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The EU’s power is waning. If only Starmer could see it
Britain is back in the big time. Or at least it is according to Sir Keir Starmer, who was tickled pink with the ‘reset’ relationship agreed with the European Union on Monday. ‘It’s time to look forward,’ declared the Prime Minister, standing alongside the EU Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen. ‘We’re ready to work with partners if it means we can improve people’s lives here at home.’
The Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, shared the PM’s delight at a reset she believes will be good for trade, defence and energy. Others weren’t so sure. Reform leader Nigel Farage – Mr Brexit – accused the government of selling out Britain to the ‘ever-diminishing political union’ that is the EU.
Even Mario Draghi admits he has ‘nightmares’ about the state of the EU’s economy
But don’t just take Farage’s word for it. As Starmer welcomed Brussels’ top brass to London, the Europhile French newspaper Le Figaro published a bleak critique of the EU. This, incidentally, is the newspaper that, above all others in France, has been the most hostile to Brexit. A week after the referendum vote in 2016, Le Figaro called it an ‘historic error’. The paper quoted the French banker David de Rothschild, who expressed his bafflement that anyone would want to leave an EU that ‘is improving in terms of growth, employment and investment’.
Nine years later and Le Figaro hasn’t got quite the same confidence in Brussels. In an op-ed entitled ‘The EU is a hostage to its bureaucracy’, the paper lamented that the bloc refuses ‘to take the initiatives that would relaunch European capitalism’. As a consequence, Europe has ‘ruined its agriculture and industry’ and is no longer capable of competing with America and China.
The facts and figures the paper lists are damning. European industry has shrunk on the world market from 22.5 per cent to 14 per cent since 2000. Steel production in the world market has, meanwhile, fallen from 7 per cent to 4 per cent. Chemicals production has fallen by almost 15 per cent since 2020. The number of automobiles manufactured in the EU has plummeted from 18.7 to 14 million since 2017. Three million farms have disappeared since 2015. Energy prices in Europe are four times higher than in Asia and five times higher than in the US.
Le Figaro’s grim assessment of the EU’s diminishing clout was reminiscent of the warning sounded last September by Mario Draghi. A former Italian prime minister and the president of the European Central Bank between 2011 and 2019, Draghi couldn’t hide his fear for the bloc’s future.
He laid it out in a 400-page report on competitiveness commissioned by the EU. ‘For the first time since the Cold War, we must genuinely fear for our self-preservation,’ he stated. Europe was stagnating. It needed less bureaucracy and more investment. If not, said Draghi
We will not be able to become, at once, a leader in new technologies, a beacon of climate responsibility and an independent player on the world stage. We will not be able to finance our social model. We will have to scale back some, if not all, of our ambitions.
The EU has not been galvanised by Draghi’s alarm bell. The latest forecasts from the European Commission, released as Starmer met von der Leyen, reveal that the economy is still dire. As a result, the Commission has revised its growth projections downward and now predicts GDP growth of 0.9 per cent in 2025 – and not the 1.5 per cent forecast last November.
If the EU has failed to rise to the economic challenge of the last decade, the same is true of immigration. I predicted last month that Europe’s annual migrant crisis is just getting started, and so it has proved. The number of migrants crossing the Mediterranean (predominantly Bangladeshis, Afghans and Malians) into Italy in April was up 40 per cent on the same month in 2024. In the last week of April, nearly 1,300 migrants reached the Italian island of Lampedusa; in the same week in 2024 it was 106.
This is deeply embarrassing for the EU, and also Giorgia Meloni, who has cultivated a reputation since coming to power as the ‘iron lady of immigration’. If this continues, she may soon be likened to Boris Johnson in a blouse. Why are so many migrants still crossing the Mediterranean? Didn’t the EU hand over huge piles of cash to Egypt, Tunisia and Libya in the expectation that they would stem the flow?
It is because these countries see what Keir Starmer doesn’t. That the EU is weak and ineffectual, and not to be taken that seriously. That’s the view of the Trump administration. Even Mario Draghi admits he has ‘nightmares’ about the state of its economy. Anyone who thinks the EU is on the up is living in dreamland.
Keir Starmer has walked into the same Brexit trap as Theresa May
One of the most depressing concepts in physics is entropy – the principle that all systems tend toward disorder and breakdown. That’s all I could think of while reading today’s headlines praising the so-called “reset” deal between the UK and the EU.
I know the tricks of the EU’s trade – and “tricks” is the key word here
We’re being told this deal represents a new direction for Britain and its neighbour, a “new era”. It’s nothing of the sort. If anything, this “deal” is more of a repeat than a reset, a continuation of a long story of sellouts.
I can claim some experience here. Having served as the UK’s deputy chief negotiator in the trade talks with the EU in 2020, I spent hundreds of hours sitting opposite the EU’s negotiating team. I know the tricks of their trade – and “tricks” is the key word here.
Many commentators have expressed some surprise at the sheer paucity of Keir’s deal – and, indeed, it reads more like a glorified press release than a treaty. It’s not so much a contract as it is a set of pinky-swear promises between the UK and EU to hash out and sign a set of treaties in the coming months.
To my eye, the UK Government – desperate to announce they’d negotiated something – has fallen into a classic EU trap. And I don’t mean the obvious betrayal of fishermen but the fact that, littered throughout the document, are a set of principles that will inform the subsequent negotiations. Accept ECJ (European Court of Justice) jurisdiction? Tick. An obligation to follow EU rules? Tick. The UK should pay shedloads of money for the privilege? BIG tick.
This is EU negotiations 101. European negotiators know that elected politicians must get deals done as soon as possible to try and get headlines (an issue the unelected Commission doesn’t need to worry about). As one senior member of the EU negotiating team once told me, “elected politicians are temporary. We are eternal.”
By exploiting this, Brussels can get the other side to agree to a set of principles that will shape the subsequent talks and bind their negotiating partner. They famously did this to Theresa May, getting her to agree early on to the idea of “sequential talks” and a “Northern Ireland backstop.”
And now it appears that Starmer has walked into the same trap. Sure, he’s got many gushing headlines today, but he’s also bound himself to a set of commitments that the EU won’t let him wriggle out of. The upcoming negotiations will be characterised by reminders that the UK has already signed up to all sorts of horrors — with Keir Starmer, head in hands, being told: ‘But you agreed to this, Prime Minister.’
While I want to be enraged, I actually feel despondent. After all, the UK Government falling for the same trick for the umpteenth time is just another example of how successive British Governments have prioritised getting a cheap and easy headline over serious governance.
Remember, this is the same administration which is currently smashing up successful schools to please vested union interests, which is prosecuting British war veterans and paying to surrender strategic assets to Beijing’s proxies in a desperate attempt to flaunt its so-called “human rights” credentials, and which has been gaslighting its citizenry with announcements based on a fictional drama about incels while shutting down investigations into the real-life rape gangs.
That’s the real tragedy of this “deal”. It shows that British politicians – of all colours – remain profoundly uninterested in turning the country’s fortunes around. Chasing a sexy headline will always come before serious governance.
This country is in trouble. Productivity has been flat on its face for nearly 20 years. Crime is out of control. Every day, more and more successful businesses and entrepreneurs move abroad. We are beset with complex problems. While we were in the EU, it was impossible to meaningfully tackle these issues. But the last five years have shown that we face another problem: that both the Tories and Labour, despite now being free to make changes, are profoundly uninterested in doing so.
Decline is a choice – history is littered with examples of countries that turned their fortunes around. But until we get politicians who are prepared to take on the vested interests that parasite off our national malaise, who are prepared to make tough and unpopular choices, and – yes – who are willing to tell Brussels to shove it when they make a bad offer, things are going to continue to get worse.
So, sure, this deal is a bad one. The treaties that follow it will deliver little and will end with more of our money being sent to an international bureaucracy to be misspent. But at the end of the day, the fact Starmer has walked into such a blatant trap is just another example of how successive politicians, with their appalling short-termism, have turned entropy from a force in physics into the operating principle of the British Government.
The problem with Shabana Mahmood’s electronic tag roll-out
David Gauke’s sentencing review, which will report this week, is going to be far bolder than anyone expected. Today it has been reported that the Lord Chancellor Shabana Mahmood has secured £700 million of funding from the Treasury to buy 30,000 more electronic ‘tags’ which will be used to curfew people at home, track their alcohol and drug usage, and log where they have been. This will be a huge expansion of the tagging system, which currently oversees about 20,000 people. Given that the system is already struggling, it’s hard not to be sceptical about this announcement.
At present, about 11,000 tag-wearers are people on bail, or immigration offenders, while the other 9,000 are wearing a tag as part of their sentence for a crime. This may be home detention curfew (HDC), a ‘sobriety tag’ (to measure alcohol consumption) or a GPS tag (for offenders who aren’t allowed in certain places – often used for domestic abusers). The aim of these systems is to support probation in supervising people so that they don’t reoffend.
If probation becomes overwhelmed, we will likely see crime and recalls to prison rising
It’s important to understand that tags don’t manage offenders. HDC is usually used at the end of a prison sentence for lower-risk offenders, who spend up to six months on a curfew at home. Between August and December 2021, I was on HDC. This meant I had to wear a chunky ankle tag all day, which would communicate with a ‘base station’ in my house. If I wasn’t at home between 7 p.m. and 7 a.m., the base station was supposed to contact Electronic Monitoring Services (EMS), the outsourced tagging provider. Then, in theory, they would alert probation.
I never breached my curfew, but I am aware of numerous cases where curfew breaches have not been communicated to probation officers. Similarly, GPS tags don’t provide live location information to those supervising the offender. Instead, they report historic movements, meaning that it may be possible to only punish a domestic abuser after they’ve visited their victim.
Even worse, Serco, the outsourcing company which has operated the EMS contract since last spring, has often proved unable to tag people. First, in September of last year, I discovered that people who should have had tags fitted on the day of their release from prison had been free for weeks with no contact by EMS. Although there have been efforts to blame this backlog on the mass early release scheme, a number of the people I spoke with had been released before it came into effect. There have also been backlogs of weeks in fitting sobriety tags.
It’s very hard to understand how Serco will cope with this vastly increased workload. I asked the Ministry of Justice if these new tags would be Serco’s responsibility or if they’d be tendering for a new supplier. They declined to comment.
The other great challenge is what this means for probation. At a press conference last week, the Lord Chancellor mentioned that probation has beaten their target of hiring 1,000 new trainees by March 2025. While this is true, in the past year 601 experienced probation officers left the service and the organisation has a shortfall of about 20 per cent compared to its ‘target staffing level’. This is before the massive increase in work for the probation service, as earlier releases and a greater reliance on community sentences drive up their caseload. If probation becomes overwhelmed, then we will likely see crime and recalls to prison rising.
In fairness to the government, I know they are absolutely aware of the need to fix probation – and fast. They believe that technology may save the day, with better automation and smoother processes allowing individual probation officers to manage more cases. The ultimate goal is a phrase I have heard from senior officials and people in government is ‘prison outside of prison’ – as system under which people can be securely managed in their homes via technology.
The problem is that many of these people have very complex and unstable lives. They often struggle with substance abuse issues, and many have rarely been in work. They are not simple to supervise, and all this technology can only be a tool for capable probation staff.
The Gauke review is ambitious. In an ideal world we would have years to test and deploy technology, increase staff numbers in probation, and ensure prisons are ready for the new model. Unfortunately, there is no time. The jails will soon be full again, so the government will need to hope that Serco ups its game and that probation staff are able to cope. Otherwise, we may see thousands of unsupervised people reoffending, filling the prisons and destroying public support for fixing the justice system. For all our sakes, we should hope this works.
Could Boris make a comeback?
Events have a useful way of illustrating changing fortunes in political stock. Keir Starmer’s EU reset yesterday proved to be one such occasion. The fishing deal, mobility scheme and legal obligations prompted predictable fury from the Tory press. But one voice dominated in the chorus of criticism: Boris Johnson. It was the former prime minister’s arresting description of Starmer as ‘the orange ball-chewing gimp of Brussels’ which led both the Telegraph and Mail’s write-ups today.
A minority in his party view Boris Johnson as the only character big enough to eclipse Nigel Farage and his Cheshire cat grin
Such prominence is not unsurprising. Johnson’s role in the 2016 referendum and then the 2019 election ensures that he, more than anyone, can credibly claim to be the enabler of Brexit. He is also a gifted penman, whose anti-Brussels screeds have delighted Fleet Street copy-editors for decades. But the timing of this fresh intervention has sparked excited chatter about a possible comeback, coming at a time when the Conservative party is facing an existential crisis.
A new YouGov poll out today makes for grim reading for Kemi Badenoch. Her party has now slumped to fourth, on 16 per cent, behind Reform (29 per cent), Labour (22 per cent) and the Liberal Democrats (17 per cent). A dire set of local elections looks to have put rocket boosters under Reform, which is clearly no longer seen as a wasted vote. One Tory MP says: ‘Forget renewal. More like resuscitation.’ ‘The Greens gaining on us as well’, adds an ex-MP. ‘Fifth place here we come.’
The problem for Badenoch is how best to cut through in a crowded market. Labour and Reform are happy to deny the Tories oxygen: last night Keir Starmer told his MPs that the next election would be all about the 'moral imperative' of ensuring 'Farage never becomes PM.' Against the inane-but-effective Liberals, a surging Reform and a landslide Labour government, Badenoch – one of the most high-profile and interesting Tories in office – risks being cut out of the picture completely.
Which explains the renewed focus on Boris Johnson. For all his known baggage, his flair, guile and sheer stage presence mean that a minority in his party view him as the only character big enough to eclipse Nigel Farage and his Cheshire cat grin. A poll earlier this month by More in Common suggested that Johnson was the only Conservative who could outpoll Reform. It was shared with much interest among friends, critics and other observers on Tory WhatsApp.
Of course, chatter is one thing, returning to Westminster would be quite another. With four years left in the life of this parliament, a by-election would seem the most obvious way for Johnson's return. But given the dire state of the party's polling, Tory holds, let alone gains, seem unlikely. For now, Boris Johnson might be content to just watch from afar – as his successor tries desperately to turn it all around.
Miliband’s wind farms won’t ease Britain’s sky-high energy prices
Rachel Reeves is perhaps not a great fan of Donald Trump, but she should be grateful to him nonetheless, and Ed Miliband even more so. The trade war sparked by Trump’s ‘Liberation Day’ tariffs is about to lower energy prices for UK consumers.
According to a forecast by consultants Cornwall Insight, Ofgem’s price cap will fall in July by 7 per cent – to a level at which the average home with a dual gas and electricity bill will be paying £1,720 a year. It will reverse the uplift in the price cap in April and moderate the rise in the Consumer Prices Index (CPI), giving Reeves a bit of breathing room and – temporarily – diverting attention from the fact that Britain has the highest energy prices of any member of the International Energy Agency.
That doesn’t mean that the good news for energy consumers is going to last
The likely fall in the energy price cap from July will be purely a reaction to lower wholesale prices on international markets. Much though Miliband wants us to believe that fossil fuel prices are set by scheming dictators, it is simply markets at work. The fall in wholesale energy prices has been caused mostly by negative factors: energy traders were expecting the world to fall into recession as a result of the trade wars, killing off energy demand along with economic growth. The chances of global recession have receded quickly as Trump has indicated his preparedness to do rapid trade deals to mitigate – at least in part – higher tariffs, but it seems as if a sharp fall in energy bills in July has already been baked in.
That doesn’t mean that the good news for energy consumers is going to last, however. If global demand for energy picks up, the energy price cap can be expected to rise again in October, in time for winter. Miliband’s wind farms and solar farms are certainly not going to save us. Britain will continue to have sky-high gas and electricity prices.
According to the government’s own figures, UK consumers in 2023 paid an average of 36.39 pence per kilowatt-hour for their electricity compared with the equivalent of 35.43 pence in Germany, 20.57 pence in France and 12.86 pence in the US. Contrary to Miliband’s assertion that it is Britain’s reliance on gas which causes us to have the highest prices in the world, the US derives more of its electricity from gas (42 per cent) than does Britain (34 per cent).
Britain has such high electricity prices because of the way we are using gas: increasingly as a short-term backup for lulls in wind and solar. Use a gas power station for an hour a day and the unit cost of electricity is inevitably going to be much greater than if it were in constant use, because it still has to be maintained and the capital investment repaid. This, combined with Britain’s bizarre ‘marginal cost pricing’ – where wholesale prices at any one time are fixed by the most expensive form of energy available – are the reason that UK consumers are paying through the nose.
None of this will change as a result of a fall in the energy price cap in July. All that will happen is that the moment of realisation when the public begins to understand that Britain’s high energy prices are caused by an over-reliance on intermittent renewables – not gas – will be postponed. Miliband’s ruinously expensive target to decarbonise Britain’s electricity by 2030 will linger for a bit longer.
Romanian man charged over Starmer fires
Last week, fires at two properties and a vehicle linked to Sir Keir Starmer were being probed by police – and now a second man has been charged in connection with the series of arson attacks on properties owned by the Prime Minister. It transpires that 26-year-old Stanislav Carpiuc, a Romanian national, has been charged with conspiracy to commit arson with intent to endanger life.
The latest development comes after a 21-year-old man was charged with arson with intent to endanger life over attacks at properties linked to the Prime Minister. Roman Lavrynovych, a Ukrainian national living in London, is accused of starting fires outside two properties and burning a vehicle in north London. He has been charged with three counts of arson with intent to endanger life and appeared at Westminster magistrates’ court on Friday. Prosecutors said Lavrynovych had denied arson when interviewed by police.
The London Fire Brigade and the police attended one of the properties shortly after 1:30 a.m. on Monday 12 May. While the door to the four-bedroom home was damaged, no one was hurt. Later that evening it was revealed that counterterrorism officers were investigating a blaze at a second property linked to Starmer as well as a vehicle fire. The vehicle fire occurred just before 3 a.m. last Thursday on the same street as Starmer’s home.
Will Gary Lineker please take the BBC with him when he goes?
They think it’s all over … well, it is now. We’ve had false alarms about Gary Lineker leaving the BBC before, and several yellow cards have been flashed. But this time – following his reposting of a video about Israel featuring a rat emoji – the ref has finally blown the whistle and pulled out the red. Lineker is to leave the BBC, ‘stepping back’ at long last.
The BBC’s attitude towards what the ‘creative sector’ calls ‘talent’ – in plain language, the attitude of showbiz to its stars – is once again on full display. It begins to look like a pattern; the Beeb lumbers itself with a powerful, popular figure it cannot control – Russell Brand, Huw Edwards – and clings on to them beyond all limit of sense. If they’re lucky, the concerning behaviour is exposed only years, even decades later, as in the cases of Brand, Jimmy Savile or Martin Bashir. But that’s no excuse for Lineker, who has run rings around them, in full public view, for years. They even rewrote their own guidelines to accommodate his foibles.
There is no particular need for Gary Lineker, just as there is no particular need for the BBC
I think this is partly due to the incredible rate of staff turnover at the corporation. One of the many oddities I noticed when working for them was that the freelancers they hired in to make programmes for them churned over far less often than the layer of actually directly employed BBC staff. You’d rarely encounter the same person twice and almost never a third time. So long-standing ‘issues’ never got resolved but were pass-the-parcelled to the next one in line.
Strangely, this constantly shifting workforce would fret about the institution and its reputation – and its ‘compliance’ with often very stupid regulations – as if they were old-time company men. This, despite the fact that their feet barely seemed to touch the ground before they melted away like summer clouds, never to be seen again. Nothing and nobody sticks there, giving the place a Kafkaesque atmosphere, of a self-replicating bureaucratic machine with only incidental human parts. This lack of continuity inevitably makes its output tend towards slush.
To my eyes, these hordes of the great churn were often treated quite badly – not out of malice but sheer bureaucratic negligence. But a select few employees – the aforementioned ‘top talent’ – attained a certain level, and suddenly they became untouchable and unchallengeable. Cars mysteriously glided up to waft them the length of the land. Wine emerged from mysterious compartments. When one of these exalted ones walked through the canteen, a ripple of haze moved with them.
Lineker was at the very apex of this talent hierarchy. What remains to be said of him? Dropping an obviously racist video on Insta was too rich even for the BBC’s blood. Lineker is the ideal mug for Hamas-fluffers – an idiotic wealthy white Westerner with a piety complex, easy pickings for a sinister death cult. The BBC threshold is very high, but he finally, inevitably crossed it.
His parting statement is typically grandiose and hand-washing; ‘I would never consciously repost anything anti-Semitic – it goes against everything I stand for,’ he said.
But hang on. ‘Everything I stand for’? Who is this speaking – Gandhi? Martin Luther King? No. This is a man whose job it is to nod affably and say things like ‘still to come, goals galore at Goodison Park’. The haughtiness makes one want to grab him by the shoulders and shout into his face, ‘Why do you believe you “stand for” anything, you oversalaried, jug-eared, salty snack-touter?’
Such self-importance is typical of the TV class. In my TV career I encountered many people who thought a large part of their job was to civilise the natives, to enlighten them into the correct progressive opinions. Unfortunately for them, the public – unlike sheep – can sense when they’re being herded and have a nasty tendency to turn and bite.
The law of TV used to be that nobody was indispensable. The BBC’s flurry and worry about holding on to Lineker, viewed from the outside, has been very strange. People are obviously not watching a show like Match Of The Day for its presenter, just like precisely nobody was tuning in to see Huw Edwards, in particular, reading the news. It’s as if people were to go into a panic because the frame of a famous painting had fallen off. Just get another frame from Homebase! Plenty of people can read the words ‘Now, more action from Leeds versus Spurs’ off a little screen or say, ‘An impressive second half from Notts there’.
There is no particular need for Gary Lineker, just as there is no longer any particular need for the BBC. Goodbye Gary – and may the sad remains of the poor old BBC follow you swiftly.
Is Reform changing its tune on voting reform?
With more than 650 councillors and a new MP to boot, Nigel Farage’s teal army is clearly on the up. But while Reform UK is always happy to call out others’ volte faces – including Starmer’s Brexit ‘betrayal’ – Farage’s party now appears to be U-turning on one of its own manifesto promises: voting reform. Reform’s ‘Contract with You’, published last July, promised:
Proportional Representation Voting for the House of Commons. Large numbers of voters have no representation in parliament and new parties are shut out of the political system. Voter turnout could be some 10 per cent higher with PR. A referendum is needed.
But during the Spectator’s latest Coffee House Shots Live podcast event at the Emmanuel Centre in London, party chairman Zia Yusuf was quizzed by an audience member about whether Reform still supports changing the electoral system to proportional representation. ‘To turn [Britain] around, it will take us winning under a first past the post system,’ he responded matter-of-factly. Going on, he added:
I firmly believe – and I’m speaking personally here – I think if PR was ever instituted in this country, we will end up in a state of gridlock. We will not be able to do the frankly quite ambitious, and in some cases radical, things by the time we get to 2029 that we’re going to need to do to unshackle the British economy from the crazy overregulation to unleash the potential of British ingenuity. So no, look, we are firmly in favour of first past the post. I don’t think [PR has] served Germany particularly well. I don’t think it’s serving France particularly well. So no is the answer. I personally think that we need first past the post and that’s what reforming tends to win under.
It’s certainly a change from Yusuf’s position just after the general election, when he slammed first past the post and blasted the result as ‘the second most disproportionate result of any advanced democracy in history’. He began to soften his stance earlier this year, however, when polling showed Reform drawing closer to Labour just three months after the July election. How interesting…
What of the party’s other senior figures? When deputy leader Richard Tice was in Scotland on Saturday, Mr S quizzed him on his stance. ‘In theory, we’ve always been a fan of proportional representation, but at the end of the day, we deal with the cards we’re dealt, and I don’t see that changing in any way,’ the Reform man admitted.
Look, I love the PR system. I mean, obviously there’s a number of different PR systems. I actually think that the ones that are used in Scotland and Wales are probably the best – but you can debate it. But ultimately for parliamentary elections, we’ve got first past the post and our job is to win with it. So that’s the bottom line and I don’t see that changing anytime soon.
Funny what winning will do. When Steerpike approached Reform for an official comment, Mr S was informed that the party position of backing a referendum on proportional representation had not changed – but do the remarks of Reform’s senior figures hint the policy could be under review? Stay tuned…
Can France’s centre-right be revived?
On Sunday, Bruno Retailleau was elected president of Les Republicains – France’s mainstream centre-right party. Just a few years ago, his election would have drawn significant attention across Europe, as the rise of a new leader within a major European political force. Today, however, Les Republicains are the shadow of their former selves: a diminished political party on the right fighting for survival.
In the 2022 presidential election, the party suffered a catastrophic result, receiving just 4.78 per cent of the vote – an all-time low for the party of De Gaulle, Chirac and Sarkozy. Today, polls show the party barely averaging 10 per cent support ahead of the 2027 presidential election, regardless of the candidate. Squeezed between Marine Le Pen’s ascendant National Rally and the fading remnants of Macronism – and challenged on the right by the insurgent Éric Zemmour – Les Républicains struggle to find a viable path back to power. It has now been 13 years since they last held the Élysée.
For too long, the French centre-right has been complacent and intellectually lazy
Retailleau faces a seemingly impossible task. A senator from Vendée, he is a seasoned local politician and skilled parliamentarian. He is also a capable orator, at least within the gilded and frescoed walls of the upper house of the French parliament. He is also the interior minister of the current government led by Francois Bayrou, where he championed efforts to tighten immigration laws against most of his cabinet colleagues and the President himself. He is also a liberal on economic issues with a hint of Euroscepticism.
Les Républicains currently lack both a coherent doctrine and a unifying political figure – two problems Retailleau must urgently address. With Le Pen weakened by ongoing legal troubles and Macronism effectively defunct, a small window of opportunity has opened.
For too long, the French centre-right has been complacent and intellectually lazy. It likes to invoke the legacy of de Gaulle, but constantly name-dropping the father of the Fifth Republic is no substitute for doing the hard work of developing a credible programme for government. Since Sarkozy left office in 2012, successive centre-right leaders all believed that there was a natural order of things in French politics: the political pendulum of democracy would inevitably swing back in their favour. It was just a question of patience. No need to think.
As a result, the party failed to grasp the major shifts in the electorate that have taken place over the past two decades – in particular, the migration of working-class voters away from the left toward the right. In the absence of a compelling offer from the centre-right, those voters found their way to Marine Le Pen. Retailleau would do well to study how the UK Conservative Party capitalised on similar realignments in the wake of the Brexit referendum, winning over working-class constituencies in Northern England and delivering Boris Johnson a sweeping victory in the 2019 general election.
But even if Retailleau manages to formulate a new doctrine to the centre-right – perhaps one resembling the 2019 Conservative playbook – a major challenge remains: many of the centre-right’s target voters still remember Sarkozy’s betrayal of the 2008 Lisbon Treaty and his failures on immigration and national identity.
Breaking with Sarkozy and thirteen years of ideological inertia seems essential to reconnect with voters. As part of this reset, Retailleau must choose between two paths: aligning with the centre in a bid to reclaim Macron’s 2017 coalition from the right, or shifting further right. Retailleau definitely favours the latter, but his decision will be made more complicated by his own position: he remains a key minister in Bayrou’s centrist government, a role that gave him national visibility and helped secure his leadership victory.
But it may already be too late – and there are many reasons for scepticism. Retailleau belongs to a generation of politicians raised in the shadow of dominant figures like Chirac and Sarkozy. He is not an insurgent, nor a populist. His appeal to working-class voters will likely be limited.
The absence of leadership on the centre-right has created a vacuum that only demands to be filled. Now, strange ghosts from the past are reappearing in new forms: Nicolas Sarkozy’s son Louis has hinted at political ambitions. Dominique de Villepin, the former foreign minister best known for opposing the Iraq War, is reportedly considering a 2027 presidential run. A random populist figure, say from the media, could also emerge unexpectedly and take advantage of the dismaying vacuum of leadership. Retailleau will need to fend off these threats as well.
He might find comfort in the fact that he is not alone in Europe to face these challenges. Centre-right parties across Europe face similar dilemmas. The UK Conservatives are under pressure from Reform UK; the German CDU is threatened by the rise of the AfD. So far, most of these parties have chosen short-term survival strategies: stitching together awkward alliances with centrist forces, like the one currently propping up Bayrou’s government in France.
One longer-term answer could be the ‘unification of the right’ – a broad alliance of political parties from Bruno Retailleau all the way to Marine Le Pen. In France, the polemist Eric Zemmour was the first to push for this concept during the presidential campaign of 2022.Although his presidential bid was unsuccessful, polls have shown that most centre-right and right-wing voters would support such an alliance. In the UK, the debate is already open on whether the Tories should partner with Reform UK.
The irony is that ideologically, the divide between the mainstream centre-right and its right-wing competitors has been narrowing dramatically. Today, the National Rally’s ideas are essentially the same as the mainstream French right of the 1990s. The obstacle is the centre-right’s pride and arrogance. They still think that they are the only legitimate governing force. In France, they simply cannot stand the idea that the National Rally could lay claim to the presidential throne and be the senior partner in an alliance by the will of the electorate.
The humiliation of the 2022 presidential election has not yet had the effect of bringing the centre-right back to reality. Time is running out for Retailleau and Les Republicains to change course and build the unification of the right on their own terms. The French centre-right ought to finally get to work.
Britain is not in charge of its energy
As much of Westminster gets up in arms about fish, the major change in Starmer’s EU deal is going under the radar. The deal, announced yesterday, commits Britain and the EU to exploring Britain’s participation in Europe’s energy market. If we go forward with this, it effectively gives up our energy policy to Brussels.
It’s a stark giveaway given that on the same morning the Office for National Statistics (ONS) published an analysis on ‘The impact of higher energy costs on UK businesses’. That impact is quite remarkable. Output from energy intensive industries has fallen rapidly since the beginning of 2021 when energy prices began to skyrocket. Paper manufacturing down 29 per cent, petrochemicals down 31 per cent, ‘inorganic non-metallic’ products down 31 per cent and basic metals and casting down by nearly half of its 2021 output in terms of volume.
The result is that whilst in the last ten years, manufacturing output is up 5 per cent, for energy intensive industries it’s down nearly 39 per cent as the below graph shows. Britain is of course a service economy, but it would certainly be nice to think we were still capable of producing at least some physical things.
The reasons for this fall in industrial output are simple: the staggering prices Britain is paying for industrial energy relative to our peers. As the ONS confirms, in 2023, the UK had the highest costs for industrial users of energy out of the 24 countries in the International Energy Association (IEA). The IEA accounts for three quarters of global energy demand. In the words of the ONS: ‘Electricity prices for UK industrial users were almost 50 per cent higher than in France and Germany and four times higher than the United States and Canada.’ And over the last decade UK industrial electricity prices have ranged from 17 per cent to 49 per cent above the average of the IEA’s 24 member countries.
Should Britain, and its government, wish to become serious about rebuilding or even having our own industrial strategy it would have to invest in nuclear, drop the net zero zealotry, and milk fossil fuels until the very last drop to bring these costs down. Instead, we seek a deal that may hand many of those powers to Brussels.
The bulk of what Europe is seeking on energy policy alignment is syncing up regulation – meaning Britain will align with EU energy regulations and likely accept the rule of the European Court of Justice. That includes the UK effectively re-entering the EU’s single market for electricity – making energy trade smoother and potentially cheaper but at the cost of sovereign control.
There are trade-offs too. Rejoining a joint carbon market would help stabilise the UK’s benchmark carbon price, which jumped 6 per cent on news of the deal –raising costs for industry and delighting no one but green zealots. Though because UK carbon prices are still lower than Europe’s, the government argues that harmonising them could save up to £800 million by avoiding the EU’s incoming carbon border tax. But the flip side is a loss of flexibility: Britain would have to mirror EU carbon pricing mechanisms, limiting its ability to adjust policy to suit domestic needs – whether that means easing costs for industry or rethinking net zero. And now, it seems, we’ve agreed to pay for the privilege of pushing prices up to avoid what is a tariff.
In short, Britain is trading strategic control for short-term stability and cost relief. Whether that turns out to be a smart energy decision or a dangerous dependency will only become clear once Brussels starts to set the thermostat.
Greggs’ security crackdown is a sign of broken Britain
Greggs is a great British success story. The ever-popular bakery chain provides good-quality (if, admittedly, rarely healthy) treats for millions of satisfied Britons. Yet some depressing news has taken the joy out of visiting Greggs for a steak bake and an iced doughnut. The chain has become a Mecca for shoplifters, who refuse to pay even its modest prices.
To deter thieves, Greggs is resorting to desperate measures
To deter thieves, Greggs is resorting to desperate measures: ditching its self-service fridges and keeping sandwiches and bottled drinks behind the counter. The crackdown will be trialled in five stores, the Sun reports. But shoplifting is now so rife it seems likely that these tighter security measures will become the status quo in Greggs – and other similar shops – around Britain.
“Find your yummy”, the Greggs website extols its visitors. Unfortunately, it would appear that the yummy, or at least its protection, has been found wanting. Spend a few minutes in a Greggs store in London and it won’t be long before you see grubby, grasping little opportunists steal their lunch, while other law-abiding people queue up to pay. A Greggs in Whitechapel, east London, where this shoplifting problem is particularly bad, is one of the stores where you now have to ask for a drink rather than help yourself.
That shoplifting has been endemic in higher-value places for years is a regrettable fact of life (if you’re trying to buy a bottle of champagne or spirits in many Tesco or Sainsbury’s stores, you’ll be getting it from behind the cashier). But there’s something deeply depressing about the idea that a £4 sandwich and £2 bottle of drink aren’t considered worthy of paying for, and instead have to be pilfered with apparent impunity.
There will, of course, be some who have limited sympathy for Greggs. People may suggest that, as a profitable business (£2billion in sales in 2024, with a pre-tax profit of £204 million), they are hardly on the breadline, if you’ll excuse the pun, and that a few sandwiches being stolen are hardly here or there.
The sort of snobs who look down on a business that unashamedly offers mass-market comfort food will probably make caustic remarks about the businesses being so basic that they almost deserve to be robbed.
This attitude is fine if you’re the kind of person who has a table reserved virtually every night at The Wolseley or The Devonshire. But for the average diner, who is grateful to be able to eat decently without spending a fortune, Greggs is a lifeline, rather than a punchline, and this is rotten news.
Obviously, there will be new efforts made to stop the shoplifting. Security guards will be prominently deployed in many of the larger stores, which will make the experience of going there rather more unsettling (I haven’t seen Pizza Express having to get in armed guards lately, although I’m sure McDonald’s is employing phalanxes of grim-faced apparatchiks to protect their Big Macs). What’s worse, if the thefts continue, prices will inevitably rise, which will in turn damage the brand’s hard-won reputation for affordability and accessibility.
Yet it says a lot about Britain in 2025 that things have got to this stage. Members of staff are afraid to tackle shoplifters, for fear of being verbally or physically abused, and the chances of the police being bothered enough to come to the store for a tenner’s worth of purloined food and drink are non-existent. (Perhaps Greggs should prominently feature a few copies of The Spectator on their tables, instead.) Having to implement these measures, ridiculous and over-sensitive though they might seem, has now become an inevitability.
A Greggs spokesperson commented of the new security measures that: “This is one of a number of initiatives we are trialling across a handful of shops which are exposed to higher levels of anti-social behaviour…the safety of our colleagues and customers remains our number one priority.”
They are doing their best to present this depressing development, not as a grim reaction to the status quo, but as a positive, forward-looking response. Few will be convinced. Instead, it’s just another reflection on the increasingly doomed high street and the grotesquerie of what awaits you when you pop out for lunch. If you’re not having your wallet rinsed at the check-out, someone else is walking off with their food gratis. Nobody, it would appear, can do very much to check this increasingly miserable state of affairs.
What the Europa League losers’ final reveals about English football
Two of world football’s biggest but worst performing clubs Manchester United and Tottenham Hotspur face off in Bilbao on Wednesday in the Europa League final. There is quite a lot at stake, not only Europe’s second most important club title but the substantial bonus of a place in next year’s Champion’s League (worth an estimated £60 million) and with it the kudos to attract top players. It’s been called back door entry to UEFA’s elite tournament, but it feels more like a magic portal transporting the currently humdrum aspirant super clubs into another dimension, and not one where they necessarily belong. If football is all about stories, this is a very odd one.
Both Man Utd and Spurs have had atrocious seasons
Both Man Utd and Spurs have had atrocious seasons and would be dicing with the ultimate indignity of relegation were it not for the even more pitiful form of Ipswich, Leicester and Southampton (now that would have been a good story). The idea that either might end the season with silverware is bizarre. Many would say neither club deserves to be anywhere near the Champions League. As a Spurs fan of the ‘Ozzie’s dream’ and Super Glen era, I would struggle to argue with that. I would categorise this season as just about the worst I’ve ever seen. I’m more embarrassed than excited by Wednesday’s game.
I also feel disturbed by what the Europa League final reveals about the current state of English and European football, and how far we have drifted from the gloriously straightforward days when I first started watching in the late 1970s. Back then, there was no ‘Champions League’ or ‘Premier League’; there was the gloriously simple, it is what it says on the tin, ‘First Division’, and the perfectly democratic, and hard as hell to get into, European Cup. For the latter, it was one nation one entrant. Simple as that. The only alternative route to entry was by winning the bloody thing.
It was a marketing man’s nightmare. Revenue was decidedly not maximised. Teams were guaranteed only two games and the most glamorous sides often did not meet for years (the champions of Spain and Italy did not play each other for nearly a decade in the 70s). With the simpler straight knock-out format, in days when ‘rich’ meant something completely different to today, so-called small teams occasionally came close to glory. Malmo (Malmo!) of Sweden made it all the way to the final in 1979 losing narrowly to…Nottingham Forest. Dundee United made it to the semis in 1984. And these results weren’t flukes.
The current rather crowded system is, of course, far more lucrative, precision engineered to extract every possible pound or euro from the fans and sponsors. Yet real meaning has been drained away, leaving us with something ever closer to the equivalent of a video game, full of skills and thrills, superficially exciting, and undoubtedly entertaining, but lacking in the deeper satisfaction that sport can sometimes provide.
For that you need stories, real stories involving jeopardy, upset, romance, all of which are fast disappearing. The minnows have got no chance now, and it is getting harder and harder for the richest clubs not to qualify for Europe (Spurs and Man Utd have given it their very best shot this year but only one will succeed). Up to eight Premier League teams will play in Europe next year.
The international game is no better. So bloated has FIFA’s big showpiece become (a ‘one-off’ – ha! – 64-team tournament in 2030 has not been ruled out) that qualifiers for the elite are fast becoming a joke. England used to struggle to qualify for the World Cup (a source of immense pleasure to Scots), but it is hard to imagine them ever struggling to do so again. Anyone looking forward to England vs Andorra in September? It’s a virtually meaningless fixture.
You also need simplicity and transparency in order to separate the faux triumphs from the real ones. But with tournament formats changing by the season, the true value of an achievement (the real story) is becoming increasingly opaque. You have to work hard to keep up. For example, winning the Europa Cup is still, I suppose, an achievement, but much less of one even that it would have been last year when drop outs from the Champions League were allowed to join.
Conspiracists might wonder if the constant changing of goalposts is a deliberate ploy to obscure what is really going on – the formation of a European Super League by stealth, with (virtually) guaranteed places for members of the cartel. The names give us a hint. Just as Peter Hitchens warns that companies with meaningless names are likely up to no good, so nebulously titled sporting tournaments (‘The Europa Conference League’, ‘The Champions League,’ ‘The Nations League’) should be treated with suspicion.
Still, I guess I will be cheering on Spurs on Wednesday and hoping the mercurial Son Heung-min at last picks up a medal (that is a decent subplot at least). But it will be with only a fraction of the enthusiasm I would once have felt for a Tottenham triumph. It simply isn’t a compelling enough story.
I’ve become a solar panel hustler
What better accessory for my fleet of electric cars (well, two) than my own solar power station, converting the rays of the sun into blistering acceleration? I am propelled by a love of tech gadgets and the prospect of a quick killing. Do not confuse me with Net Zero zealots – I’m in this eco game for myself.
So far today, my roof has thrown off 62.8 kWh – enough to drive my 2019 Hyundai Kona Electric for 350 km. (The other car is a Tesla, which I am scared to take out after a dozen of its brethren were recently incinerated in Toulouse.) Solar panels are the best investment game in town, and that’s why they’re going gangbusters in France – despite the bureaucratic mountain you have to climb.
First, I had to submit drawings and specifications on paper and electronically. Next, digital photos and computer renderings to persuade the functionaries at Bâtiments de France that my panels would not harm the view from the church tower, a historic monument. Then there was further exhausting intercourse with EDF.
And now I have been certified as a producer of electricity in France – one of a select group of 500,000 households that have climbed on the green bandwagon. This is sweet for us, but may not be so great for France, to be frank. A report in February by retired admiral Jean Casabianca warned that solar power risks the stability of France’s electricity grid. The risk is that renewables introduce huge fluctuations into the grid. In the quickest QED in history, Spain’s power grid collapsed – blamed on renewable-heavy systems. Here in Miller Towers, pas de souci.
After I have charged the cars, powered the dodgy heat pumps, recharged Bella’s GPS tracking collar and blanketed every square centimetre of the domain with gigabit wifi, I sell the excess to EDF – the parastatal generating company also responsible for Hinkley Point C in Somerset. They don’t really want to do business with the likes of me but are required to by the statutory Obligation to Buy, imposed in a flight of green fancy by the government in 2000. EDF honestly hates us. It is forced to pay us above wholesale costs for electricity that is becoming close to valueless during the day – and we are destabilising its network at night.
It has been exactly one year since I activated the parc solaire and started farming sunbeams. So it’s an opportune moment to take stock of the project. I am aware that my experience in Occitanie might differ from that of someone in, for example, Essex.
Here in the land of baseload nuclear energy – and especially way down here in the south with lots of sunshine – the problem is not a lack of power but increasingly an excess of it, as panels proliferate everywhere: on houses, sports halls and, most recently, in supermarket car parks. Of course, all these panels are useless at night.
In April 2024, before my solar panels were activated, I imported 2,594 kWh of electricity. In April this year, my importation was 949 kWh. The rest I produced myself. My bill fell from €690 to €222 – a 63 per cent reduction. This is the first month in which I have been able to do a direct comparison on the year before.
It has been exactly one year since I activated the parc solaire and started farming sunbeams
There’s more to come. I will soon receive an annual payment for exporting my surplus electricity to the grid. And kind Mr Macron has promised me yet another €2,000 bung to reward me for my investment in eco-friendliness. I should feel guilty about this, watching my poorer neighbours heat their houses with bottles of propane and even kerosene. But I don’t – since the state will simply borrow the money to pay me, I regard this as a modest contribution to the €3 trillion debt mountain.
What about the microeconomics? The cost of installing the solar was around €30,000. The carport cost another €30,000, but I was building that anyway and it needed a roof. The solar roof, made of translucent architectural panels, obviously cost wildly more than a conventional tile roof.
My solar panels have a nominal capacity to generate 12 kWh, although the output has never exceeded 10. Normal, apparently. The costly bit is the equipment where the direct current coming off the roof is converted to alternating current – to be consumed by me or injected into the grid. And then there was the cost of an electrician who knew what he was doing, and the visit by the network provider Enedis to upgrade me to a meatier three-phase 24 amp connection.
The returns, however, are fabulous. In the longer days, when the sun is unobstructed, I usually export more power than I consume. But when the sun goes down, I import it. I pay twice as much to import current than I get for exporting it. December and January yield little. So I still get a bill – just a lot smaller.
All this so far seems to equate to a yield on investment of 14 per cent – a truly staggering sum. The Livret A, the main consumer savings vehicle here, pays 2.4 per cent. If there’s spare cash, it’s a no-brainer. If you have to borrow the money, the calculus is different – but you may still be quids in.
I asked my research assistant Grok, my preferred AI engine, to calculate the return on investment of a hypothetical similar system to mine, but in Essex, with its reduced iridescence. After lengthy workings, all of which seemed to my non-actuarial eye to be reasonable, it calculated the rate of return at 6 per cent. This calculus presumably worsens as you move further north in Britain and the skies darken.
My instinct tells me these calculations are optimistic – wildly so once you start adding the cost of heat pumps, upgrading the electricity connections and maintaining it all. The maintenance, I must signal, is not entirely straightforward. Mrs M has gone to London to have a shower because we’ve had no hot water here for ten days. The village plumber arrived and was defeated by what he called a ‘usine de gaz’ – a colloquial French expression for a wilderness of complications. Electric living is not as straightforward as it seems. I have had to summon a specialist technician from Béziers.
The Net Zero Secretary, Ed Miliband, is very keen on solar panels and heat pumps for all of you in Britain. Various incentives are in place – but as the sun sets in the Languedoc and I steel myself for a cold shower, my useless Tesla fully charged with nowhere to go, I advise caution. I don’t think my own experience in one of the sunniest spots in Europe equates to the results in Britain – where, at least pending the Miliband revolution, there is still hot water.
Britain is now a slackers’ paradise
My friend recently told me about a young Chinese woman who was staying with them and kept tittering to herself. Asked what she was finding so funny, the answers were telling. In one case, it was because she had seen so many people lounging in parks that she had assumed the working day had been cancelled from on high – and was amused to find out it was a normal weekday. Then there was the way that all the shops and cafés were shut by 9 p.m. Again, the private merriment. ‘Nobody works here!’ she exclaimed gleefully.
In a sense, she’s right. Of course some people work – those in manual and service-sector jobs, for instance. Lawyers, for whom business booms when all else falls to pieces, are working; some like dogs, most are simply enjoying the nine-to-fivers of yore, often from home.
But what with all the talk of ‘stress’ (one in five have taken time off for it in the past year); the AI surge, soaring costs, inflation and Rachel Reeves’s curious chancellorship, plus trends that began in Covid, when the population got a taste of free money, a great many people are no longer working that hard. Or at all.
To the harried denizens of powerhouses like China and America, this represents real quality of life. Britain is increasingly a hell for the exiting super-rich but heaven – or at least a haven – for slackers. I was struck by a recent essay in the New Yorker by Lena Dunham, the creator and star of the hipster soap Girls. Entitled ‘Why I broke up with New York’, Dunham explains why she chose London.
‘London shocked me with its reassuring differences from New York,’ she writes. ‘The city, which is large enough to contain all five New York boroughs twice, had a spaciousness I could not get over, streets so wide that the buildings seemed to be stepping aside for me to pass. My reputation back home was as a work-obsessed hermit… Here, I moved with ease, whether walking on Hampstead Heath or sliding into a black cab, greeted by a gruff “Oy! Where you ’eaded?”’
The ‘spaciousness’, the frequenting of the Heath, the moving ‘with ease’ in stark opposition to life as a ‘work-obsessed hermit’. Welcome to the slackers’ paradise, Lena.
Reddit is full of Americans asking for advice on moving to the UK for a better life, and those sharing their experience of doing so. The vast majority recommend such a move. ‘I moved to London almost two years ago from New York and it was the best decision I’ve ever made,’ runs one typical post on a thread called ‘Americans who moved to London: how has your experience been?’.
‘I don’t make as much money as I could have, but I have a very easy life’
There are many replies like this one from Sunny_Sailor: ‘The quality of life is infinitely better.’ Or this, from one PchyKeen: ‘work/life balance tends to be better. I’m less stressed, work less, and take a lot more vacations. Employee protections actually exist.’
Or, from lndpuglady: ‘I don’t make as much money as I could have, but I have a very easy life and have always managed to live well here without much. I work from home or cycle 20 minutes to work and have had so many random health issues that I haven’t paid a cent for that would have bankrupted me back in the US.’ Freeloading healthcare, ‘easy life’, ‘a lot more vacations’ – this is the Britain the super-rich are leaving because, in part, they can simply pay for a better version of all that and get it elsewhere.
Culturally and economically, it is getting harder to become rich and stay rich here, and easier and easier to claim you are too stressed, or neurodiverse, or victimised or traumatised to work. But what’s one man’s economic ruin is another’s ability to live without bankruptcy, and to fly cheaply to Naples or Palma. Life here is pretty good for those without much ambition. Perhaps we will soon see more Americans coming to these shores. Forget the brain drain, we may soon be seeing the consequences of a strain drain.
The curious case of Bella May Culley
I was belatedly baptised last week in the Church of England, and though Christians are enjoined to show compassion to sinners and forgive them their trespasses, my eyes do not fill with tears at the plight of 18-year-old Bella May Culley from Middlesbrough. Bella currently finds herself in Prison No. 5 in the Georgian capital, Tbilisi after she was accused of smuggling drugs into the country. The prison is described in British media reports as decaying and dangerous, but which, from the pictures, looks tough, austere and simply furnished – no worse than one might expect of correctional facilities in the Caucasian republic.
Even someone as daft as Bella must be vaguely aware that in certain Asian countries, smuggling drugs can carry the death penalty
Bella mysteriously vanished from a trip to the Philippines and Thailand. Her family back home on Teesside say they had no idea what had happened to her until she suddenly surfaced in a Tbilisi court this week, charged with trying to smuggle a suitcase filled with 14kg of cannabis into the country. Allegedly, the cannabis was unwrapped and must have reeked so strongly that even a Georgian border guard with blocked nostrils would have smelt it. Now Bella could be looking at a 30-year jail sentence in Stalin’s homeland, where the laws on drugs are considerably more draconian than our own relaxed approach to the possession and sale of cannabis.
Bella says that she is pregnant, but she is still likely to face years behind bars if found guilty. In an emotional interview with Metro, Bella’s grandfather, 80-year-old William Culley, said that he was ‘terrified’ that if she got a long sentence he would not live to ever see her again. Mr Culley added that he thought drug smugglers ‘may have taken advantage’ of Bella’s youth and naivety.
Judging by the selfies that Bella posted on Instagram and TikTok during her holiday, ‘naivety’ doesn’t quite cover it. She appears to be a typical member of the Love Island generation, believing that if she poses in scantily clad selfies pouting like a Kardashian she will be magically wafted into a lifestyle appropriate to that status. Alas, reality seems to have caught up with her. Even if approached and threatened by intimidating criminals, did it not occur to her to tell the cabin crew on the aircraft what had happened?
At the risk of sounding like a harumphing reactionary old fart, dare I suggest that anyone who is so staggeringly foolish as to go through an airport laden with a case full of unwrapped cannabis deserves what they get? Even someone as daft as Bella must be vaguely aware that in certain Asian countries, smuggling drugs can carry the death penalty – so she might count herself lucky if she escapes with a lengthy jail term.
Just as reprehensible is the attitude of some parts of our media to such cases as Bella’s. She is not the victim of a cruel miscarriage of justice in a faraway country of which we know nothing, nor a persecuted political prisoner. We are expected to feel sorry for her. The sorrow I feel is for a whole generation which believes the world is its playpen and behaves as though it were as dumb as bat droppings.
The SNP attack on Starmer’s EU deal makes no sense
To mutilate the words of PG Wodehouse, it is never difficult to distinguish between a Scottish nationalist with a grievance and a ray of sunshine. Fury is the fuel that drives the SNP, which has been in power at the Scottish parliament for 18 years. So it is hardly a surprise that First Minister John Swinney has reacted angrily to the new deal struck between the United Kingdom and the European Union.
The agreement reached between Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer and European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen will increase freedom of movement, create closer relationships between businesses, and increase cooperation on food standards. These are things that the SNP has been demanding ever since the UK voted, in 2016, to leave the EU. But the decision to maintain the status quo of EU fishing boats having access to UK waters until 2038 undermines all of that so far as the First Minister and his colleagues are concerned.
The SNP’s faux rage was further weakened when representatives of Scotland’s salmon industry welcomed the new deal.
‘Scotland’s fishing industry,’ declared Swinney, as details of the agreement filtered through, ‘has been undermined by the UK government again.’ Labour has treated Scotland’s fishing communities as expendable. And guess what? Only independence would allow Scotland’s interests to be defended. The SNP’s external affairs secretary, Angus Robertson, is on the same page. The UK government had agreed a fisheries deal, in principle, with the EU without recourse to, or the involvement and approval of devolved administrations. This statement of outrage is rendered ludicrous by the fact that international relations are a matter for Westminster.
The nationalists’ faux rage was further weakened when representatives of the salmon industry welcomed the new deal. Salmon Scotland said it would reduce costly delays and red tape. In a statement released shortly after Starmer’s midday announcement, chief executive of Salmon Scotland Tavish Scott congratulated the UK government the EU deal, lauding it as a ‘breakthrough’ adding:
[It] eases the burden on our farmers, processors and the communities they support, and we welcome efforts to implement it at pace. The withdrawal of physical checks is particularly welcome. It means lower costs and quicker deliveries for our customers. Scottish salmon is the UK’s biggest food export, with strong demand in the EU, the US and beyond. We look forward to rebuilding trade ties across Europe and will continue to press for freer access to the US and other markets to support jobs and growth in our coastal communities.
Not that the approval of those behind the UK’s biggest food export suits the nationalist narrative. When the UK backed Brexit, despite a majority of Scots voting ‘remain’, the SNP, quite understandably, saw an opportunity. On the day after the referendum, then First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said the result had created the circumstances in which a second vote on Scottish independence was necessary. But despite continual nationalist rhetoric about Scotland being ripped out of Europe against its will and of democracy denied, support for the break-up of the Union did not begin to soar. Scots may have wished to remain in the EU, but not so much that they thought Scexit a wise response to Brexit.
The SNP’s Westminster leader Stephen Flynn seems to believe things have changed. He insisted today, shortly after the details of the UK-EU deal emerged, the agreement was an admission from Starmer’s Labour government that Brexit has been a ‘disaster’ for the UK. Yet today’s deal has failed to deliver the ‘only cure’: to rejoin the European Union. Flynn – choosing to ignore how referendums work – declared the Labour government had taken the ‘catastrophic decision’ to stay out of the EU. ‘The limited measures announced,’ said Flynn, ‘do not come anywhere near close to repairing the hammer blow that Brexit will continue to inflict on our public finances.’ Then came his inevitable conclusion: the best deal for Scotland is for it to become a member of the EU as an independent country.
Behind all the bluster, there is a fundamental flaw with the SNP’s argument that out of all Scotland’s different political parties only it wishes to rest the national head on the European bosom. After all, in 2014, the party campaigned for an independence result that would have seen Scotland leave the EU. Had Scotland voted for independence 11 years ago, the new state would not have retained the membership of the EU that it had enjoyed as part of the UK. This is a simple matter of fact.
For those – and I count myself among them – who believe Brexit was a mistake, a return to membership of the EU remains desirable. But the SNP’s claim that independence will make that a reality remains nonsense. Scotland outside the UK would have no automatic right to rejoin. Indeed, the financial impact of breaking from the Union would mean we’d actually struggle more to meet the criteria required for entry.
The First Minister may wish to characterise this latest agreement with the EU as yet another betrayal but his motives are too transparent. The fact is that the UK has been able to strike a deal that gets the SNP a lot of what it has been demanding for the best part of a decade.
How much has Liz Truss made since leaving No. 10?
Two and a half years have passed since Liz Truss entered – and swiftly exited – Downing Street. The former prime minister has not laid low since then, however, keeping busy by setting up the ‘PopCons’, releasing her memoir and appearing at CPAC alongside Steve Bannon. Yet while the ex-PM will be remembered by the history books for her short but eventful time in politics, her post-parliamentary career is not quite as lucrative as those of her predecessors.
The latest financial statement from her eponymous company reveals that in the year up until March 2025, the Disruptor-in-Chief had just £112,657 in net assets – some way off the sums made by the likes of Theresa May and others. The accounts show that Truss took only £8,000 more than the previous year – despite publishing her memoir Ten Years to Save the West last April.
It comes after Britain’s shortest-serving premier signed up to the same agency as her predecessor Boris Johnson, Chartwell Speakers. Johnson secured a £2.5 million advance for several well-paid speaking events, earning £5 million within his first year out of the top job, while the Maybot raked in more than £400,000 for six talks after stepping down. Rishi Sunak meanwhile last month registered a payment of over £160,000 for a single three-hour speech. Alright for some!
Truss did initially manage to make a bit of extra cash off her own speaking engagements, taking £80,000 for a Taipei talk – but her latest financial statements suggest figures have tailed off somewhat. Staff numbers have risen, though, since Truss lost her seat in parliament in July, with five employees now listed as working for her office, up from three the year before.
Still, the ex-PM has a new gig at least: launching her own Trump-esque social media site this summer. The libertarian politician told a cryptocurrency conference that she felt the ‘deep state’ – including the Financial Times and the Economist – was suppressing freedom of speech in the UK. Speaking to crypto bosses in Bradford last month, Truss announced: ‘What I am doing is establishing a new free speech network, which will be uncensored and un-cancellable, to actually talk about the issues people don’t want to talk about.’
Let’s see how much that makes eh?
The private school exodus has begun
‘Why did Albert [not his real name] leave before sports day?’ As is increasingly the norm, I am driving my seven-year-old daughter home from school, and she has questions for me. As questions go, they are reasonable. ‘Albert left to go to a new school’ I say.
‘But he told me it was because of the bat’ comes the response from the back seat. We’ve been here before. The bat is not in fact a placental mammal but the VAT rise on school fees, in playgroundese. Bats and VAT rises are both alarming and linger in the dark of parents’ minds, so it makes sense. ‘Yes’ I reply, ‘you’re right; it’s because of the bat’.
In my own experience, children have left my daughter’s year group steadily since January
Figures due to be released by the Independent Schools Council (ISC) tomorrow reveal a drop in private school pupils of 13,000, the biggest fall in student numbers since the ISC began collecting data in 2012.
Such numbers amount to a 2.4 per cent decrease in pupil numbers compared to an annual average drop of 0.2 per cent for the past 12 years. They also wildly outstrip the government’s prediction of the private school exodus. Back in the prelapsarian VAT-less days of last December, the Treasury estimated the drop-off of pupil numbers during the academic year 2024-2025 would be a meagre 3,000. The reality shows that their numbers are a little short of the mark, not to say totally unrealistic.
It is unsurprising that Labour are downplaying this – the party doesn’t want to be accused of forcing children to leave their schools abruptly, while flooding the state system with children it cannot cater for.
Instead, Bridget Phillipson has decided to focus on the money raised by the VAT levy, saying it will apparently, ‘provide the highest quality of support and teaching’ resulting in a proposed 6,500 more teachers by the end of the current parliament in 2029.
Labour’s argument is a simple one: squeeze the rich and funnel the money back into the public sector. Private schools ‘have cried wolf long enough’, as Phillipson said on Times Radio only last week. In the end though, it turns out that the much-derided private school parent isn’t as rich – or as stubborn – as Labour thought.
During the general election last summer, it seemed that the VAT rise might not happen, or would at any rate be deferred. Conversations at private school gates went along the following lines: Labour couldn’t possibly have thought through the impact on the state sector, particularly given the lack of state investment in Send (special education needs and disabilities). Could you even get a place for a child at your local state school given the sudden increase in demand? Would resistance via the ubiquitous WhatsApp petition be effective?
Bursars, once faceless members of staff on the end of an email, became hounded for sibling discounts and fevered questions over how much of the VAT rise the school might absorb. As I argued in the Times last summer, it seemed that the exodus, when it came, might be overblown or, in economic terms, ‘inelastic’. As Luke Sibieta at the Institute for Fiscal Studies noted, ‘the willingness of parents to pay for private schooling is not directly related to its price’ adding that he thought a mass exodus ‘would be incredibly unlikely’.
As it turns out, both Sibieta and I were wrong. Some things are directly related to their price. In my own experience, children have left my daughter’s year group steadily since January. A WhatsApp message announces their departure and is generally ‘reacted’ to with crying face, hearts and strong-arm emojis; people promise to stay in touch.
One mother, keen to stay on the WhatsApp class group to keep her child in touch with her old friends, was asked, eventually, to leave. There wasn’t an emoji for that, so no one reacted. As the academic year draws to a close in July, others will surely go. It’s the bats. They’re circling.
Boris: Keir is ‘manacled gimp of Brussels’
Ding ding ding! Sir Keir Starmer may have lauded it a ‘landmark’ deal but his agreement with the EU has gone done like a bucket of cold sick with the UK’s most senior Brexiteers. Former prime minister Boris Johnson is the latest to take to Twitter to lambast the move – and the gloves are well and truly off. In a fiery pitch, BoJo scorns the PM’s ‘appalling sell-out of a deal’, blasts Starmer for sacrificing Britain’s freedom to ‘do proper trade deals’ and concludes tersely: ‘Two-tier Keir is the orange ball-chewing manacled gimp of Brussels.’ Tell us what you really think!
Unleashing a vitriolic tirade on Sir Keir, the face of the ‘Get Brexit Done’ campaign picks apart the agreements on fishing, free movement and food standards. In the pugnacious post, Boris dubbed today’s UK-EU deal as ‘hopelessly one-sided’, remarking curtly: ‘It combines the vassalage of Chequers with the surrenderism of Chagos.’ Ouch. His fury didn’t stop there – with the former Conservative party leader declaring:
Most bizarrely of all he has agreed that Britain will once again be paying countless millions of pounds into EU coffers – for the privilege of becoming the non-voting punk of the EU Commission! What have we got in return? Wishy washy EU promises to get rid of some of the vexatious and unnecessary bureaucracy that they have been using against British travellers and business – but no real guarantees that this will be enforced and above all no real guarantee on frictionless trade between GB and Northern Ireland, which should be entirely a matter for the UK and not the EU.
This deal is hopelessly one sided. It combines the vassalage of Chequers with the surrenderism of Chagos. Starmer promised at the election that he would not go back on Brexit. He has broken that promise as he broke his promise on tax. This deal should not be signed, should not be ratified and should never come into force and if it is the next Conservative government should kick it out forthwith.
For his part, Sir Keir has claimed his deal had gotten the UK ‘back on the world stage’ and is a ‘win-win’ for Britain. Now it’s a waiting game to see just how much voters agree…
What is really being taught to our children in history lessons?
History is an area of remarkable success in our schools thanks to recent education reforms. However, these impressive strides forward risk being undermined by a new wave of activism in classrooms.
This process of ‘decolonisation’ in history is not necessary
Following the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, 83 per cent of schools have made changes to ‘diversify’ or ‘decolonise’ their curriculums in recent years. In many cases, this shake-up has brought politicised and one-sided narratives into schools. Inaccurate and poor-quality teaching resources are being used to give students a mistaken impression of the past.
During research for Policy Exchange’s report, Lessons from the Past, we found children being taught the ahistorical claim that Stonehenge was built by black people. Elsewhere, pupils learn radical and contested interpretations of the past: such as that the West African kingdoms, which sold other Africans to European slavers, were unaware of their role in the global slave trade. In one case, a membership organisation for subject experts has produced teaching resources describing the genital mutilation of slaves in ancient Rome as an early form of ‘gender transition’.
This process of ‘decolonisation’ is not necessary: 99 per cent of schools already teach slavery and 89 per cent teach the British Empire. Meanwhile, core elements of patriotic and constitutional British history, from the Battles of Agincourt and Waterloo to the Act of Union and the Glorious Revolution, are being dropped. Rigorous school history risks being supplanted by a fixation with diversity that denies students a coherent understanding of the past.
These concerning trends are being exacerbated by poor quality teacher training. Subject specialism has been hollowed out, to the extent that trainees on average receive just 17.8 days of subject instruction in a year-long course.
Despite the lack of time for subject specialisation, three in four university courses run sessions for trainees on diversifying or decolonising curriculums. One course specifically instructs teachers to challenge their department heads on what is being done to make the subject more diverse. New teachers, without sufficient training to be informed independent practitioners, are falling prey to activist approaches and unquestioningly adopting flawed and politicised teaching content.
Despite this, it is clear that, on the whole, history in schools is an area of strength. There was fierce criticism of former education secretary (and now Spectator editor) Michael Gove’s approach to history teaching and the re-centering of a British national narrative in schools when it was unveiled in 2014. A decade on, it is now clear National Curriculum reform and a greater focus on it by Ofsted have combined to deliver a broad and rigorous curriculum that exposes most students to the history of Britain and the wider world.
History is now the fifth most popular subject at both GCSE and A Level. Core events in our national past are widely taught, with over 85 per cent of schools surveyed teaching the Norman Conquest, Magna Carta, the Reformation, Industrial Revolution and the World Wars at Key Stage 3 and 66 per cent teaching the curriculum chronologically.
The health of history teaching is reflected by the fact that over 92 per cent of teaching hours in the subject are taught by specialists. Reassuringly, students from disadvantaged backgrounds on Free School Meals on average receive more history teaching than their peers.
In an increasingly diverse nation, history plays a vital role in building a patriotic, inclusive and cohesive society with shared values. Students should have a right to learn an unbiased and challenging history curriculum that gives them broad knowledge of the past and develops a clear understanding of key moments in British history. All pupils taking history at GCSE should be required to study a survey paper covering British history from 1066 to 1989. This would consolidate the success of past reforms and ensure all students taking the subject to 16 have a strong sense of the chronological sweep of our national past.
Improvements in history teaching represent a strong success of the last government. Yet Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson’s new push for curriculum reform risks undoing this legacy. The head of the government’s ongoing Curriculum Review, Becky Francis, famously criticised Tony Blair’s government for ‘an obsession with academic achievement’. Her interim report notes the importance of delivering ‘an inclusive and diverse learning experience’.
Rigorous lessons on Queen Matilda in the Anarchy and the emergence of the East India Company add colour and depth to school curriculums. Yet political pressure for diverse curriculums should not be allowed to shoehorn low quality, inaccurate and politicised history into our schools.
The government’s review risks empowering the forces threatening the impressive gains made in school history in the last decade. Instead, it should build on the success of recent reforms, ensuring that every history student is given a knowledge-rich understanding of Britain’s past.