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Wes Streeting’s war on NHS diversity doesn’t go far enough
When America sneezes, Britain catches a cold. Luckily for us, we have Wes Streeting on hand with the tissues. Within days of Donald Trump signing an executive order putting a stop to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programmes across the US government, our own Health Secretary has diagnosed the NHS as suffering from a similarly bad case of DEI-itis. There are ‘some really daft things being done in the name of equality, diversity and inclusion’, Streeting declared this week.
There are ‘some really daft things being done in the name of equality, diversity and inclusion’, Wes Streeting has declared
Speaking at an event on Tuesday organised by Macmillan Cancer Support, Streeting bemoaned the fact that genuine health inequalities were being undermined by ‘ideological hobby horses’. He cited the example of a social media post advertising a placement for counselling or psychotherapy trainees. The doctor, who shared the post and will be supervising the new recruits, noted that she takes an ‘anti-whiteness’ approach to her clinical work. ‘And I just thought “what the hell does that say to the bloke up in Wigan who’s more likely to die earlier than his more affluent white counterpart down in London?”’ said Streeting. Indeed.
You don’t need to be a doctor, or even the Health Secretary, to know that Streeting is absolutely right. Anyone who has had even passing contact with the NHS in recent years knows that it is utterly infected with diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. New outbreaks occur regularly, requiring continual vigilance and constant treatment. So rife is DEI-itis, the NHS struggles to perform its key task: health care.
Take the difficulty NHS England seems to have with the word ‘woman’. Back in 2023, the NHS watered down the use of the word ‘women’ in its online health guidance. Web pages on ovarian, womb and cervical cancers – crucially, diseases that only affect women – were re-written using gender-neutral language, apparently to include females who think they are men. Those looking for advice might have to work out whether they were a ‘person with a cervix’, which could be tricky for those with limited English, poor literacy or without GCSE biology. The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, which provides guidance for the NHS, rolled out a style guide recommending adding the phrases ‘pregnant people’ to ante-natal services and ‘trans and non-binary people with a prostate’ to male cancer provision.
Introducing gender ideology into the health service puts patients at risk. Men under the age of 60 are sometimes now asked if they might be pregnant before having scans or x-rays. Why waste time like this? Surely radiographers, of all people, are capable of telling whether someone is male or female? But then this is the NHS that oversaw the Tavistock Clinic, notorious for its now discredited work with children struggling with their ‘gender identity’. The full consequences of prescribing puberty-blocking and cross-sex hormones to youngsters may take decades to become apparent.
At every turn, trans-inclusion is less about medical need and more about ideology for the NHS. It is certainly not about the safety or feelings of staff. In Darlington, eight women nurses have been forced to take their NHS trust to an employment tribunal after a male, transgender-identifying nurse was permitted to share their changing room.
It is great that Streeting has spoken out against the ‘anti-whiteness’ psychotherapy placement supervisor. But there is a lot more where that came from. Nurse Amy Gallagher initiated a lawsuit against the Tavistock in 2022, alleging discrimination on the basis of race, religion and philosophical belief, as well as victimisation and harassment. Shortly after she began training in forensic psychology at the Clinic, Gallagher says she was made to attend lectures on ‘whiteness’ and white privilege where she was told that ‘whites don’t understand the world’ and that ‘Christianity is responsible for racism because it’s European’.
Gender ideology and critical race theory – the beliefs that underpin diversity, equity and inclusion practices – course through the veins of the NHS. Millions of pounds are spent on DEI. Staff have been paid to sit through training on the Black Lives Matter movement; LGBT-themed ‘tea and rainbow cake’ picnics have also been organised. To state the blindingly obvious: this is money that is not being spent on medical provision. And, let’s not forget, much of this madness happened when the UK had a Conservative government.
With Trump turning the tide on DEI in the US and Reform snapping at Labour’s heels in recent UK opinion polls, it’s perhaps not surprising Streeting is speaking out against the excesses of DEI in the NHS. But turning the tide on such a behemoth will require far more than mild-mannered statements about people being ‘well-meaning but misguided’. Those pushing for DEI training and urging the wearing of Pride-lanyards know all too well the impact of the ideology they are promoting. If Streeting is at all serious about stemming this expensive and divisive practice, he has one hell of a fight on his hands.
Meghan Markle’s tone-deaf wildfire video is hard to stomach
The recent fires in California have had many tragic effects. Many have lost their homes, possessions and livelihoods, and it has been a stark reminder that even the wealthy and privileged are not immune from a truly awful, life-changing event. Regrettably, however, the disaster has attracted a small but vocal number of people who ostensibly have offered their time and resources to provide much-needed assistance – but in reality seem more interested in creating #content to share on their social media.
It is easier, for the sake of our collective mental health, to think as little about Meghan Markle as possible
Meghan Markle, predictably enough, belongs to that category. There is, of course, her new reality television show With Love, Meghan – which, at least in a small gesture of mercy, has had its release date delayed by a few weeks until early March. This was because it was felt that releasing an ersatz lifestyle programme was somehow at odds with the efforts to clean up after the fires. But as if the prospect of that show weren’t terrifying enough, she has now decided to use her recently relaunched Instagram account to share videos of her helping her community. Or, to put it more accurately, reminding her 1.6 million followers that she has a wide assortment of famous friends, as befits her A-list status.
In the latest tone-deaf offering, the Duchess of Sussex posted an apparently candid video (jeans, minimal make-up) in which she details a tortuous odyssey by which a young Billie Eilish fan, who lost her favourite T-shirt in the fires, has been gifted a stack of merchandise signed by Eilish. Although even Meghan’s celebrity-stuffed contact list does not extend to her knowing Eilish personally, there are others that she knows who do, and therefore there is a shout-out to ‘Adam Levine and Behati’, who ‘helped me get this over the line’. She ends by announcing that she is going to email the fortunate Eilish fan’s mother now, and says, ‘I just wanted to share this with you guys.’
As with so many other things that Meghan has been responsible for in recent years, the initial feeling that many viewers might have is either to feel heart-warmed by an apparently generous gesture or, more likely, to shrug and think of this as a fundamentally harmless moment barely worth considering. It is easier, for the sake of our collective mental health, to think as little about Meghan Markle as possible, and even an article such as this gives her antics an unwelcome degree of publicity and exposure.
Yet there is something so nauseatingly contrived, so fake – so actressy – about the little smiles to camera, the faux-excitement, the casual name-dropping of famous friends (for the uninitiated, Levine is the heavily tattooed lead singer of Maroon 5 and ‘Behati’ is Behati Prinsloo, his model wife) and, finally, the idea that some signed trinkets can in some way compensate for a truly epochal disaster. It screams of consumerism and fakery: both things, by now, that the Duchess has intimately associated herself with.
Meghan and Harry have already been accused of being ‘disaster tourists’, adding another epithet to the others that have been flung at them. Whether they are making quasi-state visits to other countries or, in the case of the Duke, launching court case after court case, there is a grandiosity – you might almost say a regality – to how they conduct themselves that is no less repellent for its familiarity. We sigh, and await the advent of With Love, Meghan, and wonder if the end of days will intervene before then. It would, on balance, be a relief if it did.
Is Jared Kushner behind Trump’s ‘Riviera of the Middle East’ plan?
Who knew that America First had such global ambitions? Who knew that, when Donald Trump promised ‘mass deportations’, he also might have been thinking about using America’s might to extract Palestinian people out of Gaza to give them a ‘lasting home’ in Jordan or Egypt? Donald Trump promised ‘peace through strength’ on the campaign trail. The president never quite said that could mean deploying US funds and troops to remake Gaza into, as he now puts, a ‘Riviera of the Middle East’.
‘Gaza’s waterfront property could be very valuable,’ Jared Kushner has said
Standing with Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Washington yesterday, Trump said: ‘The US will take over the Gaza Strip…level the site, get rid of destroyed buildings, level it out, create an economic development that will supply unlimited numbers of jobs and housing for the people of the area.’
Well, as Pepper Brooks says in the film Dodgeball, ‘It’s a bold strategy, Cotton, let’s see if it pays off for ‘em.’ For many years, the United States has engaged in failed democracy-building in the Arab world. Donald Trump appears to be offering resort-building instead. Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner has so far been largely invisible in Trump’s second term, but this plan bears the unmistakable imprint of his thinking.
Trump and Kushner often speak in property development terms when discussing international affairs. For some time, they have entertained the real-estate possibilities of a revamped Middle East. ‘Gaza’s waterfront property could be very valuable,’ said Kushner last year. ‘If people would focus on building up livelihoods.’ And in a telephone call last Summer, Trump reportedly asked Netanyahu about building new hotels out of the rubble in Gaza.
But a full-on US takeover of Gaza is something new, and the potential costs to the US taxpayer could be unimaginably high. Israel might eventually thank the Donald by, say, reopening and renaming the now closed (for-obvious-reasons) Blue Beach Resort on Al-Rashid Street as the Trump Peace Resort, just as it did with Trump Heights in Golan in his first term.
But the extraordinary campness of the Donald-Bibi relationship is not the point here. Trump is moving fast and breaking things, thinking big and disrupting paradigms on every front. And, as ever, there’s method behind the Trump madness.
A White House press release last night declared: ‘The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. The killing must stop, and president Trump will finally ensure there is peace.’
There’s no denying that, in the Holy Land, Trump is boldly proposing what no president has proposed before. He also declared yesterday that America would be withdrawing from ‘certain United Nations groups and reviewing United States support to all international organisations, on the grounds that such groups ‘act contrary to the interests of the United States while attacking our allies and propagating anti-Semitism.’
The Israeli hard right seems enthused. ‘Donald, this looks like the beginning of a beautiful friendship,’ declared Itamar Ben Ben Gvir, the former public security minister, who believes that resettling Gazans is the ‘only solution.’ There’s already considerable gratitude in Israeli political circles that Trump, departing from the Biden administration’s position, has effectively buried any US commitment to a two-state solution.
Saudi Arabia has, unsurprisingly, rejected Trump’s big idea, saying it is committed to Palestinian statehood in Gaza. Yet the US-led Gaza redevelopment proposal does ratchet up pressure on the Arab States, who pay lip service to the plight of Palestinians without ever doing much to help them. Will Israel’s neighbours now suggest a counter-proposal that might be more acceptable to the Muslim world?
Moreover, the White House’s gonzo peace plan also provides cover for its ‘maximum pressure’ campaign against Iran. The Trump administration last night also circulated a National Security memorandum detailing its renewed sanctions campaign against Tehran and its plan to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons. That’s arguably the more pressing development following the Trump-Netanyahu summit, for all the dreamy talk of the brave new Levantine Riviera.
Watch: Kay Burley retires from Sky on air
So. Farewell then Kay Burley. After 36 years, the Sky star has announced she is retiring from the channel. In a two-minute monologue at the end of this morning’s programme, Burley reflected on her career in broadcast journalism, covering stories ranging from the death of Princess Diana and the Concorde air disaster to London winning the rights to host the 2012 Olympics. She said:
After over a million minutes of live TV news – more than anyone else in the world – it’s time for me to indulge in some of my other passions, including my love for travel. So after covering 12 separate general elections including Sir Keir Starmer’s victory last year I’m retiring from Sky News. Let politicians of every party just rejoice at that news…
It comes as Sky undertakes a major restructuring from linear TV towards digital media. Burley has been there since the channel’s launch in 1989: talk about ravens leaving the Tower. Mr S has had his ups and downs with Burley over the years, including the lockdown shenanigans of 2020 and 2021. But here’s to a happy retirement Kay: the morning media round just got a whole lot easier…
Record Channel crossings expose Starmer’s failure to ‘smash the gangs’
More migrants have illegally crossed the English Channel since 1 January than in any previous year for this period. So far in 2025, 1,344 migrants were detected crossing the Channel in small boats between 1 January and 4 February, beating the previous record of 1,339 in 2022.
The figures published by Border Force – and tracked daily by The Spectator’s data hub – put paid to Keir Starmer's promise to ‘smash the gangs’. A key part of Labour’s manifesto – and one of Starmer’s ‘first steps’ – was to ‘create a fair system and stop the small boat crossings’. Since Starmer took office last July, there have been 24,586 migrant crossings.
The news comes despite storm Éowyn and dangerous conditions in the Channel in recent weeks. This weekend alone, almost 200 people in four boats were detected making the crossing. Analysis by Sky News shows that last year some 40 per cent of crossings occurred on weekends, possibly due to relaxed French working attitudes on Saturdays and Sundays.
The 'small boats' are now not so small either. Exclusive analysis by The Spectator’s data hub shows that the average number of migrants cramming into each boat has soared since 2019. When the figures were first collected the average per boat was eight – it’s now over 50.
Starmer has promised sanctions and counter terror-style powers to smash the gangs, but every Prime Minister of the last few years has made similar promises. The truth is that, unless the migrants are stopped from leaving the French side, it’s hard to see how these numbers will ever go down.
Can our justice system handle cases like Lucy Letby’s?
Could Lucy Letby, the UK’s most notorious child-murderer, be innocent? The question has rumbled on ever since her convictions for the killing or attempted killing of 14 babies while a neo-natal nurse at Chester Hospital. It is a question that was given more substance this week by a panel of specialists, whose evidence forms the basis of an application from her lawyers to the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC), which could allow an appeal.
The matter of Letby’s guilt or innocence is not the only question raised by this case, however. Another, which has so far lurked mostly in the background, concerns nothing less than the quality of the English judicial process. Should an appeal succeed, this question would spring into the foreground. But the extent of unease that already surrounds this case means that it should be addressed anyway, even if there is no appeal.
Let me put my own cards on the table. I have no view on, or sense of, Letby’s innocence or guilt. I was not in the courtroom; I followed the case through media reports. As an ingrained sceptic and questioner of conventional wisdom, however, I am wary of the cast-iron certainties that marked this case, and the circumstantial nature of the evidence. It seemed to me that a consensus had been formed early on about Letby and her guilt that would have been very difficult for any trial to dislodge.
This, in turn, highlights what seem to me some real drawbacks of the English judicial process, especially in trials such as Letby’s which arouse high public emotions, and rely on highly technical evidence. The combination may not serve the interests of justice.
I was called for jury service around 20 ago and emerged a firm supporter of a system that requires a random selection of people to reach a verdict based on the evidence they have heard. But specialist evidence presents problems, especially if the whole case hangs on its interpretation.
The difficulty is more often mentioned in relation to fraud trials, but it could equally have applied in the trials of sub-postmasters which involved evidence about the workings of the Horizon computer system. This is not to say that a jury in such cases should necessarily be replaced – as has sometimes been suggested – by a specialist panel. The point is rather to recognise that a jury of lay-people has no way of judging the validity of the expert evidence that is placed before them; they depend entirely on the acquired expertise, or natural curiosity, of the legal counsel on either side.
The difficulties are only compounded by the adversarial nature of the English judicial system, where lawyers compete to convince the jury, not only with the evidence at their disposal, but with their rhetorical and persuasive skills. It seems to me that the inquisitorial system that mostly applies on the Continent is better suited – in fact much better suited – to examining and assessing highly technical evidence.
Specialist evidence presents problems, especially if the whole case hangs on its interpretation
The emotional aspect cannot be excluded either. The Letby case – a nurse charged with killing very sick infants in her care – is at the extreme end of the spectrum here, with bereaved parents and colleagues of the accused nurse being called on to testify or watching proceedings from the public gallery. But it is precisely in such cases where, it could be argued, emotions need to be kept at bay, to allow the evidence to be scrutinised as scientifically and dispassionately as possible.
The trend in English courts over the years, however, has been towards admitting ever more emotion into the courtroom, whether it is testimony at the start of public inquiries – from bereaved relatives at the Covid inquiry, for instance – or the victim impact statements that have been permitted in courts starting in 2001. It is understandable that those affected by what has happened want to stress the heinous nature of the crime. But how much of this is conducive to the passage of justice? The parents of the babies who died at the Countess of Chester hospital deserve endless sympathy; but they cannot be allowed to stand as judge and jury.
Many of these points – about technical evidence, the adversarial system and a background of high emotions – can be found to some degree in past cases where there have been proven miscarriages of justice. The notorious case of the Guildford Four, wrongly convicted of the 1974 Guildford pub bombing, took place against a background of high public alarm over IRA attacks on the mainland. The more recent cases against postmasters and postmistresses required evidence about the functioning of specialist computer software. The charges also related to defrauding the Post Office – then an institution held in some public affection. In the upper echelons of the Post Office, there seemed to be a view that fraud was more likely than not.
In the event that the convictions in the Letby case are found to be unsafe at appeal, the argument for reforming some aspects of the judicial system – up to and including replacing the adversarial with an inquisitorial system for certain cases – would surely be made.
At a time when trust in the justice system is not what it was, there must also be a case for more transparency. Much is made in the UK of the principle that justice must not only be done, but seen to be done. In at least one respect, it is not nearly as open as it could be. If, as a reporter or interested member of the public you want to look for yourself at the records of a trial, you may request a transcript – for which you will be required to pay the costs of transcription. For a case I was interested in, I was quoted £60,000. Sir David Davis said he had been quoted £100,000 for a transcript of the Letby trial. Yet there must be recordings of proceedings, which must in this day and age be digitised. Hansard publishes Parliamentary transcripts; should there not be equivalent court records, with at least a recording available free of charge – a 21st century public gallery?
If more people were able to hear what the jury heard in the trial of Lucy Letby – which has become ever more contentious as the months have passed than it ever was while the trial was in progress, then that could also help to foster confidence in the process. Or at least it could make for a more informed public debate about what is emerging as one of the most contentious cases of recent times.
The real problem with CCHQ
When Kemi Badenoch’s leadership got off to a less-than-inspiring start, her defenders made a reasonable case that she needed more time. The Conservative and Unionist party had just suffered one of the most catastrophic routs in its long history; it would take more than a few months to right the ship.
But as month has followed month, disquiet has been growing in Tory circles. The latest reports about Badenoch’s showdown with Conservative Campaign Headquarters (CCHQ) do not inspire confidence either.
This is telling, because to an audience of Tory activists, CCHQ ought to be an easy target. It’s hard to find anyone in the voluntary party with a good word to say about the organisation, with its control freakery, predilection for ‘woke’ HR practices, and its general incompetence. However, Badenoch’s reported broadside nonetheless misses the mark.
Badenoch appears to be blaming CCHQ for things which can never be entirely its fault. She reportedly told an all-hands meeting that all staff have ‘two jobs: campaigning and fundraising. If you’re not doing something to make either of those happen, you’re not doing your job right.’
Yet both of those things depend on the leader. Centrally-directed campaigning of the sort Matthew Parker Street ought to be responsible for depends on having things on which to campaign. Badenoch has made a virtue of having no policy positions, so what exactly have they got to work with?
A party cannot subsist on opposition research alone. Labour is having a miserable time, but it is bleeding more support to Reform UK, and even the Greens than to the Conservatives. Negative campaigning is not enough. Voters need a positive reason to even pay attention to the Tories, let alone vote for them.
As for fundraising, that too is ultimately the responsibility of the leader. Big-money donors expect personal attention, whilst donors on all levels need to believe in both the party’s programme and its credibility. In recent years CCHQ has tended to have a non-politician co-chairman who handles the money, but even then, the leader is the product they’re selling.
I’ve spoken to local Conservative parties who complain both that they can’t get money out of CCHQ and that local donors who don’t believe in Badenoch are refusing to open their wallets. That’s anecdotal but it does illustrate the problem.
But there’s an even deeper problem: Badenoch’s apparent critique is wrong. If you wanted a shorthand explanation for how the Conservative party reached its current parlous state, the idea that central office’s job consists solely of fundraising and campaigning is a good one.
Each is obviously important, but both are short-term goals focused entirely on the interests of the current leader. What has been missing, for the quarter-century since Wiliam Hague gutted the party’s democratic structures in 1998, is any long-term investment in the party as an institution.
Where is the investment in activist training and development, of the sort that comes to the left as second nature? The Tory party used to maintain Swinton College, an actual establishment, for that purpose. Networks of Tory trade unionists, academics, or even professionals (outside the City) are vestigial or non-existent.
Nor does the party any longer maintain the kind of national network of full-time election agents that once made it such a formidable election-winning machine. Not only are election agents hired in feast-and-famine fashion in time with the electoral cycle, but they are hired anew at each election in a new batch of target seats, with no long-term cultivation of the Tory vote over multiple cycles.
Finally, there appears to be nothing on maintaining the party as a social institution. Where once the Young Conservatives were a dating service in much of Britain, the central party is now so sensitive to scandal that it doesn’t have an autonomously-organised youth wing and goes so far as to condemn Tory students for hosting a (popular) fox-hunt themed pub crawl.
All this has served individual leaders well in the short term. But it has compounded other problems: there is no to little sense of there being an institutional or social Conservative party distinct from the leader. This means the full weight of sustaining the party as a campaigning force is on Badenoch’s shoulders – whether she likes it or not.
The audacity of Trump’s Gaza plan
Some moments in history demand recognition, not just for their weight in the present but for the seismic shifts they herald. The Trump-Netanyahu press conference was one such moment – not a perfunctory diplomatic exercise, nor a routine reaffirmation of alliance, but an unambiguous declaration of intent. It was a disruption of long-entrenched, failed orthodoxies and the unveiling of a vision that dares to reimagine the Middle East in starkly different terms.
For decades, world leaders have clung to exhausted formulas – peace processes built on illusion, agreements predicated on fantasy, and a wilful refusal to acknowledge the fundamental realities of Palestinian rejectionism and terror. That era is now over. Standing together, the President of the United States and the Prime Minister of Israel made it unmistakably clear: they are not here to mollify, to equivocate, or to perpetuate the cycles of appeasement that have long defined western diplomacy towards the Arab-Israeli conflict. They are here to reset the board entirely.
Amid the declarations that emerged from this historic moment, one stood above all: Trump’s unequivocal statement that the goal is not to reform Gaza, not to manage it, but to remove its population entirely. No more illusions of Palestinian self-rule, no more diplomatic contortions to accommodate an irredeemable status quo. Trump’s is not another failed experiment in Palestinian self-rule – but a move to dismantle the population that carried out the most brutal attack on Jews since the Holocaust and to relocate them elsewhere.
The gravity of this pronouncement cannot be overstated. As Israeli commentator Amit Segal astutely observed, had the hard-right politician Itamar Ben-Gvir proposed such a policy as part of coalition negotiations merely two years ago, it would have ignited an international firestorm. Yet here it was, calmly, deliberately articulated as the official position of the most powerful nation on Earth.
Nor was this an offhand remark – no Trumpian improvisation to be explained away later. The president read from prepared notes, delivering the statement with the deliberation and gravity of a policy long in the making. This was not casual hyperbole, nor an idle provocation; it was a calculated, official pronouncement. It was an act of political theatre designed to break the bubble of denial and intransigence.
But that was only the beginning. Alongside this, Donald Trump laid out an unambiguous multi-part framework: no to a Palestinian state. The old paradigm, a fixture of failed diplomatic orthodoxy, is now irrelevant – a fantasy proven ever more unworkable each time it has been forced into action. Yes to an enduring peace with Saudi Arabia – without Palestinian preconditions. The old linkage between Arab-Israeli normalisation and Palestinian statehood is gone, though the Saudis swiftly denied this. Yes to permanently ending Hamas and ensuring Gaza can never again pose a threat. The destruction will be total. There will be no ‘rebuilding’ for Hamas to rule over, only American led efforts. Yes to stopping Iran’s nuclear ambitions – by any means necessary. Iran will be weakened, its regional reach crushed.
This is not a strategy of containment, nor an effort to sustain the perpetual diplomatic holding pattern that has defined western policy for decades. It is a vision of finality – an approach that seeks not to manage conflict but to bring it to a decisive and irreversible conclusion. If Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize less than eight months into his presidency, Trump must surely be worthy just three weeks into his.
Trump’s ability to impose his will upon seemingly intractable situations is no accident. He understands that power is not merely about policy but about the mastery of organised chaos – the capacity to disrupt, to destabilise, and in doing so, to force a new reality into being. He has demonstrated time and again that resistance to his demands – whether from allies or adversaries – eventually bends to his will. Just ask Mexico, Canada, or the growing list of others. The question, therefore, is not whether this plan is feasible. The question is how long it will take before the world accepts that it is already in motion. Trump’s pronouncement is the emperor’s new clothes of Middle Eastern geopolitics: a reality that exists the moment he dares to name it.
Trump is set now to meet with Egypt’s President and Jordan’s King – two leaders whose cooperation will be critical in reshaping Gaza’s fate. These are not symbolic meetings. They show the seriousness of his intent, and are part of a rapidly unfolding strategy. If past is prologue, their initial resistance will give way to accommodation.
Meanwhile, Netanyahu stood beside Trump not as a mere ally but as a statesman fully aligned with the vision before them. He was not a leader reacting to a surprise American policy shift, but the co-architect of a new regional order. Together, these two men have already upended decades of Middle Eastern diplomacy with the Abraham Accords. What they now propose is even more ambitious.
Furthermore, by means of yet another executive order, Trump gave a forceful rejection of longstanding UN biases against Israel, removing financial and diplomatic support from institutions that have systematically worked against Israel’s legitimacy on the world stage. He cut all US funding to UNRWA, citing its infiltration by designated terrorist groups and the involvement of its employees in the 7 October attack. This move effectively ends American financial support for an agency long accused of fostering anti-Israel narratives and aiding Palestinian terrorism. The order also withdraws the United States from the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC), halting American participation in a body that has consistently shielded human rights abusers while disproportionately targeting Israel. In addition, the US will conduct a review of its membership of UNESCO, withholding its share of funding and assessing the body’s history of anti-Israel bias, including its efforts to erase Jewish historical ties to significant sites like the Temple Mount and the Western Wall.
Trump’s vision will terrify those who have grown comfortable with the status quo. It will unsettle those who prefer diplomatic inertia to hard truths. And it will enrage those who have built careers, reputations, and fortunes upon the perpetuation of the unsolvable. But what he and Netanyahu propose is not reckless; it is reality-based. It acknowledges the unspeakable truth that policymakers have long whispered but never dared articulate: that Gaza, under its current governance and population, is a failed experiment that cannot be salvaged.
Ever the salesman, Trump frames this all as an opportunity for Gazans to build peaceful, prosperous lives – just somewhere else. Many will recoil at the audacity of this proposition. But is it not more audacious to continue pretending that Palestinian self-rule in Gaza can exist without terror, that this small strip of land under continued Palestinian rule can be anything other than a launchpad for perpetual war?
History will remember this moment not merely for what was said, but for what it signified: the point at which two leaders, long derided by their critics, once again proved that their vision is neither naïve nor impractical, but bold, comprehensive and daring.
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Does anyone actually fancy David Beckham?
Unless your Wi-Fi has been down this week, you’ll be aware that David Beckham has got his kit off again. He’s back in his underwear for a ‘steamy’ (Daily Mail) ‘full frontal’ (Daily Mail again, though it really isn’t – and I had to watch it, dispassionately I stress, three times for the purposes of this article in order to be sure) campaign for Hugo Boss which, in that hackneyed and usually inaccurate phrase, ‘broke the internet’. Did you have problems putting your Ocado order through? Me neither.
In the advert by photographers and fash-mag-slags Mert and Marcus, Becks pulls up to his industrial, glass cube of an apartment in an Aston Martin, walks in, disrobing as he goes, eats a bowl of cereal, writhes around on a nasty World of Leather sofa, before getting in the shower (still, bizarrely, wearing his Hugo Boss pants). After clocking some revellers checking him out from the building opposite, he drops his keks, giving them a cheeky wave. I think his expression here is meant to be ‘hot and smouldering’, but it’s more George Formby. I half-expected him to say, ‘Turned out nice again’ in that squeaky voice.
But he is bronzed and manscaped, his six-pack so defined and oiled it could go straight on the barbecue, and there is a deep V line pointing to his crotch which is technically, I now know, called the ‘inguinal crease’, but colloquially the ‘love line’ or ‘moneymaker’. All of this has unleashed extraordinary, unedifying ejaculations from both (straight) male and female commentators. ‘Still got it at 49!’ squeals one. ‘It’s time to give the man a gong!’ shrieks another. While in the Times, Harriet Walker asked, breathlessly, ‘What does this tell us about what women want?’ At this point, I had to scream and call in VAR – because as far as I’m concerned, it says absolutely bugger all.
Becks has never done it for me. There’s that voice for starters; a quick straw poll of my girls and gays reveals that, crucially, any Becks-based fantasies involve him keeping his gob shut. Then there’s the weird lack of body hair – I haven’t encountered a chest that smooth since I was about 16. The man embodied, and may even have inspired, the most woeful trends of the 1990s: metrosexuals, himbos, male grooming.
But my main problem – and this is why, quite apart from describing them as ‘a bunch of cunts’, the Honours Committee will never approve the knighthood he so craves – is that this is a man who has apparently played away more than Fulham when they had to hot desk with QPR for two seasons. He seemed a wounded puppy in that carefully curated 2023 Netflix documentary, Beckham – ‘There were some horrible stories that were very hard to deal with,’ he whimpered. But he didn’t deny the affair with Rebecca Loos when he was at Real Madrid, which presumably totally wrecked her life.
There’s nothing sexy about being one half of a token marriage. Despite VB’s regular Insta pics of her husband in his undies – ‘Saturday morning workout with this fit guy, you’re welcome’, presumably signed off by three corporate comms firms – does anyone still believe in the Beckhams’s marriage?
Naturally, I can’t speak for the desires of millions of women, but I can tell you categorically what women don’t want:
He is bronzed and manscaped, his six-pack so defined and oiled it could go straight on the barbecue
- A man who indulges in any of the following: fake tan, neck tats (unless she’s heavily into thrash metal), intimate waxing, having an aesthetician on speed dial. (I spent much of the Netflix series in a nine-way WhatsApp conversation with friends speculating what he’d had done to his face and why his hairline looked so weird.)
- A man who’s so useless that the only thing he can fix himself to eat when he gets in late is a bowl of the kids’ Shreddies.
- And, crucially, a man who, when he drops his keks – however ripped he might be – leaves you wondering if he’s had to stop off at a clinic on the way over.
As a player, Becks may have had all the flicks and tricks, but for me, he’s the figurehead of the ‘golden generation’ of England who never got beyond a quarter-final. He couldn’t even bring the 2018 World Cup home, despite teaming up with Prince William; Fifa gave the tournament to Russia. This is why I won’t hear a word against Gareth Southgate: he put a stop to the psychodrama that began with Italia 90, meaning that my young sons, aged 9 and 10, can watch England go into a penalty shootout without the need to tee up counselling.
Perhaps it’s my age – I’m sandwiched between Millennials and Gen X – but I preferred footballers when they were more rugged, rough and ready. Basically, as Becks is so fond of saying, these were real men, funny, fierce, charismatic and flawed. Quite a few were French. All are long, sadly, retired. They were the sort of player who’d take a flying kick at a yob screaming abuse in the stands, rather than lashing out petulantly at a provocative Argentine midfielder. ‘Isn’t he marvellous,’ breathed my deputy headmistress as we schoolgirls swooned over the coverage of Eric Cantona’s boot to that angry oik. ‘That frightful man has BNP written all over him.’
And I’ve always had a soft spot for Tony Adams, who’s not only read a few books but has written perhaps the best sporting autobiography out there, Addicted. Of his performance on Strictly Come Dancing, his lovely, clever wife, Poppy, declared, ‘I’ve never been more proud or more in love with him.’ Now that is attractive.
Yet I realise my immunity to David Beckham’s charms may put me in the minority. Checking out listicles of the current ‘hottest players in soccer [sic]’ left me similarly cold at the realisation they’re all seeking to emulate him. Ridiculously ripped, enamel-toothed, often heavily inked with over-styled hair and pecs like cling-filmed supermarket chicken breasts inflated with antibiotics, the likes of Marcos Llorente, Jesse Lingard, Jude Bellingham and Marcus Rashford resemble fake profile pics on Grindr.
The only fantasy I can conjure up about Becks involves his well-documented OCD. Get over here and clean my kitchen. It’s dirty and it needs doing. There’s just one hard limit I need to set – you must not say a word.
Why Japan is best at whisky, tailoring, cheese, pastries… I could go on
Many people visit Japan because of its food but few, surely, have pastries in mind. In fact, Japan has no discernible tradition in this culinary realm at all. But that didn’t stop a trio of Japanese bakers from winning the biannual pastry world cup, pushing the fancied host nation France into a chastening second place.
Japan won last time too and thus became the first country ever to retain the title, which you might suppose would make this big news here in Tokyo. But the media has hardly mentioned it, probably because this kind of national stereotype-busting triumph is becoming quite normal.
For example, Japan, believe it or not, is now one of the best countries in the world for pizza, especially the Neapolitan version. The trend began in 2010 when Akinari Makishima of Nagoya became the world champion pizza maker, beating off 150 competitors from Italy, Spain and the US in the process.
Japanese confectioners are now among the world’s best, with the chocolate shops of Kyoto gaining international renown. Even Japanese cheese, in a country hardly known for its dairy products, has won prizes. The Camembert-like Sakura variety from Hokkaido was once awarded the gold medal at the Mountain Cheese Olympics in Switzerland.
As for drinks, a Japanese Scotch first beat out the home-grown versions in 2014, with one judge remarking on Suntory’s Yamazaki single malt’s ‘near-indescribable genius’. And that was no fluke. Last August, in the so-called Judgement of Glasgow, a panel of hard-drinking Glaswegian whisky experts gave Japanese varieties the nod in three out of five categories. Oh, and the world’s best bartender and champion cocktail shaker is… Japanese.
It is not just food and drink. Japan has taken on the international masters at their own game in menswear. If you fancy a pair of bespoke shoes, the best in the world may not be found in Savile Row or Mayfair but Shibuya ward in Tokyo, home to the atelier of Yohei Fukuda (check out his website – if there is such a thing as shoe-porn, this is it).
Similarly, probably the best men’s bags in the world are to be found in Paris, but made by a Japanese designer, Satoru Hosoi. As for suits and coats, Kotaro Miyahara of Sartorio Corcos of Florence has a cult following and years-long waiting list.
Why are the Japanese so good at acquiring these highly specialised skills? Partly it is the deeply ingrained stoical work ethic. The Japanese will graft, often for little money, for years on end, and put up with pretty Spartan conditions in the process. Yohei Fukuda, for example, lived in a dismal homestay in London with a family who often didn’t pay the electricity bills, which meant frequent power outages. He was also burgled twice but stayed the course, getting a job at master shoemakers John Lobb before coming home and going it alone.
I couldn’t quite see the value of spending the thousands of hours necessary to master the precise strokes of the 2,000 Kanji required for basic literacy
The Japanese are also phenomenally dexterous, which may be a consequence of all those annoying, fussy procedures that must be mastered to function in Japanese society – the tea ceremonies, the exacting way you are expected to wrap gifts, the rules governing angles and durations of bowing. I often wondered if they might be more trouble than they were worth. Perhaps they are.
I couldn’t quite see the value of spending the thousands of hours necessary to master the precise strokes of the 2,000 Kanji required for basic literacy, or the care and effort needed for chopsticks when spoons, forks and knives were available. Nor could I quite appreciate the time and trouble the Japanese would take over assembling their character bentos – the very precise lunchboxes that wives often make for their husbands – or seasonally decorated hand-crafted sweets, wagashi. And as for origami… why bother?
But then I had a eureka moment – or a Socrates moment, perhaps – for it was the philosopher’s choice of Xanthippe for a wife, reputedly the most difficult, sharpest-tongued woman in Athens, that gave me the answer. The difficulty is the point. As Socrates said when asked why he had chosen such a trying woman, he replied: ‘If I can put up with her, I can put up with anyone.’ So, mastering Kanji prepares you for the arduous journey required for the acquisition of any artisanal skill.
There is a historical parallel to all this. Arguably, the way the Japanese have gone out into the world and brought back technical mastery reflects the way modern Japan came into being. In the 19th century, as Japan reinvented itself upon the close of its 250-year period of isolation, emissaries were dispatched around Europe to cherry-pick the best examples of modern governance, which were then replicated in Japan. Thus, the French gendarmerie, the German education and legal systems, and the British parliamentary system were incorporated into the reborn Meiji Japan. It is still going on. Artisans, chefs and tailors are the new emissaries – the new cherry-pickers. It’s a Japan First strategy, courtesy of the rest of the world.
My son was born in the passenger seat footwell
A few days before Christmas, I was gently woken by my wife telling me that while I’d been sleeping through the night in blissful ignorance, she had been writhing in labour downstairs. At the last moment, she had decided against giving birth at home and now wanted to go to the hospital. I hadn’t known a home birth was even on the cards – clearly, my wife and I need to work on our communication. Moreover, it was a week before the due date, so I had gone to bed thinking there were still days remaining before the great panic.
Within minutes, we were in the car and racing to the maternity ward. Racing, but not fast enough. As we arrived at the hospital car park, my wife informed me that she wasn’t able to get out of the car. She was delivering our baby there and then.
Albert is baby number four. Our other three children were tucked up at home under the care of my mother-in-law, who was staying with us over Advent and Christmas. Compared with the births of my other children, Albert’s was certainly the most unconventional, and consequently, we have high hopes for him. Beyond that, though, I couldn’t tell you much by way of a comparison, as I had never been present at the births of my children.
On those occasions, my wife requested that I leave the room until the drama was over, at which point a midwife called me away from my coffee and newspaper to meet my newborn. Then, I would enter an immaculately clean room where my wife was sitting, make-up on and hair brushed, nursing our new child. Neither of us, in case it’s unclear, is very modern.
But now I fear I’ve been missing out on one of life’s great wonders. I had never witnessed a birth, let alone one in the passenger seat of my car. It was amazing. I had leapt out of my seat and run round the back of the car, and on opening her door, I found that in those three seconds it had taken me to orbit the vehicle, a small Morello had begun to spring forth into the world.
In the blink of an eye, my wife was sitting there in the passenger seat with our son in her arms. I found the event quite moving, and even sanctioned my lower lip to momentarily wobble as I looked at my son. The midwifery team failed to conceal their astonishment as they emerged through the sliding doors and gathered round the car: they beheld a life-sized nativity in the front seat.
With my wife having been helped into a wheelchair, we processed into the maternity ward with me holding our baby son in my arms. A few hours passed, during which Albert and I introduced ourselves to each other, when it suddenly occurred to me: I’d better get the car valeted.
As the car was exorcised of amniotic fluid by a group of charming yet bewildered Romanians, I sat in the pub and thought about how the most beautiful, natural thing one can experience has become almost unusual in our society. With most countries worldwide – and all countries in the West – heading towards demographic collapse, I’m pleased that my wife and I are doing our bit to reverse the trend.
I suppose we now count as a large family. In fact, we have been repeatedly reminded of this by the expressions of surprise as we’ve walked into shops or cafés over the past few weeks. I’m amused by these responses. There used to be a time when men were proud of the potency of their loins. If this offends modern sensibilities, the demographic suicide of civilisation certainly offends mine.
Why Trump hates USAID so much
The Trump administration’s takedown of federal spending has begun in earnest with the dismantling of the US Agency for International Development (USAID), an independent government agency that has been funding healthcare, pro-democracy and civil society programmes around the world since 1961.
‘We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper,’ Elon Musk boasted on X, describing the agency as ‘a viper’s nest of radical-left Marxists who hate America.’ Over the past three weeks, USAID’s leadership and staff have been gutted by furloughs, firings and disciplinary leaves, the website taken offline and – most painfully to many – funding for thousands of NGOs around the world has been suspended, leaving media outlets, anti-corruption centres and democracy activist organisations high and dry. The move has drawn howls of protest from the NGO-funded journalists and civil society activists who say they will have to shut down their investigative and campaigning activities.
‘Almost none of the information you read about Georgia would be available without independent and critical media, delivered by me and others who report on the country,’ complains Katie Shoshiashvili, a senior corruption researcher at the Tbilisi branch of Transparency International. ‘This is exactly what the [governing] regime is trying to silence.’
Shutting down USAID is ‘exactly what autocrats all over the world want,’ says Michael McFaul, who was US Ambassador to Russia when Vladimir Putin expelled USAID in 2012. ‘Their work supported free markets, democracy, human rights – [all] causes that threatened Putin’s dictatorship.’
Certainly, many avowed enemies of America have welcomed the move. ‘USAID is the antechamber of globalist Lodge,’ gloated ultra-nationalist Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin, who denounced the agency as ‘the core of the deep state’ and ‘where the main monster of the Swamp dwells.’
The gutting of USAID’s $50 billion annual budget has also drawn whoops of delight from those in the US and beyond who argue that the agency has been systematically funding opposition activities and media outlets around the world that would not otherwise exist. USAID programmes have been instrumental, both supporters and critics say, in inciting protests and revolutions in Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia and Romania. Furthermore, say critics, far from being truly independent, the groups funded by Washington are actually a fifth column for US influence.
‘USAID, which is a CIA front, put $5 billion to fund those riots in 2014 in Ukraine,’ Robert F. Kennedy Jr – whose uncle, President John F. Kennedy, founded the agency in 1961 – told Tucker Carlson this week. Balázs Orbán, a close political ally of the (unrelated) Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, complained that USAID has been a source of ‘illicit foreign funding funnelled into the opposition … Couldn’t be happier that @POTUS, @JDVance & @elonmusk are finally taking down this corrupt foreign interference machine.’
But if USAID has indeed been such an effective soft-power tool, enabling the US to act as puppet master in the politics of small countries around the world, why would the Trump administration voluntarily dismantle such a powerful instrument of influence? Team Trump’s own explanation is that US foreign policy should focus on promoting US interests rather than on making the world a better place.
‘US foreign policy has long focused on other regions while overlooking our own … That ends now,’ said Senator Marco Rubio. Essentially, the shutdown of USAID marks an acknowledgment by Washington that the post-Cold War unipolar world is over – and that America is disengaging from its 80-year-old role as world policeman and arsenal of democracy. ‘There are now multiple great powers in different parts of the world,’ said Rubio. ‘The postwar global order is not just obsolete; it is now a weapon being used against us.’
But there is another, more earthy component to the MAGA movement’s longstanding hatred of USAID – retaliation for the Russiagate and Ukrainegate scandals. The second impeachment of Donald Trump in the closing days of his first presidency cited investigations by an anti-corruption group funded by USAID no fewer than four times. Focusing on Trump’s alleged demands that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky supply compromising information on his opponent Joe Biden’s son Hunter’s business activities in Kyiv in exchange for US aid, the impeachment charges used reports by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project. The OCCRP received $20 million of US funding for its activities in Armenia, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova, Ukraine and the western Balkans.
‘Why did USAID pay $20 million to hit-piece journalists to dig up dirt on Rudy Giuliani and use that dirt as the basis to impeach the sitting US President in 2019?’ asks former State Department cyber expert turned online freedom campaigner Mike Benz. ‘The left-liberal-centre spectrum that drove Russiagate for four years has since forgotten about it, but for MAGA Russiagate is red hot live & a great mobiliser. Reap what you sow.’
Whether Trump’s true motivations are a deeply considered geopolitical reset or a petty act of personal revenge, the demise of USAID marks a major practical and philosophical shift in US policy. America’s longstanding role as a supporter of democratic movements around the world is officially at an end.
Trump’s popularity among Brits is rising
Back in July 2019, Donald Trump called Boris Johnson ‘Britain Trump’, before adding ‘that’s probably a good thing, they like me over there’. Awkwardly for Johnson at the time, this was certainly not the case for the majority of Brits, even among those who backed Boris. In 2019, 7 in 10 thought Donald Trump had been a bad president, including a majority of Conservative voters.
While Johnson might have squirmed at Trump’s endorsement back then, politicians in the UK today seem to be rushing to ingratiate themselves with the new administration. And it’s not just politicians changing their minds, British voters are also warming to Trump 2.0.
New data from my company JL Partners shows that the British public, only 8 per cent of whom said Trump had been a good president on leaving office, are more likely to say they view him more positively after the last few weeks than negatively. And whilst he is still by no means hugely liked, 4 in 10 Reform UK voters, 1 in 3 Conservatives voters and even 1 in 5 Labour voters say their views of Donald Trump have become more positive since the inauguration.
So what has changed? The shift is partly driven by what Trump says he will do. After his victory in November, Labour said they would learn from the Democrats’ mistake and focus on immigration and the economy. And indeed, there is now net support among the British public for much of what might be termed a Trump-style policy platform, including ‘declaring a national emergency at the channel and carrying out deportations of those living here illegally’, ‘completely changing direction from a previous government’, and interestingly given the last 48 hours, ‘increasing tariffs, cutting foreign aid and suspending visas for countries who refuse to accept deportation flights carrying their citizens.’
But there is more to it than that. British voters gave the Conservatives such a drubbing at the ballot box in July last year because they were frustrated at what they saw as 14 years of stasis and inaction. One thing we regularly heard in focus groups from voters of all stripes was that they were desperate for change, for politicians to finally stop talking about what they were going to do and actually do it. Keir Starmer’s personal ratings have in turn suffered from a pervading sense that he does not move decisively, and that he lacks the drive to execute his vision, if he has any vision at all. It is this element of Trump’s brand that voters are looking for someone to emulate in the UK.
Who might harness the political appetite for elements of a ‘Britain Trump’ in 2025?
A majority of Brits, including those that don’t like him or his ideas, say that ‘regardless of Donald Trump’s politics he is able to get things done,’ and there is similar agreement for the statement ‘it’s a breath of fresh air when a politician makes a change, regardless of if I agree with that change’. Crucially, they also agree that ‘Keir Starmer and Labour can learn from Trump’s urgency and determination to get things done.’
Perhaps it is not a surprise that Reform voters are the most likely to feel positively towards Donald Trump, but strikingly, this enthusiasm is now also seen in parts of the electorate that have been firmly in Labour’s corner in recent years. Young people and those from black, Asian and ethnic minority backgrounds are now more likely than not to say that they are ‘excited by what Donald Trump can do over the next 4 years’ and they particularly strongly agree that ‘it is a good thing for the US that Donald Trump is focused on getting things done.’
So which British political party will capitalise on this strong desire for action from voters? Who might harness the political appetite for elements of a ‘Britain Trump’ in 2025? Our last word cloud asking who would make the best Prime Minister showed ‘Nigel Farage’ feature most prominently, a marked change on this time last year when Keir Starmer dominated. Indeed, Reform UK continues to take advantage of the public’s current frustration with traditional Westminster politics and has been steadily increasing their performance in the polls since July. If Labour and the Conservatives want to reassert their traditional dominance they could do worse than to look across the Atlantic and try to demonstrate that they too can get something, anything, done.
After half a billion years, are sharks heading for extinction?
Sharks were never far from our minds as we grew up on the beach in Adelaide. Although attacks were rare, they were real. My grandfather was witness to the fatal mauling of a swimming instructor in the 1930s, and later a friend from university was killed while scuba diving off Port Noarlunga. Yet for the most part sharks were more an idea than a living presence. Other than an unsettlingly close encounter with a bronze whaler when I was 20, my interactions with the creatures as a young person were mostly confined to observing gentle Port Jackson sharks, wobbegongs and grey nurses while snorkelling and diving.
This tendency to see sharks only through the prism of their vastly overestimated threat to human life obscures the many wonders of these remarkable animals. As John Long, professor of Palaeontology at Flinders University, explains in his wonderfully rich book, sharks are one of our planet’s great success stories. Incredibly ancient, enormously various in their design and possessed of a range of remarkable adaptations, they also play a vital role in our ecosystems. They regulate food chains and maintain the health of sea grass beds, coral reefs and kelp forests by controlling fish populations; and they contribute to the carbon cycle by transporting nutrients between different parts of the ocean.
The Secret History of Sharks is both an evolutionary and a personal history. It is an account of the immensely long process of adaptation and change that has given rise to more than 1,200 species of sharks, rays, skates, sawfish and chimaeras that populate the world’s oceans and waterways today; and it’s the story of Long’s lifelong fascination with sharks, ancient and modern.
We begin almost half a billion years ago, when the first traces of sharks appear in the fossil record. These early creatures are fugitive presences, known only from a handful of scales and fin spines. They seem to have borne little resemblance to the ones we know today. Perhaps a foot in length, they had the tiny, pointed placoid scales that distinguish sharks from other fish (and grant them the extraordinary efficiency in the water that makes them so formidable); but they may have lacked teeth. It took another 50 million years before shark teeth start to become abundant in sedimentary rocks. From that point on, sharks began to proliferate through the oceans and freshwater environments, developing feeding strategies and expanding into new ecological niches.
Long’s narrative also offers a deep-time history of the planet. As the continents drifted across its surface, creating and eventually unmaking ancient oceans such as the Tethys and the vast Panthalassic, marine environments changed as well. The shallow, trilobite-infested seas of the Silurian gave way to oceans crowded with terrifying marine dinosaurs in the Jurassic and Cretaceous; and again to seas populated by human-sized penguins, whales and the ‘ultimate apex predator’, the more than 50ft long Megalodon, that endured until only a few million years ago.
This perspective makes both the vulnerability and remarkable resilience of life in general, and sharks in particular, startlingly apparent. Over and over again, waves of extinction rippled out across the planet, and each time sharks found ways to adapt. Some of these adaptations are truly remarkable: the Helicoprions that ruled the oceans of the Permian boasted teeth on their bottom jaw that grew in a spiral like a buzzsaw that they used to eat squid and nautiloids.
Equally striking is the role sharks have played as drivers of evolution. The rise of the massive cardabiodontidae, one of the first modern sharks, in the Cretaceous, may have contributed to the extinction of ichthyosaurs and pliosaurs. Similarly, Long argues that the immense size of whales may have come about as part of an arms race with the enormous Otodus lineage that culminated in Megalodon. (But he also suggests that the size of Megalodon and its ancestors may have been a side effect of their taste for intrauterine cannibalism, in which the baby sharks consume each other while still inside their mothers.)
While sharks have helped shape marine environments for hundreds of millions of years, it is we who are now reshaping their world, with catastrophic consequences. One recent study found that a third of all shark, ray and chimaerid species are at risk of extinction; other studies suggest that more than half of all pelagic shark species and nearly two-thirds of coral reef sharks are in danger of being wiped out. The major driver of this calamity is overfishing; but habitat loss, rising temperatures, pollution, plastics and unutterably cruel practices such as shark-finning also play a part.
Long’s solutions to these challenges – including encouraging shark ecotourism – tend to emphasise the local over the global. While effective conservation policies frequently depend on empowering disadvantaged communities, it would have been nice to see more space devoted to the urgent need to reduce carbon emissions and prevent destructive fishing practices. Nevertheless, the author’s insistence that the long story of sharks and their capacity for adaptation and change holds valuable lessons for us is salutary.
A piece of Mars to toy with
Since reading Helen Gordon’s The Meteorites, I keep catching myself in imaginary conversation with an Essex thatcher called Frederick Pratt. On 9 March 1923, he was working in a wheat field at Ashdon Hall Farm, near Saffron Walden, when he heard a strange ‘sissing’ sound and looked up to see ‘the earth fly up like water’. He later dug up, from a depth of two feet beneath the surface of the field, a stone weighing 1.27kg that had fallen from the sky. He took it to the police station, then on to the vicar, who shipped it off to the Natural History Museum.
There we know it was classified as a stony chondrite meteorite, composed of feldspar, pyroxene and olivine, white specks of nickel iron and other oddments from which the solar system was formed 4.5 billion years ago. The smooth ‘face’ of the conical rock was understood to have been melted into a shield by its hypersonic flight; the back end was wobblier.
What we don’t know is what Pratt made of his astonishing experience. (On average, only ten meteorites are seen in the sky and recovered each year.) As a veteran of the first world war, was he traumatised over again by the mud-churning missile, or inured to that kind of thing? Did his encounters with the law and church lead to questions of science, philosophy and faith? While there’s a wooden post marking the site of the crater left by the Ashdon meteorite, nobody knows where Pratt is buried.
Historically, meteorites have been worshipped and feared around the world. Gordon explains that the earliest recorded meteorite fall (believed to have landed in Ngoata, Japan around AD 861) was placed in a Shinto shrine and is still drawn through the streets on a decorated cart every five years. Conversely, when a meteorite fell in Tenham Station, in Queensland, in 1879, the First Nations locals were reported to be ‘deadly afraid’ of the fragments and covered them in kangaroo grass and branches to hide them from the sun, hoping to prevent further assaults from space.
Meteorites continue to fuel the beliefs of conspiracy theorists. Those who argue that aliens were responsible for the civilisation of ancient Egypt base some of their thinking on beads found around the neck and waist of a boy buried in the village of el-Gerzeh, 40 miles south of Cairo, c.3,400-3,100 BC. They’re the earliest man-made iron artefacts and were hammered into shape 2,000 years before it’s thought humans discovered smelting. While the conspiracy theorists maintain this proves aliens made the beads, archeologists believe they’re of meteorite origin – like the dagger found in Tutankhamun’s tomb. Other conspiracy theorists deny it was a meteor strike that wiped out dinosaurs more than 66 million years ago.
Gordon, who teaches creative writing at the University of Hertfordshire, writes with the enthusiasm of a teacher channelling the adult incarnation of everyone’s inner ten-year-old nerd. Space and sarcophagi and stegosauri – oh my! She finds scientists who argue convincingly that while little green men didn’t build the pyramids, it’s highly likely that the soupy origins of life on Earth may owe a debt to space rocks. She’s the kind of chummy author who’ll tell you that a cross section of most meteorites resembles a bitten-into Mars Bar or Milky Way. Who knew our treats were so aptly named?
She attends the 8th Planetary Defense Conference in Vienna – organised by the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs – and offers some reassurance that governments began taking the threat from space rocks more seriously after the 1998 release of the Hollywood disaster movies Deep Impact and Armageddon. The arrival of the 14,000 ton Chelyabinsk meteor in February 2013 also sharpened minds. Its explosion 30km above Russia released 30 times as much energy as emitted by the atomic bomb detonated at Hiroshima, injured 1,500 people and caused £11 million damage. Nobody saw it coming, and to date we’ve only detected a total of seven meteorites before collision was confirmed – the physics behind this being that they’re ‘very dark’ and therefore tricky to spot in the blackness of space. Mercifully, in 2027 Nasa will turn on the first telescope dedicated to hunting asteroids and comets – if we’re spared that long.
More entertainingly, Gordon also visits a meteorite fair in France. There she’s allowed to touch a piece of the moon, but learns that lunar souvenirs are slumping in price while Martian rocks are soaring. It seems that today’s super-rich are all fighting to get the best bits of space on their desks. Celebrity collectors include Steven Spielberg, Nicolas Cage, Uri Geller and Yo-Yo Ma. The world’s largest private collection is owned by Naveen Jain (the founder of the search engine InfoSpace). Not wanting to be excluded, I had a look online and found a pretty little slice of pallasite meteorite, studded with olive green crystals like a panettone, for £37 on eBay.
Most appealing for readers with treasure-hunting children is the idea of space dust. Gordon reveals that in the dust on roofs of large buildings such as schools there will be on average six ‘micrometeorites’ per square metre. You can collect these by placing a magnet in a sandwich bag to suck up all the metallic material. Pluck them from the plastic with tweezers and check them under a microscope. So that’s what I’ll be doing this weekend, while chatting with the ghost of Fred Pratt.
The strange potency of cheap perfume
Ah, the scents of one’s youth! What hot, sour teenage kisses and grinding youth club discos would be conjured up for me by one whiff of Aqua Manda or the original Charlie. Adelle Stripe has constructed a memoir around 18 key fragrances, one for each chapter of her life, but true perfume addicts may find ‘the juice’ somewhat lacking. It might just be scented scaffolding, but fortunately the story underneath is captivating.
Dune, CK One and the rest do not trigger madeleine-like waves of memory for Stripe; neither is this a paean to the olfactory art. The perfumes crop up casually rather than crucially: her dairy farmer father’s ancient bottle of Brut; her hairdresser mother’s Rive Gauche; a friend’s cloying Angel, which ‘fills every corner of the room like tear gas’. Under each chapter heading is a freestyle, hallucinatory evocation of era and scent, reading like discarded advertising material. (Giorgio Beverly Hills is ‘Porsche and Ferrari on Rodeo Drive… Alexis Carrington. A shag-pile carpet. No knickers, fur coat’.) Stripe lists each constituent, so Clinique’s Happy, another of her mother’s favourites, features ‘mandarin, clementine, green bergamot…’
While some pairings are on the nose, others seem almost random. Elizabeth Arden’s rosy Red Door evokes a grandmother, and Hugo by Hugo Boss a sweet boyfriend. Trésor eradicates the fug of body odour in charity shop finds, but that chapter’s most striking scene is of a cow being helped to expel a dead calf. For Stripe, it’s the pungent and unpleasant that has most impact: the stink of London in summer (‘armpits on the Tube, unbrushed teeth, overflowing bins’); the way Kiehl’s Original Musk (‘bergamot nectar, neroli and lily’) can’t dispel the stench of ‘brown sewage water’ released in a flood; the ‘citrus cleaner masking the familiar base note of human-soaked fabric’ in a care home. Stripe’s own nose renders her highly self-conscious. At school it ‘is twice the size of anybody else’s your age’. (The second person is used throughout.) ‘Boys have started running past you pretending to be aeroplanes.’
The Body Shop’s cheap and cheerful Dewberry, a teenage gateway drug to the YSLs and Diors of the future, pervades the most horrifying chapter. The first inklings of sexual attraction – ‘Grown men are suddenly being nice to you!’ – are swiftly followed by brutal disillusionment, as a lift home from a local footballer turns predictably grim. The account is all the more affecting for its lack of detail, as if experienced in a disassociated state (‘You try not to look at what is in his hands’). Afterwards, driving her back to town, he says: ‘I’m sorry, love. Let me give you a present.’ His comically inappropriate ‘present’ is promptly buried in the garden, though the trauma surfaces more often than the shin pads, and flavours the rest of the narrative.
The confusion, desperation and drugs that follow are indeed just the base notes; top notes of humour, insouciance and bravery lift the story into art. The mother is an explosion of exuberance whenever she appears, goading or coaxing her fearful child into activities such as swimming or ice skating (though it’s odd that Stripe seems to think ‘reticent’ means ‘reluctant’). Earthworm by Demeter, in the briefly fashionable genre of gimmick scents (others being Crayon and Tomato), flavoursa hair-raising trip to New York without a safety net.
Stripe, now a little more streetwise, arrives with little money and no accommodation booked, and has to cadge a bed from a doorman charmed by her English accent. The hotel he patrols is rough, but still far too expensive. Traipsing home with him might be dangerous, but ‘you… have little choice when faced with a night at a stranger’s house or a night on the streets sleeping under pizza boxes’. The favour comes with expectations, as favours often do. But the boss of the East End leather firm where Stripe subsequently works is one of the rare heroes of the story, offering kindness with no comeback. Another is the gay man who provides the perennially homeless Stripe with a brief haven in Edinburgh, to the disgust of his boyfriend.
Pin-sharp observation renders even tragic material palatable. A youth spent in Tadcaster brings familiarity with the lineaments of alcoholic despair. A job as pub barmaid is an inevitably short-term solution:
Some of your regulars are rake-thin, with exploded raspberry noses and have a peculiar lurching walk, as if they are holding marbles in their underpants or shaking a used sock from the inside of their trouser legs.
The account of work on a sex chatline is wistful, sad and funny.
The book culminates in a trip to Grasse, the home of perfumery, where Stripe works with a ‘Nose’ to create a personal fragrance to commemorate her dead mother. The experience merely demonstrates that the finest ingredients don’t guarantee success. Stripe’s literary concoction, on the other hand, smells just great.
The plain-speaking bloke from Warrington who painted only for himself
We don’t all get to achieve what we could have achieved in life. And yes, I know, so what? Tough luck. Cry me a river, build me a bridge and get over it. But, like it or not, some people really do have the odds stacked more heavily against them than others and yet somehow carry on regardless. In The Secret Painter, the scriptwriter Joe Tucker (Parents, Big Bad World) tells the true story of his Uncle Eric, born in 1932 – an ordinary man who never gave up.
Let’s be honest, The Secret Painter could have been absolutely terrible. I mean, it sounds like a bad idea: a biography of an overlooked northern artist written by his fancy, cosmopolitan, London-living nephew might easily have turned into an irritating meditation on the meaning of Art, and Family, and North vs South and the Class Struggle. It could have been told as the tale of some misunderstood genius or tragic outsider battling against the establishment. Rather, it’s a plain-speaking, thought-provoking, thoroughly sweet and unassuming story about a plain-speaking, thought-provoking, thoroughly sweet and unassuming working-class bloke from Warrington, whose delightful, self-defeating ordinariness is what makes the story extraordinary.
‘By any conventional measure,’ writes the author, ‘my uncle Eric Tucker achieved nothing in life.’ Which is true: he lived with his mother, worked as a labourer, liked a few drinks and putting on a bet and going out at the weekends to the clubs in Manchester. Just, life. But he was also quietly devoted to painting.
In the modest confines of his mother’s front room, behind a lace curtain and beneath a solitary lightbulb, in the evenings and at weekends, Eric would create his art – not for exhibition, nor in pursuit of fame, but simply because he felt compelled to do so. And he did it consistently for 60 years.
The family, of course, knew about the painting – and occasionally helped him get an exhibition in a gallery. It doesn’t seem to have been lack of talent that kept him from public recognition; rather, an inherent shyness, maybe a touch of cantankerousness and just a general unwillingness to style himself as an artist. He wasn’t interested in self-promotion or in declarations of his ideas and artistic aspirations. As Tucker points out, his uncle never spoke about his work. For Eric, art seems not to have been a career or a means to an end but a deeply personal and solitary act.
Eric would paint not for exhibition, nor in pursuit of fame, but simply because he felt compelled to do so
But art demands to be seen – and so, in the final stages of his life, suffering from a congenital heart condition, Eric asked his brother, Joe’s father, if it might be possible to arrange a solo exhibition. It’s this simple request that sets the stage for The Secret Painter, which follows Tucker’s attempt to bring his uncle’s work to the public eye. It’s an uphill struggle – partly because Eric wasn’t quite odd enough. A piece about him almost featured in the New York Times, but was rejected, not for lack of merit but because Eric didn’t fit the typical narrative of the outsider artist. A true outsider, he was not outsidery enough. ‘His great victory was that, to a world that told him in innumerable ways that he couldn’t be an artist, he proved that he was, and that he couldn’t not be.’
Eric died in 2018, and we learn just how much of his life was overlooked or dismissed. He seems to have been a man who simply got on with life, with little or no need for validation – or indeed love. There was a brief holiday fling, but otherwise there’s no hint of romance. Eric refused not only to adhere to the expectations of the art world; he refused to adhere to the expectations of any world outside his own.
Tucker is deadpan, witty and tender in his portrayal of his uncle – much like Eric’s art itself, which is a little bit Beryl Cook-y, with perhaps a hint of the Impressionists. He evokes a strong sense of place, bringing to life working-class Manchester and Warrington and Eric’s favourite haunts, including the legendary Tommy Ducks and Liston’s Bar and Yates’s Wine Lodge. He also lovingly describes the delightful characters who populated Eric’s world, including ‘Buller’ Crompton, a man who ‘used a J-Cloth as a handkerchief’.
The book ultimately suggests that Eric’s greatest artistic achievement was not any single painting but the act of creation itself. In our era, which demands novelty and spectacle even from politicians, Eric’s calm, modest, unwavering commitment to his work offers a poignant reminder of the power of persistence. I really hope Timothy Spall’s agent reads the book: the actor would be perfect casting.
The pointlessness of the German Peasants’ War – except in Marxist ideology
The preservation of a strict social hierarchy rests very often on the enforcement of correct modes of address. In America today any university student may address any other as ‘dude’, but those who have attained a certain level of prestige will object if an unwary low-status blunderer ventures to call them ‘bro’. Rebels seeking to overturn rigid class systems will often start by violating such regulations.
The German revolutionaries of 1968, for example, made a point of addressing everyone as arschloch, or ‘arsehole’ – a radical usage I remember being startled by it in mid-1990s Kreuzberg bars until it was explained to me that I wasn’t being insulted. Their other move, to use the intimate du, rather than the formal Sie, for ‘you’, has taken much stronger hold. In 1793, the French revolutionary government issued a decree forbidding the use of vous, only for Napoleon to overturn it. In 17th-century Britain, Quakers addressed everybody by their first names and used the personal pronoun ‘thou’. We are told in Keith Thomas’s superb In Pursuit of Civility that one brave soul even called the magnificently daunting Duke of Newcastle ‘Phil’.
One of the earliest examples of this interesting phenomenon can be seen in the German Peasants’ War, or Bauernkrieg, of 1524-25. This was a sequence of uprisings by the disenfranchised and heavily burdened lower classes, but also included quite affluent people whose freedom of action, economic activity and movement was still being heavily restricted. It was given impetus by the tide of the Reformation started by Martin Luther. The rebels’ demands for political and economic change were mixed with theological assertions. But one of the things that united them was the wish to be able to address everyone as du.
In some ways, this quest for informality is the most persistent legacy of historical revolutionary moments. In Britain today there can be very few people who expect to be addressed formally, and the shift in behaviour is a fundamental one. Other changes demanded by great attempts at revolution appear incomprehensible in their theological distinction-making – or arbitrary, such as the French Revolution’s introduction of the decimal day, consisting of ten hours of 100 minutes each. The question of who you’re allowed to say ‘you’ to, however, is a constant theme.
Some knights, such as Götz von Berlichingen with his iron false hand, changed sides and joined the peasants
The Peasants’ War is an extremely challenging episode for modern readers to understand. The insurgents across Europe lived under different regimes and had different objectives. Most were probably illiterate. (Lyndal Roper provides no estimate of what proportion of the population could read, or of how many of the literate even could afford paper and ink, though historians have been able to give reliable figures for literacy in other periods without official records.) Different demands were made of the nobility in different places. Some knights, such as the celebrated Götz von Berlichingen with his iron false hand, changed sides and commanded peasant troops.
A few demands circulated, including the revolutionary Twelve Articles presented to the Swabian League, which are sometimes seen as the first draft of civil liberties legislation in continental Europe. (They come some centuries after Magna Carta, of course, and in any case they had no effect.) Many of the communities engaged in the uprising based their demands on scriptural precedent, and the Reformation preacher Thomas Müntzer came close to becoming the rebel leader. But Luther – who must have been the inspiration for many – fiercely opposed the revolt. The Reformation could scarcely have proceeded had he taken the peasants’ side against the princes. He would have been executed –as Müntzer was.
It is hard to discern anything resembling a strategy in the peasants’ actions. Large gangs roamed the countryside and succeeded in ransacking the monasteries, which were soft targets. If they thought freedom from serfdom would follow with similar ease they were sadly deluded. In many ways it suited the great princes if the power and splendour of the monasteries were destroyed by lawless gangs. After the war, most of the monks’ wealth passed into the hands of the nobility.
When it came to confrontation with anything resembling a professional military operation, the peasants, of course, were slaughtered. Before one battle, a Reformation preacher assured his followers that ‘the League’s cannon would turn around by a special providence of God and shoot their own men’. Once the rebels were defeated, leaving perhaps a third of them dead, the princes imposed a state of affairs which made ordinary lives much harsher than they had been before. If the story of this war is unfamiliar to most of us, it may be because it is not only immensely complex but it resolved absolutely nothing.
The peasants’ demands would have had little chance of succeeding since they were rooted in community responsibility and strong control, not personal liberty. Another class of hereditary apparatchiks would simply have been created, exercising brutal authority. For this reason, the revolt occupies a significant place in Marxist wishful theology. Engels wrote a book about it, and it loomed large in the official DDR interpretation of history. Between 1976 and 1987, the East German painter Werner Tübke created a colossal, mad panorama, winningly titled ‘Early Bourgeois Revolution in Germany’, which you are welcome to visit in Bad Frankenhausen. Effective liberty would only come with the opportunities of capitalism, individual freedom and social mobility, not with declarations of theological duty to be imposed by new authorities. But for Roper ‘capitalism’ and ‘serfdom’ are equally distasteful terms.
Despite its ringing title, I don’t think Summer of Fire and Blood is for the general reader. It is quite difficult to follow the sequence of events, but it would have helped greatly had the author tried to evoke them more imaginatively. When we are told that a force ‘seized’ a town, it is hard to visualise what actually took place – what weapons were used, or indeed what the town might have looked like. Several castles are said to have been ‘burnt to the ground’. Were they made of stone, or wood, or what? Some important centres of the Reformation – Wittenberg, Leipheim, Eisenach and delightful Schmalkalden – are now quiet backwaters, unfamiliar to most visitors to Germany. (The woman in the tourist office in Schmalkalden was so pleased to see an English sightseer that she came round her desk to give me a hug.) Roper might have given us something to cling on to with the mind’s eye.
Her publishers describe her as ‘writing beautifully’, but this complicated story would have benefitted from more clarity of expression. One figure is introduced as Georg Truchsess of Waldburg, then as Truchsess Georg, then as ‘the truchsess’, and finally as ‘Truchsess’, as if it were his surname, and I had to resort to Wikipedia to understand what this name was. ‘Truchsess’ is an archaic title, something like ‘seneschal’, I eventually discovered.
The Reformation certainly gave rise to a world in which the inconceivable became possible – Philip von Hesse argued forcibly (and even persuaded Luther) that the ban on bigamy was now overthrown and he could marry his mistress without divorcing his wife. But we are not just interested in the teasing out of ideas or the explication of arcane pamphlets. We are interested, in a most vulgar way, in what people were like; what they were allowed to wear (how did sumptuary legislation specify the wardrobe of different classes?); and what the day-to-day progress of a savagely tragic war might have been like to experience. I have to say, too, that I find it difficult to commend an Oxford Regius Professor for beautiful writing if she doesn’t know the meaning of ‘crescendo’, ‘ironically’ or ‘enormity’.
However huge an impact the Peasants’ War made on the lives of hundreds of thousands, and however far it set back improvements to ordinary people’s lives, it needs to be explained with clarity and narrative enterprise. Roper has written an admired book about Luther. This one, I think, is for her professional colleagues.
Eleven lowlights from the assisted dying evidence session
To Westminster, where last week Kim Leadbeater’s Assisted Dying bill began the evidence session of committee stage. But rather than provide much needed clarification about the scope of suicide bill, the three days of evidence sessions instead threw up even more questions about the safety of the legislation. After paying careful attention to the hours of hearings, Mr S has compiled some of the worst moments of the evidence sessions that left critics more concerned than comforted…
Who’s there?
50 witnesses were called to give evidence last week – and it quickly emerged that there was nothing like an equal split between bill backers and sceptics. In fact, as revealed by Dan Hitchens on Twitter, of those who took a stance on the matter 80 per cent were in favour of assisted dying – while just a fifth were opposed. More than that, of the Australians invited to talk to the panel, all were euthanasia advocates. Talk about an uneven playing field, eh?
Suicide prevention
The committee stage has not been devoid of rather, er, abstract arguments. Take, for example, the claim made by Australian MP Alex Greenwich, who explained to a stony-faced Danny Kruger that: ‘Voluntary assisted dying is a form of suicide prevention.’ That’s a kind of doublethink even George Orwell would consider too far…
Knowledge gaps
In a particularly humbling moment for Leadbeater, Professor Gareth Owen of King’s College London noted that there were in fact ‘lots of gaps’ in the proposed legislation before hinting at the committee’s lack of understanding of the complexity of the whole thing. Chelsea Roff, founder of an eating disorder non-profit, made a similar point on Twitter after her hearing. ‘Overall the committee was respectful and civil,’ Roff wrote, ‘though at times painfully unaware of the international evidence on this and even the wording of the bill itself.’ Ouch.
Protecting the vulnerable
Speaking of research gaps, the second day of evidence sessions revealed that the bill simply hadn’t given much thought to disabled people. Baroness Falkner, the former chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, wasn’t pulling any punches, urging the government to do ‘an assessment of those human rights implications’. Meanwhile Fazilet Hadi of Disability Rights UK lamented the lack of scrutiny a private members’ bill allows, noting about the usual consultation period and time for debate that a bill of this nature would have allowed disabled people: ‘None of that has happened.’
Not that many on the committee bar Daniel Francis seemed all that bothered by this particular advice from their witnesses. The panel concluded that the government will only analyse the bill’s impact on the vulnerable after the committee stage concludes. Too little too late, eh?
Project Fear
Leadbeater – who was quick to interrupt and dismiss points of view she didn’t like – received a good dose of humility after the head of the Association for Palliative Medicine, Dr Sarah Cox, dressed her down over her ‘fear’ rhetoric. ‘I would also make a very brief point about the impact of the discussion about what dying looks like that this bill has raised,’ Cox remarked coolly, continuing:
The stories that have been told have suggested to many of the public that death is inevitably ugly and horrific and dramatic. Actually that’s made many people fearful who have been emailing me and saying I’m now afraid of dying and I wasn’t before. They may then choose assisted dying before they need to because of the fear instilled in them that death is inevitably horrible.
A sub-optimal look for the bill’s sponsor.
Overriding devolution
It is also not entirely clear how the legislation will affect devolved nations and Crown dependencies. The BMA’s Dr Martin Green raised concerns about legislation progressing at a different speed north and south of the border thanks to health being a devolved power while the Senedd recently voted against assisted dying. ‘The impact of this bill on devolved matters, if it became law, would be substantial’ in Wales, warned Professor Emyr Lewis, who suggested that certain aspects of the bill may require further consent motions if the Sewell convention is to be respected. Yet more uncertainty, then.
Doctor’s orders
And even the medics are up in arms at current proposals. General practitioners are adamant that assisted dying should not become part of normal practice. Dr Michael Mulholland from the Royal College of GPs insisted there must be a ‘standalone service’ while Dr Green remained firm that doctors should not be allowed to recommend euthanasia as a treatment option. Cue the dirty looks from Leadbeater…
Everyone makes mistakes
At risk of stating the obvious, Mr S would point out that predicting how long a person has left to live is not an exact science. Indeed questions on predicting patient outcomes in the UK prompted the GMC’s Mark Swindells to note that there is no robust data held on the accuracy of prognosis. Going off what we do have, as reported by the Telegraph, figures from the Department for Work and Pensions revealed that 20 per cent of those patients given six months to live are still alive three years later. Crikey. That certainly complicates things, doesn’t it?
Don’t study the small print
The discussion of terminal anorexia is just one rather shocking example of how bill backers batted away more awkward questions about assisted dying. Dr Naomi Richards – a Glasgow-based academic who has written papers stating that ‘not all planning for suicide should be unquestioningly pathologised’ – dismissed concerns that those with long-term eating disorders could become eligible for assisted dying as a ‘minor issue to get focused on’. She added: ‘This is not something that should be given a huge amount of time because it’s a distraction from the fact that really what we’re talking about is a new mode of dying.’ A distraction? Well that’s one way to look at it…
Limited scope
Leadbeater looked so keen to push her legislation through that she appeared willing to discount the advice of medical professionals who work with patients considering ending their lives. Take the psychiatrist Allan House, for example, who flagged concerns that the current proposals don’t take into account psychological and social factors that might lead a person to want to die – and instead only focus on whether the patient has capacity. ‘[The bill] just asks: ‘is this person able to make decisions?’. That’s what the assessment boils down to,’ House remarked scathingly.
Omissions
And one of the worst aspects of the whole committee session was, um, what wasn’t included. The committee decided not to hear from the Royal College of Psychiatrists or the British Geriatrics Society, while the experts that were there were rather bemused by the unreceptive nature of the panel. House took to social media to slam the committee’s ‘frustrating format and sense of minds made up’, adding tellingly: ‘Interesting to be told by Kim Leadbeater that I don’t understand suicide in life-limiting illness.’ Based on Leadbeater’s enthusiasm for listening, one might question the point of the committee stage altogether!
Starmer set to close Chagos deal in ‘coming weeks’
Is Sir Keir Starmer determined to make himself more unpopular with the British public? The news of his latest Chagos offer is hardly likely to endear the Prime Minister to his critics – not least given the Labour leader has reportedly offered the Mauritians yet more money and ‘complete sovereignty’ of an island containing a US naval base. Way to go, Keir!
Speaking to parliamentarians, the new Mauritian prime minister Navin Ramgoolam claimed today that Starmer cut a deal – in the presence, rather curiously, of his Attorney General Lord Hermer – that would effectively double the £9 billion first offered to the country to take back the archipelago. ‘We remain confident it will reach a speedy resolution in the coming weeks,’ the Mauritian politician asserted. The new offer will frontload payments and link them to inflation – after Ramgoolam dubbed the initial proposal a ‘sellout’. Talk about demanding, eh?
But it’s not just soaring costs that will frustrate critics. Ramgoolam told his MPs that the Labour leader will give Mauritius ‘complete sovereignty’ of Diego Garcia, home to a key US military base – despite President Trump expressing unease over Chinese influence in the area. So pressing a concern was the future of this particular island, it was the first issue raised by Secretary of State Marco Rubio to Foreign Secretary David Lammy. Whether these concerns have been listened to is quite another matter…
It’s all rather odd, Mr S would suggest, that the government is spending quite so much time, effort and money trying to cede sovereignty of the Chagos Islands to the Mauritians. Not only has Sir Keir upped the cost with his latest offer, as Mr S wrote in December there remains ambiguity over exactly how much the handover of the archipelago is likely to cost British taxpayers. Meanwhile Reform leader Nigel Farage has blasted the news on Twitter, writing: ‘This is a dreadful decision by Starmer. Our relationship will be in tatters when the USA wakes up to what our Prime Minister has done.’
As questions about financing and security pile up, Starmer is no closer to shaking off his sceptics…