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It’s hard to beat a drawn Test series
‘You can always tell a proper lover of cricket’, Michael Kennedy, the great music critic, liked to say. ‘It’s whether they can appreciate a draw.’ A hit, a palpable hit. By concluding a magnificent Test series at two matches each, after India’s victory in the fifth game at the Oval, even England’s disappointed players may nod in agreement. They fell seven runs short, but nobody lost. Everybody who took part in this contest of equals should feel proud.
‘Proper’ cricket-lovers will have no doubt, for this contest was one for the annals. All five matches went into the fifth day, and India eventually prevailed by the tightest winning margin in their history after Mohammed Siraj, their leonine fast bowler, took his fifth wicket, and ninth in the match.
England did jolly well to get within two hits of victory. They went into the game without Ben Stokes, their captain and navigator, and they lost Chris Woakes, one of their four pace bowlers, to a dislocated left shoulder during India’s first innings.
Woakes appeared to a standing ovation on the fall of England’s ninth wicket, with 17 runs needed. When Gus Atkinson slogged Siraj for six, England supporters in a house thronged by Indian fans began to think of an improbable climax. But he had to do it by himself, for Woakes did not trust himself to face a ball. Siraj eventually pierced Atkinson’s defences with a superb yorker, which sent India’s followers howling with joy.
A drawn series, with honour bright on both sides, may confound those brought up on the froth and bubble of instant gratification. That is the way of much modern cricket, too, which the Indians have colonised with their Premier League format – games of 20 overs a side between highly-paid franchises, which resemble the real game as closely as bubblegum pop sounds like the Missa Solemnis.
Full marks then to this Indian team, led by their new captain Shubman Gill, who have shown beyond argument that Test cricket remains the true currency. Gill made 754 runs, 430 of them in the second Test at Birmingham, where India levelled the series after England had won the opening Test at Leeds.
England took the third Test at Lord’s, thanks mainly to a remarkable example of leadership by Stokes, who bowled himself into the ground. He had another go in the fourth Test at Manchester, where a flat pitch confounded him. That and some sloppy catching, not to mention two fine centuries in a lengthy rearguard action by Ravi Jadeja and Washington Sundar.
Everywhere you looked there were outstanding performances. Two of the finest came on the fourth day at the Oval when England, needing 374, were sustained by Joe Root and Harry Brook, who made the kind of centuries we have come to take for granted. It was Root’s third ton in successive matches, and there were 18 other individual scores of more than 100 between the two sides. To quote Larkin, ‘I choke on such nutritious images’.
A drawn series, with honour bright on both sides, may confound those brought up on the froth and bubble of instant gratification
India’s players were also in the wars. Rishabh Pant, their cavalier wicketkeeper, who clobbered centuries in both innings at Leeds, sustained a broken bone in his right foot at Manchester, where he hobbled out to bat as a wounded warrior to the kind of reception Woakes got at the Oval. There was courage in abundance, as well as high skill.
There was also spice. At Lord’s, where Gill twice received an on-field massage that irritated the England players, the Indian captain responded by turning on Zac Crawley, who wasted time shamefully when England came out to bat. ‘Grow some balls’, he told the opening batsman. We’ve come a long way from Wellington and the Corsican bandit.
Throughout the series there was a lot of snarling, and the kind of pouting more commonly displayed by tarts in Old Compton Street. But the players came together when the curtain was finally lowered. They knew they had given everything to the cause, and that cause, as Arnold Bennett wrote of Denry Machin in The Card, is cheering us all up.
A great series of cricket ends with the teams standing on level ground, as they did on the first morning of the first Test, on 20 June. There have been casualties along the way. Poor Woakes will probably never play Test cricket again, and Stokes’s fitness remains a matter for concern ahead of the tour of Australia, which begins in November.
The Tests were shoehorned into seven weeks because August has been cleared for the ghastly whack-it competition called The Hundred, which the England Cricket Board introduced five years ago to provide funds for the coffers. They’ve got the money now, thanks to the Indian franchises who seek global domination, but nobody who watches a game in the next month will remember a single ball.
We shall recall the Test series that has just ended, though. It was a cracker. And two Tests each was just right, as all proper cricket-lovers will confirm.
The Daughter of Time was worth the wait
That it has taken its sweet time getting here cannot be denied, but, at last, it has happened. More than 70 years after the novel by Josephine Tey became an overnight sensation in 1951, a stage adaptation of The Daughter of Time has arrived in the West End.
Voted the greatest crime novel of all time by the Crime Writers’ Association back in 1990, The Daughter of Time is Tey’s most unusual but brilliant detective story. It’s her most unusual because its sees her Inspector Alan Grant – the central character in five of her detective stories – solving a crime from his hospital bed while recovering from a broken leg. And it’s arguably her most brilliant because the crime he solves is one of British history’s coldest and most high-profile cases – who murdered the Princes in the Tower in 1483.
Yet while it’s a brilliant book, because most of the action happens either inside Grant’s head or in his hospital room, it has probably been judged undramatisable – until now. Playing at the Charing Cross Theatre just off Villiers Street, American playwright M. Kilburg Reedy’s stage adaption takes Tey’s classic and serves it up with a leavening Shakespearian twist. And what a historical tour de force it is. If you don’t know your 15th-century history or House of York genealogy, you certainly will do after an evening here (the programme helpfully includes a family tree).
We begin with Grant, who believes he can discern an individual’s character through their face, so when his friend – glamorous actress Marta Hallard (played to the nines by Rachel Pickup) – brings him a selection of historical pictures to peruse, he becomes obsessed by the portrait of Richard III. This man doesn’t resemble the devious hunchback of history who schemed his way to the throne and then had his nephews murdered in the Tower of London. If anything he looks cautious, thinks Grant (played with great bravura by Rob Pomfret) – sober, decent, more suited to the bench than the dock.
So, since he’s a detective and has nothing better to do, Grant embarks on a police-style investigation – complete with a board, map and pinned-up photographs of key individuals all connected with string – where with assistance from his sergeant (the excellent Sanya Adegbola) and a young lovelorn American named Brent Carradine (played by Harrison Sharpe, who nearly walks off with the show) he examines the contemporary and near-contemporary evidence for what really happened to the sons of Edward IV – namely Edward V and his brother Richard, Duke of York.
What Grant discovers doesn’t match up with what the traditional history and Tudor propagandists would have us believe. Chief among those propagandists was, of course, William Shakespeare. His history play Richard III was written in the early 1590s and was required to align with the sentiments of Elizabeth I, granddaughter of the man who defeated Richard III at Bosworth Field in 1485 – Henry Tudor. Rarely in the history of drama (probably not until Alan Rickman gave us Hans Gruber in Die Hard, anyway) has such a delicious, vile but downright charismatic villain ever been conceived as the Bard’s ‘poisonous bunch-backed toad’.
While it’s a brilliant book, because most of the action happens either inside Inspector Grant’s head or in his hospital room, it has probably been judged undramatisable – until now
The problem is that the play Shakespeare wrote was mostly rubbish, based on a fishy narrative written by Thomas More in the 1510s. What Tey’s book did so expertly was to take Thomas More’s version and tear it to pieces, largely by drawing on records and evidence that was much closer to the events described than More ever was. In Reedy’s stage play, the same meticulous dissection takes place; so what we get is a journey through historical evidence that exposes the inconsistencies and omissions of the sources and the evidence upon which Shakespeare concocted his version of Richard III. And it’s a historical romp – one delivered with all the impassion vim of Simon Schama after his second round of Weetabix.
Of course, since it’s a dramatisation there are deviations from the original. First, Reedy has taken the implied romance between Grant and Marta Hallard from the book and turned it into a full-blown subplot, one which turns – irony of ironies – on an act of deception that could have graced the pages of a Shakespeare comedy. This however fits remarkably neatly with another change introduced by Reedy, which is to use a Shakespearian actor, Simon Templeton (played brilliantly by Noah Huntley), to give voice to the Tudor ‘case’ against Richard III.
And it works. While Tey’s original dialogue is flawless – and Reedy used as much of it as she could, she says – there is so much more to the play, and many more laughs than one would have expected too (thanks not least to the nurses played by Hafsa Abbasi and Janna Fox).
For fans of the book, the most significant change to the story comes in the selection of the killer of the young princes. Drawing on original sources, the playwright has come to a different conclusion – but it’s one which I think holds just as much water as Tey’s prime suspect. It certainly works in the context of the play, even if there are many people around now who believe (based on sound evidence by the way) that both princes actually survived the reign of Richard III and didn’t die at all in 1483.
What would Tey have made of the playwright’s handiwork? I’m not sure she would have approved of the romantic subplot, since she never chose to marry Grant off herself and she could have done in his last outing (The Singing Sands of 1952), published posthumously. But – and it’s an important but – the rest of it, I think, is spot on. At the heart of her book is the very probable innocence of Richard III and the concomitant calumny done against him ever since, something this lively play brings indisputably to life. ‘Truth is the daughter of time, not authority,’ is the Francis Bacon quote that inspired the title. Time will tell if this is the play that finally gets Richard III off the historical naughty step.
The Daughter of Time is at the Charing Cross Theatre until 13 September.
Kate Forbes showed real bravery
There is a certain worldly cynicism aroused by the announcement that a politician is stepping down to spend more time with their family. It was for a long time the refuge of MPs who had earned themselves an entry in the News of the World, the Who’s Who of romeos, rogues and reprobates, for their activities with ladies – or young gentlemen – of the night. Less commonly, it was regarded as an admission that someone could not hack it or was frustrated by their slow progress up the greasy pole. After all, no one wants to quit politics.
Contra the cynics, Kate Forbes. Scotland’s deputy first minister will stand down from Holyrood at next May’s elections, having somehow crammed a whole political life into ten tempestuous years. In that time, she has been a backbencher, public finance minister, finance secretary, leadership candidate, backbencher again, and finally deputy first minister and economy secretary. In her letter to first minister John Swinney, she acknowledges that ‘quite rightly this job entails long days far from home’ but ‘I do not wish to seek re-election and miss any more of the precious early years of family life’. Forbes married her husband Alasdair, a widower, in 2021 and became stepmum to his three daughters. The following year the couple had a daughter, who is turning three. (Some men go to war, others jump out of planes, but living with five women is true bravery.)
Forbes was never meant to get where she did. Upon her election to the Scottish parliament in 2016, her religious views were known and they marked her as an apostate in an era of secular progressivism. A member of the Free Presbyterian Church, Forbes’s religion is not an identity category but a living faith. She believes in it all: birth, death, resurrection and salvation. The happy-clappy bits and the fire and brimstone alike. There was little chance of her progressing beyond the outer ministry in the modern, uber-liberal SNP, and she had to settle for a junior ministerial post in the Scottish government’s finance department.
Unfortunately for the party leadership, events overtook. The night before the 2020 budget speech, finance secretary Derek Mackay was forced to quit after a newspaper learned of his text messages to a 16 year old. Forbes, who had been allowed no real input into the budget, was thrust onto the floor of Holyrood to deliver – and be interrogated on – a speech she had only been handed hours before. She did so with such confidence and composure that even the SNP’s most loyal critics commended her. That performance made her promotion to the cabinet finance post inevitable, though some more glumly considered it unavoidable.
By the time Nicola Sturgeon resigned in February 2023, Forbes had established herself as a moderate, pro-business Nationalist who wanted the Scottish government to focus on prosperity rather than gender ideology, an agenda she opposed. Yet the prospect of the party moving to the centre, and especially of it being led by an evangelical Christian, prompted the SNP establishment to throw its weight behind Humza Yousaf, who was well-meaning but plainly not up to running a devolved government. In a straight fight, he would have been no match for Forbes, but instead the leadership contest was shaped by her internal enemies and the media into an inquisition on her religious beliefs.
Journalists well-laden with secular prejudices delighted in making her answer for those verses of Scripture which scandalise modern sensibilities. To her credit as a Christian, but disastrously for a politician, she refused to lie or be evasive about her beliefs. When they asked her views on abortion, she told the truth. When they enquired as to her thinking about gay marriage, she did the same again. When they tried to corner her on trans rights, she was honest and took the punishment that came with it. Compelled to bear witness, she did so with her head held high, fighting the good fight and keeping the faith. It is one of the most personally admirable and politically suicidal decisions I have ever seen.
In the end, she lost, though only narrowly, and was vindicated when her opponent swiftly proved as unequal to the challenges of office as she had warned. He inflicted so much damage with a programme of Continuity Sturgeon progressivism that, just 14 months later, his successor was drafting in Forbes as deputy head of the government to repair relations with the business sector, steer economic policy back to growth, and serve as the symbol of a new pragmatism.
Despite our fundamental disagreements, I rate Forbes as a politician and a public official and said so regularly on Coffee House and elsewhere. This did nothing for her reputation among Nationalists. In fact, I know that it was used against her, and I’m sorry for that. Some regarded with bemusement, others horror, the sight of a gay Catholic Unionist simping for a Wee Free separatist, but the simping was not for Forbes so much as for the fleeting possibility that a leader of her calibre could get her hands on the controls. In a way, I should be relieved that she was sabotaged by the liberal bigots in her own party. If she had been half the first minister I reckon she might have been, she could have broadened the SNP’s electoral coalition to the point at which independence became the consensus view across the electorate. She was a very dangerous woman for a time there, and might be again if she were to return after her children have grown up.
She was a very dangerous woman for a time
The cynics will reassert themselves in the coming days, pronouncing that Forbes has seen the writing on the wall, that the SNP is finished, that she is hinting at her lack of faith in Swinney, that she had risen as high as she would be allowed to in a party thoroughly in the grips of identity politics progressives. Or, and I will tread lightly here, perhaps she truly values motherhood above career, one of the few remaining mortal sins in a non-judgemental age. Her fellow Nationalist Gail Ross did the same in 2021, admitting that five days a week away from her son was just too much. Not coincidentally, she too was a Highlands MSP, where constituencies rival small countries for square mileage. Labour’s Jenny Marra, a considerable talent, walked away after ten years darting up and down the vast North East Scotland region. Family had to come first.
Anglo culture is hardly alone in associating labour with fortitude and moral uprightness, but it is noticeably unforgiving of those who opt out in favour of raising children. Try to balance work and family but say you find it impossible, and you can expect to be chastised for failing at something so many parents do. The resentment is not for admitting you cannot manage but for forcing others to reconsider how well they are managing. I have sat in many a newsroom well into the evening, hearing bedtime stories read over the phone by loving parents who were wanted at home, and wanted to be there, but who were working late to give their children the best start in life. I’m not a parent, and maybe it’s not my place to comment, but I know too many people whose fathers and mothers worked those hours, provided abundantly for their offspring, but now have no relationship with them. Their material needs were more than met but at the expense of other, deeper needs.
No doubt Kate Forbes has made the right decision for her family but I can’t help but wonder how many more families would have benefited from her making it to Bute House. Yes, she’s hopelessly wrong about the constitution, but there’s more to politics than policy. There’s talent and character and leadership. We will have to settle for much less.
Bonnie Blue and the menace of ‘para-porn’
There are two proper responses to pornography it: to condemn it, and to ignore it. There are two other responses. One is to use it. It doesn’t bother me too much if some men are enriching internet prostitutes while debasing themselves, as long as everyone shuts up about it. It’s the final possible response to porn that concerns me: giving it air-time.
Para-porn takes very different forms. One form of it is the reality show that’s all about casual sex
Lots of media activity claims to be reflecting on porn in a thoughtful way, but is actually promoting it. News stories about porn, and documentaries about porn, and interviews with porn stars are not healthy reflections on a serious issue. They are the servants of porn. And this is the real problem of our day: not porn itself but para-porn. It spreads the menace of porn, brings it into the mainstream.
Of course this is typified by last week’s Channel 4 documentary about Bonnie Blue. But it goes far wider. The week before, Janice Turner helped to publicise the documentary by interviewing Ms Blue for the Times. The tone of course was neutral, knowing, a bit disapproving in a calm, witty, above-it-all way. That’s not the right approach to porn. The right approach, as I have said, is either to ignore it or to condemn it strongly.
The enlightened media person of our day prides herself (it’s almost always a her) on being so liberated and independent-minded that she can discuss porn without hang-ups, without judgement. But neutrality, in relation to porn, is complicity. If you report on it, reserving judgement, you serve it. It is a strong force – a strong god I almost said. But maybe seeing it as a sort of demon is more enlightened than the normal secular view. It subtly subverts neutrality to its own ends.
Para-porn takes very different forms. One form of it is the reality show that’s all about casual sex, whether swinging or watching virgins get laid. These programmes are obviously titillating in a porn-adjacent way, thought they have the nerve to present themselves as therapeutic.
But in a sense the most insidious form of para-porn takes the form of journalistic hand-wringing. As I wrote earlier this year, Newsnight was guilty of this when it interviewed the other internet prostitute of our day, Lily Phillips. Victoria Derbyshire did a sort of kind-mum-of-a-difficult-teen act, wondering whether poor Lily had herself been damaged by exposure to internet porn. She should have represented the average viewer by saying, ‘What you do is utterly foul, why aren’t you ashamed?’
Unless there is explicit condemnation, there is complicity. Turner and Derbyshire are doubtless very decent people, and it might seem over-the-top to suggest that they are in any way complicit in the porn industry. Surely they are just doing their best to report and reflect on a tricky issue? But this is not a normal topic or issue. If there is not condemnation, there is complicity.
Journalists attempting neutrality are either cynical morons, like the makers of that documentary and the commissioners at Channel 4, or out of their depth.
Truss takes a pop at Badenoch over Tory record
Uh oh. As if Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch didn’t have enough on her plate with the rise of Reform eating into the Tory vote, now one of her predecessors has taken a pop at her. Liz Truss has taken to the august pages of the Telegraph to attack Badenoch, accusing the Leader of the Opposition of being ‘not willing to tell the truth to her own supporters’. The gloves are coming off…
Truss’s scathing remarks follow a piece in the same newspaper by Badenoch, in which the Conservative leader said that Keir Starmer’s Labour government was failing to learn from the mini-Budget that led to Truss’s downfall. In an attempt to push back on Labour’s narrative that the country’s economic woes are the fault of the Tories, Badenoch wrote:
For all their mocking of Liz Truss, Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves have not learnt the lessons of the mini-budget and are making even bigger mistakes. They continue to borrow more and more, unable and unwilling to make the spending cuts needed to balance the books.
But Truss was left rather unimpressed by the comparison, with the former Prime Minister and her allies convinced that her low-tax vision was the right thing for the country. In her latest piece, Truss wrote: ‘She is wrong. Labour is doing the opposite of the mini-budget, which is why the country is headed for disaster.’ Shots fired! She went on, describing how her previous policies put her in line with the thinking of US President Donald Trump, before lamenting:
It is disappointing that, instead of serious thinking like this, Kemi Badenoch is instead repeating spurious narratives. I suspect she is doing this to divert from the real failures of 14 years of Conservative government in which her supporters are particularly implicated.
Ouch! Will Badenoch bite back? Stay tuned…
Edinburgh Fringe venue under fire over mixed-sex toilets
While the Supreme Court in April backed the biological definition of a woman, it would appear that in Scotland the ruling hasn’t yet been taken into account. Women’s rights campaigners have taken aim at an Edinburgh Fringe venue – Underbelly Bistro Square – for allowing biological men to use women’s toilets. Dear oh dear…
The venue has been accused of breaking the law, after it added a disclaimer below the female bathroom sign – which told attendees to ‘use whichever toilet best fits your identity or expression’. While the men’s toilets featured a similar note, the cubicles themselves were reportedly still labelled ‘gents’. This is despite the Supreme Court ruling prompting new guidance from the Equality and Human Rights Commission, which says that although it is not compulsory for public services to have single-sex facilities, it could be indirect discrimination against women if the only toilets available are mixed sex.
The landmark case was brought to the Supreme Court by women’s rights campaign group For Women Scotland – after its argument (that the definition of women in the Equality Act referred to biological sex) was rejected by two Scottish courts. Susan Smith of the organisation told the Telegraph about the latest Fringe furore: ‘This is plainly unlawful. You can’t have a sign like that. You can either have a mixed sex space or a single sex space. It’s not possible to have both at the same time. It’s either one or the other.’ Helen Joyce of charity Sex Matters added: ‘Organisations that fail to get this right risk enabling sexual harassment and ultimately being sued.’ Oo er.
Will Underbelly push back? Stay tuned…
Kate Forbes’s exit is proof the SNP has lost its way
In little over a week, the Scottish National Party (SNP) has lost two of its greatest political stars. Mhairi Black, the left-wing MP for Paisley and Renfrewshire South, threw in the towel last week, citing the ‘toxicity’ of politics and the party’s lack of support for transgender rights. Now, the deputy leader of the SNP, Kate Forbes – regarded as a social conservative – has stepped down to spend more time with her family. The trickle of nationalist departures risks turning into a flood.
Forbes’s departure is the greater shock. Many regarded the 35-year-old MSP for Skye, Lochaber and Badenoch as the leading leadership challenger from the right of the party. As the SNP’s first female Finance Secretary, she championed a return to pro-business economics and strongly defended the oil and gas industry. Her statement today that she doesn’t want to miss ‘the precious early years of family life’ – she has a three-year-old daughter – came as a complete surprise.
The loss of two high-profile women only adds to the sense that the SNP has lost direction
Mhairi Black, on the other hand, had long expressed her disillusionment with Westminster politics and had made it clear last year that she was standing down as an MP. However, her many supporters on the left of the SNP hoped she might seek a political future in Holyrood. Instead, she announced on 25 July that she was quitting the SNP for good.
Black was highly regarded as an articulate and dynamic champion of the youth vote. When she was elected to Paisley and Renfrewshire South in 2015, defeating the Labour cabinet minister Douglas Alexander, she became the youngest MP to be elected since 1832 at 20 years old. Black went on to become deputy leader of the SNP in Westminster and, with a prominent media profile, including a show at the Edinburgh Festival, was seen by many as the future of Scottish nationalism.
But last week, she cited the SNP leadership’s ‘capitulations on LGBT rights, trans rights in particular’ as the reason she could no longer remain a party member. She also criticised the SNP leader, John Swinney, for equivocating on the issue of Palestinian ‘genocide’. There is little doubt that Black regarded Kate Forbes as a leading figure in those ‘capitulations’.
The deputy leader made clear that she ‘unequivocally’ supported ‘single-sex spaces and women’s rights’, and Forbes openly praised the gender-critical author J.K. Rowling as a ‘national treasure’. A committed Christian and member of an evangelical sect, Forbes also said she personally did not support abortion, although she accepted that it was the law of the land. She admitted that she would have voted against same-sex marriage had she been in Holyrood when the matter was debated in 2012.
Black argued that the SNP could not remain a party of young people while clinging to such policies. Centrists may argue that the departures of these two controversial figures, in a sense, cancel each other out, allowing the party to stabilise behind John Swinney, the ultimate centrist dad. But this development will only further demoralise the party as it seeks to avoid defeat in next year’s Holyrood election and has barely recovered from its drubbing in last year’s general election when it lost 38 seats.
The loss of two high-profile women only adds to the sense that the SNP has lost direction since the equally sudden departure of former first minister Nicola Sturgeon in February 2023. Of course, many will blame the difficulties that women face in politics, though neither Sturgeon nor Mhairi Black had young children to look after. The attrition rate for female politicians in Scotland is high. The former women leaders of the Scottish Labour party, Kezia Dugdale, and the Scottish Conservatives, Ruth Davidson, also left politics at short notice.
However, as far as the SNP is concerned, it is probably more a consequence of the failure of nationalist politics than of personal issues or misogyny. Kate Forbes stood for the party leadership as recently as 2023 and lost narrowly to Humza Yousaf, who is himself standing down at next year’s Holyrood elections. The former SNP minister, Fergus Ewing, who left the party last month, has said: ‘With Alex Salmond’s passing last year, the SNP lost the best leader it ever had; with Kate’s decision, the SNP has lost the best leader it never had.’ The SNP has haemorrhaged electoral support since the departure of Nicola Sturgeon and is now polling in the low 30s.
The current leader, John Swinney, has been heavily criticised for his lacklustre leadership and his failure to translate support for independence, which is running at over 50 per cent in many recent opinion polls, into support for the party of independence. This latest shock will only increase murmurs of discontent about Swinney’s leadership. The main beneficiary is likely to be the party’s Westminster leader, Stephen Flynn, who is beginning to look like a shoo-in for SNP leader if and when John Swinney takes the long walk.
Why the world is obsessed with white women
Until a couple of weeks ago, the clothing company American Eagle was mainly known as a kind of low-rent Levi’s. Founded in 1977, headquartered in Pennsylvania, the firm – specialising in denim, casualwear and kids’ clothes – has quietly expanded into Europe, and beyond, without ever generating much excitement. Let alone a worldwide culture war.
Why has much of the world desired paler, whiter women?
All that changed in July, when the company launched a new ad campaign featuring the petite, sassy, curvaceously ubiquitous actress Sydney Sweeney – very much This Year’s Blonde – draping her desirable shape in the company’s clothes. Several ads have been made, they all feature variations on the line ‘Sydney Sweeney has great jeans.’ A clear pun on genes.
The result, whether intended or not, has been online uproar. Entire data centres have been devoted to churning out TikTok reels and YouTube mewls where women – and it is nearly all women – complain about the ad blitz, denouncing its connotations of white supremacy, of eugenics, of Nazi racist hierarchy – and of enforcing 19th century imperialist ideals of European beauty. All the more since Sweeney has been identified as a registered Republican in Florida. Some of the women complaining are white liberals, many are Asian or black (often in tears of fury or distress).
Sydney Sweeney, of course, is notably young, blonde, blue eyed – and white.
And there, I fancy, is the rub. What we are witnessing is not peculiarly or entirely a modern kulturkampf against renewed colonialist discourse. What we are witnessing is, as well, the age-old and rather awkward fact that pale/white women are perceived by almost all humanity as more desirable, and have been for all of recorded history. And this evokes – understandably – resentment, envy, anger, even rage, and now tearful TikToks, in others.
Don’t believe me? Think I’m trolling? Let me run you, like a blonde girl dancing through harvest corn in a retro cereal ad, by the plentiful evidence.
As long ago as 3000 BC Egyptian art shows high class women (or deities) as being desirably paler than males. This can be found on tiny faience figurines and enormous funereal paintings, and it persists for 30 centuries. Egyptian love poems also praise the pale skin of mortal sweethearts – the earliest written evidence for the preference. Again, this poetic trope lasted for millennia.
Moving on to Greece and Rome, we find the same pattern. Upper class Greek women were so keen to enhance their whiteness they used toxic white lead as face paint (a phenomenon which recurs throughout history – think of England’s white virgin Queen, Gloriana).
The concept – white women best – was amplified in Imperial Rome. The poet Ovid explicitly mentions it in his work Medicamina Faciei Femineae. Like the Greeks (and so many others) high-status Roman women used dangerous cosmetics – cerussa –to preserve the wanted pallor. Cleopatra bathed in asses’ milk to accentuate the milkiness of her skin.
Nor is this exclusively a European and Middle Eastern phenomenon. In Ancient Han and Tang China, the preference for white skinned women was deeply ingrained. The legendary beauty Wang Zhaojun was famed for her ‘pale skin’. Chinese women even drank ‘pearl powder’ to achieve a pearly whiteness.
Further east, in Heian Japan, the yearning for whiteness was easily as marked, with porcelain pale skin seen as the acme of loveliness (think of white painted geishas, even today). An enduring Japanese proverb says ‘white skin covers the seven flaws’ implying that white skin is such an erotic prize, it can compensate for other physical or social disadvantages.
One of the most notable examples of this socio-cultural phenomenon can be found – perhaps ironically – in Islam. Many know that dead jihadi warriors are promised ‘72 virgins in paradise’, fewer realise that the Quran and various hadiths promise, overtly, that these wonderful virgins will be white: fragrant ‘houris’ with skin so translucent you can ‘see the marrow in the bones’.
This urgent preference for white-skinned women runs throughout Islamic history. Early Islamic warriors were fired up for battle against Byzantium with the promise of ‘the white girls’ they would find as booty within Byzantine cities. Over following centuries Muslim emirates, kingdoms and empires made plain their wants via the slave trade, where white women – especially blondes – fetched far higher prices in the slave markets of Constantinople.
Some historians have argued that the southwards Viking slave trade through Russia existed primarily to sate this imperious Muslim hunger for white skinned blue-eyed blondes, fetched from the British Isles, northern Europe, and Slavic countries. Circassian girls from the Caucasus mountains – famed for their soulful whiteness – were exported throughout the Islamic world, and this trade continued into the early 20th century.
The case is made, but not explained. Why has much of the world desired paler, whiter women? The obvious answer is that, through most of history, darker skin has denoted outdoors toil, farmwork, poverty. The ability to avoid this and stay indoors, or under a parasol, soon became associated with high status and elite women, and thus a sun-less pallor became a near-universal preference.
There are also some highly contentious evolutionary explanations. Women of all ancestries tend to be paler than men, paleness therefore equals femininity, ergo ‘the more paleness the better.’ There is also some evidence that female skin darkens as women age, so whiteness or paleness perhaps equates to youth, fertility, nubility. And desirability.
None of this denies that European colonisers – in the 19th century – imposed grotesque, racist European ideals of beauty across the world. Nor does this deny the real harm that rigid beauty standards can inflict. When young women of colour grow up seeing only pale-skinned models celebrated in media, when skin-lightening creams cause genuine physical damage across Africa and Asia – these things are immoral or unjust. But the truth is, ‘white woman equals beautiful woman’ is a concept so deeply rooted in human culture, right back to the Sumerians, it is probably ineradicable.
Will any of this matter to Sydney Sweeney and American Eagle? Maybe they will be intrigued that their ad campaign is perpetuating a stereotype that dates back to an early Egyptian poet near Luxor, who praised his lover’s ‘brilliantly white, shining skin’. They will probably be more excited by the fact that, as I write, American Eagle’s stock price has risen 10 per cent.
Why Kate Forbes is standing down
A year is a long time in politics. Just over 12 months ago, Kate Forbes MSP was made Deputy First Minister of Scotland when John Swinney took the reins from Humza Yousaf. This morning, with less than a year to go until the 2026 Holyrood election – and after the SNP had finalised its candidate list – Forbes has announced she no longer plans to stand at the Scottish parliament election.
While Forbes has claimed her turnaround is down to family reasons, others aren’t convinced
In a letter she has shared on social media, the Cabinet Secretary for Economy and Gaelic has informed Swinney that ‘after careful thought over the summer recess’ she will not stand again for the Highland constituency of Skye, Lochaber and Badenoch. Forbes, who has a two-year-old, added that:
Quite rightly this job entails long days far from home, constant attention and total dedication. As I consider the upcoming election and the prospects of another term, I have concluded that I do not wish to seek re-election and miss any more of the precious early years of family life.
Forbes’s announcement is significant: she ran for the leadership contest after Nicola Sturgeon stepped down in early 2023, and while she came a close second to continuity candidate Humza Yousaf, she had been expected to go for the top job again. Even after Yousaf’s election, her campaign team – slightly depleted after the furore caused by Forbes’s religious views – remained intact and were considering their next moves. Although Swinney has said that he plans to stay on as First Minister for the next parliamentary term, there has been much discussion about who his successor may be. Forbes was expected to be a contender, alongside Westminster leader Stephen Flynn and housing secretary Mairi McAllan.
The timing is interesting: the SNP finalised its candidate list three months ago, which saw Forbes as one of 37 MSPs selected to stand again. Pulling out with nine months to go is not ideal for a party that is 15 points behind where it was in 2021 and in need of improving its ground campaign efforts. It’s a shock to those who previously supported Forbes’s leadership campaign, with one insider explicit in their surprise: ‘No one expected this, and I’m not sure why she arrived at this decision.’
While Forbes has claimed her turnaround is down to family reasons, others aren’t convinced that’s the full picture. She represented a decreasing group in the SNP with socially conservative views and her pro-growth agenda hasn’t always gone down well with some of her more left-wing colleagues. Some have suggested that the late announcement shows a lack of faith in Swinney’s leadership. Others wonder whether the post-2026 makeup of the group – with 15 councillors and 10 ex-MPs standing for election – looks to push the party further from Forbes’s values.
Do motorists really need this car finance payout?
It was, at least, far better than the City feared. Shares in banks and finance houses such as Lloyds and Close Brothers were soaring on the London market this morning after the Supreme Court rejected claims that they potentially owed tens of billions in mis-sold car finance. Instead, they are likely to get away with a mere £9 billion to £18 billion instead. But this still doesn’t address a pretty important question: it is not really clear why Britain’s motorists deserve a few billion from the banks. All it is doing is putting us on a slippery slope to an out-of-control compensation culture.
A lot of holidays will be paid for with the spare cash
After the markets closed on Friday, the Supreme Court surprised the City by finally making a sensible decision. It rejected the bulk of the claims that the main banks and finance houses had mis-sold millions of car finance packages by not fully disclosing the commission paid on the deals. It ruled, perfectly reasonably, that the terms were mostly set out in the small print, and, anyway, anyone buying a car already knew that the trade, to put it politely, has never been famous for its scrupulously fair dealings with customers, so people should have checked what they were signing.
These claims could have run to £40 billion or more. On the news, Lloyds shares jumped by 8 per cent, and Close Brothers by 34 per cent. It was a relief for shareholders – and also for the government, which could hardly afford to bail out any lenders who might be bankrupted by the payouts.
The trouble is, the Financial Conduct Authority is now planning a more limited compensation scheme to cover cases where commissions and interest on car loans were excessively high. It could still cost between £9 billion and £18 billion, with motorists getting around £950 each. Given that almost everybody who buys a car uses some form of finance scheme, it could provide a useful bonus for millions of families. A lot of holidays will be paid for with the spare cash.
And yet, it is very hard to see the point. After all, the payout won’t be very significant to any individual. In reality, many of the complaints are widely inflated by ambulance-chasing lawyers and claims management companies who rake off huge fees. The problem for the UK is that we are fast developing an American-style system of mass consumer litigation, with all the expense and uncertainty that creates, but without the American levels of productivity and innovation to make up for it. It is the worst of all worlds. The £950 handed out to motorists won’t make much difference to any of them. But it will make the UK a far worse place to run a finance business – and that matters far more.
Putin’s economic alchemy can’t last forever
The Kremlin’s accountants are having a problem: Russia’s state budget, once the engine of spectacular growth, is now flashing red. The mathematics are brutal. Russia’s fiscal deficit has ballooned to 3.7 trillion rubles in June – roughly £34 billion – skating perilously close to this year’s legal limit. As a share of GDP, the deficit threatens to breach the 1.7 per cent ceiling, a prospect that has Valentina Matviyenko, speaker of the Federation Council, preaching the gospel of ‘strict savings’ with all the enthusiasm of a Victorian governess.
The transformation of a petro-state into a war economy was supposed to demonstrate Russian resilience
The root of Moscow’s monetary malaise lies in spectacular overoptimism. Last September, officials confidently predicted a 2025 deficit of just 0.5 per cent of GDP, banking on Brent crude at $66 per barrel, robust 2.6 per cent growth, and a conveniently weak ruble at 100 to the dollar. Instead, they’ve watched their projections crumble fast.
In the first half of the year, oil and gas revenues, which fund more than a quarter of the Russian state, have collapsed by 17 per cent compared to last year and 25 per cent below projections. The market consensus for next year’s Brent prices hovers between $55 and $65 per barrel, below the government’s projections. Meanwhile, an unexpectedly strong ruble means fewer rubles per exported barrel, creating the peculiar problem of being too successful at currency strength.
The broader economy tells an equally grim tale. Growth has plummeted from a respectable 4.3 per cent in 2024 to 1.4 per cent in the first quarter of this year, with the Central Bank now forecasting sub-1.5 per cent growth for 2025. Lower growth translates to reduced VAT and income tax receipts, creating a vicious cycle that would make even Gordon Brown wince. Lower growth also means lower GDP, and with nominal fiscal deficit rising monthly, the 1.7 per cent legal threshold for this year’s deficit to GDP ratio has all the chances to be blown.
Putin’s bookkeepers face a difficult problem. The president promised not to raise taxes, ruled out meaningful currency devaluation (which would stoke inflation and increase government costs), and ringfenced defence, security, and social spending. What remains is a game of fiscal Jenga where removing the wrong piece brings down the entire structure.
Defence spending alone accounts for roughly $172 billion – 7.7 per cent of GDP – with little prospect of meaningful reduction. The stockpiles of Soviet weaponry that initially sustained the Ukraine campaign are running dangerously low, forcing expensive rearmament. The Kremlin has convinced itself that military production must remain the economy’s primary driver, a strategy worthy of Stalin planners’ applause, but expensive for the state finances.
With limited options, the government would be passing the fiscal burden to business and citizens with the subtlety of a Moscow traffic policeman. Companies face the prospect of losing subsidies while shouldering additional costs for security and social programmes: hardly conducive to investment or innovation. Citizens, meanwhile, can expect higher duties on vehicle registration, steeper excise taxes on life’s small pleasures, and increased fines. It’s austerity with Russian characteristics: brutal but presented as a patriotic duty.
The regime’s fiscal contortions reveal a deeper vulnerability.
In 2022, when sanctions first bit, Russian businesses and citizens queued cap-in-hand for state assistance, receiving generous help in exchange for war enthusiasm. Now the state coffers are running dry, but the enthusiasm must remain undimmed – dissent being rather more dangerous than bankruptcy in Putin’s Russia.
Two external threats loom large over this precarious balancing act. Should President Donald Trump make good on threats to throttle Russian oil trade, or should Brussels tighten technological sanctions, Moscow’s fiscal gymnastics could collapse entirely. The Kremlin has thus far managed to fund its war without triggering mass protests, but the margin for error is shrinking.
Putin’s great gamble – that Russia could outlast Western resolve while maintaining domestic stability – increasingly depends on economic alchemy. The transformation of a petro-state into a war economy was supposed to demonstrate Russian resilience. Instead, it may prove that even autocrats cannot indefinitely defy the laws of arithmetic.
Could Prince Andrew’s reputation sink any lower?
Even the most seasoned royal watchers may not have expected the revelations that came from the serialisation of Andrew Lownie’s new book, Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York, in the weekend’s newspapers. The biography nominally focuses on the vagaries of Prince Andrew and his ex-wife Sarah Ferguson, but judging from the excerpts released so far, there is embarrassment for much of the rest of the royal family, not least Prince Harry. The Duke of Sussex has now begun legal action against the Mail group for publishing some of the more scabrous stories: in his well-paid, much-used lawyers’ words, the newspaper has published ‘gross inaccuracies, damaging and defamatory remarks’.
Prince Andrew’s already tarnished reputation is likely to sink even further into the gutter
There are several attention-grabbing incidents relayed in the book, but perhaps the most notable is that Lownie has described a good old-fashioned punch-up taking place in 2013 between nephew and uncle. In his book, Lownie writes that ‘punches were thrown over something Andrew said behind Harry’s back’ because ‘Harry told [his uncle] he was a coward not to say it to his face. Harry got the better of Andrew by all accounts, leaving him with a bloody nose before the fight was broken up’.
While most might sympathise with Harry in this situation, the Duke of York got his own back a few years later, apparently telling the future Duke of Sussex that his marriage to Meghan Markle would not last a month. He allegedly said that she was ‘an opportunist and [that] she was too old for Harry, adding that his nephew was making the biggest mistake ever’ and accusing him of not having conducted any due diligence into who he was marrying. For good measure, Andrew apparently described Harry as ‘bonkers’.
Stories like this are all good gossipy fun, but will they stand up? Lownie has published bestselling and similarly attention-grabbing biographies of the Mountbattens and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. He has stated that the various stories within his latest book – which include revelations that Andrew’s friend Jeffrey Epstein sold his secrets to some of the most repressive regimes and dictators in the world – are double, if not treble-sourced. When it is published next week, the world will apparently be appalled by the various revelations of what Andrew and Fergie have got up to.
Certainly, public appetite for scandal and gossip when it comes to the less than grand old Duke of York is high. His already tarnished reputation is likely to sink even further into the gutter, especially if Andrew does not dignify any of the stories in the book with a refutation of any kind. That responsibility has instead passed over to his nephew, who has declared via his spokesman that:
I can confirm Prince Harry and Prince Andrew have never had a physical fight, nor did Prince Andrew ever make the comments he is alleged to have made about the Duchess of Sussex to Prince Harry.
It seems likely, on this evidence, that the ever-litigious former royal will be suing Lownie and his publishers when the book is released in its current form. Given the robust remarks that Dr Lownie has made on social media, he will be up for such a fight. Those with long memories might remember that the biographer engaged in a long, expensive battle with the government over the release of the unexpurgated Mountbatten diaries. Lownie claimed this had cost him the best part of half a million pounds, and he declared in 2023 that he had been spied on by cabinet sources. As he said then, ‘It’s made me even more determined to carry on researching and writing controversial books even if it doesn’t win me friends in high places.’
With the book racing to the top of the Amazon charts following the publication of selected excerpts, it promises to be another attention-grabbing bestseller. These will help with the inevitable costs of defending any legal actions that ensue. But will Entitled live up to the hype? You’ll have to wait for my review to find out – in The Spectator’s pages, naturally.
Picking on foreign students won’t solve the migration crisis
We can’t stop the illegal migrants, so let’s crack down on legal ones instead. That pretty well sums up the government’s policy on migration. Last year foreign students earned Britain £12.1 billion in revenue. They are one of our strongest export industries (while the students might physically be entering Britain, they are an export because it is the direction the money is flowing in which matters). Some universities have become truly international institutions – Imperial College and UCL now draw more than half their students from abroad. Mickey mouse courses aside, UK higher education has become one of Britain’s success stories.
This government’s biggest error was one of its very first: to close down the Rwanda scheme
How natural, then, that the government wants to throttle it in its panic to get the migration figures under some sort of control. Home Secretary Yvette Cooper is reported to be planning to announce a ban on universities accepting foreign students if too few students go on to start or complete their courses. If fewer than 95 per cent of accepted students get as far as enrolling, or if fewer than 90 per cent go on to complete their course, it seems as if that university would be banned from accepting any foreign students at all. In other words, you might be a university which is just embarking on advertising itself to foreign students. You make a tentative start by offering ten students a place. Then one of them fails to turn up to start their course – and you get banned from taking any more foreign students whatsoever.
There is, it has to be said, a problem with abuse of student visas. Some migrants have been applying for visas in order to gain access to the country in order to claim asylum. Last year, 16,000 asylum claims were made by foreign students.
But the issue, as ever, is the feebleness of the asylum system itself. It takes far too long to make decisions, and even when people are rejected, they are not removed from the country. Moreover, we have asylum tribunals which perversely interpret the European Convention on Human Rights to grant criminals and terrorists the right to stay in Britain if they have succeeded in impregnating a British woman and can claim the right to a family life. It is all these issues which need sorting out, not the higher education sector which needs thwarting.
If we are going to try to deal with abuse of the asylum system by stopping legal migrants entering Britain in the first place, we would have to close our borders completely: ban foreigners coming to Britain not just to study but to work, to come on holiday, visit relatives, take part in sporting competitions – all of which have been used by asylum claimants to enter the country. There might be a few Britons who would be happy with that situation, but it would be the actions of a country in which most of us would not be happy to live. And still it wouldn’t stop people arriving illegally on small boats – and being put up in four-star hotels for years while their cases are wrung through layers of taxpayer-funded legal arguments.
This government’s biggest error was one of its very first: to close down the Rwanda scheme. That failure has contributed to an explosion in illegal migration and the associated costs and other problems. The fact that the Rwanda scheme was beginning to act as a deterrent, even before a single asylum applicant was sent to that country, could be seen in the large number of migrants who were fleeing to Ireland to make their claims instead.
Now, to try to cover up for that failure, the government is going to pick on legal migrants instead, because they are the easy targets – never mind that it could mean turning down billions of pounds in foreign earnings from foreign students. That is where Starmer’s fundamentalist approach to human rights leads.
The West has rewarded Hamas for the torture of Evyatar David
They’re making Jews dig their own graves again. In grim mimicry of their Nazi heroes, who would often force Jews to dig ditches before shooting them into them, Hamas has released a video showing a shockingly emaciated Israeli hostage digging a grave. ‘This is the grave where I think I’m going to be buried,’ says the bag of bones as he feebly scoops up dirt with a spade. It is one of the most chilling images we have seen in this century.
The man in the video is 24-year-old Evyatar David. He was abducted from the Nova music festival during Hamas’s pogrom of 7 October 2023. He has been held in the dark, dank tunnels of Gaza’s neo-fascists for 666 days. And he has clearly suffered beyond imagination. He is a ‘living skeleton, buried alive’, said his family when the clips of his ashen, raw-boned body were released.
Hamas is now convinced that Jew-torture wins prizes, and it isn’t wrong
Then there are the words young Evyatar is forced to say. ‘What I’m doing now is digging my own grave,’ he says, as his wasted arms and angular frame struggle to manoeuvre the spade. ‘Every day my body becomes weaker and weaker,’ he says before bending with exhaustion and leaning against the spade for support. All of it captured on camera by some monster propagandist hell-bent on exploiting this deathly Jew for moral gain.
This is more than torture. It is more than psychological cruelty. It is more than a war crime. It is the violent rebirth of the fascist imagination itself. Hamas is expressly paying tribute to the Jew-killers of the past. It is aping the Nazi tactic of jailing Jews for being Jews and gleefully starving and humiliating them. For all the hyperbolic cries about how Israel is executing a ‘new holocaust’ in Gaza, in truth it is this, this intentionally famished Jew, this videoed spectacle of racist barbarism, that most clearly echoes that darkest moment in human history.
At the same time, Islamic Jihad released a video of the 22-year-old hostage, Rom Braslavski. He has wasted away. He sobs as he says what his Islamofascist captors have told him to say. The camera pans his withered frame as he writhes in agony from starvation. His jailers seem to take glee in his physical and mental anguish. ‘Look what we did to this Jew!’ they are essentially saying to the world’s anti-Semites.
These vile clips, this videoed taunting of half-starved Jews, made me think not only about the wickedness of Hamas and Islamic Jihad but also about the suicidal credulity of many in the West.
Just think about it. When Western media outlets parrot the press releases of Hamas-run institutions in Gaza, this is who they are citing: a movement that takes pleasure in the violent degradation of Jews; a movement that thinks nothing of making a global spectacle of Jewish agony. Next time you hear the BBC reference the ‘Hamas-run Ministry of Health’, remember who they are quoting – this army of anti-Semites that parades stolen, gaunt Jews before the eyes of the world.
Worse, these are the monsters to whom Keir Starmer, Emmanuel Macron and Mark Carney have promised a state. All three say they will shortly recognise the State of Palestine. Yes, they paid lip service to the importance of disarming Hamas. And yet to offer statehood to a territory that is still part-controlled by these barbarous militants who kidnap, jail, starve and humiliate Jews is unconscionable in the extreme.
Evyatar David’s broken, ravenous body should haunt Starmer’s every waking moment, for he has essentially rewarded the men who did this to Evyatar. That is certainly how Hamas sees it. They welcomed Starmer’s promise of statehood as proof that ‘victory and liberation are closer than we expected’. That Starmer and the others gave their imperious nod of approval to nationhood for Palestine even as Jews still languish in its fascistic jails is almost beyond moral comprehension. It will do nothing to speed the release of Evyatar and Rom. Quite the opposite: Hamas is now convinced that Jew-torture wins prizes, and it isn’t wrong.
Here’s my question: why does Hamas have so little shame over what it has done? Why is it so content to show the world the consequences of its fascistic loathing for the Jewish nation and the Jewish people? The answer, I think, is because it knows even this will be blamed on Israel. It knows the West’s activist classes are so thoroughly under the spell of Israelophobia that even these dystopic, Nazi Europe-style images of haggard Jews will not be enough to arouse them back to reason. It knows it enjoys carte blanche among our Israel-hating influencers.
It is a testament to the savagery of Hamas that it has visited such racist atrocities on young Jews. And it is a testament to the ethical disarray of the West that Hamas thinks it can get away with it. For the sake of Evyatar, Rom and the long life of the Jewish State, we urgently need to repair our moral reason.
Boomers don’t know how hard the young have it
When my father, a barrister who still insists on calling himself ‘working class’, talks to his friends about their early days in London, I almost reel at how pleasant it all sounds. Cheap rent in Chelsea. Jobs they got by word of mouth. Long holidays and longer lunches. It sounds less like real life and more like a Richard Curtis fantasy. My own version of post-university London is somewhat different.
I have had a privileged life. I’m one of six children, all privately educated – the result of a Catholic mother, said barrister father and years of school fees paid to institutions that, frankly, struggle to justify their expense. I won’t pretend I’ve had a hard upbringing. And yet, my life as a young professional looks much bleaker than those tales of Sloane Rangers heading to the south of France on holiday or leaving London to their second home in the country for the weekend.
I usually work 60, sometimes 70 hours a week, split between my full-time job and a second role at the weekend as an estate agent (please forgive me). I consider myself a hard worker. And yet, I’m not working to save for a flat or even a holiday – I’m working to cover rent and decide which can of soup feels least depressing that evening. I know readers are probably tired of hearing young people complain, insisting that ‘we don’t have it like you did’. But perhaps it’s time we acknowledged that it’s true.
The average home in London now costs 12 times the average wage, compared with 4.6 in the 1970s. Now look at pay: in 1980, the average wage was £6,000, the equivalent of £25,800 today, while median pay in 2025 is £37,400. That’s growth of around 45 per cent, compared to a trebling in the cost of a home. The biggest expense, the main thing that eats up all of those earnings, has massively increased in cost. The idea of getting on the property ladder feels less like a potential milestone and more like a mythical quest.
I have a student loan that increases each year (interest is around the 7 per cent mark), an overdraft I’ve accepted as permanent – and yet I’m expected to hand over half my modest salary just to keep a roof over my head. The irony of those over 60 enjoying free travel across London while I’m charged £240 a month by TfL feels less like a serious policy than a generational betrayal.
Then there’s the taxman, who in my new post-university role seems especially cruel. My age group pays in and sees almost nothing in return. My father’s finances aren’t especially abundant, but the state pension gives him an extra £1,000 a month which he uses to top up his Roederer champagne supplies and expand his esoteric collection of prints. It makes me want to stick pins in my hands.
Even the idea of having a child now feels like a luxury I can’t afford. I certainly won’t be able to give my imagined children the kind of life I had. Of my five older siblings, four have sworn off children entirely simply because of the cost – much to the dismay of my mother. Of course, not everyone in my generation is struggling. There are still those cushioned by the Bank of Mum and Dad who glide through their twenties with trust funds and flats that just ‘sort of happened’. One trust-funded friend recently told me she was ‘too busy’ to get a job.
So yes, this may all sound like whingeing. But I don’t write this in search of sympathy. I write it as a warning. Only those with stonking rich parents, able to sub the cost of a flat, can afford to live in London. The rest of us, who came here looking for high-paying jobs, have discovered that even when we find them, the cost of housing takes most of our wages.
I fear we are witnessing the death of the middle class. What will replace it? A vast group of renters and wage slaves who can’t escape – no matter how hard they work. And at the top, those who have inherited their cash, able to live quite happily from the proceeds of investments made by their parents. It doesn’t seem a particularly healthy way to run a country.
There’s nothing extreme about veganism
At a time when Britain feels increasingly unstitched – with families queuing at food banks and sewage drifting from rivers to seas – it’s almost impressive that anyone has the emotional energy to be annoyed by vegans. Yet we continue to provoke strong feelings, and Katie Glass gave strong voice to them in these pages last week. So allow me to be annoying again, and disagree.
Katie says veganism is becoming an ‘extremist’ lifestyle. But to be vegan is, quite simply, to opt out. We choose, as consistently as possible, not to hurt, kill or exploit animals – nor to induce others to do it on our behalf. That’s it.
What’s truly extreme is the cruelty that vegans refuse to be part of. More than 92 billion land animals are slaughtered for food each year. In the UK, around 85 per cent of farmed animals live and die in industrial conditions that most of us would find unconscionable if we witnessed them first-hand. Male chicks can’t lay eggs so they get thrown into shredders soon after hatching. Calves are torn from their mothers so that the milk intended for them can go to humans. This isn’t vegan propaganda. It’s simply what happens.
Whether you consider yourself an animal lover or not, when you think of piglets having their testicles cut off without anaesthetic, or weaker newborns being smashed on the concrete floor in a practice known as ‘thumping’, does it seem more extreme to support this and pay people to inflict that kind of misery and bloodshed on animals, or to opt out and say it’s wrong?
I know it’s uncomfortable to dwell on what actually happens. The meat industry prefers us to talk about ‘choices’ and ‘personal preference’. But when somebody buys some bacon, their money flows through the checkout to the people who confine, torment and cut up the pigs. It’s not a metaphor. It’s not an ethics class. It’s a real transaction with real consequences.
Pigs are as intelligent as dogs, emotionally complex and capable of forming stronger social bonds than most people in Westminster. And yet, in slaughterhouses across Britain, they are herded into metal chambers and gassed to death. People who’ve witnessed their final minutes say they sound like screaming children. They panic. They writhe. The euphemism is ‘controlled atmosphere stunning’ but what happens is the CO2 gas burns their lungs from the inside. They die in terror. Isn’t that extreme?
Katie says that the UK vegan food market is both ‘growing’ and ‘dropping’, depending on which paragraph we’re in. There’s actually some truth in both claims: the novelty food market – the faux burgers and meatless meatballs – seems to have plateaued, but that’s a welcome evolution, not a setback. More vegans are choosing simplicity over simulation: pulses, grains, vegetables. Not because it’s fashionable, but because it’s food.
Katie also raises the familiar trope that vegan food can still be processed and unhealthy. And yes, of course it can. The point isn’t that all vegan food is virtuous. Junk food is still junk food, whether vegan or fleshy. The difference is that vegan food didn’t require the hurting and slaughtering of animals.
If you truly think it’s wrong to hurt animals, then you shouldn’t do it – and you shouldn’t pay others to do it on your behalf either
She says the fact that veganism is more environmentally friendly seems ‘dubious’ to her and offers a few hand-picked examples of issues with almond milk, quinoa and avocados. The thing is, many vegans don’t consume these things and many non-vegans do. The data from Oxford, Cambridge, Yale, the UN, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and elsewhere is clear: a plant-based diet remains one of the most powerful ways an individual can reduce their environmental impact. It’s not perfect – nothing is – but it’s one of the very best ways to help.
Another of her beefs comes in the form of: ‘What would we do with all the animals if everyone went vegan?’ In reality, that won’t be an issue because everyone won’t go vegan suddenly, all at once. As fewer people buy meat, fewer animals will be bred – the number of forced impregnations will continue to be driven by supply and demand.
Katie says vegans can be judgmental and I won’t quibble on that. Why not be? If you believe – truly believe – that sentient beings are suffering needlessly, isn’t it natural to say something? For some vegans, speaking out is emotionally akin to speaking out about child abuse or human trafficking. I think we all realise the horrors on some level but there’s a spectrum of how we respond: from numb silence to manic evangelising.
What marks out vegans is that we forgo things. We sacrifice. It’s not because we’re perfect – we’re all flawed in our own ways – but because on this topic we’ve each seen something we cannot un-see; felt something we cannot un-feel.
So perhaps it’s less that vegans are becoming extreme and more that we’re becoming inconvenient. We think many of the same things you think but we’ve gone a step further and done what you can’t bear to do. We’ve not only denied ourselves the meat and other animal products but also the belief that we were ever entitled to them – that our transient desire for taste or texture could ever be worth more than another being’s life.
If you truly think it’s wrong to hurt animals, then you shouldn’t do it – and you shouldn’t pay others to do it on your behalf either. That’s not extremism. It’s consistency. It’s mercy, in action. So if that feels annoying, perhaps it’s worth sitting with that for a while.
What we could learn from Swiss bins
Every time I’m in Switzerland, where I grew up, I find myself madly squeezing as much rubbish as I can into a garbage bag. It’s a delicate and messy task. In Switzerland, every bag of non-recyclable waste comes with a price tag – and it’s expensive. You won’t be surprised that the Swiss have perfected the art of recycling, aiming to minimise the amount that ends up in those pricey bags.
The system is both simple and ruthless. Across Switzerland – except for the canton of Geneva – every household is required to use government-sanctioned bin bags for anything that can’t be recycled. They’re not your ordinary supermarket variety – these bags are sold at a premium to cover the cost of waste disposal. The less you throw away, the less you pay. The system encourages Swiss citizens to recycle as much as humanly possible. Plastic, glass, paper and organic waste all get sorted into their respective bins. What’s left – only the true rubbish – goes into the bag.
This approach has transformed waste disposal into a highly organised activity. Every commune and canton is in charge of managing waste, and they ensure that recycling is as accessible as possible. Most villages now have dedicated recycling centres, where you can drop off everything from batteries to broken electronics. The system has been in place for quite some years, pioneered in the 1990s in German-speaking cantons. Less waste – and a massive reduction in the amount of garbage being incinerated – has followed since the system was introduced.
Swiss obsession with discipline comes into play. Each bag has a price – up to 2.50 Swiss francs (about £2.25) per bag depending on the size. The cost adds up quickly if you’re not diligent. I find myself pressing down on the top of a bulging garbage bag, hoping the bag won’t tear, and doing my best to avoid having to use a second one. And like any self-respecting Swiss, I do this with the acute awareness that my neighbours are likely doing the same – or at least watching me when I take the garbage out.
Geneva is the only canton that hasn’t implemented the system. And, as many Swiss would tell you, that’s no surprise. Geneva is seen as the least disciplined canton – the outlier in a country where order and precision are prized. Geneva’s stance boils down to local resistance against what is seen by some as an onerous burden.
Now let’s contrast this with London, where I have a flat. On collection days I am often shocked by the piles of rubbish strewn across my otherwise pristine street close to Notting Hill Gate. Black bags, supermarket bags, takeaway bags, boxes and loose refuse are dumped willy-nilly, waiting to be collected. There’s little incentive to reduce the amount of waste, and recycling is patchy at best. Despite efforts to improve the system, the results can be inconsistent. Some neighbours conscientiously sort their recycling, while others throw everything in the same bag without a second thought. In London, unlike Switzerland, there’s no financial penalty for being wasteful. The result is completely chaotic. The council does a brilliant job, but I can’t help but feel that they’re constantly catching up.
Geneva is seen as the least disciplined canton – the outlier in a country where order and precision are prized
The Swiss, on the other hand, have made waste management into an art form. And it’s not just about the cost – it’s about the cultural expectation. There’s a collective discipline in play, where everyone is expected to do their part. It’s unthinkable to ignore recycling or to dump everything into one bag. And while that level of scrutiny may seem stifling to some, it works. The system relies not only on financial incentives but also on a sense of civic duty. But perhaps more importantly, there’s the fear of standing out as the one neighbour who isn’t following the rules.
For a system like this to work in the UK – or anywhere else, for that matter – you’d need more than just a price on garbage bags. You’d need the social infrastructure and discipline that comes with it. In Switzerland, each canton and commune plays a key role in making sure the system is seamless. Recycling centres are convenient and ubiquitous, and the rules are clear – and enforced.
Doubtless such a system would not work as smoothly in Britain. While the financial incentive is certainly powerful, you’d need a shift in mindset. The Swiss aren’t just motivated by the cost – they’re motivated by the system itself. Squeezing as much as humanly possible into a single garbage bag has become part of the fabric of everyday life, as has separating out every last scrap of plastic and paper.
Why JD Vance is worth watching this summer
America’s two most powerful men are visiting Britain this summer. After Donald Trump’s trip to Scotland last month, his Vice President is expected shortly in the Cotswolds. Both men share an interest in the UK – but for different reasons. Trump’s ties are ancestral; Vance’s passion is more intellectual. ‘What’s going on with Reform?’ he asked Peter Mandelson at a recent function. His choice of England as a holiday destination reflects an engagement in this country’s politics.
Among Vance’s friends and contacts are several prominent British academics. They include Blue Labour founder Maurice Glasman, who corresponded with Vance over email, and James Orr, with whom Vance bonded in 2019 after converting to Catholicism. Shortly after his election to the Senate in January 2023, he came to London and was keen to meet with prominent conservatives. As Vice President, he has shown an eagerness to use his office to engage in UK domestic issues.
The best example of this was his Munich Security Conference speech in February. Here he attacked successive British governments for ignoring voter concerns on migration and free speech. He demonstrated too a level of familiarity with specific UK case studies – including a man in Bournemouth convicted for praying outside an abortion clinic. Vance has subsequently weighed in on different European issues, calling the continent the ‘cradle of Western civilisation’.
Vance is willing and able to use his status to shape the dynamics of the UK-US relationship and, potentially, the future of British conservatism
All this is to say that Vance is willing and able to use his status to shape the dynamics of the UK-US relationship and, potentially, the future of British conservatism. Right-to-life groups in this country were ecstatic when Vance raised the little-known-case of the Bournemouth abortion clinic. The Vice Presidency might have once been dismissed as ‘not worth a bucket of warm piss’ – but JD Vance has shown that it affords a bully pulpit with considerable clout in the social media age.
Prominent figures in both Reform and the Conservative party are clearly aware of this dynamic. Allies of the Vice President have already met with senior members of Nigel Farage’s party. The Clacton MP, who made little comment about Trump’s Scotland visit, was this week willing to publicly indulge talk of a meeting with Vance when interviewed on LBC. Other engagements are expected with other leading conservative personalities of interest.
Such engagements are timely, given Vance’s status as the Intellectual-in-Chief of this White House. For now, he remains the second most powerful in the United States – but all that could change very shortly. The race for 2028 is set to begin in earnest in about 18 months’ time and Vance is in prime position to succeed Trump as the Republican nominee. Much as how Thatcher and Reagan first met in 1975, an engagement with Vance this summer could prove most fruitful in four years’ time.
Jess Phillips: ‘I’m being controlled by aggression and violence’
Jess Phillips begins her interview with Iain Dale at the Edinburgh Fringe with a meandering homage to her hometown, Birmingham, which is still in mourning for Ozzy Osborne.
‘Birmingham is like a village. I can link anyone in my family to someone in your family in three steps. Barbara Cartland is from Birmingham. Lawn tennis was invented on the Cartland estate. I grew up around Ozzy Osbourne’s first son, Louis. I count them as good friends. My son went to the funeral procession. And Sharon is a lovely, lovely woman.’
‘There were fireworks thrown, tyres slashed and constituents threatened at polling stations. And they were almost exclusively men’
Phillips makes a promise to her host. She offers to recruit Sharon as part of his All Talk line-up at next year’s festival.
‘We could do a double header,’ she says.
Phillips seems to prefer the company of her family and her old social circle to her political allies. After entering parliament, she told her best friend, Amy, that she’d appeared on Question Time. ‘Did you win?’ said Amy who assumed that Question Time was Mastermind. Phillips jokes about her popularity. ‘In Birmingham, I am quite beloved. I’m like Birmingham royalty. But it’s a very low bar, isn’t it?’
Then they get down to politics. Dale asks about Phillips’s resignation from the shadow front bench in November 2023 over a motion tabled by the SNP calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. She couldn’t support the motion without returning to the back benches which she found agonising. ‘I had to stake my life’s work on it.’ But she faced loud calls from her constituents to support the ceasefire. ‘The clamour got considerably strong. And the pressure.’
Dale asked her to specify. ‘Pressure? What do you mean?’
She chooses her words carefully and doesn’t mention that her constituency is 45 per cent Muslim (according to the 2021 census.)
‘I’ve always known it mattered greatly to my constituents. Some are of Kashmiri heritage. And there are Irish communities and I’m Irish myself. And both communities understand the idea of annexation. They understand that lines drawn on a map can lead to violence. … The pressure was in no way aggressive,’ she adds, ‘in no way aggressive.’
A moment later, she qualifies this and admits to ‘a smattering of aggression.’ She explains that passions are likely to run high when controversial issues are aired.
She praises the Labour whips who helped her to manage her departure. ‘I didn’t peacock about it.’ And she was rewarded with a return to the front bench when Labour won power last July. Keir Starmer expressed his support for her in public.
‘He made a bee-line towards me across a very busy room and gave me a cuddle.’
She needed that cuddle. The battle for her seat in 2024 was mired in controversy. ‘I’ve never known a breakdown of democracy like it.’
She says that her opponent, ‘the independent candidate,’ brought in external canvassers. ‘From London,’ she believes. ‘We couldn’t advertise where we were going. They were haranguing voters. There were fireworks thrown, tyres slashed and constituents threatened at polling stations. And I have to say they were almost exclusively men.’
She told her sons, aged 16 and 20, to keep away from the count. ‘I thought, I’m being controlled by aggression and violence.’
She won by 693 votes but her opponent asked for a recount. The returning officer refused. ‘She was incredibly professional,’ says Phillips. ‘And absolutely tiny. About five-foot nothing. And she was encircled by men, shouting at her. It made me fucking furious.’
After the count, Phillips exchanged a handshake with each of her defeated opponents.
‘The independent candidate refused to shake my hand. Petty little idiot.’
Jonathan Ashworth had a similar experience in Leicester South where he narrowly lost to the independent, Shockat Adam. Phillips now regrets her decision not to publicise her opponent’s tactics for fear of tarnishing the image of her constituency. ‘Lots of journalists came and I kept them away. I didn’t want the people who live there to look bad.’
Dale moves to lighter matters and asks about her experience with civil servants.
‘You have to be careful what you say [inside the department.] If you say “tag all men” someone will draft a paper about it.’
On her first day, she was asked if she preferred the stairs or the lift. She chose the stairs and a note was duly entered in an official file. ‘Minister likes to use the stairs.’ Now she can’t enter the building without being ushered away from the lift and towards the stairs. ‘But I don’t like to use the stairs!’
Dale suggests that she might be offered a job at the foreign office.
‘I don’t think so. And diplomacy needs to change,’ she says. ‘It should be more about doing down the pub together.’
He asks her if she’s met Nigel Farage. She hasn’t but she praises the Reform member, Nora Kamberi, who stood against her last year. ‘Lovely woman.’ Encouraged by Dale, she goes off on a tangent about Boris Johnson. ‘He’s nothing like he is on TV. Nothing like that. He’s nervous and awkward, like a shy boy. He wasn’t unpleasant or anything but he was like a kid. Kicking his feet.’
Phillips briefly stood for the Labour leadership in 2020. Does she still dream of forming her own administration?
‘It’s a hard job, being prime minister. I wouldn’t boss it. I absolutely wouldn’t boss it. I think I’d be a basket-case after about 15 minutes. And I’d drink a lot. But it would be entertaining.’
Dale asks her to name her favourite Tory MP. ‘Simon Hoare,’ she says, ‘and Priti Patel.’
The second name elicits a gasp of horror from the Edinburgh crowd. Phillips explains that Patel was deeply affected by the assassination of David Amess who represented an Essex constituency close to her own. After Amess’s death, Patel telephoned Phillips every Sunday evening ‘to see if I was all right.’ Patel was home secretary at the time. This gesture meant a lot to a safeguarding minister who believes her job should not exist.
‘I hate that there’s someone with the words “violence against women and girls” in their title.’
Dale ends with the ‘Angela Rayner question.’ It’s a challenge rather than a query. Earlier in the day, Dale tried it with Rachel Reeves by innocently asking her to name the most outstanding member of the Labour cabinet. Reeves stayed loyal to Starmer and nominated the colourless environment secretary, Simon Reed. Dale frames the question differently and asks Phillips if Labour has a successor to Barbara Castle. Phillips spots the trap and steps over it deftly.
‘We’ve had numerous successors,’ she says. ‘Margaret Beckett, Margaret Hodge, Harriet Harman and Yvette Cooper.’
Horst Mahler, the far-left terrorist who became a neo-Nazi
One of the strangest German lives in the post-second world war era closed on 27 July 2025 with the death of Horst Mahler at the age of 89.
Mahler’s life epitomises the fatal German tendency for much of the 20th century to embrace extremist politics
Mahler’s life epitomises the fatal German tendency for much of the 20th century to embrace extremist politics of the far-left and ultra-right, since he converted from being a hunted and jailed leader and lawyer of the Red Army Faction (RAF) terrorist group, also known as the Baader-Meinhof gang, to become Germany’s most notorious neo-Nazi, an outspoken anti-Semite and a Holocaust denier – activities for which he also spent time in jail in his old age.
Even more extraordinarily, Mahler was also a one-time legal partner of his friend Gerhard Schroeder, Germany’s Social Democratic Chancellor from 1998 to 2005. As a young lawyer, Schroeder had defended Mahler and other RAF terrorists and led a successful campaign to readmit Mahler to the German Bar after he was briefly disbarred. If you want a British parallel, imagine Tony Blair defending members of the Angry Brigade in his youth.
Mahler was born in Silesia (now in Poland) in 1936. The family was forced to flee west in the face of the advancing Soviet Red Army at the end of the war. Mahler’s father was especially anxious to avoid the Russians, as he was an ardent Nazi, and appears to have passed his ideas on to his son.
At university, where he studied law, young Horst joined one of the ultra-nationalist and conservative ‘bursenschaften’ – elite student societies that combined drinking and duelling with sabres. He also joined the youth arm of Germany’s moderately left-wing Social Democratic Party (SPD) but soon migrated to the far-left Marxist wing of the movement.
The late 60s were a period of foment among West Germany’s students, with frequent violent clashes between police and students protesting against the Vietnam War and against the staunchly right-wing tabloid newspaper empire of Press tycoon Axel Springer.
After the shooting of the leftist Student leader Rudi Dutschke, Mahler converted his left-wing legal practice into a hotbed of the so-called ‘extra-Parliamentary opposition’. His lifelong journey into illegality under the cover of the law had begun.
Mahler became an active terrorist in 1968 when he organised the springing from a Berlin courtroom of Andreas Baader, an early leader of the RAF, and Baader’s girlfriend Gudrun Ensslin during the couple’s trial for firebombing a department store.
For much of the 1970s and 80s, West Germany was convulsed by the activities of the RAF, a violent group of middle-class radicals who pursued their version of the class struggle by shooting down working-class cops, bombing ‘bourgeois’ symbols like department stores and US army bases, robbing banks and kidnapping and killing business leaders. They moved between their targets in fast BMWs which were nicknamed ‘Baader-Meinhof Wagons’ as a result.
I lived in Germany at the time among such student leftists, and many a night passed in anguished debates in our communal flats as to whether the RAF’s violent acts were the right way of achieving a socialist society. One morning a flatmate seized me and pushed my face against the wall lest I should recognise and betray an on-the-run RAF fugitive who had spent the night in the apartment.
The thoroughly alarmed West German state responded to the challenge with crackdowns of dubious legality, but eventually the RAF militants were all hunted down and jailed. Here, some of them emulated the IRA and starved themselves to death, while others committed suicide with pistols smuggled into their cells by their lawyers.
Mahler was one of those lawyers before going on the run himself with a price on his head as a hunted terrorist. He spent some time with his comrades in Palestine, undergoing military training with the PLO which almost certainly fuelled his own growing anti-Semitism.
Returning to Germany, Mahler was finally caught and jailed. Hailed as a martyr by Germany’s far left, by the time of his release Mahler’s political views had undergone a dramatic sea change. At the funeral of a far-right activist, Mahler claimed that Germany was an ‘occupied land’, controlled by foreign forces in the pay of an international Jewish conspiracy. He put his new beliefs into practice by joining the neo-Nazi NPD party and defended it in court against attempts to ban it as unconstitutional.
He soon proclaimed such classic Nazi ideas openly, and for the last quarter century of his life the ageing Mahler was in and out of the jails where he had spent so many years, but this time for such crimes as Holocaust denial and trying to revive Nazism. By the end of his days Horst Mahler had returned to the warped ideas he had first learned at his father’s knee.