the past year. They are particularly concerned about how many young men might have been lured into Islamist extremism. Those who are radicalised on the internet are harder for security services to track, since they don’t leave behind a physical trail.

This is a hard problem to solve. Tech firms don’t want to publish their algorithm because that is their most valuable piece of intellectual property. But it is evident many of them are contributing to the current unhealthy culture of political polarisation and, at worst, they might be hurrying some damaged individuals towards violent extremism.

There needs to be far more transparency about how these algorithms work. There is also a strong case for, as the Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen has argued, appointing external figures to supervise social media companies from the inside.

The polarisation of our political culture and the threat of terrorism are not the same problem. Yet the solution to both problems relies on working out how to effectively regulate social media without descending into authoritarianism — something that no liberal democracy has yet found a way to do.

Can a criminal really be ‘prolific’?

The BBC made a documentary about a man sent to prison for being the ‘most prolific rapist in British legal history’, in the words of Ian Rushton, the deputy chief crown prosecutor for North West England. To my ears, it sounds weird to call a rapist ‘prolific’. It sounds no better to refer to ‘one of the country’s most prolific serial killers’ as the Sun did last weekend.

The difficulty is that the word still carries connotations of its Latin origin prolificus, ‘capable of producing offspring’. The Latin word was in use in Britain from the 14th century, and the English form developed only in the 17th century. Swift, in his satirical Modest Proposal, averred: ‘Fish being a prolifick Dyet, there are more Children born in Roman Catholick Countries about nine Months after Lent.’

Etymology does not reveal today’s senses of a word. The late-Latin prolificus was itself derived from proles (pronounced pro-lez) meaning ‘offspring’. We don’t hear proles in English now because it has been swamped by the newer prole (rhyming with hole). Orwell introduced us to these proles in Nineteen Eighty-Four when Winston Smith notes in his diary a very good film ‘of a ship full of refugees being bombed’, with ‘a wonderful shot of a child’s arm going up up up right up into the air’. At this ‘a woman down in the prole part of the house suddenly started kicking up a fuss and shouting they didn’t oughter of showed it not in front of kids they didn’t it ain’t right’.

He was not the first to shorten proletariat to prole. In 1887 Bernard Shaw remarked in a letter: ‘We call the working men proles because that is exactly what they are.’ Proletariat had come from Latin proletarius, a Roman citizen of the lowest class, who served the state not with his property but only with his offspring.

Karl Marx saw the proletariat as a progressive working class capable of revolution. Below them came the Lumpenproletariat, whom he didn’t think of as lumpy but as ragged, from Lumpen, ‘rags’ in German. He thought such beggars, buskers and criminals a regressive force, though they were more interesting than his revolutionary cannon fodder.

The problem with online property searches

In 1966, the legendary adman David Ogilvy set out to buy a home in France. He boarded a transatlantic liner to meet a French estate agent who had a perfect house waiting for him in Paris, but while still in mid-ocean he heard he had been gazumped.

There were presumably other houses on sale in Paris at the time, but it seems the agent did not show David any of them. Instead he suggested they board a train to Poitiers, 200 miles away, to an area David later described as ‘the South Dakota of France’. On the banks of the Vienne stood a decaying 13th-century château with around 30 bedrooms and a network of dungeons. David bought that instead. He lived there from the mid-1970s until his death in 1999. Restoring the building and gardens was one of the great joys of his life.

I have always wondered who that estate agent was. Perhaps he or she never had any intention of selling the house in Paris and this was a canny example of what salesmen call a ‘bait and switch’. After all, it is relatively easy to find buyers for townhouses in Paris, while only a tiny niche can be persuaded to buy a dilapidated château in the back of beyond.

I was reminded of this story when talking to the boss of one of London’s largest estate agents. I have long instinctively felt that online property search is a very bad way of buying a house, and he was able to explain why. An online search merely shows you what you think you want. When people buy through a human estate agent, however, they very rarely end up buying something matching the specifications they set in advance.

In decisions of this kind, the search process is highly recursive. We adapt our preferences on the basis of what we find. We may think we want a garden flat in Fulham but once shown a penthouse in Rotherhithe we revisit our assumptions. A good salesman may know you better than you know yourself.

This explains why economists discount the value of salesmanship. An axiom of economics is that we all have stable, known preferences. But there’s a problem with this assumption — it’s rubbish. Often we can’t get what we want, so we settle for wanting what we can get (the fox and the grapes). Or else new information mid-search leads us to reshape our desires completely.

Moreover, unnoticed by the economist, the human salesman performs a valuable function which a property website does not. He does not ask only ‘What do you want?’ but also: ‘What can I sell you that other people would not buy?’

This is a vital question to ask if markets are to function efficiently. As David Ogilvy’s estate agent knew, successful property matching is not just a question of finding properties people want, but also finding buyers who will buy things other people won’t. It devalues a property if it is next to a cemetery, beside a pub, next to a railway line or in a poor school district. But all these things are desirable to me, since I am an unsuperstitious, bibulous train–spotter whose children have left school. Ideally I’d like to search online for a Georgian rectory next to the Railwayman’s Arms in the catchment area for St Crackhead’s Academy (Ofsted rating: cataclysmic), but I can’t.

The problem when we buy or choose online (at Amazon, Rightmove, Ocado), or when we buy anything using a decision tree, is that we never get to see what we might have bought had we chosen differently.

This is why you should frequently make the effort to visit a bookshop, browse at a supermarket, or even talk to a French estate agent. Simply looking for what you already believe you want feels logical, but it’s also incomplete. Leave some room in your life for serendipity.

Vega Sicilia: the best Spanish wine I have ever tasted

Four hundred and fifty years ago this month, a great victory helped to safeguard European civilisation. The battle of Lepanto would be more enthusiastically commemorated if our civilisation retained its self-confidence.

For decades, the Ottoman empire had been menacing western Europe. Suleiman the Magnificent was the most formidable commander of the age, and Europe was doubly divided, both by the endemic rivalry between Spain and France and by the Reformation. Popes made regular attempts to persuade European monarchs to set aside their differences but these were usually unavailing. Rulers with other preoccupations often anticipated Stalin’s question: how many divisions has the Pope? By the 1570s, Venice was encouraging an anti-Ottoman coalition, for obvious reasons. Its possessions were in the front line. But no one ever trusted the Venetians for long.

Moreover, it could be argued that they were getting their just deserts. Venice played a crucial role in ensuring the Fourth Crusade ended with the sacking of Constantinople rather than the recapture of Jerusalem. Loot aplenty found its way to the Serenissima, most notably the four horses of St Mark’s. But the Byzantine empire had been fatally weakened. The Turks were the ultimate beneficiary. As they took control of the eastern Mediterranean, Venice lost trade and territory.

There was a dramatic example two months before Lepanto. The Ottomans overran Cyprus and the last Venetian garrison to fall was Famagusta where, their position hopeless, the defenders capitulated. Under the rules of war, a besieged city could expect merciful terms if it surrendered: not otherwise. Initially, the Turkish conquerors did show mercy, but there was then a hideous mood swing, with a massacre of Christians. The Venetian commander, Marco Antonio Bragadin, was tortured to death over three days, culminating in his being flayed alive.

News of this swept Christian Europe, which stiffened the sinews of war, especially in Venice. Military historians have come up with a cacophonous but indispensable phrase: species pseudo-differentiation. It is easier to kill your enemies if you regard them as a different — and inferior — species. ‘There is no place for cowards in heaven,’ proclaimed Don John, an illegitimate son of Charles V and the Christian fleet’s supreme commander. There was also no hope of mercy from the Ottomans.

The western allies won a smashing victory, inter alia freeing thousands of Christian captives the Turks had used as galley slaves. Although a triumph, Lepanto did not end the war. The Ottomans had been held at bay, not destroyed. It was more than a century before the Turkish threat to western Europe was ended, when King Jan Sobieski of Poland rescued Vienna.

Pope Pius V decreed that in thanksgiving for Lepanto, there should be a feast day to Our Lady of Victory. That has now been watered down to Our Lady of the Rosary: how wet. A few of us decided that we would have proper celebration, based on Amarone — for the Venetians — and Vega Sicilia, that great Spanish wine of victory.

Amarone is made from partially dried grapes and by tradition spends several years in oak, from which it emerges with a long life in prospect. It is not sweet enough to be a dessert wine, nor is it easy to pair with food. This has led some growers to aim for a lighter wine. Again, how wet. We drank the 2010, which was only just ready. It was a wine which would have been perfect for stiffening soldiers’ resolve on the morn of battle.

The Vega Sicilia, a 2005, soared above and beyond. This is a vinous Nike: a wine for the paladins’ toasts at the end of a glorious day. The best Spanish wine I have ever drunk, it was fully worthy to toast a heroic past. And a great anniversary.

Why I left the Church of England: an interview with Michael Nazir-Ali

By now, almost everyone who’s remotely interested will know that Michael Nazir-Ali, former Bishop of Rochester, a man once tipped to become Archbishop of Canterbury, has converted to Catholicism. Dr Nazir-Ali is the second senior Anglican cleric to jump ship this year, which makes church gossip sound pleasingly Shakespearean: ‘Ebbsfleet has fallen… what and Rochester too?’ But it’s also sad. It’s as if the Church of England is exploding in slow motion, all its constituent pieces — bishops, buildings, parishioners — drifting off for want of a centre to hold them.

When I went to meet Dr Nazir-Ali this week, I expected to find him full of vim. As Bishop of Rochester, he was a striking and confident figure, often pictured in the papers in his bishop’s purple, with an impressive set of sideburns clinging to his jaw like a pair of ecclesiastical ferrets. He’s written punchy pieces for all manner of publications, including this one. In February he wrote that the C of E had taken to ‘jumping on every faddish bandwagon about identity politics, and mea culpas about Britain’s imperial past’.

I’m expecting a firebrand, but when we meet Nazir-Ali seems subdued and anxious. We bump into each other at the crossroads outside his office, walk quietly down the street, and it’s only when we’re sitting opposite each other and begin to talk about how he joined the church he’s left that his spirits rally.

‘As a young man at university [in Karachi] I came under the influence of this brilliant Anglican chaplain,’ he says. ‘He kindled faith in us and also showed us how to serve and I thought: I want to be doing these sorts of things, taking the Gospel to areas where it is difficult.’

And so he did. Just after Nazir-Ali was ordained as an Anglican priest, General Zia-ul-Haq took over and began to enforce shariah law across Pakistan. This gave Nazir-Ali his chance to take the Gospel into the fray. ‘There was one day when women, led by Benazir Bhutto, were demonstrating against shariah law outside the cathedral,’ he says. ‘The police charged them with steel-tipped batons so we opened the cathedral gates, let the women in and then shut them. The police were left fuming outside.’ Wasn’t he scared of making an enemy like Zia? ‘In a way, in those circumstances, the Gospel suddenly comes alive,’ he says. ‘Zia was imposing shariah law, including penal law, and so the Gospel of forgiveness, of dealing kindly with people suddenly became relevant.’

Nazir-Ali has a lifetime’s experience debating with both Islam and Islamism. He has dual Pakistani/British citizenship, his extended family in Pakistan are Shia Muslims, and he’s been the church’s authority on Islam for decades. You’d have thought that these days he’d be just the sort of cleric the C of E would cling to. Yet word has it that none of the top-dog Anglican bishops tried to persuade him to stay, which is perhaps because he actually believes in the truth of the Gospels. Believing that there is such a thing as truth, and that one faith might have more access to it than another, makes a modern Anglican most uncomfortable.

Do Christians and Muslims pray to the same God? I ask him. ‘This is a very thorny question,’ he says. ‘Let’s put it like this: Muslims do have a sense of the divine through creation, through their own conscience. But in the end, it’s a legalistic religion and it fails because we all need grace. We need grace even to live up to the demands of any faith. And if we fail, what happens then? We need a way back…’

So it’s not all just different ways to approach the same God? ‘I think the main difference has to do with what happens inside you. Whatever else Christianity may be, it is a religion of the inside, of the interior life, of a change of mind and heart. Then there’s the person of Christ. People often ask me, why are you a Christian? With your Muslim inheritance and so on. And in the end the only answer is Jesus Christ. I say to them, find me someone to follow like Jesus, and no one ever does of course.’

And why does he think following Jesus has led him to leave the Church of England? In the days since Damian Thompson broke the news of the conversion on The Spectator’s website, Nazir-Ali must have spoken and written thousands of words about it. So I’m surprised that there’s no pre-prepared reply. He looks into the middle distance, pauses, and then says: ‘At the 1998 Lambeth conference, I had a debate with Bishop Spong about the person of Christ, who he is; about marriage, children and how to live as a Christian. After the debate the president of the Humanist Society, who was there, got up and offered Bishop Spong honorary membership of the Humanists. I thought: my case has been proved! Now I don’t want to be judgmental about particular people but the church from time to time has to set out clearly what it believes about the human condition, about the nature of men and women, how they relate to one another. But the fact is, it is never able to hold a line on anything.’

It goes back on its decisions? ‘For 15 years I was a member of the Anglican Roman Catholic International Commission and the stated aim given to us by both churches was to restore communion between the two,’ he says. ‘That was an exalted aim and we worked very hard, but each time there was an agreement, it was sabotaged by someone in the Anglican communion. It’s the same with divorce and remarriage. When I began my ministry, the Anglican church had an even stricter policy on marriage, divorce and further marriage than the Catholic church. Now it’s open house, and you can’t even discuss whether it’s right or wrong, even with those who are in ministry.’

So what has happened to the Church of England? How has it come to this? ‘I think what has happened is what you might call entryism,’ he says. ‘A lot of people have come into the church or are active in the church who have specific agendas. It may be a strongly feminist agenda or it may be about gender identity and things like that, and the church has become captive to them, thinking we mustn’t offend them — but sometimes it simply has to. It has to say for instance that Marxism and its teaching of historical determinism is contrary to the teaching of the Bible and the Christian church.’

Like Dr Nazir-Ali, I’m a convert to Catholicism from Anglicanism, and like him I still love the C of E and care about what’s happening to it. So in the spirit of a sort of ex-Anglicans Anonymous, sharing the pain, I read out to Nazir-Ali something said this summer by Bishop Bayes of Liverpool: ‘Let the world set the agenda,’ said Bayes. ‘The world beyond the church finds the community of faith wanting and offensive.’

Let the world set the agenda? But if you did, of what use is the church? ‘I think that sums it up,’ says Nazir-Ali. ‘How can you preach if you allow the world to set the agenda, rather than the Bible or the church’s teaching? That is what preaching is all about. You take a passage from the Bible and you say what does that mean to us today?’

Bishop Bayes also said: ‘I want to see an abolition of the foolishness that sees the call to ordained ministry as a call to a state morally higher than that of the baptised. I want to see all this before I die. These things must be done and I believe that LLF will awaken the church and open the door to them.’

LLF is ‘Living in Love and Faith’, the C of E’s book-length exploration of gender, identity and sexuality. I’ve read it and if it awakens most ordinary believers to anything other than a strong desire to follow Nazir-Ali out of the church, I’ll be amazed.

On LLF, and the C of E’s creep towards critical gender theory, Nazir-Ali says: ‘One of the troubles is that the research cited is often all very one-sided, and it’s not accurate. So for instance the massive Johns Hopkins study about gender identity is quite clear about the whole phenomenon. It says that dysphoria is of course a very distressing condition and of course we should support people who have it, but that there is no such thing as a man in a woman’s body or a woman in a man’s body, scientifically. So, to force us down that road, when there are massive studies to the contrary, is mad. Then of course there’s this business of constantly telling sob stories, hard cases, as if that justified abandoning the long tradition of apostolic teaching.’

But doesn’t he worry that the Catholic church is inevitably going to follow in the same direction as the C of E, I ask — that it lags just a decade or so behind? Nazir-Ali considers this, then says: ‘After “Living in Love and Faith”, the Vatican issued a response. Pope Francis with his authority issued a one-and-a-half-page document saying, we can’t do these things, because the Bible forbids us to do it. Look, you have to allow some exploration, I’m not against that in any way. But then you have to take a position.’

At the moment, Nazir-Ali exists in a sort of religious limbo. He’s been received into the Catholic church, into the Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham, the structure set up within the Catholic church by Benedict XVI to receive Anglicans, but he has yet to be ordained a priest. If he seems a little bewildered now, it’s perhaps because he’s so used to office, to the purple shirt, he’s unsure what authority he has without it.

But nothing gives you more moral authority, among all the rat-like scrabbling for church power, than to voluntarily give it up, I’d like to say. And anyway, as our conversation ends, I sense the beginning of a new missionary zeal in him, a new glint in his eye.

Has he converted to Catholicism, I ask, or does he simply see the Ordinariate as a sort of safe house for Anglicanism? Nazir-Ali replies: ‘With my background, I don’t think of myself as a convert. Conversion is from one religion to another. I see this more as a fulfilment, that what Anglicanism in its classical form has held most dear is being fulfilled in the progression of the Ordinariate.’

It’s often said that the Ordinariate is doomed because the Catholic bishops loathe it; that it will inevitably fade away. But listening to Nazir-Ali, soon to be Father Michael, I’m not so sure.

‘The Ordinariate has a vocation, I think, in this country of producing an English way of being Catholic,’ he says. ‘Now, that is an opportunity but also a challenge. Some people within the wider Catholic church may feel uncomfortable with it but I think that has to be worked out. It is a huge mission opportunity.’

Dear Mary: How do I stop a dinner guest double-dipping?

Q. During lockdown I made good friends with a neighbour who I would never have met otherwise. This man lives so close that he now regularly comes to informal dinners at our house. Unfortunately he has a habit of ‘double dipping’ his used fork into jars of redcurrant jelly, mustard, whatever — even though I always supply saucers and teaspoons. It means I have to throw away half-full jars when he has left. How can I stop this without drawing attention to his table manners and making him feel too shy to come again? I want to introduce this adorable man to other friends but feel I can’t while he has this disgusting habit.

— Name withheld, Bath

A. Next time your new friend comes, invite other guests and ask everyone if they would like, for example, redcurrant jelly? Fill eggcups off-stage accordingly and as you bring them in, each with its own saucer and teaspoon, explain the eggcups are a present from a child who bought them with her own pocket money and keeps asking if you like them. Since you never eat boiled eggs, by using them in this way you can honestly tell her that they have been useful.

Q. I am giving a Christmas party in December and sent out invitations last month in good time for friends to arrange accommodation, as I live in the country. Unbeknownst to me — an acquaintance sent out, in May, a save-the-date for the same day. The friends we share are now undecided about what to do. Yes, there has been uncertainty over Covid rules but they have heard nothing since May and some have said they are definitely coming to mine. Others are still waiting to hear. Mary, whose invitation takes precedence in the event both parties go ahead?

— Name withheld, NSW

A. The rival event takes precedence — but the rival host is at fault. Although you can issue a save-the-date for up to two years ahead, you need to firm up with the actual invitation no later than eight weeks before the date saved. Ask one of your shared guests to pleasantly enquire whether the first party is still going ahead as, if so, they would like to book accommodation. Pose the question very much in the mood of ‘no one would blame you if you have postponed it due to the Covid uncertainty’. This will force the rival host’s hand and at least the uncertainty will be at an end.

Q. I know I have written before about my husband losing things like wallets, car keys, etc, but my daughter mentioned today that in your bank app you can now apply a ‘hold’ on your cards, stopping them being used without cancelling them. Then when you find them under the bed or in the car or wherever, in one minute you can use them again.

— A.E., Pewsey, Wilts

A. Thank you for this most useful tip.

Twitter has taken the place of the ancient curse-tablet

Twitter and other easily accessible means of online communication have encouraged the public to believe that Their Voice Will Be Heard. When it isn’t, they express their frustration through abuse and threats or by blocking roads. In this way, the mentality of the ancient curse-tablet lives on.

In the ancient world, the purpose of the curse was to ‘bind’ the person you disliked — i.e. frustrate them from achieving the end they wanted and you did not. It was written on a thin lead plate, rolled up tight, sometimes twisted (to ‘hobble’ the victim) and pinned (to constrain him), then placed into the tomb of someone who had died before their time. The belief was that the dead man, resentful of his early demise, would be happy to enact the curse against the named victim.

The curse, composed in a terrifying formulaic language, might be designed to prevent a chariot team from winning a race, a lawyer or politician from gaining their ends, a competing trader from selling more goods, or someone running off with a beloved boy or woman.

But did it work? We hear of a few cases where that claim was made, including the lingering death of Germanicus, much-admired heir apparent to the imperial throne but hated by the emperor Tiberius: unusually, curse-tablets inscribed with his name were found behind the walls and under the floors of his house. The problem is that the curse-tablet was kept secret. So how was the victim of the curse even aware of it? Again, no curser attached his name to the tablet, or had any certainty of success. So what was in it for him?

Plato made the psychological point that such curses comforted the curser, while the prospect of being cursed might have struck fear into a guilty party. Is there a better explanation for the motives of the 21st-century equivalents? Abusive Twitter-users, who never sign their names, imagine they will achieve their ends by screaming, pointing and threatening; protestors merely infuriate the public. This might make their voice heard, but does anyone except journalists pay the slightest attention?

Why won’t the US media talk about trans issues?

The wonderful thing about woke narratives is that you only have to wait a while until they collapse. The core of Donald Trump’s appeal in 2016, we were told by the media, was that white supremacists and various gammons saw a chance to reverse racial progress. The results of 2020 showed that, in fact, black and Latino support for Trump had increased over those four years, while Biden won by increasing his white male vote. The ‘racial reckoning’ in the wake of George Floyd’s murder was proof, we were told, that we needed to ‘defund the police’. Only months later, the Democratic primary for New York City’s mayoral election was won by a black former cop, Eric Adams, who promised to increase police funding and had more support among African Americans and Latinos than upscale whites.

Last year every major media organisation ran story after story about how white supremacists, inspired by Trump’s rhetoric on the ‘China virus’, were inflicting random violence against Asian Americans. As video after video and local news story after local news story showed that the attacks were largely by young black men or deranged homeless people, the establishment media started to run articles about ‘multiracial whiteness’ to cover their posteriors. While racial justice figures insisted critical race theory (CRT) was only being taught in a few law schools, teachers leaked secondary and even primary school curricula showing precisely the concepts of CRT in action. The CRT scholars moved seamlessly to the argument that, sure, it’s there — and should be taught.

Unlike in Britain, where there is a strong debate about trans questions, especially the treatment of children with gender dysphoria, the woke media in the US will not print a word about it, and when they do, describe it as function of hateful transphobia and nothing else. But last week we found out, in fact, that medical treatment of gender dysphoric kids was ‘sloppy, sloppy healthcare’, without sufficient attention to kids’ overall mental health, and that many children who have been put on puberty blockers, followed by cross sex hormones, will never experience an orgasm as an adult. Who told us this? Two transgender surgeons who are pre-eminent practitioners of trans surgery — on the board of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health — no less.

We were also told it was an absurd idea that some people might abuse trans-inclusive provisions that allow trans women with male genitalia to be in intimate spaces with other women. And then a sex offender showed up in a spa in Los Angeles. First the media argued that nothing had happened, and that transphobes were making it up. Then they ran defensive pieces reluctantly copping to the truth. A second case is unfolding in Virginia, with a rape in a school girls’ toilet. We don’t know all the facts yet, but it has a similar dynamic.

Has any movement ever crashed and burned more quickly than the social justice revolution? Yet it powers on strong, sustained by the unfalsifiable, its increasing passion commensurate to the debunking that happens every day.

I know there are plenty of other things to worry about, but the increasing frequency of people playing their own music in public is beginning to get to me. People go to the beach or get a spot in a park, whip out their boombox — often now a small hi-tech gadget — and blast their noise so everyone else has to hear it as well. On their bikes, they play throbbing club music as they pass you in the street. Cars vibrating with the beat blasting from their stereos instantly force every passer-by to pay attention. I understand the need to brighten up your day and chores and work and even downtime with your favourite tunes. I do it all the time. But there are these things called ear-phones or AirPods or a million other headsets you might have heard of. They allow you to listen to a better quality sound, at any volume, without imposing your tastes on everyone else in your vicinity. It’s win-win! I used to be a total Karen about this, going up to these noise-machines and asking them to turn it down or off. Now, I just sigh, lick my wounds and walk on. It’s a strange time, isn’t it? At the same time that codes of speech and behaviour are increasingly enforced with discipline in workplaces, on the street, anything goes. Is that what happens when civilisations die?

The simple pleasures of sloe gin

The gin craze of recent years has reached a scale that would have horrified Hogarth. You can now buy strawberry, raspberry, rhubarb, blueberry and lime gins in supermarkets.

For me, though, there is only one flavoured variety worth bothering with: sloe gin. Where the rest are novelties, this is a staple dating back to the early 19th century.

Sloe gin is everywhere — Buckingham Palace even launched a line this year. But it is the easiest thing to make at home and there’s something very pleasurable about the ritual of doing so.

Folk wisdom suggests you should go foraging for sloes in the days after the first frosts — by which point they won’t ripen further but haven’t yet dried up — which means from mid-late October through November.

Though ‘foraging’ makes it sound like they are hard to find, sloes are almost as widespread as blackberries. They are the fruit of the blackthorn, Prunus spinosa. The distinct small white blossom appears from March to May — and sloe berries are everywhere in autumn. They are a deep blue-black colour with a pretty silver sheen. They are related to the plum but closer in size and appearance to a blueberry. When raw they are inedibly tart, but they become aromatic when steeped in gin.

I won’t give a detailed recipe: you really don’t need one. Just use roughly double the amount of berries to sugar and add enough gin to cover — and then a slosh more.

Some people suggest using a thorn from the shrub to prick each individual berry to let the flavour bleed out. But I can tell you from bitter experience that pricking is not only unnecessary but a fiddly, sticky nightmare. Instead, just freeze the sloes overnight so the skins crack. Then add gin — a generic London dry — and sugar. If you want to post about it on Instagram then maybe invest in an attractive Kilner jar. But otherwise you can use a recycled plastic lemonade bottle. Give it an occasional shake before straining and bottling after at least three months but ideally a year: you can start drinking your 2021 vintage while prepping your 2022. And so on, in perpetuity. Gin geeks will tell you it’s more complicated than this, adding all manner of complexities and upping the quality and cost of the gin used, but it really isn’t.

Sloe gin has recently become popular served as a fizz with some soda or prosecco. My personal favourite cocktail iteration is in a Spitfires Over Kent, where it’s shaken over ice with lemon juice, crème de violette and maraschino. But undoubtedly the classic way to drink it is straight from a hip flask on a cold winter day.

Virtue signalling is really status signalling

A £19,000-a-year London day school was in the news this week because it has started instructing its pupils about ‘white privilege’ and ‘microaggressions’. Apparently, St Dunstan’s in south London, which boasts Chuka Umunna among its alumni, teaches its well-heeled students that the royal family bolsters expectations of ‘inherited white privilege’, asks them to ‘explore’ why Meghan Markle faced ‘additional challenges’ compared with Kate Middleton when she married a prince, and tells them why it’s important for the National Trust to examine the colonial past of its country houses and links to the slave trade.

I was surprised this story attracted so much press interest. Surely a majority of top independent schools have been teaching their charges about these issues for some time? And quite right too. I say that not because I’ve made a Damascene conversion to critical race theory, but because children need to master the lingua franca of social justice ideology if they’re going to shin up the greasy pole in their careers. It’s the equivalent of being taught French during the age of empire.

What critics of these trendy initiatives fail to grasp is that concepts like ‘white privilege’ are not intended to be taken at face value nor have any real-world impact. Rather, they are almost wholly performative. To be clear, when the teenage son or daughter of an Anglo-Saxon power couple is told to denounce ‘whiteness’ and affirm that it is a toxic affliction responsible for all the injustices in this world, they are not being asked to forego their place at a Russell Group university in favour of a student of colour or prepare themselves for a life of atonement. On the contrary, they are being taught a kind of catechism that they’ll need to re-cite several times a day to preserve their privileged status. Think of it as like joining an exclusive dining society. Part of the initiation process involves being given a special item of clothing that they can wear to signal their membership of the ruling class. In the Bullingdon, it was a fancy waistcoat. Today, it’s a T-shirt saying: ‘White silence is violence.’

We’ve seen this before — fashionable political credos that purport to be revolutionary but in fact are a way of advertising your status at the top of a rigid social hierarchy. Professing your faith in Russian communism became a means of signalling your membership of the intellectual elite in the 1920s and 1930s, but few authors or academics actually wanted to live in the Soviet Union. Ditto Mao’s China in the 1960s and 1970s. But the social justice movement is well-suited to serve this purpose.

For one thing, to be fully conversant in this gobbledygook, you need to have been to an expensive private school and a good university. That makes it a reliable status indicator, like having an upper-class English accent was until about 50 years ago. Then there’s the fact that a working-class white person would be unlikely to engage in racial self-flagellation, making it a useful way for the professional class to differentiate themselves from those beneath them in the food chain. When a top BBC executive says no one wants to watch white men explaining things on television any more, he doesn’t mean Sir David Attenborough. No, he means Jeremy Clarkson, whose sin is that he appeals to white working-class viewers.

Above all, being a subscriber to this doctrine requires you to express your passionate belief in things which are patently absurd, such as claiming that sex isn’t binary. The role these statements play is to convey to the gatekeepers of elite social and professional circles that you are so beholden to the intersectionality cause that you’re prepared to go to any lengths to promote it, including intellectually humiliating yourself. It’s a way of communicating that your loyalty is absolute — and the more absurd the things coming out of your mouth, the better. That explains why social justice warriors often make claims that are directly contradicted by empirical evidence, e.g. that Britain is one of the most racist countries in the world, even though the international survey evidence suggests it’s one of the least.

So of course children are being taught this nonsense at London’s most expensive private schools. Parents shelling out £19,000 a year need to know that when they present Tarquin and Esmerelda in society, they will condemn their ethnicity, denounce their country and decry capitalism before washing down the caviar with a glass of Cristal.

The Battle for Britain | 23 October 2021

Bach’s Cello Suites represent a spiritual meditation — from the Nativity to the Resurrection

‘One player on four strings, with a bow.’ That’s what Bach’s six Cello Suites boil down to, says Steven Isserlis. It sounds simple enough, until you add more than 100 editions and 200 recordings into the equation, not to mention countless books, chapters and articles all wrestling with a work Isserlis calls ‘a Bible’ for cellists. And this tussle isn’t just a lofty question of meaning or interpretation either: we’re still arguing about the actual notes. Suddenly the numbers no longer add up.

The cellist Isserlis released his award-winning account of the Cello Suites in 2007. That Hyperion disc (still quietly revelatory, whatever his self-deprecating, occasionally rueful footnotes might suggest) is both the prelude and afterword to the book that now follows. But what seems at first like an elegant extended programme note — an essay that dutifully takes in biography, context, genesis and analysis — smuggles something far more unusual along with it. It’s not a theory, Isserlis stresses, but rather an ‘instinctive reaction’ that carries all the weight of one without its burden. More of that presently.

First Isserlis does his due diligence. We hurtle through the composer’s life and career with plenty of energy (and perhaps more exclamation marks than are strictly necessary), including some spicy anecdotes about brawls and women. But it’s far from facile; this is Isserlis’s way of reminding us of Bach the man — that the veneration we feel for his music is a comparatively recent phenomenon. Whether it’s the suspicion of Bach’s ‘mediocre’ skill by the Leipzig authorities, scholarly criticism of his ‘turgid, over-intellectual’ style or the countless scores carelessly lost, leaving the Cello Suites unpublished until 1824 and unrecorded until 1936, the music is gently removed from its display case and reframed as part of the everyday fabric of life and changing fashions.

Such was the work’s casual status for so long that no autograph score survives. Instead, modern editions rely on four manuscripts — each with differences of context, priority, articulation and notes. What does the tiny difference in a slur or a fermata matter to the casual listener? Like William Carlos Williams’s red wheelbarrow, so much depends on them, as Isserlis doesn’t so much argue as demonstrate — with photographs of manuscript details giving us the clues, inviting us to turn musical detective and put them together as we choose.

Isserlis himself, however, has a broader case to make. His ‘theory-that-is-not-a-theory’ explores the meaning of pieces whose original function and application are still unclear. He proposes a narrative context for this unprecedented sequence of six Suites: together they represent a spiritual meditation, taking us from the gentle, cradle-rocking Nativity (Suite No.1), through the D minor anguish of Gethsemane (No. 2) and the musical ‘heart of darkness’ of the Crucifixion (No. 5), to the joy of the Resurrection, celebrated in the pealing bells that open No. 6.

When considered in the context of Heinrich Biber’s earlier Rosary Sonatas, the number symbolism we can trace through the works and the faith that saw Bach head each score with the words Soli Deo Gloria (Glory to God Alone), it’s an appealing case — one only intensified by the blow-by-blow analysis of each Suite that follows. The humour and humanity that Isserlis reveals in the detail of a dotted rhythm or a cadence, the architectural breadth of music whose ‘invisible bassline’ amplifies a single voice into a multitude, the emotional journey ‘through every possible region of the human heart’ that a performance of the Suites represents, all add up to a striking argument.

The Biblical comparison — both in the status of the Suites and their content — is an interesting one. Reverence creates respectful distance, prevents you getting too near. What’s so beguiling about Isserlis’s approach is that he feels the awe and does it anyway. This is a book only a performer could have written; only a cellist who has had his hands in the guts of the thing, weighing every semiquaver and stretching out the sinews of each chord and feeling their tension, could take us this close.

There’s a liberating misdirection to musician-authors. The best of them — the pianist Stephen Hough, the tenor Ian Bostridge, Isserlis himself — write as well as they perform. But because the recording or the concert will always remain the thing itself, the book the supplement, there’s a freedom to both thinking and writing. No scholar could — or would — throw out a theory taking in God, Bach, the universe and everything with such exploratory ease and concision.

And that’s the final joy: this is a short book — a pocket paperback desperate to slip its stiff boards and dustjacket. It’s not intended to be the final word, the oracle-tome on the shelf, taken down occasionally for consultation. It’s a companion book to keep close, to dog-ear and take on the train, the start of a conversation not the end of the argument. After all, as Isserlis acknowledges: ‘The truth lies within the music, not in anything outside it.’