The school that made an American century

With the Karamazovian hangover now only a weekly occurrence, the healthy life rules supreme. Well, most of the time. Up early, I go for a brisk 30-minute walk, then it’s breakfast in the park that stretches out two blocks away. I finish off with two sets of 20 push-ups on a park bench, a few kicks and punches using leaves as targets, then cross Fifth Avenue going east. (Karate is now a three-night-a-week activity, and I’ve given up Judo as it takes up too much time and needs too many partners.) I then buy the papers from a friendly Indian, get my first coffee of the day from a friendlier Greek, and return to my flat in the 1928 art-deco marvel that is my Park Avenue abode. I exchange jokes about their sex life with the three uniformed doormen who are from Puerto Rico, Howard Beach and Montenegro, then tuck into a hearty breakfast prepared by Margarita, the Colombian lady who has been with me for 40 years in New York, brought up my two children, and still cannot speak a word of English.

So I was surprised the other day, as I was crossing Park Avenue, when a nice-looking young man asked me in English if I was ‘Taki of The Spectator?’ All the more surprised since I was wearing a mask. He turned out to be as pleasant as he looked, and later in the week he sent me a book about the boarding school he attended, Groton. Ted Leonhardt is co-author of the book about his alma mater, and a practising lawyer. Groton is the American Eton, and then some. In his book Ted explains how Groton’s old-boy network actually made the American century, how the relationships between Groton boys developed in shaping American Cold War policy. The book’s title is Divine Fire: Groton School and the American Century.

Uncle Sam became the indisputable ‘numero uno’ during the 20th century. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Sumner Welles, Averell Harriman, Dean Acheson, John Hay Whitney, Kermit Roosevelt, William Bundy, Stewart and Joe Alsop, Douglas Dillon and others like them made the country what the fawning lefty media and the degenerate New York Times are doing their best to undo at present: a Christian nation that saved Europe twice, rebuilt the old continent with its capitalist wealth, and destroyed the Marxist dream of world socialism. Those now referred to as superannuated Wasps managed it all, their impeccable manners hiding a will of iron. After them came LBJ, Vietnam, social unrest, too much migration, and the deluge. All great states fall from within and America is no exception. Uncle Sam’s fifth column targeted the family and religion. The monopolies of Silicon Valley turned against those two institutions, as did Hollywood and the media. Once Biden packs the Supreme Court and adds a couple of Democratic stars to the flag, the undoing of America will be complete.

Am I being cloyingly old-fashioned and reminiscing about an Arcadia that never existed, a Norman Rockwell America? If you believe media lies, I suppose that I am. But I lived in this so-called idealised country long ago, and if you don’t agree all you have to do is read today’s newspapers or watch American television. I lived in a two-parent family with traditional beliefs and had a religious upbringing. I now defend a world where pronouns were all-important, and ‘mother’ and ‘father’ were not words to be avoided at all costs. I went to rest rooms marked Men, pursued women, and never knowingly gave a bad sporting call in my life. I was taught all that at home and at boarding school.

Today all this makes me a superannuated fool and bigot. I never felt the consequences of inequality because I was privileged, but nor did I ever feel envy for those more privileged than me. The so-called robber barons who created American wealth left a hell of a legacy behind. The Ford, Rockefeller and Carnegie Foundations have given away billions and continue to do so — alas to mostly leftist causes. Museums such as the Frick and Whitney, medical research, scientific inventions and so on all came from the wealth created by men who were poor once upon a time.

But that was then. Today we have the Sacklers, subjects of a new book that exposes their crimes. In Empire of Pain, the secret history of the Sacklers is meticulously exposed, showing what a callous, entitled and tone-deaf bunch these bums are. Owners of the company that made OxyContin, and recipients of many billions, the Sacklers continue to try to manipulate the media and the Justice Department. OxyContin is part of the opioid epidemic that has killed more Americans than the Nazis and the Japanese did in world war two, 500,000 and counting, yet the Sacklers pocketed more than ten billion greenbacks and have paid only a fraction of that back in fines. Their company rewarded those who turned a blind eye — an FDA reviewer landed a lucrative job a year after approving the deadly drug, a US attorney who raised alarms quickly became a company consultant — like the Mexican drug dealer El Chapo, but here’s the rub. The Mexican is rotting away in jail and his moolah’s gone.

The Sacklers are in Gstaad and in Florida and have their money. Where’s the RICO justice? This is the America the degenerate Times should be railing against, not the America Groton and other schools made great long ago.

Dead brain cells

As round 14 of the Candidates tournament unfolded, I had the feeling of watching an anti-climactic post-exam bender. Ian Nepomniachtchi had already passed with distinction, wrapping up tournament victory with a round to spare. The Russian plays energetic chess, but part of his success in Yekaterinburg was surely attributable to tempering his impulses throughout the event. In the final round he knocked out a few brain cells with his exuberant attack against Ding Liren. It was soundly refuted, but that hardly mattered.

Nepomniachtchi’s instinctive aggression promises a thrilling clash of styles in the World Championship match against Magnus Carlsen, which is scheduled to commence in November 2021. His main pursuer had been Anish Giri, whose commendable performance in the second half included a win against Fabiano Caruana, Carlsen’s previous challenger. But the die was cast when Giri foundered against Alexander Grischuk in the penultimate round. Obviously deflated, and with no remaining chance of victory, he lost a toothless game against bottom seed Kirill Alekseenko in the final round.

Barring the final hiccup, Nepomniachtchi played superbly, particularly in seizing his chances against the bottom markers. Against Wang Hao, he worked relentlessly to create winning chances in an arid position. If Wang’s resignation was slightly premature, his disconsolate state was explained after the event when he announced his retirement from professional play, citing health problems. By contrast, Nepomniachtchi’s win against Alekseenko (below) has an effortless air, which speaks of a player in blistering form.

Ian Nepomniachtchi–Kirill Alekseenko
Candidates, Yekaterinburg, April 2021

1 c4 Nf6 2 g3 e6 3 Bg2 d5 4 Nf3 dxc4 5 Qa4+ Nbd7 6 Qxc4 a6 7 Qc2 c5 8 Nc3! The automatic 8 O-O allows Black to prepare Bc8-b7 with 8…b5, as the discovered attack 9 Ne5 yields little after 9…Nd5. White’s move 8 Nc3 is more precise, as now 8…b5 9 Ne5 Nd5 10 Nxd5 Nxe5 11 Nf6+! wins rook for knight. 8…Be7 9 O-O O-O 10 d4 cxd4 11 Nxd4 Qc7 12 Rd1 Rd8 13 Be3 The clean pawn structure looks innocuous enough, but on closer inspection Black has severe difficulties in developing his pieces, especially the Bc8. The b7-pawn is pinned, while Ra8-b8 and b7-b5 only invites Nd4-c6. Moving the Nd7 (to prepare Bd7) suggests itself, but where to? Placing it on e5 allows a pin with Be3-f4, while 13…Nd7-c5 permits 14 Na4!?, since Bd7 15 Nxc5 Qxc5 16 Qxc5 Bxc5 17 Nxe6! wins a pawn. On f8, the knight is passive while on b6, as in the game, it soon becomes vulnerable to tactics from the bishop on e3. 13…Nb6 14 Rac1 e5 As the game shows, this critically weakens the light squares, particularly d5. But there was nothing better, e.g. 14…Bd7 15 Qb3! threatens Nc3-d5 or Nd4xe6, and Black’s position would collapse after 15…Nc4 16 Nb1! Rac8 17 Bxb7. 15 Nf5 Bxf5 15…Bf8 16 Qb3! Bxf5 17 Bxb6 Rxd1+ 18 Rxd1 Qe7 and now simply 19 Be3 Rb8 20 Qb6 looks likely to win a pawn. 16 Qxf5 Nc4 17 Bg5 Rxd1+ 18 Nxd1 Rd8 19 Bxf6 Bxf6 (see diagram) 20 Be4! Very awkward for Black, as 20…g6 drops the bishop on f6. Note that 20 b3? Ne3!! would turn the tables completely. 20…Qa5 21 Nc3 Kf8 22 Nd5! Clever. Now 22…Rxd5 23 Bxd5 Qxd5 24 Qc8+ picks up the knight on c4. 22…b5 23 Qxh7 Rxd5 24 Bxd5 Qd2 25 Rxc4 bxc4 26 e4 This mighty bishop on d5 enables an easy harvest of pawns in the coming moves. 26…Qxb2 27 Qh8+ Ke7 28 Qc8 Qb6 29 Qxc4 Qb5 30 Qc7+ Qd7 31 Qc5+ 31…Qd6 32 Qa7+ Qd7 33 Qxa6 leaves White two pawns up with complete control, so Black resigns

No. 652

White to play and mate in two moves. Composed by Revd Ernest Clement Mortimer, The Problemist, 1942. Answers should be emailed to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 10 May. There is a prize of £20 for the first correct answer out of a hat. Please include a postal address and allow six weeks for prize delivery.

Last week’s solution 1 Bd1! Kd3 2 Qd5 mate, or 1…Kc4 2 Qe4 mate.
Last week’s winner John Payne, Cheadle Hulme, Cheshire

2505: Endgame

The unclued lights (one hyphened) are of a kind, confirmed in Chambers. Elsewhere, ignore one accent.

Across

1 I returned with note and wave to Bletchley Park expert (11, hyphened)

11 Tried and kept in control in the past (6, three words)

13 Goes off for a while (7)

16 Women’s painting first seen returning by tube (5)

17 Ask individual hence (6)

18 Colonel Lyndhurst’s bird (5)

20 Amateur left, watching train (6)

21 Like a judge with tattered robes (5)

22 Excited, once, in river, surrounded by upland (7)

29 Stretch or bird! (5)

30 Singer in church introduced by priest (6)

32 Fabulist appears from river – waters ebbing (5)

34 Less brutal Austrian kids (6)

36 Sikh’s prayer from substandard asylum (5)

37 Young family member backed number one son – gets caught (5)

40 President of furniture company no longer active (3)

41 Etna, beginning to erupt twice, under whirling cloud of volcanic ash (11, two words)

Down

1 Film of the Hispanics’ White House nightclub (10)

4 28 batiks pulled down in Scotland’s first New Town (12, two words)

5 This province of the Belgian Congo loses £1000 for Japanese sword (7)

6 The Large Stag – regularly go back to pub (8, two words)

7 Up to some stunt, I’ll be bound (5)

8 Four points for composer and Cockney bee keepers? (4)

9 Camping design (6)

10 Leading Ordnance Survey guides for climbing crags (5)

12 Didn’t go to grave, reportedly (6)

14 Crooner and unmistakable tsarina performing (12, two words)

19 Greer’s ways stewing fish (10, two words)

21 Qualified, though detailed (9)

23 Pursues and captures and becomes exhausted (8, two words)

24 Poor handsomer loveless farm employee (8)

25 Shoot at in head of bank’s estate (6)

26 With happy heart, go for a wander – OK? (7)

28 Songs by Schubert or Schumann top violinist sung (6)

31 People grabbed by you turned hostile (5)

35 Wine – Andrew Strauss thinks it tops (4)

A first prize of £30 for the first correct solution opened on 24 May. There are two runners-up prizes of £20. Please scan or photograph entries and email them (including the crossword number in the subject field) to crosswords@spectator.co.uk – the dictionary prize is not available. We will accept postal entries again at some point.

2502: Nay-sayers? – solution

The unclued lights are HORSES.

First prize Bob Toland, Ramsey, Cambs
Runners-up Gareth Davies, Langstone, Gwent; Catherine Knox, London SW4

Holyrood 2021: Seats to watch out for

Scotland goes to the polls today to vote for 129 members of the Scottish Parliament. Polls forecast victory for the ruling SNP but there are a string of seats where the result last time was close enough to inject some unpredictability into proceedings.

SNP targets

Dumbarton

Incumbent: Jackie Baillie (Labour) 

Majority: 109

This is the seat the Nationalists want more than any other. Politically, it is a stubborn west-coast hold-out against the glories of nationalism. Symbolically, it is home to the Clyde Naval Base and the UK’s nuclear deterrent, which the SNP wants to scrap. But perhaps most important of all is the personal dimension. Jackie Baillie, the Labour MSP who has held Dumbarton for all 22 years of the Scottish Parliament’s existence, sat on the Holyrood inquiry committee and was noted for her exacting questioning of Nicola Sturgeon. She was just as exacting with Alex Salmond, but that hardly matters. You don’t try to hold Nicola Sturgeon to account and get away with it.

Baillie, who is moderate, pro-Union and pro-Trident, will need tactical votes to survive. The Conservative candidate in Dumbarton has no chance of winning but Tory voters hold the key to the seat. If they vote Conservative, the pro-Union vote splits and Sturgeon gains another seat and moves even closer to a majority. If enough Conservatives vote tactically for Baillie, she will see off the Nationalist challenge and sour the SNP’s election night.

Edinburgh Central

Incumbent: Ruth Davidson (Conservative)

Majority: 610

Former Scottish Tory leader Ruth Davidson delivered a surprise victory in 2016 in this very liberal, very affluent and very young seat. Davidson isn’t standing this time (she’s off to the House of Lords) and the SNP’s former Westminster leader Angus Robertson hopes to win the constituency back. Given the politics of the city — Edinburgh voted 61 per cent against independence but 74 per cent for Remain — and Robertson’s advocacy for EU membership, he has to be considered the favourite. The only bump in the road is that Scottish Green list MSP Alison Johnstone is contesting again, having taken almost a fifth of the vote last time and having acquired a greater public profile since then. Johnstone is pro-independence and pro-EU but might attract leftish voters looking for an alternative to the SNP. Whether that will be enough to split the separatist vote isn’t clear but it is Unionists’ best (perhaps only) chance of retaining the seat, either via the Tories or Labour.

Ayr

Incumbent: John Scott (Conservative)

Majority: 750

Farmer John Scott has been Ayr’s MSP since the 2000 by-election but his majority has yo-yoed and is now down to 750, which makes this a key target for the SNP. Scott’s Toryism is that of yesteryear — patrician, gentlemanly, unfailingly polite — but without any of the aloof entitlement. That might be enough to swing some of Ayr’s 5,000 Labour voters behind him. Absent that, he will have to hope that the presence of former SNP MSP Chic Brodie on the ballot, now heading up his own socially conservative pro-independence party Scotia Future, will take votes away from SNP candidate Siobhan Brown. That, however, seems like wishful thinking. If Scott holds on here, it will be a testament to his personal vote rather than any party consideration.

Aberdeenshire West

Incumbent: Alexander Burnett (Conservative)

Majority: 900

Alexander Burnett took the Conservatives from third place to win Aberdeenshire West in 2016. This monied, rural constituency is home to, among other estates, Balmoral Castle and the SNP has sensibly put up Fergus Mutch, a former Holyrood spin doctor from the party’s right wing. A young-ish Fergus Ewing, the cautious, Tweed-wearing Mutch is arguably more Tory than Burnett and well-placed to overturn his opponent’s slim 900-vote majority. Burnett will have to hope enough of Aberdeenshire West’s 7,000 Liberal Democrats vote tactically for him, otherwise he will struggle to cling on here.

Edinburgh Southern

Incumbent: Daniel Johnson (Labour)

Majority: 1,123

Incumbent Daniel Johnson has earned a name for himself as a hard-working local MSP but his majority is precarious and the SNP bent on capturing the last Labour-held seat in Edinburgh. Challenging him is Nationalist rising star and local businesswoman Catriona MacDonald. Johnson will need the tactical votes of Tories to cling on in this leafy, suburban seat.

East Lothian

Incumbent: Iain Gray (Labour)

Majority: 1,127

East Lothian has been Labour since the first session of the Scottish Parliament in 1999 but the party’s majority is now a tenth of the 11,000-vote advantage it enjoyed back then. With former party leader Iain Gray standing down at this election, the SNP stands its best chance yet of seizing the seat. Standing in the Nationalists’ way is Martin Whitfield, who represented the Westminster version of the seat between 2017 and 2019. A quarter of the vote here goes to the Tories and if enough of their supporters switch to Whitfield, he will be able to keep the SNP out. Absent tactical voting, Whitfield has an almighty battle on his hands.

Dumfriesshire

Incumbent: Oliver Mundell (Conservative)

Majority: 1,230

Oliver Mundell took Dumfriesshire from Labour in 2016 and has a battle on his hands keeping it from the SNP’s Joan McAlpine, who came second here last time and is currently a list MSP for South Scotland. McAlpine is a true-believing nationalist but has earned respect across the political spectrum for standing up to her own party over gender identity politics. Labour’s Colin Smyth, also a regional MSP, is mounting a challenge, too. Mundell has shown himself to be a plain-speaker — he was thrown out of Holyrood’s debating chamber last year for calling Nicola Sturgeon a liar — but that can cut both ways with the electorate. If he can fend off both the Nats and Labour to retain Dumfriesshire, it will be an impressive feat.

Galloway and West Dumfries

Incumbent: Finlay Carson (Conservatives)

Majority: 1,514

Tory Fin Carson has a modest majority in Galloway and West Dumfries, a southern constituency an hour’s drive from Carlisle. Fortunately for Carson, his opponent is Emma Harper, the SNP list MSP who recently pronounced that ‘jobs can be created if a border is created’ between Scotland and England. Of course, Scottish nationalism being what it is, that kind of talk might only motivate more SNP voters to come out for Harper. Like many of his colleagues, Carson will need tactical voting.

Eastwood

Incumbent: Jackson Carlaw (Conservatives)

Majority: 1,611

Former Scottish Tory leader Jackson Carlaw is up against it in this iconically Middle Scotland seat, and he doesn’t have much of a majority to fall back on. Eastwood’s Westminster analogue, East Renfrewshire, reverted to the SNP in 2019 despite the best efforts of Paul Masterton. Carlaw faces the same problem as Masterton: he is a representative of the party that delivered Brexit in an area where Remain took 74 per cent of the vote. He can’t rely on tactical Labour votes in this three-way marginal, plus he has to contend with a Ukip candidate eating into his support from the right.

Shetland

Incumbent: Beatrice Wishart (Lib Dem)

Majority: 1,837

Shetland has been Liberal country uninterrupted since the days of Jo Grimond and a bastion of liberalism and Whigism for generations before then. However, the SNP has been making headway in the last decade. Incumbent Beatrice Wishart got in at the 2019 by-election, which saw the Lib Dem vote collapse by almost 20 per cent even as the overall turnout increased. The Tories and Labour both lost their deposits here last time, so Wishart can’t fall back on tactical voting. Her best bet is that Shetlanders rebel against the SNP’s centralising style of governing in Edinburgh and decide they prefer an independent-minded, rather than independence-minded, MSP.

Edinburgh Western

Incumbent: Alex Cole-Hamilton (Lib Dem)

Majority: 2,960

Another well-to-do seat the SNP desperately wants to take back. Standing in their way is Alex Cole-Hamilton, one of the most passionate Lib Dem advocates for the Union. He has also been to the fore recently as a member of the Holyrood inquiry, where he grilled Salmond and Sturgeon. Much like Jackie Baillie, the Nationalists would like to claim his scalp for this alone. Whether they succeed will come down to local Tory and Labour voters. Those two parties took a quarter of the vote combined in 2016 but if enough of their supporters switch to Cole-Hamilton, they can get a dedicated community MSP and keep the SNP out.

North East Fife

Incumbent: Willie Rennie (Lib Dem)

Majority: 3,465

North East Fife was a reliably Lib Dem seat until being swept away in the 2011 SNP landslide. Scottish Lib Dem leader Willie Rennie reclaimed it in 2016 but his majority is not insurmountable. Rennie is one of the most effective critics of the SNP government, having forced their failings on policing, mental health and Covid testing onto the national agenda. He is also steadfast on the Union and made of sterner stuff than most Lib Dems, which should bring him the backing of some of North East Fife’s 6,000 Conservative voters. If he gets enough of them, he could clinch a commanding win over the Nationalists. If not, and if the SNP vote turns out in droves while Lib Dems stay at home, he could be in trouble.

Conservative targets

Perthshire South and Kinross-shire

Incumbent: Roseanna Cunningham (SNP)

Majority: 1,422

One to watch. SNP veteran Roseanna Cunningham is standing down at this election, giving Tory list MSP Liz Smith an opportunity to snatch this rural redoubt from the Nationalists. PSK is one of those constituencies the Tories really ought to be winning by this stage. Smith is in with a real shot here; the only question is whether a lacklustre national campaign trips her at the finish line.

Edinburgh Pentlands

Incumbent: Gordon MacDonald (SNP)

Majority: 2,456

Pentlands hasn’t voted Tory since 2007 and Lothian list MSP Gordon Lindhurst is having his second go at changing that. Lindhurst didn’t shift the dial much last time, despite the Conservatives having the wind at their backs, which raises the possibility that the party has simply maxed out its vote here. That said, the 2017 local elections saw the party’s vote more than double in the very unTory ward of Sighthill/Gorgie while recording significant boosts in already friendly territory like Colinton/Fairmilehead and Pentland Hills. Another of those seats the Tories need to win again if they are ever to be more than just an opposition party.

Angus North and Mearns

Incumbent: Mairi Gougeon (SNP)

Majority: 2,472

The late Alex Johnstone built up the Tory vote in this seat, and its predecessor Angus, over four elections and now a five per cent SNP-to-Conservative swing would place this seat in the blue column. The party’s candidate this time, Braden Davy, will need tactical voting help if he’s to pull that off in this election. The incumbent is Nicola Sturgeon’s public health minister Mairi Gougeon.

Aberdeen South and North Kincardine

Incumbent: Maureen Watt (SNP)

Majority: 2,755

The Tories went from fourth to second place in ASNK in 2016 and could benefit from the fact that SNP incumbent Maureen Watt is retiring. North East Scotland list MSP Liam Kerr is the party’s candidate and the result will be an indication of whether the Ruth Davidson phenomenon can outlast Davidson herself, or whether the Tories have peaked in this coastal seat.

Moray

Incumbent: Richard Lochhead (SNP)

Majority: 2,875

In 2016 Douglas Ross, now the Scottish Tory leader, cut the SNP’s majority in this northern seat from 11,000 to just under 3,000, but he isn’t contesting it this time. The Conservatives aren’t popular with Morayshire fishermen these days (or fishermen elsewhere in the north and north-east of the country), plus this constituency has been SNP since 1999. The Tory candidate is local councillor Tim Eagle and he faces SNP higher education minister Richard Lochhead. Eagle’s only chance is a collapse in Lochhead’s vote, a serious bout of tactical voting, or both.

Perthshire North

Incumbent: John Swinney (SNP)

Majority: 3,336

Another one to watch. Nicola Sturgeon’s chief bruiser, deputy first minister of the Scottish government, and much-criticised education minister, John Swinney is a controversial figure and one the Conservatives would dearly love to unseat in a constituency they consider prime Tory territory. The fact they have failed in every election since 1999, when the seat was called North Tayside, can’t be overlooked but nor can the fact Swinney’s majority is at its lowest ebb in 22 years. Tory list MSP Murdo Fraser is having another swing this time, having challenged Swinney in all five previous devolved elections. There aren’t many Labour or Lib Dem supporters in Perthshire North, so Fraser will need to persuade soft-SNP voters that Swinney’s time is up. It’s not out of the realms of possibility that Fraser pulls off an upset here but it won’t be easy.

Angus South

Incumbent: Graeme Dey (SNP)

Majority: 4,304

This is a big ask for Tory candidate and current list MSP Maurice Golden, but Graeme Dey’s vote share did drop by almost 10 per cent in 2016. Golden would need a similar drop to take Angus South this time. Unlikely, but an opportunity to cut the SNP majority further.

Aberdeenshire East

Incumbent: Gillian Martin (SNP)

Majority: 5,837

The SNP’s Gillian Martin should be safe in this north-east seat. It’s home to a chunk of Scotland’s fisheries industry — bonjour, Monsieur Brexit — and was previously held by Alex Salmond. Note, however, that the Nationalist vote plummeted by 19 per cent in 2016. Whether that was a reflection of Salmond’s absence from the ballot paper or discontent with the SNP’s independence agenda (Aberdeenshire voted 60 per cent No in 2014) is up for debate. But it’s yet again one of those seats the Tories need and ought to be taking from the Nationalists.

Labour targets

Cowdenbeath

Incumbent: Annabelle Ewing (SNP)

Majority: 3,041

Former Scottish Labour deputy leader Alex Rowley hopes to reclaim his old seat from the SNP and with Annabelle Ewing, the woman who won it from him, retiring at this election, he might be in with a decent shot. That’s all the more so since the pro-independence Scottish Greens are standing and could take votes from the Nationalists. A little vote-splitting, a little tactical-voting, and a little luck could see Rowley emerge victorious.

Rutherglen

Incumbent: Clare Haughey (SNP)

Majority: 3,743

The SNP’s Clare Haughey snatched Rutherglen from Labour’s James Kelly last time and he’s standing to try to snatch it back. Now the Scottish government mental health minister, Haughey has a respectable majority but Kelly has a good public profile and spearheaded the successful campaign to repeal the SNP’s Offensive Behaviour Act. How well or badly Haughey performs could signal whether Labour’s former Lanarkshire heartlands are turning back to their old party or minded to stick a while longer with the SNP.

Coatbridge and Chryston

Incumbent: Fulton MacGregor (SNP)

Majority: 3,779

Socialist bastion Coatbridge and Chryston fell to the nationalists in 2016, one year after the Westminster seat Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill was captured. The latter has changed hands twice since and is back in the SNP’s grip. Could the Holyrood seat return to the Labour fold this time? Coatbridge councillor Michael McPake has been tasked with pulling this off. It’s not as unlikely as it might seem on paper. There is still a lot of sympathy — even affection — for Labour in this area.

Lib Dem targets

Caithness, Sutherland and Ross

Incumbent: Gail Ross (SNP)

Majority: 3,913

The SNP’s Gail Ross isn’t standing again, which gives the Lib Dems a chance to pinch this seat in what used to be bright yellow Liberal heartland. Candidate Molly Nolan is a Harvard graduate, not a phrase you hear often in connection with the Scottish Parliament, and has focussed her campaign on rural jobs, infrastructure and climate change. Last time, Jamie Stone (now the MP for the Westminster seat) put the Lib Dem vote up nine per cent, turning the seat into a two-horse race. Nolan needs a swing of around seven per cent to take this constituency from the SNP, who have put up list MSP and children’s minister Maree Todd.

Argyll and Bute

Incumbent: Mike Russell (SNP)

Majority: 5,978

Argyll and Bute has been SNP since 2007 and Scottish government constitution minister Mike Russell, standing down at this election, has built up a redoubtable majority over the years. The Lib Dems have an outside chance — and it very much is an outside chance — in the form of the area’s ex-MP, Alan Reid. When he stood in 2016, he took the party from fourth to second place, pushing up their vote almost 14 per cent. The SNP’s Jenni Minto can only be considered the favourite here but even if Reid fails to capture the seat, he could cut the Nationalist majority enough to make 2026 a more promising prospect.

Other results to watch out for

Alba back

Alex Salmond made a comeback in this election, springing directly from the Holyrood inquiry to a new political force, Alba. If the SNP is Ukip pretending to be the Labour Party, Alba is not pretending. It is an unabashedly nationalist outfit. One campaign video invoked how the Scots ‘broke the spine of English superiority’ at Bannockburn. Alba is standing only on the regional list, Salmond’s pitch being that the proportional system sees list votes for the SNP wasted. Instead, he argues, nationalists should give them to Alba and ensure a ‘supermajority’ for independence at Holyrood. Polls suggest Alba has failed to cut through — no wonder, given its very amateur operation — but its message might have more appeal than the polls are registering. Might we see a ‘shy Alba voter’ phenomenon in which SNP voters tell pollsters they are full-square behind Nicola Sturgeon but, in the privacy of the polling booth, give Salmond their list vote in the hopes of hastening independence? 

The dauphin takes on the queen

The new Scottish Labour leader has undoubtedly fought the cheeriest, most upbeat campaign, including an impromptu bout of booty-shaking at an outdoor dance class. But Anas Sarwar has taken on an even more daunting challenging than reviving the fortunes of the Labour Party in Scotland: he is standing against Sturgeon in her Glasgow Southside constituency. Last time, the Nationalist leader took a mere 61 per cent of the vote, so Sarwar’s on a hiding to nothing. Or maybe not. If he can eat into La Sturgeon’s majority, as Spectator contributor Susan Dalgety has suggested, he could demonstrate that Scottish Labour is back in business.

Dear Green place

Glasgow Kelvin is home to Scotland’s greatest concentration of ageing yuppies, skinny-jeaned hipsters, and people willing to pay a fiver for a cup of coffee. The constituency contains Glasgow’s city centre and parts of its west end, including all three of the city’s universities. Scottish Greens co-leader Patrick Harvie stood for Kelvin for the first time in 2016 and shot straight into second place. His chances of taking the seat this time are decidedly outside but the incumbent MSP Sandra White is standing down and if the Greens are going to make a constituency breakthrough any time soon, it will be here.

Unity ticket

George Galloway, former MP for Glasgow Kelvin, later Bethnal Green and Bow, and later still Bradford West, is standing on the South Scotland regional list for anti-nationalist outfit All for Unity. Galloway is AfU’s best chance (albeit an extremely slim one) of gaining a seat, since South Scotland is red, white and blue territory. But the party has had little cut-through beyond social media. It has, however, tapped into discontent with the main parties among more strident and politically active opponents of the SNP. If Galloway does make it into Holyrood, those parties will have paved his way by failing to detect this discontent until it was too late.

Independent’s day?

Lothian MSP Andy Wightman quit the Greens last December over its hardline position on gender ideology, complaining of ‘intolerance’ towards dissenting views, and is now standing as an independent in the Highlands and Islands, where he now lives. He needs about 15,000 votes to win a list seat, a huge ask for a one-man campaign, but his message of radical localism could cut through in a region that feels alternately neglected and bossed around by remote Holyrood. Wightman’s fortunes will be a useful barometer of the standing of independent politics after two decades of devolution, a system in which independents and single-MSP parties initially did reasonably well.

The battle for second place

The top-line result is a foregone conclusion: SNP wins. What is still unknown is whether the Scottish Tories will manage to hold onto second place or whether Anas Sarwar’s energetic campaign will be enough to propel Scottish Labour back into the main opposition slot. Since Labour beat the Tories on the constituency vote in 2016 but trailed them on the list, this is not as straightforward a question as it might seem. Does it only count if Labour wins more seats than the Tories, or will they be accorded a moral victory if they beat Douglas Ross’s party on the constituency and list votes but remain third in seats? Of course, the Conservatives could defy all expectations and hold second handsomely, but even that is unlikely to quell questions about Ross’s lacklustre campaign.

Why the Hartlepool election result doesn’t really matter

Ah, Hartlepool. The by-election there brings back memories: I am old enough to have reported on the last one, back in 2004, when Peter Mandelson went off to Brussels and left behind what was then a fairly safe Labour seat.

My slightly faded memory of that 2004 vote informs my view of what is apparently the most important question in British politics today: who will win the latest Hartlepool by-election? And my view is this: it doesn’t really matter.

To explain what I mean by that, let’s go back to that 2004 by-election, where a bright young local lad called Iain Wright (he’s now 48 and retired from politics) saw off a solid challenge from the Lib Dems in the form of Jody Dunn, an earnest, accomplished barrister who thought it was a good idea to write a blog about canvassing in the town, recounting how everyone she met was either drunk, accompanied by an angry dog or undressed – ‘and in some cases two or more of the above.’

The 2004 results:

LAB – 12,752

LIB – 10,719

UKIP – 3,193

CON – 3,004

Note that last number. In 2004, Jeremy Middleton, the Conservative candidate in Hartlepool, finished fourth with less than 10 per cent of the vote.

Now, back to 2021. Today, Labour and Conservative spinners are playing the usual games of expectation management about the latest Hartlepool result; a lot of clever people seem to expect a Tory win, but clever people can be wrong just as easily as others, and maybe more so, since they find it harder to accept that they don’t know things.

And the truth of most by-election reporting and commentary is that the people doing it don’t really know what’s going on. Reporting by-elections well is damned hard; predicting them harder still. At best, as a journalist, you can cobble together a few nice vox pop quotes with some (always questionable) accounts from political insiders who, if they were honest, don’t really know how the vote will go. From such straws does journalism make bricks that are laid one on top of the other until a narrative is built.

The tallest tower of speculation currently faces towards a Tory win. I have no idea how likely that is. But I also know that it doesn’t really matter. Not in the grand scheme of things.

And that wider context is found in those numbers from 2004. Once upon a time, not too long ago, the Conservatives were struggling to be an also-ran in Hartlepool. If someone writing about that by-election had predicted that a Conservative candidate (let alone one from well outside the constituency) would be competitive in Hartlepool little more than 16 years later, they would have been laughed out of town. Whatever the result, the mere fact that the spinners are duelling over the latest Hartlepool vote is a sign that an awful lot has changed since 2004.

By-elections are hard to predict partly because of turnout. No one really knows how many people will bother to vote, and the individual decisions of a relatively small number of people (even a few hundred, potentially) can make all the difference to the result. That is one of the reasons not to read too much into the exact outcome of the by-election: a close Conservative gain really has about as much significance as a Labour hold by a similarly small margin.

And how much significance would that be? Well, another of those nice narratives says that politics is undergoing a fundamental shift, with the Conservatives re-orientating themselves further into the old working-class Labour heartlands.

There’s certainly a lot of substance to that narrative: Boris Johnson has indeed continued the strategy of Theresa May and made the Tory offer one that can be summarised as ‘a bit to the Left on economics, a bit to the Right on culture.’ And that offer worked pretty well for a man called Tony Blair for a long time, so why not Boris? As long as he can keep small-state Conservatives onboard with his big state agenda, Johnson’s well-disguised neo-Blairism could well capture new ground for his party.

It could also pose some big strategic challenges for Starmer. The logic of a Conservative party advancing into the socially-conservative Labour homeland with a bigger, more generous state is for Labour to aim for the territory such Tories cede: more affluent, liberal places with lots of graduate voters and a history of choosing between the Tories and the Lib Dems. The near-certain defeat of the Conservative candidate in the London mayoral election and likely success of Labour in the London assembly elections shows that Johnson’s blue-collar Toryism is not cost-free for his party. He may win places like Hartlepool but eventually lose places like Guildford. Is that a trade the Conservative party is really prepared to make?

I don’t think it’s impossible to imagine a British political scene dominated by a Conservative party that’s slightly left of centre on economics, right of centre on social issues and reliant on older, poorer voters without university degrees, and a Labour party that absorbs the Lib Dems and Greens to capture the support of most degree-holding urban and suburban voters. That would be a proper realignment.

But will Hartlepool’s signpost point clearly to that future? Or will it just reflect the temporary relief of an electorate emerging from a horrible pandemic thanks to a time-limited vaccination programme that enjoys almost astronomical levels of public support?

The awkward truth for narrative-builders is that whatever the result, what happens in Hartlepool will mean something – but quite what won’t be clear for a few years yet, and certainly not tomorrow when you read the first draft of this chapter of history.

The dangers of buying a ‘doer-upper’

Is there any television programme as cruel as Grand Designs? At least Jeux Sans Frontieres only offered 15 minutes of humiliation at a time. Grand Designs, by contrast, offers a lifetime’s worth, often with bankruptcy and divorce thrown in. But none have come quite such a cropper as Edward Short who, in 2008, paid £1 million for a building plot on the North Devon coast and has spent the past 13 years – as well as a further £6 million – trying to turn it into a lighthouse-inspired luxury home with infinity pool, home cinema and sauna. What stands there at the moment, however, looks more like the remains of Chernobyl nuclear power station. That Mr Short runs a company called the Department for Good Ideas merely adds to the theatre of cruelty.

Why do building projects so often end up in misery? It is easy to blame amateurism – and certainly wide-eyed private speculators are part of the problem. Yet professionally-managed projects come to grief just as often. If you put, say, HS2 on an episode of Grand Designs it would fit the format perfectly, with its soaring costs and delays. It is just that in that case the mess isn’t left to an anxious-looking couple in hard hats — the reliable old British taxpayer can always be called upon to fill in the gaps. Building and construction in Britain more generally has developed a culture of escalating costs and excruciating delays.

Partly this is to do with standards. Obviously, we need building standards, but the sheer quantity of them, covering every aspect of a building down to the height of letter boxes and electrical sockets, has made any building project a bureaucratic nightmare. Moreover, many projects involve liaison between different council departments, which often will not agree with each other. Planners, conservation officers and building standards people will each have their own ideas.

Secondly, building is one industry which in Britain has never succeeded in rationalising its operations. Unlike in some countries, where a string element of prefabrication is the norm, in Britain most homes are still pieces of bespoke craftmanship, made from bricks stuck together one by one, and with hand-plastered walls. The industry has been unable, as a result, to benefit from the efficiency of mass production.

But above all this stands a tolerance of high costs, created by galloping house price inflation. If house prices weren’t in the habit of increasing by five, 10, 20 per cent a year, home-renovators wouldn’t be prepared to take on such extravagant projects. To put it simply, most people who have bought property in Britain over the past few decades have seen its value grow sharply over the course of a few years. It is easy to fool yourself that you are making a profit from your own home improvements when really you have simply ridden a swell of inflation. The irony is that the now-separated Mr and Mrs Short are among the unlucky few who have not made a paper profit by buying a home over the past few decades. They could have done so had they simply retained the frumpy old property which preceded their mock lighthouse – while doing absolutely nothing other than lying on the adjoining beach.

If you really must create a building to satisfy your creative urge, and are prepared to suffer bitterly for your art, then fine, go ahead and get yourself on Grand Designs. But if you want to make some money and enjoy a relaxed lifestyle, don’t renovate or build your own property – just buy someone else’s project – quite possibly after they have broken their finances in order to create it.

The ‘Covid deaths’ that are not caused by Covid

Registered Covid deaths fell to just one on Monday, leading many to comment that the epidemic in Britain is effectively over. One day’s statistics don’t mean an awful lot, especially over a bank holiday, but what about the wider picture? Over the UK as a whole, there have been 90 deaths over the past seven days, a fall of 41.2 per cent over the previous seven day period – although that, too, may be affected by the bank holiday.

A more in-depth analysis, offering more context – although a little out of date – is provided by the latest weekly analysis of deaths from all causes, published today by the Office for National Statistics and covering the week ending 23 April. It shows that in that week there were 9,941 deaths in England and Wales, 497 fewer than the previous week and 5.3 per cent lower than the five-year average. It was the seventh week in which deaths were lower than the five-week average, suggesting that that second wave of Covid-19 is now thoroughly well over – we are seeing fewer deaths than normal at this time of year, perhaps because some people who would otherwise have died now had already been carried off by Covid-19. Of those 9,941 deaths registered in the week to 23 April, 260 (2.6 per cent of the total) mentioned Covid-19 on the death certificate.

Confusingly, the government uses two different definitions of a Covid death. Public Health England (PHE) – which produces the figures quoted in the opening paragraph – defines a Covid death as one which occurs, from any cause, within 28 days of someone testing positive for Covid-19. The ONS, by contrast, defines a Covid death as one where Covid-19 or ‘novel coronavirus’ is mentioned anywhere on a death certificate. There are obvious weaknesses to both. In the case of the PHE figures, they include deaths which have nothing to do with Covid-19 – you could be run over by a bus and still be counted. As for the ONS figures, they could feasibly miss people who have never been tested for Covid (a large number of people who died in care homes early on in the pandemic never were tested). On the other hand, they include people who may really have died from other causes.

Of the 260 people whose death certificates mentioned Covid-19 in the week up to 23 April, only 176 (67.7 per cent) mentioned the disease as an underlying cause. In other words, in a third of ‘Covid deaths’, the real cause was something else; Covid was at most a contributory factor. The further the vaccination programme progresses, the fewer deaths we can expect to have Covid as underlying cause. This is because the vaccines have been found to be more effective at preventing serious illness and death than they are at preventing infection. As a result, we are bound to see more and more cases of people who died of some other disease while they were mildly infected with Covid-19.

But the figures which arguably give the best overall view of the lethality of the pandemic are those published by the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries as part of its Continuous Mortality Investigation. These look at mortality as a whole, and don’t just compare it with a raw, five-year average as the ONS does – they adjust for population growth and for an ageing population by looking at the standardised mortality rate. The latest figures, published today, show that cumulative mortality for 2021 up to 23 April is running just 2 per cent ahead of the average for the years 2011 to 2020.

We have become conditioned to hearing frightening daily death figures, which are often crudely converted into ‘Jumbo jet-loads’. Yet the wider picture is of overall mortality running only slightly ahead of a normal year.

Scottish nationalism is no better than any other kind

Even the Americans are noticing Nicola Sturgeon now and if you are – like many nationalists – the kind of Scottish nationalist forever on the lookout for external validation, lengthy articles featuring the first minister in The New Yorker and The Atlantic is the kind of thing to make you proud. There has always been a strong streak of what I like to think of as Sally Field nationalism – ‘And I can’t deny the fact that you like me! Right now, you like me!’ However happy it might be, it cannot quite escape being cringeworthy. But there we have it; nationalism is essentially myopic and all nationalisms are alike in that respect. This is a view challenging the sense, almost universally accepted by Scotland’s nationalist movement, that it should never be compared to other forms of nationalist sentiment.

In The Atlantic, Jack McConnell, the former first minister and leader of Scottish Labour, draws a distinction between Sturgeon and her predecessor. She is a social democrat who happens to be a nationalist, ‘rather than a nationalist who poses as a social democrat.’ It’s a good line and superficially plausible but not one which withstands much scrutiny.

Sturgeon joined the SNP when she was 16 years old. Even then, the Labour party had disappointed her. ‘I joined the SNP’ she once said, ‘because it was obvious to me then – as it still is today – that you cannot guarantee social justice unless you are in control of the delivery.’ Note, then, the sharply drawn territorial limits Sturgeon places – and places – on her ambitions. Country first, then social justice. Neil Kinnock couldn’t do it for her and John Smith’s commitment to social justice left Sturgeon unmoved. Tony Blair, obviously, existed far beyond the pale.

Few people joined the SNP in the mid-1980s because they believed the party a vehicle for social justice. They joined it then, as they do now, because they consider the SNP the authentic articulation of a distinct Scottish political consciousness. A movement more than a mere party and, more importantly, the voice of a nation too. In Sturgeon’s case, they also joined the party during a period when she was tearing through the nationalist historical novels of Nigel Tranter.

There is nothing especially awful about this but it would be as well to be honest about such things. At its best, modern Scottish nationalism is an awfully dull business but no matter how much it pretends to be quite unlike any and all other forms of nationalism it is, in the end and at bottom, in precisely the same business as other nationalisms. Few things are quite so smug as a Scotch sense of moral superiority but when it comes wrapped in a saltire it takes on an extra special level of unbearableness.

And like other nationalisms it is, in the end, founded upon a keen sense of victimhood. Scotland must be protected because Scotland never receives its due, never enjoys a fair crack of the whip, can never be expected to thrive in whatever circumstances pertain at any given time. The neighbours to the south must take some of the responsibility for that, but the real villains are those Scots who fail to recognise there is even a problem. As Alex Salmond explained in a 1992 party election broadcast, ‘What sort of person are you? Do you let other people talk for you, act for you, walk all over you? Of course not. But here’s a puzzle. As a Scot, that’s exactly the sort of person you are.’

The modern SNP is a little more subtle than that, but the core message remains much the same. At the conclusion of an otherwise ordinary New Yorker profile, Sturgeon lets the mask slip: ‘Most people here in Scotland, subliminally, have spent their whole lives being told that we are not capable of being an independent country.’ Boris Johnson and those who think like him ‘don’t seem to understand that on an emotional level, that having things done to you… You know, people don’t like that in their individual lives. So why should a country put up with it?’

As always, the personal must be conflated with the national for, in truth, there is no division between the two as far as the SNP is concerned. And since the SNP is driven by the national interest it follows that SNP’s preferences must always, eternally, be in everyone’s personal interest too.

No sensible person disputes that Scotland could be an independent country and a perfectly respectable, if initially poorer, one too. Millions of people voted No in 2014, not because they had internalised and accepted some notion of Caledonian inferiority but because they neither saw the need for, or the wisdom of, independence. Since the SNP now disowns the case it presented for independence in 2014 and since Sturgeon now suggests Alex Salmond – the would-be premiere of the newly independent state – is not a person fit for public office, the SNP’s own arguments now implicitly suggest Scotland made the right choice seven years ago.

In truth, Scotland enjoys certain unusual advantages: all the advantages of nationhood without the accompanying inconveniences of statehood. The cringe lies with those who think nationhood cannot endure unless it is buttressed by statehood. But a passport and a seat at the United Nations are, in the end, mere baubles. Some things would doubtless be better arranged post-independence but every step forward is likely to be matched by at least an equal step back. For that is how life tends to work and it is dishonest to sell independence as a cause uniquely free of disagreeable consequences and then, when forced to concede the existence of those challenges, doubly dishonest to present them as some kind of ennobling voyage of national rediscovery. For your mortgage really is more important than your passport.

Sturgeon insists her nationalism is ‘utilitarian’ rather than ‘existential’ but this is, to put it fairly, a grossly dishonest interpretation of her position. There are, I think, no circumstances in which Sturgeon would consider independence a retrograde development. Her faith is unfalsifiable and, as such, cannot be subjected to any disinterested or useful cost-benefit analysis.

Indeed, Sturgeon has herself confirmed that her argument puts the conclusion first. In a number of interviews during this campaign she has conceded that no new work, taking account of recent developments, has been done on the practical or economic consequences of independence. At some point in the future, a fresh argument for independence will be presented to the people and, obviously, it will be an argument claiming that independence is the key, not just to a more democratic future, but to a more prosperous one too. The conclusion has already been reached; the evidence to support it has not yet been found. Feelings first, then facts. Existential nationalism, not utilitarian nationalism.

Once more, I make no suggestion this is intolerable. Nats gotta Nat. But, again, let us allow this magic to be spoilt by the intrusion of some honesty. Nicola Sturgeon is a utilitarian nationalist to the same extent Nigel Farage is. That scarcely means they are comparable in every way but what is independence if it is not a desire to ‘take back control’?

Just as Brexiteers insisted all would be for the best in the best of all possible post-Brexit worlds, so Scotland’s nationalists spin the same yarn. Fret not about currency or the border or pensions or mortgages or anything else for everything will be fine. We cannot yet show you how it will all be fine but you should know that one day we shall – and it will be. Those who worry it might not be are, once again, ‘talking Scotland down.’

Nicola Sturgeon undoubtedly believes all this for she is a conviction politician and I dare say she truly believes herself just a dull utilitarian. The evidence, however, points in a different direction.

How Labour will spin defeat in Hartlepool

Campaigning in the Hartlepool by-election is reaching its feverish final hours as the Labour party tries to hold onto the seat. There has been sufficient talk of the party losing the constituency for such a result not to come as a shock if it does happen. Indeed, many in the party are already talking as though they have lost, openly discussing what might happen next.

It is clear that while the Left of the party will use this as evidence that Starmer’s plan to rescue the party isn’t cutting through, there won’t – or can’t – be a serious challenge to his leadership from this faction. What we are more likely to hear are calls for a change of message and a higher volume way of communicating it.

Starmer has, to his credit, said he will take ‘full responsibility’ for the result. This is not a given for Labour politicians, who are often content to blame attacks by the media, or the existence of more ruthless campaigners in the Tories, the weather and so on, rather than say that a result is a verdict on them. 

But the Labour leader and his allies do seem to be preparing the ground to argue that the Hartlepool loss had been inevitable for a while and that he just did not have sufficient time in the year after taking over the party to turn the tanker around. There is also a line doing the rounds that voter attitudes towards Labour seem to have improved a little. One insider told me: 

‘What’s interesting is people in 2015/2017 and 2019 were reporting back raw fury towards Labour on the doorstep which is no longer the case.’

This is quite a hard argument to make: does it really make sense that voters aren’t as angry with Labour as they once were, but they’ve still taken a step further away from the party in this by-election? It will be even harder against a backdrop of local election losses, and potentially disappointing results in the mayoral elections too. What’s the evidence beyond anecdotal reports from the doorstep? 

The answer may be that this anecdotal evidence is still useful for Starmer’s standing among his activists, who are not returning from the campaign trail in despair and wondering whether they made the right choice of party leader. But it’s unlikely to make much of a difference to the national narrative.

David Cameron’s golf diplomacy

It has been a tough few weeks for David Cameron. The former Prime Minister’s brief lobbying career appears to have come to an end with the collapse of Greensill capital while his long-awaited UK-China investment fund is still ‘yet to be established’ four years after being announced. Still, at least he can always relax with a good game of golf.

Cameron is known for his love of the game, having enjoyed complimentary membership to the Ellesborough golf club near Chequers when in office. Now though he enjoys practicing his swing in the coastal surroundings of St Enodoc in North Cornwall, near his £2 million holiday home. Cameron is a familiar figure on the links there, playing in the Seniors’ match and being mentioned in excitable Golfshake reviews of the green.

The current talk of the club is a game Cameron played there last month with his son, for whom the ex-premier initially forgot to pay, prompting members to pursue the onetime First Lord of the Treasury around the course. A spokesman for Cameron confirmed there had been a ‘misunderstanding’ but that the matter was eventually resolved when the former PM good-naturedly stumped up the £10 fee in the clubhouse after his game. 

Still, as one wag noted to Steerpike ‘it’s not the first time Cameron’s links have got him in trouble.’

Is this a new dawn for the Spanish right?

In Tuesday’s regional elections in Madrid, the right-wing Partido Popular emerged as by far the most successful party, more than doubling its representation to win 65 of the 136 seats in the assembly.

Isabel Díaz Ayuso, the 42-year-old local Partido Popular leader who was seeking re-election, won more seats than the three left-wing parties combined. Vox (13 seats), the most right-wing party on the Spanish political spectrum, has already promised Ayuso the support she needs in order to govern.

Despite not quite delivering an outright majority, Ayuso’s bold decision to call the snap election has clearly paid off. Her slogan of ‘Libertad’ (Liberty), her attacks on the way Spain’s socialist Prime Minister has handled the pandemic – ‘Madrid’s problem is Pedro Sánchez’ – and her comparatively light touch with Covid restrictions have clearly won her many friends, especially in the hospitality sector.

Most significantly of all perhaps, she has seen off her previous partner in government, the liberal, right-of-centre party Ciudadanos. Over the last couple of years Ciudadanos has seen its support collapse. The party won 57 seats in the April 2019 general election but only managed ten in the re-run in November later that year. It won 36 seats in the Catalan regional parliament in 2017 but just six in the election in February this year. And now it has lost all 26 of its seats in Madrid.

During a bruising and at times vicious election campaign Ciudadanos tried in vain to carve out a new role for itself as a peace-maker, proposing that all six competing parties – three on the left and three on the right – agree to condemn violence and undertake to stop branding their political rivals as criminals. Nobody took much notice.

Instead the campaign became an increasingly heated affair. As it progressed there was less and less constructive debate about responding to the pandemic – despite the worrying number of Covid cases in Madrid – or about governing the region. The candidates seemed to prefer name-calling and trading insults to serious discussion. Politicians on the left accused their opponents on the right of being fascists. Politicians on the right called their opponents on the left communists. Both sides claimed they were engaged in a crusade to preserve democracy from extremists.

Ayuso, for example, presented the elections as a stark, indeed apocalyptic choice: voters should decide if they wanted ‘Communism or liberty’ and if they preferred ‘Madrid or Caracas’ (an allusion to the links between the radical left Podemos party and the Venezuela of Chávez and Maduro). ‘When they call you a fascist… you know you’re on the right side of history,’ she announced proudly.

This polarisation of the campaign worked out well for her. Turnout was very high and many who had previously voted for Ciudadanos turned further to the right – to Ayuso’s Partido Popular. She has consolidated her position as a high-profile opponent of Spain’s socialist government and is even being talked of as the future leader of the party: voters seem to prefer her categorical, plain-speaking approach to the opportunistic ideological shifts of her party’s national leader, Pablo Casado.

Indeed, this victory for the right in Madrid seems set to change the political landscape at national level too. If, as seems most likely, the more moderate Ciudadanos is now consigned to oblivion, the coming months should see support for the Partido Popular grow considerably as ever more Ciudadanos voters shift their allegiance to a party with a chance of winning.

Even so, to form a government after the next general election the Partido Popular will probably need the support of Vox, a party which is routinely described by the left as beyond the pale: far right, xenophobic, misogynistic and homophobic. In the last general election the Partido Popular won 89 seats and Vox 52; a total of 141 which left the parties well short of the 176 needed to govern the country. But that was before the demise of Ciudadanos.

Politics in Spain is now likely to become even more polarised, bad-tempered and aggressive. And the next general election, which is due in 2023, might well see the Partido Popular return to power – perhaps under more abrasive Ayuso-style leadership – with the support of Vox.

The new care home scandal

Care homes have been at the centre of controversy and mishandling throughout the Covid-19 crisis. Decisions taken last spring to move patients out of hospital, without so much as a Covid-19 test, contributed to a surge of cases in facilities designed to look after Britain’s most vulnerable. Failure to tackle early on the problem of asymptomatic transmission meant that workers weren’t isolated. They unknowingly brought the virus in, sometimes to multiple homes. Zero detection – until it was too late – resulted in tragedy. It’s estimated that over 29,000 excess deaths have occurred in care homes since last March.

Now there is another care home scandal brewing, the details of which are just coming to light. It stems from overcorrections made to our original, failed attempt to protect residents during the first leg of the pandemic: that some residents have been living in ‘prison-like’ circumstances, deprived of contact with loved ones.

A new parliamentary report published today – made up of the Joint Committee on Human Rights – highlights the crux of the problem. As the government updated its guidance for care home visits to allow nominated people to see loved ones indoors, some homes prioritised Covid-19 safety above all else, and didn’t heed the advice. As a result, some residents have remained separated from their nearest and dearest. While the Care Quality Commission insists 95 per cent of homes adhered to the guidance, the report’s authors are ‘still aware’ of care homes issuing ‘blanket bans on visiting’. Others ‘have imposed restrictions on visiting to just 30 minutes a week or forced families to endure “prison-like” visits, permitted only to speak to their relatives through telephones behind plastic screens’.

The committee is recommending for visitation rights to be underpinned by law, arguing that such restrictions ‘engage human rights’ and require the state to ‘secure the right to life’. But what damage has been done in the meantime? An investigation conducted by the Alzheimer’s Society last summer, surveying more than 125 care homes, revealed 80 per cent saw a ‘deterioration in the health of their residents with dementia due to lack of social contact’.

The deadly effects of isolation can be seen everywhere: last September, the United States reported 13,200 excess deaths from dementia, compared with the previous year. A survey reported from an Italian memory clinic last summer found ‘31 per cent of people with dementia had experienced significant cognitive deterioration during the first month of lockdown and 54 per cent a worsening of agitation, apathy and depression’.

The past year has been psychologically challenging for all age groups (with more data out today showing depression rates in the population have more than doubled since the pandemic hit; young women are disproportionately affected). But for most of the public, there have been periods of respite: garden parties and restaurant meals in the better times, ‘bubbles’ and a socially distanced walk in the harder times.

For some care home residents, though, these moments have been explicitly forbidden, causing deterioration in health and leading to trauma, much of which we’re not remotely aware of yet. It appears the right balance has never been struck for protecting and supporting our care home residents. Given they have been one of the most vulnerable and important demographics this past year, it’s difficult to fathom how this passed rule-makers by.

Michel Barnier’s Brexit diary shows he needs a lesson in diplomacy

David Davis was ‘truculent’. Dominic Raab was ‘almost messianic’. Theresa May was ‘rigid. While Boris Johnson kept asking to borrow a tenner and whether it would be okay if Carrie joined the meeting. 

Okay, I made that last one up, but the rest are among the startling revelations contained in Michel Barnier’s Brexit diary, published in France this week, and due to come out in the UK in the autumn. 

From the extracts so far, ‘The Great Illusion’, to give it is full-title, seems to be fairly standard Europhile stuff. Indeed, if you are stuck for what to give that special Remainer in your life for Christmas it will do perfectly. 

The UK didn’t understand what it was voting for. The negotiations were dominated by Tory in-fighting. The process was marked by betrayals, thwarted ambitions, and faded delusions of power. The British were consummately outplayed by the far smarter, more united team from Brussels, led by the formidable French politician. It is all much as you might expect.

And yet, there is also a more interesting question. Why is Barnier publishing a diary at all? After all, shouldn’t the negotiations have remained confidential? 

Britain’s departure was always going to be a delicate process, with lots of fraught nerves on both sides of the table. Feelings had been wounded, and dignity had to be maintained. Both the British and EU side were entitled to advance positions, and explore options, without worrying about whether everything they said was going to be published a year or two later, with a few snide, personal digs thrown in. There are lots of different words you could use to describe that. But ‘diplomatic’ probably wouldn’t be among them.

Of course, the diary may advance Barnier’s ambitions for the French presidency. There is still a space on the centre-right in the 2022 race. And if president Macron falters, Barnier may be able to stake a claim to the Elysee Palace. Sniping at the hopeless, dishonest Brits is seldom a bad look for anyone running for office in France (and neither is the reverse, come to think of). 

Barnier’s diary may also help settle a few personal scores; it will certainly allow him to get his version of events public at a time when it is not yet clear the negotiations have been the triumph for the EU he likes to claim they were. Even so, it is hardly courteous, or indeed helpful, especially as there will inevitably be more negotiations to come. 

Barnier is quick to lecture the other side when it comes to self-interest, and a lack of basic diplomacy. Yet it doesn’t seem to have occurred to him that he might be guilty of that himself.

Unesco and a revealing tale of two journalists

Bank Holiday Monday, in case you didn’t know, was also World Press Freedom Day. Unesco understandably marked the occasion. But more interesting than its official communiqué – and a great deal more informative about the way that organisation thinks – was a recent report it sponsored in support of two journalists said to be the subject of attacks on press freedom: Maria Ressa in the Philippines, and, at home, Carole Cadwalladr. The views expressed in that document are worth a closer look.

Maria Ressa is a long-standing and courageous thorn in the side of the Philippines’ strongman president Rodrigo Duterte. A man who has said openly that ‘just because you’re a journalist, you are not exempted from assassination if you’re a son of a bitch,’ Duterte is determined to silence her by attrition. In the last four years, Ressa has been subjected to ten arrest warrants, one hounding on a dubious allegation of tax fraud and a conviction on an equally dodgy charge of ‘cyber libel’.

Carole Cadwalladr certainly has some features in common with Maria Ressa. She is articulate, combative, progressive, and relentlessly anti-government. But there the parallel stops. Unlike Maria, she works in a liberal democracy and is very comfortably placed. She can say anything she likes without fear of arrest or governmental harassment, and indeed with the assurance of plaudits from an admiring metropolitan audience. No regime moves to silence her. She lives the good life as a successful, high-earning, well-fêted darling of the progressive left.

Yet Cadwalladr is said to also represent press freedom under attack, and to be as much in need of international support and protection as Ressa. How so? The answer, as usual, depends on your point of view. 

This report, typical of documents from Unesco and its acolytes, sees press freedom in a light most readers will find strange. It places surprisingly little emphasis on the obvious matter of legal restrictions and extra-legal bullying emanating from governments which do not like what the press says about them. Instead it concentrates on two less tangible features: societal misogyny fuelled by right-wing media, and governments’ failure to monitor closely (and, where necessary) restrict what is said about female journalists on social media, which leads to so-called ‘online violence’. 

This term ‘violence’, as might be expected, goes way beyond the periodical death threats and the like received by many public figures from an unhinged minority. It includes purely verbal online attacks on their competence, credibility or reputation, and anything designed to shame or humiliate them. Misogyny seems to mean anything which, however tangentially, refers to a female journalist’s sex.

Thus Ressa is portrayed as the victim, not so much of an authoritarian government (which she clearly is), as of a hostile and misogynistic right-wing social media campaign condoned by the Philippine authorities. Having said this, the report can then go on to equate Cadwalladr’s case to hers. While the report admits ‘their cases are not directly comparable’, the comparison the reader is intended to make is all too clear.

Britain is, by implication, just as bad as the Philippines, since it too has failed to control what people are allowed to say on social media and thus protect female writers from misogynistic online violence. In Cadwalladr’s case, this violence is said to include the permitted use on Twitter or Facebook of words like ‘liar’, ‘stupid woman’, ‘hysterical hag’ or ‘crazy cat lady’; hackneyed political slang like ‘remoaner’ and ‘libtard’; and jocular references to ‘Carole Codswallop’. Even a measured but effective attack on her and her views by Douglas Murray in The Spectator is apparently to be regarded as part of a campaign of verbal violence aimed at silencing her. 

What are we to make of this? Some points are obvious. While the abuse Cadwalladr has received should be condemned, the suggestion that Cadwalladr is a seriously victimised journalist as much in need of protection from the international community as Maria Ressa is preposterous. 

But this episode also reminds us to be wary of taking Unesco too seriously. The organisation, one should remember, has form as a vehicle for anti-west and anti-liberal propaganda: so much so that between 1985 and 1997, while it was being run by the openly pro-Soviet Amadou-Makhtar M’Bow and his successors, the UK simply dropped out. Today the partisanship may be less blatant, but Unesco is still an organisation with a desire to avoid upsetting certain authoritarian regimes. It also has a need to be seen as progressively cosmopolitan, genteelly anti-capitalist and not beholden to ideas of Western liberalism.

Hence this report is perfectly in character. As soon as you suggest journalists might be discouraged from writing if verbally attacked – and extend the idea of violence to cover mere speech – you immediately gain enormous scope to suppress free speech and attack the Western liberal tradition. For another, you can also posit a false equivalence between authoritarian governments, who openly censor the press, and liberal western regimes that do not, but do allow criticism of it.

This also allows you to be politically partisan. It’s no accident, one suspects, that both journalists featured in this document are politically to the left. As regards Cadwalladr, the authors can hardly contain their enthusiasm for the causes she espouses (she is ‘multi-award winning’, engages in ‘courageous investigative journalism’, and has ‘linked the Cambridge Analytica scandal to both the election of former US president Donald Trump, and Brexit’ despite being opposed by a ‘right-wing information system that is all powerful’, and so on). It is, to say the least, unlikely that a right-of-centre journalist would have received similar treatment had he or she suffered a similar social media storm.

There is one pertinent question worth asking. Would Maria Ressa, a journalist genuinely under threat and deserving of our sympathy, hounded from pillar to post by none-too-gentle government agents out to get her and prevent her from plying her trade, be willing to change places with Cadwalladr? The answer, except perhaps to a Unesco groupie, isn’t difficult. Would Cadwalladr, for her part, be willing to change places with Maria? I’m not so sure.

Scottish independence isn’t like Brexit. It would be a real disaster

A sure sign of paying too much attention to politics is when the arguments of your own side begin to grate as much as those of the opposition. Currently number one in my personal sources of ennui is the frequent damning of the SNP by comparing them to Brexiteers, with their claims of self-determination, demonisation of the ‘other place’ (Westminster/Brussels, delete as appropriate), a certain unwillingness to face hard facts, and a tendency to be slightly economical with the actualité. And, of course, there is more than a grain of truth to the accusation.

Understandably, the SNP would reject the suggestion. After all, it is only the rank injustice of Brexit which has converted Nicola Sturgeon, a member of the SNP for 35 years, to the cause of Scottish independence.

But just because it winds up the cybernats doesn’t mean that it’s helpful to the Unionist cause. For one thing, it immediately validates the SNP grudge. It tells them their grievance is justified. Once you start down the path of ‘We can all agree that Brexit is terrible…’ you inevitably provoke people into working out ways to escape Brexit. The fact that the commentator class in both Scotland and England leaned heavily Remain is highly relevant here. Many of them really can’t think of a worse insult to attach to a political campaign than to compare it to Vote Leave. But that’s not a universal sentiment, not even in Scotland.

For one thing, 38 per cent of the Scottish electorate voted to Leave, including a third of SNP supporters. Why ignore or insult them? Also, while Brexit has proved problematic for specific industries and regions of the UK, on the whole it hasn’t been a total disaster. For most people, things have remained much the same. By inviting people to compare Scottish independence to Brexit, even if you suggest it will be worse, you are actually downplaying the impact. The degree of economic and social disruption would be incomparable, far more than just a somewhat larger knock to GDP.

Many observers also regard it as the height of hypocrisy for the likes of Michael Gove and Boris Johnson to argue against Scottish independence. How can they possibly support self-determination for the UK but refuse it to Scotland? It would be understandable if this case was being made by the nationalists, but the unionist cause is hardly going so well that it is free to spurn support from wherever it is offered. However, let’s examine the merits of the argument.

Just because something is good does not mean that more of it is necessarily better. For example, you might think that belonging to the EU is a noble act of pooling sovereignty with others to prevent war and promote harmony among nations. Does that mean that you would also welcome the pooling of sovereignty with Russia, Ukraine, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Egypt, Libya, Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco in a vastly expanded EU? Or why not just a single world government, where Europeans will have votes proportional to their 10 per cent of the population? You wouldn’t want to be on the wrong side of history, would you?

Alternatively, if you favour independence, why not independence for Orkney, Shetland, the Borders, the Kingdom of Strathclyde, Glasgow, or even Sauchiehall Street? Surely you wouldn’t cruelly deny them the right to self-determination? You might regard these as ridiculous propositions but in each of these cases there is a point on a sliding scale that you regard as optimum. Just because you put your preferred point in a slightly different place than other people doesn’t imbue you with some sort of moral superiority.

And so, if a person happened to strongly believe in the United Kingdom as presently constituted, it is perfectly coherent for them to neither want it to be subsumed into a supra-national organisation nor for it to be broken up into its constituent parts. In fact, a Leave/No voting combination is the most authentically pro-British position.

It is also surely less coherent to believe that the UK is in some way special but also that it could be absorbed into the EU project without any degradation of that uniqueness. Here we may get dragged kicking and screaming into a debate about British (or English) ‘exceptionalism’ and its deleterious effects, but if you wish to argue that remaining within the UK is the right course of action for the Scots, then it must be because the UK offers something more than any alternative option. And so logically you must be open to the proposition that the UK is special in a way that, for example, the EU is not.

That doesn’t necessarily mean the UK is an objectively better country than any other, but if the Scots had to choose to remain alongside anyone, it is surely hard to think of two more similar countries than Scotland and England. As James I and VI put it:

Hath not God first united these two kingdoms, both in language, religion, and similitude of manners? Yea, hath He not made us all in one island, compassed with one sea, and of itself by nature so indivisible?

We still share a language, religious observance is similar, and the British Social Attitudes Survey confirms that our ‘similitude of manners‘ is still high, regardless of what the SNP say. To which you might add that we use the same currency, have the same Armed Forces, the same model of health provision, watch the same TV programmes, listen to the same radio, cheer for many of the same athletes, and any number of other similarities, with the deep family ties and history that befit a 314-year-old union.

But the view of the SNP is that somehow Scotland would more comfortably sit in the EU than in the UK? In which case I would challenge anyone to name an EU member state that is more similar to Scotland than England. (For those tempted to identify Ireland, government spending in the UK is 36 per cent of GDP compared to 24 per cent in Ireland and 45 per cent in Scotland; visits to the GP cost €65, and when did you last watch a programme on RTE or tune into the Gaelic football?)

Also, back in the EU, Scotland would wield a mighty one per cent of qualified majority voting rights. Some nationalists like to boast of being able to wield a veto, on a par with Germany and France, which displays nothing more than a brutal misunderstanding of how power is wielded. When Greece was being economically water-boarded and asset-stripped by the Troika, where was its veto? If the Scots feel ignored by Westminster, wait till they’re being ignored by Brussels, Paris and Berlin.

It’s understandable that people are still sore about Brexit. But membership of the EU is such an incomparably trivial matter compared to being an essential part of the United Kingdom. If that is something you believe, maybe it’s time to lay off the Brexiteers?

The emptiness of the UK-India trade deal

Britain and India have been trading for over 400 years. For 190 of those, between 1757 and 1947, the subcontinent was close to being a captive market of the United Kingdom. Today commercial turnover between the two nations is a mere £23 billion — a tenth of the goods and services traffic between Britain and the European Union.

For many Leave voters, Boris Johnson included, expanding trade ties beyond the EU’s borders was a major motivation for Brexit. India was seen as both an exciting emerging market but also a nation that is culturally entwined with this one. However, five years after Britain voted to depart the lucrative single market, all Johnson and Narendra Modi have been able to conjure up is a below-expectation ‘enhanced trade partnership’. Downing Street was surely exaggerating when it called yesterday’s deal a ‘historic commitment’ by the two leaders.

Modi too has been engaged in a game of spin. On the day the pair announced the agreement, the Booker Prize winning Indian novelist Arundhati Roy endorsed a chorus of millions of her compatriots who have been pleading for Modi’s resignation in the face of the country’s resurgent pandemic. ‘We need a government. Desperately. And we don’t have one… I beseech you, step down,’ she penned. But Modi proceeded with the summit in the hope of offering some good news to Indians, demoralised by the Covid crisis.

After a virtual meeting with Modi, Johnson claimed an extra £1 billion worth of UK-India trade and investment had been ensured, along with 6,500 new British jobs. Included too was a £240 million investment by the Serum Institute of India, the world’s biggest vaccine maker. But much of the deal sounded like wishful thinking. Indian companies Infosys and HCL Technologies promised 1,000 jobs each, but their financial commitments were unstated. MPhasis, another Indian firm, will amazingly provide 1,000 jobs by sinking just £35 million in the UK economy.

The agreement does not reflect a major leap forward. A mutual commitment on education could trigger an increase in Indian students studying at UK universities, perhaps an attempt by No. 10 to replace the Chinese students that have been abandoning British higher education thanks to Covid and increasing hostilities. Meanwhile British fruit producers will be able to export apples, pears and quince to India for the first time. But a pledge to remove barriers to enable British lawyers to practice in India — so far unrealised because of resistance from the Indian legal fraternity — was recycled, having been mooted for decades.

Trade minister Liz Truss persevered with her ‘win-win’ sing-song in a TV interview, while conceding India was yet to give in on lower tariffs on imports of British cars and Scotch whisky. There was obviously no meeting of minds on an important Indian demand for reduced import duties on garments and textiles either.

In 2010, David Cameron, enthusiastic about a special relationship with India, aimed at doubling trade between the two countries in five years from around £10 billion. This target was missed. The suggestion of a further doubling over the next decade is an admission that the most populous member of the Commonwealth will not significantly compensate for the likely loss of revenue from the EU.

Both nations continue to harp on about a free trade agreement, with a promise of full talks resuming in the autumn. India and the EU began negotiating one in 2007 — with Britain an integral part of that dialogue — before suspending the exercise in 2013 due to what Brussels described as ‘a gap in the level of ambition’. While the two sides remain engaged, there is still no tangible progress. There are, in fact, fundamental differences in a comprehensive opening of markets and on social and environmental consequences in the event of a free trade agreement.

The issues that impede an India-EU deal have also plagued an Anglo-Indian understanding. For example, an Indian quest for easier travel to the UK was seen as untenable given British wariness towards mass immigration — although scepticism over immigration has softened in the last few years. Britain’s relaxation of visa rules was also dependent on India taking back tens of thousands of suspected illegal immigrants in the UK — which Modi agreed to but reneged on in 2018. Soon after the talks between the heads of government, Priti Patel and external affairs minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar signed a protocol in London whereby Indian professionals will be permitted to work in the UK for up to two years. Meanwhile, the process to return Indian nationals who have no right to stay in Britain will be accelerated.

Johnson and Modi upgraded the ‘strategic partnership’ established in 2004 when Tony Blair was prime minister to a ‘comprehensive strategic partnership’. Its meaning remains unarticulated. Britain hopes the change translates into greater defence purchases by India. Modi, despite bankrupting his country, has displayed a penchant for military hardware consistent with his authoritarian tendencies. If China continues to violate Indian territory, British arms manufacturers may soon see the rupees flooding in.

There have been no major investment projects either way since Modi came to power in 2014. Unfortunately for Britain, the Indian economy has subsequently collapsed under the weight of coronavirus. As it is, the Indian Prime Minister had previously stewarded a steady downward spiral in the Indian economy. Indian businesses are despondent and exploring options abroad. Britain could be a beneficiary of such investment.

Modi’s attempts at international politics appear increasingly ill-timed to those watching back home. His unpreparedness in the face of a second Covid wave and a chastening election defeat in the state of West Bengal have rattled his ruling Bharatiya Janata Party. The prospect of greater trade with Britain is unlikely to ease their discomfort.

CofE bishop demands MPs withdraw ‘very divisive’ Sewell report

The Church of England has spent much of 2021 grappling with how it handles race relations. In the wake of one Anglican ordinand claiming in February that ‘The cult of Captain Tom is a cult of White British Nationalism’ the Church has had to contend with revelations about the use of Non Disclosure Agreements in silencing allegations of racism and the fall out from its report From Lament to Action which called for non-white clergy quotas. 

Now though, one Anglican bishop has taken things a step further by writing to MPs to attack the recent findings of the government’s commission on race and ethnic disparity, which criticised the misuse of the term ‘institutional racism’ and found little evidence that it existed in Britain.

A letter sent last week by The Right Reverend Roger Morris, Area Bishop of Colchester to all Members of Parliament in the Diocese of Chelmsford has been passed to Steerpike. In his self-flagellating missive, Morris begins by lamenting the Church’s ‘ongoing failure’ to ‘recognise where racism exists in our structures, systems, culture and behaviour’. 

He explains that he is ‘writing to convey the dismay and hurt that many within our Diocese feel’ about the ‘very divisive’ report by spending ‘much time pointing to issues among the poor white population… this approach to the work of the Commission plays one group of people off against the other, and is something no responsible Government should ever do or condone.’ 

Morris, who is himself white, lambasts ‘the quite superficial understanding of racism that runs through the report’ and the ‘very unsophisticated’ way in which racism is seen ‘in terms of specific, deliberate acts of discrimination’ – something no doubt of interest to the report’s black chair Dr Tony Sewell. Sewell’s credibility is criticised by Morris on the grounds that he ‘was already known to have been sceptical’ about institutional racism – something which has only served to further strengthen ‘our doubt regarding the genuineness of this inquiry.’ 

The bishop ends by praising ‘the Black Lives Matter protests [which] opened the eyes of many people and institutions to the racism that exists in our society and brought real momentum to the work of ridding us of it’ before decrying how the ‘the work of the Commission has set things back’ and concluding ‘as our elected representatives, we urge you to request that HM Government withdraws this report immediately.’

Ooft. Steerpike is told that this letter has not gone too well with all those who have received it, with one parliamentary source noting drily: ‘Amazing to think the CofE was once called the Tory Party at prayer.’

Your guide to the 2021 election results

This week will see the biggest set of polls in UK history outside of a general election. Contests are under way in Wales, Scotland, London and in the various mayoral, local and PCC elections across Britain as part of a so-called ‘Super Thursday.’ But while past election nights have been met with the chimes of the BBC’s Arthur theme and a Dimbleby fronting hours of programmes, Covid means there will be no all-night television special.

Whereas normally all results are in by midday Friday, this year it will take longer to verify and count the votes than it has done in previous elections. This is due to both reduced staff numbers to allow for social distancing and the high number of polls taking place in some areas. Each individual returning officer will make their own decision on when the counts will be held for their area.

In England, most local authorities will start the count process on Friday, but different areas will be counting different polls at different times, with some counts scheduled to take place over the Saturday, Sunday and Monday too. In London, the Greater London returning officer has confirmed that all constituencies for the Assembly and Mayoralty will be counted over Friday and Saturday, starting at 9 a.m. on Friday and 8 a.m. on Saturday.

Expected timings for key marginals identified by election experts Rallings and Thrasher include:

England

• Hartlepool by-election. Billed as Keir Starmer’s first big test, polls suggest this Red Wall seat is set to return its first Tory MP since 1959. Polls close at 10 p.m. on Thursday followed by the voting verification process with a result for the constituency being expected no earlier than 4 a.m. on Friday. Local council results here should follow shortly at around 5 a.m. or 6 a.m. the same day.
• Northumberland County Council is currently No Overall Control. The Tories, Labour and the Liberal Democrats have all had spells as the largest party here since it was created in 2008 with none yet to win a majority. Labour hopes to reverse 2017 losses in places like Bedlington and Prudhoe. It should be one of the first key councils to have all seats declared, with officials aiming for completion by around 4 a.m. Friday.
• Nuneaton and Bedworth council covers a number of marginals with elections held here every two years. It is currently under No Overall Control but could go red or blue with vote counting set to begin at 1 a.m. and being completed by 5 a.m. Friday.
• Derbyshire County Council is aiming for a result by Friday afternoon at 4 p.m. Another ‘red wall’ test of Labour’s post-2019 recovery, this area has a history of switching between the two major parties. In 2017 a 10-point swing from Labour to the Conservatives saw a near 20-seat turnover between them.
• Barnsley Council estimates its full declaration time will also be Friday 4 p.m. A rock-solid red area, having been Labour since its creation in 1973, results here will nevertheless give an indication as to how Labour is performing under Starmer.
• Bury Council has a narrow Labour majority but the Tories gained both Bury seats at the general election. A few Labour held wards look vulnerable but the Conservatives only challenge here in exceptional years. The count here will be on Friday afternoon, starting at 2 p.m. with results expected to come through between 4 p.m. and 6 p.m.
  
• The Tees Valley mayoralty is expected to be declared at 7 p.m. on Friday. One of the ‘big three’ contests alongside Hartlepool and the West Midlands, Ben Houchen’s re-election here would signal the Tory ascendancy here is far bigger than Brexit.
• Wakefield council’s elections last year were delayed due to Covid. One third of the 63 seats here are up for grabs and given these include Normanton in Yvette Cooper’s constituency. Results are expected to be declared by 9:30 p.m. on Friday.
• The West Midlands mayoralty is between incumbent Andy Street and former Labour cabinet minister Liam Byrne. First preference votes should be in by 2:30 p.m. with counting for second preferences not expected to be completed before 4:30 p.m. Other mayoral results expected on Saturday include contests for Bristol, Greater Manchester, Liverpool City Region, London, North Tyneside, Salford and the West of England.
  
• Worthing Borough Council votes will be counted from Sunday morning with results expected sometime in the afternoon. Labour won no seats at all here in 2016, but five in 2019 as the influx of younger, professional voters began to have an impact. The Conservative majority here could fall for the first time since 2003 if a similar performance is repeated in wards like Central, Heene and Selden.

Scotland

Provisional dates suggest 47 constituency MSPs will be confirmed on Friday with the remaining 26 expected on Saturday. The key contests include the following:

• Dumbarton where Scottish Labour stalwart Jackie Baillie faces a tough challenge from the SNP to keep the seat she has held since its creation back in 1999. Having clung on last time by just 109 votes, Baillie was lionised by unionists for her forensic questioning during the Salmond inquiry. This key marginal is expected to declare between 6 to 7 p.m. on Friday.
• Edinburgh Central has played host to a hard-fought contest between the SNP and Scottish Tories in the seat currently held by Ruth Davidson who is standing down. Angus Robertson, the former SNP former Westminster Leader is bidding to overturn Davidson’s narrow majority of just 610 votes. The SNP needs to win this seat if it is to guarantee a pro-independence majority in the next parliament. Vote counting here is expected to begin at 9.30 a.m. on Friday but with fewer people counting than normal due to restrictions, officials think it may take between 8-10 hours.
  
• Moray will give an invaluable insight into whether the Scottish Tory vote is holding up in their north east stronghold. Party leader Douglas Ross represents this seat in Westminster but in 2016 the SNP won it here with an 8.6 per cent majority in the Holyrood elections. The announcement here is expected at a similar time to Edinburgh Central on Friday afternoon.

Wales

The Senedd count will start at 9 a.m. on Friday with all expected to declare by the end of the day. The elections will see 60 people selected as Members of the Senedd – 40 as constituency MSs and 20 to represent Wales’ four regions. Regional results could therefore be pushed into Saturday as they are dependant on what happens in the constituencies. Key races to watch include:

• Brecon and Radnorshire is the last constituency held by the once mighty Liberal Democrats. The party dominated Welsh politics for many than a century but is now fighting for survival. Kirsty Williams has spent five years serving as education minister in successive Labour governments. If she loses her seat, the party’s only hope is one on the regional list. Otherwise the bleak prospect of a wipe out beckons and the first national election in Wales where the Liberal party, the Liberal Democrats or its predecessor parties have failed to win a seat.
• Aberconwy sees incumbent Tory Janet Finch-Saunders attempting to fight off a tough Plaid Cymru challenge. The Conservatives have held this seat for a decade but with a majority of just 754 there’s a real risk of Plaid making ground here as part of its efforts to make inroads into the key north Wales battlegrounds.
• Llanelli is where sitting Labour MS Lee Waters has a wafer thin majority of just 342. The most marginal seat in the Senedd, it is situated in the Mid and West Wales region and will serve as a useful test case as to whether Labour can hold off its nationalist rivals in spite of what Plaid leader Adam Price calls a ‘deep yearning for change.’

All timings may be subject to change and are based on estimates from local returning officers.