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Reform tops a YouGov poll for the first time
There’s reason for cheer at Reform HQ this morning: Nigel Farage’s party is leading Labour in a YouGov voting intention poll for the first time. According to the poll, Reform UK leads on 25 points with Labour in second place on 24 per cent and the Conservatives in third on 21 per cent. Meanwhile, the Liberal Democrats are on 14 per cent and the Greens on 9 per cent. While there have been a handful of polls to date putting Reform in the lead, they have so far been regarded as outliers. In response to the poll, Richard Tice, the deputy leader of Reform, said: ‘Much more to come as common sense policies welcomed to save Britain and make us better off’.
This poll will alarm both the Conservatives and Labour. The question: does it point to a long term shift in UK politics – or can it be dismissed as a blip? The problem for both main parties is there is clearly an opening for an insurgent party promising to stick it to both sides. After kicking out the Tories six months ago, voters have quickly turned against the new Labour government. In government, ministers and aides are trying to work out how they can respond to the anti-establishment sentiment in the country.
How do Labour become the disrupters not defenders of a bloated, misfiring status quo that never delivers? In a bid to answer this question, No. 10 is working closely with Labour Together to find effective attack lines against Farage's party. However, there's still a question as to how joined up the approach is. The Telegraph reports today that Rayner plans to create a council on Islamophobia and whether to bring in an official definition. 'I'm not sure this is the policy we need to take on Reform,' says a party figure.
Yet in the short term, this poll could cause the greatest anxiety to the Tory party. It fits into a trend of the Tories polling in third place. While it is early days for Kemi Badenoch's leadership of the party, the new Tory leader is under pressure to show she can take on Farage. The local elections in May are viewed as a crunch point for her leadership. Already there is an effort to try to lower expectations for the elections, with the Tory party chairman Nigel Huddleston telling the shadow cabinet last week that losses are expected, given most councils were last voted in at the high point of the post-pandemic Boris boom. Regardless, if the Tories suffer heavy losses and remain in third place in the polls, calls for some kind of electoral pact with Reform will grow louder.
Germany’s immigration election is heating up
These are dramatic days in the usually dull world of German politics. Last Wednesday, midway through a fiercely fought federal election campaign, the Bundestag Parliament narrowly voted to close the nation’s borders and curb the legal rights of immigrants. Two days later, the same assembly reversed ferret and voted a similar measure down. So what on earth is going on?
The bills to close the borders were the work of the man likely to become Germany‘s next Chancellor, Friedrich Merz, leader of the CDU/CSU Christian Democrats – the centre-right equivalent of our Tories. Hard pressed in the polls by the hard-right Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD) populist party, Merz took the controversial step of stealing the AfD’s clothes and adopting its anti-migration agenda. To get his measures through the Bundestag, however, he needed the AfD’s parliamentary votes, which effectively shattered the long standing Brandmauer (firewall) built by all parties against the AfD, which rules out any cooperation with the party, on the grounds that the AfD allegedly harbours extremist neo-Nazi tendencies and members.
Two parties of the outgoing coalition government, which collapsed late last year – Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s social democratic SPD and the Greens – accused Merz of making the AfD pariahs salonfahig (respectable) and endangering German democracy. He in turn charged them with forcing him to take such action by their neglect of the nation’s ‘order and security’. ‘How many more people must be murdered?’ he demanded. Merz meant the recent spate of deadly attacks by men with an immigrant background, like the Saudi Arabian psychologist who drove a car into a Christmas market in Magdeburg, killing six and injuring 300; and an Afghan criminal awaiting deportation who fatally stabbed a two year old toddler and a man who tried to stop him in the Bavarian town of Aschaffenburg last month.
In the wake of such atrocities, the AfD chancellor candidate Alice Weidel called for the closure of the country’s borders, and the ‘remigration’ of immigrants convicted of crimes. With her party polling more than 20 per cent, and rapidly gaining on the CDU’s 30 per cent, Merz was left with little choice but to harden his line in an election campaign which, along with the slowing economy, is dominated by the immigration issue – even though he knew he risked bringing the AfD in from the cold.
When it came to the Bundestag votes, Merz’s non-binding measure initially squeaked through with the aid of the AfD’s parliamentarians by 348 votes to 345. Forty-eight hours later, however, Liberal rebels in the CDU, emboldened by unprecedented criticism of Merz’s bill as ‘wrong’ by former CDU Chancellor Angela Merkel, helped the centre-left parties vote a near identical bill down on Friday by 350 to 338.
How this confusion will affect the election’s outcome is as yet unclear. The centre-left parties opposing a hard line on migrants have a problem in that a large majority of Germans – 67 per cent according to polls – strongly support Merz’s tough line and blame Merkel for opening Germany’s borders and letting a million largely unvetted refugees fleeing Syria’s civil war flood into the country in 2015.
One little noticed consequence of Merz’s measure, had it passed, would have been Germany breaching the EU’s Schengen agreement abolishing internal borders between member states. Such a break by the bloc’s biggest country would shake the EU to its foundations and kill open borders stone dead. There is already anecdotal evidence of Schengen being ignored by border police stopping and searching vehicles at the frontiers anyway.
Neither killing Merz’s popular bill nor Merkel’s sour criticism will harm his strong chances of becoming chancellor, though lacking an absolute majority and rejecting the AfD, he will probably be forced into an uncomfortable coalition with the SPD and/or the Greens. Merz seems set on continuing to exclude the AfD from power. He told a CDU rally in Berlin on Sunday that the party would remain his main opponent, and that as chancellor he will make Germany a bulwark against the extreme left and far right alike.
Not that this will halt the advance of the AfD – rather the reverse. It is also unlikely that efforts to ban the insurgent party as unconstitutional will bear fruit. No democracy could reasonably outlaw a party enjoying such massive public support, even if they are found to be using Nazi slogans and tropes. Given voters’ reluctance to tell pollsters that they back a hard right party, I would be surprised if the populists draw less than a quarter of all votes on election day on 23 February. Ordinary Germans want to be confident they won’t be knocked down by a maniac in a speeding SUV at a Christmas market this year.
Canada’s tariff reprieve isn’t a victory for Trudeau
US President Donald Trump’s long-standing threat to enact 25 per cent tariffs on Canada and Mexico didn’t materialise yesterday. Both countries were granted 30-day reprieves on Monday after they agreed to Trump’s demands to stop the flow of illegal immigration and illicit drugs like fentanyl across the American border. Discussions related to tariffs and trade will be conducted during this time, too.
‘I just had a good call with President Trump,’ Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau wrote in a post on X. ‘Canada is implementing our $1.3 billion border plan – reinforcing the border with new choppers, technology and personnel, enhanced coordination with our American partners, and increased resources to stop the flow of fentanyl. Nearly 10,000 frontline personnel are and will be working on protecting the border.’
The PM also mentioned that Canada will ‘appoint a Fentanyl Czar… list cartels as terrorists, ensure 24/7 eyes on the border, launch a Canada-US Joint Strike Force to combat organised crime, fentanyl and money laundering,’ among other things.
Some talking heads in Canada have actually declared this a victory for Trudeau. They argued that Canada’s border plan had already been introduced last December. Many strategies mentioned in Trudeau’s post have been or are about to be implemented. The appointment of a fentanyl czar was a new development, but National Review’s Dominic Pino questioned its validity. ‘Does anyone seriously believe that Canada appointing a fentanyl czar will make any measurable difference in drug overdose deaths?’ he wrote on Monday.
That’s one way to look at it, but it’s not the right way. If the Trudeau Liberals had made these issues a priority years ago, instead of just in the past few days and weeks, the Trump tariff threat wouldn’t have reared its ugly head in the first place.
Trump has made no secret of the fact that he was mightily concerned about illegal migrants and deadly drugs like fentanyl. He was frustrated with these issues (among others) during his first presidential term. He also clearly pointed out these specific problems well before his second presidential inauguration on January 20.
‘On January 20th, as one of my many first Executive Orders, I will sign all necessary documents to charge Mexico and Canada a 25% Tariff on ALL products coming into the United States, and its ridiculous Open Borders,’ Trump wrote on Truth Social in November, 2024. ‘This Tariff will remain in effect until such time as Drugs, in particular Fentanyl, and all Illegal Aliens stop this Invasion of our Country. Both Mexico and Canada have the absolute right and power to easily solve this long simmering problem.’
Howard Lutnick, who is Trump’s choice to become the next Secretary of Commerce, made a similar point last week. ‘This is a separate tariff to create action from Mexico and action from Canada,’ he said during his US Senate confirmation hearings. ‘And as far as I know, they are acting swiftly, and if they execute it, there will be no tariff.’ I would part ways with Lutnick here: there was no swift action by the Canadian government. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth.
Trudeau has let border safety and security collapse by the wayside since he became prime minister in 2015. Illegal immigration at Canadian border crossings has been a serious concern for years.
Canada’s lax legal immigration system is also problematic: Mount Royal University criminology professor Kelly Sundberg, a former Canada Border Services Agency officer, told CTV News that ‘we are a weak link and in the United States border security programme framework, it’s very easy to come to Canada.’ And while the flow of fentanyl from Mexico to America is substantially larger, Canada’s drug decriminalisation policies have led to, in Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum’s words, ‘a very serious problem with fentanyl consumption.’
After Trump threatened to impose tariffs on Canada, Trudeau attempted to launch a tariff-for-tariff retaliation. As if Canada, a middle power, could effectively threaten the massive US economy. Ontario premier Doug Ford directed all Liquor Control Board of Ontario stores to remove American products from their shelves, and promised to rip up the province’s contract with Starlink, an internet service owned by Elon Musk. (Ford walked all of this back on Monday.) Average Canadians even threatened to cancel their Amazon accounts and Netflix subscriptions, and incessantly booed the US national anthem at NHL and NBA games like spoiled brats.
Instead of dealing with these significant border concerns intelligently and working with Trump to resolve them speedily, Canada went into an emotional tizzy. That’s incredibly foolish, and hardly constitutes a victory for Trudeau. If my country wants Trump’s tariffs to disappear permanently, this childish behaviour can’t ever be repeated.
Who cares about the cold old?
When I was a child, we lived in a two-up, two-down terraced slum in Walthamstow, East London with bombsites at the back. My father made me a doll’s house by dividing a box into four for the rooms. One year when we hadn’t any coal, I watched my doll’s house, disassembled, burning in the living room grate. I couldn’t grumble. I had asthma and for the first couple of years of my life there was no NHS. Just being alive was a bloody miracle. I rather admired the glittering ice patterns on the inside of my bedroom window.
I was cold then, and I am cold now. I had hoped things might improve in the 21st century. My £200 winter fuel payment was eaten up in just over a month by my energy company. I must have been too warm. Now I can only afford to have one radiator on at 18.5 degrees, so my clothes and books have been going mouldy. A marvellous local Somerset Council charity, Surviving Winter, helped me out and provided a dehumidifier, and I have a cold shower every morning now too to toughen myself up.
Perhaps the poor have become an embarrassment
I’ve been a writer all my life, with twenty published books. There’s generally not much money in the arts and we are surely meant to starve in our garrets. The Royal Literary Fund has been magnificently supportive as they think well of my oeuvre and make me a grant once a year from the estates of great writers. So I am lucky. But other pensioners are not.
What does it cost to live these days? Average weekly earnings in Britain are an estimated £705, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS). The state pension is £221.20 a week with no realistic means of extra income other than taking in washing. Supermarket bargains come in family packs. I fully appreciate there are more important priorities for a socialist government than keeping poor pensioners alive. After all, a lot of us will be dead four years from now and of no electoral value. I receive £137.14 state pension and £81.01 pension credits a week. That must be a drain on the exchequer. No wonder they are thinking of abolishing the triple lock and letting the devil take the hindmost of us.
There are 1.36 million pensioner households in receipt of pension credits like myself, and there are an estimated 760,000 pensioner households eligible but not receiving them. Older people were brought up to be proud and independent. Many would rather die than claim benefits or ask their families for help when they themselves are struggling to raise their children. Age UK warned last year that high numbers of pensioners living below or just above the poverty line – 82 per cent or four in every five – would lose their winter fuel payment as a result of the government’s policy change.
Sure enough, the charity now estimates that 2.5 million of the poorest pensioners no longer receive help to keep warm, vulnerable as they are to hypothermia. Before Starmer stopped their winter fuel payment, better-off pensioners used to donate to charities for the poorer ones. Astonishingly, some still do.
But the cold old are not a cause célèbre. I’ve had books published on various subjects, one of them being dogs. It’s common now, when one meets a dog owner on the street, to discover that their rescue mutt came from Rumania or Turkey, while literally thousands of unwanted British dogs are put to sleep because nobody wants them, and all the small shelters are closing, starved of funds. It seems our own waifs and strays are not sufficiently exotic for fashionable taste, a bit like foreign aid being more resonant with charitable minds than the poor boring old British.
Another of my books was the official biography of the great Marje Proops, advice columnist to the Daily Mirror with 2 million readers’ letters in the archives showing how she helped desperately unhappy people. Marje was a campaigning socialist in the days when that word meant something. She occasionally helped to change the law and got very angry indeed about the casualties of poverty. One double-page feature that damn near broke my heart was about an elderly lady who was found dead in her own home apparently having eaten cardboard to try to stay alive.
Because they were working class, my parents and all their friends voted Labour. They expected their MPs to speak for them as they were not well-educated and had no other voice. They and their own parents avoided unemployment like the plague. They supported the Rhondda miners when they fought pitched battles with Churchill’s police over the 2s 3d a ton they had to produce, and they lived through two world wars and the Blitz, dodging doodlebugs to get to work, ‘toughing it out’. None of them would have recognised the political party that goes by the name of Labour now.
Nor would my pensioner friends. There’s octogenarian Peter in Sussex, who has been an armourer and Roman technical adviser on the film Gladiator, who peers in the chiller cabinet looking for those £2.50 meal deals. There’s 90-year-old widow June in Suffolk, who spent most of her life working in animal welfare, withdrawing £15 from the ATM ‘because you have to be so careful’. There’s writer Christopher who lives in London and can’t afford to go out, and brilliant Sean, who produced a novel that had two film options on it which came to nothing, who relies on lifts as he can’t afford to run a car. They’ve all worked hard but without the necessary business acumen to capitalise on their industry or their talent. They surely deserve better.
Perhaps the poor have become an embarrassment, and cold pensioners are therefore viewed with disdain. The debate about deserving and undeserving poor has raged since the 1300s. The Victorians, whose ideas seem to be enjoying a resurgence, thought the latter. Under the 1834 Poor Law, 150 workhouses were established in large towns and cities around England – there’s one in my village of Williton that has been converted into flats – where paupers were separated from their children, punished for not finding work and disciplined with starvation rations and sometimes thumbscrews. The Victorian Tory radical Richard Oastler called them ‘prisons for the poor’.
William Blake railed about child chimney sweeps and tiny textile workers crawling under the looms, and Charles Dickens, who worked in a boot-blacking factory at the age of 12, drew down the imaginations of the selfish rich into his novels. Scrooge is told by the Ghost of Christmas Present, showing him two desperate kids hiding under his coat, ‘This boy is ignorance, this girl is want. Beware them both, but most, beware this boy.’ He might have added, ‘And look out for the riots.’
I have no idea what this Labour government thinks it’s doing. They certainly do not represent the downtrodden, or the white working classes of this country. To me, Starmer and his leftist elite seem more like ideologues who revere ideas above people, or the National Socialists we fought in the last war. And we all know how merciful they were.
The voice coach row reveals how Keir Starmer will come unstuck
The news that the Prime Minister Keir Starmer, the adenoidal android, has employed a voice coach is simply astonishing. ‘I’ll take no lectures from the party opposite,’ is one of Starmer’s most well-worn sentences. At least now we know who he will take lectures from: actress Leonie Mellinger, star of The Winters Tale and the BBC’s Bergerac, who has been helping Starmer find his voice. ‘The transformation,” she says, “has been enormous.’ Really? Even after receiving years of tuition from the classically-trained actress, Starmer’s droning voice still send me to sleep.
Starmer seems to see the rules as things for lesser mortals to follow, but for a smartypants like him to cleverly work around
Mellinger started working with Starmer in 2017, when he was shadow Brexit secretary, and their work together continued through the pandemic. The future prime minister considered Mellinger to be so important that she qualified as a “key worker” in 2020, visiting Labour headquarters in a mask on Christmas Eve in 2020 to advise Starmer.
During that time when Boris Johnson was prime minister, Starmer acted as something of a witchfinder-general, rooting out breaches of the covid rules. He was constantly calling for Johnson and Rishi Sunak to resign. It’s worth asking whether Starmer thinks the rules applied to him, too. Either way, let us stop to enjoy the mental image of Starmer repeating that he’s merely the pheasant plucker’s mate, and that on the slitted sheet he sits.
If Starmer did break lockdown rules, one thing is clear: it wasn’t worth it. We could pause here to list the many soundalikes of those now familiar grating Starmer tones. There’s Miss Othmar from the Peanuts TV specials; a Dalek when it finds out that the Doc-tor has es-caped; the child of George and Zippy; a Speak & Spell with its battery running down; a mortally injured cassowary. Starmer’s forced laughter at Prime Minister’s Questions brings back the metallic mirth of the Smash Martians when they discover that we pitiful humans peel potatoes with our metal knives.
At its heart, the Starmer voice strikes a chord because it’s very close to the traditional ‘nerd’ voice of British comedy. It’s hard to identify the patient zero progenitor of that tradition. There’s Harry Enfield’s ‘only me/you don’t want to do that’ character. Further back, we can point to Peter Cook’s EL Wisty, or Michael Palin’s Reg Pither from Monty Python: ‘thank you again for the excellent banana and cheese delicacy’. Richard Briers performed many variations, from Custard the Cat to Martin of Ever Decreasing Circles. This nerd voice is in our national bloodstream, almost always used to signify pettifogging, carping, unwanted advice. John Major was an earlier political sufferer of the phenomenon; ‘cones hotline,’ the telephone number introduced by the beleaguered PM in 1992, was meant to be said in that tone.
But if Mellinger at least is wowed by Keir’s transformation, the question arises: what did he sound like before? We can check by loading up old footage. Here we get a surprise. This is Starmer in 1994, aged 32:
Our future leader already has that familiar glassy demeanour, but he sounds (comparatively) positively normal. So where, and when, did he acquire that pronounced chunter on consonant-heavy words?
In the clip above, he is talking about removing the splendour and majesty of the law courts, making them places where ‘an ordinary person feels they can go…much more like a GP’s health centre’. What an ambition! I’m reminded of the character described in Breakfast At Tiffany’s: ‘Her flat eyes…only turned toward the stars to estimate their chemical tonnage’.
The rules bend around Starmer like laser light around an exotic dancer
This mission makes it clear that Starmer, and Starmerism, is about procedure, form and forms; it’s about the law, not as something special, grand and separate from the flow of life, but as a process that infects and infests every waking moment. We are back in the very English world of wardens and jobsworths and chits and dockets and stamps and inspections, and – that horrible modern word – compliance.
That love of tedious procedure solidified around Starmer. His voice changed to fit, subconsciously, around that world view; altering itself along the lines of the stereotype.
Tory leader Kemi Badenoch appears to have spotted this Starmer obsession with procedure and doing things by the book. She has discovered that the perfect way to needle Starmer at PMQs is to imply that he hasn’t followed procedure in some way. It’ll be a delight on Wednesday to see how Starmer responds to her questioning him on whether it was right for a voice coach to be defined as a key worker during the pandemic. To my mind, it smacks of hypocrisy. Then again, this should hardly come as a surprise: Starmer seems to see the rules as things for lesser mortals to follow, but for a smartypants like him to cleverly work around.
As the writer Alex Dale said on X: ‘No he’s not lying, but only because he genuinely sees himself and his class as being beyond the old fashioned categories of truth and lies. He does what he wants first and then makes it true afterwards.’ It was this kind of thinking that led Starmer to think it was OK to accept freebies to go to football games, and get thousands of pounds of clothes paid for by a nice generous Labour donor.
At yesterday’s lobby briefing for Westminster journalists, Starmer’s spokesman refused to comment when pressed on whether the Labour leader had breached legally-binding measures during the pandemic, saying that he ‘wouldn’t get involved in matters relating to his time in opposition.’
The rules bend around Starmer like laser light around an exotic dancer. None of this would matter if he was any good. But he isn’t. When Starmer eventually comes undone, you’ll see him sinking into the quicksand still blithering away, ‘The correct procedure was followed at all times glug glug glug’. But at least his voice will impress his coach.
Rory Stewart is no match for JD Vance
I was highly amused to see that JD Vance has administered a right old ‘fagging’ – or whatever public school boys call it – to the ghastly Rory Stewart. Better known in some quarters as ‘Florence of Belgravia’, Stewart has developed a habit of dashing about in a dish-dash in search of broadcasting dosh, pouting all the while like an ambitious member of an all-boy fifth-form drama club determined to play Portia. Thanks to his inability to avoid spouting off, Stewart has embroiled himself in a spat on X with the new vice president of the US, JD Vance.
In an interview with Fox News last week, Vance said:
It’s so simple that saying it aloud – as Vance did – can sound quite shocking and rude
It’s a very Christian concept that you love your family and then you love your neighbour, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens, and then after that, you can focus and prioritise the rest of the world. A lot of the far left has completely inverted that.
Stewart couldn’t help himself, and opined on X that this was ‘a bizarre take on John 15:12-13 – less Christian and more pagan tribal. We should start worrying when politicians become theologians, assume to speak for Jesus, and tell us in which order to love’. To which Vance answered – thrillingly: ‘The problem with Rory and people like him is that he has an IQ of 110 and thinks he has an IQ of 130. This false arrogance drives so much elite failure over the last 40 years.’
The reason I found this thrilling is because working-class people who have become successful in their field generally don’t rub their achievements in the faces of their less talented but more privileged colleagues. Even despite the huge handicap we started with, and the fact that our class-ridden society has seen social mobility – never going great guns – savagely reversing in recent years.
There are several reasons why we meritocrats don’t crow more in the manner of Vance. American success stories of humble origin are prouder; they’re less liable than Brits to make themselves into cuddly mascots who accentuate the worst alleged qualities of their class, like the ghastly pugilist and toilet-seat-breaker John Prescott. Also, no one wants to be called ‘chippy’ – a slur only ever used to describe the white section of the proletariat who complain about the unfair set up, I’ve noticed – probably stemming from plain cowardice at the wrath that would descend on the mockers should they sneer at anyone non-white. Also, meritocrats by their very nature swerve anything that sounds like our old mate the politics of envy.
Vance is not just the second most powerful man in the world’s most powerful nation, but was born into poverty and abuse, raised by his grandparents due to his mother’s drug addiction. He describes himself as a ‘Scots-Irish hillbilly’ from the Appalachian region and might well have been described as ‘white trash’ by his alleged betters – a ‘deplorable’ (Clinton, H) or ‘garbage’ (Biden) at least. As is often the way of those who are poor enough to be patriots, he joined the military as a teenager, afterwards utilising the excellent GI Bill to study political science and philosophy and then attending Yale Law School. During his first year, he began his majestic memoir, the best-selling Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, published in 2016. He’s 40 years old.
Rory Stewart’s CV, at the age of 52, isn’t quite so striking – and very predicable for one literally to the manor born. He was expensively educated at Eton and Oxford. He joined the diplomatic service and became an MP. He has, over the years, carved himself a cushy billet with the BBC, making several series: The Legacy of Lawrence of Arabia; Afghanistan: The Great Game – A Personal View by Rory Stewart and Border Country: The Story of Britain’s Lost Middleland. He hosted the Radio 4 podcast The Long History Of Argument as well as cosying up to the ghastly Alastair Campbell for The Rest Is Politics, best described as the tubular bells of podcasts.
Stewart is a cut-and-dried, dyed-in-the-wool member of the establishment. He’s not some exotic outlier, despite his liking for posing in the flowing robes of Araby like someone who was enthralled by too many Fry’s Turkish Delight commercials at an impressionable age.
That’s why it was so typically cloth-eared of him to take on a man like Vance: of all the dumb things anyone can do, a privileged person trying to appear cleverer than an under-privileged person who has made it big has to be the dumbest. When he brought up the IQ thing, Vance was basically saying ‘You, like many of your kind, had a great start in life, and you are still nowhere near as smart as me.’ Rory Stewart’s dad was – surprise! – a diplomat and high-flying government functionary. This brings to mind something Mrs T’s character says in the new Thatcher/Walden drama Brian and Maggie about some Tory MPs: ‘There are so many of them who didn’t earn their place; they knew someone who knew someone, and they bluff their way through.’
It’s a fact: if you reach the top of your profession without having had family money, a famous name or inside help, you are a really exceptional person. You’re far cleverer than those who had a head start. It’s so simple that saying it aloud – as Vance did – can sound quite shocking and rude. I’d love to know how Stewart will react; maybe he’ll even use this opportunity to keep those luscious lips buttoned and learn something rather than ceaselessly offering his precious opinion and getting it wrong.
Maybe all those – from actors to journalists – who haven’t made it totally on merit might learn something here. A handy little momento mori when your head gets a little too big might be to look in the bathroom mirror and say ‘I am Brooklyn Beckham…’ in the manner of the Spartacus film highlight. That way, you will hopefully avoid the curse of Stewart, flouncing through life thinking you’re something special when the best that can be said of you is that you had a very good start in life. And make the best of your hand-me-down name while you can, because AI is no respecter of lucky sperm, I’ll wager – and no one’s easier to replace than someone who didn’t make it on merit.
How John Swinney changes his stripes
Turning around a government that has lost its way is one of the trickiest feats in politics, all the more so if that government has enjoyed a long stretch of incumbency. The big beasts are gone, everyone who’s left is exhausted, the voter coalition is coming apart, and some begin to question the party’s purpose in power. ‘Time for a change’ is no longer just an opposition talking point: even insiders wonder if a spell out of office wouldn’t be for the best. A party veteran or a rising star steps forward, pledging renewal, a fresh direction and a fighting chance come the next election. That was the offer made by James Callaghan in 1976, Gordon Brown in 2007 and Rishi Sunak in 2022. They each failed and their parties went down to significant defeats.
Might John Swinney buck this trend? The SNP leader will have been gratified by a poll putting him on course to win the next Scottish parliament elections, securing for the Nationalists an unprecedented fifth consecutive term in power in Edinburgh. The survey, conducted by FindOutNow for the Sunday Herald, gives the SNP a 12-point lead over Labour in constituency voting intentions and a ten-point lead on the regional list. On the strength of those numbers, the Nats would comfortably be the largest party at Holyrood and able to continue governing as a minority administration or could strike a pact with other parties. This is a very different prospect than that which faced Swinney nine months ago, when he took over the leadership after Humza Yousaf’s short and unhappy sojourn in Bute House. Back then, the SNP was tied with Labour in the constituencies and six points behind in the regionals.
What went right for Swinney? The question ought to be: what went wrong for his opponent, Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar? The answer is: Sir Keir Starmer. The Labour government became unpopular quickly, in no small part thanks to its removal of the winter heating allowance, its tax-raising budget, and the costs to consumers of its energy policies. This handed the SNP an opportunity to do what it does best: triangulating populism. It could talk left on fuel poverty and welfare reforms and right on National Insurance hikes and the taxing of family farms. The Nationalists are at their most formidable when they have a story to tell the urban poor, another one for comfortable suburbans, and another still for depopulated rural areas. After several years in which the party became stuck down an ideological rabbit hole of gender theory, rent controls, job-killing Net Zeroism, and seven-year prison sentences for hate crimes, the SNP has edged its way back towards the centre ground. They’re still wrong, but at least now they’re wrong about stuff the voters can understand.
Not so long ago, Sarwar looked like Labour’s best shot at regaining control of Holyrood, which the party lost in 2007. The Prime Minister and the Chancellor appear to have put paid to that. If voters in Scotland want to give Labour a bloody nose, the 2026 elections are a prime opportunity. Notable, too, is the rise of Reform. While it does not enjoy the same level of support as seen in England, Nigel Farage’s party is doing better than the Scottish establishment ever imagined. I hate to say I told them so – wait, that’s not true. I love to say I told them so. While Reform is doing most of its damage to the Tories, there is a not insignificant segment of the Labour vote who have migrated towards it.
Swinney is an implacable separatist and nationalist demagogue, but he has learned to repackage these impulses in terms more palatable
It would be churlish to deny that Swinney has made a contribution to the uptick in the SNP’s chances. He has not simply waited for Labour to unravel, but has done the work to get his party back to the mainstream and some degree of credibility. He is a more moderate, reassuring figurehead than the hyper-political Sturgeon and Yousaf, who allowed activists and fringe ideas to dominate their agendas and seemed to lose the ability to address anyone to their right, which, unfortunately, was most of the country.
Truth be told, Swinney is an implacable separatist and nationalist demagogue, but he has learned to repackage these impulses in terms more palatable to to the average voter. He has cultivated the public image of ‘Honest John’, a dull but decent bank manager type, and the voters appear to buy it. In this venture, he has been ably assisted by his deputy Kate Forbes. She is the church-going pro-business moderate who was reviled by the Scottish press and internal SNP opponents alike when she contested the leadership in 2023. Her evangelical Christian faith became the central issue in the campaign, in particular her views on premarital sex, same-sex marriage and abortion, and the membership handed Yousaf a narrow victory, a decision they came to regret. Arguably, Swinney’s masterstroke was bringing Forbes back in from the cold, handing her the economy brief, and sending her to repair relationships with the business community. SNP members have Sir Keir Starmer to thank for their party’s revival but they also owe a debt to Swinney and Forbes.
All this is infuriating for the SNP’s opponents and critics. Eighteen years in government, wielding the vast array of powers given to the Scottish parliament, and the Nationalist record on health, education, growth, climate, drugs and transport is unspeakably grim. If Scotland had simply had no government for the past two decades, there is a decent chance it would be in a better position than it is under the ministrations of the SNP. It isn’t fair. In a healthy democracy, the Nationalists would be facing electoral oblivion for their sins, but democracy isn’t about fairness. It’s about power: winning it, using it, retaining it, and keeping it out of the hands of your opponents. Absent a significant reversal of fortune, the SNP is on course to cling onto power for another five years and John Swinney to deliver the midterm turnaround that eludes so many political leaders.
Why is Spain so anti-Trump?
Spain has been receiving some lavish praise of late in the British press. ‘Booming Spain is on track to a new age of prosperity’ was the headline in the Times last week, a response to the news that its GDP is forecast to grow by 2.5 per cent this year.
The Financial Times was similarly effusive about Spain’s economy in a piece last October, in which it quoted the country’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez. ‘I can say that Spain is living an extraordinary moment. Our country is experiencing great success.’
The Times explained that Spain is growing at three times the rate of the Eurozone for three reasons: immigration, tourism and lower energy prices. Since 2022, Spain has welcomed one millions immigrants and they have snapped up 40 per cent of all new jobs created, predominantly in agriculture, hospitality and construction.
Nevertheless Spain’s unemployment rate is 10.6 per cent, the highest in the EU, which is why opposition MPs aren’t quite so upbeat. ‘When growth is based on public spending that you can’t maintain in a country with a high debt-to-GDP ratio, somebody should be concerned,’ said Juan Bravo of the People’s Party.
There is a fourth explanation as to why Spain’s economy is outperforming its EU rivals and that is because Spain is the new Germany when it comes to shirking on its defence commitments. Of the EU’s 27 member states, Spain’s defence expenditure as a share of GDP is the lowest, at just 1.28 per cent of GDP (which is around £17 billion). In contrast, Estonia, Greece, Latvia and Poland are all spending more than 3 per cent.
True, Spain’s 1.28 per cent is marginally up on the 0.9 per cent it forked out in 2014 but it is stark evidence that Spain – the fourth largest economy in the EU behind Germany, France and Italy – is not pulling its weight in defence. No country among Nato’s 32 members spends less on defence than Spain.
For years the slackers’ mantle in the EU belonged to Germany. Their frugality was good for their economy but not for their image abroad, particularly in America. Barack Obama was too polite to point it out – in public, at least – but that reticence changed when Donald Trump was first elected to office in 2016. Relations between the US and Germany hit rock bottom in early 2019 when Angela Merkel as chancellor broke a promise to increase spending to 1.5 per cent of GDP on defence. ‘NATO members clearly pledged to move toward, not away, from 2 per cent by 2024,’ said an angry Richard Grenell, the American ambassador to Germany. ‘That the German government would even be considering reducing its already unacceptable commitments to military readiness is a worrisome signal to Germany’s 28 Nato allies.’
Germany’s spending has subsequently increased to 2.12 per cent, a consequence of the war in Ukraine, which resulted in the launch of a €100 billion (£83 billion) special defence fund.
The fact that Merkel is no longer in office is also significant. She was always reluctant to increase Germany’s defence spending, particularly once Trump was in power. One began to sense the Chancellor was being deliberately wilful, part of her policy of establishing a role for herself as the leader of the ’progressive West’ against Trump, whom she regarded as the leader of the ‘regressive West’.
Since Merkel left office in December 2021 the progressive West has been leaderless. Emmanuel Macron had coveted the position, but since he lost his absolute majority in the 2022 legislative election his authority has been on the slide in France and across Europe. Merkel’s successor as chancellor, Olaf Scholz, has been a disaster, while Italy is led by Giorgia Meloni, no friend of progressives.
Trump is aware that Spain of all the EU nations is most hostile to his presence in the White House
That leaves Spain among Europe’s ‘big four’ nations. The Socialist party’s Sanchez is proud that under his premiership Spain is the most migrant-friendly country in Europe, because, as he declared last year, ‘We are the children of migration, not the parents of xenophobia!’
Sanchez also likes to flaunt his environmental credentials and his ambition is to turn Spain into a world leader in renewable energy. ‘Green, baby, green,’ he declared recently, a riposte to Trump’s promise in his inauguration address to ‘drill, baby, drill’.
Shortly after Trump’s election victory last November, Robert Benson of the Center for American Progress, one of the Democratic party’s most influential thinktanks, gave an interview to the Spanish media. Benson said that Trump’s re-election presented Spain with a ‘unique opportunity’. He elaborated: ‘With progressive leadership under Pedro Sanchez, it can play a pivotal role in countering authoritarianism globally… It’s crucial for leaders like Sanchez and PSOE [his Socialist party] internationally to carry the banner of a compassionate politics because the rest of the EU is unable in its current state.’
Trump appears to be aware that Spain of all the EU nations is most hostile to his presence in the White House.
After being sworn in for a second time, Trump was quick to criticise Spain’s reluctance to spend money on defence. Sanchez responded by saying ‘Spain is very committed to achieving this goal of 2 per cent of GDP on defence expenditure’.
But last week the Americas edition of the centre-right Spanish newspaper El Mundo said that Trump’s administration had snubbed Sanchez since taking office. The State Department had made calls to the foreign ministers of most European countries, including France, Poland, Germany and Italy, but no one had picked up the phone to Madrid.
‘The ideological differences between them are evident,’ said El Mundo, ‘and the Spanish leader seems to be seeking a role among those who openly clash with Trump’s worldview.’
Evidently the Spanish PM hasn’t felt the ‘vibe shift’ sweeping the West, and there will be only one winner if Sanchez takes on Trump. Even his ‘booming’ Spain is no match for America.
The signet ring is back
The signet ring is back. Perhaps, like King Charles, who has worn his since the 1970s, you think it never went away, but I can confirm that it did – sometime around the time of the New Labour government, when being seen as a raging toff was bad for business. Now, thanks in part to the Instagram account Signet Ring Social and posh television and film dramas such as Saltburn, the signet ring, or ‘siggie’ as it is referred to by Gen Z devotees, is making a comeback. Perhaps, instead of the hemline index, used as an indicator of bull or bear economic markets, we may consult the signet ring index as a guide to prosperity. Do you see more or fewer ‘siggies’ in a recession, and what exactly does that tell us?
Small but mighty, the signet ring punches above its weight, managing to say so much with so little. Class, bloodlines, patrilineal heritage – it’s all there, twinkling away on the pinkie finger of the left hand. Unlike the male wedding ring, which announces something boring and rather smug – I’m taken, hands off – the signet ring is mysterious, offering up all sorts of social statements: I am descended from aristocrats, I own a vast estate, or simply, I am a gentleman. But gentlemen beware. When it goes wrong – too chunky, too bling, too gold – the signet ring undoes all its symbolic power and simply announces to the world that you live in Clapham and work for Foxtons.
Precisely because it is worn by princes, penniless Sloanes and the middle classes alike, the signet ring has long been a peculiarly confusing British statement. Once a piece of jewellery that possessed a literal function – monarchs historically used signet rings to seal documents in wax – the signet ring was reserved for royalty and aristocrats alone. From the Renaissance onwards, when class and trade merged, the signet ring trickled down through society to become not just political but also aspirational. In our own moment, one need only look at Pippa Middleton’s shiny siggie to see how far the signet ring has travelled from its original iteration and intended sex.
Perhaps because of the erosion of its original status, the signet ring continues to provoke a ludicrously outsized reaction in most people. One male friend tells me that he used to take his off before job interviews in case the ‘enemy’ discriminated against him. A female friend tells me, having presumably done some research into the matter, that ‘men who wear signet rings are amazing in bed’. In popular culture, singer and former Guards officer James Blunt (né Blount) attributes the class fury he received in the British press partly to the signet ring that he has always unapologetically worn. When David Nicholls’s One Day was dramatised on television, much was made of the signet ring worn by his middle-class male protagonist, Dexter Mayhew – even if true signet ring aficionados will have noted that Dexter’s ring was all wrong: silver, far too effeminate, and without even a crest. The other problem, of course, is that he’s called Dexter.
‘We make about 40 a month; five years ago, it was just ten a year’
To better understand the numbers, I speak to the experts. Mark Ruff of Ruff’s, signet ring makers of long standing, proffers the theory that signet rings have never gone away. ‘It’s fairly easy to find your coat of arms and crest on Fairbairn’s these days,’ he says cheerfully, ‘but lots of people think they have a special coat of arms when they don’t,’ he notes, explaining rather darkly that one crest may do for an array of surnames. Which brings us to the portable nature of such a precious item: ‘We’re always replacing them because young people lose them in nightclubs,’ he says drily. Guy Burton, director of Hancocks, signet ring makers to the King, has seen a definite spike in recent years. ‘We make about 40 a month; five years ago, it was just ten a year.’ But are his female clients coming to him to have their rings adjusted in the Ozempic era, I wonder? I wager he would be silent on the matter since alterations are presumably good for business.
For the uncensored answers on the take-up of signet rings by Gen Z, I speak to Charles Rolls (28), founder of Signet Ring Social. The idea emerged over a few drinks in the Sloaney Pony in Fulham. Charles believes the signet ring encapsulates class and belonging in his generation. The Instagram page has of 84,000 followers (of which 60 per cent are British he estimates) and posts mainly satirical, self-parodying collages. ‘It started out as memes,’ he admits. When I catch Rolls, he is driving to a shoot in Cornwall and says he is happy to ‘speak for hours’ on the subject. Why are Gen Z wearing siggies, I ask, quietly fingering mine as I speak to him. ‘I hope this doesn’t sound pretentious,’ he cautions, ‘but there’s a deeper meaning to them.’ And just like that, Rolls is off to his shoot and I have my answer: signet rings are back because nothing else makes sense anymore. Sounds reasonable – just don’t lose it.
My plan for a better dating app
It’s 30 years since a website called Match.com opened the Pandora’s box of online dating. Until then, with the tiny exception of the classifieds, meeting a mate had to begin out there and in person. But from 1995, dating retreated to a desktop computer – a virtual shop window of real people. Match.com was launched as a minimum viable product that sold, so said the wags, other minimum viable products. Today, the online dating industry makes more than $9 billion. By 2033, its revenues are expected to double.
There are now tons of apps, yet still so many loners. According to one survey, 44 per cent of Londoners are single. If Pandora’s box opened years ago, today it’s surely shattering. Dating apps, says feminist author Louise Perry, are great fun for a certain type: the socio-sexual (man). Players, to you and me. Bumble, Tinder and the rest have enabled these cads to clean up. We’re talking multiple dalliances per week, sometimes per night. Everyone else, meanwhile, good luck.
For men, the apps conspire with our cowardice to relieve us of the mission of having to ask a girl out in the flesh. For women, it’s even worse. By their thirties, most want marriage and children, so need their date to commit. But the all-you-can-eat buffet of apps, swipes and matches is hardly a recipe for making one-woman men out of thirty-something man-children.
As a 37-year-old man, I can just about recall a time when a date was a special occasion. One you might have dared to dress up for and certainly looked forward to. But in 2025, a date is barely a notch above an errand. Less romance in the air, more the stink of inconvenience. That’s if the thing isn’t cancelled at the last minute.
If it does go ahead, all the lies might make you wish it hadn’t. We all have to pretend on dates that we’re not the arrogant, underachieving, flatulent pigs known to our friends and exes. But the apps encourage these deceits. Photos that flatter (and filter) us. Bios that flog our good traits, while forgetting our bad. All redrafted with the wit of the raconteur you’d like to be but aren’t. What LinkedIn does for our professional lives, Hinge accomplishes for our love lives. Good for our egos, perhaps, but hardly a sound foundation for a relationship.
Because here’s what no dating profile ever tells you: up close, we’re all deeply, deeply flawed. Alain de Botton, married 22 years, has a suggestion for new couples: ‘Ask each other on an early dinner date… “How are you crazy? I’m crazy like this, how about you?”’ Gulp. Except, there’s also solidarity in the candour. One that takes the edge off and laughs at each other’s expense.
Swipes and matches is hardly a recipe for making one-woman men out of thirty-something man-children
Like so many features of the internet, you’d never invent the dating app now, but you can’t uninvent them either. So here’s an idea: a new dating app with a proper point of difference. Let’s call it Worst (in homage to Marilyn’s quip about men who don’t deserve her at her best). Unlike the other apps with their false promises, Worst isn’t in the game of finding your perfect match, but your imperfect one.
Users wouldn’t upload sociable photos, and certainly not one shot by a professional or snapped ten years ago before your hairline bailed. Rather, it would oblige you to add – what else? – your passport photo. As plain and pure as a headshot can be. To go with the photographic evidence, users would list three facts about themselves:
- Worst thing about your appearance – the physical imperfection (you know the one) that you’re most insecure about;
- Worst thing about your behaviour – e.g. control freakery, flightiness, a laugh that sounds like a clubbed seal;
- Worst thing about your character – a ‘This Be the Verse’-level flaw, doubtless inherited, that makes you crazy.
Such an app wouldn’t be immune to porkies itself. But to mitigate against dishonesty, a social proofing feature could let users flag any flaw that was loud and clear on the date yet missing from the profile. But beyond the design of the algorithm, Worst would be about a spirit of truth – giving you permission to fess up to the weaknesses that are horrible to you, but redeemable to someone who inexplicably finds you rather lovely.
In recent years, the share prices of Match.com have plummeted. A dose of honesty might just be what their business models need. A beautiful relationship should start with the ugly truth.
What happens when you can’t pee?
‘I really do think you should think seriously about that operation,’ my urologist told me about a year ago. The plumbing had deteriorated further and, in a calculated gamble for more tranquil twilight years, I eventually capitulated, submitting in early December to a so-called TURP, a transurethral resection of the prostate.
Two days later, he sent me home with a reassuring message: ‘It’s settling down nicely, but don’t be alarmed by a little blood in the urine in a few weeks’ time. Expect a sort of “dry rosé” colour when the scabs start to fall off.’ I took that as a green light for a family Christmas in northern Spain, a plan marred only slightly by my Spanish wife Marina’s wrist fracture (she tripped on the stairs) shortly before we set off on Brittany Ferries.
And Christmas did indeed prove largely pleasant and untroubled. It was only when the younger generation left us to fend for ourselves that TURP-related complications began to surface. Initially, these took the form of sudden, extreme urges to pee – so much so that I found myself irrigating several spots around Marina’s hometown, requiring her to grovel on my behalf: ‘Please do forgive him, he’s not well! Don’t get the idea he does this kind of thing all the time!’
But when the scabs began to flake off, I realised that mere incontinence was for beginners. ‘A little blood in the urine’ proved absurdly understated and the alleged affinity to dry rosé downright misleading: more like crusted port, I reckoned. Soon, the coagulating flakes were beginning to block the exit altogether until sheer pressure eventually pushed them out, bringing temporary relief before the gruesome cycle began all over again.
Then, during the night before our scheduled ferry home, no degree of bladder pressure sufficed to shift the bung. How long, I wondered, before I would, quite literally, burst? Hospital beckoned urgently but, given our obscure location, the only realistic solution was for Marina to drive me there. Remarkably, despite a phobia of nighttime driving, a single usable arm, a right-hand drive car and a couple of near misses, we made it to Urgencias without mishap.
All was eerily quiet at that hour, but with a cursory ‘¡Disculpe!’ the duty nurse deftly eased in a ‘sonda’ (catheter) – the initial agony giving way instantly to sublime relief. A line-up of four oracles then opined on my case, exhorting me to abandon all other plans. It would take days to sort this out and anyway, how did I fancy a bladder blockage during a 24-hour ferry journey in rough seas miles offshore?
During the night before our scheduled ferry home, no degree of bladder pressure sufficed to shift the bung
Soon I was clad in one of those puzzling hospital nighties that shield your front modesty, but not your rear, which is inexplicably exposed to the four winds. The nightie is an especially bizarre set-up when various drips and sluices are also snaking under the hem to rendezvous with the catheter. Meanwhile, the medics were intent on flushing me out, rigging up a giant syringe to dislodge the stubborn accumulation of ‘coágulos’. And goodness, how many of the nasty little blighters did that diligent young urologist suck out before my very eyes.
Otherwise, I was enjoying my hospital quarters, the delightful nurses and even the food. I was even warming to my eccentric roommate, the giant, rotund Goyo, whose vast belly refused to be harnessed in any hospital garb. His verbal diarrhoea (incomprehensible dialect or speech impediment?) gushed forth torrentially, his spicy oaths almost our only linguistic overlap. But I did grasp that the inflamed testicle that had landed him in hospital was causing acute discomfort, necessitating urgent nocturnal demands for painkillers, cold compresses, sleeping pills – anything to tame the pain.
As time went by, despite his snoring, I started to like this cacho pan (salt of the earth) and, incongruously, we began to bond, our shared ordeals bridging linguistic and cultural gaps. And when the oracles finally deemed my flow to be not just ‘all clear’ but apt to ‘put most young men to shame’, Goyo congratulated me and delivered the full Spanish backslapping, cheek and neck-tweaking routine.
Reforming Ofsted won’t fix Britain’s problem schools
The proportion of children staying away from school may be alarming – one in five – but the proportion of parents – almost one in three – who do not see school as a necessary part of their child’s daily schedule is even more so. Keir Starmer’s government understood that the connection between parents and schools needed fixing – and settled on Ofsted as part of the solution.
For many, however, Ofsted was part of the problem. The suicide of Ruth Perry, a much-loved headteacher, had highlighted the pressure that school inspections placed on the teaching profession. The majority of teachers viewed the regulator negatively. Meanwhile, fewer than 4 in 10 parents felt short-changed by Ofsted’s one-word verdicts (‘Outstanding’, ‘Inadequate’) delivered after their two-day inspections.
Too many heads ignore the positive outcomes of parent power
On becoming Secretary of State for Education last year, Bridget Phillipson pledged to reform Ofsted. She unveiled her new vision for ‘reform, renewal, for modernisation’ at the Centre for Social Justice this morning. A report card will replace the one-word judgements, with a colour-coded scheme to assist parents to gauge their school’s performance. Already, however, the sector has hit out with a barrage of criticisms, and parents are sure to follow.
Teachers worry that the many facets of a school’s ecosystem, where learning involves everything from attendance and attainment through behaviour and improvement, cannot be evaluated properly within a 48-hour visit. Daniel Kebede, the General Secretary of the National Education Union, has branded the Phillipson new deal as ‘intellectually inconsistent’. Others worry that the new-look Ofsted does nothing to address cheating – not by pupils but by the schools themselves, excluding (or off-rolling) pupils whose grades could compromise the school’s record, or else forfeiting challenging subjects in the curriculum in order to drive SATs scores.
None of this will boost parents’ confidence in schooling. The same parents who didn’t buy the one-word judgement hung by the school gates will have trouble believing the colourful new ‘report cards’. Many will have little faith in report cards – their own were never great. They won’t like the sound of an inspector much either.
What they do want is someone to engage their children, spark their curiosity, encourage their ambition and offer an opportunity for a social life that does not revolve around their phone. They want to know that they, whether as mother or father, play a crucial role in their child’s learning for life. When schools can show that this is on offer, whether through a family liaison officer or an attendance mentor, parents become allies rather than sceptics in the effort to turn school into the core of a child’s weekday.
Engage parents with school, and you have a far better accountability system than Ofsted could ever hope to deliver: day in, day out, an engaged parent will scrutinise their child’s progress, note bullying in the playground, pick up on a teacher’s unpopularity and support extracurricular activities. This is not a two-day blink and you miss it visit but a regular and continuous study of what works and what doesn’t.
Schools that draw parents into a close-knit community can rely on word of mouth appeal. Schools that fail to take into account parents, instead, will continue to quake at the prospect of that dreaded Ofsted inspection.
Yet too many heads ignore the positive outcomes of parent power. As one assistant head at a secondary school in Kent puts it, ‘Too often parental participation gets crowded out of the busy curriculum, and without a clear direction and without schools being held to account for the way they engage with their families, the new Ofsted reports will do nothing to improve this.’ To improve attendance, attainment, and accountability, schools need parents’ support, not report cards.
Burning a Quran shouldn’t be a crime
England ditched its blasphemy laws back in 2008. No longer would it be an offence to engage in ‘contemptuous, reviling, scurrilous or ludicrous’ speech concerning God. No longer would any poor soul be hauled off to jail, far less to the stocks, for the crime of profanity. So you can imagine my surprise when a man was arrested in Manchester on Saturday after desecrating a copy of the Quran. Was blasphemy snuck back on to the statute books without anyone noticing?
Sadly, Manchester’s cops appear to take a different view
Reading about Saturday’s arrest, I found myself wondering what century this is. The man allegedly live-streamed himself burning a Quran ‘page by page’. He executed his supposed sacrilege next to the Glade of Light memorial, which commemorates the victims of the Islamist suicide bombing at the Manchester Arena in 2017. Call me a free-speech fanatic, but is there really anything wrong with him doing that?
Sadly, Manchester’s cops appear to take a different view. Scores of them swarmed the man, handcuffed him, and took him to the cells. He was interrogated over his fiery impiety. Are we free to say ‘contemptuous, reviling, scurrilous and ludicrous’ things about religion, or are we not?
The man was arrested on suspicion of a ‘racially aggravated public order offence’. That’s a lot of words to say ‘blasphemy’.
The Manchester police gave the game away when they said the burning of the Quran might cause ‘deep concern’ within ‘some of our diverse communities’. It might even ‘cause harm or distress’, they said. In short, they took action against the alleged Quran-burner to protect the feelings of those who consider the Quran a holy, unimpeachable text. They apprehended him on suspicion of causing ‘distress’ to those who believe the Quran is a revelation directly from God.
It is a species of tyranny to elevate religious sensitivity over individual liberty, to accord greater moral worth to the feelings of believers than to the freedom of non-believers. The arrest of a man on suspicion of desecrating a Quran should outrage the liberal sensibility every bit as much as yesteryear’s Inquisatorial assaults on the ‘unchristian’. Freedom of speech absolutely must include the freedom to doubt all religious claims, to deny all gods and prophets, and even to destroy their books. To my mind, burning a Quran is as much an act of free expression as reading the Quran is – and people should be free to do both.
The alleged Quran destruction in Manchester came just two days after Salwan Momika was shot dead in Stockholm. He was an Iraqi-born atheist and stinging critic of Islam who also had a penchant for putting a match to the Quran in public places. It is widely suspected that his killing was an act of Islamist vengeance, a religious execution for ‘blasphemy’. Europe’s response to that outrage should have been a loud and unapologetic reassertion of the liberty to speak, of that hard-won human right to mock all gods, prophets, books and beliefs. Instead, we’re arresting people for dissing Islam. It’s such a dangerous game.
No one benefits from this neo-inquisition against ‘Islamophobic’ speech. Islam’s sceptics, including ex-Muslims keen to rebuke the religion they once followed, are silenced. And Islam’s followers are infantilised. The erection of a moral forcefield around all things Islamic treats our Muslim citizens like overgrown children who must be protected by officialdom from ‘distressing’ ideas. It’s racial paternalism masquerading as political correctness. Yes, the sight of a Quran on fire will offend some people, but you know what? Occasionally feeling offended is an infinitesimally small price to pay for living in a free society.
Has Ukraine just carried out another assassination in Moscow?
The Alye Parusa (Scarlet Sails) apartment complex in Moscow’s north-western Shchukino suburb bills itself as an exclusive place to live, and a safe one, too, with cameras, gates and 24-hour security. Neither this, nor his detail of bodyguards, saved Armen Sargsyan when, on Monday morning, a bomb with more than a kilo of explosive detonated as he was walking out the lobby. His leg was blown off, and although he was airlifted to hospital, he died shortly after.
So far, this appears to be the latest in a campaign of assassinations carried out by Ukrainian intelligence. Sargsyan was a rather different figure to the last target in Moscow, Lt. Gen. Kirillov. Born in Armenia, Sargsyan later moved to Gorlivka, a grimy industrial occupied Ukrainian city (twinned, incidentally, with Barnsley) north of Donetsk. He was a criminal-businessman turned warlord, who had acquired the underworld nickname ‘Armen Gorlivsky’ for the stranglehold he acquired over legal and illegal business there. In particular, though, he was likely on Kyiv’s hit list because of his role in setting up the so-called Arbat Separate Guards Special Purpose Battalion in 2022. One of many such smaller mercenary and militia forces fighting for the Russians in their war on Ukraine, this was never really a battalion, comprising only 200 to 300 men, a mix of Armenian, Ukrainian and Abkhazian mercenaries. Nonetheless, it fought on the Toretsk front and was then transferred to operations in the Kursk salient late last year.
His trajectory, from well-connected dodgy businessman to underworld opportunist and then mercenary entrepreneur in many ways paralleled that of Yevgeny Prigozhin, founder of the Wagner private army. He did well enough for himself: a 4-room flat at Alye Parusa is currently on the market for 210 million rubles, or £1.7 million. However, the two men operated on very different scales. Sargsyan was essentially a small-time, bargain basement imitation at best who, unlike Prigozhin, never thought to challenge the Kremlin.
Nonetheless, his career does illuminate the changing opportunities and demands facing an ambitious opportunist in the Donbas. Before the 2014 Revolution of Dignity in Ukraine, he was the very model of a shady entrepreneur, protected by his close relationship with the Party of Regions, that dominated local politics and from which had sprung elected president Viktor Yanukovych. The consensus seems to be that he may well have paid a bribe here to expedite a permit, sent a bit of muscle to warn off a competitor there, but was, well, as legitimate as anyone else in that environment.
Then, as anti-government protesters clashed with police in Kyiv’s Maidan Square, Sargsyan was asked to recruit some likely lads to head to the capital and crack some heads. There’s no suggestion he was uncomfortable with the request, but in any case, he could hardly say no. At that point, Sargsyan – who does not seem to have had any real loyalties beyond expedience – was deemed to have taken sides and was later charged by the Ukrainian police. So, he was stuck in the rebel parts of the Donbas, which soon became de facto Russian controlled.
Sargsyan was. again, hardly unwilling to take fullest advantage, extending his control over Gorlivka’s economy and using his position as head of the Donetsk Boxing Federation to recruit more thugs to his cause. Between 2014-22, after all, the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic essentially became a gangster pseudo-state, its economy kept afloat – other than by subsidies from Moscow – by organised criminality, from industrial-scale coal smuggling to producing counterfeit cigarettes. With the February 2022 invasion, though, the environment changed again. Raising a militia was not just a way of making money (the Russian defence ministry pays well) but also an act of performative loyalty that gives small-scale local warlords and biznismen like Sargsyan the license to continue their other criminal activities.
So Sargsyan’s real significance is precisely that he was so run of the mill. Despite inflated claims that he was a shadowy figure controlling the prisons of the Donbas or being groomed as a rival to the late, unlamented Prigozhin, he was nothing special, just another thuggish entrepreneur happy to be involved in any ‘business’, from the legitimate to the criminal, so long as it makes a return. There is still the chance that he was killed in a settling of scores, as Russia’s underworld becomes more unstable again. He was, after all, close to several controversial Chechen politicians and crime figures (the two are not mutually exclusive). However, if one accepts the current working assumption in Moscow, that this was a Ukrainian hit, then Sargsyan was presumably a target precisely because he was so representative of a whole stratum of Donbas opportunists who have moved into the warlord business. How many may now be reconsidering their life choices – or hiring more bodyguards?
Foreign Office struggles to mind its Mandarin
The Foreign Office was once described as a ‘palace of dreams’, yet these days it seems increasingly like a graveyard full of nightmares. Just weeks after the Gaza ceasefire, the outbreak of a tariff war in America is just another fresh headache for the Sir Humphreys of Whitehall. Yet with Trump returning to the White House, our elected Labour overlords have decided that now is the perfect time to reset Britain’s relations with both Europe and China. Talk about having your work cut out…
The Foreign Office’s work has been made harder by the declining number of foreign language speakers in its department. Mr S has done some digging to see how language levels compare to ten years’ ago. And, sadly, newly obtained figures reveal that the number of fluent Mandarin speakers passing exams within the Foreign Office has more than halved in less than a decade.
A Freedom of Information request by Steerpike showed that there were just 22 British diplomats with exam passes for the ‘gold standard’ certification in Mandarin, known as C1, down from 45 in 2016. Such figures refer only to the number who have passed the C1 exam and do not reflect the number of total staff who speak some level of Mandarin within the department. C1 exams are valid for five years, with diplomats then expected to re-qualify.
Edward Morello, MP for West Dorset and a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee, told Mr S: ‘It is incredibly important that our diplomats are able to represent Britain’s interests abroad, especially in those places we wish to grow our economic ties. Language skills are a key component of that. I hope the FCDO will ensure that we reverse some of the negative trends we’re seeing in this data.’
Something perhaps for Sir Olly Robbins, the new Permanent Secretary, to sought out pronto…
Did Starmer breach Covid rules?
Oh dear. It seems No. 10 aren’t keen to go anywhere near suggestions that Sir Keir Starmer might have broken lockdown rules. Back in December 2020, the Labour leader was receiving voice training lessons from actress Leonie Mellinger, who claimed status as a ‘key worker.’ This included a visit to Labour HQ on Christmas Eve, while London was under tier four restrictions, according to a new book being serialised in the Times by journalists Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund.
The Tories are demanding answers – but Downing Street aren’t willing to give them. At today’s lobby briefing for Westminster journalists, Starmer’s spokesman refused to comment when pressed as to whether the Labour leader had breached legally binding measures. No answers were forthcoming on whether Starmer adhered to lockdown rules at all times, with a spokesperson stating, ‘He wouldn’t get involved in matters relating to his time in opposition.’ That wasn’t the line during last summer’s Lord Alli’s controversy….
Importantly, however, Downing Street did not deny that Starmer would resign if found to have broken lockdown rules – a pledge he made during the ‘beergate’ controversy of May 2022. We’ve all seen this movie before – good luck to Keir in changing the ending…
Bridget Phillipson tries to rebrand her education reforms
Education has been in the spotlight in recent weeks, as the government’s Schools Bill makes it way through parliament. So far, the legislation has grabbed headlines precisely for all the wrong sorts of reasons. Critics claim it will water down standards and that Bridget Phillipson, the Education Secretary, is effectively doing the teaching union’s bidding. Particular attention has been paid to the thorny issue of Ofsted school inspections, following the suicide of headteacher Ruth Perry.
Today was Phillipson’s chance to respond. In her first major speech since taking up the role, the Education Secretary sought to shift her rhetoric – while ardently standing by the changes she proposed. She insisted that she was ‘delighted’ by the ‘raging debate’ over the new rating system to judge schools, in which single-word ratings are replaced by a colour-coded five-point ‘report card’ scale. These range from the red coloured ‘causing concern’ to green shades of ‘secure’, ‘strong’ and ‘exemplary’. The change is necessary, she says, because too many places are ‘coasting’ with 600 ‘stuck receiving consecutive poor Ofsted judgments’.
Gone was the partisan Tory-bashing of yesteryear. Instead there were repeated warm words for Michael Gove, the ex-Education Secretary and current Spectator editor. She echoed his criticisms of ‘the soft bigotry of low expectations’, said he ‘brought a real drive and reform to education’ and dubbed him one of ‘a succession of great education reformers’ Now, it is the unions which Phillipson suggests are her motivating animus: ‘My first responsibility as Secretary of State is to children and families and their life chances – and I won’t let anything get in the way of that.’
Indeed, Phillipson suggested that claims she has been ‘in hock to the trade unions’ have now been disproved today by their angry reaction to the proposed new rating system. This is now being framed as an extension of parental choice, with Phillipson insisting that ‘parents are more than able to understand and to take on board greater information about what’s happening within their children’s school’. ‘All the evidence’, she added ‘is clear that they do’ want such information.
Yet while the Education Secretary has changed her tune, she certainly has not done the same for the legislation. The Tories have been quick to ridicule her attempt to portray herself as merely the latest in a long line of education reformers. Laura Trott, her opposite number, pointed out that actions, not words, speak loudest, with the Department for Education last week revoking an academy order after the school threatened legal action. ‘This is exactly what those who have raised concerns said would happen’, she said.
Phillipson clearly feels the moral mission of her department, repeatedly insisting to the CSJ that ‘background shouldn’t be destiny’. But with the Tories cheered by last week’s U-turn on the Schools Bill, she will need to convince school leaders that her new ratings system does not simply co-opt the language of progressive meritocracy to conceal an effective watering down of standards.
The BBC always knew that Russell Brand was a lout
Several women who worked with Russell Brand at the BBC have revealed that they were too scared to make official complaints about the lunatic’s behaviour. I dare say it will astonish you to learn that Mr Brand seemed to display a somewhat predatory sexual nature and was apt to touch young ladies inappropriately, though Brand has said that his relationships were ‘always consensual’. It is also alleged that he frequently used the disabled toilets for reasons other than those for which the BBC intended them to be used. Hmm. As far as I can remember from my time at the BBC, the disabled toilets were used almost exclusively for amorous trysts of a semi-clandestine nature. There were loads of these installations and very few disabled people, you see. They were clean and spacious and one could clean up after the act had been consummated. And of course for the couple inside, if things turned a bit S&Mish, there was always that emergency cord to pull to get help. Anyway, at least it meant the license payer was getting value for money for these costly structures.
The phrase ‘hiding in plain sight’ was never more appropriate than when applied to Brand at the BBC. The comedian was taken on for precisely the reasons for which he is now being pilloried. A libidinous lout who was also sadly prolix. But here is my take on some of those complaints. You regret have sex with Russell Brand in a disabled lavatory? Then don’t go into a disabled lavatory with Russell Brand and take all your clothes off. There is no suggestion that force was involved, after all. I don’t see why Brand should be persecuted for your questionable decisions in life.
Will Britain get dragged into Trump’s trade war?
North America is now engaged in a full-blown trade war. Markets are reacting. Japan’s Nikkei was the first to indicate the downturn, falling 2.9 per cent this morning, while early trading on the FTSE is down 1.1 per cent. It’s not the cataclysmic shock some were expecting, though also not the ‘FANTASTIC’ response the President insists has occurred since his announcements over the weekend, which include hitting Canada and Mexico with a 25 per cent import tariff, and China with an additional 10 per cent.
It is also just the start of market reaction, as forecasters pile in with predictions about what these tariffs mean for inflation, business confidence and future trade relationships between close allies. Wall Street has yet to open, but futures suggest a volatile day ahead in the United States, with Nasdaq 100 futures down 1.7 per cent and Dow Jones futures down 1.3 per cent.
Meanwhile, Goldman Sachs economists warn that stocks will continue to tumble. JPMorgan’s chief economist says Trump may be ‘business unfriendly’. Warnings swirl over the possibility of another inflation spike, as oil prices rise in the wake of Trump’s announcements on Canadian energy resources, which will be subject to a 10 per cent levy.
None of this is fazing the President – who is warning the country that ‘pain’ might be part of his journey to a new ‘golden era’ for America – but one he believes will be well worth it. But this weekend’s announcements, according to the President, are just the start. So where will Donald Trump set his sights next?
Europe is a likely contender for the next tariff announcement. Taxing the EU has been hinted at by the President for some time, though he did not include the bloc in his executive orders this weekend. But now that he has addressed his neighbours, he has stronger words for Europe.
‘The UK is way out of line, and we’ll see,’ was Trump’s response to reporters in Washington, D.C., when asked which country might next be hit by tariffs. ‘But (the) European Union is really out of line. The UK is out of line but I’m sure that one, I think that one can be worked out. But the European Union, it’s an atrocity what they’ve done.’
The addition of the UK to his list is new. The EU has largely been the President’s gripe, due to the significant trade deficit the United States has with the EU – around $200 billion in 2023 – and competition in particular manufacturing areas, especially the automotive industry. But thanks to technical number-crunching, the US (on paper, at least) has a trade surplus – a position Trump views favourably.
What might the UK have to do to keep out of the Trump trade wars? The simple decision to stay friendly might do the trick, if Britain is lucky. ‘Prime Minister Starmer’s been very nice,’ Trump told reporters. ‘We’ve had a couple of meetings, we’ve had numerous phone calls, we’re getting along very well, we’ll see whether or not we can balance out our budget.’ If the nice phone calls stop doing so much heavy lifting, the UK could find itself in far more pressing conversations with the United States over the trade relationship. In the most extreme case, this would involve discussions around agriculture: a sticking point for Trump when it comes to both the EU and the UK, which are heavily opposed to importing products like American chicken.
But the real challenge for Britain may be how to be friendly with both sides in a US–EU trade battle. In Brussels today, the Prime Minister is supposed to be ‘resetting’ relationships with the EU-27 by strategising on defence. But there is no doubt Trump will come to dominate these conversations – not simply because of the tariff threats, but because they are intrinsically tied, as well, to his calls for Nato states to increase their defence spending substantially (a goal the President may use tariffs to achieve).
That’s the thing about Trump: when he’s out of office, he is still the topic of conversation. And when he is in office, his agenda dominates every conversation.
SNP mull ban on household cats
Here’s one to make you paws for thought: SNP ministers are considering a ban on pet cats, in a bid to protect birds and other wildlife. Yes, that’s right, an official report for the Scottish Government suggests establishing containment zones where residents can be forced to keep their pets indoors, or stopped from owning them altogether. Talk about putting a cat among the pigeons…
The report by the Scottish Animal Welfare Commission (SAWC) claims that domestic cats have a ‘significant impact on wildlife populations’ as they hunt for fun, torture prey through play, and bring maimed animals home to their owners. According to the Daily Telegraph, SNP ministers said they were ‘fully considering’ the findings of the report, which claims domestic cats are threatening rare wildcat populations by passing on diseases and competing for resources. It recommends consideration of ‘compulsory containment’ of cats in vulnerable areas, meaning they would not be allowed outside.
SAWC was set up by – who else? – Nicola Sturgeon, that sainted secessionist, in 2020 to provide recommendations to ministers on the ‘welfare of sentient animals in Scotland’, based on ‘scientific evidence and ethical considerations’. Mr S gently suggests that the commission consider popular feeling too. Given the Brits’ well-known love of animals, Steerpike suspects you’ll be more likely to get SNP ministers kept indoors than the feline friends of Scotland…