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Can South Korea fix its birth rate woes?
Month after month, it just kept plummeting. The South Korean birth rate last year earned the not-so-holy prize for being the lowest in the world. The demographic crisis faced by South Korea seems hardly the hallmark of the country’s self-proclaimed status as a ‘global pivotal state’. That said, the country’s fertility rate rose incrementally to a high of 0.75 births per woman in 2024, marking the first time in nine years that any such uptick has been seen.
It is too early to say whether the tide is turning. Nevertheless, South Korea faces an unholy combination of an ageing population (with the over 65 year-olds accounting for 20 per cent of the country’s nearly-52 million people) coupled with a catastrophically low birthrate. As is well-known, the demographic crisis is hardly the only one faced by the country, as the South Korean people wait to hear the fate of their impeached president, Yoon Suk Yeol.
A low birth rate will also have consequences for South Korea’s national security
South Korea, whose moniker of the ‘Miracle on the Han River’ is testament to its rapid economic growth from rags to riches, is certainly no exception to the typical relationship between prosperity and fertility. As the cost of living rises – particularly with respect to housing and the cost of having a child, let alone more than one – skyrockets, the incentive to do so declines. Add to the situation a hyper-competitive job market, a significant gender pay gap, a lack of appetite amongst South Korean women to get married (let alone bear children), coupled with the inconsistent application of laws discriminating against pregnant female workers, and the reality of an almost non-existent birth rate is perhaps hardly surprising.
Having children in South Korea is not simply about the financial cost of childcare and schooling. In a society infatuated by educational achievement from a young age, private education in South Korea takes on a whole new dimension, as parents send children as young as five to hagwon – or private extracurricular educational institutions – even after a long school day. These classes, whether in English, Mathematics, or otherwise, may not necessarily lead to stronger academic results on the part of the student. But on the part of the education provider, they are a lucrative means of gaining cash. Parents, too, may not enjoy having to send their children to these institutes, often during evenings and weekends, but as one South Korean mother once told me, ‘it is what everyone does’.
Though there may be a shortage of births, there has certainly been no shortage of incentives on the part of the South Korean government to encourage women to have more children. Indeed, one of the few areas uniting the ruling conservative People Power party and the leftist Democratic party is the recognition that something must be done.
In 2023, the government rewarded new parents with cash incentives, giving the equivalent of £420 a month to families which children up to the age of one, and £206 per month for those with children under two years old. These ‘baby bonuses’ rose by 40 per cent in 2024 when the government expanded financial support for working parents to enable them to take leave in order to care for children.
It will take time to ascertain whether the slight increase in South Korea’s fertility rate, coupled with a 1 per cent increase in the number of marriages in 2023 – the first time any such increase took place in eleven years – is an aberration or a result of these policies. But the concern on the part of the South Korean government is clear, particularly as the percentage of the country’s ageing population only looks to grow. If left unchecked, South Korea’s population is expected to shrink by nearly 30 per cent by 2072 to a level last seen in the state’s pre-democracy era in the late 1970s.
A low birth rate will also have consequences for South Korea’s national security, in a country where military service is mandatory for all men aged between 18 and 35. Kim Jong Un has pledged to increase the size and readiness of the North Korean military. As the South Korean intelligence agency highlighted on Thursday, more soldiers have been deployed to Russia to assist Moscow’s war against Ukraine. In the South, a declining birth rate will inevitably mean fewer men able to be conscripted into the military, leading to concerns of how South Korea could hold its ground in the event of any possible inter-Korean conflict reminiscent to the Korean War. Whilst some politicians, such as Lee Jun-seok, the leader of the centre-right New Reform party, have called for mandatory military service for women as a solution to the low birth rate, such a proposal is hardly free from controversy.
Yet before any further decisions on how to address South Korea’s population issues can be made, the country must first have a robust government to make such decisions. Earlier this week, in what would be his final statement at his impeachment trial, President Yoon offered the possibility of cutting short his presidential term, due to end in 2027, if the South Korean constitutional court does decide to reinstate his presidential powers. If enacted, the manoeuvre will likely attract much criticism. But as is the case in Britain, running a democracy is far from easy. Decisions, whether unashamedly allowing a strategic archipelago to fall into the hands of an enemy state or otherwise, must not be taken rashly.
Why won’t supporters of assisted dying use the ‘s-word’?
Kim Leadbeater, the Labour MP in charge of the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill currently going through its committee stage, has repeatedly called on Tory MP Danny Kruger not to use the term ‘suicide’ in relation to proposed new laws on assisted dying. This is not the first time proponents of assisted suicide have tried to distance themselves from the ‘s-word’. But just this week, Kruger once again had to reiterate in parliament why clarity of language is so important in this debate.
The dictionary defines suicide as ‘the act or an instance of ending one’s own life intentionally and voluntarily’. Throughout medical school, doctors learn the definitions, assessments, causes, and the various forms this can take, ranging from jumping off high buildings to taking massive medication overdoses. Suicide in people who have a terminal illness happens, rarely, and often around the time of learning the diagnosis, even before disease-modifying treatments have begun.
Definitions in the international classification of diseases – an internationally agreed classification of mental disorders designed to improve diagnoses, treatment, and research – can also be a guide to help with wording. Intentional self harm, or injury and poisoning of undetermined intent are classified as suicidal acts according to the code. Organisations like the World Health Organisation, for instance, rely on these classification codes to identify international trends in suicide incidence.
Leadbeater’s belief appears to revolve around the thinking that these terminally ill people are dying anyway, so by engaging in an assisted death they are merely bringing the inevitable forward. The act of actively taking a lethal medication mix to end one’s life then becomes something else than suicide.
‘They are all dying anyway’ may seem like a benign explanation for the avoidance of using the word suicide. But dig a bit deeper and some eligible people under the current version of the Bill could be years away from the actual natural end to their lives, surprising as that may sound. We doctors know that six-month-or-less prognoses are meaningless and largely guess work, so relying on these as the starting gun for assisted suicide discussions is a risk. Similarly, the mechanisms of how these drugs work, inducing a cardio-respiratory arrest and usually resulting in a death from asphyxiation, make this very different to ordinary dying.
When did ‘suicide’ become such a controversial word to use? Is it really still seen as something that needs to be hidden away from society, a source of terrible shame, to be kept secret and under the radar, and to be dealt with only by the thousands of bereaved families unlucky enough to be affected?
Suicide prevention, whatever the reason for wanting to end one’s life, must not be diminished. The Anscombe Bioethics Centre has indicated in its analysis of assisted dying and suicide prevention in other countries that latter becomes much harder to do when the former is legalised.
Being precise with our language is important. This is especially important given that the probably deliberately vague term of ‘assisted dying’ mistakenly means the right to forgo life prolonging or life-saving interventions to some people. At least assisted suicide adds the clarity that this law is intended to allow for individuals to receive a concoction of lethal medications from the state, and that it is to be ingested or released into a vein by the person themselves in order to end their life.
Britain is reliving the 1970s
Is Britain going back to the 1970s? Even under the Conservatives in 2022, the Financial Times was warning we were in danger of reliving that ‘relentlessly awful decade’. Since Starmer’s accession to power, the similarities have become only clearer.
Millionaire hotelier Rocco Forte drew the same comparison in the autumn, saying we’d ‘come full circle’ and that the new Labour government was ‘doing a lot based on socialism, but not a lot on common sense’. ‘They talk about growth, but everything they’re doing is anti-growth,’ he added. Broadsheet newspapers warn us that the return to ‘stagflation’ – that perilous mash-up of high inflation and stalling development – is taking us right back to the dismal era of Heath, Wilson and Callaghan. Dipping into accounts of the 1970s – Alwyn Turner’s Crisis, What Crisis? or Dominic Sandbrook’s masterly two-volume history, State of Emergency and Seasons in the Sun – you can see they have a point.
The sense of national decline, then as now, led to many dreaming of radical solutions
Of course, there are differences of degree. Under the 1974 Wilson government, the highest level of income tax stood at 83 per cent, while in 1975 inflation soared to a staggering 25 per cent, dwarfing the current rates of both. Such body-blows left the country reeling, crippled by industrial action and national debt, and made it widely known as ‘the sick man of Europe’.
‘Britain is a tragedy,’ US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger reported to President Ford at the time. ‘It has sunk to begging, borrowing, stealing… That Britain has become such a scrounger is a disgrace.’ The magazine International Insider declared it was ‘fast turning into a borrower to be classed alongside an undeveloped country’. In the Margaret Drabble novel The Ice Age, one character laments the way other nations had ‘turned against England…. Powerless, teased, angry, impotent, the old country muttered and protested and let itself be mocked’.
Meanwhile, professional diarist James Lees-Milne railed that the Labour government did ‘nothing to save the economy, nothing to boost industry. Everything… is intended to placate the trade unions’. In a letter to the press, one woman from Blackburn complained it was the ‘middle people’ who had been hardest hit: ‘If you have any money left to build up the firm, it’s taken away’. It felt, she said, as if it had been ‘diabolically arranged’. Conservative leader Margaret Thatcher put it more succinctly: the Labour government had paid ‘far too little attention… to wealth creation and far too much to wealth distribution’. Plus ça change…
It wasn’t just the government or striking unions who seemed to attack the country from within. When, in 1972, the BBC screened a 13-part series about the British Empire, the one-sided picture caused uproar. Why, asked Charles Gibbs-Smith, head of PR at the V&A, had the BBC only emphasised the ‘so-called past wickedness of British imperialism?’ Another added: ‘’I cannot conceive what the purpose behind this series can be, unless it is to make us ashamed, and our children,’ Gibbs-Smith agreed: ‘Have certain quarters in the BBC decided the time has come, not only to chip away at the nation’s public image, but to erode our patriotism, particularly amongst the young?’
Britons, Sandbrook tells us, took refuge in the past, membership of the National Trust soaring to new heights. It’s doubtful whether today, with its ongoing determination to confront visitors to their properties with the darker moments of Britain’s imperial past, that same organization can provide such solace to anyone.
But there were other, more violent threats to national security to worry about. ‘Acts of casual terrorism,’ said a 1974 Times leader – which might have been written last week – had become ‘part of the texture of our lives… There is no pause in the violence… It is a sign of a civilization in regression, turning back from achievement to neobarbarism.’
Few recall just how prolific the IRA terrorist campaign against mainland Britain was at its height. In 1974, there were 11 bombings alone, from the M62 coach bombing in February (killing nine soldiers), to attacks on pubs, barracks, shops, clubs, the Houses of Parliament and the Tower of London, killing about forty people and injuring countless more. In 1975, the Hilton Hotel was bombed and so was Green Park station, the year ending with the assassination of Guinness Book of Records editor Ross McWhirter at his London home. Anti-Irish feeling in Britain seemed to run off the scale. ‘I loathe and detest the miserable bastards,’ wrote a Tory politician in the Evening Standard. ‘May the Irish, all of them, rot in hell.’
Nor was it just Ireland the British were exercised about. Immigration, then as now, was a hot issue, as the 1972 arrival of 40,000 Ugandan Asians, thrown out of their homes by newly installed dictator Idi Amin, split the UK down the middle. Some called for the Ugandans’ British passports to be honoured, others raised fears of non-integration and pressure on public services. Contemplating the sudden influx, too, of rich Gulf Arabs into Central London, Anthony Burgess in his novella 1985 imagined a future capital – Sandbrook tells us – ‘where the London skies resonate with the call to prayer’, and ‘half-moon banners flutter from street corners.’
Though many in the 70s felt average yearly immigration figures (about 72,000) were unabsorbable, politicians, then as now, flinched from tackling the topic. ‘Fear of being attacked by the press as a “racialist”,’ writes Sandbrook, ‘was much greater than the appeal of pandering to working-class sentiments.’
When Thatcher in 1978 said on World in Action that there was a danger of British people feeling ‘swamped’ by new arrivals, condemnation was swift and brutal. Liberal leader David Steel denounced the remark as ‘appallingly irresponsible’ and ‘really quite wicked,’ while Healey accused her of ‘cold-blooded calculation in stirring up the muddy waters of racial prejudice’. But what, you can’t help wondering, would any of these politicians make of current rates of immigration – at 728,000 net in 2024, just over ten times more?
The sense of national decline, then as now, led to many dreaming of radical solutions. The recent finding that over half of Gen Z would be happy to see Britain ruled by a dictator is, like many other things, a case of déjà vu. In Arthur Wise’s 1970 novel Who Killed Enoch Powell? (which imagines the assassination of the right-wing firebrand), the home secretary muses what Britain needs is ‘a strong man – the iron fist’.
Actor Alec Guinness, who’d just played Adolf Hitler onscreen, saw traits of Weimar Germany in the modern UK, saying that ‘the situation in England strikes every month a decadent, yes, decadent note… People say, why not get someone else to sort it all out for them… a strong man’. In October 1975, David Bowie told the NME that Britain needed ‘an extreme right front [to] come up and sweep everything off its feet and tidy everything up’, adding to the press a few months later that Britain ‘could benefit from a fascist leader’. Even a literary penfriend of the comedian Joyce Grenfell – that model of middle of the road English staunchness – wrote that, following a power cut, she had wondered ‘whether democracy is quite the answer!’
Various candidates for ‘strong man’ were floated – the crusty General Sir Walter Walker, ex-Commander-in-Chief of Allied Forces Northern Europe or, in one surreal moment, Lord Louis Mountbatten, uncle to the late Prince Philip. Enoch Powell, sacked by Heath for his ‘rivers of blood’ speech, remained the most popular politician in the country – ‘Man of the Year’ in a BBC survey two years running – with many pining for his return. Powell, said the Guardian’s Peter Jenkins, was oddly tuned into people’s fears that ‘the politicians are conspiring against the people, that the country is being led by men who had no idea about what interests or frightens the ordinary people in the backstreets of Wolverhampton’. But it was perhaps appropriate, in an era of Women’s Lib, that it should be a woman, and a strong one at that, who would come to power at the end of this fraught decade to sweep the entire panoply away.
If our own times seem to mirror the 1970s, we should perhaps count our blessings. ‘One of the more frequent recurring fallacies,’ wrote the late Christopher Booker, ‘is people’s belief that their own age is without precedent, that some new order is coming to birth in which all the general assumptions previously made about human nature are becoming outmoded.’ You can only hope, looking round at a rapidly changing world in 2025, that Booker got it right.
Why Henry Kelly was popular
Henry Kelly was a well-loved personality in Britain. The Irish television and radio presenter, who died this week, came to prominence in this country in the 1980s in the ITV show Game For A Laugh, consolidating his popularity on BBC’s Going For Gold and on the airwaves as a presenter on Classic FM. And intrinsic to Kelly’s appeal was his unmistakeable Irish persona.
Kelly has been variously described in his obituaries as ‘jovial’ and ‘ebullient’, blessed with ‘humour’ and a ‘cosy Dublin charm’. Such appraisals could have easily been invoked to described Dave Allen or Terry Wogan, his co-patriots who also endeared themselves to the British public, entertainers who similarly embodied a benign Irish stereotype. When Terry Wogan passed away in 2016, a BBC online report lauded his ‘jocular’ presence and ‘genial manner and Irish blarney’. The same qualities were the making of Henry Kelly here, too.
That Kelly and his forerunners in popular entertainment should have come to prominence and retain such affection in the 1970s and 1980s was remarkable, given the circumstances of the time. This was a decade in which the IRA infamously took its campaign ‘to the mainland’, setting off bombs in London, Birmingham and Guildford. This wasn’t the ideal time to be Irish in Britain.
For centuries the Irish in this country had been subject to mockery, derision and discrimination – even though there is little evidence that there were signs outside hostels bearing the specific combination of words ‘No blacks, No Irish, No dogs’. And even though levels of historical and contemporary anti-Irishness have in recent history been overplayed by the left, the Irish in Britain were a self-conscious lot. As Tim Pat Coogan wrote in his 2002 book Wherever Green Is Worn: The Story of the Irish Diaspora, many Irish in Britain did experience outright hostility after the Birmingham bombing of 1974. But that was, for the most part, an exceptional experience – the year in which the Troubles reached their nadir.
When I was living in Manchester in 1996, a Belfast housemate was met with the casual greeting ‘hello bomber’ the day after the explosion went off in that city. That typified an English attitude that could certainly be ignorant, thoughtless and callous, but not necessarily one grounded in hatred or ‘racism’. My mother, like Henry Kelly, also a native Dubliner, recalls London cabbies noticing her accent in the 1970s and 1980s, but mostly in order to mock it with their own faux-Irish imitation. Again, this was crass, but hardly cruel. It was at once complimentary and idiotic.
This is how stereotypes work: they have their malevolent and benign aspects, with each reflecting the other, with each often seeping into the other. Henry Kelly is remembered as ‘ebullient’, which all seasoned obituary readers will recognise as code for ‘too fond of the drink’. But even if the Irish have been disdained as a bit too partial to the ‘ebullient’ stuff, they have been simultaneously envied for their cheery, Bacchanalian ways. This stereotype was the motor behind the explosion of Irish theme-pubs in the 1990s. It’s why, whenever Ireland win at rugby or football, the English commentator will conclude breathlessly at the final whistle: ‘they’ll be celebrating with a few pints of the black stuff back in Dublin tonight!’
Caricatures of the Irish are grounded in ambivalence, one that goes back to Shakespeare’s Captain MacMorris, the amiable buffoon from Henry V. For every Irishman portrayed as a drunkard, there has been a fun-loving Irishman who enjoys the ‘craic’. For every joke about ‘thick Paddies’ there have been jokes made by Irishmen themselves – a people the English regard as intrinsically funny. Henry Kelly appealed to a long-standing, Janus-faced apprehension. As we read this week, he was ‘cheesy’, and resembled a ‘smoothie confidence trickster’, but that taint of tackiness lent him a cosy and unpretentious air, too.
The 1990s television series Father Ted continued to embody this ambivalence, and its popularity to this day – it was copiously repeated by Channel 4 over Christmas – reflects its persistence. The comedy had three Irish characters that our English forebears would have recognised instantly: the drunken Irishman, the simpleton Irishman and the shifty Irishman. But these characters worked and failed to cause offence, partly because by the 1990s the benevolent Irish stereotype had not only survived the trials of the 1970s and 1980s – it had triumphed.
Henry Kelly is remembered fondly in Britain because, for all its awful failings past and present, this country has never stopped regarding the Irish, in general, with affection.
Ireland is on a knife edge
Is Ireland a powder keg of racist, anti-immigrant sentiment, ready to explode at any moment? That was certainly the dominant narrative after a night of rioting in Dublin city centre in November 2023 that left a trail of destruction along O’Connell Street.
On that occasion, politicians and elements of the Irish media were quick to blame far-right provocateurs for stoking tension and this was used as a convenient pretext to stress the importance of introducing the strongest hate speech legislation in the EU. Yet when it emerged that many of the Dublin rioters may themselves have been from an immigrant background, the politicians swiftly moved on to other matters.
But while TDs and ministers can afford to decide which issue is going to concern them on a day-to-day basis, the ordinary people of Ireland don’t have that luxury and with the number of people applying for entry into Ireland increasing by 300 per cent in the last five years, tensions are inevitable.
When Helen McEntee, then justice minister, told people in November that there was absolutely no evidence that asylum seekers or migrants were responsible for an increase in crime, she was sharply reminded that the reason why there is no evidence is because the government refuses to keep official statistics.
Tensions are running particularly high in Dublin, with many locals complaining of feeling increasingly unsafe. That sense of unease was heightened when, on 15 February, a Nigerian asylum seeker, Quham Babatunde, was stabbed to death during a mass brawl outside a nightclub popular with African immigrants on the normally sedate South Anne Street, which is situated just off Grafton Street and is only a stone’s throw from the Dail.
This followed an incident in Stoneybatter when a Brazilian immigrant, who has been living in Ireland for the last two years was charged with going on a stabbing spree on an otherwise quiet Sunday afternoon, which further inflamed community tensions. The case is ongoing.
While parts of Dublin remain on a knife edge, the picture isn’t much rosier in rural Ireland where tensions have been stoked by the number of hotels which have been converted into migrant accommodation centres.
In December 2023, the Ross Lake House hotel in Galway was burned down when it emerged that it was being turned into accommodation for asylum seekers. Protests have been ongoing in Newtown Mount Kennedy in Wicklow against plans to turn a former convent into a shelter, and virtually every county in the Republic has seen locals rally against local hotels and amenities being converted.
In many areas, the local hotel is at the centre of rural life, with weddings and parties held there. One of the main causes for anger has been the perceived lack of transparency about which venues have been chosen for conversion by the Department of Integration.
The Tipperary TD, Mattie McGrath, recently condemned the department for what he called their ‘deception’ over plans to turn his local hotel, the Kilcoran House, into an International Protection Centre. Speaking this week, he said: ‘It’s such a shame. What really is so upsetting is the denial which took place around this – and now we find out it’s true. It seems that local people were deliberately deceived… It’s a shame and nearly criminal that it would be used now by the present owners for greed, just for greed, not for humanitarian issues, just to make huge money and a quick buck.’
According to the department’s own estimates, there are now around 33,000 asylum seekers receiving shelter in 320 sites around the country. So, with growing concerns about an increase in violence and the decimation of once loved local amenities in favour of providing asylum accommodation, how has the government responded?
Well, to the absolute fury of many, this week saw a ‘refugee job fair’ take place in Croke Park, the home of Irish GAA. It was a co-initiative sponsored by hiring platform Indeed Ireland and the UNHCR. The job fair offered employment opportunities to refugees in traditionally low paid sectors such as hospitality, retail, healthcare and transport. During the event, translation services were provided for refugees who don’t speak English, with the languages on offer ranging from Ukrainian and Russian to Arabic and Farsi.
The head of the UNHCR Irish office, Enda O’Neill, said the initiative was a ‘game changer’ and added: ‘Refugees and asylum seekers bring the skills, talents, and qualifications that Irish employers need and they’re ready and eager to work.’
The fact that such labour tends to drive wages down and make it simply impossible for many Irish people to earn a living when competing with refugees was conveniently overlooked.
As a pre-condition to taking part in the event, potential employers were required to sign a five-point pledge on their commitment to provide opportunities for refugees and, in return, would receive grants for each one they hired.
With public anger now growing to genuine crisis levels the job fair seems, at best, remarkably tone deaf.
Far from assuaging anger, it would appear that this new government is intent on making the same mistakes as the previous administration. Never has the phrase ‘there may be trouble ahead’ seemed so appropriate.
Will the Gaza ceasefire collapse?
The end of February, which coincides with the start of Ramadan, was meant to mark the conclusion of the initial exchange of Israeli hostages held by Hamas for Palestinian prisoners held by Israel. However, rather than engaging as planned on what should happen, how, and when in the second phase, the ceasefire appears to be stalling and the parties sliding inexorably towards stalemate or renewed conflict.
So far, the ceasefire that started on 19 January, the day before President Trump’s inauguration, has defied the expectations of many. The conflict in Gaza stopped and more deliveries of humanitarian aid were allowed to reach displaced and desperate Palestinian refugees. Twenty-five Israeli hostages have been returned by Hamas and Israel has reciprocated with the release of hundreds of Palestinian prisoners. Hamas has also returned the remains of some dead hostages. Palestinians have returned to the rubble of their homes and an uneasy detente has settled on the Gaza strip.
What has gone wrong? Why does a second phase of the ceasefire seem increasingly unlikely to materialise? Both sides accuse the other of flaunting the agreement. Israel is delaying the release of about 600 more Palestinians. That is in protest at the shocking physical condition in which some hostages have come home and the distasteful, triumphal parading by Hamas of hostages about to be released. Benjamin Netanyahu has threatened to block second phase negotiations and begin fighting again if the hostage handover spectacles continue and all the remaining hostages are not released. He has massed his forces at the borders of Gaza, and in recent days the Israeli military have been undertaking a significant military operation in the Occupied West Bank, killing tens of Palestinians.
As phase one slips away, the challenge of negotiating the next phase grows. Under the agreement brokered by the US, Egypt and Qatar, the end of the first phase would see Israel withdraw within eight days its forces from the Philadelphi Corridor on the Egyptian border. The prospects of that happening anytime soon seem slim. Then in the second phase, the remaining 60 or so Israeli hostages still alive should be released. These hostages are Hamas’ main negotiating chip, so it is hard to envisage their release before Hamas has secured guarantees paving the way for a long-term ceasefire.
We should not be surprised by any of this. The Israel-Palestine story has consistently frustrated any misplaced diplomatic optimism for almost a century. The reason this particular chapter is so fraught with risk is because the ceasefire was really no more than the word describes. The detail was meant to be thrashed out in negotiations for the second and third phases. So far, only preliminary discussions have taken place.
There remains a fundamental contradiction in both Israel’s and Hamas’s stated aims. Neither recognises the other’s legitimacy, and Netanyahu’s war objectives made clear that Hamas should be destroyed. The televised hostage releases show Hamas terrorists armed and apparently far from disarming, or from disappearing as the force controlling Gaza.
Netanyahu faces a choice: to accept Hamas’ continued existence; or to fail to secure the release of the remaining hostages. Given that a majority of Israelis apparently prioritise getting hostages out of Gaza, Netanyahu will have to use all of his political and survival acumen to navigate the coming weeks.
So, what next? The international mediators are also showing signs of disunity. President Trump’s Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, who seems to have played a decisive role in securing the ceasefire agreement, returns to the region this week. He supports an extension to phase one which would allow negotiations on phase two to start. Hamas may be open to that, though Netanyahu’s recent statements might suggest little appetite from his government to engage in further negotiations. It appears that Egypt opposes an extension.
Much has been made of President Trump’s colourful – fantastical? – rhetoric describing the apocalyptic rubble of Gaza transformed into a riviera on the eastern Mediterranean with Palestinians moved to somewhere safer and better, such as Egypt or Jordan. Global and regional leaders, including many US allies, dismissed the idea summarily, and it was described as ethnic cleansing by the Arabs. Only Netanyahu and Israel’s political right embraced the proposal. The Trump team subsequently qualified and distanced itself from literal interpretation of the President’s vision. Trump himself has since said he would not force it to happen and that it was for the Israelis to decide.
Some of the richer and more powerful Arab states appear to recognise the time has come to step up
If we have learned anything about the Trump playbook over the past nine years, it should be that more often than not – with a few notable exceptions – the President’s wilder ideas should be taken seriously but not literally. He tends to be a disruptor without a detailed plan. This is dangerous, even reckless, but can sometimes yield results. Having shaken the box, long-fixed positions can in some cases be unpicked and new possibilities – as well as risks – opened up.
It took a dramatic Trump threat before his inauguration to catalyse the ceasefire agreement following 15 months of seemingly endless conflict. It will likely take another such intervention to move Israel and Hamas back to the negotiating table and into a second phase of the ceasefire. The unrealistic riviera proposal will not come to pass as Trump described it. Without the prospect of and a roadmap towards a Palestinian state there will be no sustained peace for Israel and its neighbours.
Some of the richer and more powerful Arab states appear to recognise the time has come to step up and not rely on the US or Europeans to provide the answers. That is why in parallel – no doubt partially galvanised by Trump’s outrageous and provoking rhetoric – the Gulf Cooperation Council, plus Egypt and Jordan, met on 21 February to prepare a summit in Cairo on 4 March that will seek to lay out a plan for the stabilisation and rebuilding of Gaza. It foresees no role for Hamas, but is clear that Palestine must be under Palestinian control.
Unpalatable US cajoling, combined with Arab leadership and investment, may prove to be the best hope for saving the fragile ceasefire. Without an extraordinary diplomatic gambit that pushes the limits and forces new approaches, the agreement may unravel and never reach its second phase. That would simply result in further cycles of conflict and the pointless further bloodshed of innocent people.
The troubling truth about ‘witchcraft’ in modern Britain
Witchcraft, and accusations of witchcraft, are returning to Britain. We might think of witchcraft as a thing of the past; sadly, this isn’t the case. In multicultural Britain, folk practices like witchcraft and sorcery are more common than you might expect. Alongside the practice of witchcraft, there is also its opposite: accusations that others, particularly children, are witches, or demons, or possessed by spirits.
In the last decade in Britain, 14,000 social work assessments flagged possible abuse linked to faith or belief, which includes witchcraft, and also things like spirit possession, and claims about the presence of demons or the devil. Between March 2023 and 2024 alone, there were 2,180 such assessments, according to official statistics. In London, the Metropolitan Police recorded 569 witchcraft accusations or cases of ritual abuse between 2021 and 2024.
An accusation of witchcraft does not just mean a false and malicious claim against a vulnerable person. It means what the jargon calls ‘faith-based abuse’. That could be as mild – as if anything like that is harmless to a child – as being accused of something that’s not true: harbouring devils, for instance, or being possessed by an evil force. But it can be much worse: attempted exorcisms are deeply unpleasant; they are loud and possibly violent. Children forced to go through such procedures often do not know what is happening to them, or what they are meant to do, to show they are cleansed of sin and free of demonic possession.
Because these practices are not true, children almost by definition cannot satisfy their accusers. How do you show adults who are certain you have an evil spirit in you that you do not? Perhaps they decide that the devil is tenacious, and has to be made to quit your body by compulsion. Sometimes these children are beaten and otherwise attacked. More than once, these children have died as a result of how they were treated.
A quarter of a century ago, Victoria Climbié was an eight-year-old girl from Abobo in the Cote D’Ivoire. She was brought to Britain by her family, supposedly to receive a better education. But in Britain, she was accused of witchcraft. Unable to defend herself, to convince her accusers that it was not true, she was tortured to death over months, in circumstances I do not want to tell you about. Her great aunt Marie-Thérèse Kouao and Kouao’s boyfriend, Carl John Manning, were convicted of her murder. They said that they believed Climbié was possessed, and that harsh treatment was the only cure.
Children who face such accusations are often victims of their families’ financial or personal troubles. As in the Middle Ages, in difficult times a scapegoat is sought and often found. Someone must be responsible for my ill health, the thinking goes; the child must be responsible for our money worries. It must be punished. It must have the evil spirit in it exorcised by ritual.
Most disturbingly of all, by the time of Climbié’s death on 25 February 2000, she had been contacted or otherwise connected with several arms of the British state, all of which failed to note her deterioration, her injuries, her malnutrition. None of them took her away from her abusers. None of them did a single thing for her. Only after her death, when the abusers were caught and tried, were some changes to child protection law in the wake of this dreadful case.
But the violence did not stop. The remains of a little boy, who was later tentatively identified as either Patrick Erhabor or Ikpomwosa, were recovered from the River Thames on 21 September 2001. Police investigations eventually decided that the boy (dubbed ‘Adam’ while his name was unknown) had been trafficked from Nigeria to Britain for ritual purposes. He was in Britain for little time, possibly only for a few days. The boy had been killed as part of a ceremony, and dismembered; his body disposed of in the river.
The film Kindoki Witch Boy, which was released this week, describes the story of Mardoche Yembi. He’s now in his early thirties, as Victoria Climbié would now be, had she lived. Yembi was himself accused of witchcraft when he was a boy in north London in the early 2000s. So seriously did his accusers take the claim, that Yembi suffered through – and luckily survived – three years of attempted exorcisms.
These are not practices you associate with modern Britain. Yet they’re here nonetheless. Films like Kindoki Witch Boy and the campaign around it do good in that they raise awareness. But what good is awareness of abhorrent practices if they continue?
The National FGM Centre itself is named for Female Genital Mutilation, something which is still distressingly common for British girls, despite supposed legal changes and even a few token prosecutions of the culprits. As many as 170,000 women and girls living in Britain were estimated in a parliamentary report to have undergone FGM; 65,000 girls aged 13 and under were considered ‘at risk’ of FGM.The state is fighting a losing battle against the practice.
The roots of these things are cultural, even geographic. And they have been imported into Britain with no end in sight.
Clarification: An earlier version of this article suggested that, in the last decade in Britain, 14,000 social work assessments have been linked to false accusations of witchcraft. It also said that, between March 2023 and 2024 alone, there were 2,180 such assessments connected to witchcraft, according to research carried out by the National FGM Centre. We are happy to clarify that these figures relate not only to false accusations of witchcraft but also to a broader definition of abuse ‘linked to faith or belief’. The piece also wrongly attributed these figures to the National FGM Centre. We are happy to clarify that the National FGM Centre is not the source of these numbers, which come from the Department for Education.
Why Roman gladiators were the first feminists
Chiselled out of stone in around the 1st century AD, the scene in this image gives a powerful snapshot of the excitement of gladiatorial combat. In this carving found in Turkey – once a key part of the Roman empire – the opponents face each other head-on, with a look of grim determination. From behind their curved rectangular shields, both appear ready to lunge with short stabbing swords.
However, this gladiatorial fight differs from what you might expect in one crucial way: both opponents are women. Look closely enough and you will see the gladiator on the left has her long hair in a plait which snakes down to a bun at the bottom of her neck. But it’s the stage names underneath the figures that provide the most compelling evidence that this was a different kind of fight. One gladiator is called Amazon, after the mythical tribe of female warriors. The other is Achillea, the feminine version of the Greek hero Achilles.
If you’re a fan of gladiator films, this may well come as a surprise. From Kirk Douglas to Russell Crowe and now Paul Mescal, you will have got the impression that these ancient prize-fighters couldn’t be anything but men. But multiple sources of written and archaeological evidence show that, while they were far more rare, female gladiators fought all over the Roman empire – and possibly even in Britain – until they were banned in 200 AD by the Emperor Septimius Severus for bringing women into disrepute.
Male writers of time deemed female gladiators unworthy of their attention, and it seems Hollywood’s filmmakers have so far done the same thing. But as our fascination with gladiators is showing no signs of going away – Ridley Scott’s Gladiator II was one of the biggest films of last year – I’d say it’s time to give the women in the arena the credit they deserve.
The true details are sketchy. Most mentions of female gladiators are passing – because girl-on-girl fighting was considered less noble and not worthy of attention. But though we tend to imagine all gladiators fighting to the death in front of bloodthirsty crowds, the best ones were entertainers who could forge decent careers to become the celebrities of their day. And for some women with the aptitude, volunteering to enter the profession was one of the few ways they could win freedom and independence. This means that well before the suffragettes of the early 20th century, Roman women were responsible for the earliest – and boldest – acts of feminism in human history.
The appeal of pursuing such a brutal and dangerous path makes more sense when you consider the oppression of women under the Roman patriarchy. If you were one of the estimated one in ten women who were enslaved, telling your master you’d like to train up was a way to get out of a lifetime of domestic drudgery and hard labour. Scholars believe it’s possible that physically strong female slaves would volunteer to enter gladiator training because if they did well enough they might earn their freedom.
But it wasn’t just female slaves who were willing to give it a go. Free women were also heavily constrained in Roman society, expected to devote their lives to providing heirs and running households. But some – such as divorcees and widows with financial means – could pay for gladiator training and pursue a life of glamour and excitement.
While it’s not known how many female gladiators entered the arena, or ultimately died there, evidence suggests women were only pitted against each other – or wild animals brought in from around the empire for contests.
Well before the suffragettes of the early 20th century, Roman women were responsible for the earliest – and boldest – acts of feminism in human history
For the Roman male writers, who clung to rigid ideas about gender roles, the female gladiator was both a novelty and an aberration. Some mocked them, accusing them of play-acting or doing it for the opportunity of meeting male gladiators – who were the rock stars of their day – for sex. Others saw women gladiators – particularly those from higher class backgrounds – as a symptom of Rome’s moral corruption and decline.
Classical historian Professor Catharine Edwards says the idea of a female gladiator was a troubling irritation for Roman masculinity. And Amy Zoll, an expert on the Romans, writes in Gladiatrix: The True Story of History’s Unknown Woman Warrior: ‘A female gladiator is a hugely paradoxical notion for Romans. The spectacle of an athletic, confident woman wielding a sword might well have been found exciting in all sorts of different ways for the Roman male viewer. Such a figure is perhaps embodying the worst fears of the anxious Roman male. Is this what’s really lurking inside every apparently demure Roman female? The gladiator waiting to get out?’
Whatever view men took of them, however, it seems becoming a gladiator was a risk some women were prepared to take – if it offered them a chance to live life on their own terms. Indeed, the frieze of Amazon and Achillea shows that by entering the ring, they may have been slaves able to win their freedom. Above their heads is the word ‘Apleythesan’ – a Greek term for honourable retirement from gladiatorial combat, which could be earned after a good fight.
Two thousand years on, Amazon and Achillea may be forever frozen in time in marble at the British Museum. But it’s still not too late for them to claim a new victory – to be seen as history’s first feminists.
Why even parts of Berlin are moving right
‘Berlin is more East than West’, said Thilo Sarrazin. A member of the centre-left SPD, in 2010 he published Germany Abolishes Itself, a book which warned about the impact of mass immigration. It sold over one million copies in a year but it went down less well with his own party, which tried to kick him out for writing the book. In 2020, after three attempts, the party finally succeeded, but it was a Pyrrhic victory. Over the course of those ten years, the SPD’s grasp on Berlin, which they had ruled since reunification, slipped away from them, as mass immigration not only changed the country but also its politics.
Berlin has a reputation for being left-wing, yet it now has a CDU mayor, and in last week’s federal election the hard-right AfD won several districts. Strikingly, the party did best in former communist East Berlin areas: Pankow, Lichtenberg, Marzahn-Hellersdorf and Köpenick all turned blue.
Despite being the capital and home to a growing tech sector, Berlin has not been immune to Germany’s economic woes. This downturn, the longest in decades, has been fuelled by high energy costs, a sluggish post-pandemic recovery, and competition from global markets like China. Many Berliners, especially from working-class districts, have faced rising costs, especially high rents.
The SPD struggled to address the housing crisis, opting instead to impose rent controls, which only made things worse. Other parties on the left went further, with the hard-left Die Linke calling for the city to seize property from one of Berlin’s biggest real estate owners. In contrast, the AfD took a more free market approach in places like Pankow, calling for more building.
It’s no secret that the AfD differs vastly from the SPD, Die Linke and the Greens when it comes to migration and security. Days before the election a Syrian refugee stabbed a tourist near the Berlin Holocaust memorial, ‘wanting to kill all the Jews’. Parks in Berlin such as Görlitzer have become notoriously unsafe and used by drug addicts and dealers, many of them illegal immigrants. Instead of tackling this, the SPD has focused on housing large numbers of asylum seekers in disused buildings all over the city. Many Berliners feel the increased pressure on social services and infrastructure. They also worry about their safety, despite reassurances that private security will be in place to protect citizens and refugees alike.
Many Berliners felt neglected by the mainstream parties. When Dr Gottfried Curio of the AfD won a seat from the CDU, he said, ‘With me…people can sense that I tackle the big issues like migration and security with credibility’. Like many in the AfD, he uses X and Facebook to connect directly with voters. While the production values are not always high-end, these posts and videos are shared widely.
But that is not the only reason the AfD established itself in Berlin. For over ten years in districts like Pankow they have been building up grassroots support. As political insurgents, they initially relied on people who had little experience in politics, with the other parties complaining that they were disruptive. For some of their supporters though, the AfD’s lack of political experience was seen as a positive. Over time, the party has professionalised.
The AfD gains in a difficult field like Berlin illustrate a broader shift to the right in Germany, which is no longer contained to the East nor to more rural areas. As immigration soared and politicians failed to tackle the asylum crisis, Berliners have faced a housing crisis, the growth of immigrant organised crime groups, and a shifting culture. That was summed up last year when a Berlin police chief warned Jews or openly gay people to be careful in some areas of the city.
The AfD is not the only party from the shift away from the mainstream, of course. While the Berlin SPD received 15.1 per cent this weekend, their worst result since 1990, Die Linke achieved their best, with 19.1 per cent, making them the strongest party in the capital. The party’s viral social media campaign, led by figures like co-chair Heidi Reichinnek, resonated with Berlin’s progressive electorate. Reichinnek’s impassioned defense of the ‘firewall’ against the AfD, which garnered millions of views online, helped Die Linke secure 25 per cent of the 18-24 vote nationwide, a trend even more pronounced in cosmopolitan Berlin.
Both the left and right are moving towards political radicals, as well as rejecting the mainstream parties who have failed to deliver for Germany. Maybe the SPD should not have ignored the warnings by Thilo Sarrazin that mass immigration would lead to widespread changes that cannot be solved with money and integration courses alone. The SPD has to decide whether they want to govern as left-wing radicals like Die Linke or to win back working-class voters by taking a more moderate position on immigration and crime. It will be interesting to see how Berlin will be governed in future.
What Europe can learn from the White House clash
The Trump-Zelensky summit is a geopolitical Rashomon. Some saw a lying, maniacal bully and his snarling sidekick berate a patriot for telling the truth about his nation’s attacker and refusing to surrender to him. Others witnessed a bratty ingrate haughtily shaking his begging bowl while dictating to his benefactors the terms on which he would accept their charity. Or you might, like me, have watched a medley of the two, a war-worn leader grown impatient with diplomacy and unwilling to tell the great despotic lump in front of him whatever he wanted to hear.
It’s possible to sympathise with Volodymyr Zelensky’s desperate situation, and his nation’s larger cause, and still regret his tactlessness in handling a neuralgic personality. Zelensky’s insistence on truth and his country’s interests was righteous but it was a righteous vanity given the stakes. Agreeing with Donald Trump’s every word, heaping praise on his genius, pledging to nominate him for a Noble Peace Prize — all would have surely stuck in Zelensky’s craw but might have coaxed the president in a more pro-Ukrainian direction. Sometimes you just have to let the bully have your lunch money.
European liberals raging at Trump and JD Vance’s treatment of Zelensky would do well to watch those exchanges again, and not out of noble indignation or hypertensive masochism, but to look for another interpretation. It’s there, staring us right in the face, however much we might want to avoid it. The American president is able to address Zelensky with such contempt because the balance of power lies overwhelmingly, crushingly on the American side, and it lies there because that is where Europe has been happy for it to lie since World War II and even more so since the end of the Cold War. Europe poured its treasure into public services, state employment, social welfare and, latterly, foreign aid and development, and was content to allow the United States to foot the bill for the Continent’s security.
The United States was willing to do so in the years of global hegemony, when the world’s most benign empire was happy as long as everyone was buying its cheeseburgers and F-16s. But it was a fatal and entirely self-inflicted wound on Europe’s part to proceed as though what was would always be. Wise statecraft, to say nothing of national self-respect, should have led European nations to shelter under the American military umbrella while building up their own armaments for a day when that umbrella was withdrawn.
It is no excuse to say that no one could have predicted the coming of Donald Trump. The point of contingency planning is that it insures against developments which no one could predict, though it must be said that there have been omens over the years, including Pat Buchanan’s primary challenge to George Bush, Barack Obama’s muddled foreign policy, and the Tea Party movement and other nativist spasms in Republican politics. For generations now, European social democracy has been underwritten by American geopolitical designs, and all of a sudden those designs have been torn up. Trump doesn’t want to lead the free world, and enough of his countrymen feel the same way that we must regard the American century as finally, definitively, unrevivably over. It’s every John, Pierre and Helmut for himself now.
European strategy and spending urgently needs to reflect this. It may feel satisfying to protest that European nations have collectively pledged more financial assistance to Ukraine than the United States, but it obscures the more important point that Europe has for decades tried to defend itself on the cheap. Even today, we are expected to regard the UK’s uptick to 2.5 per cent of GDP as a bold stepping up to the challenges of an emerging world order, rather than the pittance that it actually represents. Double that figure and even then the best Britain could hope to fund would be a Sainsbury’s Basics defence capability.
Outside of immediate threats, it’s difficult to convince the public of the need to direct resources to military and strategic budgets, not least because doing so would require sacrifice on a scale that Western European governments stopped asking of their populations after 1945. Fortifying Europe will require citizens to forgo certain expenditures to which they have become accustomed and consider themselves entitled, whether that is generous public sector and old age pensions, subsidised healthcare and higher education, or price-regulated energy and transportation. Those citizens are not going to like that and, even after watching the blood-letting in Ukraine, many will insist that higher defence spending is wasteful since the UK/France/Germany isn’t about to be invaded by Russia or anyone else.
Perhaps nothing will persuade these doubters, determined as they are to cling to an American-guaranteed good life which America is no longer prepared to guarantee. But their leaders should at least try. They should direct them to those 40 awkward minutes in the Oval Office and let them see what it looks like to plead for your country’s survival with someone who simply does not care. Volodymyr Zelensky is a patriot, his leadership of Ukraine has been heroic, but watching his internationally broadcast scolding should motivate other European leaders to ensure they are never put in the same position. Europe should stand strong, independent and fearsome to enemies apparent and potential, and to stand strong it must stand on its own two feet. No longer someone else’s tab to pick up, European defence must become central to European budgets and political priorities.
Did Zelensky fail his nation?
Volodymyr Zelensky fought for Ukraine’s security guarantees so fiercely last night, it was as if he’d been invited to sign a surrender to Russia, not a mineral deal with the US. It was neither the time nor the place to take on Donald Trump and JD Vance for parroting Kremlin talking points – a fact Zelensky seemed to acknowledge later on Fox News. Looking visibly distressed, he admitted such matters should be handled behind closed doors. There was regret, but no apology to Trump’s camp. ‘I respect President Trump and the American people, but I’m not sure we’ve done something bad. We must be open and honest’, Zelensky said.
The meeting in the Oval Office turned into disaster because Zelensky couldn’t bite his tongue when he should have, and because he and Trump have fundamentally different visions for how Russia’s war in Ukraine should end. Zelensky insists on receiving security guarantees to achieve lasting peace, while Trump backs quick ceasefire with security discussed afterwards. The American president was so irritated by the topic that, when asked by a reporter last night what would happen if Russia broke the ceasefire, Trump scoffed: ‘What if a bomb drops on your head right now?’.
Trump doesn’t want to have any obligations in Ukraine and insists that Putin can be trusted not to break the ceasefire because Trump is in office. But Ukraine’s security guarantees cannot depend on another country’s temporary administration. Trump’s ignorance of this fact – and of Ukrainians’ needs to ensure the war never happens again – makes the quick peace he dreams of even harder to achieve. This is what Zelensky tried to explain in his third language last night before Trump and Vance took it personally and accused the Ukrainian president of ‘disrespecting’ them and not being grateful enough.
For the past two weeks, the Trump’s administration has used blackmail, intimidation and provocation to force Zelensky into a deal that, in its original form, would have saddled Ukraine with $500 billion in debt to the US. Zelensky fought for a better version of the draft – one he still saw as a concession in exchange for a first step to security – before traveling from a war-torn country to the US to sign it. Zelensky may have been better off ignoring Vance’s jabs and focusing solely on speaking with Trump, but that doesn’t change the reality: Trump either genuinely lives in Russia’s disinformation bubble or is clearly on Russia’s side.
Trump’s rhetoric – calling Zelensky a dictator, blaming Ukraine for ‘starting a war,’ demanding wartime elections to install a more obedient leader, twisting facts and making up numbers about the aid – was seen by Zelensky as a direct attack on him and his country. He entered the Oval Office ready to defend. Did Zelensky overplay his hand? Yes. But when Trump blamed him for having ‘too much hatred’ towards Putin, a man responsible for at least 55,000 Ukrainian deaths in three years, Zelensky knew that staying silent would mean he would have to seek forgiveness later at home.
Whether it was worth the cost is another question. Reports suggest Trump is already considering halting all military aid to Ukraine. Without Patriot air defense missiles, Ukrainian cities will once again be exposed, and it will take Europe months to replace American arms. In response, Ukrainians began raising donations to build nuclear weapons, collecting £400,000 within hours. Of course, the money will ultimately go toward drones, but their message was clear. Last night, they felt disrespected and betrayed by the Trump administration.
Can J.D. Vance be part of the peace talks?
Practically every aspect of that Oval Office meeting between Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky was surreal. The blow up at the end was certainly the most shocking, but watching the American President repeatedly bite his tongue – until he didn’t – was also very strange.
Holding back opinion is not normal behaviour for the American President. Yet we watched Trump speak very cautiously throughout the meeting, refusing to take sides, but more importantly, resisting the urge to push back when Zelensky insisted there would be no compromise to end the war or highlighted that the rare earth deal did not go far enough to ensure Ukraine’s safety.
Trump’s deliberate attempt to toe the coolest, (for better or for worse) neutral policy line was most clear when he hinted that he might like to express a more colourful opinion. But that would not allow the United States to play intermediate. ‘I’m in the middle, I want to solve this thing,’ he told the press. ‘I’m for both. I want to get it solved. It’s wonderful to speak badly about somebody else, but I want to get it solved.’
That repeated line nearly got the two presidents out of the media spotlight and into the private stages of negotiation. Then J.D. Vance chimed in.
‘The path to peace and the path to prosperity is, maybe, to engage in diplomacy,’ said Vance, when Trump brought him in to speak. The interjection seemingly reflected the general mood of the press conference so far. But it was too much for Zelensky, who was clearly not happy or comfortable throughout the entire conference, but particularly angered by the Vice President’s interjection.
While Trump has long argued he wants the war to end — what he simplifies as ‘peace’ — Vance has spoken far more brashly about the fate of Ukraine, making clear in the past that he would withdraw American resources and support (Trump, in contrast, said in the conference tonight that the USA would continue to supply Ukraine with arms). ‘I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another’ was Vance’s commentary the eve of Russia’s invasion back in 2022.
These are vastly different positions that Trump and Vance have held on the war over the past three years – a difference Zelensky will be more aware of than anyone else.
Of course, Trump knows who he made his Vice President, and his previous opinions on the war. Many are speculating now that Trump and Vance wanted to humiliate and fight with Zelensky in public. Perhaps Vance was bait – bait Zelensky took, as he started asking the Vice President questions about what he really knew about the history of invasion and current situation in Ukraine.
But it would be an odd tactic – not least because Trump had just spent the whole conference fighting his basic instincts. That’s to say, he didn’t riff. He stuck to a line, and it seemed to hold until Zelensky and Vance tried to best one another. That’s when Trump became extremely angry – particularly at the suggestion that America had not done its part to support Ukraine’s war efforts historically.
It doesn’t really matter if the American President had a point or not. If his goal is ‘peace’, outcomes like this are a problem. He says he wants the war done. Indeed he asked American voters to return him to the White House so he could bring an end to the war swiftly. If he wants to be that leader, he cannot lose his temper.
Perhaps more importantly, he cannot lose control of the negotiations. And what became clear tonight is that Zelensky appears able to handle Trump as a negotiator. He is not open to negotiating with his more ideological deputy.
Trump knows he pulls the purse strings, as he made clear to Zelensky in front of the press. But the suspension of talks, and the rare earth deal signing, is not good for Trump’s broader agenda. Trump can try to remove the US’s backing and involvement, but Joe Biden’s botched withdrawal from Afghanistan is very recent history – and no doubt on the 47th President’s mind. Whatever unspeakable scenes resulted in Trump’s decision to withdraw support would always be tied to his legacy.
So the war rumbles on – a very bad outcome for both Trump and Zelensky. So if Zelensky does return to talk ‘peace’ as Trump has insisted, can he risk Vance sitting by his side again?
The legacy of Covid will stay with children for life
Five years ago in March 2020, schools fell silent as Covid-19 swept across the world. At first, there was a tinge of excitement among some students and staff; it was as if, perhaps, we had been told that the whole country was going to be snowed in for six weeks.
Had the restrictions thawed within a couple of months, the impact on at least some children’s education might even have been positive. New experiences stretch the mind, after all. But it didn’t work out like that. While pubs, restaurants and hairdressers re-opened on 4 July, schools stayed on remote teaching until September.
This generation of children was let down badly in the pandemic
Meanwhile, daily government press conferences, laced ‘R numbers’, infection rates, hospital admissions and excess deaths, instilled a sense of fear that also impacted on children. The world is not a safe place – indeed, it has never been a safe place – but we were told that risk must be avoided at all cost. Draconian policies – remember the four tiers of misery? – were underpinned by fear and policed ruthlessly.
The impact was bad enough on those of us who had been around a while and were used to managing risk. It was harder for children to keep a sense of perspective during their formative years. Real life, they were told, was dangerous. No wonder that so many of them retreated to screens and social media. But youngsters were not significantly at risk from Covid. The restrictions they suffered protected the elderly and the vulnerable.
Even when children returned to school, the new academic year was like nothing we had known before. My classroom was demarcated by two lines of red and white tape: one zone for me and one for the ‘bubble’ into which my pupils had been corralled. Never mind that even a fart could cross this no-man’s land with ease, the illusion of safety trumped everything. Mandatory facemasks were similarly useless at preventing that particular form of communication, but they effectively muffled voices and shrouded facial expressions from view.
The first lockdown was probably inevitable. Two recent novel viruses had been genuinely terrifying. The SARS outbreak of 2003 left a case fatality rate of about 10 per cent. A decade later, the mortality rate from MERS was around 35 per cent. They were both respiratory diseases and both caused by coronaviruses. But certainly, by the autumn of 2020, it was clear that Covid-19 was much less severe. It was prevalent, though: one positive test would send an entire bubble of children back to their homes to be quarantined. The disruption to teaching and learning continued, but most of us at least were able to turn up to school every day during the ‘Halloween’ lockdown of November 2020.
Then, just after Christmas, schools were shut for the best part of another term. Mary Bousted, joint general secretary of the National Education Union (NEU), had demanded that ministers ‘do their duty’ by closing all primary and secondary schools to contain the virus. But to be fair on the NEU, the government had already put the fear of death into teachers. Plans for pupils to return later in January 2021 came to nothing. I went into school regardless. I could broadcast my lessons from there as well as I could from home but, crucially, I also enjoyed the company of other teachers who had also gone into work. I might be an introvert but I am also human, and human beings are social animals.
By now, the novelty of remote teaching had worn off. Besides, the spring term is crucial teaching time and children needed to be provided with lots of work. Some of them did it but too many gave up. Unlike me, they were cooped up at home, and during ‘live lessons’ their cameras needed to stay off. Some of them contributed their voices, but all I could see on my screen was an array of avatars. It was telling which avatars did not log off at the end of the lesson. Likely they had disappeared long before. All I could do was log my concerns. That went on for two long months.
I teach in a secondary school; in primary schools, the restrictions were arguably worse. A group of 16-year-olds might have coped with a worksheet on Newton’s Laws of Motion, before uploading it to the Google classroom and ultimately discussing it in breakout rooms after reading my feedback. But it’s harder for six-year-olds, especially those without a parent alongside them. For them, the two years of restrictions were a third of their lifetime, dominating crucial developmental phases that can never be repeated.
The legacy will be with us for life. Not surprisingly, school attendance has not recovered to pre-pandemic levels. In the current academic year, overall absence rates are running 6.6 per cent; previously it ranged between 4.5 per cent and 4.8 per cent. Meanwhile, there are reports of an ‘alarming’ surge in mental illness among young people. The classroom bubbles may be gone, but social media bubbles never went away.
This generation of children was let down badly in the pandemic. We must invest not only in education and training, but specifically in that generation of youngsters who paid a heavy price during Covid. If ever again we need to balance the needs of the young with the needs of the elderly in a crisis, then a more equitable solution must be found. Children are the future, and they are our future. We need to look after them, not lock them down.
Gentler stop and search tactics won’t keep Britain safe
What sort of mojo do you want your police officer to bring with them the next time you’re stopped and searched? The Metropolitan police asked Londoners to help them use this procedure better: one quoted consultation response was to stop using ‘bad energy’ in such an encounter. Perhaps the answer to London’s awful street crime problem is more astrology than criminology. Such comments have influenced the creation of a new ‘charter’ eighteen months in the making, which signals the advent of kinder, gentler frisking in the nation’s capital.
Of course, most people reading this piece will never have reason to be approached by a police officer in the street, detained and subject to their possessions being examined. However polite or empathetic your chartered police officer is, it is plainly undignified. Unless, of course, you are carrying a bladed weapon or drugs, or often both, intent on committing one of the 15,859 knife-related crimes detected by the Met last year – up 24 per cent on 2023. Then it could literally be lifesaving.
Except in clearly defined and time-limited circumstances, police officers must have a reasonable suspicion that you are carrying weapons or drugs in order for them to use their powers to search you. This is a necessarily subjective judgment. Sometimes this is misplaced. On rare occasions, the power is misused. Most of us would expect this interaction between the state and the citizen to be respectful and for there to be no motive by the officer beyond using their skills and instincts to keep us safe.
The two-year training programme for a Met police officer starts with 16 weeks in a college followed by two months supervised beat work with a tutor constable. It’s surely not unreasonable to think that treating people without fear or favour might play some role in this transformation into civilian in uniform. Why do we need yet more time, more consultation and yet more windy covenants to satisfy bureaucrats while the streets grow ever more dangerous?
But then the Met has been on the naughty step for a long time. From 1999 to 2023, report after report has laid bare appalling failures in form and function. A consistent feature of the many reviews of awful misconduct from McPhearson to Casey is institutional racism. While successive police commissioners have been at pains to point out that this is not the same as all cops being racist, that’s a distinction that is lost or ignored by a strident activist minority. It sees stop and search as merely the instrumental outworking of prejudice against London’s minority communities, in particular its black citizens.
London’s black community makes up 13 per cent of the population yet it is victimised at a hugely disproportionate rate – 45 per cent of all knife murder deaths in data released by the London Assembly in 2022. Moreover, the ten child victims of homicides in the capital last year, all were boys and nine were stabbed to death. The majority of these children were black or from ethnic minorities. Is it possible that failing to robustly tackle this appalling death toll could be the most racist thing about it?
As well as being murdered at disproportionate rates, black people are stopped and searched at rates that outstrip any other ethnicity. At 38.2 stops per thousand people, they are nearly four times more likely to be stopped and searched and at significantly greater risk of having a more thorough search carried out. However, much of this disparity can be accounted for simply because of the location of high crime areas, the profile of offenders and offending, and the people available and appropriate to search when police are in the neighbourhoods trying to stop people dealing drugs and carrying weapons that have a horrific impact on local communities.
Close to half of the London probation caseload for managing those convicted of knife crimes are black offenders. It is one thing to argue that police officers must use their powers respectfully, but quite another to maintain that quoting facts is racist. Criminal impunity relies on institutional timidity. Bad actors repeatedly conflate aggressive and assertive tactics to protect all Londoners from being victimised. Confrontational behaviour is inevitable when police try to interdict criminality at street level. These encounters are recorded, edited, uploaded and consumed sometimes before the last pocket is emptied. We ought to be more worried about the reported reluctance of officers to use their street powers legitimately for fear of years-long disciplinary investigations than occasional misbehaviour. ‘Less stop and search’ as no bereaved parent ever said.
What Kierkegaard tells us about Bridget Jones
The scene is a well-appointed drawing room in Copenhagen in September 1840. A fresh-faced girl in her late teens is playing the piano in an attempt to soothe the troubled spirit of her boyfriend, a slender, bouffant-haired philosopher in his late 20s by the name of Søren Kierkegaard. Suddenly, he grabs the score from her and claps its pages shut before exclaiming, ‘Oh! What do I care for music? It’s you I want!’ Upon which, he proposes marriage, and soon after, the young Regine Olsen accepts.
Immediately, Kierkegaard has second thoughts. Being an existentialist, he doesn’t deal in casual doubts. His are devastating. When Regine bumps into him in the street a few days later, he is so physically altered that she doesn’t recognise him. He agonises in his diary. Is marriage really for him? Will it get in the way of his vocation, which is to write world-changing philosophical tomes? It takes him a full 13 months to make up his mind. At length, in October 1841, he ends things with Regine, takes back his engagement ring, and flees to Berlin.
So far, you may feel, so typical. You just can’t trust a continental philosopher. Yet in a couple of key respects, Kierkegaard breaks the mould. For one thing, he writes supremely well, with tremendous wit and vigour. For another, one of his key ideas, which he developed in response to his own quarter-life crisis, feels as relevant today as it did 200 years ago.
Kierkegaardian stage theory – the idea that we naturally pass through three life stages, the aesthetic, the ethical and the spiritual – provides a lens through which not only to understand our own lives but also to interpret on a deeper level many of our most beloved fictional stories, from the Iliad and Hamlet to The Godfather and Bridget Jones’s Diary.
In the aesthetic stage, the theory goes, we’re self-absorbed. We write poetry and go out partying. It’s all about us. The ethical stage turns us inside out, so we live less for ourselves and more for other people. We might marry and have children, caring more about their comfort than our own. We might employ people in a business or engage in civic duties. This ultimately gives way to the spiritual stage. The kids have left home. Retirement beckons. We become less engaged in worldly things and more interested in religion or abstract philosophical thought.
In fiction, the secret story is nearly always a painful transition from the aesthetic to the ethical stage. Take Bridget Jones, or for that matter, the protagonist of almost every romantic comedy. Her struggle is to overcome her sense of having left it too late, and to progress from the limitations of single life to the rewards and responsibilities of marriage. Ditto Harry in When Harry Met Sally, whose default setting is detached male narcissism, and who only learns slowly, through painful experience, that there’s another way to be.
This kind of commitment phobia – or, to give it its Kierkegaardian name, the struggle to move from the aesthetic to the ethical life – now seems more prevalent than ever. A new book connects it with the compulsive self-curation of social media, which has caused a spike in perfectionist attitudes. Perfectionism leads to procrastination, according to Jump! A New Philosophy for Conquering Procrastination by Professor Simon May. The data appears to back him up, showing a general trend to get married much later, if at all, and to change jobs far more often.
Professor May argues that Kierkegaard’s own romantic-comedy crisis – you might picture him as a 19th-century Danish equivalent of Hugh Grant’s dithering character in Four Weddings and a Funeral – carries lessons for those prone to procrastination. It sounds counterintuitive, but the pain of hesitation, and even the later sting of regret, can be an unavoidable part of decision-making. By that rationale, the philosopher, like Billy Crystal’s Harry, has to suffer before he can understand. This chimes with the advice of creativity guru Jim Kroft, a singer-songwriter who counsels his thousands of online followers on how to break productivity blocks. As he tells me, ‘The problem is, stuckness comes for a reason. It is asking us to be here, to deal first with things as they are. The toughest thing is doing just that, to accept that you have to exist within your circumstances, before you can then move forward out of them.’
Hard to hear, but this sounds true. In the case of Kierkegaard, his year of living in uncertainty ushered in a period of astonishing creativity. Above all, during those bleak months in Berlin, after he had broken his own heart, he completed a draft of his first cast-iron masterpiece, the appealing, freewheeling, many-voiced literary monster that is Either/Or (1843). As much an experimental novel as a philosophical treatise, the book purports to be a collection of papers by a range of different authors, all of whom Kierkegaard actually invented.
Its central theme, embodied in its title, is the dilemma of choosing between an aesthetic and an ethical life, because both have their pros and cons. Kierkegaard being Kierkegaard, his inclination is to emphasise the cons, most famously in a highly entertaining passage of Scandinavian miserabilism. ‘Marry and you will regret it,’ he warns his readers, like a half-drunk uncle at a wedding reception. But then he continues, ‘Don’t marry and you will also regret it. Marry or don’t marry – you will regret it, either way.’
In real life, too, it’s easy – indeed, it’s now easier than ever – to think of people who struggle with the transit between stage one and stage two
In later works such as Stages on Life’s Way (1845), Kierkegaard develops the dilemma into a trilemma. This is where he includes the third option of the spiritual stage, which for him was about making a commitment to God. To complicate matters, these ways of living are not mutually exclusive. It’s possible for one person, for instance, to embody all three to differing degrees. Yet we’re left with the sense of a natural progression. The young person lives, and should live, an aesthetic life. In middle age, they ideally progress to an ethical way of living. At length, this gives way to the spiritual stage of detachment from life, which helpfully makes life easier, in the end, to part with. The spiritual stage, then, is a gentle rehearsal for death.
The unworldly protagonist of Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot is arguably a spiritual-stage hero. But in the main, as we’ve seen, protagonists are most often making, or struggling to make, the transition from the first to the second stage. This holds true not only in rom-coms but in every genre. In The Godfather, for example, Michael Corleone must shoulder the ethical-stage burden of the family business. In the TV show Succession, the trauma of the younger Roys is that their domineering father won’t let them make that Kierkegaardian transition.
Make the move too early or too late and you run into trouble. Romeo and Juliet, arguably, try too early. They’re children inspired by love to act like adults, which helps explain why they make such catastrophically poor decisions. Hamlet, like the Roys, is trapped in the limbo between stages. He’s blocked by his uncle’s manoeuvrings from taking his rightful place as king.
In real life, too, it’s easy – indeed, it’s now easier than ever – to think of people who struggle with the transit between stage one and stage two: the eternal singleton, for example, locked in a cycle of diminishing aesthetic returns, or the friend who, having married young, chafes against the limits of their ethical life. Kierkegaard may not have been the ideal fiancé, but we owe him a debt of gratitude for enduring his year of angst, on the back of which he built his three-stage scaffolding of thought for understanding such predicaments.
Professor May and Jim Kroft may be right to suggest that pain is often a necessary part of the process. But the way I see it, if you can navigate Kierkegaard’s stages skilfully, and with the right instinctive timing, you can turn his depressive dictum on its head. When you are single, you will be happy. And when you marry, you will be happy. Unmarried or married, you will be happy, either way.
Was Starmer’s love-in with Trump really such a triumph?
Opponents of Keir Starmer would be well advised to concentrate on his many real weaknesses rather than inventing non-existent disasters just to bolster their own prejudices.
The British radical online Right spent the last 48 hours not only hoping for the UK Prime Minister to be humiliated by Donald Trump, but then pretending he had been even when he clearly hadn’t. The reality is that Starmer’s visit to Washington DC was very successful, at least in the short-term.
As well as establishing an unlikely public rapport with Trump, the Prime Minister advanced a promising dialogue on tariffs and trade and got the President to endorse his Chagos Islands deal. British Trump-worshippers are at this very moment still trying to devise fresh arguments as to why this development – the very opposite to what they predicted – shows that their hero has still dumped on Starmer. What it actually shows is that Trump thinks the outline agreement is compatible with American security needs and doesn’t really care that it is an anti-patriotic embarrassment for Britain.
On top of all this, only someone with an acute case of Starmer Derangement Syndrome could deny that the deployment of a letter from the King inviting Trump for an unprecedented second state visit amounted to the brilliant use of a political prop. The triumphant theatricality of the moment suggested to me that it could only be the work of a high-calibre and seasoned political choreographer. So, congratulations may be due to Peter Mandelson on an early success in his ambassadorial role.
Yet there is a strong prospect that a couple of years down the line, this visit will be seen very differently: as the moment when the seeds of Starmer’s downfall were planted. Because it has potentially cleared the way for the most perilous deployment of British military power overseas since the Falklands War. While that conflict ended in triumph, it was the proverbial damned close-run thing and involved our country taking back sovereign territory from a lesser power. Starmer’s proposed deployment of British “boots on the ground” in Ukraine is a very different kettle of fish.
The Prime Minister is proposing that British soldiers be a leading part of a European peacekeeping force, alongside French troops and presumably a rag-bag of whatever other infantry units are going spare from other EU nations. The plan is to send the force into Ukraine without any US troops to serve alongside them. America is only being asked to offer a “backstop” involving providing air cover should the European force come under attack.
One does not need to be a strategic military genius to suppose that Vladimir Putin will be licking his lips over this idea. The country that did most to help Ukraine fend off his planned full takeover, leading to an enormous Russian death toll, is proposing to put a necessarily small troop deployment within a few miles of his frontier. He will know that British public opinion will not be steadfastly behind entanglement in yet another foreign conflict. He will be fully aware of just how difficult a depleted British military will find the task of rotating forces every six months or so to sustain such a commitment. The temptation to humiliate us and chase us out will surely prove overwhelming.
So stand by for an escalating campaign of sniper attacks – no doubt to be attributed to local pro-Russian Ukrainian partisans – of “border skirmishes” to be blamed on UK soldiers allegedly straying a few yards out of their zone and eventually to a concerted Russian attack on our lines. Would Trumpian “air cover” turn up to defend British soldiers in such an event? Not until after the damage had been done. A US President fixated on the smooth workings of a lucrative minerals deal with Ukraine would probably be more interested in just calming things down than in piling in on the side of our beleaguered forces.
Perhaps just the idea of a British-French force waiting in the wings may help Ukraine secure better peace terms over the next few weeks. But for it then to turn into a reality would be an act of reckless folly on the part of both Starmer and President Macron. This one has disaster written all over it.
If the backslapping bonhomie of Starmer’s Washington visit is seen in retrospect as the moment that cleared the way for it to happen then that meeting will go down in history very differently from the way it has gone down in the British media on Friday morning.
What does it mean to be British?
The comic writer George Mikes, who died nearly 40 years ago, knew he had made it when he received a fan letter one day from Albert Einstein. Mikes, the scientist said to him, was blessed with ‘radiant humour… Everyone must laugh with you, even those who are hit with your little arrows.’
Chief among Mikes’s targets were the British people, whom the writer – a refugee from Hungary – had chosen to spend the greater part of his life among. He had come to the UK on a visit in 1938 and wisely, given what would happen to his country in the years that followed, decided never to leave. Though it describes an England now long vanished, his 1946 book How to be an Alien, a comic study of the country and its foibles, brought him fame and acceptance. It was published, he wrote, ‘at a moment when the English were in an introspective mood, preoccupied with themselves and their status in the world… A little foreigner came along and made fun of them but that was all right, they had always been proud of being able to laugh at themselves… My book flattered them, although I never meant it to.’ It also gave us epigrams that have since become part of the national lexicon:
- ‘An Englishman, even if he is alone, forms an orderly queue of one.’
- ‘On the Continent people have good food; in England people have good table manners.’
- ‘Continental people have sex lives; the English have hot water bottles.’
The last observation drew an indignant response from one reader when the book was reprinted a few years later. His observation, she told him huffily, was quite out of date and no longer applied to the English people at all. These days they used electric blankets.
In some ways, Mikes was typical of his generation of Magyars in London – they invariably knew each other, were in and out of one another’s flats for pálinka and goulash, and seemed to move as a pack. The men were unrepentant woman-chasers and often worked for the BBC Hungarian Service at Bush House (where, Mikes said, ‘everyone flirted with everyone else’). Barely able to speak the language on his arrival, he quickly fell in love with the Brits – their understatement, eccentricity and strange, stoic humour – and soon was the most English Hungarian of the lot. He joined the Garrick Club, played tennis at the Hurlingham and, with the Duke of Bedford, co-authored the Book of Snobs.
He also wrote in an English prose – effortless, warm and drily comic – that won him a legion of readers both here and abroad, and which can still make you laugh out loud. One of his happiest moments, he said, was finding himself next to a stranger on a London bus, both of them clutching copies of his books. ‘You read him too then?’ asked his neighbour eagerly. ‘No, sir,’ Mikes replied. ‘I write him.’
How to be an Alien was both Mikes’s blessing and lifelong curse. However many books he wrote thereafter – and he wrote a shelf-full – he would always be known for this one. But the author, who always said he was ‘damned’ with a ‘pleasant and equable nature’, accepted it: ‘Why complain? It is better to be remembered for one book than for none.’
There are plenty of others worth reading. Alien was followed by a spate of ‘How to’ books by Mikes – How to be Affluent, How to be Poor, How to be Decadent, How to be God. He wrote travel books on (among other countries) Italy, Central Europe, France, Greece and Israel. Though these were basically benign, Mikes never shied away from the skewering one-liner. On a visit to Austria, he found the Viennese ‘annoyingly over-courteous. The manners of waiters, hotel staff, shop assistants and so on have a slightly feudal flavour, implying a great deal of respect, indeed humility towards you, which appears (and is) completely phoney.’
Of Italy’s cultural treasures, Mikes had this to say: ‘The Italian picture galleries are the pride of western civilisation. It is a great pity, if you come to think of it, that they make you sick of the arts in every shape for four or five years to come.’ Comparing Italian emotion with British reserve, he observed that England was ‘the only country in the world where people discuss the eventual death of their parents with objectivity – sometimes bordering on gusto. The discussion very frequently takes place in the presence of the parents concerned.’
British national decline, he saw as the inevitable consequence of our politeness: ‘We know it was wrong to rule two-thirds of the world. Our mistake. We do apologise. We’ll never do it again… We shall try to sink lower, difficult though it is, with all our gifts. But we’ll try. We won’t give up. Sorry for being alive.’
British national decline, he saw as the inevitable consequence of our politeness
But it is when this professional humourist writes about comedy that we get the really timely insights. In his 1971 Laughing Matter, Mikes was already (even in the era of Peter Cook, Peter Sellers and Woody Allen) announcing humour’s impending death. ‘The idea that something might be seriously funny seems to be alien to young people today,’ the editor of the New Yorker complained to him, and Mikes, looking at the upheaval of the 1960s, concurred: ‘A new era is unsure of itself; and uncertainty has created pomposity and hypocrisy. Our age cannot afford to laugh at itself because it is ridiculous.’
Dwelling on the subject, he went on to tell a story from his childhood, when a friend, Tibor, had called him out for making others the butt of his savage jokes. ‘He said that one’s spiritual powers were given one to protect the weak against the unjust tyrant… making a fool of harmless and defenceless people was a worse crime than stealing.’ As a man, Mikes said, he had felt gratitude to Tibor for a long time for showing him the error of his ways. It was only when he became a professional humourist that he realised the gratitude was perhaps misplaced.
Tibor’s ‘nobility of soul,’ Mikes wrote, ‘is the cause of my pending downfall; it is [the] more or less general acceptance of his mentality that has killed Humour… In many great practitioners – from Swift through W. S. Gilbert to Evelyn Waugh – a strong streak of cruelty is noticeable and, for weaker souls like myself, disturbing.’ But, he added, ‘to deprive humour of its streak of cruelty is like depriving the elephant of its trunk, like depriving water of its wetness. It is like putting a meek, old cow, kindly disposed to the world and to all toreros, in the bullring… The ensuing spectacle is pleasanter, less bloody and less hair-raising than those provided by more spirited animals, but it is not a bullfight. And it does not quite satisfy the crowd…’
Those who make the case for woke comedy, who rail against punching down, or who work in publishing houses as sensitivity readers – that dismal non-job devoted, at its worst, to casting its own patina of mediocrity over the individual writer’s voice – should sit up here and pay attention. So should we all. It seems that in 2025, even from beyond the grave, George Mikes – that most astute and generous Boswell to the British – has something important to tell us about who we are.
Zelensky knew who he was dealing with. And he misstepped
Seldom in modern times has the fate of a whole nation been so dependent on a single meeting and on a single relationship. When Volodymyr Zelensky entered the Oval Office on Friday he had one job: to repair a deep and catastrophic rift between him and Donald Trump, who the previous week had called the Ukrainian president a ‘dictator’. Zelensky held the future of US support for his country’s defence against Russia in his hands.
But instead of a reconciliation, the meeting turned into an epochal diplomatic train wreck. So disastrous was the exchange that by the end Ukraine’s ambassador to Washington Oksana Markarova was holding her head in her hands. A planned joint Trump-Zelensky press conference was cancelled, and as Zelensky drove back to his plane for an early departure, Trump delivered the online equivalent of a kick up his departing guest’s backside with a terse message on Truth Social accusing Zelensky of being ‘not ready for peace’.
Where did it all go so wrong? First and foremost, Zelensky made the cardinal mistake of disagreeing with Trump and telling him that he was wrong. For instance, when Trump repeated his false claim that the US had provided more money to Ukraine than Europe, Zelensky corrected him three times. Was Zelensky right? Of course. Could Zelensky have been more politic? Also yes. Is it a good thing for the world that major policy decisions are apparently being taken on the basis of Trump’s personal likes and dislikes? Probably not. Yet the fast-emerging reality of Washington politics is that government by personal whim is the new normal.
Zelensky quickly discovered just how thin skinned Trump can be – and how terrible his temper is. ‘The problem is, I’ve empowered you to be a tough guy, and I don’t think you’d be a tough guy without the United States’, a visibly irritated Trump told Zelensky before wrapping up the meeting. ‘Your people are very brave. But you’re either going to make a deal or we are out’. He also accused Zelensky of ‘gambling with the lives of millions, you are gambling with World War Three. And what you are doing is very disrespectful to this country’. And his final words to Zelensky were ‘you’re not acting at all thankful and that’s not a nice thing’.
What is most surprising is that hopes were high that Zelensky would be able to exercise his famous powers of persuasion and turn Trump back into a supporter. On the day before the meeting, Trump was asked about his previous claim that Zelensky was a dictator. ‘Did I say that?’ was Trump’s smirking response. ‘I can’t believe I said that. Next question?’ A major deal that would have seen Ukraine exchange a stake in the country’s mineral resources for continued US financing was on the table, the centrepiece of a new phase in Kyiv-Washington relations. Crucially, the US had removed a controversial demand that it was owed $500 billion in exchange for the military aid provided during the war.
‘I do deals. My whole life is deals’, Trump said of the accord on Ukraine’s minerals earlier this week. ‘We’re going to be signing an agreement, which will be a very big agreement’. Transactional it may have been, but the minerals deal would at least have helped attract billions of US investment in Ukraine’s shattered mining sector and given Washington a material stake in Kyiv’s future stability and independence.
The first sign that the Trump-Zelensky meeting could go badly wrong came just seconds after their initial handshake, as Trump teased Zelensky’s trademark military clothes. ‘Oh look, you’re all dressed up!’ said Trump sarcastically. ‘He’s all dressed up today!’ But the more substantive disagreement came over whether Vladimir Putin could be trusted. ‘I think once this [peace] deal gets done, it’s over’, said Trump. ‘Russia is not going to want to go back, and nobody’s going to want to go back’. Zelensky objected that Putin had broken ceasefires and agreements with other countries 25 times, and flatly announced that ‘we will never accept just a ceasefire’ and insisted that no peace deal would work ‘without security guarantees’ from the US.
Reasonable points, doubtless. But reason is not among the primary currencies of the Trump White House. Zelensky, who has for three years achieved regular diplomatic miracles in persuading, cajoling and inspiring western leaders and electorates to give billions in aid, has finally and fatally misstepped. He may have right on his side. But when it comes to dealing with Trump the only formula for success is – as demonstrated over the last few days by both Emmanuel Macron and Sir Keir Starmer – apparently flattery and abject agreement. Zelensky perhaps went into the meeting intending to play that very game. But Trump’s proposals to trust Putin’s word, force Ukraine to pay back aid money and accept whatever peace deal Washington chose to strike, proved too much for Zelensky to bear. The result was righteous indignation – and a collapse in relations. But the price will be paid by ordinary Ukrainians who face the prospect of fighting on without the support of their wealthiest and most powerful sometime ally.
Zelensky made a fatal mistake in going toe-to-toe with Trump
What possessed the Ukrainian leader, Volodymyr Zelensky, to go toe-to-toe with Donald Trump in a verbal wresting match in the White House? It makes almost no sense as a diplomatic strategy. It is well documented that the US president, notoriously thin-skinned and egotistical, likes to be showered with compliments and treated as an all-knowing, all-seeing master of the political universe. All that Zelensky was required to do was behave in a simpering manner while the cameras were rolling, before moving on to the substantive negotiations behind the scenes.
Indeed, only 24 hours earlier, Sir Keir Starmer provided a useful primer on how to go about pandering to Trump in order to get what you want. It’s dirty work, but that’s what leaders have to do. Yet, in an act of pique, Zelensky decided to tackle Trump head-on. It was something of an unequal fight in every way. English is not the Ukrainian leader’s first language (some might say the same about Trump) so he was on the back foot from the start, and Trump doesn’t let anyone get a word in edgeways when he is in full flow. Secondly, Trump had in his corner vice president JD Vance, who was ready and willing to step in and give Zelensky a verbal bashing whenever Trump did pause for breath. The television cameras caught the ugly spat between the leaders in all its goriness.
Trump repeatedly told Zelensky that he was “gambling with the lives of millions, with the third world war”, and told him to stop holding out for further security guarantees, saying “you’re either going to make a deal or we’re out”.
‼️A heated back and forth between @ZelenskyyUa, @POTUS, and @VP now in the Oval. pic.twitter.com/j1YCy4Jm3K
— Misha Komadovsky (@komadovsky) February 28, 2025
This is the kind of statement an all-powerful American president might make to a recalcitrant ally behind the scenes – yet here it all played out in public in front of the world’s television cameras. The pair repeatedly clashed over their view of Russia and the negotiations, as well as the extent of European support for Ukraine.
In equally bizarre scenes, JD Vance accused Zelensky of not thanking the United States for its support. He claimed that “words of appreciation for the US and the president who is trying to save your country” had been absent. At one point, Zelensky appeared to accuse Vance of “shouting”, only for Trump to interrupt and say that Vance was doing no such thing. It was real playground stuff featuring three toddlers – hurt glances all round and simmering resentment on open display. And all taking place in the grand setting of the Oval Office.
What then is the end result of this unseemly spat? Zelensky left the White House much earlier than planned, and Trump didn’t bother to see him out. It has been reported on CNN that it was Trump’s decision to conclude the talks after the exchanges in the Oval Office. The Ukrainian delegation apparently wanted to continue but they were refused. Plans to sign an important deal on minerals were also abandoned. Zelensky was due to speak at the conservative Hudson Institute; that too has now been cancelled.
In a social media update, Trump said that Zelensky “is not ready for peace if America is involved, because he feels our involvement gives him a big advantage in negotiations”. He said the Ukrainian leader “disrespected the United States of America in its cherished Oval Office.” For his part, Zelensky posted an update on social media, pointedly and repeatedly thanking the US for its support.
European leaders have been swift to show their support for Zelensky after his White House ordeal. “Ukraine, Spain stands with you,” declared the Spanish prime minister, Pedro Sanchez. President Emmanuel Macron of France backed Ukraine over “aggressor” Russia. And Poland’s leader, Donald Tusk, reassured Ukraine that it was not alone.
This is all well and good but, ultimately, words are cheap. Ukraine needs American support above all else. Zelensky has put that needlessly at risk with his behaviour in the White House. Ukraine’s leader put his his vanity and pride before the wider interests of his country in reacting the way he did to Trump’s remarks and behaviour. In effect, he lost his cool when it mattered most. No one wins a slanging match with Donald Trump, least of all someone who needs his help. The road ahead looks distinctly uncertain for Ukraine and Europe. Russia’s Vladimir Putin is the only winner after the unseemly scenes in the White House.
Zelensky’s White House visit turns sour
Keir Starmer will have been pleased on Thursday after his meetings with Donald Trump managed to avoid any major gaffe or diplomatic incident. There was some relief when Trump chose not to repeat his past comment that Volodymyr Zelensky was a dictator. However, the same cannot be said of Friday’s meeting between Zelensky and the US president. Trump met the Ukrainian president at the door of the White House where he gave reporters a thumbs up ahead of his arrival. However, the mood quickly turned sour when they sat down for initial remarks ahead of talks and a press conference where the pair were expected to sign a US-proposed minerals deal with Ukraine.
Sat in the Oval office, Trump was accompanied by key members of his team including JD Vance and Marco Rubio. The mood music was initially positive as Trump said it would be ‘great’ if he and Zelensky can stop the war between Russia and Ukraine. The exchanges – which spanned 53 minutes – started off constructively with Trump praising Ukraine and Vance stating that Russia had ‘destroyed’ Ukraine. Zelensky in turn spoke about the important role America could play and spoke of how powerful the US was. He shared photos with the president of Ukrainian suffering which led Trump to say it showed how important it was to end the conflict.
Zelensky said that there should be ‘no compromises’ with Vladimir Putin when it comes to a ‘peace’ deal. Trump went on to tell the assembled press pack that Nato and Europe need to ‘step up’ and not rush to talk about security when a deal still needed to be done. However, the mood then began to become rather hostile as Vance took issue with Zelensky’s attitude and tone – eventually accusing him of being ‘disrespectful’.
‼️A heated back and forth between @ZelenskyyUa, @POTUS, and @VP now in the Oval. pic.twitter.com/j1YCy4Jm3K
— Misha Komadovsky (@komadovsky) February 28, 2025
This then led to a tense exchange of words between Zelensky, Vance and Trump. Trump accused the Ukrainian leader of ‘gambling with World War Three’ – and suggested he ought to be ‘thankful’. The US president went on to say that Zelensky does not have the ‘cards’ right now adding that the exchange is ‘going to make great television’. Trump added that it would be ‘very hard’ to do business like this. Reporters quote Vance – who has long been sceptical of US funding to Ukraine – of accusing Zelensky of ‘litigating in front of the American media’ – suggesting his comments were ‘disrespectful’: ‘Have you said thank you once?’
The quite extraordinary exchange points to trouble ahead. Rather than head into private discussions and take part in a press conference, Zelensky’s visit was cut short. Trump has now said he is unsure he can end the conflict – pointing the finger of blame at Zelensky. While Starmer and Emmanuel Macron both had civil meetings with Trump, little was secure in terms of security commitments. If Zelensky’s White House visit turns into a nightmare, European leaders will soon face some tough decisions about their next move. On Sunday, European leaders will gather with Starmer to discuss their next steps. Judging by today’s display, they may have unappetising choices ahead of them.