The ‘joy’ of fireworks isn’t worth the misery they inflict on animals

The crowd gathers, wrapped in thick coats and scarves, the crisp air mingling with the scent of hot chocolate and warm smoke from the bonfire. Children sit on their parents’ shoulders, eyes wide with anticipation, as the first crackle in the sky is met with an appreciative cheer. As more fireworks light up the sky, the excitement begins to wane. Each pop and bang elicit fewer reactions, and the comfort of shared laughter and idle chit-chat begins to take hold. Soon enough, the fireworks become little more than a backdrop to the real joy of the evening – familiar faces and easy conversation.

Sheltered in our homes, a very different scene unfolds: our pets shaking, crying, attempting to escape. It’s a 5 November tradition that’s as predictable as it is distressing. The UK is home to 13.5 million dogs; around 6.75 million are visibly scared of fireworks. As a result, these dogs can sustain physical injuries, suffer from prolonged anxiety, and even have shorter lifespans.

In my household, the only remedy for our dog, Mollie, is the deep, monotonous drone of the tumble-dryer – understandably, she prefers the machine’s humming to sporadic explosions or, her former therapy, the cheerless melodies of Starsailor. Mollie’s experience isn’t exceptional; each year, the RSPCA receives hundreds of complaints about fireworks. But household pets are only the tip of the flame. Once the bonfires are lit, countless wild animals are thrown into a warzone without humans and tumble-dryers to keep them safe.

Fireworks can make panicked horses collide with fences, birds scatter in distress, and foxes abandon their cubs. Although limited, the scientific literature paints a pretty clear picture: human-made noise is ‘detrimental to wildlife and natural ecosystems’ and impacts the overwhelming majority of species.

Most popular

Jimmy Nicholls

It’s last orders for craft beer

Julie Burchill

I can’t help liking Bonnie Blue

Andrew Tettenborn

The Epping tipping point

When we inflict pain and suffering on animals – when owls are caged and dolphins harpooned – we experience empathy and concern. Something about these acts strikes us as wrong. It’s the job of philosophers to understand what, if anything, makes them wrong. Like Guy Fawkes, our ancestors were enthusiastically religious – humans from the heavens, our fellow creatures from the dirt – but we know better now. We come from, and will return, to the same place: the cruel, blind processes of the natural world. To borrow from Mary Midgley, ‘We are not just rather like animals; we are animals.’ Our moral kinship consists in this fact: we share with our fellow creatures a capacity for pleasure, pain, happiness, and suffering. In the case of fireworks, the question we have to ask is as follows: is our pleasure worth their pain?

Less than a third of Brits enjoy fireworks ‘a lot’, according to a recent government report. Most of us enjoy fireworks ‘a little’, ‘not that much’, or ‘not at all’. That doesn’t seem nearly enough enthusiasm to justify the harm caused to animals. Each year, we sleepwalk into a parade of animal misery and, the worst part is, so few of us care about the explosions.

There are things to be done, at both the state and individual level. Fireworks for private displays are currently limited to 120 dB. (There are no such limits for public displays.) Birds respond to frequencies above 40 dB and, for dogs, anything above 85 dB is ‘playing with auditory fire’. The compromise is obvious: governments should legislate against fireworks that aren’t ‘silent’ or low-noise. The flashes will still cause harm; but it’s a step in the right direction. At least, this way, the firework fanatics can enjoy their glitter and sparkles.

At an individual level, using non-silent fireworks is rarely defensible. The RSPCA has published an interactive map that shows how many cats and dogs your private display will affect. There are very few residential areas where the numbers are reassuring. In my garden, for example, setting off a standard 120 dB firework would frighten around 2,000 dogs. I have to ask myself, honestly: is it worth scaring so many dogs – let alone the birds, foxes, cats, sheep, cows, horses, and the like – for a flash of tinsel in the sky? It would take some fuzzy logic to justify that.

So, this 5 November, let’s choose traditions that don’t come at the cost of unnecessary suffering. As we gather to celebrate, let’s remember what really matters. So long as we share the night with the people and pets we care about, the rest is just (unwanted) background noise.

The cult of Paddington has gone too far

‘Kindness is like marmalade – a little goes a long way,’ Paddington Bear tweeted recently. But it isn’t only imaginary talking bears who take this approach on social media. The News Agents’ Emily Maitlis was inspired by the rather sickly – and given the seriousness of current events, rather inappropriate – chummy love-in between Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer at their final Commons encounter last week. ‘Just imagine if PMQs was like this every week,’ she tweeted wistfully, ‘Conciliatory. Helpful. Bipartisan. Passionate and compassionate.’

Thankfully, as it turned out, Rishi Sunak was faking. His Budget response displayed the fire down below that only gets switched on in some people after they’ve been utterly trounced. Poor Emily, her bipartisan dreams smashed so soon. I pictured her sighing sadly and taking a consoling bite from the emergency marmalade sandwich she keeps under her hat.

Because what we can only call Paddingtonism – ‘Oh, isn’t it sad. Why can’t people agree? If only we could all be a bit more like a CGI teddy’ – is rampant among certain adults. It’s the acme of passive aggression and comes with a plaintive twinkle and a pensive little shake of the head. Jeremy Corbyn was forever at it.

We are about to get a sugared avalanche of it with the release on Friday of Paddington’s third big-screen excursion, Paddington In Peru. A big-budget West End musical is in the works. Paddington’s thoughts on social media are enthusiastically greeted and retweeted by the kind of grown-ups who like to feel tewwibly sad about Brexit, ‘populism’, and people objecting to mass uncontrolled immigration. Because Paddington is a refugee, you see, and wouldn’t it be nice if we were all a little more kind?

Most popular

Jimmy Nicholls

It’s last orders for craft beer

Julie Burchill

I can’t help liking Bonnie Blue

Andrew Tettenborn

The Epping tipping point

There is something terribly appropriate to our times about a cuddly creature that doesn’t actually physically exist, something you couldn’t actually touch because it’s a collection of bytes of data, becoming a cult figure. I’m not a ‘furry’ – someone who likes anthropomorphic animal characters – but the 21st-century Paddington is a strangely unadorable creature. Surely the appeal of such beasts is meant to be that they are like our pets, warm and soothing to pat and stroke? To me, CGI Paddington looks cold and dead-eyed. He’s an untrustworthy sort.

I accept that I’m hopelessly in the minority here, as things which aren’t actually there are wildly popular and lucrative. But the artistic wisdom of blending real people and animated characters (of any kind) seems questionable. Something about it gives me the ick, the same way it did watching Bedknobs and Broomsticks when I was five.

The 1970s TV version of Paddington was mercifully brief – a mere five minutes a shot – and it was entirely animated, with its own unique aesthetic of moving line drawings. Paddington himself looked cuddly. It didn’t look like anything else. The 21st-century Paddington franchise looks exactly like everything else.

The charm and innocence were there too, as they were in the books by Michael Bond. But the big difference is that then they were implicit, understated. Now, they are repeatedly spelt out. Paddington has that most deadly of things, franchise ‘brand values’. One of the biggest and most disconcerting changes to the national character in my lifetime has been this shift from a simple, unspoken acceptance of general civility (even in children’s fiction) to the aggressive statement and restatement of ‘values’ in everything. We used to groan and lament when Americans did this. Whenever Captain Kirk in Star Trek launched into one of his end-of-episode homilies, my father – a not-uncritical viewer at the best of times – would turn red and start hurling nearby objects.

We used to know that people telling us, at length, how nice they are, meant that they were a rotter of some kind.

The trailer for Paddington In Peru shows us lots of big-name actors (Hugh Bonneville, Olivia Colman, etc.) doing the kind of twee, simpering acting they wouldn’t dream of turning in for any other kind of film. During my own time working in kids’ TV, I saw this syndrome – ‘now’s the chance for me to have a spot of fun’ – very often at table readthroughs of scripts, after which the director was dispatched to have a quiet word.

Cynicism in kids’ entertainment is deadly, yes, and it’s nice to have something that isn’t ‘dark’. But there are ways to engage with the world in a family film – Up, Finding Nemo, etc. – that aren’t so saccharine and schmaltzy.

However, maybe that British goo-resistant spirit lives on. When the Paddington account tweeted, with astonishing inappropriateness during the riots in August, ‘Perhaps it’s time for a little more kindness’, the furry Fauntleroy was met with a pleasing series of replies including ‘Shut it, you little hat-wearing gimp’ and ‘Get to the taxidermist, you little marmalade nonce’. That’s the Britain I know and love.

The curse of cool

One of the freedoms of later life, if you’re not Keith Richards, is that you no longer have to worry about being cool. Cool, far more than money, is the currency of youth, and as a teenager I knew who had it and who didn’t. But what was cool, all those decades ago? Who possessed it, and why did it matter?

There were various things that defined ‘cool’ when I was a teenager, and most of us in some way fell short. It was the ability not to get too excited about things. To feel enthusiasms but show them obliquely. To wear clothes that hinted at certain trends but never to copy anyone else’s style too slavishly. To hang out with beautiful women but not develop crushes on each of them in turn. It was a knack for never having anything foolish happen to you or, if it did, for showing the style and wit to minimise it quickly and carry it off.

But beyond all these things, real cool was something indefinable, an ‘it’ quality, a charisma that showed itself early. Some just had it and from the age of about ten had probably been wowing onlookers. The rest of us watched from the sidelines and tried too hard to achieve it – the very definition of ‘uncool’.

Most boys at my boarding school aimed at a kind of street cred. They put on mockney accents, played in bands, had Aswad posters on their walls, were rude to the prefects and worked a lot in the art department on vaguely ethnic-looking daubs. Some spoke agonisingly slowly or sotto voce, to make demand for their thoughts well outstrip the supply. They were the kids often in trouble for smoking or answering back, always teetering on the edge of expulsion. By the age of about 15 some of them had more sexual experience than many of their teachers would have in a lifetime.

Most popular

Jimmy Nicholls

It’s last orders for craft beer

Julie Burchill

I can’t help liking Bonnie Blue

Andrew Tettenborn

The Epping tipping point

But the really cool were also usually well-travelled. They spoke other languages, knew what brioche or cassoulet were, and they were already au fait with foreign cinema – while we trogged along with Ghostbusters and Brat Pack films. They listened to Bob Marley and Django Reinhardt; we to Duran Duran, Elton John or (God help us) Howard Jones. At parties they danced effortlessly, or if they didn’t, knew how to skank with an endearing gangliness or economy of movement. If you weren’t cool, you could still befriend the cool, hoping some of the magic would rub off on you. But the differing planets from which you hailed would pull apart in late adolescence and the friendship, often riddled with unspoken condescension on one side and envy on the other, would usually founder.

Because it was difficult, if not impossible, to become cool. Many cool people were simply born to it. They had names like Mungo, Atticus or Tarquin, and a background to match. The druggie father of one organised an annual rock festival at his stately home in Cornwall. Another girl I knew had had, on the very day of her birth, a song written in her name to celebrate the event by a famous French crooner her parents were friends with. These things meant much, much more than money ever could.

It helped enormously if your family knew a lot of famous people, and the right ones. If your literature teacher was rhapsodising about the work of Tom Stoppard, you could just think: ‘What, Tom? Isn’t he that hairy bloke with the accent my parents had over to dinner last week?’ In the art department it was handy to be able to talk of ‘Lucian’ and ‘Francis’ and what they’d said to you as a child. This, if you were very cool, was done lightly and naturally and didn’t register as name-dropping. Name-dropping as such was desperate and an act of vulgarity, marking you out as ‘nouveau cool’ rather than born to it. It was the equivalent of bringing a pump-action shotgun to a pheasant shoot.

Their love lives looked easier than for others. They didn’t seem to get their hearts broken, or if they did, they knew to recover (or give the show of it) very quickly. Cool, they realised, was a kind of wealth they needed to protect; they were all, in a sense, carriers of Ming vases over a slippery parquet floor. This didn’t stop them developing drug habits, with weed or stronger substances – heroin addiction, before it covered you in acne or turned you into a shoplifter, could only add to the mystique. Occasionally there were suicides and sometimes nervous breakdowns, but these were always over existential matters and never from being unattractive or having no friends. Even their deepest neuroses had an air of Montmartre to them, of Simone de Beauvoir, not Victoria Wood.

It’s been interesting watching their progress in life. With names and pasts like these, they couldn’t go off and become chartered surveyors, and this was perhaps their curse. One’s now a world musician with a cult following in Paris, another runs a successful London art gallery, a third’s a famous actor. In the worst case scenario, they could simply run a shop (second-hand books/ antiques/Moroccan tagine dishes) and let the renunciation of the rat race become its own kind of cool. Why struggle to become someone when you were someone already?

Of course, life’s a great leveller in these matters. Cool, over time, can become uncool. We see it for the gawky self-consciousness it is, a kind of death force. Older people still trying to mythologise themselves or speak with a kind of gnomic languor just seem sad. Most people outgrow it – one of the reasons rock stars like Brett Anderson or Bowie tend to smile more in middle age, drop their mockney accents and admit to a liking for Abba or garden centres. No longer struggling to sound like gurus, they often have more to teach. Cool, a kind of stylish gaucherie, is strictly for the young.

Yet bumping into them in later life, we still feel the gulf between us. Even if we’re apparent equals now, they were once cool, and we were not. They’ll always be to the manner born, while we, however, will forever feel the insecurity of the upstart or interloper. Coolness, in my youth, seemed in the DNA, something you either had or didn’t, and one day, in frustration at the injustice of it all, I wrote a brief poem called ‘Louis’, which I hope is some small solace to the uncool (you know who you are) of the world:

Louis devoured Dostoyevsky
(I liked Jilly Cooper)
Louis cooled out to John Coltrane
(I, to ‘Super Trouper’)
Louis agonised over Existence
(I worried about being single)
Louis was draped in Joseph Pour Hommes
(I wore Pringle)
Louis’ Dad was a major poet
(Mine a minor cleric)
Louis’ name was ‘Louis Tarquin Jack Mungo de Selincourt’
And I am Derek.

Laura Trott’s Commons debut gives a clue to Kemi’s tactics

What difference has Kemi Badenoch’s victory made to the way the party talks about education? Badenoch doesn’t want to make policy straight away, having stood on a platform promising a fundamental rethink of what the Conservatives stand for. Today’s Education Questions in the Commons suggested that in the meantime, she wants her frontbenchers to put their efforts into defending the party’s legacy.

Laura Trott had been appointed to the shadow education secretary brief just hours before the question session, along with Neil O’Brien in the shadow minister of state role. Her first contribution was to ask about early years funding and whether it would increase in line with the hike in employers’ National Insurance – with no answer forthcoming other than ‘we will set out more detail on funding rates in due course’. Trott then used her slot to argue that the Conservatives had overseen huge improvements in school standards in England:

There has been a lot of discussion about our record in government. Under the Conservatives, England climbed international educational league tables, but what happened to Labour-run Wales? It fell. Under the Conservatives, youth unemployment went down and school standards improved—that is the record of the Conservative Government, which we are proud to defend. Does the Secretary of State agree that academisation was one of the driving forces behind that very good school improvement?

Bridget Phillipson replied that she was ‘sorry to disappoint the right honourable lady, but we will be talking about the Conservatives’ 14 years of failure for a very long time indeed’. At this point, the Speaker had to rebuke Neil O’Brien for heckling from the front bench, before Phillipson continued that the Conservative party ‘made sure that our children went to school in buildings that were literally propped up’. 

Most popular

Jimmy Nicholls

It’s last orders for craft beer

Julie Burchill

I can’t help liking Bonnie Blue

Andrew Tettenborn

The Epping tipping point

Trott’s second question continued to defend the Tory record. She asked:

The problem that we have is that while we are learning the lessons of our defeat, the Government are failing to learn from our brilliant record on school standards. Results improved, more schools were “good” or “outstanding”, but now the party in government is trying to undermine one part of the basis for that success. Why is the Secretary of State scrapping the academy conversion support grant when it was such a push behind improving school standards?

There were other Conservatives trying to push Labour to accept that it had inherited rising standards in English schools. Nick Timothy also criticised what he felt was an answer which had ‘very little focus on academic attainment’, which led to Phillipson claiming ‘the honourable gentleman and his party have learned nothing from the massive defeat inflicted upon them by voters in July’.

This will be the tenor of the exchanges between shadow ministers and those in government for a good while to come. On education, the Conservatives forgot to trumpet their achievements in their later years in government, almost acting with surprise when England started to climb up international league tables for literacy. So the party has a lot of catching up to do as it counters the Labour narrative about Tory neglect of schools, even before it gets onto what it would want to do if it got back in government. 

Listen to more on Coffee House Shots, The Spectator’s daily politics podcast:

Raising university tuition fees will only delay the inevitable

Universities in the UK desperately needed Bridget Phillipson’s announcement this afternoon of a rise in tuition fees. The Education Secretary has said they will rise from £9,250, to £9,535 next year and £10,500 by 2029. This was necessary if only to offset the effect of last week’s Budget announcement of a 1.2 per cent rise in employers’ NI and the reduction in the threshold at which it becomes payable; that alone will saddle them with extra costs of just under £400 million a year. 

All this aside, the institutions are already in deep trouble. Fees for domestic students do not cover costs. The previous practice of trying to make ends meet by an increased recruitment of higher-paying foreign students, relatively successful until about five years ago, has become more difficult. The removal by the outgoing Tory government of foreign students’ rights to bring extended families with them was entirely understandable – but it did have the side-effect of reducing the attractiveness of UK universities. The universities’ bind has been made worse by increased competition from other English-speaking institutions elsewhere, and also by the unfortunate collapse of Nigeria’s currency, with the country up till now the source of many overseas applications. 

The result has been a dismal process of more cost-cutting and a decline in quality. It is well known that a number of institutions are effectively insolvent, including some relatively high-profile ones. And even among those that are not, we are hearing of an increasingly industrial process of instruction, with vastly inflated student numbers. Tutorials, the small-group teaching that used to mark UK universities out as a seriously quality product, have meanwhile been reduced to online sessions held over Zoom with groups of up to 50 students at a time.

Most popular

Jimmy Nicholls

It’s last orders for craft beer

Julie Burchill

I can’t help liking Bonnie Blue

Andrew Tettenborn

The Epping tipping point

Will Bridget Phillipson’s announcement help universities? To give her credit, we must admit in some ways that it will. Even if offset by the extra NI costs, the absolute increase in income will remove some immediate pressure – even if the money will not flow into the coffers for nearly a year. Further, the recognition that the amounts paid to universities should be closer to the costs they actually incur in educating students injects some necessary realism into their finances. Also welcome is the recognition that fees need to increase with inflation in the same way as universities’ costs do. The figure of £9,250 has not risen for seven years: while explicable for political reasons, this is clearly unsustainable.

However, we are not out of the woods yet. The announcement from the Department for Education is only a temporary solution; the malaise remains.

First, to some extent, this amounts simply to sending the bill for present expenditure to future generations of students. The average student already graduates with an eye-watering debt of between £40,000 and £50,000. Since in the vast majority of cases the increase in fees will be covered by student loans, this millstone round students’ necks is likely to get progressively heavier over the next few years.

Secondly, even if in theory the extra costs will be covered by those students who choose either to pay up-front or borrow the money to invest in their educational qualifications, future taxpayers as whole are on the hook for fairly substantial sums. Not all student loans are paid off; recipients may either disappear or go abroad, or not earn enough to trigger a duty to repay. In any case, amounts owing are written off after thirty years or (if earlier) when a student reaches 65. To this extent, therefore, the can has merely been kicked down the road as regards sustaining universities in the long term.

Thirdly, there is no guarantee that this will be enough to prevent a need for an immediate bail-out of those institutions that are facing insolvency and cannot wait until 2025. So long as universities are seen as too important to be allowed to fail, the Treasury may still find itself faced with the necessity to come up with further funds to prevent this happening.

No one likes to admit it, but in the long term what is unsustainable is the number of students the state chooses to support and the number of higher education institutions that educate them. There is already a growing appreciation that too many people engage in university education, at great expense to themselves and the taxpayer, and then regret it.

Sometime in the next ten years, an education minister will need to grasp this nettle and announce in the House of Commons that a number of the less successful universities will be allowed gently to fold when the present cohort of students has passed through. It would be nice to think that Bridget Phillipson was the minister with the courage to do this. Somehow, unfortunately, one doubts it. For the moment at least, we are stuck with the dreary status quo of gentle decline caused by too little money spread too widely, and a refusal by government to take the political risk of doing anything about it.

Could ADHD bankrupt English councils?

Every time a chancellor sits down after delivering their budget, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) releases their ‘economic and fiscal outlook’. What seems a boringly-named Whitehall document is actually a treasure trove of information about the state of the country. It reveals more about how we live our lives – and what lies ahead, than perhaps any other document apart from the decennial census. Buried within its pages are harbingers of the problems future governments will face.

Page 129 of the nearly 200-page document carries one such alarming warning: a huge surge in the amount local authorities are likely to have to provide to fund children with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND). Research by The Spectator’s data hub shows that the DWP has forecast that the number of children entitled to disability benefits will rise by a third over the next five years – one of the fastest growing benefits categories.

Last week, the OBR put in black and white what a rise like that could mean. They show an almost exponential rise in the number of children on so-called ‘education, health and care’ (EHC) plans. A measure that puts significant financial pressure on the local authorities who must fund them. The pressure is so much, the OBR warn, that ‘some local authorities may be placed in financial distress or be unable to set balanced budgets’ in two years’ time.

But why are so many children either already or forecast to be so unwell or unable to function that they need additional funding to support their schooling? In the last year, the number of English school kids with special educational needs (SEN) increased by over 100,000 – with the majority of the most common conditions requiring support being autism or speech and language issues. 

In the five years to 2015, SEN numbers had been in decline – partly in response to an Ofsted report that claimed SEN was being over-diagnosed. Could that be happening again? There’s certainly been more awareness of SEN conditions such as autism and ADHD. Another report found that children born in the summer were over-represented in SEND simply because health ‘assessors’ were not taking into account how much children can develop over a 12 month period…

Meanwhile, other data suggests that another Labour policy – VAT on private schools – could be making the spike even worse. Local authority insiders told the i newspaper that since the announcement that private school fees would not be exempt from VAT, a growing number of parents had applied to EHC plans. Most of these will be genuine claims from parents who were once happily paying for their children's SEND support but will now claim it from local authorities instead. 

What’s more, the OBR’s comments don’t come on their own. A report from the National Audit Office last month had already warned that the system has already become ‘financially unsustainable’ and that two in five local councils are at risk of going bust within 18 months. Data from the Department for Education shows that one in five privately educated pupils receives SEND support with 33,500 of those pupils with an EHC plan. It’s easy to see how just a fraction of those students moving to the public sector could quickly cripple things.

Team Badenoch: A guide to the new shadow cabinet

The result is in. Kemi Badenoch is the new leader of the Conservative party. She faces a daunting task trying to transform the party, following its worst ever defeat earlier this year. The new Tory leader won with 56.5 per cent of the vote with her rival Robert Jenrick on 43.5 per cent.

So, who will be the key players in ‘Team Badenoch’? She faces an uphill task on funding, campaigns, staffing and party management. In the aftermath of July’s election defeat, and a drop-off in party donations, Conservative Campaign Headquarters (CCHQ) has been forced to cut back on staff numbers. Meanwhile, there aren’t that many Conservative MPs to choose from when it comes to building a crack team. With the parliamentary party totalling 121 MPs, it won’t be hard to get a job. Around 100 frontbench posts will need to be filled to shadow the government, with some MPs likely to have multiple roles. 

Filling the key positions with the right people could be what decides whether Badenoch sinks or swims as leader. Notably, neither James Cleverly nor Tom Tugendhat will serve in Badenoch’s shadow cabinet – both have decided to return to the backbenches.

Here are the appointments in full:

Shadow chancellor: Mel Stride. The former leadership contender has been rewarded for his efforts with what is arguably the most senior job in Badenoch’s shadow cabinet. Stride has long been tipped as a frontrunner for the role of shadow chancellor (with some in the party viewing his leadership bid as clever positioning for the role). However, his decision to back James Cleverly meant it was up in the air whether Badenoch would give him such a key role. Stride brings with him plenty of relevant experience, having served as work and pensions secretary and prior to that chair of the Treasury select committee.

Shadow foreign secretary: Priti Patel. The former Home Secretary has been appointed as Badenoch’s shadow foreign secretary. It’s another sign of Badenoch attempting to reach out across the party, bring in fellow leadership contenders and make the most of the experience that remains in the parliamentary party. Patel was the first to be knocked out of the contest (followed by Stride). As for what she may bring to the job, as international trade secretary in 2017, Patel ran into trouble when she met the leader of one of Israel’s main political parties without telling the Foreign Office. In the years since, she has gained more ministerial experience and her appointment now suggests that Badenoch take a much more pro-Israel line than the Labour government. Her appointment does beg the question of whether Tom Tugendhat, the third candidate to be knocked out, was approached about the role. It was seen by his supporters as one of the only positions he would consider taking.

Shadow home secretary: Chris Philp. The former policing minister has been given the Home Office brief. An early backer of Badenoch, Philp described her as a ‘ferocious and fearless defender of genuine conservative values’ when he endorsed her over the summer. Having served as minister of state in the home office between October 2022 and July 2024, Philp comes into the new role with experience of the department. He faces one of the toughest policy challenges – so far Badenoch has refrained from saying the UK should leave the ECHR (despite calls to do so from the right of the party). She has promised a radical approach but has not offered specifics.

Shadow chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and shadow secretary of state for Northern Ireland: Alex Burghart. The 2017 intake Badenoch loyalist has been rewarded with not one but two jobs. Burghart – an Essex MP like his boss – played a key role on parliamentary engagement in Badenoch’s leadership campaign. As for his new briefs, he has Cabinet Office experience – serving as parliamentary secretary in the department during Rishi Sunak’s government. Seen as one of the brains in the Tory party, he now has two meaty briefs with which to prove himself. Badenoch has spoken of issues in Whitehall previously so reform could be on the agenda. As for Northern Ireland, any Brexit policy will come up against the commitments in the Windsor Framework.

Shadow defence secretary: James Cartlidge. The shadow defence secretary remains in post – having taken on this role for Rishi Sunak during the interim period. Cartlidge backed Badenoch early on in the campaign and has been rewarded for his efforts. He said Badenoch could communicate with the public so the party’s message ‘cuts through’. Cartlidge was a minister of state in the Ministry of Defence between April 2023 and July 2024. This is one area where the Tories hope to win back the advantage over Labour with stronger commitments on defence funding.

Shadow justice secretary: Robert Jenrick. After some confusion, Jenrick has been confirmed as shadow justice secretary. On Monday night, allies of Jenrick said the runner up accepted the role of shadow justice secretary – as he wants to help unite the party. The problem? No one in the Badenoch camp would confirm this – with talk that they instead wanted the focus to be on Patel and Stride, who had just been announced. On Jenrick’s appointment, there are two things to note. First, the relationship between Jenrick and Badenoch after the contest always had the potential to be tricky. The mixed messages confirm this may be the case. Second, will Jenrick push for the Tories to leave the ECHR from his shadow cabinet role? The convention runs across various justice issues – yet Badenoch has so far resisted calls to say the UK must quit it.

Shadow education secretary: Laura Trott takes on the role, leaving her former position as shadow chief secretary to the Treasury. Trott, who had a stint working for George Osborne in No. 11 prior to entering parliament, was an early backer of Badenoch’s. She will be helped by Neil O’Brien, who is to be shadow minister of state for education. O’Brien is a 2017-er who (unlike the majority of the intake) backed Robert Jenrick over Badenoch.

Shadow health and social care secretary: Ed Argar. At last, a senior Robert Jenrick backer has a role! Argar, who endorsed Jenrick for leader early on, has been appointed to the health brief. He brings plenty of experience to the role having served as a minister of state in the department for three years.

Shadow ‘Levelling Up’, housing and communities secretary: Kevin Hollinrake. A former Sunak loyalist, Hollinrake backed Badenoch in the leadership contest. He now takes over from Badenoch in the brief. However, it’s hard to imagine Hollinrake’s exchanges with his counterpart Angela Rayner being quite as ferocious. How the Tories choose to respond to Labour’s planning reforms will in part define what type of conservatism Badenoch adopts. In Canada, the right – led by Pierre Poilievre – has made housebuilding a priority.

Shadow environment secretary: Victoria Atkins. Atkins moves from the health brief to the environment. Given Atkins backed Robert Jenrick rather than Badenoch this could be read as a demotion. However, it’s worth pointing out that Atkins represents a rural seat in Lincolnshire (Louth and Horncastle). She is understood to be keen to lead the fight against Labour over their approach to farmers, farm and rural voters more generally.

Shadow business secretary: Andrew Griffith. An early backer of Badenoch, Griffith has been handed the business brief. As a former chief operating officer of Sky with a long career in business prior to entering parliament, Griffith will be looking to create some clear dividing lines with Labour following their budget which has led to a business backlash.

Shadow energy secretary: Claire Coutinho. Coutinho stays in her current brief – one she also held when the party was in power. It suggests continuity on net zero – with the Tories adopting an approach whereby they agree with the general aim but question the speed (and cost to consumers) of the green transition under Labour.

Shadow work and pensions secretary: Helen Whately. Whately, who backed Badenoch for leader, has been given the challenging work and pensions brief. With Labour promising welfare reform and facing a parliamentary party likely to be resistant to it, this will be a key department when it comes to opposition. It’s also the case that until the welfare bill comes down, any economic growth or plans for tax cuts will be harder to make happen.

Shadow transport secretary: Gareth Bacon. Formerly shadow minister for London, the Orpington MP backed Badenoch during the leadership contest – suggesting she was best placed to deal with the Reform threat.

Shadow culture secretary: Stuart Andrew. Andrew moves from the shadow whip role to the brief largely regarded as the most fun in government. Key issues include Labour’s football Bill. There is also the question of how Andrew approaches the culture war debate from the brief – with his counterpart Lisa Nandy claiming she would end culture wars.

Shadow science, innovation and technology secretary: Alan Mak. Mak is promoted to the shadow cabinet after taking on a key role in the Badenoch leadership campaign. One question for Mak is the approach this government takes to social media firms in contrast to Labour. Badenoch previously told The Spectator she was a ‘huge fan’ of Elon Musk.

Shadow Scotland secretary: Andrew Bowie. The West Aberdeenshire MP takes over the Scotland brief – he will also serve as a shadow minister of state in the energy department.

Shadow Wales secretary: Mims Davies. Davies backed James Cleverly in the leadership contest. She attended Swansea university.

Shadow chief secretary to the Treasury: Richard Fuller. Fuller moves from the party chairman brief to a shadow Treasury role, working under Mel Stride.

Chief whip: Rebecca Harris. Like Badenoch, Harris is an Essex MP. She has seven years experience as a whip, and was Badenoch’s first whip when she entered parliament so the pair know one another well. Given no candidate won the support of more than a third of MPs, party management will be key if Badenoch is to make her leadership a success. Therefore it matters that Badenoch has a chief whip she trusts.

Shadow leader of the House: Jesse Norman. Norman backed Badenoch in the leadership contest. The experienced politician will now lead on Commons’ business.

Shadow leader of the Lords: Lord True.

Party co-chairman: Nigel Huddleston and Dominic Johnson. Badenoch has chosen to split the role between the MP for Droitwich and Evesham and the Conservative peer. As a businessman and financier, Johnson is likely to play a key role in fundraising – something the party is in bad need of. Huddleston, meanwhile, will be tasked with fixing the party machine.

Parliamentary private secretary: Julia Lopez. One of Badenoch’s fellow 2017-ers and loyal backers, Lopez has been given a role traditionally viewed to be a fairly junior position. However, Lopez will be attending shadow cabinet. What’s more, appointing someone Badenoch trusts suggests an awareness of the need to keep the party on side through parliamentary engagement.

As for the back of house roles, key positions are yet to be announced.

Chief of staff: This is the most senior role for a non-politician and the expectation is that it could go to Lee Rowley should he want it. Rowley is a former 2017 intake MP who ran Badenoch’s campaign. The son of a milkman, he is a socially liberal free-marketeer who held a succession of junior posts under four Tory premiers. Passionate about housing, he was well liked in parliament. Another potential candidate for an adviser role could be Henry Newman, the former Michael Gove adviser who now runs The Whitehall Project Substack (which has led to him being described as the ‘de facto leader of the opposition’ after various stories of Labour cronyism). He worked with Badenoch in government.

Other ex-MPs set to be tapped for policy commission roles include Rachel Maclean and Mark Jenkinson and perhaps Simon Clarke. Badenoch boasts a loyal team of special advisers who have served her both in government and now throughout this campaign.

The long time Badenoch media aide Dylan Sharpe, who previously worked for Theresa May’s 10 Downing Street as head of broadcast before a stint with HS2, is expected to continue to work on her communications. James Roberts has been key to Badenoch’s parliamentary engagement over the past 18 months too.

Given Badenoch’s interesting relationship with the media, could she be tempted to bulk up her team with some former hacks to help build relations? Could Badenoch’s media allies such as Liam Halligan at the Telegraph be tempted to lend a hand?

Listen to Katy Balls, Michael Gove and Cindy Yu discuss the leadership results on Coffee House Shots:

Scots revealed to be biggest Trump fans in western Europe

In a rather surprising development, it transpires that Scottish people are Donald Trump’s biggest fans in Europe. A Norstat poll for the Times has revealed that support for the US presidential candidate is higher north of the border than in the rest of the UK – and indeed western Europe. Who’d have thought it, eh?

According to the survey, a quarter of Scottish adults back the former president for the win this week – while, of the rest of the country, just 16 per cent would throw their weight behind the ex-businessman. Italy is closest behind the Scots in terms of Trump hype, with 24 per cent of Italians hoping the Republican candidate sees victory. Meanwhile 17 per cent of Spaniards back Trump, while the ex-president has the support of 15 per cent in France, 14 per cent in Germany, 13 per cent in Sweden – and just 7 per cent in Denmark. How very interesting.

Mr S reckons the presidential candidate would be rather pleased to hear of his support among Scots given the pride he has for his Scottish links. His mother Mary Anne MacLeod was born on the Isle of Lewis and the US presidential hopeful currently owns one golf club north of the border with big plans to build another in Aberdeenshire next year. Not that the SNP government will be quite as thrilled about the stats – given just last week Trump waded into the independence debate by proclaiming about the Union: ‘I hope it stays together. I hope it always stays together.’ Cover your ears, Nats…

More than that, First Minister John Swinney’s decision to endorse Kamala Harris last week sparked outrage across the country, and even prompted Trump to label the move an ‘insult’. It seems it was a rather controversial choice among separatist supporters too – given today’s Norstat poll has revealed almost a fifth of SNP voters hope the Republican soars to victory. There are now just days to go before the result is announced and America meets its new president. Tick tock…

Why does ITV hate Trump?

It would be consoling to think that the BBC, alone among our supposedly unpartisan TV news providers, is guilty of hopelessly biased coverage of the US presidential election. This would conform to the increasingly popular notion that Auntie is in a place beyond redemption, unique in its iniquities.

That notion may be true, but it is not true of its US election coverage. All of the news providers have been biased and the BBC is probably one of the least egregious of offenders. It would seem to me that all the broadcasters broadly concur that a second Trump presidency would be a disaster for the US, for democracy and for the world and that therefore the normal rules of balance are not applicable. They demonstrate this bias in the following four ways:

1. Story selection.
2. The tone of reporting.
3.  Choice of interviewees.
4. Editorial comment

I have not watched enough of ITV’s coverage to generalise that it is by far the worst, but the edition of its Friday night News at Ten – which seemed to be presented by a great white shark with a quiff – was relentless in its bias. Gaffes made by the Democrats were explained away, those by Donald Trump not so.

Most popular

Jimmy Nicholls

It’s last orders for craft beer

Julie Burchill

I can’t help liking Bonnie Blue

Andrew Tettenborn

The Epping tipping point

It was implied – indeed, stated – that Trump had wished upon Liz Cheney a firing squad which would shoot her in the face. This was a pretty grotesque misrepresentation of Trump’s point, which was that Ms Cheney would be less hawkish if she herself had to face the consequences. His point, nastily expressed for sure, did not seem a terribly complex allusion to unravel, but even the notion that it might possibly be an allusion was ignored: Trump had said she should be shot in the face, end of.

The package which followed contained all the signifiers of casual, unthinking, bias. So, for example, a voter who professed himself a Trump voter was asked a subsidiary question along the lines of ‘don’t you worry that he is a despotic orange-faced right wing maniac?’ (or words to roughly that effect), while his neighbour, who was for Harris, was asked no subsidiary question (such as ‘don’t you worry that she was a fabulously useless VP with the IQ of a bottle of tomato ketchup?’).

On the same evening, a little later, Newsnight – presented by the excellent Katie Razzall – gave us an admirably weighted debate about the same issues. I mention this not to exonerate the Beeb, which in its straight news coverage does display a marked tilt towards Harris, but to suggest that it is not the worst offender. This bias is almost universal on our screens.   

Should GPs make a profit?

The Budget has started a fight between the government and GPs. As is often the case with doctors, that fight is about money, but there is also something even more valuable at stake: the proper public understanding of general practice and the NHS.

When I ran a thinktank, I kept a list of things I wished the public understood about government and public policy. Top of the list was: ‘No, your state pension isn’t funded by your own National Insurance payments – it’s funded from the taxes of today’s workers.’

Health got lots of entries on the list too:

• ‘The NHS’ isn’t one big organisation; it’s lots of small and medium ones. 
• The British Medical Association isn’t a medical authority seeking better care for patients – it’s a trade union seeking more money for doctors. 
• GPs aren’t part of the NHS; they’re private contractors who make a profit from providing healthcare.

Thanks to Darren Jones, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, that last fact might be reaching more of the public. The reason is the government’s plan to raise employers’ National Insurance rates, effectively taxing them more for employing workers.

Public sector bodies are being spared that rise but, as things stand, private organisations aren’t, even if they provide vital services to the public. That list includes charities, care home providers and GP partnerships.

‘GP surgeries are privately owned partnerships and not part of the public sector and will therefore have to pay,’ Mr Jones said last week, with the admirable frankness that makes him a politician worth watching very closely in the years ahead.

Mr Jones’s words have made the British Medical Association unhappy. Some would consider the BMA’s complaint as evidence in itself that Mr Jones is doing the right thing, but the point still bears a little exploration.

GPs are not part of the NHS and never have been. Indeed, they almost prevented its creation. In January 1948, some 84 per cent of GPs in the BMA voted against the new service.

Most popular

Jimmy Nicholls

It’s last orders for craft beer

Julie Burchill

I can’t help liking Bonnie Blue

Andrew Tettenborn

The Epping tipping point

And when the NHS was established, GPs stayed outside it, preferring to organise themselves via partnerships. These are private organisations that are paid by the NHS to dispense services. Partnerships are not, legally speaking, companies but are private entities owned by individuals who share any profits they make. The average GP partner made £140,000 in 2022/23, roughly £13,000 more than the previous year. (Non-partner GPs earn lower salaries, but pay comparison is tricky because they’re more likely to work part-time.)

Is the partnership model a good idea? Let’s ask a doctor – Tom Riddington, a (non-partner) GP in Dorchester.

Dr Riddington says:‘Partners are contractors, not NHS employees. We are, to be blunt, incentivised to provide the cheapest possible care that fulfils our obligations to our patients.’

What does that look like in practice? Some of this comes down to drugs. Some GP practices directly administer drugs, including vaccines and contraceptives, among others. They buy these drugs at the lowest possible cost then get paid a standard rate by the NHS for administering them.

The margins available here are quite high.

According to specialist medical accountants at Page Kirk, ‘a typical non-dispensing GP practice would expect a drug profit of around 25–30 per cent, while dispensing practices can aim for 30–35 per cent.’

Profits create incentives. Are the incentives here working in favour of patients, or taxpayers?

In 2021, a study at York University found that GPs who stood to make a profit from medicines tended to prescribe more of those drugs to patients:

Our analysis provides evidence that English GPs modify their prescribing behaviour when permitted to dispense medications in ways that are consistent with a profit motive. These behavioural differences are unlikely to be explained by differences in the healthcare needs of their local patient populations.

None of these things are secret. The nature of GP partnerships and the financial framework in which they operate are facts knowable to the public, but in reality almost never discussed. Partly that’s because they’re pretty complicated and often boring. Partly it’s because GPs’ representatives have been very careful to keep quiet about the financial reality of ‘family doctors’ as profit-seekers.

Personally, I’m quite relaxed about the idea of people and organisations making a profit from providing public services: I think the incentive to make money can, in the right framework, deliver better outcomes for service-users and taxpayers.

But I’m also very committed to political debate based on facts, and the fact that GP partnerships are private contractors outside the NHS is almost always absent from public debate about healthcare. The BMA appears to calculate that voters don’t really like the idea of doctors making money out of treating them, so it keeps quiet and hides behind the sacred NHS brand.

If more voters knew about GPs making a profit from treating them, would doctors’ political strength in negotiations with government change?

It’s a thought to ponder, especially for the BMA as it takes on Mr Jones. A minister armed with facts and the willingness to use them could be a dangerous opponent.

Especially if this fight leads to a bigger conversation about the relationship between GPs and the NHS. A few years ago, there was chatter in healthcare circles about the case for effectively nationalising general practice, ending the partnership model and bringing GPs into salaried employment.

Wes Streeting, now health secretary, looked closely at such plans before backing away a little – after fierce objections by the BMA – but the idea surely hasn’t gone away forever. Especially since Labour has an urgent need to get better value for money in healthcare to help justify its tax increases.

It’s also worth noting that a few doctors, such as Tom Riddington, are in favour of nationalisation, arguing that it would give doctors clearer incentives to serve patients.

The BMA’s case against GP partnerships paying higher National Insurance is that doing so might make them financially unviable – by eroding their profits. The more clearly that argument is heard by the public, the greater the chance that voters start to take a more informed interest in GP finances. It would be no surprise if this means GP nationalisation returns to the political agenda.

Labour’s tuition fee U-turn

Dear oh dear. It now transpires that Starmer’s army will increase university fees in line with inflation from September next year, as announced by Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson in the Commons today. It’s the first hike to tuition fees in eight years after university payments have remained frozen at £9,250 a year since 2017 – and accompanies growing concern about the financial state of the country’s higher education institutions.

The move, which Phillipson says is the ‘first step’ to reform of the sector, comes after Russell Group universities complained that the tuition fee cap means that they make a £4,000 loss per UK student – and will be accompanied by a slight increase in maintenance loans to help students with living costs. However Steerpike remembers that raising university fees has not always been a Labour policy. In fact, when Sir Keir Starmer ran to be party leader, the politician insisted at the time that he wanted to abolish payments altogether. Just four years ago, the Labour MP ran on a campaign to ‘support the abolition of tuition fees and invest in lifelong learning’. So much for that promise, eh?

And it’s not just Starmer under scrutiny over the U-turn. Last year, the now-Education Secretary wrote an op-ed for the Times in which she promised university leavers a Labour government could ‘reduce the monthly repayments for every single new graduate’, adding that she hoped to ‘[put] money back in people’s pockets when they most need it’. With economists predicting that raising fees in line with inflation over the next five years could lead to costs reaching around £10,500 Mr S reckons prospective students and their families will not be best pleased by this volte face. After the outrage sparked by ex-Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg’s infamous U-turn on the issue back in 2012, Starmer’s Labour lot could be in for a rocky ride…

How Germany became the sick man of Europe

Vertrauen ist gut, Kontrolle ist besser – trust is good, control is better – is a popular German saying. It’s also the state’s motto for overseeing Europe’s biggest economy, which is now being run into the ground. Germany’s economy is officially expected to shrink in 2024 for the second year in a row. Berlin’s Social Democratic Chancellor Olaf Scholz and his Greens Vice-Chancellor Robert Habeck, who are fighting for their political lives as their coalition crumbles around them, are to blame.

Only one German sector is growing: the state. Government consumption grew by 2.8 per cent from mid-2023 to mid-2024. Dealing with bureaucracy costs German business €67 billion (£55 billion) per year, says Berlin’s Federal Justice Ministry.

Scholz’s answer? Expand the state, more debt, redistribute more money and, his party’s all-time greatest hit: tax the rich. Germany already has the second highest taxes in the OECD club of industrial nations. The plan could raise the top income tax rate to as high as 56 per cent from the current 45 per cent, German media reports. The SPD calls this a tax on the top one per cent, yet it’s not just aimed at millionaires – it kicks in for those earning over €280,000 (£215,000). Final details will be unveiled for the SPD’s re-election campaign next year.

Scholz’s latest antics are to condemn a possible takeover of Germany’s stumbling Commerzbank by Italy’s far more successful UniCredit bank as ‘unfriendly attacks.’ Petty nationalism trumps creating European banking champions.

While Germany remains Europe’s largest economy, the truth is that this is a country in which it is not always easy to do business. In the 25 years I’ve been running our family forestry business in eastern Germany, the biggest problems haven’t been markets or weather, but rather the grasping hand of the German state. These troubles are structural and go back to German reunification in 1990.

I bought our first forest from the state during privatisation of ex-communist East German land. Big mistake. The contract said I needed to have my main residence ‘close by’ the forest. Nowhere was it defined what this meant in miles. I ended up being dragged to court by the BVVG privatisation agency, which belongs to the German Finance Ministry, over claims that my home was too far away. The legal circus lasted five years and cost me tens of thousands of euros before I eventually won.

This year, we again went to battle with the German state – and lost. Adjoining a forest we own in Saxony-Anhalt state are 28 hectares of meadow. Our son is more interested in beef cattle than in trees, so the plan was to buy the meadows and start raising grass-fed beef. After years of negotiating, we signed a contract to purchase the land from a neighbour. ‘Not so fast!’ the state said. When it comes to farmland, Germany is a command, state-planned economy. With no plausible explanation, the county government not only blocked the sale to us but awarded the land to another farmer. This wasn’t some poor, struggling smallholder but rather one of the big landowners in the region.

Such stupidities pale compared to the Scholz-Habeck bungling of what they claim is their top priority: building wind turbines and solar parks to speed Germany to net-zero nirvana. But they are revealing of the trouble of doing business in Europe’s supposed economic powerhouse.

The Scholz-Habeck government was lightning fast when it came to shutting down Germany’s last nuclear power stations. So fast that Habeck may have ignored expert voices warning against it. This is now the subject of a parliamentary investigation in the Bundestag.

The big problem is that Germany is proving unable to speed up the construction of new wind parks and the high-tension lines needed to shift electricity around the country. In the first half of 2024, just 250 new windmills were built in Germany. That’s only a fraction of the year’s target.

I’ve been trying to build a wind park with my neighbours in a forest in eastern Germany since January 2021. It’s been approved by the town council and a year-long environmental assessment found scant evidence of conservation conflicts. I have signed contracts surrendering land to be reforested as compensation for the footprint of the windmills. You would think all is good. But you would be wrong.

Germany’s Energiewende, or energy transformation, is running head-on into a wall of state bureaucracy, even in sparsely populated eastern Germany. As the Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper warns: ‘The success of the energy transition in Germany will be decided in the east.’ But the German state doesn’t seem to have woken up to the fact.

Earlier this year, I was told that the wind park was too big and ordered to reduce it from 15 to five windmills. Other state agencies soon weighed in. A conservation official indicated he is against windmills in forests – even though they are legal in Brandenburg state – and would oppose the wind park. Then the historic monument agency claimed the wind park might detract from sightlines at two, historically trifling castles.

Laws that Scholz and Habeck have passed, which they claim will speed up renewables, don’t seem to concern the officials tasked with giving the go ahead to wind farm projects. But Germany will soon pay a heavy price for this sluggishness on planning for the future.

Where the country gets its energy from in the years, and decades, to come will become a huge problem for the world’s third biggest industrial economy. Coal-powered plants are being rapidly closed. The lignite electricity plant near my woods – that’s been running 24/7 all year – will be shuttered in 2028.

Habeck’s suggestion on dealing with energy misery – if you can believe it – is to ration electricity. German industry should produce only at peak electricity periods and electric cars and heat pumps, that he insists home owners install, may have their power cut off.

‘This is a great idea for, say, bakers who bake bread at night. Shall they wait until the morning when the sun rises?’ asks Jörg Dittrich, head of the German Confederation of Skilled Crafts (ZDH).

A poisoned cocktail of massive over-regulation, high energy costs and possible future energy shortages, lack of skilled workers and generous social welfare for those who don’t – or won’t – work has again made Germany the sick man of Europe.

Deindustrialization is real. German companies are closing factories at home and fleeing the misery. Volkswagen plans to close at least three of its ten plants in Germany and will downsize the rest, according to the company’s works council. There will be wage cuts and some divisions will be moved abroad, says the works council. VW and Mercedes-Benz are investing billions of dollars in the US. Chemicals giant BASF is doing the same, flanked by a ‘permanent’ downsizing of its Ludwigshafen headquarters, along with thousands of job cuts in Germany.

These aren’t isolated examples: around 37 per cent of German companies are considering cutting production or moving abroad, says a survey by the DIHK Chambers of Industry and Commerce.

Meanwhile, US chipmaker Intel in September announced a two-year delay for a planned €30 billion (£23 billion) chip plant in eastern Germany. This is despite the fact that Scholz’s government had pledged €9.9 billion (£8.3 billion) in subsidies.

Despair over Germany as a place to do business also led me to start bailing out. I bought a forest in the US southeast state of Georgia in 2017. Georgia is a centre of American forestry. It has light-touch regulation. When I deal with Georgia bureaucrats, it’s still a shock to discover that most want to help me succeed. Selling up in Germany and shifting to the US makes business sense. In Georgia, we do what tree farmers increasing cannot do in Germany: we simply produce what the market wants.

But creating guardrails and getting out of the way so an industry can produce for the market is foreign to Scholz and Habeck. They’re too busy regulating, banning, subsidising, magically thinking about electricity as they close nuclear and coal plants, and fantasising about post-industrial net-zero.

Any responsible head of government would look at Germany’s misery and say ‘this cannot go on’. He’d sack at least half his cabinet and place every sacred policy cow on the table and slaughter those that aren’t delivering. But there’s no sign Scholz will do this.

Chancellor Scholz is responsible for Germany’s failure to rebuild the military. He’s responsible for Berlin’s failure to play a leadership role in Europe. And now he’s to blame for the tanking economy. The gentleman’s not for turning, even as he marches Germany into decline, debacle and irrelevance.

Avanti dilettanti!

A fragile democracy has bloomed in Botswana

There’s been a momentous election in Africa, Botswana to be exact. Not heard about it? Don’t be surprised. The British and US media have all but ignored the story or got it wrong in the run-up. Even the BBC barely mentioned it though they bang on about Israel to such a degree you’d think the war was in Guernsey instead of Gaza.

On 30 October, Botswana held a general election as they have every five years since independence from Britain in 1966. Of all the countries in Africa, it’s the only one that’s never had a coup or a period of autocratic rule. But since 1966, the Botswana Democratic Party (BDP) has won every time.

No surprise given a gerrymander that works in their favour and scant attention paid to the vote itself. In Zimbabwe, Britain goes rightly moggy over rigged elections. And there’s enormous focus on South Africa, Kenya, even Nigeria. So why not here? Because on every motion of substance at the UN, including all the resolutions against Russia over its war in Ukraine, Botswana votes with Nato, whereas South Africa and much of the region abstains.

A momentous election? Yes, because this time the ruling BDP came fourth, with just four seats out of the 61 in parliament. President Mokgweetsi Masisi, 63, was standing for a second and final term, as allowed by the constitution, and had a comfortable majority from the previous election in 2019. Masisi’s rival was Harvard lawyer and human rights activist Duma Boko, who had persuaded four opposition parties to group themselves as the Umbrella for Democratic Change (UDC).

I was in Botswana last month, and it was clear to me the government was in trouble. Of all the people I spoke to, not one said they intended to vote for the BDP. And they believed the system was rigged.

Most popular

Jimmy Nicholls

It’s last orders for craft beer

Julie Burchill

I can’t help liking Bonnie Blue

Andrew Tettenborn

The Epping tipping point

Michelle Gavin was US ambassador to Gaborone from 2011 to 2014 and is now a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in Washington. A day before the election she penned an excellent take, explaining how polls show 80 per cent of adults in Botswana believe there is corruption at the highest level of government and unemployment among the youth is at a record high. 

The former ambassador’s prediction? A ‘BDP victory that returns President Masisi to office for another term,’ she wrote, was ‘the most likely outcome.’

How did she and the establishment get it so wrong? Here’s how Boko did it.

Boko had run before. In 2019, his UDC lost and he alleged there’d been ‘massive electoral discrepancies’. The ruling party used state-owned radio and television for propaganda. Journalists who criticised the government found themselves barred from briefings.

So Boko hatched a plan. This time around, his party recruited thousands of volunteers who would stand guard at every polling booth, keeping the boxes in sight until they were opened after which they watched the entire count and logged the numbers – something the British, US and EU observers should have been doing all these years.

Out of Masisi’s 38 MPs, 34 lost their deposit and the UDC has a majority in the house. The president conceded before the count was finished. Botswana is a member of the Commonwealth, so you’d think there’d have been more coverage – but few seemed to care. Like Michele Gavin, those who did assumed history would repeat itself.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and British Foreign Secretary David Lammy were quick to send their congratulations to the new leader. Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa did the same. But everyone appeared to be in shock.

In the weeks leading up to the vote, I spent a lot of time with the man who is now President Boko of Botswana. He is suave, sharp and swore me to secrecy on his party’s plan to micro-monitor the vote. In 40 years at this game, I’ve never revealed anything told to me ‘off the record’ and I kept my word.

Even I was amazed at how well it worked out and the utter collapse of Masisi’s once-invincible party. So what comes next?

Botswana’s GDP is dominated by diamonds and, thanks to factory-made stones, the real things have crashed in value. Most of the trade is handled by De Beers, which is in turn owned by the London-based company Anglo American. Some months ago, the Aussie mega-firm BHP tried to buy that company for £38 billion but were knocked back. Anglo then announced it would hive off De Beers and a few other assets. In 2018, 2 per cent of US engagement rings carried a factory gem; now it’s close to half, and growing. Selling De Beers might be akin to flogging a VHS tape. But President Boko hopes to assemble a global consortium, rescue the brand and headquarter it in Gaborone.

His other problem is youth unemployment. The streets of the capital are rife with youngsters looking for work. He plans to diversify the economy and Britain should help where it can with know-how and investment. The youth will only stay quiet for so long and if we want this new-found democracy to thrive, then riots are not the answer. The euphoria this change has brought to town is real, but people can’t eat it.

2024 hasn’t been a good year for ‘legacy’ parties. In August, the African National Congress lost in South Africa and have been forced into an awkward coalition that trembles with every vote in parliament. Then it was Botswana’s turn.

On 27 November, Namibia will decide whether to keep the South West Africa People’s Organisation (SWAPO) after 30 years in power. SWAPO has an 11-seat majority; in 2019 they lost 14 seats and another drop like that will see them out of office.

If you’ve read this far, at least you won’t be able to say you didn’t know the election in Namibia was happening. Let’s just hope the media will tear itself away from the Middle East long enough to report it.

Guardian removes Israeli whisky reference

Well, well, well. It seems that the Guardian, the self-proclaimed bastion of ‘clarity and imagination’, has been acting rather censoriously of late. It transpires that, in a column navigating the world’s great whiskies by wine critic Henry Jeffreys, a reference to an Israeli single malt whisky was first removed from the print copy – before subsequently being deleted from the online version. How very curious.

Taking to Twitter to point out the baffling omission, Jeffreys posted a screenshot showing which clearly showed his reference to Israel’s M&H beverage. ‘Even so, world whisky isn’t going away any time soon,’ the wine critic had written. ‘The best offer something unique: Israel’s M&H, for example, ages its whisky in old pomegranate wine casks in the heat of the Dead Sea.’

Yet now the online copy is distinctly different. It reads: ‘Even so, world whisky isn’t going away any time soon. The best offer something unique: Kyrö in Finland recently announced a sauna-aged whisky.’ How very bizarre.

It’s not the first time the Grauniad has made rather notable deletions after publication. Only last month, Steerpike revealed that the paper had removed a controversial 7 October review after it received backlash over its author’s suggestion the film had portrayed Gazans as ‘testosterone-crazed Hamas killers’. While it was certainly quite the take, the paper could have defended the publication of the piece – or acknowledged its flaws – and yet it seems this beacon of transparency opted for neither option.

Mr S has approached the newspaper for comment on the latest edit of Jeffreys’s piece, but the Guardian are yet to respond. Stay tuned…

Heads will roll after Spain’s flooding catastrophe

Spain’s King and Queen were pelted with mud yesterday when they visited Paiporta, epicentre of the flood disaster zone in the Valencia region. Over two hundred people have died in the flooding, dozens of them in Paiporta; more are thought to be trapped and, by this time, surely dead in underground garages and car parks. Local people are furious that the authorities were slow to issue flood warnings when the rains came last Tuesday and then very poor at coordinating what has turned out to be a seriously under-resourced relief effort.

Many people are still without electricity, gas and water. Streets remain blocked by huge piles of cars. Some locals say that volunteers bringing in food and other supplies have been of more help so far than the police or army.

Protocol requires that the head of the regional government accompanies the monarch on official visits and Pedro Sánchez, Spain’s prime minister, who had not yet visited the disaster area, also decided to join Felipe and Letizia. Unsurprisingly, locals seized the opportunity to give vent to their feelings of abandonment and desperation, chanting ‘Murderers’ and hurling slurry at the group.

As the situation became increasingly volatile, Carlos Mazón, the regional leader, and Sánchez were quickly extricated by security officials. But King Felipe and Queen Letizia stayed for over an hour to listen, trying to console local people. When his escort attempted to shield Felipe with an umbrella, he insisted that they take it down so that he could meet people face to face. Letizia, pale, mud-spattered and apparently close to tears, could also be seen listening intently and nodding as locals shouted and screamed in despair.

Most popular

Jimmy Nicholls

It’s last orders for craft beer

Julie Burchill

I can’t help liking Bonnie Blue

Andrew Tettenborn

The Epping tipping point

Sánchez was surely right when he suggested that now is not the time to analyse negligence and allocate blame for the disaster, but that day of reckoning will soon come. Mazón is already being criticised for not declaring the flooding a ‘catastrophic emergency’ as soon as the scale of the disaster became apparent last week; that would have immediately transferred control of the situation to the central government. 

In a country governed at five levels – local, provincial, regional, national and European – the distribution of powers in such extreme situations is, as Sánchez has intimated, a key problem. During the pandemic, the bureaucratic confusion caused by too much government also quickly became apparent. And problems are compounded when a left-wing central government has to deal with a right-wing regional administration: instead of working in harmony for the good of the people, politicians of both sides soon succumb to the temptation to score points. 

Spain has an estimated 300-400,000 politicians; relative to population, that’s twice as many as France. The country’s politicians, while very numerous, are also seen as remote and unaccountable. And corruption is rife partly because there is so much administration. Both main parties, Sánchez’s left-wing PSOE, and regional leader Carlos Manzón’s right-wing Partido Popular, are constantly at loggerheads and mired in scandals. 

In normal times, Spaniards are noticeably tolerant of their venal politicians’ ineptitude. But these are not normal times. Once the dead are counted and some semblance of normality has been restored, the political fallout will be huge. Any attempt to blame this disaster on climate change or to pass it off as a natural disaster which has to be accepted as ‘one of those things’ will be given short shrift by a furious populace. Heads will surely roll. 

In the meantime, the monarchy’s popularity looks set to rise still further. Felipe, who’s 56, has done a good job during his first ten years on the throne. Taking after his mother rather than his back-slapping father, he’s seen as sober, hard-working and honest. Not surprisingly his June approval rating of 6.6 out of ten, according to IMPO Insights, is far higher than that of any of Spain’s leading politicians. The courage that he and Queen Letizia displayed yesterday will be remembered for a long time. 

Starmer’s plan to stop the boats is a comical gimmick

The shiny new Downing Street operation that has come into being since the departure of Sue Gray has decreed that this is going to be ‘small boats week’. They have created a media grid with the aim of promoting the idea of Keir Starmer as a strong and authoritative leader busily coordinating measures to accelerate Labour’s plan to ‘smash the gangs’.

Rather comically, the Sun newspaper was briefed that Starmer will declare the border crisis a ‘national security issue’, announce a crack new team of investigators, hold talks with Giorgia Meloni and vow to end ‘gimmicks’. So that’s three gimmicks followed by a promise not to indulge in gimmicks. It would take a heart of stone not to laugh.

None of Starmer’s activity addresses the key driver of the illicit Channel traffic: the fact that people who illegally gatecrash their way into our country are rarely detained in jail-like conditions and almost never removed. Instead, the bulk are put up in hotels, given spending money, allowed to come and go as they please and thus able to work in the cash-in-hand economy. Ultimately they can expect to win formal permission to stay and unlock for themselves permanent access to the British welfare state and possibly the right to bring family members to join them. Such access for a young man could easily be worth £1 million over a lifetime – truly a golden ticket.

Yet Starmer and Home Secretary Yvette Cooper continue to peddle an approach to the issue which focuses exclusively on an alleged mission to destroy the very profitable people-moving gangs: all of them. The purported aim is to make sure there are no rubber dinghies available to take illegal migrants across the Channel (or more precisely, take migrants to the mid-point of the Channel from where UK Border Force or RNLI vessels provide a water taxi service into Dover). 

Most popular

Jimmy Nicholls

It’s last orders for craft beer

Julie Burchill

I can’t help liking Bonnie Blue

Andrew Tettenborn

The Epping tipping point

Unsurprisingly the strategy has yet to bear any fruit: no gang has been smashed. The numbers crossing have accelerated upwards too since Starmer and Cooper took over and pulled the plug on the Rwanda removals policy, having connived in its frustration for the previous two years. The BBC today reports that in October alone there were more than 5,000 arrivals,

Yet for Starmer and Cooper it is an unconscionable sin to acknowledge that the migrants themselves have agency and are the key drivers of this trade. When he came into office in July, the Prime Minister wrote that: ‘Every week vulnerable people are overloaded onto boats on the coast of France. Infants, children, pregnant mothers – the smugglers do not care.’ The reality is that 80 per cent are young men typically paying £3,000 a pop and helping to carry the boats down beaches to the water’s edge.

But still, the policy of zero deterrence and an exclusive focus on ending the supply of boats continues. Today, Starmer announced a doubling of the budget of his new Border Security Command to £150 million – an unprecedented investment in gold braid and epaulettes that may at least be of some benefit to the British textiles industry.

Perhaps, sooner or later, a gang or two will be ‘smashed’ and Starmer will excitedly dash down to Border Security Command HQ to celebrate. But what will happen then? Anyone with a basic knowledge of economics will understand that a temporary downturn in the supply of boats will lead to higher prices for a seat in a boat, making the remaining gangs even more profitable until new gangs are drawn into the trade. It’s a demand-driven business.

One Channel migrant is currently on a murder charge in a Midlands town. Not much has been written about it. Public anger locally largely remains below the surface – a result of Starmer’s summer law and order crackdown against ‘Far Right’ agitators, no doubt. British nationals are deemed to have agency you see, even when driven half-mad with grief about the killing of compatriots. 

Yet the tectonic plates of British politics are on the move. Reform’s MPs continue to highlight what they term an ‘invasion’; the Tories finally have a new leader ready to go for the throat of ‘Two Tier Keir’. The Starmer shtick – a former DPP with Action Man hair launching a never-ending stream of securocrat gimmicks – is already wearing very thin. The truth cannot be hidden from people for much longer: it is the ideological weirdness of the British left, embodied by Starmer, which facilitates the gatecrashing of our borders by ruthless and undocumented young men from other cultures.

James Dyson isn’t helping farmers

If I were president of the National Farmers’ Union I know what my first task would be today: ring up Sir James Dyson and plead with him to keep his trap shut. It isn’t that Dyson, one of the few living Britons who has set up a manufacturing business of worldwide reputation, isn’t worth listening to on the economy and many other things. But when it comes to protecting the interests of family farms – which is the NFU’s prime interest after last week’s Budget – Dyson is the very last voice you should want to hear publicly supporting your case.

For all I know Dyson may have been harbouring a latent interest in agriculture since he was a lad. He may be as passionate about growing peas as he is about designing vacuum cleaners – more so, even. But he also happens to epitomise the very target of Rachel Reeves’ decision to limit agricultural property relief (APR) to the first £1 million of assets: a wealthy individual who starts buying up farmland in late middle age. The 77-year-old now owns 35,000 acres of it. It is hard to believe that concerns about inheritance tax did not enter his head when he moved into farming.

It is not just farmland which will be affected by the changes to inheritance tax: Reeves also put a £1 million limit on the tax relief which can be claimed on business assets, which will affect thousands of small businesses. Writing in the Times today, Dyson does indeed lead on small businesses of all kinds, only later moving onto the subject of farms. But like it or not, family farms have become the face of resistance to the Budget. Having a man estimated by the Sunday Times Rich List to be worth £20.8 billion emerging as the figurehead for their cause is not helping them. Nor, by the way, is Jeremy Clarkson helping them either. There is another wealthy figure who seems to have discovered a remarkable interest in food production fairly late in life.

Most popular

Jimmy Nicholls

It’s last orders for craft beer

Julie Burchill

I can’t help liking Bonnie Blue

Andrew Tettenborn

The Epping tipping point

If the farming lobby wants to win its battle for public opinion against the Chancellor it wants to be getting before the cameras tearful men and women who have been labouring a lifetime on their 300 acre farms and who, while they might be asset-rich, are distinctly cash-poor. According to the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs, 26 per cent of mixed farms in Britain made a loss in 2022/23, while 23 per cent made a profit of under £25,000. The typical victim of Reeves’ changes is hardly a barley baron. And nor will they consider themselves wealthy on the basis that they own a few hundred acres. On the contrary, their land will not have been particularly valuable until recent years, when farmland prices started to be bid up by, er, wealthy individuals looking to acquire an asset which they can use to avoid inheritance tax – and also now by bands of ‘green’ investors looking for somewhere to plant trees in order to claim carbon credits. It is those two things which have driven up farmland prices to the level at which family farms will now be caught by Reeves’ new threshold.

Reeves’ error was not to take on the super rich farmland owners – while they have a loud voice, few members of the public will want to support them. The mistake was in failing properly to come up with a mechanism which distinguishes between genuine farmers and those who have bought hobby farms for tax purposes. She should have devised a test whereby, say, farmers had to prove they or their forebears had been farming the land for at least 30 years before they could claim relief from inheritance tax. Or a system whereby the longer you had been farming, the bigger the relief. Or, say, making inheritance tax relief apply only in cases where a family could prove that farming had been it main source of income for many years.

Those are the kinds of arguments that the family farming lobby needs to be making if it is to win its case. Dyson is not the man who is going to help make them.

Watch more on SpectatorTV:

Watch: Home Secretary flounders over small boats

Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour lot are desperate to get the press and public talking about anything but the Budget this week – and so the issue of Channel crossings is where the Prime Minister is focusing his attention today. Yvette Cooper was quizzed on the airwaves this morning ahead of the PM’s speech to Interpol’s general assembly in Glasgow over Labour’s small boat plans – but the Home Secretary seemed a little uncomfortable on the specifics…

Grilled on BBC Breakfast, Cooper was asked when Labour expects to see a drop in the number of migrants crossing the Channel. ‘We obviously want to make progress as far and as fast as possible,’ the Home Secretary started, adding: ‘We know of course it does take time to get the investigators in place.’ Pushed on exactly how long the process would take, however, Cooper simply refused to say.

What I’m not going to do is what Rishi Sunak did and just set out slogans and say everything was going to be solved in 12 months, all on the basis of a slogan, because I don’t think people will take that seriously anymore.

How curious. Will the public take seriously a government that is unwilling to set timeline targets on the matter? Mr S isn’t quite so sure…

Watch the clip here:

Can Starmer stop the small boats?

It’s small boats week in government. Following last Wednesday’s Budget, No. 10 is turning its attention to the ceaseless flow of Channel crossings. Keir Starmer will use his speech at the Interpol General Assembly in Glasgow today to set out Labour’s plans to – you’ve guessed it – ‘smash’ the criminal gangs. Starmer’s remarks are certainly timely. More than 5,000 people crossed the Channel in October, making it the busiest month of the year so far. In total, 31,094 people have crossed so far this year, up 16.5 per cent on the same point in 2023 but still down 22.1 per cent on the same point in 2022.

Starmer is expected to announce that Border Security Command will get £75 million on top of an equal sum announced in September, over the next two years. It is expected to help pay for advanced maritime drones and undercover recording devices. An intelligence source unit will pay for British officers to be deployed in high-emigration nations such as Vietnam and Iraq. As well as equipment, the additional funds will pay for more staff, with 300 personnel in the Border Security Command and 100 specialist investigators. There are new powers too, with the Crown Prosecution Service able to deliver charging decisions more quickly on international organised crime cases.

The Prime Minister will tell representatives of Interpol's 196 nations that 'the world needs to wake up to this challenge' and that 'there's nothing progressive about turning a blind eye as men, women and children die.' He will declare that 'I was elected to deliver security for the British people – and strong borders are a part of that.' The accompanying No. 10 press release declares the border crossings a 'national security' issue. It's a similar phrase to the language used by Nigel Farage, who wants a 'national security emergency' officially declared to stem the crisis.

Keir Starmer believes that migration is a law and order issue that can be solved with greater global co-operation. The PM wants to use every international forum available to champion cross-border collaboration and point the finger of blame solely at the criminal gangs. Morgan McSweeney, the No. 10 chief of staff, told Labour MPs last month to talk more about migration – or else risk losing their seats in 2029. With Reform making in-roads in longtime Labour heartlands, ministers hope today's speech shows Starmer takes voters concerns seriously.

The problem is that many of these measures announced today are exactly what the Conservatives were doing in government less than six months ago. More powers, further funds and talks with Italian leader Giorgia Meloni were exactly what Rishi Sunak was doing in No. 10 – plus they had the Rwanda scheme to work as a deterrent. Labour, of course, scrapped the scheme on day one in office, brandishing it a mere 'gimmick'. That word 'gimmick' is now being hurled back at ministers by Tories who feel as though Labour have learned little from the last four years. As an official party spokesman put it: 'Keir Starmer’s announcement on tackling gangs will mean absolutely nothing without a deterrent to stop migrants.'

Many within Labour approve of Starmer's refusal to blame the migrants themselves for making the hazardous journey to Britain. Privately, they feel much more comfortable bashing the criminal gangs and posing as the party of law and order. But this ignores the thorny question of incentives for migrants: cash, an expedited right to work, hotels and leniency against deportation. For all the promises of meetings and task forces, the danger is that until the incentives of Britain's asylum laws are addressed, the boats will keep coming – regardless of the risks.

Listen to Coffee House Shots, The Spectator’s daily politics podcast:

Is Kemi Badenoch the new Mrs Thatcher?

Prior to her election as Conservative Leader at the weekend, Kemi Badenoch was, on numerous occasions, compared to Margaret Thatcher. Simon Heffer, under the headline ‘No Tory has ever reminded me more of Mrs Thatcher than Mrs Badenoch,’  claimed that Kemi was ‘hard-minded, deeply principled, and has Mrs Thatcher’s vital grasp of what Rab Butler called “the art of the possible.”’ Tony Sewell spoke of her ‘Thatcher-like determination: “Because I believe this is right, I’m going to do it,” and said that today’s ‘biased and self-serving’ Civil Service was as much a dragon for her to slay as overweening Trade Union power had been for Mrs Thatcher in the eighties. Mark Dolan of GB News this weekend underlined the parallels, joking, ‘Thatcher was the Iron Lady, Kemi has balls of steel.’ 

The new leader, meanwhile, has wisely distanced herself from such comparisons: ‘I’m not Maggie. I’m not a chemist. I’m Kemi. I’m an engineer.’

Nevertheless, it’s interesting to look back through The Spectator‘s archive to see how the election of Thatcher was reported in 1975, and whether this has any light to shine on the present day. True, circumstances were different: Thatcher, far from being an obvious frontrunner, was thought little more than an also-ran when, after Ted Heath’s two election defeats in 1974, it was clear many in the Party were getting sick of their organ-playing, ocean-going leader. 

Following the widespread industrial unrest, pay freezes and price controls of the banished Heath government, it was clear a completely new Conservatism was called for. Yet only after Tory grandee Edward du Cann ruled himself out of standing – for marital reasons – and Torch-Bearer of the Right Keith Joseph shot himself in the foot (with his notorious ‘human stock’ speech in Edgbaston, October ’74) did Thatcher put herself forward. ‘If you’re not going to stand, I will,’ she told the departing Joseph, ‘Because someone who represents our viewpoint has to stand.’ Her husband Denis was far from joyful: ‘You must be out of your mind,’ she recalled him saying. ‘You haven’t got a hope.’

Most popular

Jimmy Nicholls

It’s last orders for craft beer

Julie Burchill

I can’t help liking Bonnie Blue

Andrew Tettenborn

The Epping tipping point

Yet it was just this apparent hopelessness which campaign manager Airey Neave so cleverly, even deviously, exploited, to get her elected: ‘Jolt [Ted] by voting for Margaret,’ he told wavering supporters. ‘She won’t win, but she’ll give him a fright.’

Almost no one in the media supported Thatcher before the first ballot. Mrs Thatcher, the Economist said (speaking for many) was ‘precisely the sort of candidate who ought to be able to stand, and lose harmlessly.’ For Bernard Levin in the Times, it was Thatcher’s frostiness – worse, in his opinion, even than Heath’s – that made her unelectable: ‘There is no point in the party jumping out of the igloo and onto the glacier.’ Only The Spectator came out for Thatcher from the outset – in particular Patrick Cosgrave, its political editor.

Cosgrave was something of a character. Irish-born, thrice-married, a lapsed Catholic prone to the odd drink (and then some), a man constantly teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, he was nevertheless the canniest reader of political runes.

On 14 December 1974, two months before the leadership vote, Cosgrave wrote of Thatcher possessing a ‘quality of courage and endurance under fire’ that the Conservative Party so sorely needed ‘in its own struggle to win,’ and described her as ‘the foremost Tory in the country.’ Some of her faults Cosgrave was clear-eyed about: while recognising she had a ‘remarkably retentive memory, a quick logical intelligence, and the capacity to freeze a critic,’ she did sometimes respond with ‘an aggression that did not always serve her purpose; and she did not always seem to grasp that she was damaging herself thereby.’  

But, for the moment, these were small objections. Mrs Thatcher had proved a highly competent Education Minister and Shadow Secretary of State for the Environment. She was also a brilliant performer in the Commons, quick with a comeback and regularly bloodying the nose of Labour Chancellor Denis Healey, a famous bruiser himself. On 1 February 1975, three days before the contest, a leading article in The Spectator argued that, having declared her candidacy some ten days before, she had ‘come to the fore as a challenger for the Conservative leadership’ and ‘emerged as a heavyweight candidate’ with ‘a distinct chance of winning.’

Mrs Thatcher, the piece went on, had ‘many of the attributes that the Conservative Party now most desperately needs in a leader…. She is a parliamentary debater of the utmost force, precision and wit.’ But ‘perhaps more important than any of these attributes, she has a definite understanding of the kind of Conservatism which the nation needs, and she would articulate it forcefully and with courage…’  

‘What, then,’ the article ended, ‘are the Tories dithering about?’

They were not to dither much longer. On the first ballot she received 130 votes to Heath’s 119. On the second, following the ex-leader’s glowering departure, Mrs Thatcher, standing against colleagues like Jim Prior, Willie Whitelaw and Geoffrey Howe, received 52.9 per cent. The age of Thatcher – set to endure a decade and a half – had now begun.

Cosgrave was beside himself. In ‘Britain’s “second lady”’, an article published a few days later, he crowed that ‘the election of Mrs Margaret Thatcher as leader’ had given the party ‘after more than two years of ineffectiveness and decline, a new chance.’ It was Thatcher’s ‘directness, toughness and honesty’ which had won it, her ‘clear determination – and ability – to reclaim for the cause natural and hitherto loyal Conservative voters who have drifted away…’

Despite the country’s most obvious problems – inflation, a high mortgage rate, seemingly incessant industrial strife – solutions would ‘come the better and the more readily from a leader who is obviously and sincerely a thinking and believing Conservative, who knows what has gone wrong, and who knows how to put it right. The party could hardly have chosen better: the quarrels of the recent past can now be put behind it, and a new future can begin.’

This upbeat note would be pleasant to end on, particularly as the outcome of last weekend’s leadership election was what so many of us hoped for, and for so long. But amidst the merriment and plain relief, a note of caution too should be sounded. Kemi Badenoch has asserted repeatedly of late that the Party must – before it even thinks of formulating policy – reestablish its core principles. Given that, it’s another article from Cosgrave, ‘Getting the Priorities Right’ (January 1975), which seems most pertinent:

‘It is the conviction that she stands for something recognisable as Conservatism which has gained so much support for her in recent weeks,’ he wrote of Mrs T.  ‘Unless it is different, the Tory Party is nothing… But it cannot be too often said that, until the party decides where it wants to go, and what it stands for, it is unlikely to get any votes at all.’  

Something for Kemi and her newly assembled Shadow Cabinet to ponder in the weeks and months ahead. The late, great Patrick Cosgrave, you can’t help feeling, would have raised a brimming glass to Mrs Badenoch, wishing her the best of Irish-British luck.  

Watch more on SpectatorTV: