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Are you Beatles or Stones?
You find me in the south of France, holed up in that inn of near perfection called La Colombe d’Or in St Paul de Vence. I escape here twice a year and marvel at how little has changed since the 1950s, when it was Mecca for artists of all types, painters such as Chagall and Picasso (Matisse was an early fan between the wars) and stars of stage and screen, Brigitte Bardot, Yves Montand, Simone Signoret, all looking breathtakingly cool, smoking of course. One can still catch a glimpse of the fabulous Dame Joan C and her husband Percy sipping ice cold glasses of rosé. It is a place where the living is easy but civilised – not something one can say about London these days.
Oh London, what have we done to you? ‘To be tired of London…’ Hmm, sorry Dr J, but that is no longer true. Everyone I know is tired of London. The traffic congestion gets steadily worse, the litter and general filth and graffiti builds up daily, the constant tinkering with one-way systems makes driving almost impossible. I take my bike (and my life) in my hands, and attempt the now habitual slalom of e-bikes thrown down willy-nilly, muttering obscenities and longing for the moment when I can escape (if my train hasn’t been cancelled – but that’s for another day) back down to sleepy Wiltshire.
I’m guessing quite a few Spectator readers fall neatly into two categories, the Beatles or the Stones. I was definitely a Stones boy. It was a slightly more anarchic choice for someone with such rigidly establishment parents. Mick’s androgynous prancing around was exciting to a stagestruck boy back then. But in 1967 it suddenly became more personal. The boys got busted for drugs at a party at Redlands, the home of Keith Richards. It was huge news. My father was reading about it disapprovingly and harrumphed into his glass of sherry: ‘I hope they don’t ask me to defend them.’ An hour later the phone rang. After a couple of minutes, Dad returned: ‘I shall be defending the Rolling Stones!’ As he got to know them better, he became fond of them, and much more tolerant of the Swinging Sixties generation, including me. They lost their case initially, but Dad was determined to fight, and the famous Times leader by William Rees-Mogg, ‘Who Breaks a Butterfly on a Wheel’ (original words by Alexander Pope), became synonymous with the case. Dad got them off on appeal, and the rest is history.
This story has been part of my family legend from that date to this. It has been simmering in my brain for 50 years as something that has the makings of a great play. I have tried to get it off the ground several times without success, but now, finally, at last, eureka! The artistic director Justin Audibert and writer Charlotte Jones have turned it into a play – currently on at the Chichester Festival Theatre – and it is brilliant. I popped down there the other day to do a touch of TV reporting for The One Show. What a pleasure it was to interview a young actor who is playing me! The young cast inhabit the characters perfectly, even though obviously they can have scant knowledge of the Stones era, nor could they have ever experienced anything like the nationwide hysteria that the two greatest bands on Earth at that time induced in young impressionable fans. It was an enormous thrill to finally see a dream realised – and an example of the tenacity required to make a pipe dream take wings.
Autumn has arrived with a bang, the curtains need drawing and, dare I say it, we’ve had the odd fire already. Depressing in a way, but I rather like this time of year. I like kicking the leaves as I walk the dog through beech woods, wearing wellies and ever-increasing layers for warmth. I enjoy being back in a suit – oh yes, I do love a good suit – and suddenly there is an avalanche of new, exciting-looking television shows appearing to see us through those long cold nights. Of course, nowadays we can binge anything we fancy and I think back with great nostalgia to the days when we would rush home to catch the weekly episodes of The Forsyte Saga, Brideshead Revisited or Jewel in the Crown. If you missed an episode, that was it – gone for ever. I wonder how many times we nearly crashed the car in a frantic effort to get home and turn on the Radio Rentals 12in TV in time.
Many people have given us their memories of the magnificent Dame Maggie Smith. Sadly, I only worked with her once, on the Dame Maggie Show, otherwise known as Downton Abbey. I saw her relatively recently and greeted her by saying how marvellous she looked. ‘Clutching at straws, darling, you’re clutching at straws,’ she replied.
The Tories’ Greek tragedy has reached its catharsis
I write this as I leave the Tory conference in Birmingham. I have covered most of these events (and many Labour ones too) since the beginning of the 1980s. They do not lift the heart, but it is always interesting to watch the activity of the tribe. I attended the 1997 conference at Blackpool after the Tories had been broken by Tony Blair. William Hague had just become leader. The tribe was in a state of tongue-tied mourning. The party faithful were perplexed that the Conservatives had bequeathed extremely favourable economic conditions and public finances and yet had been utterly rejected. The trappings of power still hung about the agenda and the rituals, but Blair had ‘stolen hence the life of the building’.
This time, though the defeat is even worse, the mood is far better. I think the Tories do want to recognise their failures. I even think a lot of them are pleased to have been beaten. The years from March 2020 (Covid begins…) have been agony. The cathartic stage of Greek tragedy has now been reached. It is a positive advantage that this year there is no leader’s speech to end the show. There is a choice of leader, and so the party members feel empowered. They (including far more young people than I had expected) crowd into the debates and listen responsively to what is said. They like ‘Why did it all go wrong?’ discussions. It should help unity in the coming years that so many activists were in at the beginning.
It is also marked how hard many of them are finding it to make up their minds about the candidates. They see the virtues and the faults of all four. Here is a summary of what they say: Kemi Badenoch is simultaneously the most striking and the riskiest. Robert Jenrick is the most skilled and well disciplined campaigner but his appeal to party atavism may put off non-Tories. Tom Tugendhat is the one who sounds most clearly suited to leading a nation but his message is not easy to encapsulate. James Cleverly could win ‘by mistake’, because he is everyone’s second choice.
Representatives want to back a candidate who really wants the job. My unscientific canvass says that, on this measure, Jenrick comes first, Tugendhat second, Badenoch (over-preoccupied with second-order rivalries) third, and Cleverly fourth – though one cannot discount the possibility that he is the tortoise against three hares. The candidate not present is Nigel Farage. Slightly against the mood of the moment, I suspect he won’t make it.
Birmingham, especially in the rain, is a grim place to navigate. It is something to do with its incomprehensible relationship between roads, waterways and pedestrians. Nowadays, there is the added hazard that hardly anyone knows where anything is. My Uber driver took me to the wrong conference centre and had not heard of the right one, though it is vast and central. Nor had he heard of the Library, the Symphony Hall or the Hyatt Hotel, all right in the middle and very famous. Later, I had to speak at the Grand Hotel. I had gone astray for 25 minutes and asked seven people and Google Maps (who misdirected me) before I found someone who knew. Did people predict the great unlearning of geography which technology has produced? I see it as a metaphor for our 21st-century predicament: we have lost the map.
When I was convicted for failing to pay my television licence, I noticed that everyone else up on the same charge appeared to be a single mother. The BBC’s enforcers pick on the vulnerable. I am glad that ministers are now talking of decriminalisation. But beware of what happens next. Labour, being Labour, will instinctively reach for the solution of charging the taxpayer for the licences of the poor, thus guaranteeing the BBC an income in perpetuity.
Now that French champagne houses are buying up land for making wine in Britain, they have begun to get more interested in the Channel Tunnel. They realise that the Eurostar will be useful for sales and tourism. They note that, since Covid, the Kent stations of Ashford and Ebbsfleet have ceased their international service. They want them revived. It is true that Ashford is charmless and Ebbsfleet is rather far from the wine country. I can’t see either becoming an Anglo version of Épernay, but I think the French are in the right. The current Eurostar is a tremendous missed opportunity to ensnare gourmets. The time approaches when, for the first time in human history, the French might cross the Channel for something to eat and drink.
This is the last Spectator of something like 750 edited by Fraser Nelson, easily a post-war record. I would argue that he is one of the two most consequential editors in the same period, the other being Alexander Chancellor. I would not like to decide which should take precedence. Sufficient to say that Alexander gave the paper the kiss of life and Fraser made it an unprecedented success. The two men are utterly different characters – Alexander was lazy and unpolitical, Fraser is hyper and steeped in Westminster – but both had/have the great gift of being respected and loved by their staff and contributors and I hope, by extension, their readers. Not the least of Fraser’s service has been to hold everything together so well during these 16 months of doubt about our ownership. At last, we have a new owner, Sir Paul Marshall, and now a glittering new editor, Michael Gove. The former has kindly asked me to become chairman, my task being to protect the ‘spirit’ of The Spectator. I hope this does not make me an unwelcome, ghostly presence, but I must admit that, 40 years after I became editor of The Spectator, I do not feel able to refuse. I have also been asked to continue with these Notes, and the spirit has moved me to accept.
Lord Alli under investigation for donations
Dear oh dear. It now transpires that Lord Alli is under investigation by the Lords Commissioner – with the millionaire businessman being looked into over ‘alleged non-registration of interests’ with concerns the Labour donor may have breached the Lords code of conduct. How curious…
The donor – who funded workwear for the Prime Minister and his wife, paid for expensive glasses for Sir Keir Starmer and even provided luxury accommodation worth over £20,000 to the Labour leader – is being investigated over ‘alleged non-registration of interests leading to potential breaches of paragraphs 14(a) and 17 of the thirteenth edition of the Code of Conduct for Members of the House of Lords’. The revelation follows Sir Keir’s ongoing freebie fiasco, in which the Labour lot were found to have accepted a rather lot of donations from the donor, who briefly even held a No. 10 pass. The only other peer under investigation by the Lords Commissioner is, Mr S would point out, one Baroness Mone. Good heavens…
It’s scandal a minute with the Labour donor Lord Alli — who, it has now emerged via the Times, gave a £62,000 loan to Baroness Uddin to help her repay her expenses after she was ordered to by the Lords authorities. Revelations this evening found that the Labour donor bailed out the Baroness after she was found to have wrongly claimed £125,000 in the parliamentary expenses row. How very interesting…
The donation row hasn’t gone down well with Starmer’s army – with one lefty backbencher telling the Telegraph: ‘I don’t know of anyone who thinks [accepting these donations] is a good idea. Friends and colleagues are mortified.’ Oo er. Another Labour MP fumed that: ‘Lots of us are livid. This is what hypocrisy looks like.’ Certainly today’s latest news that Lord Alli himself is under further scrutiny is unlikely to calm tensions in the party any time soon. Talk about trouble in paradise…
London’s failed night czar resigns
At long last, and not a day too soon, it transpires that London’s ‘night czar’ is standing down. Amy Lamé will leave her City Hall role at the end of the month after, er, eight years in the job on a six-figure annual salary – despite receiving a 40 per cent pay hike part way through. Sadiq Khan’s nightlife guru – who presided over the closure of almost half of the cities nightclubs – has said she felt it was the ‘right time’ to ‘move on’, but added it had been a ‘real privilege to serve Londoners’. Mr S can’t imagine the feeling is mutual…
Lamé announced her resignation today, stating:
It has been a real privilege to serve Londoners and deliver for the mayor, and I’m deeply proud of what has been achieved in the face of so many challenges… Cities across the UK and the world have created their own champions for life at night in recent years, and it’s been inspiring to work alongside them. Despite the ongoing challenges that it faces, I know that London’s life at night will continue to evolve and I look forward to seeing the work that has already started to deliver the mayor’s manifesto pledges, as I begin my next chapter.
The outgoing night czar leaves quite the legacy behind her. Not only was she the inspiration behind the #LameLondon hashtag after rage at the early closure of venues in the city left Londoners frustrated – but she has been a source of outrage after it emerged that the BBC DJ was most recently on a salary of over, um, £130,000 a year. Crikey…
In 2020, Lamé gave an interview to the Observer in which she stated: ‘I will be judged by the work that I do.’ And indeed she has. Last month it transpired that the night czar had taken six weeks of ‘unplanned sick leave’ this year but still mysteriously still managed to host her BBC radio show, before becoming a no-show at a recent City Hall Economy, Culture and Skills Committee meeting on, er, London’s nighttime economy. Sounds like that six-figure salary was money well spent, eh?
The winners (and losers) from Tory conference
Who was the winner from today’s Tory leadership speeches? The final day of the party conference saw all four candidates take to the stage in a bid to have a David Cameron moment. Back in 2005, Cameron managed to gain momentum at the party conference with an assured speech (no notes) and get one over on his main rival – the then frontrunner – David Davis. So, has anyone managed a similar feat in Birmingham?
It was Tom Tugendhat who was up first to speak. The leadership hopeful – viewed to be on the left of the party – spoke about restoring trust and the path back to power. He talked about the NHS, national security and growing the economy. However, it was the candidate who followed him who managed to grab the audience’s attention. Step forward James Cleverly. The former foreign secretary began with an apology, saying his party needs to say sorry to the public in order to get a hearing. He went on to tell a personal story about his parents and his family now, talking about his wife’s battle with cancer.
What Cleverly did well was to make the audience laugh and give a speech that was at times surprising. He said that the Tories needed to be ‘more normal’ before going on to talk about Reagan. Unfortunately for Tugendhat, Cleverly going straight after him meant he stole his thunder. It puts Cleverly in a good position ahead of the knockout rounds next week. The general thinking is that Tugendhat or Cleverly will be knocked out in the first round on Tuesday. Then the survivor could have a path to the final two if they can sweep up the fallen candidate’s backers over night.
What about Kemi Badenoch? The one-time frontrunner has had the bumpiest conference of the lot after getting embroiled in a row over maternity pay. Badenoch has since sought to clarify her comments (stating she supports maternity pay at current levels) but the episode has dented morale amongst some of her supporters. In her speech today, Badenoch steadied the ship and gave a clear explanation of her worldview and politics.
She pitched herself as the candidate ready to take the fight to Labour – and as one of the deeper thinkers in the contest. It will have calmed some nerves in her team, yet her path to the final two is far from assured. For Badenoch, the conference may still feel like a missed opportunity – there had been a hope that she could use it to show that she was clearly the membership’s preferred candidate. She leaves with uncertainty over whether MPs will give the membership that choice.
Finally, Robert Jenrick. He arrived as the frontrunner and leaves as the frontrunner. In his speech (which like James Cleverly’s speech was well over the 20-minute time limit), Jenrick pitched himself to the right. He offered red meat (cutting foreign aid and leaving the ECHR) and he attempted to invoke Margaret Thatcher while saying he would lead the ‘new conservatives’. However, his speech has been criticised by some MPs, with Jesse Norman (a Badenoch backer) calling it ‘simplistic tripe’. It also didn’t provide a stand out moment.
It means conference ends with the race still wide open. As one senior Tory puts it: ‘James had the most rizz [slang for charm]. Kemi was the most conservative’. Another adds: ‘It is still Robert’s to lose.’ It’s conceivable that Badenoch, Jenrick or Cleverly could win the contest. After four days of party conference, the run off between the final two looks likely to be more competitive than previously expected.
Listen to Coffee House Shots:
Badenoch is the best the Tories have got
What an ordeal. If there is one thing more trying than watching a leader’s speech at a party conference, it is watching four of them in a row – four doses of platitudes, jokes that miss the mark, personal anecdotes about their childhood and parents which are supposed to build up a sense of character but instead make you groan because you have heard them a dozen times before.
She speaks with words, not phrases
Tom Tugendhat came across as a middle manager on a public speaking course. Never mind where he wanted to take the country – he didn’t seem sure how and in which direction he was supposed to leave the stage after his low-energy presentation. James Cleverly had a good story about how, as an army reservist, he thought he was being mobilised and sent to Basra, when in fact he was being sent to Luton. But otherwise, he came across as wooden and ponderous. Robert Jenrick was more full of beans but had nothing interesting to say whatsoever; you feel his one strategy to win the leadership is to bang on about illegal migration, and that nothing else much matters. The new leader certainly will need a strategy to tackle small boats, but when it is your dominant theme, it plays to Labour’s idea of the Conservatives as a self-help group for xenophobes.
Then came Kemi Badenoch. She is a big risk for the Tories. She showed earlier this week how she is capable of putting her foot in it and upsetting people – and not always the right people – over her comments on maternity pay. Was she calling for it to be cut, or wasn’t she? Still, it is hard to be sure – only it is absolutely certain that she won’t be winning a general election on that kind of offering, only frightening voters whom the Tories will need to form a government. Already, she has ensured that by the time of the next election she will be presented by Labour as the Tory who wants to scrap maternity pay, whether that be fair or not.
Yet today, Badenoch came across as the one candidate with anything interesting to say. She alone was prepared to address issues which have the potential to divide Conservatives, such as on net zero, which for Boris Johnsons of the party has become a holy grail. She alone was prepared to address the divisive subject of identity politics, which many Conservatives seem happy to nod along with. Her personal anecdote – of hearing her neighbour’s home being broken into while living in Nigeria and wondering whether hers would be next – actually led somewhere: to her saying that the experience had led her to fear nothing.
Badenoch could implode. She has a habit of handing her opponents useful material to use against her. But she is also – and this is not entirely unconnected – worth listening to. She speaks with words, not phrases. She is prepared to take on members of her own party, accusing them of talking right but acting left. There is no obvious runaway winner for the Conservative leadership, but Badenoch is the one who looked as if she could well grow into the job – as indeed Margaret Thatcher had to after weak early performances. That ought to be enough to convince Conservatives that she is the best of what is on offer.
Listen to Coffee House Shots:
The demise of the Tory party has been greatly exaggerated
Something happened at the Conservative party conference today which suggested it is too soon to write off the democratic world’s most successful party: there were three brilliant speeches in a row. Given that this political era is not known for its great orators, this was a most unusual and very welcome occurrence.
It is too soon to write off the democratic world’s most successful party
Of the four Conservative leadership contenders, only Tom Tugendhat – perhaps hampered by being first on and having to warm-up the audience – failed to truly connect beyond his enthusiastic gaggle of camp followers. His workmanlike address was perfectly competent but lacked a transcendent moment.
James Cleverly, Robert Jenrick and Kemi Badenoch all gave orations which reached that elevated level of fluency that professional sportspeople sometimes refer to as ‘being in the zone’: the moment when everything comes together.
Despite inspiring an audience of thousands in Birmingham, the more prosaic reality is that the trio were in fact pitching to a key group of 38 Tory MPs: the 16 who voted for Mel Stride in the last round plus Tugendhat’s 22. How this select band break between the three will determine which two of them will go before the whole membership for the final round.
Cleverly’s hit performance was undoubtedly the most unexpected. He found a way to show that his aptitude for projecting warmth should not merely be dismissed as mastery of ‘vibes’ but could actually lead to electoral recovery. Cleverly did this not by citing Margaret Thatcher as his political hero, but by choosing Ronald Reagan instead. He had a couple of clever oblique lines about his main competitors too. ‘Be more normal’ was surely a riposte to the ‘Be More Kemi’ T-shirts worn by Badenoch supporters, while ‘don’t pretend to be something we are not’ will be widely interpreted as a dig at Jenrick.
Sure, there was a hole where one might have expected a big political idea, but having a leader normal people found likeable worked wonders for the Tories in 2019.
Jenrick began stutteringly, expecting a big cheer for having grown up in Wolverhampton ‘just down the road’ from the Birmingham conference hall, but not getting one. He also dropped a blooper by appearing to suggest that 1974 was an epoch-making year because it had given the Tory party Margaret Thatcher as leader, when in fact she was not installed until well into 1975.
But once he got into the meat of his argument, it became compelling, promising nothing less than ‘a new Conservative party’ under his leadership. This new party would, he promised, implement five key changes: securing borders, taking a stand on the implementation of net zero, getting Britain building again, creating a small state that works and standing up for British culture and identity. All these missions were set out in some detail and together they seemed to capture the scale of the change the Tories need to make to win back millions of disillusioned erstwhile supporters.
The quality of the two previous speakers meant that Kemi Badenoch needed to deliver a humdinger. She duly delivered with her pledge to ‘rewire, reboot and reprogramme’ the British public realm. Badenoch was less specific than Jenrick when it came to policy prescriptions. But she may well have done enough to calm worries that too many establishment fixers had got their mitts on her and taken the radicalism out of her.
Badenoch skilfully set out her record of fearlessness in the face of all kinds of left-wing villainy and the hall loved it. She told them that she had fought for conservative values every day of the last parliament – possibly a dig at Jenrick’s Johnny-come-lately gut conservatism, that – and they lapped it up. Both Jenrick and Badenoch spoke of the disgrace of having a Batley schoolteacher still in hiding for daring to show a cartoon of Muhammad in a lesson on free speech.
Badenoch said she had fought for women’s rights to safe spaces and for the right of children to grow up in their own time, defeating the madness of militant trans when first Nicola Sturgeon fell and then Labour accepted her arguments. And she won a huge roar of support when she pledged to fight to champion and defend young people with conservative views who had been intimidated into silence on college campuses.
Had she been even five per cent underpowered then one would have assumed that all roads led to a Jenrick v Cleverly showdown. But she wasn’t. She’s back in the game and quite possibly the Tories are too.
Listen to Coffee House Shots:
Robert Jenrick promises a ‘new Conservative party’
The Tory front runner was third up in Birmingham. Throughout this race, Robert Jenrick has sought to position himself as someone with the polish of David Cameron and the politics of Nigel Farage. His speech today was very much in that vein: a staunchly right-wing message centred around delivering a ‘new Conservative party’. Like Cameron in 2005, he talks of change: but change, he would argue, of a very different nature to hug-a-hoodie modernisation.
Jenrick’s pitch was much more critical about the state of modern Britain
Jenrick’s speech began with a neat bridging exercise: talking of his father’s work in a metal foundry as a way of referencing the Iron Lady. He was keen to draw comparisons between 1974 and 2024 – with him as the new Thatcher, rescuing his party and country from the politics of decline. The Conservatives, he said, must be the ‘trade union for the working people’, ordinary men and women for whom there is ‘no lobby demanding their so-called rights’.
This was then the cue to move into a wider policy offer. Jenrick suggested five tests for the future, with a key section of his speech focused on the need to leave the European Court of Human Rights. He argued that talk of reform was a fantasy, given the need for unanimity from signatory states. ‘The choice before us is Leave or Remain – I’m for Leave’, he said to cheers – a neat way of repacking his past support to remain in the EU.
His speech moved on to a wider critique of the modern British state, rattling off failures to nods of approval from the crowd. There was talk of the Batley grammar school teacher, forced into hiding. There was condemnation of the RAF for its diversity policies in hiring. There was the timeless Tory pledge to spend the aid budget on defence – ignoring the fact that much of it now goes on housing asylum seekers. Jokes were in abundance too as Jenrick took shots at various members of the cabinet. Ed Miliband, he said, was ‘Wallace without his Gromit’; David Lammy was proof that ‘there is a more annoying LBC presenter than James O’Brien’. Keir Starmer meanwhile ‘may take the knee but he will never take the stand. He doesn’t even take the stand anymore at the football!’ It was slightly end of pier but it found favour with the room, which gave him a warm response.
It was a marked contrast with the speech which preceded it. James Cleverly talked of Reaganite optimism and the importance of being ‘more normal’. Robert Jenrick’s pitch was much more critical about the state of modern Britain and displayed an acute awareness of the fears of many members. Both found favour in the hall today.
Listen to Coffee House Shots:
Badenoch pitches herself as the great disruptor
Kemi Badenoch’s opening video before her speech had a series of politicians and normal people talking at odd angles into their phones about the need for a new politician. She was pictured smiling, charming people in person, and vowing ‘let’s renew’, before she walked onto the stage for another no-notes speech.
It was, as you would expect, a speech that embraced the idea of tearing everything up and starting again, with Badenoch as the disruptor. She promised to ‘Rewire, reboot and reprogramme’, adding that: ‘Nothing is more exciting to me. I am an engineer, and engineers don’t hide from the truth.’ Her overhaul would involve the Conservatives rewriting ‘the rules of the game’, and producing a ‘plan that considers every aspect of what the state does and why it does it.’ That would include looking at international agreements, the Human Rights Act, judicial reviews, activism, the Treasury, the Bank of England, the civil service and the health service.
She promised to ‘Rewire, reboot and reprogramme’, adding that: ‘Nothing is more exciting to me. I am an engineer, and engineers don’t hide from the truth’
She was as critical of the direction of the country as Jenrick, but unlike Jenrick, she offered more of a solution than simply promising to stand up to the people who were taking Britain in the wrong direction. Jenrick’s speech was designed to make the members feel sad and angry about what was happening in Britain. Badenoch wanted to make them feel like they were part of changing everything, just as Thatcher changed everything in the 1980s. ‘We have it in our power to make the 2030s a golden decade,’ she said.
She pitched herself as up to this huge overhaul by telling the hall that she wasn’t afraid of a fight, and giving examples of where she had stood up to identity politics, particularly in the form of gender ideology. She argued that it was wrong to say that she liked a fight, but that she isn’t afraid of one either. Badenoch drew on her upbringing in Nigeria, telling the hall of the fear she felt when she could hear her neighbours’ homes being burgled in the middle of the night, adding: ‘when you’ve experienced that kind of fear you’re not worried about being attacked on Twitter.’ Just as well, really.
This was probably the best speech of the four, but also the most challenging. Badenoch wants the party to be ready to look back over the ideas and settlements of the past few decades and think again about everything, including policies the Conservatives have ended up accepting wholeheartedly such as the minimum wage. Jenrick largely wants to resist what is happening now. Cleverly wants to manage an upbeat party that largely accepts the status quo, as does Tugendhat, but with less clarity. They all came on the stage at the end to wave together, and then left, ready for the final votes from MPs in Westminster.
Listen to Coffee House Shots:
Labour under scrutiny over gambling gifts
Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour lot have had a tough time of it lately with the freebie fiasco – and it’s only getting worse. Now it transpires that Labour figures received gifts from the gambling sector worth, er, over £1 million. Talk about a bad bet, eh?
Starmer’s army accepted a range of items from the industry – including tickets to musicals and football matches – with key Cabinet figures implicated. It has emerged that his winter fuel payment-cutting Chancellor Rachel Reeves took three tickets for a show in 2023 from the Betting Gaming Council, alongside £20,000 of donations from gambling organisations for her private office prior to the election. Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds took a Wembley ticket worth £3,457 for a European Championship match from Entain, a company in charge of Ladbrokes and Sportingbet. And Transport Secretary Louise Haigh thought it was a good idea to accept hospitality tickets for a League One football match in Wembley from Entain, in a £1,400 gifting bid from the firm. The PM himself accepted a £25,000 donation for his leadership campaign in 2020, from none other than the chief exec of Bet365. Alright for some…
The news that the Labour lot have accepted £1.08 million from those connected to the gambling industry has certainly raised eyebrows, not least because it adds to the pressure on Sir Keir over the freebie scandal – with links to millionaire businessman Lord Alli – that has dampened his party’s mood in recent weeks. Longtime foe Rosie Duffield even quit the party last week after blasting the Starmtroopers over ‘sleaze, nepotism and apparent avarice’, slamming Starmer as being unfit for the top job after ‘inexplicably’ accepting clothing donations from Alli while enforcing unpopular policies like the winter fuel payment cut. The public tend to agree, with a recent poll revealing that Starmer’s government is preferred less than Rishi Sunak’s boys in blue – despite the new government being less than three months old. Talk about a short honeymoon…
James Cleverly thinks the Tories need to be more ‘normal’
James Cleverly’s speech did a much better job than Tom Tugendhat’s of explaining what sort of person he is, and what he wants to do with the party. It was very characteristic of Cleverly: there were lots of mentions of ‘optimism’, which is probably his guiding philosophy in life, and some well-delivered jokes, including one about his time in the Reserves when he got a call telling him he had been mobilised. ‘I thought I was going to Basra, or Baghdad. And I was sent… to Luton,’ he told the hall, to genuine laughter. But he also focused heavily on his experience in government, trying to differentiate himself from Tugendhat in terms of the big jobs he’s had, and also to answer the doubts that he isn’t quite up to the role of leader.
Some of his speech, particularly the peroration, sounded like a team pep talk before a rugby match
He opened the speech by very slowly and quite quietly asking the party what its purpose was, before pausing dramatically. He then said that before the party could get back on track, it needed to say something: ‘sorry’. He added: ‘Sorry on behalf of the Conservative parliamentary party who let you down. We have to be better, much better, and under my leadership, we will be.’
His version of being better involved being ‘more optimistic’ (that word again), ‘more normal’ (lots of laughs to that), and selling ‘the benefits of conservatism with a smile’. He promised to ‘build more homes so that we can build a new generation of optimism in the tradition of Macmillan and Thatcher.’ He promised to ‘get rid of bad taxes like stamp duty’ and to make sure that ‘work always pays and that the state never takes more than half of any pound that you have earned.’ But beyond that, there wasn’t much policy in the speech. There was much more on why he was better than the other candidates, particularly Tugendhat, who he has been vying against to stay in the race. He repeatedly said that ‘now is not the time for an apprentice’, and that ‘we need a leader who can deliver from day one, someone who has already done the tough apprenticeship.’ He also clearly attacked Robert Jenrick by saying ‘these are consistent values, not opportunist, a signpost, not a weathervane.’ But his attacks on Kemi Badenoch were harder to discern.
Some of his speech, particularly the peroration, sounded like a team pep talk before a rugby match, with ‘talk is easy, doing is hard’, and ‘there is no time to lose, and I don’t lose’. But the speech did garner a much more enthusiastic reception than anything the previous speaker had offered. And if Cleverly is made leader, it probably would be rather like a rugby coaching session, complete with jokes that he would have to apologise for later. But he would probably get the team on the pitch, which isn’t happening right now.
Tom Tugendhat fails to rouse the Tories
It is the final day of Tory conference and the event for which we have all been waiting: the four leadership candidates are each delivering their 20-minute speeches, setting out their vision for the country. Tom Tugendhat had the mixed blessing of going first. The benefit of this was that it allowed him to deliver a series of gags about Labour donor Lord Alli which still sounded somewhat fresh. But it meant too that his speech was something of a warm-up act, delivering feel-good lines to an audience that was still filtering in throughout the first few minutes.
The first half of Tugendhat’s speech was pedestrian
The first half of Tugendhat’s speech was somewhat pedestrian. He spoke of an optimism at the conference and the need to take the fight to Labour. Keir Starmer, he said, was guilty of leading the ‘most vindictive and venal administration in decades.’ The audience politely applauded but it felt stilted, rather than enthusiastic.
References to NHS failings felt more like a tick-box exercise than a serious agenda for public sector reform. His section on cutting net arrivals to 100,000 felt like an obligation rather than a great political cause.
The second half saw a marked improvement. The final seven minutes of Tugendhat’s speech focused on the importance of wedding economic prosperity to foreign affairs. He used the example of Germany – to enthusiastic applause – which he argued had bartered its future on its energy deal with Russia. ‘Trust’ he said, ‘is the foundation of growth,’ in one of his better lines.
His conclusion was met with loud clapping and even a chant of ‘Tom! Tom! Tom!’ Yet there was a lack of any great theme holding the speech together. Tugendhat opened by suggesting that there was too much focus on ‘personality’ in politics, yet he spent several minutes talking about character and his own military service. There were endless references to ‘fighting’ and ‘battles’. ‘I have never failed a mission yet,’ he told the room with a smile – presumably ignoring his previous leadership bid in 2022. He mentioned again the need for a ‘Conservative revolution’. But he did not use this golden opportunity to stress the need for a revolution in the various fields he mentioned, like the NHS. Overall the address was much like his campaign: slick, polished, full of nice lines but lacking a sense of an overarching narrative.
This is only the third time that the Conservatives have used their conference as an explicit beauty pageant. The one we all remember was when David Cameron became leader in 2005, but the previous occasion was 1963 when Rab Butler’s plodding speech killed his chances. One newspaper ran with the headline ‘Butler fails to rouse Tories.’ The same might be said of Tom Tugendhat after his performance today.
Listen to Coffee House Shots:
Israel was right to ignore the West
There are sources in the Jewish tradition that warn against exultation at the downfall of one’s enemies. But I am not Jewish, and so I have exulted greatly these past two weeks.
If you follow most of the British media, you may well think that the past year involves the following events: Israel attacked Hamas, Israel invaded Lebanon, Israel bombed Yemen. Oh and someone left a bomb in a room in Tehran that killed the peaceful Palestinian leader Ismail Haniyeh.
Kamala Harris warned that the IDF shouldn’t go into Rafah. As she wisely said: ‘I’ve studied the maps’
Of course all this is an absolute inversion of the truth. Hamas invaded Israel, so Israel attacked Hamas. Hezbollah has spent the past year sending thousands of rockets into Israel, so Israel has responded by destroying Hezbollah. The Houthis in Yemen – now so beloved of demonstrators in the UK – sent missiles and drones hundreds of miles to attack Israel, so Israel bombed the Houthis’ arms stores in Yemen. And Hamas leader Haniyeh, who was born under Egyptian rule and died in Tehran, never brought the Palestinian people anything but misery.
On 7 October last year Israel was surprised by a brigade-sized invasion of terrorists into its territory. These terrorists raped, murdered and burned their way as far inside Israel as they could get. How this intelligence and military failure was possible is something that Israelis still have to work out. But the first answer is because they face a fanatical, ideological opponent which wants to destroy them. Hezbollah joined in the action on 8 October. All these attacks were funded and orchestrated by the Revolutionary Islamic government in Iran, which as I write this is sending hundreds of ballistic missiles at Israel from Iran – strikes that have so far proved a failure.
Hamas still holds a hundred Israelis hostage inside Gaza, but the Israeli government has managed to bring half the hostages home already. For many people in the first days of the war, it seemed impossible that even one hostage would be able to come back to their families alive. So this is no mean feat in itself. Aside from saving the hostages, the other most important thing for Israel has been to strike and destroy the proxy armies of Iran who wish to make the whole of Israel unlivable for Jews.
All this time the governments in Britain and America have given the Israelis advice which mercifully they did not listen to. Earlier this year, Kamala Harris warned that the IDF shouldn’t go into Hamas’s Gaza stronghold in Rafah. As she wisely said: ‘I’ve studied the maps.’ Fortunately the Israelis did not listen to Kamala’s beginners’ guide to Rafah. They went into the Hamas stronghold, continued to search for the hostages, continued to kill Hamas’s leadership and continued to destroy the rocket and other ammunition stores that Hamas has built up for 18 years.
Next came the complete destruction of Hezbollah, which has the blood of hundreds of Americans and other nationals on its hands, as well as that of Israelis. Not to mention the fact that this foreign army of Iran has immiserated Lebanon for 40 years. The Christians of that country have dwindled to a minority as these Shiite fundamentalists have taken a once thriving country and turned it into yet another ayatollah-dominated hellhole.
Then, in a series of attacks which historians are already studying, everything went kaboom for Hezbollah. First thousands of its operatives were targeted all over Lebanon and Syria. Having decided that phones were not a safe means of communication, the terrorists had recently reverted to pagers, but someone managed to get into the supply chain, put a small amount of explosive in every Hezbollah device and then blew the balls off the people who were hoping to destroy their neighbours. Then Hezbollah’s walkie-talkies also suddenly detonated. Much of Hezbollah’s leadership – including those involved in the killing of 241 American marines in their barracks in Beirut in 1983 – met up in person to discuss all this, during which they too were killed in a strike.
The British and American governments among others had told the Israelis that there should be no escalation. But fortunately they weren’t listened to. The Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had gone to New York to address the various despots and kleptocrats on First Avenue; so the ultimate leader of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, thought that this would be a safe moment to get together with the few remaining members of his organisation. Before going on stage in New York and observing the traditional walkout of ‘diplomats’, Netanyahu ordered the final strike. While he was up there, Hassan Nasrallah went to meet his maker.
By this point, there is nobody left in Hezbollah. They’re all gone. All of the leadership, every one of their commanders, while their lower-level operatives are trying to get their testicles reattached in the hospitals of Beirut. It’ll be wall-to-wall wreath-laying for the Hamas and Hezbollah fanboys.
But there it is. The wisdom of the international community is that ceasefires are always desirable, that negotiated settlements are always to be desired, and that violence is never the answer. As so often, these wise international voices have no idea what they are talking about.
Israel’s enemies have spent the past year trying to destroy it, as they have so many times before. But it is they who have gone to the dust, with the regime in Tehran the only thing that is, for the time being, still standing. Absent that terror regime, and not just Israel but the whole of the Middle East has a bright future. Sometimes you need war to make peace. Sometimes there is a price to pay for trying to finish the work of Adolf Hitler. Who knew?
Israel is likely to hit back hard against Iran
Iran’s decision to launch 181 ballistic missiles at Israel on Tuesday night followed a similar pattern to the attacks of 14 April. Israeli and allied air defences appear to have performed extremely effectively. The damage to the military and civilian sites targeted is minor to non-existent. One Palestinian Arab man was killed in a village near Jericho, not from the Iranian missiles, it appears, but from interceptor debris.
I live in a Jerusalem neighbourhood on what’s called the ‘Seam Line’ between the Jewish and Arab populations. We generally have cordial relations with our Arabic-speaking neighbours, and as I stood outside my front door last night trying to get some pictures of the missiles flying over the night sky, I was entirely unsurprised to hear the honking of car horns and shouts of celebration from the Arab houses a little further down the street. So it goes, and so far, so predictable.
Israel must signal to Iran that such aggression will be met with a determined, escalatory response
The question now is what comes next. The Israeli response following the 14 April attacks was small, and largely symbolic. US President Joe Biden at that time advised Israel to ‘take the win’, referring to the successful region-wide, US-led air defence system that was mobilised for the first time on that night. Israel retaliated with a symbolic attack on an Iranian air defence system, largely to prove to Teheran that it could do a lot more than that. And the matter was left there.
This time, the response is unlikely to be merely symbolic. The reason is that, with the Middle East being what it is, if Israel again responds with just a little nudge to Iran indicating what it could do if it really tried, this is likely to be interpreted as hesitation – and hence weakness. It will convey to the Iranians that they can now see a massive Iranian missile attack as part of the rules of the game: that every time Israel takes major action against an Iranian proxy in the context of the current war (such as the assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh or the killing of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah), or makes a move against an Iranian official, this kind of response must be factored in.
This is not a ‘norm’ that Israel can accept. Hence, it must now signal to Iran that such aggression will be met with a determined, escalatory response. Such a response is now likely. The natural next question is what form might that take? What assets does Israel have to hand, which could deliver the appropriate message to Iran, and what Iranian vulnerabilities can be exploited?
In terms of the assets which Israel could bring to bear, there are two immediately apparent instruments which it could mobilise. The first is Israeli air superiority. Israel’s raid on the Hodaidah and Ras Isa ports in Yemen last week was the latest proof that the Israeli Air Force is able to effectively project power to distances which bring Iranian targets well within its range. This was also demonstrated, of course, in the pinpointed response to the attacks in April. Israel’s F15, F16 and F35 fighter jets, together with its refuelling planes, have the capacity to reach any target in Iran.
Nor does a response using air power need to be limited to the realm of piloted aircraft, with the accompanying possible dangers to personnel. Israel is a world leader in the use of drones. Its Heron TP, Hermes 900 and Shoval systems could all, if desired, be employed against targets in Iran. It is also worth noting that while Israel’s missile defence systems are better known, Jerusalem possesses a ballistic missile capacity of its own – the Jericho 3 system – also capable of reaching Iran.
Regarding the second set of available instruments: ample evidence exists to suggest that Israel possesses an irregular capacity on Iranian soil, which is available for activation when needed. It is almost certain that this capacity includes the involvement of Iranian citizens. The regime in Teheran is not popular, and finding individuals willing to work against it isn’t difficult, though of course details of this are elusive.
The existence of this Israeli capability is apparent mainly from the results: sudden deaths suffered by scientists and officials involved with Teheran’s nuclear programs, mysterious explosions and power outages, theft of materials and so on. If needed, these saboteurs could presumably be engaged as an element in the current war. It is worth noting that while they have most notably been used in recent years against people involved with the nuclear program, they could also theoretically be used against other Iranian officials and individuals associated with the regime.
What are Israel’s potential targets, should it choose to respond? Of course, there are the facilities related to the Iranian nuclear program, but it is more likely currently that Israel would focus on strategic targets essential to the functioning of the Iranian economy. The oil sector would be one vulnerable area in this regard. The oil terminal on Kharg Island and the Bandar Abbas port would be two sites that may well appear on Israel’s hit list for this sector thanks to Iran’s vulnerability regarding its export capacity.
Yesterday’s attack shows we need to shift our perceptions with regard to the current situation in the Middle East. The competition between the Iran-led regional bloc on the one side, and Israel and its western and pro-western allied countries on the other has long dominated strategic affairs in the region. For the last two decades, this contest has largely played out through feints, the use of proxies, clandestine and intelligence warfare, and diplomatic stratagems. That chapter in this long and historic battle of wills now appears to be drawing to a close. A phase of open confrontation looks set to take its place.
Why hasn’t Trump congratulated J.D. Vance?
Even the most ardent Trump-loathers are admitting that, last night, the Republican vice-presidential nominee J.D. Vance easily won his debate against his opposite number, Tim Walz. ‘Vance is going home with Walz’s wallet,’ said the veteran Never Trumper David Frum.
It’s curious, then, that – at time of writing at least – Donald Trump still hasn’t congratulated his running mate over his resounding victory, at least not publicly. Last night, on his Truth Social media account, Trump posted a rude meme about how stupid Tim Walz is, but no applause for JD.
Even more mysteriously, as the debate finished, Trump posted on Twitter/X a tribute not to Vance but to ‘one of the most magnificent baseball players ever to play the game’ – the late Pete Rose.
Does Steerpike detect a whiff of lèse-majesté? Vance defended Trump against a number of attacks from Walz in the course of the televised discussion. But he was not quite as a sycophantic to his dear leader as he has been in the past. Perhaps Trump, a proud man to put it mildly, felt insufficiently revered.
Or it could be that the Donald, having given such a rotten display in his head-to-head with Kamala Harris last month, is peeved at Vance for doing so much better. Vance, after all, showed that you win televised debates by mastering details, which is something Trump has never quite been able to do.
Vance also criticised Republicans for not doing a better job of defending the party’s pro-life position on abortion, an issue Trump has been much attacked over.
Worst of all, perhaps, Vance went to great lengths to be polite to his opponent, which is not quite in keeping with Trump’s preference for ‘killer’ spokesmen who articulate his greatness by endlessly trashing enemies.
What we can say almost for certain is that, by tweeting out his admiration for a baseball player rather than congratulating his VP, Trump made it clear that he does not think the Walz-Vance contest matters. It’s all about him, after all.
China’s fear and loathing of the Japanese
Cindy Yu has narrated this article for you to listen to.
Chinese nationalism is a mixture of self-pity and cultural arrogance
Ten-year-old Shen Hangping was walking to school when he was stabbed. Japanese on his father’s side, Chinese on his mother’s, he was a pupil at the Japanese School in Shenzhen. There are only a small number of these expat schools across China, and they have recently become targets of Chinese nationalist anger. Shenzhen was the second such attack in three months. In June, a knife-wielding man tried to board a bus full of children attending the Japanese school in Suzhou. The Chinese bus attendant held him off: he killed her instead.
Knife attacks are not rare in China (just this week, a man killed three in a Shanghai shopping centre) but what makes the Suzhou and Shenzhen attacks different is that they were almost certainly racially motivated. It’s highly unlikely to be a coincidence that Hangping was attacked on the anniversary of the ‘Mukden incident’, a Japanese false flag operation of 1931 which led to the invasion of Chinese Manchuria.
The two attacks were manifestations of a new development in China’s long-standing fear and loathing of the Japanese. The latest bout of antagonism has been over Tokyo Electric Power’s plan to release mildly radioactive wastewater from the ruined Fukushima nuclear plant into the Pacific Ocean. Even though the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency approved the process and classified the radiation risks as ‘negligible’, the Chinese government and state media have been in a frenzy. China has banned all Japanese seafood while its censors took down scientific blogs that fact-checked the government’s apocalyptic warnings.
At the same time, China’s anti-espionage law has broadened the definition of spying, encouraging the public to keep a lookout for potential infiltrators in their midst (read: foreigners or Chinese who might have dealings with foreigners). Recent viral videos have linked Japanese schools to such activity.
The mood has become febrile and absurd. When Japan was hit with a major earthquake on New Year’s Day, keyboard nationalists celebrated the disaster as ‘retribution’. When the underground station in the regional capital of Nanning was accused of having the rising sun of the Japanese flag on its walls, it apologised and removed the image. A complete photograph showed that it was, in fact, the circular spoke of a Chinese folding fan. Critics mocked the nationalists online: what else should be banned? Circles? Wheels?
Some 80 years after Japan’s withdrawal from China, Chinese people today love Japanese food, clothing, films, anime and even pornography (the actress Sora Aoi having cult status among millennial men). But none of this has dampened the Chinese antipathy to their former occupier.
There are still nonagenarian Chinese alive today who were trafficked by the Japanese army to be ‘comfort women’ for the invading soldiers, or who had family and friends killed. My home city of Nanjing is infamous for the 1937 massacre during which some 200,000 Chinese civilians were raped, tortured and killed. It’s near impossible to get closure for such historical trauma when (unlike, for example, in Germany) Japanese politicians have been reluctant to dis-avow their country’s wartime actions. For the same reason, resentment of Japan is still rife in South Korea and the Philippines.
The Chinese Communist party is keen to foster this antagonism. After 1989’s Tiananmen Square protests, which the leadership decided stemmed from a lack of love for the homeland, the CCP embarked on a ‘patriotic education campaign’. Textbooks emphasised China’s past suffering under foreign aggressors and presented the CCP as a saviour.
As China has grown in power and prestige, so has Chinese nationalism – but this is tinged with victimhood. ‘China can say no,’ a 1990s bestseller declared. Some of my compatriots continued to see foreign bullies everywhere, bolstered by events such as the Nato bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999. This kind of nationalism – a mix of self-pity and cultural arrogance – is intoxicating. Above all, it’s convenient for the CCP when it needs someone to blame.
Twice – in 2005 and 2012 – this spilled into mass anti-Japanese demonstrations across dozens of Chinese cities, catalysed by issues such as the prospect of Japan permanently joining the UN Security Council, or disputes over islands in the East China Sea. Japanese shops were destroyed and consulates vandalised. The Beijing government turned a blind eye to much of this, though it risked becoming the target of nationalistic anger when riot police sought to quell the most extreme and violent of the protestors.
The atmosphere today isn’t as dramatic, but it may be more insidious. The racism that seems to be emerging is directed against diaspora Japanese, specifically children. The electronics company Panasonic is among several businesses allowing their China-based employees to return home for a period, while expat schools have paid for extra security. Parents have even been asked to refrain from speaking Japanese in public.
Two madmen in a country of 1.4 billion are, of course, hardly representative. The vast majority of Chinese have reacted to the attacks with horror and sympathy. The Shenzhen school has been sent thousands of bouquets. Kuaishou, a TikTok-style video platform, announced it has shut down more than 90 accounts for disseminating anti-Japanese misinformation.
But the authorities have kept uncharacteristically schtum about the attackers, though both men were arrested straight after the stabbings. To what extent were the murderers influenced by the government’s spy hunt and the Japan-bashing over Fukushima? Had they bought into the anti-Japanese misinformation that is allowed to spread online?
Without transparency, such questions are impossible to answer and there can be no reckoning for violent Chinese nationalism, and those who promote it. But that’s exactly the point.
Inside the Welsh village where English speakers aren’t welcome
On a Saturday morning, no life stirs. The village café is closed and the ancient church of St Beuno’s is locked and deserted. Beside the stone porch stands a dusty glass case that advertises church services and parish gatherings. Not a single event is scheduled. This is the peaceful village of Botwnnog (pronounced Bot-oon-awg) in the Llyn peninsula, north Wales, whose council recently rejected a plan to build 18 houses for rent.
Few Welsh words have found their way into English, even though we inhabit the same island
The language chosen by the council made headline news. ‘The Welsh village where English speakers aren’t welcome,’ said the Daily Telegraph, referring to the council’s claim that the new homes posed a ‘danger to the Welsh language and the fabric of the community’. The council’s statement even speculated about language tests for newcomers. ‘It would be great if the availability of proposed houses could be limited to Welsh speakers only.’ Bit of a mistake. A village council has no power to treat its community like a members-only club and to require probationers to sit an exam before receiving a residency permit.
In their defence, the village councillors were speaking hypothetically and their stance reflected anxieties shared by the county authority, Gwynedd council. Last month, the county implemented a notorious ‘Article Four’ directive which limits the ability of freeholders to convert their properties into ‘a second home or a short-term holiday let’. The aim is to reduce the demand for holiday homes by choking off supply. The council decided to act after seeing evidence that in popular resorts more than 54 per cent of homes are holiday lets. An impact assessment suggested that ‘the median average price for a house in Abersoch is £482,500… This means that 96.1 per cent of local people have been priced out of the market’. Hence its desire to engineer a housing slump and to make homes more affordable to locals on modest incomes.
The ploy may be working. A shop-keeper in Pwllheli told me that every property-owner he knows is selling up. ‘Including you?’ I asked. ‘No, I’m staying put,’ he said, ‘I love it here. I moved in 28 years ago. If I didn’t like it, I’d leave.’ He was from Liverpool. A cleaning lady told me that the council’s attempt to rig the market was pointless: the weather does the job far better. ‘It rains all the time. If it’s not raining in the morning, it’ll start by lunchtime. And the second homeowners from London and Essex don’t expect that. Their houses are left unoccupied. They’re cold. The heating’s off. The damp gets in. And they can’t afford the maintenance bills.’ In her experience, few buyers last more than two or three years before they surrender to the monsoons and sell up.
Gwynedd’s consultation process weighed up the pros and cons of Article Four – and the language was pretty blunt. ‘Preventing people from England from accessing affordable accommodation is racist,’ said the report. ‘It is a form of ethnic cleansing… It may create divided communities where people who are not indigenous Welsh feel uncomfortable and separated from the community.’
And they considered the social fallout of a property crash. Many people may be pushed ‘into a cycle of deprivation which they cannot get out of’. If homeowners can’t help their kids on to the property ladder, ‘the young will leave Wales. And with them goes the future of the Welsh language’. Then again, the policy may harm the Welsh language by attracting settlers from overseas. ‘Many people with different beliefs, languages and cultures will move to the area for cheaper housing – not Welsh-speakers and not Christians.’ Despite these warnings, the council passed the directive. ‘Any detrimental impact can be justified,’ they said. Clearly they underestimated the risk of saddling north Wales with a reputation for xenophobia.
Perhaps new residents could do their bit by learning Welsh voluntarily, as a courtesy to their hosts. Plenty of help is available. Shop windows in Pwllheli carry advertisements for a ‘fast-track Welsh’ programme that costs £50 and lasts 33 weeks. As I wrote down the details, I got chatting to an English woman who had completed the course and taken part in coffee-and-cake sessions with Welsh-speaking volunteers. But she hadn’t achieved fluency. In fact she’d given up completely, even though she held a degree in Russian literature. Welsh is not a language that welcomes the casual student with open arms. It’s remarkable how few Welsh words have found their way into English, even though we inhabit the same island.
Everyone in Britain can say ‘thank you’ in Spanish and ‘hello’ in Italian and ‘goodbye’ in French or German. Hardly any of us could guess at the Welsh equivalents. One of the alienating complexities of Welsh is the pronunciation which varies from speaker to speaker. The town of Tywyn, for example, can start with a ‘tee’, a ‘two’, or a ‘tuh’. The second syllable of Llandeilo rhymes with ‘dial’ or with ‘deal’ according to taste. Fierce arguments erupt over the correct usage. Even robots join in. As my train trundled through Snowdonia, the automatic voice-over announced Penrhyndeudraeth in a form that was not matched by the ticket collector’s. Criccieth got three syllables from the auto-announcer but the locals give it two. Every-one’s wrong and everyone’s right. This uncertainty discourages beginners who fear ridicule every time they open their mouths.
That’s why I felt a pang of anxiety as I boarded the bus from Pwllheli and asked for a ticket to ‘Botnog’. I was sure I’d mispronounced it and I expected to be met with a withering glare from the driver. But she gave me a friendly grin and said ‘Bot-oon-awg’ indulgently. Later, after parking the bus, she chatted to me about Article Four, which she regards as a godsend. ‘Before they brought that in,’ she said, ‘estate agents wouldn’t even take your calls, let alone show you a property. They wanted cash buyers from Cheshire. But now the long-term residents can get a foot on the ladder.’ She’d lived in north Wales for more than a decade but her accent wasn’t Welsh or English. ‘Where are you from?’ I asked. ‘Los Angeles, California.’
What we know so far about Iran’s massive missile attack
Last night, Iran launched a large-scale missile strike against Israel, dubbed ‘Operation True Promise II’. According to the latest reports, the attack involved approximately 180 ballistic missiles, making it one of the largest missile assaults in history.
Iranian officials stated that the attack was in retaliation for the assassination of Hamas’s political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Iran in late July, the killing of Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah in Lebanon last week, and Israel’s broader conduct in the region in recent months.
Details about the attack, including its targets and the damage caused, remain murky at this time. But it seems that Iran targeted Nevatim airbase, Tel Nof airbase, and the headquarters of Mossad, Israel’s intelligence service.
Nevatim airbase was already struck by Iranian missiles in April with minimal effect. This time, videos show around a dozen missiles striking the airbase, though it is unclear what damage the attack caused. The airbase, which is home to Israel’s F-35 fleet, quickly became the subject of Iranian media reports claiming that several of Israel’s most advanced aircraft had been destroyed. However, no evidence has surfaced to support these claims.
6. A strike on Nevatim Airbase, verified by The Post, @JakeGodin and others. One of the heaviest documented so far. pic.twitter.com/37QlbnhvFB
— Evan Hill (@evanhill) October 1, 2024
Tel Nof airbase appears to have been struck by several ballistic missiles, with at least one impact resulting in secondary explosions, likely from stored munitions. As well as hosting military aircraft, the airbase is also suspected to house Israeli nuclear bombs. But even if these were present during the attack, they are likely stored in specially secured, deep underground bunkers, out of reach of Iranian ballistic missiles.
The Mossad headquarters on the northern outskirts of Tel-Aviv remain unharmed. The closest ballistic missile appears to have landed approximately 500 meters away in Gilliot, with no other impacts reported.
Round-up of verified Iran ballistic missile strike videos:
— Evan Hill (@evanhill) October 1, 2024
1. A strike in Glilot, Tel Aviv, possibly near Mossad headquarters, verified by @TwistyCB (POV: 32.162814, 34.814391)pic.twitter.com/lOesMJnfar
Another missile struck and damaged a school in Gedera, south of Tel Aviv. Overall, there are only a few reports of minor injuries, likely from shell shock and flying fragments, and one individual died after being hit by a falling spent rocket booster which landed outside of Jericho in the West Bank.
Although the actual damage from the attack seems minimal, a substantial number of Iranian ballistic missiles managed to penetrate Israel’s integrated air and missile defence network, which is considered one of the most effective in the world.
Although Israeli and American officials have not disclosed the exact number of intercepted missiles, the percentage of ballistic missiles that penetrated the Israeli defences is likely higher than in April’s missile attack. In that instance, around 94 per cent of all the ballistic missiles were intercepted, along with a significant number of cruise missiles and long-range one-way attack drones.
Several potential explanations have been proposed for why Israel’s air defences were less effective this time. It could be that Iran launched a more concentrated volley of missiles targeting fewer objectives. Or it could have used more advanced ballistic missiles compared to the previous attack. It appears that Iran used larger numbers of Fattah-1 and Kheibarshekan medium-range ballistic missiles, which have greater manoeuvrability in the last stage of their flight, complicating missile defence.
Another reason could be that Israel exhausted much of its interceptor arsenal during the previous missile attack and was unable to replenish it in time, resulting in fewer targets successfully intercepted. This being said, several videos on social media appear to show successful intercepts both inside and outside the atmosphere, suggesting Israel used a a substantial amount of its David Sling, Arrow 2, and Arrow 3 interceptors.
It’s important to keep in mind that not every impact captured on video will have been a successful strike. It is difficult to tell from a video the difference between a warhead hitting its target and falling missile debris after a successful intercept. In addition, several Iranian missiles that did land appear to have failed to accurately strike their targets. Israel may have also chosen to not intercept every incoming warhead, focusing its interceptor arsenal on defending higher-value objects instead. Nevertheless, the Iranians will likely see this attack as more successful than their April barrage.
Israel’s response remains uncertain, though officials have vowed to retaliate. On the lower end, this could involve additional strikes against Iranian proxies in Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq. On the higher end, a retaliatory strike might target Iran directly, potentially hitting military installations, oil infrastructure, or even nuclear facilities.
While a large-scale response is possible, it’s important to note that Israel likely cannot sustain a prolonged air campaign against Iran without direct US involvement, particularly against Iran’s nuclear infrastructure. Additionally, a strong Israeli response might be the last push Iran needs to weaponise its nuclear programme, a factor that will likely influence Israeli decisions. What is clear is that the coming days and weeks will be crucial in shaping the future of the Middle East.
Pornography and the truth about the Pelicot case
There have been protests in 30 cities across France, people marching in outrage over the case of Dominique Pelicot who drugged his wife Gisèle and raped her and invited more than 70 other men – strangers – to come to his house and rape her too. Pelicot is a monster, a modern-day Bluebeard. But what has shocked France most is how very many normal Frenchmen he was able to find, in and around his Provencal village, who were up for having sex with an unconscious woman.
If the feminists of France really want to stand with Gisèle, they’d educate their sons to abstain from porn
A firefighter, a painter, several businessmen… every week as the trial continues another set of these ordinary men shamble into the courthouse in Avignon and make their bad excuses. They thought it was consensual, they say, and that Gisèle was in on it; that she was faking sleep. But they had been told not to wear aftershave or to smoke for fear that Gisèle would smell a rat when she came to. The chat room they’d met in was called ‘Without her knowing’. A son insu.
For the marchers, the Pelicot case is clear evidence that most men are still steeped in the vicious misogyny of the past. The placards they carry are very #MeToo: ‘I am Gisèle.’ And: ‘Not all men, but only men.’ In response to the case France’s new justice minister, Didier Migaud, last week solemnly promised to rewrite the legal definition of rape to include the word ‘consent’.
‘Educate your sons,’ say the marchers’ placards. To me it feels like watching hounds suddenly, inexplicably swerve away from the scent and set off in entirely the wrong direction. What happened to Gisèle has zip all to do with a lack of education. Some of the men on trial are graduates; others are in their twenties, and sex education has been compulsory in France for two decades. Why would M. Miguad think it would improve matters if the word ‘consent’ was to appear in French rape law? I don’t expect there’s ever been a set of rapists in history with a better understanding of the need for consent – or ‘enthusiastic, informed consent’ as my niece’s university has it.
What the protestors don’t seem to grasp is that it’s precisely because these men understood the importance of consent that it carried such erotic appeal to proceed without it. The lack of consent is the point. And it’s not patriarchy that’s to blame, but porn-ography. It’s porn which leads a human down into the sludgy gutters of his own psyche – and if the feminists of France really wanted to stand with Gisèle, they’d educate their sons to abstain. Not just from the obviously illegal stuff, but from all of it.
This isn’t an original point. It’s one I’ve borrowed from the author Mary Harrington, who recently wrote about the Pelicot case and ‘the degree to which the atrocities themselves are bound up in and emblematic of the porn industry’s central operation: the monetisation of taboo’. As Harrington explains it, pornography, the whole great, growing, metastasising, $100 billion mess of it, is not about selling sex so much as selling transgression. The dopamine hit that drags human bonobos back to their laptops time after time is a result of busting through a taboo, and that’s why it’s progressive. Once a taboo is normalised, it loses its transgressive power, so you look for another. And some men (not all men, but enough men) keep chasing that feeling until they end up in a chat room with Dominique Pelicot. A son insu.
Sean Thomas explained it all extremely well in a piece he wrote two decades ago in The Spectator’s Boris Johnson era (unsurprisingly). I hadn’t been long at The Spectator back then, and porn was just beginning to burrow its way into the internet. The piece caused a stir in the office, and I still think it’s to the credit of both Boris and his deputy, Stuart Reid, that they ran it.
Sean had become curious about online porn and he’d followed his curiosity, clicking away from site to site until he found a taboo that hit the spot – after which he lost control. And when he finally kicked the habit, he wrote about it. Sean’s conclusion was this: ‘Most male sexuality is designed by evolution to be an unscratchable itch; a desperate, unsatisfiable urge. It is like hunger: just as you aren’t meant to wake up one day and say, “Oh, I’ve had 6,000 meals, I think I’ll stop eating now”, so men aren’t meant to wake up one day and think, “Oh, I’ve ogled 500 girls, I think I’ll stop staring at them now.” A further problem with this is that when a man starts to explore his more deviant sexual fantasies, he can find himself in an addictive spiral, pursuing ever stranger forms of sex.’
It baffles me that in the decades since Sean’s piece, instead of developing a clear understanding of how porn acts on a brain, we’ve all become slowly habituated to it, slowly boiled alive in porn culture like frogs. Men in leather pup masks having sex in the street? What of it? It’s Pride. Take the kids! Got yourself a ‘rape kink’? Go for it! Be you. Join the growing ‘rape kink’ community on Reddit. The only serious modern taboo is ‘kink shame’.
As the police were rounding up Gisèle Pelicot’s abusers last year, a report was published in France which revealed that as much as 90 per cent of online porn featured violence towards women. ‘Women… are humiliated, objectified, dehumanised, assaulted, tortured, subjected to treatment that is contrary to both human dignity and French law… the women are real and the sexual acts are real and the violence is real. The suffering is often perfectly visible and at the same time eroticised.’ And it was also reported that more than half of 12-year-old boys in France view porn every month. So, yes, educate your sons.
Letters: Are there still any reasons to be cheerful?
Doctor’s note
Sir: Your leading article ‘Labour vs labour’ (21 September) follows a recent theme that I have noticed in The Spectator, in which the government is criticised for allowing public pay rises without implementing changes to working practices to increase productivity. I cannot comment on other sectors but I work in the NHS, working closely with junior doctors as colleagues and am involved in training them.
Your article appears to imply that if they worked harder or differently, productivity would improve. While I accept that NHS productivity may not have improved (or may have worsened over recent years), my experience as a GP and trainer is that my productivity and that of juniors is limited by structures and barriers to the efficient provision of care imposed by changes imposed from above. These changes have come from the last government, the Department of Health, NHS England and the wider society, and are completely beyond the control of frontline clinicians, who are as frustrated as the public about the situation. This is not in any way relevant to pay awards, which reflect the length and level of training (and responsibility carried) by junior doctors. In my experience, they are extremely diligent and hardworking (not to mention bright and motivated) members of the workforce.
Dr Jonathan Cleary
Gloucestershire
Migratory patterns
Sir: ‘The Swedish model’ (14 September) makes some very important points about illegal immigration – notably that withdrawing from the ECHR is in itself unlikely to be a silver bullet. But your leading article also implies that the fundamental problem is that we are admitting too many people to be able to provide them with the basic needs of housing, public services and the maintenance of social cohesion. In that case the issue is not so much illegal migration, which only accounts for a few tens of thousands, but also legal migration, which can be measured in hundreds of thousands. This is driven both by British industry’s tendency to treat overseas recruitment as the ‘default option’ and by British higher education’s decision to base its business model on overseas student recruitment – many of whom (some sources suggest as high as 40 per cent) morph into the domestic workforce before their visa expires. By contrast, ask students from the settled population who graduated this summer about their search for a job and they will likely say how very difficult it is.
The truth is that the system is running out of control. In reply to my parliamentary question on 17 September, the Department for Work and Pensions revealed that in the 12 months to 30 June, 940,039 new national insurance numbers were issued. Of these, 544,241 were to people from Asia and 119,220 from Europe. Where are they all working? Further, it makes the unrealistic suggestion that immigration can be reduced to 300,000 per annum – though that is a very high number by historic standards.
Robin Hodgson
House of Lords, London SW1
Reasons to be depressed
Sir: My work and social contemporaries are in our seventies and eighties and have never knowingly suffered from ADHD (‘The adult ADHD trap’, 21 September). However, increasingly we experience mild depression. Our worries include the new government, the failing NHS that is driving more of us to private healthcare, the Arts Council’s restrictions to opera by ENO, WNO and Glyndebourne, limitations on free speech particularly in education, and, further from home, US politics, the Middle East and Ukraine. In 1979 Ian Dury and the Blockheads sang a long list of ‘Reasons to be Cheerful’. I’m hard pressed to think of a list for 2024. Can readers help?
Catherine M.S. Alexander
Stratford upon Avon, Warwickshire
Ambrosial fruit
Sir: Milton did not ‘retrofit the Bible’ to make the fruit of the Forbidden Tree an apple (Letters, 21 September). He read the Bible in Hebrew, not Latin: that he regarded Jerome’s translation as misleading is clearly shown in Paradise Lost. The ‘ambrosial fruit’ is only twice called an apple: and in each case Satan, the ‘father of lies’, is the speaker. In the first instance, he is simply lying to Eve; in the second, boastfully jeering to an audience of devils.
Caroline Moore
Etchingham, East Sussex
Baldwin’s phrase
Sir: Visitors to Hughenden would be misled if they were told Disraeli invented ‘One Nation’ (Notes, 21 September). The famous words were first used by Stanley Baldwin after the Tories’ greatest ever election victory a century ago. Speaking in the Royal Albert Hall on 4 December 1924, Baldwin called on the party to show that it was ‘Unionist in the sense that we stand for the union of those two nations of which Disraeli spoke two generations ago: union among our own people to make one nation of our people at home which, if secured, nothing else matters in the world.’
Alistair Lexden
House of Lords, London SW1
Civilised hours
Sir: As a serving civil servant I want to correct Charles Moore’s incorrect understanding of the situation regarding flexible working in the civil service (Notes, 21 September). Civil servants are required to attend their office for at least 60 per cent of their contracted hours, where this is practical for their role. Teams within the service have adapted well to these arrangements and the flexibility is extremely helpful for those who have to balance the demands of childcare and so on.
After years of salary erosion, the service is struggling more than ever to attract staff. In today’s workplaces staff expect the flexibility technology affords. In his ardour for more rigid employment conditions for civil servants, Charles Moore would make it harder to recruit and would increase the financial burden on already struggling employees, leading to more vacancies and, I’m sure, less efficient public servants.
Name and address supplied
Moot point
Sir: Dot Wordsworth writes of the word ‘moot’ as a kind of meeting enjoyed by the Anglo Saxons (Mind your language, 21 September). Twenty years ago, I was briefly a member of a Dark Ages re-enactment society. It was organised by area, and I fell into that of ‘Suddrighe’, or Surrey. I was informed that monthly ‘moots’ would take place in the local pub; Dermot, the leader, told me when I met him for a pint that he was the leader, or Ealdorman, of the whole county, as if he had legions at his back ready to face down William the Conqueror. In fact during the whole year our group was only him and me, and as he turned his ankle in the first event, he issued instructions to me from the sidelines thereafter. I exchanged my shield and spear for a Civil War musket the following spring.
Tom Stubbs
Surbiton, Surrey
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