Why can’t Israel-haters accept that their Eurovision song was good?

Eurovision is an annual celebration of the gaudy and the garish – but I suppose someone should come to its defence amid the backlash. This year’s contest has provoked a fit of fury not about the naff music, simpering performers, or style choices that make Lady Gaga seem demure, but about the fact that Yuval Raphael came first in the popular vote.

I probably don’t need to tell you which country she was representing. It was, inevitably, Israel, under whose flag she sang the pop number ‘New Day Will Rise’. Twenty-four-year-old Raphael is a survivor of the Nova music festival massacre on 7 October 2023. After Palestinian terrorists shot up the shelter she and her friends had fled to, Raphael spent eight hours lying alongside their bodies pretending to be dead.

In Saturday night’s Eurovision final, Raphael came out top in the public vote, with viewers watching at home awarding her 297 points, but fared poorly in the jury vote, made up of music performers and industry insiders, where she picked up just 60 points. In the end, Austria’s JJ leapt from fourth place among viewers to overall first thanks to a very favourable jury vote for ‘Wasted Love’. Raphael came second overall. This made some Eurovision-fixated progressives very happy, an odd way to respond to a singing contest but hardly the first time Europeans have sided with an Austrian over the Jews.

Others were not so satisfied. How could Israel, the global pariah reviled by all right-thinking people, have won the popular vote across enlightened, progressive Europe? On X, coping and seething were to be seen in roughly equal amounts. Irish state broadcaster RTE commissioned a politics lecturer to explain why Irish viewers gave Israel ten points, the second-highest allocation possible. (Answer: opposition to Israel was too divided.) Across social media, a few minutes on any Eurovision hashtag or topic will quickly throw up a plethora of users explaining that the public vote was rigged.

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It might just be that the viewers liked the song. Israel-haters struggle with this. If that were true, it would mean viewers saw Eurovision as a mere music competition rather than another platform for doing their mandatory daily devotion to the Palestinian cause. The masses might be frightfully unideological but their consciousness couldn’t possibly be in need of that much raising. Or maybe viewers felt bad for what Raphael had been through and gave her a sympathy vote. If Israel had more rational detractors, this would have been the explanation they coalesced around. European audiences didn’t embrace Israel or enjoy its music, they were emotionally blackmailed into giving pity points to a massacre survivor.

Israel has rational critics, but they are more likely to be found in mid-level roles in the Trump State Department than among very online European progressives or TikTok-radicalised zoomers who agree that Zionism, the definition of which they are currently skimming on Wikipedia, has no place at Eurovision.

It would never occur to such people to dismiss Yuval Raphael’s popular appeal as the product of excessive empathy because they could not conceive of the person who would feel any empathy for an Israeli, excessive or otherwise. To feel empathy for an Israeli is to deny empathy to a Palestinian. The possibility that someone could empathise with both the victims of 7 October and the Gazan civilians killed by Israel during its military response simply does not register.

Hating Israel was once a favoured sport among the intellectuals, and just as their race and gender hobbies have been loosed upon the rest of the world, so too has this one. There is no requirement to know anything of the conflict, its origins, its history, its nuances, or its hypocrisies. If you have reserves of resentment dammed up – and don’t we all? – you can let them flood down upon these new villains, who, I must tell you, aren’t all that new to the vilification business. Progressive politics is fashion or it is nothing, and Palestine is the latest iteration of the omnicause, the viral trend all your favourite influencers have hopped on, a cultural password by which the low-information may gain access to the world of high-status opinion.

When an Arab hates the Jews it’s damnable, but at least there’s a long-running, two-way beef there. When Callum who lives in Vauxhall, works in marketing, and until two years ago thought the Gaza Strip was a drag act at Pride, hates the Jews, there is no dispute of history or religion or philosophy from which to extract context. Callum has never knowingly met a Jew in his life, has never heard of Ben Gurion, couldn’t name a single Palestinian, and would stare blankly if you started up a conversation with him about the nakba. Hatred can be understood, but shallow hatred doesn’t deserve the attempt. Viewers who just tuned in to listen to some pop music somehow managed to be the least superficial members of Eurovision’s audience.

This year’s final was held in Basel, Switzerland, the city where in 1897 Theodor Herzl convened the First Zionist Congress and proposed that the Jews, tormented and vilified across Europe, return to their ancient homeland and establish a Jewish state in Palestine. It was a provocative idea then and remains so now, albeit the identity of those provoked and the nature of their objections have switched a few times since. Israel didn’t come back to Basel to justify itself, it came to sing its song. It will go on singing its songs for as long as there are Jewish songs to be sung.

One in two Labour voters back Supreme Court ruling

While members of Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour party have long struggled with the concept of biological sex, his voter base appears more confident on the subject. YouGov polling reveals that half of those who backed Starmer’s army in last year’s July election agree with the Supreme Court ruling that saw judges unanimously agree that ‘sex’ in the Equality Act refers to biological sex. In fact, two-thirds of British voters are in favour of the judgment, according to data collected between 8-9 May, in a revelation that may compel the UK government to be a little more decisive on the issue.

A survey of 2,106 British adults for Sex Matters found that one in two Labour voters agreed with the judgment, with opinion split along generational lines – three-quarters of those aged between 50 and 64 years old support the ruling while just a third of those aged under 24 back it. Comparatively, 85 per cent of 2024 Tory supporters agree with the ruling while almost all of those who voted Reform last year (93 per cent) are in favour of the judgment. More than that, the research also found that voters from across the board (including those who backed the reds) would prefer ID documents to reflect a person’s biological sex rather than gender identity – after a government minister admitted that passports couldn’t be used to assess whether someone was male or female. Crikey…

Other issues that gender-critical campaigners have raised include the problem of public bodies not being forced to record biological sex – meaning different places may use sex and gender interchangeably. There is increasing pressure from peers to change rules so that public authorities record data using biological sex – with members of the House of Lords supporting a Tory amendment to the Date (Use and Access) Bill which backs this sentiment. A Labour source insisted to the Times that the polling shows that 'when Keir said he was taking a common-sense approach on single-sex spaces he was in step with voters'. Mr S would point out that this selective reading of history omits any reference to Sir Keir's rather considerable flip-flopping over the trans debate. Talk about rose-tinted glasses, eh?

Who was the real winner of Poland’s presidential election?

The latest exit polls in Poland suggest that liberal Warsaw mayor, Rafal Trzaskowski, has won the first round of the presidential elections, with 31 per cent of the vote.

Trzaskowski is a career politician, the heart-throb son of a jazz musician. He ran on a pro-European platform and has pledged to defend the independence of the judiciary and rebuild Poland’s democratic institutions. He is the candidate for Donald Tusk’s Civic Platform party, and is seen as a progressive and a ‘moderniser’ who represents a more cosmopolitan and outward-facing Poland.

His rival, conservative candidate Karol Nawrocki, came in second with 29 per cent of the vote. Nawrocki, a historian with very little political experience, stood as an independent but is backed by the right-wing Law and Justice party. He is seen as the Eurosceptic ‘populist’ candidate, gaining votes for his anti-Ukrainian and patriotic rhetoric.

If the official result, not expected until later today, confirms the poll, the election will now go to a second round, a run-off between Nawrocki and Trzaskowski, which will take place on June 1.

While the result may on the surface appear to be a victory for Donald Tusk’s Civic Platform party, conservatives in Poland see it differently, and the figures suggest they might be right to feel optimistic.

For a start, Nawrocki was expected to come in five or six percentage points behind Trzaskowski. The actual margin appears to be much smaller than predicted and puts Nawrocki in a strong position. But it is the results further down the list which might mean victory for Nawrocki in June.

Slawomir Mentzen, candidate for the political party Konfederacja, which is to the right of Law and Justice, came in third with 15 per cent of the vote, again higher than was expected. And another right-wing candidate, Grzegorz Braun, who stood as an independent, came in fourth with 6.2 per cent of the vote. Braun caused controversy recently when he used a fire extinguisher to douse the candles of a Hannukah menorah in the Polish Sejm (parliament). If Mentzen’s and Braun’s voters back Nawrocki in the second round, this should lead to his victory.

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The results on the other side of the aisle point to this result as well. Tusk’s coalition partner, Szymon Holownia, from the far left ‘Third Way’ party, had an embarrassingly bad result. He came sixth with only 4.8 per cent of the vote. Holownia, the Speaker of the Sejm and former host of Mam Talent, Poland’s version of Britain’s Got Talent, had expected to do much better.

The result of the second round will be key for prime minister Donald Tusk. While Poland is a parliamentary democracy, the president has significant influence. They are commander-in-chief, have veto powers, shape foreign policy and can influence the national discourse.

Until now, Donald Tusk’s left coalition, which came to power in 2023, has been endlessly frustrated by the outgoing president, Andrzej Duda, and his presidential veto, which was recently used to block reform to social security payments.

With an ally as president, Donald Tusk’s ruling coalition would have no problem pushing through its reforms. Trzaskowski has vowed, for example, not to obstruct the government over issues like easing access to abortion. Trzaskowski is also likely to agree to Poland taking part in military unification within the EU and to the imposition of the Euro.

A Nawrocki victory, on the other hand, would ensure that socially conservative, traditional Catholic Poles, many of whom live rurally, continue to have influence nationally. His victory would be a counterweight to Tusk’s left-leaning coalition.

He would not be a puppet of the Law and Justice party though. ‘Nawrocki is supported by Law and Justice currently, but does not appear to listen to anyone’s orders’ says Matthew Kielanowski, a lawyer and former government advisor. Trzaskowski, however, is more elusive, with many seeing him as a careerist who will say whatever is needed to get ahead.

Much could still change over the next few weeks. Poland’s three biggest broadcasters are planning to hold a televised debate between the two second-round candidates on Wednesday this week. Only Trzaskowski has so far confirmed his participation. Either way, slurs rather than sophistication will likely characterise the remainder of this race. As the Polish saying goes: ‘Democracy is only when we win’.

Gary Lineker is an excellent presenter

Gary Lineker is off then, much to the BBC’s relief. It is moot as to whether it was his resoundingly stupid views on Israel and Gaza that did the trick, or his criticism of the direction in which Match of the Day seems to be heading (and about which I think he is right).

Lineker may have the depth of geopolitical knowledge of a plastic tea tray, but he has been a superlative presenter, bringing an easy lightness of touch to a sport which is full of too much pomposity, hubris and faux expertise to be bearable. I also think he should be allowed to say whatever he thinks, no matter how dim-witted: the more transparent the bias of all BBC presenters, correspondents and producers, the stronger the case for abolishing the whole caboodle. The BBC sticks to its neutrality façade and bans staff from offering an opinion because it knows damn well what would happen if we heard the monocultural whining that would be emitted were the rules to be relaxed.

And Match of the Day. Please God, not more analysis. They don’t know much more than we do and it is boring. Just listen to the earnest drivel we get from Mark “Chappers” Chapman on a Sunday. Football isn’t a science – more often than not it’s luck. A programme which showed longer highlights of games would suit me, instead of the glistening array of goals, stripped of context, which we get at the moment.

Bridget Phillipson is destroying Britain’s education system

Congratulations are due to the Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson. Not many ministers achieve much at all, let alone ticking off the core of their agenda within a year of taking office. But figures to be released this week, which show that over 13,000 children have had to leave private schools over the past academic year, are merely the latest confirmation that Phillipson is well on her way to achieving what she set out to do when she took office. Phillipson can already boast that she is the most destructive education secretary since 1979.

One assumes that has been her aim since being appointed last July, given that she has spent the past ten months doing everything in her power to destroy two of the most successful elements in British education – private schools and academy schools. It is, after all, difficult to discern any other purpose to the wrecking ball she has directed at both.

Credit where it is due, Phillipson is a skilled saboteur. In opposition, there were any number of flattering profiles portraying her as the bright, modern face of Labour. In office she has sought to maintain that image, whilst in reality pursuing policies straight out of a well-thumbed guide to the 1970s, the last era when an education secretary deliberately set out to destroy good schools. Back then it was Shirley Williams, whose mission was to finish off grammar schools. For Phillipson, it is private and academy schools which are the target.

To recap: one of the government’s first actions was to impose VAT on school fees, which came into effect in January. The effect is (and was always going to be) undeniable, despite Phillipson’s repeated attempts to do just that. The government produced figures estimating that only 3,000 or so pupils would leave the private sector during the 2024-25 academic year – a figure which turns out to have been wrong by around 10,000, according to the annual census by the Independent Schools Council (ISC) of its 1,380 members. With fees having increased by more than 22 per cent on average (an extra £4,000), that was always going to happen.  

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It’s not just VAT. The removal of charitable business rates relief, the rise in employers’ national insurance contribution rates and the rise in pension contributions have created a perfect storm for the achievement of Phillipson’s ambitions. 

And next year’s figures will be much worse, as many parents have scrambled to somehow keep their children in their school until the end of this academic year, rather than yank them out now and immediately disrupt their education with new exam boards, different GCSE and A-Level subjects and different teaching. 

‘Worse’ is, of course, a subjective term. For Phillipson this must be seen as a huge success, since she has clearly set out to do as much damage to private schools as possible. Far fewer pupils will now be enrolled at the start of their school careers, as parents recoil from the higher fees. And what a brilliant idea it has been to force state schools to take on so many extra pupils, many with special educational needs and disabilities (Send) needs. It’s not as if state school budgets are under pressure, eh?

The bigger, more established private schools are finding ways to cope as they look elsewhere for pupils, but the impending collapse of many smaller, often more specialist schools – such as those which cater for Send pupils – means it’s probably time to crack open the champagne in Phillipson’s office.

As for academy schools: Phillipson has managed in a few months to undo thirty years of consensus which saw devolving decision-making and responsibility away from the centre and local authorities to schools themselves, most obviously through academy schools funded directly by government, driving state school standards ever higher. That consensus was opposed throughout by the teaching unions and their ideological bedfellows – of which the Education Secretary is one.

The OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests show the extent of that improvement, which is made even clearer in comparison with Scotland and Wales. Between 2009 and 2022, England went from 21st to 7th in the PISA league table in maths, while Wales went from 29th to 27th. England went from 19th to 9th for reading, and Wales stayed 28th. England went from 11th to 9th in science, and Wales fell from 21st to 29th. And although Scotland went from 12th to 9th in reading, it fell from 15th to 25th in maths and from 11th to 26th in science.

What was different in Scotland and Wales? They resisted the reforms from which English schools have benefitted over the past decades. Now, Phillipson is pursuing the end of the academy freedoms which have powered English performance and the adoption of Welsh and Scottish-style centralisation. She has a special genius for destruction. 

Academy schools are currently able to hire staff who do not have qualified teacher status, and they are allowed to diverge from the national curriculum. Under Phillipson’s Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, it will be illegal from September 2026 for schools to employ anyone without a teaching qualification or to depart from the national curriculum. The Bill also repeals the requirement to turn failing schools into academies, which has been pivotal in transforming them from disasters into exemplars.

Phillipson’s Bill also gives the Secretary of State wide overall powers to order academies to act as she sees fit on any subject of her choosing, where she believes a school ‘has acted or is proposing to act unreasonably with respect to the performance of a relevant duty’. This includes, as the Bill spells out, an academy trust’s school uniform policy or how it deals with parental complaints. 

So congratulations to Phillipson. She set out to destroy, and she is a long way towards achieving her goal.

French Guiana is the perfect place for a supermax prison

So that you don’t have to, I’ve conducted a reconnaissance of French Guiana where the French justice minister is to build a strict regime, maximum-security prison to warehouse France’s most dangerous criminals.

I’ve been there a couple of times as a guest of the French space agency, which occasionally conducts launches of the Ariane rocket from Kourou. You fly in from Paris over virgin rainforest and can see the enormous space base on the descent. It’s the hand of man on the face of God.

French Guiana has a veneer of French civilisation. You can buy decent baguettes. There’s a Carrefour supermarket. But it’s essentially an anachronism of French colonialism.

Europeans run the spaceport and local government. There are industrious Indochinese, descendants of the families who were exiled there after the fall of Dien Bien Phu in 1954, who run much else. And there are indigenous Amerindians, who have the good fortune to benefit from the generous French welfare system, but who do not otherwise play a prominent part in the economy.

I had lunch at the Chez Tintin restaurant in Sinnamary and the food was excellent, brochettes of shrimp hauled in from the ocean, and the native Cayenne peppers. The menu at the new supermax is unlikely to be so appetising.

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It’s without doubt an excellent place for a prison. In the jungle, the butterflies are poisonous, the snakes venomous and the Caiman crocodiles hungry. There are jaguars and panthers. So no shortage of apex predators. Also, take care not to disturb the heavily armed Brazilian clandestines, who illegally mine for gold and pollute the waters with mercury. 

Any escaping prisoner attempting to swim across the Maroni river to Suriname should be aware of piranas. They should also be mindful of the French ninth marine infantry division, which is on constant alert against incursions from the north.

French Guiana has an ignoble penitential history. There are three islands surrounded by shark-infested waters about 13 km off the coast.  The notorious Île du Diable was part of the notorious French penal colony, Le Bagne, known for its brutal conditions and housing political prisoners, including Alfred Dreyfus. It was also the temporary lodging of Henri Charrière, nicknamed ‘Papillon’ who was convicted in 1931 for the murder of a pimp in Paris.

Sentenced to life, he was sent to Saint-Laurent du Maroni’s Camp de la Transportation, then transferred to the island, from which he remarkably escaped, eventually making his way to Venezuela. His book famously became a movie starring Steve McQueen as Charrière but it is an unreliable guide since it was filmed in Jamaica and Spain.

The islands are now a tourist attraction although I couldn’t go there as they evacuate them during rocket launches. A highlight of such visits is said to be the remains of the execution blocks where the most dangerous criminals were guillotined. 

The penal complex also included mainland facilities, like Saint-Laurent du Maroni, which served as a primary prison and processing centre for convicts before they were sent to the islands or labour camps. This is about 200km away from Devil’s Island, and the site where France is to build the new prison. It will accommodate 500 prisoners with a high-security wing for about 60 drug traffickers, and another for Islamist terrorists.

I’d give French Guiana a five-star rating for adventure tourism but because I believe firmly that one should avoid lowering one’s standard of living on holiday, I would recommend the Novotel Cayenne.

How convinced is the Trade Secretary about the UK-EU deal?

Today’s the day of Sir Keir Starmer’s big UK-EU summit and just hours ago it was confirmed that the UK had indeed struck a broad-ranging deal covering defence, immigration, food trade and fisheries with the European Union. The Prime Minister will hold a Lancaster House presser at 12.30 p.m. today to share the details – and in the lead-up to the announcement government ministers have been busy on the airwaves lauding the PM’s progress. Yet Trade Secretary Jonathan Reynolds appeared just a little lacklustre when telling GB News his views on the agreement…

Presenter Eamonn Holmes quizzed Reynolds on how he would rate what Starmer has wangled. ‘Secretary of State,’ Holmes began, ‘let’s just try and put this simply because there’s a lot of news emerging. Is this a good deal or a bad deal? If ten was your best deal, how would you score this one out of ten?’

Responding, the Labour man replied matter-of-factly: ‘Well, look, this is a solid eight. I’m not the kind of man to get hyperbolic about these things but this is a good deal for borders, for bills, for security in the UK and for jobs.’ Hardly the most full-throated defence, eh? If the Trade Secretary appears to think there’s room for improvement, will British voters feel the same? Stay tuned…

Watch the clip here:

Democracy dies in Romania

If the vote in the first round goes the wrong way, cancel the second round. If the ‘wrong’ candidate is still likely to win the rescheduled election, then detain him before he can register to stand and then ban him. Then hold the election again, this time with a stronger ‘independent’ candidate who with media support can defeat the ally of the ‘wrong’ but more popular candidate you have banned. This is exactly what has happened in Romania.

Democratic? Well, if it happened in an ‘official enemy’ country, we can be sure ‘centrists’ would be falling over themselves to denounce it. But when it happens in an EU or Nato member state, in the immortal words of Leslie Nielsen in The Naked Gun, it’s a case of ‘Nothing to see here!’. 

The hypocrisy is truly off the scale. The man who should be Romanian president now, if genuine democracy had been allowed to run its course, is Calin Georgescu. He was the winner of the first round of the original presidential elections and looked to be in a good position to win the second round too. He was popular for the reasons I outlined here.

But then in an unprecedented move, just two days before the December run-off, Romania’s constitutional court annulled the entire election, citing declassified intelligence which alleged foreign interference chiefly through Tik Tok videos. Now if you’re going to take the drastic step of cancelling an election 48 hours before it is going to be held, you better have cast-iron evidence and make that cast-iron evidence public. But that hasn’t been done. ‘Authorities still haven’t provided any concrete evidence of Russian interference in the election, frustrating many Romanians’, admitted Rowan Ings of the BBC’s Global Disinformation Unit on 25April.

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You don’t have to support or endorse all or even any of Georgescu’s policies or statements to acknowledge that what happened in December was outrageous. Cancelling the second round of a presidential election because the candidate likely to win is a critic of both the EU and Nato (which, let’s be honest, is the real reason it was scrapped) is the antithesis of democracy. To her credit Elena Lasconi, Georgescu’s pro-EU second round opponent thought so too. ‘The constitutional court’s decision is illegal, amoral and crushes the very essence of democracy, voting’, she declared.

Things got even worse in February. Georgescu was detained by police and indicted on his way to register his candidacy for the rescheduled presidential election. The most popular politician in Romania was forbidden to leave the country. There were huge street protests, but guess what, no condemnation from the EU. Instead it was left to US Vice President J.D. Vance to criticise the cancellation of the election – and even for that he was attacked.

And now, in May we finally get the result the bigwigs of Brussels wanted all along. The Romanian people have at last voted the ‘right’ way, for a nice, sensible, pro-EU, pro-Nato ‘centrist’ candidate, the ‘liberal’ mayor of Bucharest, Nicusor Dan, who defeated the boo-hiss, nasty nationalist-conservative and ally of Georgescu, George Simion. There’s no need to annul this election. The result can stand. Crisis over. Ursula von der Leyen and Guy Verhofstadt are ecstatic. Europe has won! Like the Irish who had to vote again after they first rejected the Treaty of Lisbon, the Romanians got there in the end. But what happened in Romania should concern us all. If we genuinely believe in democracy, then votes are everything. If voters want to elect a candidate labelled ‘far-right’ or ‘far-left’, it is entirely up to them.

But note how elite ‘liberal’ discourse has shifted to talking about ‘democratic values’, instead of ‘democracy’. There is a crucial difference. If ‘democratic values’ trump democracy then you open the door to barring candidates who espouse the ‘wrong’ positions, according to the powers that be.

And it’s not just Georgescu. Another populist-nationalist Eurosceptic Romanian politician, Diana Sosoaca, was barred from standing in both the original November presidential election and the re-run. She was banned in November, for making declarations – wait for it – ‘contrary to democratic values’.

Of course, Orwell would have a field day with all of this doublespeak. But it’s happening in real time, in front of our very eyes. In Europe. Today.

Ask yourself this question. Do you really believe that in 2025, a candidate who espouses anti-EU, anti-Nato views in a strategically important country in Europe will be allowed to win an election? Marine Le Pen? She’s been banned too. We routinely criticise other countries for sham elections where only officially ‘approved’ candidates can stand and win, but aren’t we, in the ‘democratic West’ at least halfway there already?

Under Labour, Britain is living beyond its means

The bleak future of the UK’s public finances can be summed up in a few statistics. For the financial year just ended, the Office for National Statistics’ provisional estimate for the government’s deficit – the gap between income and expenditure – is £151.9 billion. The Office for Budget Responsibility’s estimate is that spending on welfare (including the state pension) will rise from £313 billion in 2024/25 to £377 billion in 2029/30 in today’s money – an increase of £64 billion. The government, meanwhile, has proposed changes to the welfare system, reducing Personal Independence Payments (PIPs) which it hopes will save £4.8 billion a year.

These changes have been opposed by 42 Labour MPs who have written to the chief whip to object, although it is reported that a further 100 of them – more than enough to wipe out the government’s majority – have also expressed their intention to rebel. The government also intends to spend £1 billion a year on a back-to-work scheme which it claims will mitigate the fall in benefits for many people. But, like the government’s other efforts to grow its way out of fiscal disaster, it looks like under-delivering: the Learning and Work Institute claims that it will only help 70,000 people back into work by the end of the current Parliament in 2029.

The government, in other words, is only fishing around in the shallows when it comes to trying to rein in public spending. The savings it aims to make will hardly make a dent in the expected increase in the welfare bill.

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And yet even those modest savings seem to be politically impossible. We have a party in power, many of whose MPs will not tolerate any cuts to welfare whatsoever. They are not interested in the figures showing that the government is living well beyond its means. They are driven purely by emotion, and by the sense of entitlement and rights. Inasmuch as they are interested in the public finances at all, they imagine that the vast gap can be filled by more taxes where ‘those with the broadest shoulders bear the burden’, especially a wealth tax – in spite of gathering evidence that many of those with broad shoulders have been fleeing the country.      

Look rationally at the figures above and there is only one reasonable conclusion: that, barring a sudden change of attitude on the part of those in power, Britain is heading for national bankruptcy. We are going to be in the position that Greece and Spain were in back in 2011. Only in our case there will be no European Central Bank to bail us out.

Maybe the IMF will help, just as it did in the 1970s, but if it does, any rescue package will come with demands for very serious cuts which will make the ‘Tory austerity’ of the 2010s seem extremely mild. Benefits will have to be slashed and whole areas of government spending abandoned.

Global bond investors have already shown signs that they are losing faith in the ability of the UK government to repay its debts. They are demanding interest rates which exceed those demanded in the wake of Kwasi Kwarteng’s infamous mini Budget in 2022. At some point they will call time for good on Britain’s loose fiscal policy – at which point the political landscape is going to change totally. As in 2010, the electoral winners will be the party which promises to bring order back to the public finances and help Britain recover from what will be a very deep national embarrassment. I don’t think it will be the Labour party.        

Is Starmer’s EU meeting a ‘surrender summit’?

A pragmatic ‘reset’ or a ‘surrender summit’? The spin has already started ahead of today’s big UK-EU jamboree at Lancaster House. Three main items are expected to be announced today: a security pact, a declaration on global issues, and a ‘common understanding’ of future topics to be negotiated. Expect plenty of the greatest hits from the Brexit years: cries of ‘betrayal’, talks going ‘down to the wire’ and endless cliches about how ‘nothing is agreed until everything is agreed.’ As with every negotiation, there are likely to be both winners and losers from today’s conference.

A defence deal is likely, enabling greater co-operation and, potentially, further UK access to EU databases too. Britain’s main ask is for its defence companies to be able to bid for contracts under the EU’s new re-armament scheme – ‘Security Action for Europe’. The French want to severely restrict non-EU companies while the Nordics, Baltics and Germany favour greater openness. Future defence talks between the UK and EU will likely be put on a more structured basis too.

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Holiday-makers look set to be a winner too. The surprise revelation in the Sunday Times that Britain has secured access to EU E-gates, could help cut looming summer passport queues. However, that comes at a price: Jonathan Reynolds, the Business Secretary, has confirmed this morning that the UK will be signing up to a youth mobility deal for students and others under 30. Numbers will be capped – but Reynolds refused to tell broadcasters the number.

Ed Miliband’s team appear to have also achieved their goals. Britain looks set to merge with Europe’s emissions trading schemes, under which companies can buy and sell permits for their level of carbon emissions. The government says that this will serve a dual purpose: reducing households bills by operating at scale and boosting the net zero transition.

Among the likely losers are British fishermen, with the existing arrangements in Boris Johnson’s Brexit deal due to expire next year. Paris has led demands that the UK now grant a new, very long deal on fishing rights while London is insisting on just four or five years. The EU’s response was to use the bargaining chip of checks on the sale of food, animal and other agricultural products. The UK wants these lifted; Brussels argues that fish should be pegged to the same timescale.

A more surprising loser is the UK university sector. European students will receive a discount on the current international fees they paid to attend UK universities. Currently, one in eight overseas students is from the EU: if they pay fees closer to the £9,250 demanded of UK undergraduates, it will hit many struggling universities. The UK is also likely to rejoin the Erasmus student exchange scheme and scrap the entry fee levied on EU nationals for using the NHS.

The bulk of today’s business will be concluded this morning. The summit starts at 10:15 a.m, ahead of a press conference at Lancaster House at 12:30 p.m ahead of a classic slap-up lunch on the Thames. After that, it will be back to the spin wars as Starmer tries to sell his big Brexit ‘reset.’

Could Bruno Retailleau become France’s next president?

Emmanuel Macron appeared on French television last week and spoke for three hours without saying anything of interest. It was a damning indictment of his eight years in office. The country is up to its eyes in debt, ravaged by insecurity and overwhelmed by immigration, but Macron told the country that none of it is his fault. On the contrary, the President scolded the French for being ‘too pessimistic’.

The disdain is mutual. A poll conducted in the wake of the President’s interminable television interview found that 71 per cent of the people consider him to be a ‘bad’ president. As to the idea that Macron might stand for re-election in 2032 (the French constitution precludes an incumbent serving three consecutive terms), 84 per cent of people expressed their opposition to the idea.

‘Macronism’ is on its last legs and the question for France is what follows. The polls indicate that the National Rally are still favourites for the 2027 presidential election, but rumours are growing that all is not well within the party. Marine Le Pen is in political limbo after a judge ruled in March that her punishment for misusing EU funds is a five-year disqualification from politics. Her appeal will be heard in the summer of 2026 and Le Pen is confident she will be exonerated.

But in the meantime? The party’s president, Jordan Bardella, appeared on television and described himself as the ‘plan B’, causing some of the National Rally’s senior lieutenants to ‘choke’ with astonishment. Was this Bardella beginning to ease Le Pen out of the frame?

The left is not in much of a position to gloat over the tribulations of the National Rally. The coalition formed a year ago during the campaign for the legislative election is cracking, with the centre-left Socialists troubled by the radicalism of many within the far-left la France Insoumise. At a recent rally in Paris, the Jewish Socialist MP Jerome Guedj was chased away with cries of ‘Zionist bastard, get out!’.

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If, as Macron claims, the French are pessimistic, it is because of the political class. Never has there been such a dearth of talent across the spectrum. Macron, often described as a ‘spoilt child’, has turned parliament into a playground.

This in part explains the rise of Bruno Retailleau in recent months. A long-serving Republican senator, the 64-year-old was named Interior Minister last September when former prime minister Michel Barnier was asked to form a government. Barnier didn’t last long as prime minister and his successor, Francois Bayrou, has been equally impotent, but Retailleau’s popularity continues to soar.

This is because he tells the truth. Yes, Retailleau says, mass immigration has not been a success, and it is one of the reasons crime is so rampant. He wants a referendum on immigration – as do the majority of the country – and it is said that his conservative views make Macron ‘ashamed’.

They don’t make Republicans ashamed. That proof came on Sunday, when the party’s members nominated Retailleau their new president. He thrashed his challenger, Laurent Wauquiez, winning 74 per cent of the vote, and in his acceptance speech, Retailleau expressed his belief that all was not lost for the Republican party.

Eighteen years ago they were the dominant force in French politics with 345 MPs out of 577 in the National Assembly; today they have sixty. Like the Tories, the Republicans believed what mattered most was pleasing the chattering classes. They moved to the centre, embraced mass immigration and the rest of the progressive dogma that swept the West in the 2010s. Retailleau promises to return the Republicans to the right. ‘I think that what gives structure to political life is convictions,’ he said on Sunday evening.

The left-wing Le Monde reacted to his victory with the headline: ‘Anti-immigration minister Retailleau becomes leader of French conservatives’. There are other reasons the left hate Retailleau; he is a practising Catholic, a man opposed to gay marriage and assisted dying. As is the wont of some of the French media, Retailleau is now described in some quarters as ‘extreme right’.

It won’t only be the left who are troubled by the rise of Retailleau. His growing influence is also a problem for the National Rally, regardless of whether Le Pen or Bardella runs for the presidency in 2027. In the last three years the National Rally has attracted significant support from two demographics that were traditionally hostile: the retired and white collar graduates. This is largely down to Bardella, who is more economically liberal than Le Pen and isn’t burdened by the family name.

Retailleau will seek to lure these voters back to their former home – the Republicans – while also reaching out to the legions of the disillusioned centre right who feel betrayed by Macron. He will do this by portraying himself as the antidote to the President and also to Bardella. Both rely heavily on image: dapper men who communicate best on social media. Style but little substance.

Retailleau looks like a maths teacher, but he insists that what he lacks in style he makes up for in substance. He has two years to convince voters he is the man to solve France’s myriad problems.

Labour’s defence review is anything but strategic

Fans of the classic British sitcom will feel a warm glow, as details of the forthcoming strategic defence review (SDR) were revealed this weekend. It leads with a proposal for a ‘home guard’ of civilian volunteers to protect the UK’s critical national infrastructure of power plants, airports, telecommunications networks and subsea connectors. Predictably, this cued up references to Dad’s Army, Captain Mainwaring and the Local Defence Volunteers (LDV) raised in the dark days of 1940.

The SDR, commissioned within weeks of the government taking office last July, has been drafted by a team led by former Nato secretary general Lord Robertson of Port Ellen, assisted by General Sir Richard Barrons, ex-head of Joint Forces Command, and County Durham-born Dr Fiona Hill, previously director for Europe and Russia at the US National Security Council. There has been an alarming number of iterations, with a fourth draft presented to ministers in February, but publication is finally believed to be imminent.

Although the SDR ‘focuses heavily on homeland security, national resilience and the need for the public to realise that Britain has entered a pre-war era’, focusing on the ‘home guard’ proposal seems a peculiar distortion. The wartime LDV, renamed the Home Guard, quickly grew to 1.5 million strong, made up of those ineligible or unfit for military service, at a time when 11,000 British servicemen had been killed and another 40,000 taken prisoner during the Battle of France. The comparison with the small force of several thousand reportedly proposed in the SDR is very loose.

This must not obscure other elements. There seems to be no prospect of a significant increase in the size of the British Army, at 67,107 trade-trained regular personnel (as of 1 January), the smallest since the Napoleonic Wars. The Royal Navy is reportedly demanding a dozen new nuclear-powered hunter-killer submarines, partly to protect underwater cables which are vulnerable to sabotage. A defensive system to defeat ballistic and hypersonic missiles is also believed to feature.

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The SDR is entirely theoretical without adequate resources. The government eagerly points to the impending increase in defence spending to 2.5 per cent of GDP from 2027, an additional £13.4 billion, and its ‘ambition’ – remember that word – to go further to 3 per cent in the next parliament. Yet 18 months ago the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee concluded that the Ministry of Defence’s Equipment Plan 2023-33 had a £16.9 billion shortfall between requirements and resources. As I pointed out in February, a larger budget will make good existing shortfalls, rather than leading to a spending spree.

The Ministry of Defence’s response is a predictably robotic and empty exercise in buzzword bingo:

The UK’s strategic defence review sets out a path for the next decade to transform the armed forces to ensure we’re prepared for emerging threats – making Britain secure at home and strong abroad while transforming defence to drive innovation and economic growth as part of our Plan for Change.

In fact, the review seems positively un-strategic. There is no suggestion of any fundamental change in force size or structure, nor any major alteration in the UK’s global posture or the tasks expected of the armed forces. The Chief of the General Staff, General Sir Roly Walker, spoke last year of doubling the army’s ‘lethality’ by 2027 and tripling it by 2030 – essentially, using advances in technology to allow fewer soldiers to kill more of the enemy. But lethality cannot always substitute for numbers.

The Royal Navy was already expecting new hunter-killer submarines. The current Astute class will gradually be replaced by a joint US/UK/Australian design under the AUKUS agreement, beginning in the late 2030s. But note that the sixth and seventh Astute-class boats, HMS Agamemnon and HMS Achilles, have not even entered service yet. Even if joint procurement means that the AUKUS submarines are no more expensive than the Astutes they replace, they will cost around £1.6 billion each, so the idea of buying twelve of them to replace seven Astute-class boats seems financially implausible.

Earlier this month, the Prime Minister told the London Defence Conference that the review would be a ‘first-of-its kind, root and branch’. Unless there are major surprises, it is hard to see how the armed forces will look radically different after its implementation from their current size and shape: slightly bigger, perhaps, and marginally better equipped, with a greater emphasis on UK resilience.

This was always a possibility. The review’s terms of reference placed so many issues outside its scope that the ability to change either roots or branches was very limited. The additional resources are welcome if urgently needed, but so many questions are unanswered: we must also wait for a new National Security Strategy, due before the Nato summit on 24-25 June, and a defence capability command paper in the autumn. At the moment, the strategic defence review feels more like a tactic to get through the next few months.

The far right is gaining footholds across Europe

The relentless rise of the populist right in Europe has been confirmed by provisional first results of elections held yesterday in three different countries: Poland, Portugal and Romania.

In Poland, there will be a run-off in the second round of the presidential election. This is after Rafal Trzaskowski, the centre-left candidate close to the Civic Coalition government of Prime Minister Donald Tusk, was run to an unexpectedly close second place by the ultra-conservative candidate Karol Nawrocki, who is backed by the former ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party. Ominously for the Left, the third and fourth places were also taken by ultra right-wing candidates, whose votes are now likely to go to Nawrocki in the second round.

In Romania, there was better news for the pro-EU centre. With 90 per cent of the vote in the final round of the presidential election counted, the centre-left mayor of the capital Bucharest, Nicusor Dan, was enjoying a comfortable surprise seven-point lead over the ultra-right populist Georgei Simeon, who won the first round and who polls had predicted to win. Both Simeon and the Polish ultra-right candidates campaigned on a programme of patriotic nationalism and are sceptical of Europe’s support for Ukraine’s resistance to Russia’s invasion. An earlier presidential election in Romania was cancelled by the country’s Supreme Court late last year after another ultra-right candidate’s winning campaign was accused of being funded by Putin’s Russia.

In the third of the weekend’s elections – a snap parliamentary general election in Portugal – the ruling centre-right Democratic Alliance (AD) government was returned with around 32 per cent of the poll. But in a shock result, an ultra-right populist party called Chega, was running neck and neck in second place with the opposition Socialists. Both polled around 23 per cent: the best result for the far right in Portugal since the overthrow of the Salazar dictatorship half a century ago. Like its sister parties across the continent, Chega had campaigned against mass migration and the EU.

The political wind in Europe for the past decade has been blowing strongly to the right, with declining support for old, established left-wing and liberal centre parties. The issue of uncontrolled immigration – especially from the Islamic world – which has fuelled the rise of the right is not going to disappear any time soon.

Starmer’s EU e-passport plan is the ultimate Brexit win

As I was passing through Stockholm’s Arlanda airport last week, a WhatsApp from a colleague pinged into my phone as I came through arrivals, so I’m able, as it happens, to quote verbatim my thoughts at the time: ‘Just in the arrivals hall now, and as I queue in “all other passports”, I am once again reminded of what a stupid [expletive deleted] idea Brexit was.’ I may, indeed, to my shame, have added some unflattering reflections on the policy of the magazine I have the honour to work for.

It strikes me that my experience in that passport queue, and the experience of many like me, was one of the last real Brexit noticeables. For as time goes on, the effects of Brexit – both positive and negative – become less and less visible to most of us. Sure, we can argue until we’re blue in the passport about whether we are significantly poorer than we would have been had we stayed in the EU, or whether we have, conversely, been showered with ‘Brexit dividends’. Nobody who takes either position will be remotely persuaded by the arguments of those who take the other, and most people of sound mind won’t take much of a position at all. The jam has been stirred through the semolina. Economics is a fuzzy discipline at the best of times, and economic counterfactuals are fuzzier still. The moment someone pulls out a slide deck of pie charts and starts burbling on about rates of change in GDP and hypothecated tax spending, all normal people glaze over and turn their attention to Gardeners’ Question Time.

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Tangible benefits and harms – the ones you feel in the heart and gut if they are symbolic ones, or in the pocket if they are material ones – are what move elections. And much as the likes of me will regret it, the further that 2016’s climacteric recedes into the past, the thinner and less persuasive arguments about Brexit’s economic harms become – and as Project Fear’s defeat by Project Take Back Control showed, they weren’t all that persuasive at the time.

Shoulda beens, mighta beens: all in the past. There is no control experiment. We are where we are. The shuttered fishmonger reopens as a bakery or a Ladbroke’s. Steve Bray eventually gets tired of shouting, or the batteries in his megaphone run out, and peace descends again on Parliament Square. Inertia favours the status quo.

There’s the odd patriot who, no doubt, rubs the cover of his blue passport with a proud thumb and feels a swelling of pleasure in the knowledge that Brexit gave him that passport. Such a person will no doubt stand waiting for a stamp for 45 minutes in ‘All Other Passports’ with bulldog stoicism while Johnny Foreigner whizzes through the e-passport gates smugly. He will account his wait as a price amply worth paying for the privilege of Taking Back Control.

But for most people, I suspect, it’s only in that passport queue that they will think about Brexit much at all. It will indeed be their once or twice a year chance to be once again reminded of what a stupid [expletive deleted] idea Brexit was. This is not insignificant. I’ve long thought that perhaps the most profound and enduring effect of the 11 September attacks in New York in 2001 was the tightening of airport security.

How many trillions of hours of wasted time, how many human lifetimes, cumulatively, has the post-9/11 regime in almost every airport cost the western world? In lost time, in discontent and annoyance, in hours of productive work forgone in airport queues? Those billions of boots wearily unlaced and shucked, those laptops removed from hand luggage, those bottles of cosmetics sealed in transparent bags, those belts rolled and placed in jacket pockets. One doesn’t like to say ‘the terrorists have won’ but in this respect, they undoubtedly did. The response to their barbarism continues to affect millions of people every single day, a quarter century after a handful of jihadi nutbags flew those planes into those buildings in New York.

So if Sir Keir Starmer’s new deal with the EU does, as has been trailed, contain a provision that Britons will be able to use the e-passport gates in European airports like everybody else, that’s a huge thing. (Leave aside for the moment the question of why, if the technology has always been completely compatible anyway, EU countries were sending us to have our documents manually stamped in ‘all other passports’ anyway. Post-Brexit spite?)

We can argue back and forth over whether, for instance, alignment on EU trade standards is a Sickening Betrayal of Brexit (the inevitable Tory position) or a Thrillingly Independent Sovereign Decision to do exactly what the EU would have us do anyway (the already stated Labour position). But what most people will notice, or now cease to notice, is the length of the queue in the arrivals hall as they set off on their holidays. If they’re not noticing that – if they’re not getting a once- or twice-annual tangible, material reminder of what a stupid [expletive deleted] idea Brexit was – they will tend to forget that Brexit happened at all.

In this respect, far from betraying Brexit with his trade deal, Sir Keir may indeed for a generation, woe though it causes me to say so, be putting the last nail in the coffin of Rejoin.

How to save Britain’s pubs

In Bradford a few weeks ago, I popped into a pub called Jacobs Well. It’s a squat old building, all but submerged behind the stultifyingly ugly road that grinds around the edges of the town centre. The Well was fairly quiet on a Monday night, but everyone there was congregated around the bar and it was immediately apparent that this was a place where long friendships are nurtured and strangers are welcomed. There were interesting cask ales, free hotpot and doorsteps of bread on a side table for anyone who fancied a meal, wonderful photos of old Bradford on the walls and a blackboard chock-full of handwritten notices advertising upcoming band nights and quizzes.

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The Jacobs Well probably doesn’t make huge profits. But, as a northerner who has lived in London for 25 years, it made me feel almost tearfully atavistic. ‘Yes,’ I insisted to my fiancée, who grew up in Chelsea and has never lived outside of the capital, ‘this is a pub that knows how to be a pub.’

Contrast this to my last London pub experience in a hostelry which seemed entirely baffled by the concept of an individual wandering in and sitting down with a drink spontaneously. Broadsided by staff wearing basilisk stares, my path was blocked as they interrogated me as to whether I had a booking. When I stated that I hadn’t – and that I had no wish to order a meal – it was as if I’d asked them to solve cold fusion on the spot, or if I could rummage through their house while they’re on holiday.

Depressingly, I (along with many Londoners I suspect) have become used to this kind of hostility from boozers that yearn to be restaurants but have grudgingly settled for gastropub status. Islington seems to be the worst neighbourhood for this long-established landlord trend of hoping that, by charging £32 for a plate of fish, mere drinkers and peanut-munchers will get the message and seek their pint elsewhere.

But the Stasi-esque collaring I recently received was in an entirely mediocre Streatham boozer that harboured no culinary ambitions beyond serving up flimsy looking burgers. I suspect it won’t be long before this pub ‘does an Islington’ and ups its epicurean game to the point where the remnant locals flee to another pub, if they can find one, or simply decide to drink beer in their living room of an evening from now on.

Even if a pub has a posh kitchen, handwritten menus and doesn’t smell of Embassy tips, it is still a pub, and the point of pubs is that you should be able to saunter in at any time you please and be served a pint of beer to sip while propped against the bar counter. Yet despite the desperate state of the UK pub economy, the strategy now seems to be that of excluding anyone who isn’t prepared to shell out three figures on a bottle of Pouilly-Fumé and a three-course meal of game meat, ‘sustainably caught’ fish and organic cheeses.

Incredibly, it’s far easier to wander into a restaurant without a booking than into many pubs in London at the moment. But, and sorry if this sounds axiomatic, if I want a restaurant meal then I’ll go to a restaurant. The contrapuntal fraud of London pubs in 2025 is their desire to charge restaurant prices while only offering lackadaisical grog-shop levels of service

I played a game with some friends the other Sunday after having, grudgingly, booked in advance for a roast in one Tooting boozer. We counted seven members of staff who were either chatting among themselves, picking their noses or chugging energy drinks. We were the only people left in the dining area, which, inevitably, now spans 90 per cent of the entire pub space. After spending close to £200 between the four of us, we decided to see how long it would take for any of the seven staff members to come to clear our table.

After 50 minutes we gave up and called them over to ask if they wouldn’t mind doing a tiny bit of work. Would this happen in a restaurant? Unlikely. And the cost of our roast wouldn’t have been much more if we’d decided to dine at the Goring.

We bemoan, quite rightly, the shocking acceleration of pub closures in this country. But what we’re not talking about as much is the pitiful, bowdlerised state of the pubs that remain and the mean processes of faux-gentrification and status-shifting they are so badly attempting in order to stay in business. If it’s a choice between a pub turning into a block of flats or turning into a place that is actively scornful of anyone wandering in off the street with the urge for a seat, a pint and a bag of crisps, then I’m not entirely sure that the flats option is any more nefarious.

If pubs (in London in particular) want to make a comeback then the only way to do it is to make them places that don’t seemingly aspire to the exclusivity (and prices) of Scott’s or Wiltons. Wetherspoons has shown that, with low prices and long opening hours, pubs can still look pretty busy most of the time. How difficult would it be for traditional inns, taverns and hostelries to swap larcenous prices for the few into lower prices for the many?

Start opening for breakfast; make sure at least 50 per cent of the pub is for drinkers; encourage community meetings, book clubs, acoustic sessions and so on to be held in the vault rooms. Have all the daily newspapers splayed out at the bar; let dogs drink water out of old ashtrays; have a liberal approach to smoking in the beer garden; have some basic homemade sandwiches priced at £3 each on sale every lunchtime; and don’t get all antsy if someone accidentally sits in the ‘dining area’ but only wants a gin and tonic.

These are the simple, albeit hardly innovative, tactics that landlords of free houses urgently need to start deploying, rather than putting wood pigeon on the menu for £35 and snarling at anyone who didn’t book a table for seven two weeks ago.

Pubs won’t die if they remember what they’re here for in the first place. But the current identity crisis and panicky tactics are only going to make it even more likely that the last orders bell gives way to a clanging death knell.

The unfashionable truth? Early motherhood is wonderful

At the end of last year I developed a pathological aversion to going to my local supermarket, owing to a garish sign in the window counting down the number of ‘sleeps’ until Christmas. The twee Americanism was grating enough, but I had another reason to feel queasy: I was heavily pregnant with my first baby and my due date was Christmas Day.

Of course, my husband and I were longing to meet our much-wanted son. But as the day drew inexorably closer and I dived ever deeper into the ubiquitous ‘exposés’ on early motherhood, I began to feel afraid. Is it any wonder? To read pretty much any book, magazine or internet forum about becoming a mum in 2025 is to be told that it is an ordeal to be dreaded. If you are lucky enough to escape your body and soul being torn apart by a horrific birth, the fate awaiting you is the total erasure of your ‘pre-baby self’ through the drudgery and isolation of caring for a newborn.

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Well, if any pregnant women are reading this, let me write what I dearly wish I could have read last December. Early motherhood is brilliant.

At this point, tradition dictates that I should backpedal and caveat that sentence with some ghoulish stories about bleeding nipples or months of sleep deprivation-induced delirium. But I won’t. In part because women know that having a baby isn’t a walk in the park, and it’s patronising to assume we don’t understand what we’ve signed up for.

But also because, truthfully, that hasn’t been my experience. Once, women who had a terrible time with birth and early motherhood felt unable to talk about it. That taboo, thankfully, has lifted. But the pendulum has now swung too far the other way. Afraid of seeming smug – or perhaps simply out of a fear of boring a society determined to bash parenthood – women who’ve had an easier, or even enjoyable, ride on the motherhood rollercoaster stay silent.

Of course, there have been moments of stress and embarrassment. I had to break off writing this piece because my darling son had an epic screaming tantrum, ending in him passing out semi-naked in my arms like a tiny drunk after a huge pub session. Just yesterday, he mastered the art of rolling over – which would have been cause for celebration, had he not mastered it directly onto another baby in our mum-and-baby group – and proceeded to throw up all over her beautifully smocked dress.

But in the round, unfashionably earnest as it is to say so, Wilfred has made both my husband and me happier than we’ve ever been. There are the obvious joys: the glorious gummy smiles, the gurgling giggles or the fun of dressing him up in silly outfits (he made a very fetching Easter chick).

Then there are the pleasures no one really mentioned. Yes, being a new mum makes you vulnerable – that classic image of a harassed young woman apologising while trying to feed or change a wailing infant in public holds water. But when you’re in that moment, you see another, wonderful side to friends, neighbours and strangers.

There was the older woman in a café who told me I was doing a brilliant job, even while a three-week-old Wilfie attempted to burst her eardrum. And the waiter who, on seeing me breastfeed alone, cut my meal into bite-size chunks I could eat with one hand. I’ve even made friends with my next-door neighbour but one – a lovely mum of two whose name I didn’t even know until this year.

Increasingly, we seem to be a society which sees value only in independence. The most vociferous proponents of the assisted dying bill argue, for example, that feeling like one is a burden is a good enough reason to end one’s life. But having a baby has made me realise that independence isn’t the be-all and end-all, and that being vulnerable and needing help opens the door to the sort of everyday kindnesses.

Or at the very least, a screaming baby in urgent need of a feed is a great excuse to nip into the nearest pub. So, little Wilfie, I hope you’re enjoying your time as an only child. Because I have a funny feeling it won’t last long.

The semicolon had its moment; that moment is over

Rend your cheeks and rub ashes into your hair; for that most elegant, elusive of punctuation marks – the semicolon – is, if not yet quite dead, at least fairly close to being on first name terms with St Peter. Research from Babbel, a ‘learning platform’, shows that usage of the semicolon in texts has plunged by 47 per cent over the past two decades. I would be more surprised if the Pope turned out to be Catholic. These days, students struggle with commas and apostrophes. How can the poor milquetoasts be expected to grasp the finer usages of semicolons?

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This is all a terrible shame. Good punctuation is a balm for the soul. As punctuation (or ‘pointing’, as it used to be called) orders sentences, so this relates to the order of mind, body and the universe itself. I do not exaggerate; Cicero himself thought so.

We can thank Aldus Manutius for introducing the semicolon into Venice, in the 1490s (though its previous life, in Ancient Greek, was as a question mark). What better birthplace than La Serenissima? Where brackets, or lunulae, remind us of the moon, simply using a semicolon in a sentence links us to gondolas, to the Bridge of Sighs; to sunlight shining on the waters of the canals. The typesetter Nicolas Jenson used a star in place of the point; I wish this had become common usage. Its first appearance in English – its debut, perhaps – came in the highest possible authority: the Coverdale Bible, printed in Paris in 1538.

Sure, Theodor Adorno thought it looked like a drooping moustache, but I disagree: formed, from two other punctuation marks, it is a gorgeous, enigmatic, humanist chimera. It more closely resembles a gentleman, on the edge of his chair, leaning slightly forwards, poised to hear the aphorism fall from your learned lips. It is the jewelled hand, held out to be kissed; it is the tactful recognition of a guest in the glittering salon.

This, I’m afraid, is why modernity despises the semicolon. It is too courtly, too refined, too subtle. I blame the democratic, cow-steering Americans, who shun it. They think of it as King Lear did the letter zed: unnecessary. For them it is a foppish aristo sipping absinthe, while the plebeian comma sweats beneath. Computers can’t stand it, because its proper usage refuses strict rules. Deploy it and their horrible, bossy ‘writing’ programmes become confused. (Which, to my mind, is more than reason enough to carry on with them.)

Indeed, the semicolon is useful, unlike the poor old punctus percontativus, ⸮, or rhetorical question mark, which vanished along with ruffs. Who needs a mark to tell us a question is rhetorical, I ask you⸮

The semicolon’s role, on the other hand, is manifold. It is caesura; it is release mechanism; it both divides and connects. ‘It was the best of times; it was the worst of times’ is rendered much better with a semicolon. Witness this gorgeous specimen by Christopher Marlowe, in ‘Hero and Leander’:

Come thither; As she spake this, her toong tript.
For vnawares (Come thither) from her slipt.
And sodainly her former colour chang’d.
And here and there her eies through anger rang’d.

That slight, erotic pause after the first ‘thither’; it’s heavenly. Daniel Defoe’s usage of the semicolon threw Samuel Taylor Coleridge into raptures. When Robinson Crusoe returns to his ship for the final time, he finds a large amount of gold; now all useless and for a moment he wants to let it sink with the ship. Defoe then writes: ‘However, upon second thoughts, I took it away; and wrapping all this in a piece of canvas…’ For Coleridge, this semicolon was ‘exquisite and masterlike… A meaner writer… would have put an ‘!’ after ‘away’. It rendered Defoe, he said, on the same level as Shakespeare. (Incidentally, the original Robinson Crusoe doesn’t have a semicolon there, since it was inserted by a later editor. But still, the point, if you’ll excuse the pun, holds.)

We must resist this decline. Like napkins, black tie and having a glass of champagne before lunch, the semicolon remains a bulwark against civilisational decline. We mustn’t let a generation ape the meaner writers (!) Pause, rest, think; and encourage this most noble of punctuation marks to flourish anew.

Gary Lineker quits the BBC amid antisemitism storm

Good riddance, Gary Lineker. The ex-England striker has now quit the Beeb in a huff, having presented his final Match of the Day show on Sunday. It comes after Lineker shared a social-media post featuring an ‘anti-Semitic’ rat emoji and declared that Israel’s response to the October 7 terrorist attacks was ‘beyond depraved’. Lineker – the Corporation’s highest-paid ‘star’ – had been due to host the BBC’s coverage of the 2026 World Cup but has now ended his contract early. Talk about an early bath…

The Sun got the scoop on his departure, reporting that ‘Gary agreed to leave the BBC for good after meeting bosses last week’, having realised that ‘his position was untenable.’ The paper quotes a source as saying: ‘It is a heartbreaking end to an extraordinary broadcasting career… He remains absolutely devastated by the recent turn of events and is deeply regretful about how his post was interpreted. His last Match of the Day will air on Sunday now and he won’t be back.’ Heartbreaking? Look on the bright side: that’s £1.3 million saved off the Beeb’s salary bill.

Back of the net!

Joe Biden diagnosed with prostate cancer

Joe Biden has been diagnosed with an ‘aggressive form’ of prostate cancer, according to a statement released by his office on Sunday. Biden, 82, was diagnosed on Friday, after he saw a doctor last week for urinary symptoms. The former US president and his family are now reviewing treatment options, with the cancer cells now having spread to the bone.

Prostate cancers are ranked on a ‘Gleason score’ that measures, on a scale of one to 10, how the cancerous cells look compared with normal cells. Biden’s office said his score was nine, suggesting his cancer is among the most aggressive. Metastasised cancer is much harder to treat than localised cancer because it can be hard for drugs to reach all the tumours and completely root out the disease.

However, the former president’s office says that ‘the cancer appears to be hormone-sensitive, which allows for effective management.’ Biden, of course, has dealt with cancer before. Prior to being inaugurated in January 2021, he had several non-melanoma skin cancers surgically removed, and he had a cancerous lesion removed from his chest in February 2023. He notably made cancer a priority of his administration, declaring in 2022 that he wanted to halve the death rate within 25 years.

The news of Biden’s condition follows a Democrat war-of-words over his so-called ‘redemption tour.’ In recent weeks, the ex-President has given his first interviews since leaving office. The octogenarian has tried to defend his legacy, amid a wave of damning accounts on his mental decline in office. Now, all that will be brought to a halt by the news of his latest diagnosis.

A Dad’s Army won’t save Britain

Eighty-five years ago, on 14 May 1940, Anthony Eden, newly-appointed secretary of war in Winston Churchill’s government, went on the radio to appeal for volunteers to join a newly formed defence militia to guard against a German invasion. Originally called the Local Defence Volunteers, this force later became the Home Guard, immortalised on our TV screens as ‘Dad’s Army’.

As things turned out, the Battle of Britain ensured that Operation Sealion, the Nazi invasion plan, never took place, but the Home Guard remained in being, and while never tested in combat, they were a morale-boosting reminder that Britons old and young were ready to do their bit in defending the country. According to the Sunday Times, the idea of reviving the wartime Home Guard forms a central part of the forthcoming Strategic Defence Review of Britain’s military response to a menacing new world order.

The job of guarding our nuclear installations rests with the Civil Nuclear Constabulary, a specially trained and armed branch of the police who have for more than 50 years carried out their job with exemplary efficiency. It is far from clear why they should need the assistance of a scratch force of untrained and inexperienced civilian weekend volunteers to carry out their work.

In the event of a terrorist assault or cyber attack, either the professional army is on hand or the expert advice of IT experts can be called upon – or is the government admitting that we just don’t have enough trained soldiers to do the job?

The still unexplained breakdown in an electricity generating sub-station that caused the closure of Heathrow Airport earlier this year illustrates just how vulnerable our complex network of power and energy supply is, but it is hard to see how an untrained force of well-meaning amateurs can make that shaky situation more stable.

Starmer’s unconvincing portrayal of himself in a military flak jacket may raise the odd mocking snigger, but for a genuine belly laugh we should watch a re-run of Dad’s Army, rather than endure this weak imitation of the real thing.