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Why the AfD is leading in the polls
Germany has a new government. It may also have a new government in waiting. On the same day that the centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and centre-left Social Democratic party (SPD) announced they had concluded coalition talks to form a government, a poll showed the hard-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) is the most popular party in Germany. A quarter of all voters now support the AfD. Since the election in February, the CDU has lost 5 per cent of its support.
It’s easy to see where it all went wrong for the CDU. Having promised fiscal responsibility, moderate right-wing governance, and the return of controlled borders, the party has instead rolled into bed with the SPD. Somewhat sneakily, the old parliament was recalled after the election in order to pass a giant debt package that lowered the ‘debt brake’, which is seen as protecting taxpayers from yet more government over-spending. The new parliament would never have supported such a move.
In return for lowering the debt brake, the CDU has had to give the SPD seven ministries, including the Ministry of Finance. They’ve also agreed to a €15 minimum wage and rent freezes. Not bad for the SPD, which only won 16 per cent of the vote. To win over the Greens, the CDU have said that another €100 billion will be spent on climate change, while reaching net zero by 2045 has been put into the German constitution. As you need a two thirds supermajority to change the constitution, there seems little chance that pledge will be removed.
Add in Trump’s tariffs, ever-rising taxes, and high energy prices and you have a recipe for yet more lay-offs and bankruptcies. German’s export model looks increasingly fragile and as Boomers increasingly retire, social spending is bound to rise.
Nor does it help that it remains far too easy to get German citizenship. Even though the coalition agreement includes abolishing the three-year long ‘turbo naturalisation’ process, immigrants can still get citizenship after only five years rather than the eight years it used to take. As it is mostly low-skilled migrants or asylum seekers moving to Germany at the moment, that means the state will be taking on an even greater benefits and pension burden.
Unsurprisingly, the German public are upset. Not only has the CDU dropped below the AfD in the polls but their leader Friedrich Merz is considered untrustworthy by 70 per cent of people. Merz has responded by saying that he won’t take criticism from the ‘far-right’, telling those worried by the polls ‘not to stare like a rabbit at a snake’. That may be enough for the party leadership and their members in parliament but the CDU grassroots are increasingly upset.
They have good reason to be. When the CDU dared to vote with the AfD in the last parliament, they faced a wave of outrage from the media and protest groups, many of which had state funding and links to left-wing parties. After the election, the CDU tabled 551 questions into state funding of these murky NGOs, only to withdraw them so they could form a coalition with the SPD. Rather than find out how much taxpayer money was spent on those who blockaded the CDU HQ in Berlin or the antifa who occupied some of their offices, they are going to give another €180 million to likes of ‘Living Democracy’. No wonder that even pro-CDU voices are saying the party has chosen to lose the culture war.
All of this explains why the party has been losing ground to the AfD in the polls. But rather than responding to the concerns of voters, the CDU and German society have instead embarked on a witch-hunt against those who support the AfD.
Normally the oldest member of the Bundestag becomes ‘senior president’. This should have been Dr Alexander Gauland, who was a member of the CDU for 40 years. But because he now belongs to the AfD, and to prevent him from giving a speech at the opening of the Bundestag, the CDU changed the rules to give the position to the far-left Dr Gregor Gysi.
Germany has become hysterical about the AfD. The party is banned from participating in the parliamentary football team ‘FC Bundestag’, despite winning a court case over the matter. The editor-in-chief of a pro-AfD paper was given a seven-month suspended sentence and fined for posting a meme jokingly showing the old interior minister holding a sign reading ‘I hate freedom of speech’. In Bavaria an altar boy was dismissed by his priest after taking a selfie with the controversial but charismatic AfD politician Maximilian Krah.
The coalition agreement between the CDU and SPD calls for lying to be banned in Germany. Perhaps the CDU should therefore reflect on their own broken promises to voters. So long as they keep giving in to the left, they will continue to sink in the polls. Meanwhile the AfD will benefit from being in opposition, as it waits for this coalition to become so unpopular that it collapses. The AfD may not be in government yet – but it seems only a matter of time.
The BBC is right to restore this paedophile’s sculpture
The BBC is once again at the centre of criticism – this time for spending more than £500,000 in restoring the vandalised sculpture of Ariel and Prospero from Shakespeare’s play The Tempest, that adorns the entrance to its London headquarters Broadcasting House.
The statue was sculpted in 1931 by Eric Gill, rightly described today by both the Daily Telegraph and the Guardian as ‘a paedophile’ who not only sexually abused his two daughters and his sister – but had illicit relations with the family dog as well.
But along with his sexual deviance, Gill was arguably the greatest British sculptor of the 20th century, whose name lives on in the Gill Sans typeface font that he designed in 1928. A fervent Roman Catholic, he is also renowned for sculpting the Stations of the Cross in Westminster Cathedral. His hidden life of incest and bestiality was first revealed by his biographer Fiona MacCarthy in 1989, using Gill’s own diaries in which he confessed to his secret perversions.
Since then, Gill has been posthumously targeted by anti-abuse campaigners who say he should be cancelled and his work covered up or destroyed because of his offensive secret life. In 2022, the Ariel statue was attacked by a campaigner with a hammer, watched by Police who did nothing to stop the hour long attack. In 2023, it was attacked with a hammer again.
In a statement explaining their decision to restore the statue behind a protective vandal proof screen, the BBC said that in doing so they were not condoning Gill’s abusive behaviour to his family. The whole affair raises anew the age-old question of whether an artist’s questionable personal life can or should be separated from their work.
Very few artists have led private lives of unblemished moral probity, and some have been positively criminal. The great Italian masters Caravaggio and Cellini, for example, are both believed to have killed men in brawls, and the early 20th century Austrian expressionist artist Egon Schiele was briefly jailed for allowing underage girls to see his erotic paintings, with the judge burning one of his depictions of a very young girl. Yet the works of all three are worth millions today, and no one has yet suggested that they should be cancelled. If the only works displayed in galleries were by morally upstanding artists living virtuous lives, they would be practically empty.
Gill was undoubtedly an eccentric figure who flouted respectable social standards in his own lifetime. He favoured dressing in loose smocks with no undergarments, and people passing in and out of Broadcasting House while he was working on Ariel would have received something of a shock and seen more than they bargained for, had they happened to glance upwards.
Some authorities have already succumbed to the anti-Gill campaign. In my home town of Chichester a blue plaque marking the site of Gill’s childhood home, was removed on the orders of West Sussex County Council in 2022.
Others have so far stood firm: I used to live opposite Gill’s birthplace in Hamilton Road, Brighton, and when last I looked, the plaque recording his arrival there was still in place.
In making a clear distinction between a great artist’s works and his shabby private habits, for once the BBC has done the right thing.
Lily Phillips isn’t an authority on sex
I wasn’t intending to write about Lily Phillips again. Her story would ideally be ignored. But if it does appear in the media, we must be vigilant about how it is represented, especially if the BBC is doing the representing. On some issues, neutrality is a bogus aspiration. It means allowing a very dubious narrative to stand, because contesting it would be awkward.
I am talking about Newsnight’s interview with Phillips this week, and the studio debate that followed it. Victoria Derbyshire, whom I generally rate highly, failed to challenge Lily Phillips in any serious way. Instead she allowed her to present herself as an authority on sex. She asked her, at length, about her early exposure to pornography, and noted that such exposure was common in her generation. This implied that Philips was a sort of spokesperson for her generation. ‘Sex is a part of life’, said Phillips at one point – Derbyshire should have asked her what she meant by ‘sex’. Then she distanced herself from extreme pornography, saying that she had ‘normal sex’ with guys. This too should have been challenged. Her final comment was this: ‘I think there’s always been women like me who have sex – the difference is that we talk about it online, we’re open about it.’ This too should have been contested – what on earth did she mean by ‘women who have sex’? Instead, those were the last words of the interview.
Then Derbyshire was joined by the journalist Sarah Ditum and Reed Amber, a sex-worker. Amber immediately came out with this: ‘I love the fact that [Lily Phillips] was saying that lots and lots of women across the globe also enjoy sex – I think that we have a really negative spin on the way we see sex – there’s a lot of stigma around not only sex but people who enjoy sex, and also people who enjoy sex for money.’ Ditum contested this pretty effectively: ‘I think there’s a really important difference between talking about female sexuality and talking about commercialised sexuality – they are very, very different things, and I think it is a mistake to parcel them together as the same thing.’ Spot on – but she should have been blunter. Her fellow-guest seemed not to understand the point, and maybe half the audience missed it too.
Let me put it bluntly, then. Sex-workers who claim to speak for modern liberated females should be sternly rebuked. They have an eccentric idea of sex, to put it politely. When a sex worker says that sex is a healthy desire, not something to be prudish about, we should respond like this: ‘No, no, no. You do not have the right to speak about sex, as it is generally understood. What you do, making money from your body, whether you charge people for having sex with you or for watching, is not sex as it is generally understood. It is a weird offshoot of it. Sex, for almost all of us, is rooted in committed relationships, and the serious slow business of psychological intimacy. If you by-pass these roots you are not qualified to speak about sex in the full sense.’
Donald Trump has got what he wanted
Donald Trump has peered into the abyss. The US President watched the Wall Street meltdown and the global trading system (from which America benefits as much as anyone) start to collapse, and he hit pause. The conventional narrative will be that Trump has blinked, but I think he simply got what he wanted.
Yesterday’s decision to put a 90-day pause on reciprocal tariffs, while increasing the rate on China to 125 per cent, has certainly come as a relief to the markets. The S&P500 was up almost 9 per cent on the news. Investors can breathe again.
It would be easy to argue that President Trump has simply chickened out of the fight. The tariffs were about to trigger a global recession, and the fallout from that would dominate the rest of his time in the White House. It is not worth it.
And yet that ignores an obvious point. The rest of the world has been terrified into submission. Over the next three months will see a series of concessions. Countries in Asia such as Vietnam that were about to be wiped out will welcome American goods. The EU will realise that Ford pick-up trucks don’t need any levies on them. Heck, even the British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer may be photographed tucking into chlorinated chicken as he opens up the UK market. Trump will have won.
All this may well end with a global agreement to reorder trade and finance: the ‘Mar-a-Lago accord’ that had been rumoured in the markets for weeks. We will see over the next few weeks. True the uncertainty will linger for months and that will damage confidence. In the meantime, however, the crisis has been averted – and global trade can stagger on.
Fide Women’s Grand Prix
I like tournaments which award prizes for the best game, offering a welcome reminder that there is more to chess than points on the scoreboard. Naturally, who wins those is a subjective matter, and even what you call the award is up for debate. Should it be a ‘best game’ prize, in the sense of high-quality play with few mistakes? A brilliancy prize for a quick attack? Perhaps a beauty prize, for the game’s visual impact?
At the end of the Fide Women’s Grand Prix held in Monaco in February, a beauty prize was awarded for the game below. The former women’s world champion Alexandra Kosteniuk won a Cartier watch, much to the displeasure of Kateryna Lagno, who considered her own win against Elisabeth Pähtz to be the more deserving, describing it as one of the best games of her career. Lagno decried the judges’ decision as politically motivated, claiming that they would not award the prize to a Russian player. Lagno has represented Russia for many years, though she competes in Fide’s world championship cycle under the international flag, since Russia and Belarus were sanctioned by the governing body. Kosteniuk, once her teammate in the Russian women’s team, switched her federation to Switzerland in 2023.
Lagno’s game is well worth a look, even if her claim was doubtful: spectator.co.uk/lagno.
In the prize-winning game below, Tan Zhongyi grabs the initiative with a pawn sacrifice in the opening. But once it peters out, her attempt to reignite the game with 20…b7-b5 and later 22…Ng4-e3 is too ambitious, meeting a sharply calculated refutation from Kosteniuk beginning with 24 Nb5-d6. Once the dust has settled 15 moves later, the rest is a matter of technique.
The reigning women’s world champion, Ju Wenjun, is currently defending her title in a match in China against Tan Zhongyi. The 12-game match runs up until 20 April, with a possible rapid tiebreak on the following day.
Alexandra Kosteniuk-Tan Zhongyi
Fide Women’s Grand Prix, Monaco, Feb 2025
1 d4 Nf6 2 c4 g6 3 Nc3 d5 4 Nf3 Bg7 5 h4 dxc4 6 e4 c5 7 d5 Bg4 8 Qa4+ Bd7 9 Qxc4 O-O 10 Qxc5 e6 11 dxe6 Bxe6 12 Ng5 Nc6 13 Bf4 Ng4 14 e5 Ncxe5 15 Rd1 Qe8 16 Nxe6 fxe6 17 Bg3 Rc8 18 Qb5 Qe7 19 Be2 Rf5 20 Qa4 b5 21 Nxb5 Qc5 22 O-O Ne3 23 b4 Qb6
24 Nd6! This counter-fork, the key move of the game, is by far the strongest response. 24…Nxf1 25 Nxc8 Nxg3 26 Nxb6 Nxe2+ 27 Kf1 Ng3+ 28 Kg1 Ne2+ 29 Kf1 Correctly walking into further checks. 29 Kh1 looks safe, but 29…h5!! creates a bolthole on h7 in anticipation of Qa4-e8+, and the various ideas of …Rf4, …Rxf2, …Ng4 and …axb6 give Black excellent chances to save the game. 29…Ng3+ 30 Ke1 Nf3+ 31 gxf3 Bc3+ 32 Rd2 axb6 33 Qe8+ 33 fxg3 would also win, though 33…Rd5 offers some resistance. 33…Kg7 34 Qe7+ Rf7 35 Qxe6 Nf5 36 Kd1 Bxd2 37 Kxd2 Rf6 38 Qe4 Rd6+ 39 Kc1 Kf6 40 a4 Rd4 41 Qc6+ Rd6 42 Qc7 Ke6 43 Qxh7 Ne7 44 h5 gxh5 45 Qxh5 Nd5 46 Qg4+ Ke7 47 Qe4+ Kd7 48 f4 Kc7 49 Kb2 Nf6 50 Qe7+ Nd7 51 Kc3 Rf6 52 Qe4 Rd6 53 Kc4 Rc6+ 54 Kb5 Rd6 55 a5 bxa5 56 bxa5 Rf6 57 Qc4+ Kb8 58 a6 Rb6+ 59 Ka5 Rb1 60 Qd4 Kc7 61 a7 Nb6 62 Qxb6+ A neat finish, although many moves suffice for the win. Rxb6 63 a8=N+ Kd6 64 Nxb6 Ke6 65 Kb5 Black resigns
No. 845
White to play. Bjerre-Bodrogi, European Individual Championship, 2025. The game was eventually drawn, but in this position Bjerre missed a beautiful winning move. What was it? Email answers to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 14 April. There is a prize of £20 for the first correct answer out of a hat. Please include a postal address and allow six weeks for prize delivery.
Last week’s solution 1 Rf8+ Bxf8 2 Nf6+ Kh8 3 Qh7 mate
Last week’s winner Samantha Morgan, Rayleigh, Essex
Spectator Competition: Vernal triolet
For Competition 3394 you were invited to submit a vernal triolet.
In 1894, the poet Banjo Paterson wrote a heartfelt triolet in dispraise of the triolet and Brian Allgar did the same this week:
I really hate the triolet,
And, Spring or not, I find them hell.
‘Oh, tra-la-la, it’s cold and wet.’
I really hate the triolet.
All those repeated lines that get
Nowhere (just like the villanelle).
I really hate the triolet,
And, Spring or not, I find them hell.
Nonetheless, you rose to the challenge with gusto, producing a funny and poignant entry that was hard to whittle down to a winning line-up. Hats off to unlucky losers Tom Adam, Martin Parker, Iain Morley, Jasmine Jones, Alan Bradnam, Dorothy Pope, Nick Syrett, Bob Newman, Anna Cox and Susan McLean. Those below snaffle the £25 John Lewis vouchers.
Our snowman is a thing of woe,
A pile of coals is all that’s left,
He’s gone where melted crystals go,
Our snowman is a thing of woe.
Spring’s warmth has dealt a mortal blow;
Strange how it feels an act of theft.
Our snowman is a thing of woe,
A pile of coals is all that’s left.
Janine Beacham
Along the verge the daffs are out,
But sigh and have another vape.
Thrilling to see the green shoots sprout.
Along the verge the daffs are out,
Augurs of Spring without a doubt;
The human world is in bad shape.
Along the verge the daffs are out,
But sigh and have another vape.
Basil Ransome-Davies
Cruel spring, tell youth your lovely lies
Of greenery and resurrection
And happiness that never dies.
Cruel spring, tell youth your lovely lies.
Hide winter from their wishful eyes
And blind them with your false affection.
Cruel spring, tell youth your lovely lies
Of greenery and resurrection.
Frank McDonald
Sore eyes, runny nose and the impulse to sneeze,
these are the torments I suffer each spring,
It’s the pollen that spawns, as it wafts on the breeze,
sore eyes, runny nose and the impulse to sneeze,
though it may be like nectar to numerous bees
to me there’s the spectre of what it will bring:
sore eyes, runny nose and the impulse to sneeze,
these are the torments I suffer each spring.
Sylvia Fairley
Poets: they’re so excited over Spring –
all Oh-to-be-in-England, daffodils
and burgeoning when Love can have its fling.
Poets — they’re so excited over Spring
and yet it comes round every year, that thing
with birds and bees. It’s how they get their thrills,
poets. They’re so excited over Spring –
all Oh-to-be-in-England, daffodils.
D.A. Prince
It’s Spring! The sunlight’s in the mood;
The garden really won’t relax –
It can’t be still, it’s keen to brood.
It’s Spring! The sunlight’s in the mood
To breed a weed, to grow some food.
I pay new rates of Council Tax,
It’s Spring, it’s sunlight. In the mood?
The garden really won’t … Relax!
Bill Greenwell
‘Jug-jug, pee-wit, tu-witta-wu,’
These blasted birds are always singing.
Are there no other ways to woo?
‘Jug-jug, pee-wit, tu-witta-wu,’
Are not the sounds that I or you
Would choose to make when love is springing.
‘Jug-jug, pee-wit, tu-witta-wu,’
These blasted birds are always singing.
Gail White
The cuckoo’s call is quite unique –
It tells us all that spring is here.
Two notes announce her slick technique,
The cuckoo’s call is quite unique;
She has no shame, a wicked beak,
That ousts another’s eggs each year.
The cuckoo’s call is quite unique –
It tells us all that spring is here.
Elizabeth Kay
When May be out we cast a clout
And wear a shirt against the skin.
It’s pleasant when the sun is out
When May be out we cast a clout
Enjoy the sun and lark about;
Then shiver when the sun goes in.
When May be out we cast a clout
And wear a shirt against the skin.
Philip Roe
When little lambs come out to play,
it means that Spring’s begun its course.
Daffodils greet each brightened day
when little lambs come out to play.
While other lambs, from far away,
are silenced now. I serve mint sauce.
When little lambs come out to play,
it means that Spring’s begun its course.
Tracy Davidson
Oh, to be in Devon
Now that Spring is here,
Where it blows a gale force seven –
Oh to be in Devon,
Where it’s pissing down from Heaven
As though the End is near –
Oh, to be in Devon
Now that Spring is here!
David Silverman
No. 3397: In out, in out
You are invited to recast the ‘Hokey-Cokey’ in the style of a poet of your choice. Please email entries to competition@spectator.co.uk by midday on 23 April.
2698: Au pairs
Fourteen unclued lights comprise seven pairs.
Across
7 Looked for nothing when leader makes a U-turn? (6)
12 Medical instruments deal with something breaking old cast (9)
13 Maybe Queen’s speech is without purpose, on reflection (5)
15 Shot bird left, eaten by parasite (9)
16 Twins, perhaps extremely amoral, notable (6)
21 European dictionary contains chestnut for ‘imitated’ (6)
22 Wasted new mortgage in Scotland (6)
24 Coterie didn’t regularly boast duke (2-5)
27 Cut shaft, losing line (3)
28 Bird’s bone uncovered (3)
32 Think ancient Persian priests will stop in east (7)
33 Times introducing trendy revolutionary snack (6)
34 Port that iså red (6)
38 Press release before opening of enormous great structure (6)
41 More than one cocktail is a quid, surprisingly, around Ireland (9)
42 Exhaust unserviceable, emissions primarily amiss (3,2)
43 Hard test crushes son, at sea, way behind the rest (9)
Down
2 Just this splits bare metals (7)
3 Aussie idiot’s no good around legside (4)
4 Acetone almost corrupted sulphur compounds (7)
5 Foot, mine being bathed in English ceremony (8)
6 Pier having a black appearance? (5)
10 Catch broadcast of what golfer may have done (4)
14 Formerly not employed, aunties worried about it (9)
17 Chef’s beginning to chop up meatballs (6)
18 Those maintaining form in Oxford and Balmoral, say (9)
23 Bound to include papers put in order (6)
26 Youngsters lost fancy neckwear clips (8)
30 Where one may go awry in alert (7)
31 Alcoholic residue somehow vanishes when dehydrogenated (7)
35 Woolworths embraces value (5)
36 Mum starts to serve up salmon (4)
37 Old man holds aloft pre-adult peacock? (4)
39 Hawk emerging from lake covered in mist (4)
Download a printable version here.
A first prize of £30 and two runners-up prizes of £20 for the first correct solutions opened on 28 April. Please scan or photograph entries and email them (including the crossword number in the subject field) to crosswords@spectator.co.uk, or post to: Crossword 2698, The Spectator, 22 Old Queen Street, London SW1H 9HP. Please allow six weeks for prize delivery.
2695: Struck hard – solution
The theme-word is SMITH which can be preceded by GOLD (24A), LADY (37A), HAMMER (3D), BLACK (5D) and SILVER (22D). The pertinent quotation ‘A mighty man is he’ at 9D comes from The Village Blacksmith by Longfellow. BLACK had to be shaded.
First prize Andy Grady, Tutbury, Staffs
Runners-up Steve Reszetniak, Margate, Kent; Oenone Green, Feltham, Middlesex
Labour has once again betrayed grooming gang victims
Parliament’s last day before recess is usually a dull affair. A one-line whip allows MPs to return to their constituencies early and the matters for debate are deliberately parochial. When the Commons rose for Easter this week, the government could have expected attention to have been even more desultory than normal, since politicians and the media were focused on the fallout from Donald Trump’s global tariff war. Which is why it is all the more concerning that the Home Office chose that afternoon to slip out the announcement that it was retreating from its commitment to investigate the operations of grooming gangs in five local authorities. Someone must have thought it was a good day to bury bad news.
The government’s new approach to grooming gangs is an invitation to the guilty to evade their day in court
The commitment being watered down was already thin gruel. Rather than establish a national inquiry – as the opposition requested in January – into a scandal that ruined the lives of thousands of young women, the government opted for five discrete local investigations and pledged £5 million to support them. Seeing as the investigative work of GB News reporter Charlie Peters had established that grooming gangs operated in 50 towns and cities across the country, the selection of just five for scrutiny was inadequate. Given that a past inquiry into child sexual abuse in just one local authority, Telford, cost £8 million, the sums allocated for investigation were insultingly paltry.
Initially, though, there was the hope of some rigour being applied to the process. In January, a respected KC, Thomas Crowther, was appointed to draft the framework for the inquiries. This raised the prospect of an attempt to hold local authorities accountable for their failures.
Now even that hope has been extinguished. Crowther has been sidelined and ministers have decided they will oversee the scope of any investigations. Worse, they have given local authorities a veto over any rigorous examination of events.
Following ‘feedback’ from the councils involved – in other words, a concerted pushback against failures being uncovered – local authorities may now adopt a ‘flexible approach’ when it comes to using the money originally earmarked by the Home Office for independent inquiries. Councils can instead opt for ‘more bespoke’ work, such as hosting ‘local victims’ panels’ or undertaking ‘locally led audits of the handling of historical cases’.
The government’s new approach is an invitation to the guilty to evade their day in court. The abuse of young women in so many towns and cities occurred because individuals in local authorities were at best neglectful and at worst involved in criminality. The failure to insist upon properly independent scrutiny is deeply worrying. How can anyone, most of all the victims, have confidence that the institutions which have repeatedly failed will welcome the searching questions required?
The shadow minister responding to Labour’s retreat, Katie Lam, was admirably forthright in delineating just how much the process has betrayed the victims. The scale and nature of abuse; the targeting of vulnerable girls, often in care settings; the intertwined nature of criminal activity and clannish community cover-ups – all demand a much more thorough approach than the government is ready to offer.
Jess Phillips, the minister responsible for tackling violence against women and girls, has a strong record in supporting victims and campaigning for action against abusers. Her commitment to highlighting past failures, including by Labour local authorities, should be applauded. It is therefore all the more regrettable that her courage has failed her at this moment.
She may believe that some of those most anxious to see these crimes pursued have ignoble motives. That was also the initial reaction of the Times reporter, Andrew Norfolk, who first uncovered the scandal. He was concerned that by laying bare the ethnic and religious backgrounds of the overwhelming majority of abusers, he would give succour to the arguments of right-wing extremists. But he concluded that the truth, however uncomfortable, must be pursued when victims have been marginalised, ignored and forgotten. He also recognised that a failure to discuss difficult questions openly only helps such extremists even more.
It is of course true, as Phillips has argued, that child sexual abuse is a crime which extends far beyond the operation of grooming gangs. It is right that any response to abuse and exploitation takes account of all the ways in which victims can be targeted. That requires more focus, attention and investment to support vulnerable children in care and to encourage fostering, kinship care and adoption.
But in acknowledging these truths, ministers must not hide from others. The sheer number of gang victims, the way in which social services, police and others failed them, the communal cultures which shielded abusers and the attitudes that indulged them all need the determined and unsparing attention of an independent national inquiry. Ministers must think again.
Portrait of the week: Trump’s tariffs, a theme park for Bedford and a big bill for Big Macs
Home
In response to President Donald Trump’s global tariffs, Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, said: ‘This is not just a short-term tactical exercise. It is the beginning of a new era.’ He wrote in the Sunday Telegraph: ‘We stand ready to use industrial policy to help shelter British business from the storm.’ The FTSE100 fell by 4.9 per cent in a day, its biggest such fall since 27 March 2020. The government published a 417-page list of US products upon which Britain could impose retaliatory tariffs after 1 May. Figures from the Office for National Statistics showed that, although in 2023 the UK imported £57.9 billion of goods from the US (10 per cent of all goods imports) and exported £60.4 billion’s worth (15.3 per cent of all goods exports), it exported £126.3 billion of services (27 per cent of all service exports) to the US, compared with service imports of £57.4 billion (19.5 per cent of all service imports). The Coventry-based Jaguar Land Rover said it would ‘pause’ all shipments to the US. The government tinkered with net-zero rules for vehicle-makers, whose import tariffs to the US had been put at 25 per cent. It also approved the expansion of London Luton airport, including a new terminal, and the Prime Minister signed a £50 billion agreement for Universal to build a theme park on an old brickworks near Bedford.
Russell Brand was charged with rape, indecent assault and sexual assault, charges relating to four women between 1999 and 2005. Dan Norris MP was arrested on suspicion of rape, child sex offences, child abduction and misconduct in a public office; he was suspended from the Labour party. Dion Arnold, a Metropolitan police constable, was charged with sexual offences including rape, allegedly committed while off-duty. Livia Tossici-Bolt, 64, was given a two-year conditional discharge and ordered to pay £20,000 after being convicted of breaching an abortion clinic protection zone in Bournemouth by holding a sign saying: ‘Here to talk, if you want.’ Her case had caught the attention of J.D. Vance, the US Vice-President.
Two Labour MPs, Abtisam Mohamed and Yuan Yang, on a trip to visit the occupied West Bank, were denied entry to Israel. In the seven days to 7 April, 154 migrants arrived in England in small boats. Birmingham sank deeper under rubbish and rats during its dustmen’s strike. Nick Rockett won the Grand National at 33-1, ridden by the amateur Paddy Mullins, whose father Willie trained the first three past the post.
Abroad
China, against which President Trump had announced a rise in tariffs to 84 per cent, itself announced a 34 per cent tariff on US goods. So Mr Trump confronted China with an extra 50 per cent tariff, provoking the reply: ‘China will fight to the end.’ Asian stock exchanges experienced falls. Shares in Asian banks and car-makers were down. Elon Musk said that President Trump’s trade adviser, Peter Navarro, was ‘dumber than a sack of bricks’. Australian farmers claimed that a 10 per cent tariff on their $3 billion beef exports to America would make Big Macs there more expensive. Among Australian territories landed with a 10 per cent tariff were the uninhabited McDonald Islands, 1,000 miles north of the Antarctic.
Kryvyi Rih in Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelensky’s home city, was twice attacked by Russian missiles, leaving at least 20 dead, including nine children. Ukraine reportedly struck the only plant in Russia that produces fibre-optic cables for drones. Two Chinese citizens were captured fighting for Russia in eastern Ukraine, Mr Zelensky said. During a visit by Benjamin Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel, against whom an International Criminal Court arrest warrant has been issued, Hungary announced its withdrawal from the ICC. Israel’s army admitted mistakes in an account by its soldiers of the killing of 15 emergency workers in southern Gaza on 23 March. Israel bombed military targets in Syria.
Yoon Suk Yeol was deposed as President of South Korea by the Constitutional Court, which upheld his impeachment by parliament after his attempt to impose martial law. Wisconsin elected Susan Crawford, a Democrat-backed judge, to serve on the state’s Supreme Court, despite huge spending by Republican opponents. The earthquake in central Myanmar on 28 March was said to have killed more than 3,500 people, with hundreds more missing. Eggs laid by a Galapagos tortoise held by Philadelphia Zoo since 1932 hatched for the first time. CSH
Heaven is an oeuf en gelée
Petroc Trelawny has narrated this article for you to listen to.
The cherry blossom was at its finest as I made my last early morning trip through Regent’s Park to Broadcasting House to present Radio 3’s Breakfast. When hire-bikes arrived in London, the planners were thoughtful enough to install a docking station outside my flat. I have used the heavy cycles for my commute ever since. Over the past 14 years I have become accustomed to the regular faces on my route: the man in an elegant dressing gown, surveying the morning scene while waiting for his dog to pee; the jogger who for some reason processes backwards along the pavement (whatever the supposed health benefits of his technique, I’ve always wondered how he avoids colliding with one of the elderly lampposts, some of which date back to the reign of George IV). The dedicated speed-cyclists of the 545 Racing Club – named after the time their peloton departs – acted as a marker on my morning schedule: if they were already gathered outside Denys Lasdun’s gloriously stark Royal College of Physicians, I knew I was running late. Whether I was cycling under moonlight on an icy January morning, in June when the sun was already dazzling, in autumn when I would slip-slide on the leaf mulch, my voyage through one of London’s great public gardens never failed to set me up for the day. I hope my colleague Tom McKinney will find similar inspiration during the journey from his home in the Peak District to the BBC’s studios at Salford, from where Radio 3 will now launch the new day.
BBC Television’s first home was Alexandra Palace in north London. For five decades its once magnificent Victorian theatre was used as a storeroom for sets and props. It then lay empty for 35 years until an ambitious restoration project brought it back to life. I went there recently to record a special episode of Friday Night is Music Night for broadcast during the week of the VE Day 80th-anniversary celebrations next month. The BBC Concert Orchestra shared the stage with the Central Band of the Royal Air Force. The biggest cheer of the night went to a 99-year-old member of the audience – Joyce Terry, who spent the war as a singer in the pioneering all-female Ivy Benson Band. After the Germans surrendered, it was Field Marshal Montgomery himself who ordered the ensemble to go to Berlin to entertain British and Allied troops. I asked what sort of reception they got. ‘What do you think?’ Joyce laughed. ‘We were two dozen attractive young ladies. We were pretty well received.’ After the recording finished, musicians in immaculate RAF 9A concert dress queued up for selfies with this elegant woman, a living link to VE Day 1945.
In a long weekend in Paris, where the espaliered trees in the Tuileries are bursting into leaf, I caught a bloody, beautifully staged and excitingly sung reconstruction of Rameau’s lost stage work Samson at the Opéra Comique. I stayed with my friend Henrietta, who gave me a battered copy of A.J. Liebling’s excessive (probably downright dangerous) food and drink memoir Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris. His description of a decent oeuf en gelée sent me hungrily to Brasserie Lipp, where I found the perfect example: yolk runny, aspic well herbed and salted, thinly sliced tongue holding it all together. Why does this attractive dish of low-cost ingredients not feature more on British menus? As Liebling says, it ‘is within the competence of any respectable charcutier’.
‘Bach Before 7’ has become the way many Radio 3 listeners start their day. In the few times when I have mischievously suggested we might ‘rest’ the feature, our inbox has overflowed, with 99 per cent of respondents demanding its survival. Salford colleagues assure me that it is safe. Over the years we have thoroughly mined the rich stock of sacred cantatas Bach wrote for the Thomaskirche in Leipzig. The secular cantatas are also well worth listening to. Some are comic, such as the ‘Coffee Cantata’; others celebratory, written for court feasts at Weimar or Köthen, or royal birthdays among the prince-electoral family of Saxony. Producer Susan Kenyon found a brilliant one for my final morning programme: the Cantata No. 71, written for a new town council in Mühlhausen, where Bach worked when he was in his early twenties. It includes the chorus ‘Crown the new regime in every way, crown with blessing!’ It was the perfect sentiment as I handed Breakfast on to Tom. And how splendid that the great Johann Sebastian Bach found inspiration not just from his faith and his princely patrons, but also from a local government election in early 18th-century Germany.
Marriage, motherhood and money: Show Don’t Tell, by Curtis Sittenfeld, reviewed
Show Don’t Tell, a collection of 12 short stories by the American writer Curtis Sittenfeld, explores marriage, sex, money, racism, literature and friendship from the 1990s to the present. There is a fine line here between memoir and fiction, with many of the female protagonists being Midwestern, bookish Democrats – quite like Sittenfeld herself.
In the eponymous story, Ruthie, a writer, dismisses the notion that ‘women’s fiction’ is perceived as giving off ‘the vibe of ten-year-old girls at a slumber party’. She reflects on internalised misogyny: ‘It took a long time, but eventually I stopped seeing women as inherently ridiculous.’
This volume can indeed be described as ‘women’s fiction’, whose subjects include mammograms, motherhood, menopause, pubic hair and clitoral stimulation. Sittenfeld explores the dilemmas of middle-class life and the sweet and sour nature of female friendship; and she successfully captures feelings and places – nostalgia for awkward youth, ‘usually hungover and let down’; dating and attraction, viewed as a ‘murky collaboration’; and some real zingers, such as ‘Harvard is a hedge fund with students’.
One character says about couples therapy: ‘The only thing worse than being in my marriage would be paying someone $250 an hour to discuss being in my marriage.’ The married state is described as ‘edible, but stale, like a cracker left on a sideboard too long’. And there is sound cautioning against ‘building a life on status markers’. Parents may relate to ‘the isolation of modern life’; to being called ‘cringe’; and to teens, glued to phones, condescending on the subject of veganism.
While the stories are funny and smart, they have an aftertaste of vanilla and are not as savage as, say, Lucia Berlin’s ‘A Manual for Cleaning Women’ or Nora Ephron’s essay ‘I Feel Bad About My Neck’. One contrarian character proposes that ‘great literature has never been produced by a beautiful woman’, but this is left unexamined. Similarly, a sharp story, ‘White Women Lol’, explores the uncomfortable ambiguity of micro-aggressions and the peril of becoming an accidental racist. But, again, it doesn’t go far enough.
Political hot cakes are dropped and then left to cool. ‘Non-binary’, ‘white privilege’ and being ‘performatively virtuous’ are phrases tossed about, and it’s hard to know whether Sittenfeld is being satirical or hedging her bets. But when she’s not in doubt, you certainly feel it: ‘Nancy, who is 50, tends to be overtly sexist in a way most men in 2014 no longer are.’
These stories, which invite us into the interior lives of kind but complex people, feel like a quiet celebration of coupledom, love and ordinary lives. They are catnip for marrieds. Vanilla ice cream is delicious after all.
What did John Lennon, Jacques Cousteau, Simon Wiesenthal and Freddie Mercury have in common?
Robert Irwin – novelist, historian, reviewer and general all-round enthusiast and scholar of just about everything – died last year. It might seem odd that a man whose previous works included the definitive one-volume introduction to The Arabian Nights and a controversial critique in 2006 of Edward Said’s Orientalism – not to mention what is one of the great novels about Satanism, Satan Wants Me (1999) – should have spent his final years working on a book about stamp collecting.
But fear not. This is not some weird aberration in a career of weird aberrations; it is, in fact, another weird aberration. The Madman’s Guide to Stamp Collecting, Irwin announces in his first paragraph, ‘will be of little or no practical use or interest to stamp collectors’ – a declaration that serves as both a disclaimer and a challenge. If you’ve come here looking for advice on watermarks and perforations, walk away. The book does not deal with stamp collecting ‘practicalities’. Instead, the following topics are covered:
The Psychology and Psychopathology of Collecting; Seriality; Miniaturisation; Classification; Nostalgia; Anal Retentiveness; Specialisation; Fraudulence; Commemoration; Rarity; Completeness; Sexuality of Collecting; Secrecy and Subversion; Digressiveness; Boyhood; Dutchness; Boredom; Death.
So, not a manual for the aspiring philatelist but rather a philosophical disquisition on subjects of interest to Irwin, and indeed to anyone who’s ever experienced, say, boyhood, obsessions, boredom or desire. The stamps are merely the means by which the subject matter gets delivered.
Borrowing a phrase and an insight from the Polish writer Bruno Schulz, Irwin figures stamps as portals, tiny little paper ambassadors for ideas and for people and places that often no longer exist and for events long forgotten. So there are notes and remarks on, for example, Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne project, Dennis Wheatley’s occult thrillers, the poems of Osip Mandelstam, and – at great length – praise for the work of the late Ciaran Carson, the consummate snapper-up of unconsidered trifles, whose great book The Star Factory (1997) provides Irwin with a kind of model for his own practices and procedures. ‘For me,’ he writes, ‘just the discovery of the writings of the Belfast poet and fiction writer Ciaran Carson has made this project worthwhile.’
Items pile up like stamps in a dealer’s stockbook. On one page we might get a passing remark about Frederick William of Prussia, who ‘collected a regiment of giant soldiers’ and who also ‘acquired women in the hope of breeding giants’. On another, there’s a discussion of the work of Ayn Rand, prompted by her article ‘Why I Like Stamp Collecting’, published in the Minkus Stamp Journal, in which she argues that stamp collecting ‘has the essential elements of a career, but transposed to a clearly delimited, intensely private world’. Then, suddenly, we have T.E. Lawrence’s role in the evolution of Arab stamp design, some stuff about Ellery Queen, and a description of the peculiar character of Iranian stamps: ‘Commonly they depict scenes of carnage, successful terrorism, imperialist outrages which must be avenged and glorious but bloody military triumphs.’ In arranging his remarks and thoughts about writers, artists and books, often only loosely linked by stamps, by cataloguing them and preserving them, Irwin not only describes but demonstrates the collector’s process of creating order out of chaos.
Iranian stamps depict imperial outrages which must be avenged and glorious but bloody military triumphs
The psychological dimensions of collecting receive, of course, due consideration, with Freud, Walter Benjamin and D.W. Winnicott all making their expected appearances, though frankly who cares about Freud and his ideas on anal retentiveness when you can simply luxuriate in a constant stream of Irwin’s wonderful asides: ‘Elizabeth David was informally associated with the Warburg Institute and she collected cookery books dating from the 17th century onwards, many of which she left to the Warburg library’; ‘By the way, useful information about the necessary procedures for issuing postage stamps, passports and flags and choosing a national emblem is obtainable from How to Start Your Own Country by Erwin S. Strauss.’
This is not to suggest that the book is all whimsy and flimsy. On the contrary: there are lots of rather serious and useful insights. Irwin is particularly good on the function of stamps in fiction – though he suggests that only two novelists have ever known much about stamps, Wheatley and David Benedictus, both of whom, he admits, ‘did not produce better novels as a result’. ‘Though stamps mostly play quite minor roles in novels, it is sometimes useful to focus on things that are marginal to the story’, because they ‘may tell us more about the author than swathes of passionate and high-spoken dialogue’.
Towards the book’s conclusion, we’re offered a glimpse of Irwin himself, the ‘would-be part-time hippy anarchist’ drifting from Oxford to London in the 1970s, and his progress towards acquiring a ‘truly weird mindset’. He was a bit of a stamp collector himself, in his youth, ‘but is there really a type?’ he asks. ‘Can one smell a stamp collector?’ The long list of stamp collectors that follows – including Freddie Mercury, John Lennon, Edward Said, Jacques Cousteau and Simon Wiesenthal – suggests not. Or perhaps it suggests that the type is simply ‘human’ and probably ‘male’, and possibly a little bit unusual.
I’ll admit that I shed a tear at the end of this, Irwin’s final work, recognising not just a fellow collector – of ideas, ephemera, stuff – but a fellow man emptying his pockets, as it were, at the end of a long life.
Event
The Book Club Live: An evening with Max Hastings
‘I felt offended on behalf of my breasts’ – Jean Hannah Edelstein
Jean Hannah Edelstein is a British-American journalist and the author of a 2018 memoir entitled This Really Isn’t About You, which was about her dating life, the death of her father and her discovery that she had Lynch syndrome – which predisposes her to some cancers, as it had her dad. There is a sickening inevitability that her Breasts is at least partly about her being diagnosed with breast cancer. Yet, this is an uplifting volume, as well as a short, sharp shock.
The three sections of the book, ‘Sex’, ‘Food’ and ‘Cancer’, mean that readers will know what’s coming. But before the final section, Edelstein writes perceptively about adolescence, her first bra and being made to feel even by her schoolteachers that she and her female classmates ‘walked around in our flagrant, provocative teenage bodies day in and out. If men regarded them as invitations – well, had we tried hard enough to stop them?’ Later, she is honest about weaponising a great rack, not least when she meets men in bars: ‘“I’m Jean,” I’d say. “I believe you’ve already met my breasts.”’
She writes measuredly about the assaults she was subjected to by colleagues – one when she worked in a bar and another when she was employed by a tech company – and strangers, including the teenage boys who pelted her with eggs so incessantly that she feared she would crash the bike she was riding. And she is funny about the glamorous illustration drawn of her to accompany a dating column she wrote for a men’s magazine, lamenting: ‘I’m not hot enough to be myself.’ But a friend said: ‘It kind of looks like you had a baby with Gisele Bündchen.’
In the part entitled ‘Food’, she becomes pregnant and considers the fact that her breasts are about to have a different purpose – to feed her son – as ‘a freedom. Even a revenge’. For starters, she is no longer subject to catcalls during this period. Her baby was conceived by IVF and is delivered by C-section, and she comments that this makes her feel somewhat like ‘a passive participant in his creation’. She goes on: ‘I wanted to breastfeed because I wanted to do something by myself, unmediated and unmedicated. I wanted something to be natural.’ Her maternal grandmother had called breastfeeding ‘the life of a cow’. Edelstein notes: ‘I also wanted to breastfeed because I wanted to experience the full utility of my breasts. For so long it had seemed that their sole purpose was as objects of pleasure: sometimes mine, very often other people’s.’ She candidly recounts watching her husband spill half of the milk she painstakingly expressed – before leaving her baby to go to a doctor’s appointment – and being unable to speak to him for hours.
She has another child, a daughter, and at the end of breastfeeding her, she reflects: ‘My breasts belonged to me.’ It is poignant that these are the last words before the final section. Aged 41, Edelstein is diagnosed with breast cancer. She contemplates the mastectomy that her surgeon says is necessary, although her cancer is at a very early stage. She remembers a long-forgotten boyfriend who had early male-pattern baldness and had once remarked how little time he and his hair had spent together. ‘I didn’t grow any until I was two and I started losing it when I was 20,’ he said. ‘In the total span of my life, my relationship with hair will have been relatively brief.’ She experiments with thinking of her breasts in the same way and the detachment helps to some extent.
She also contemplates the reconstruction after surgery, and I felt enraged for her when she reports that some misguided people
tried to help me see the bright side, implying that this was the opportunity for me to have the breasts of my dreams. I felt offended on behalf of the breasts that I had. What I wanted to say was: ‘These are the breasts of my dreams. The ones attached to my body.’
Her interactions with different surgeons – including the one who told her ‘Of course, you can’t expect them to look as good as natural ones’ – are fascinating and important. Roughly one in seven women in the UK will develop breast cancer in their lifetime. How wonderful that we now have this sane, detailed and funny account of Edelstein’s experience from detection to reconstruction. The writer and breast cancer survivor Rosamund Dean has described it as ‘a tit punch of a book, in a good way’. At 100-odd pages, it also powerfully makes the case that sometimes, a short book is best.
Event
The Book Club Live: An evening with Max Hastings
A gruesome bohemian upbringing: Days of Light, by Megan Hunter, reviewed
Ivy, the protagonist of Megan Hunter’s magnificent Days of Light, lives with her family at Cressingdon, a Sussex farmhouse, which is ‘covered with her mother’s fabrics and artworks, every room thick with the breath of her, of Angus’ (her mother Marina’s lover). At weekends, her father Gilbert, a travel writer and notorious womaniser, comes down from London to stay.
The clear parallels with Angelica Bell and Charleston extend even further. Ivy develops a tendresse for, and eventually marries, Bear, a man 25 years her senior and Angus’s former lover. Like his prototype Bunny Garnett, Bear worked on the farm to avoid conscription during the first world war. Like Bunny with Angelica, Bear is present at Ivy’s birth and immediately contemplates marrying her.
Hunter deftly skewers the tensions and contradictions within this unconventional household where sexual shibboleths are challenged yet class distinctions are rigorously policed. (Marina is horrified when Ivy considers becoming a cook.) For her part, Ivy believes herself to be devoid of talent and a constant disappointment, ‘coming from the family she did, the daughter of artists – famous ones at that’. Marina, meanwhile, is bitterly resentful of her sister Genevieve, a celebrated writer who has ‘all the time in the world. And Hector waiting on her every bloody need.’ In contrast to the childless Genevieve, Marina feels that Ivy and her brother Joseph have held her back.
This sibling relationship lifts the novel to another dimension. Days of Light opens on Easter Sunday 1938, when Ivy and Joseph go for a swim in the nearby river. Joseph drowns and Ivy witnesses a strange, otherworldly light, which ‘in some ways was love itself’. Joseph’s body is never found and the mystery, together with the loss, haunt Ivy for the rest of her life, as she marries, has two daughters, and, in an echo of her parents’ romantic entanglements, embarks on a passionate affair with her brother’s former girlfriend Frances.
Where Ivy differs from her mother’s set is in her strong religious faith. Marina proudly declares Cressingdon to be ‘the most secular house in England’, and inhabits ‘a world of objects’ (a phrase repeated several times in the book). Ivy, on the other hand, studies theology and, in the 1960s, enters a convent. The speed with which she abandons her vocation after a resurgence of romantic love is the one flaw in this beautifully written novel, that, rare in contemporary fiction, evokes a deep sense of the numinous.
What if Trump is just bonkers?
‘I wonder what he meant by that,’ King Louis Philippe of France supposedly remarked on the death of the conspiratorial politician Talleyrand. Whenever a person behaves in ways we had not anticipated, it is a Darwinian and often useful human instinct to suspect a rational motive, and seek it out.
So it’s unsurprising that in the world of commentary a whole industry has now arisen in search of an ‘explanation’ of Donald Trump’s various démarches concerning, for instance, Gaza, Greenland and Canada.
And now he’s trying to wreck world trade.
Academic economists have been hauled from their ivory towers, business journalists from their statistical charts, public opinion pollsters from their psephological scrutinies, and even child psychiatrists from their textbooks on infant development, to make sense of the US President’s decrees, speeches and obiter dicta for a bewildered world.
I have especially enjoyed the valiant efforts of fellow journalists on financial pages to find the rationale (if not the wisdom) behind a large nation slapping massive tariffs on its allies and trading partners. There have been charts, forecasts, modellings – all designed to guess or suggest what the President hopes to achieve and why, and to assess his chances of success.
A favourite answer to the apparent riddle of a man who appears able to believe (and say) six impossible things before breakfast has been that Trump must not be taken literally. Another is that ludicrous demands are part of the negotiating strategy of a ‘transactional’ dealmaker. And still the explanations, some more plausible than others, come. Keep them coming, chaps.
But what if Trump has just gone bonkers? Literally bonkers? What if no other explanation is needed? What if we behold an old man who, as he approaches 80, is simply losing his mind? What if a kind of early-onset (and not all that early) senile dementia is taking place?
After all, Joe Biden isn’t much older than Trump. But with Biden we reached the right diagnosis quickly and stopped looking for more subtle explanations because his symptoms are so very common in ageing individuals. We oldies start forgetting things, losing our thread, showing signs of confusion. For a while (you may remember) there was an attempt to explain away such surface traits as being unconnected with Biden’s deeper wisdom and acuity: as disregardable as, say, a shaky hand or faltering voice. But soon the obvious could not be brushed aside. The President was losing it, and had to be eased out.
Among senior Republicans there will already be a growing recognition that their President has lost his marbles
In Trump’s case, the power, if not the content, of speech remains strong. He still looks vigorous. He is not yet frail physically. Superficially at least, he has lost neither his grip nor his bite. But the power of reason, the ability to reflect and contemplate all sides to a question, the capacity to ask oneself at least privately whether one might be wrong, the suppleness of intellect that marks a person in full command of their mental faculties – might these all be in sharp decline?
The atrophy of what we might call the brain’s muscle is a kind of degeneration whose outward signs may not be immediately evident until what crystallises as a series of terrible decisions becomes impossible to overlook as part of a mental disorder. Whispers of ‘not right in the head’ are heard. Any family business whose patriarch is slowly going gaga but who can still walk, talk and conduct an apparently intelligent conversation will be familiar with the creeping realisation. Fits of obvious insanity become ever harder to ignore.
As so often, Shakespeare created the archetype. Trump is beginning to remind me of King Lear: fitfully reasonable, physically strong but gripped by sudden bouts of madness and a kind of lunatic stubbornness – a vicious hardening of the mental arteries. George III’s illness took him more stealthily, returning him for long periods to sanity, until senior figures felt obliged to make legislative provision for a regency.
Winston Churchill, though never mad, had slipped into a mild senescence before he ceased to be prime minister. Learned volumes have been written about ailing leaders in power and many examples are cited – but there have surely been many more whom we never suspected: old fools kept on their feet by discreet courtiers as their powers ebbed.
I remember watching General Franco’s new year message on TV in Spain in 1973. You could all but see a strong arm behind his back keeping his spine vertical as the shrunken old man, a pile of bones inside a stiff, bemedalled military uniform lisped his now-croaky way towards his concluding: ‘¡Que viva España!’
But Franco had long lost real power. Trump has not. In his first term, though his utterances were sometimes typically deranged, his actions – far more restrained – evidenced a sense of the limits of the possible. We can already be confident that among senior Republicans who still publicly support him there will be a growing private recognition that their President has lost his marbles, and with them that better part of valour.
Public silence betrays, I suspect, a realisation that the US Constitution makes it difficult, if not impossible, to remove a sitting president still in possession of his elementary faculties except through impeachment. But in politics, even constitutional politics, where there’s a will, a way can sometimes be found.
The imperative with Trump is to hobble him. If or when his policies begin to redound to the clear disadvantage of those who voted for him, if the next midterm elections show powerful evidence of national disgruntlement, if he loses the congressional control he now has, the President’s fair-weather friends will begin to peel away. Once that starts, the abandonment will become headlong: I’ve observed often enough in British politics how shamelessly fast such friends depart once the weather turns.
And it will turn. Our own Prime Minister may be unwise to seek the role of go-between with a White House incumbency that may soon be regarded as a moment of quite literal madness – and sooner than some think. I remain to be convinced that the world order has changed for ever.
Letters: The case for ‘raves in the nave’
Reality check
Sir: While I share Mr Gove’s diagnosis of lodestar-less Starmerism (‘Cruel Labour’, 5 April), I cannot share the accompanying pearl-clutching.
For decades, politicians and voters have engaged in a mutually reinforcing entitlement spiral that took it as given that the civil service and welfare bill could expand ad infinitum, that working for a living was optional, and that our geopolitical enemies didn’t really mean what they said. This fantastical worldview was predicated on an equally fantastical delusion that cheap energy, low inflation and low interest rates were locked in rather than temporary historical blips. You can ignore reality, but you can’t ignore the consequences of ignoring reality.
Lee Jenkins
Bolton, Lancashire
Trust issues
Sir: When I heard of the National Trust’s proposal to leave Clandon Park as a ruin I was relieved that another pastiche as at Uppark was ruled out (Arts, 5 April). Reconstruction of badly damaged buildings is, I suppose, a way to soak up the insurance payout, but it is fake. There is no getting away from it. In other situations the Prince-Bishop’s Palace in Wurzburg is similarly a beautifully realised fake. So are the remains at Knossos: I was surprised at how much of the place Minoan builders had left until I found out how much reconstruction had been done by Arthur Evans and his team.
Why can’t they just leave things as they are? And, in the case of the National Trust, look after the place better. One all-consuming fire might be accounted a misfortune; two looks like carelessness.
Nicholas Wightwick
Rossett, Wrexham
Rave reviews
Sir: I sympathise with the Revd Franklin’s stance on ‘spiritually hollow’ events being held in sacred spaces (‘Foolish naves’, 5 April). But as a former (and short-lived) chief operating officer of an English cathedral – which is another story – I am afraid that without the spiritually hollow events he despises there will eventually be no sacred spaces to cherish. Put simply, the economics of your average cathedral demand income-generating events to survive but, in my experience, they only proceed with the congregation’s permission. And what better way to introduce a whole new audience to these beautiful buildings? In my glass-clearing duties at one of our ‘raves in the nave’, I overheard countless middle-aged ravers declare their amazement at the beauty of the place and state that they would return. ‘Success!’ I cried. More footfall, and a dramatic reduction in the average age of our visitors.
Alex Siddell
Chelmsford
Gospel truth
Sir: In his manifesto for the next Archbishop of Canterbury (Diary, 5 April), Quentin Letts suggests that he or she should ‘urge most clergy to stop preaching’. He cites, as justification, a parish priest who warned his congregation they would not reach heaven unless they denounced the Balfour declaration. If that counts as preaching, I wholeheartedly agree it should stop – but let us be clear: it is not. Preaching, as the New Testament writers understand it, is the proclamation of the message of Christ – his life, death and resurrection – from the word of God. This kind of preaching has the power to change lives, fill churches and transform society. Martin Luther believed as much when he reflected on what effected his reforms to the abuses of the church in the 16th century: ‘I simply taught, preached and wrote God’s word; otherwise I did nothing. And while I slept or drank Wittenberg beer with my friends… the word so greatly weakened the papacy that no prince or emperor ever inflicted such losses upon it.’ We need an Archbishop who will, first and foremost, teach, preach and write God’s word – and will inspire the clergy to do the same.
Richard Coombs
Rector of Cheltenham
Face value
Sir: I find it hard to imagine senior Anglican women with thick moustaches, though Giovanni Guareschi, the inspiration for Quentin Letts’s NUNC!, would surely have known of the definition of baffona, in Alfred Hoare’s Short Italian Dictionary (Cambridge, 1954): woman with not unpleasing moustache.
Rhidian Llewellyn
London SW14
Pull your punches
Sir: Roger Alton asserts that ‘boxing belongs in the Olympics’ (Sport, 29 March). At a time when Rugby Union’s authorities are making changes to the game intended to minimise head contact to avoid injuries which have devastated the brains of players such as Steve Thompson, the fact that boxing hasn’t come under closer scrutiny is surprising. That there exists a spectacle involving two powerful and highly trained people deliberately harming each other, in order to ultimately create a head injury so serious that the opponent becomes disabled through unconsciousness, is archaic and immoral. Muhammad Ali’s mind, once so sharp, was destroyed by the head impacts he sustained over his lifetime. Boxing certainly should not be in the Olympics.
Jacques Francis
Westcott, Surrey
Ringing the changes
Sir: Apropos Charles Moore’s lament for red telephone boxes (Notes, 29 March), he will be happy to know that here in Topsham, Devon, we have one which houses a small library, and another which has been taken over by our local museum. It contains a changing exhibition of items of local interest and, being beside the church, often features in wedding photographs.
Jenny Pearson
Topsham, Devon
Why it might be best if US stock markets go on falling
It gives me no pleasure to say I told you so. ‘If [Donald Trump] is prepared to cause mayhem in global trade as his first move, he’s even more dangerous than his detractors thought,’ I wrote in February. ‘British commentators of the “Why can’t we have visionary maverick musclemen like Trump?” persuasion should be careful what they wish for.’ And in November, ahead of the presidential election, I wrote that gold could have ‘more upside ahead’ while bitcoin holders would be wise to take profits – advice that looked wildly wrong in December but finally came right with gold at an all-time high and the cryptocurrency suffering its worst first quarter for a decade.
All of which (you’ll think, if you’ve taken refuge in Casablanca for the umpteenth time) ‘don’t amount to a hill of beans’ beside the $10 trillion wiped off global share values since Trump’s so-called Liberation Day. Let’s face it, all market predictions are ephemeral; new ones amid a strengthening tempest would be peculiarly pointless. But what’s perverse about the present imbroglio is that it might actually be better for US stock markets to go on falling, because the ruin of crony fortunes and voters’ pension plans may be the only thing that will persuade the President to reverse his catastrophic course.
Safe-haven gold
‘Sit tight unless you have urgent cash calls’ must be the only advice worth offering any investor today. But I’m grateful to a City reader for this nugget: on the 12 occasions since 1945 when the S&P500 US share index fell by 20 per cent from its peak, it delivered positive returns over the subsequent year in eight of those cases – and in all of them over five years, with an average return of just over 50 per cent. And my source adds that the political impetus behind this week’s market plunge makes it more susceptible to a quick rebound than a sell-off driven by pure economics.
But would you also be wise to add some safe-haven gold to your portfolio? It’s the classic store of value for those uncertain where else to park cash, with buyers currently ranging from Chinese retail punters to central banks, and it’s usually quick to bounce from wider market dips. What’s more, this column’s veteran investment guru Robin Andrews sees an opportunity to buy shares in gold and silver producing companies that have declined sharply along with other asset classes: ‘Hochschild and Fresnillo are outstanding longer-term opportunities – for the brave.’
Cold shower
This column comes from France, where President Emmanuel Macron has called for ‘collective solidarity’ in the form of a suspension of new investment by French companies in the US until the tariff standoff is ‘clarified’. His targets included CMA CGM, the shipping group, which has $20 billion worth of US expansion plans, and Schneider Electric, which is investing $700 million in energy projects over there. It may also have been aimed at Bernard Arnault, the LVMH luxury -goods tycoon, who recently declared in response to French corporate tax hikes that he felt ‘the wind of optimism’ in the US, but ‘when you come back to France, it’s a bit of a cold shower’.
Arnault’s attitude is an indication that Macron’s appeal to corporate patriotism is unlikely to land well: a Le Figaro editorial summed it up as ‘Punish yourselves to punish Trump’. Rational businesspeople every-where, accountable to shareholders, concerned for their workers, concerned for their own pensions, watch in despair as vain politicians turn their livelihoods to dust.
I must be mad
I’m here to build my own coalition of the willing around the idea of converting a redundant barn in my Dordogne village into a theatre and concert venue. A majority of those to whom I’ve shown sketches have responded: ‘What a wonderful idea, go for it!’ But the one person I know who has actually battled with French planning and licensing bureaucrats to complete a similar scheme said simply: ‘You must be mad.’
Maybe. But as world leaders (except our prudent or pusillanimous Prime Minister, that is) trade blows with Trump while he wrecks the trade in goods that has done so much for prosperity and peace, what can we citizens do but form ‘small platoons’ to promote benign co-operation on a local scale? That phrase belongs to Edmund Burke, writing, as it happens, in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). It originally referred to the need for aristocrats to resist revolutionary vandalism of traditional institutions, but it came to be applied to civil society in all its forms as a positive counterweight to overbearing government.
That’s not entirely why I conceived a pipe dream which another of my doubters compares to Fitzcarraldo’s opera house. But I’ve certainly found a distraction from the horrors of the greater world.
A cortege passes
Returning north via the drab railway town of Brive-la-Gaillarde, I have a couple of hours before my departure for Paris. But the station brasserie has closed down and the hotel opposite is shuttered, as are most of the shops towards the town centre. There’s only a Turkish barber, a tabac doing desultory trade in scratchcards and a funeral cortege. Dispirited by this vision of the near future, I pause to read the rest of Le Figaro’s rant about Trumpian protectionnisme suicidaire.
Then a door opens – Le Comptoir St Sernin, which serves a pleasant lunch ahead of a contemplative journey to Gare d’Austerlitz in time for a stroll at dusk along the banks of the Seine among thousands of young Parisians chattering, drinking and flirting without a care. Onwards a day later to Épernay, to join The Spectator Champagne tour at Pol Roger and Taittinger. As darkness descends, we must find comfort wherever we can.
Eco warriors are driving themselves to extinction
It wasn’t that long ago when the fashionable gathering place for young couples was a meeting of the National Childbirth Trust. I remember, in the early months of 1995, sitting in our instructor’s front room as she passed around a plastic model of a female pelvis while she asked us: ‘So how do you think the baby gets out?’
Fast-forward three decades and there is a new way for middle-class would-be mothers to spend their evenings: attending sessions of a project entitled ‘Motherhood in a Climate Crisis’ put on by the University of Bristol’s Brigstow Institute. There is no better way to describe it than to quote the academics’ blurb. The project, they write, was designed to use ‘therapeutically informed participatory theatre techniques to collaboratively explore concerns around reproductive decision-making for women in an era of unfolding climate crisis’. There are photographs of women curled up on the floor, or standing arms outstretched as if in religious devotion.
A report of the project reveals that the sessions have led to many couples deciding not to have a child for the sake of the planet. ‘I have this deep grief and anger around not having a second child amid the climate crisis,’ declared one 37-year-old attendee, Rosanna, who added that she spent the sessions writing a letter entitled ‘To the second child I will never give birth to’. Ruby, 31, had made her mind up, saying: ‘I don’t want to bring new children into the world as it currently is. I wouldn’t feel OK making that choice.’
The sessions, which began in 2022, will not have helped Bristol’s collapsing birth rate. Ten years ago, the city was enjoying a mini baby boom. Now, it has one of the fastest-plunging fertility rates in the country. It doesn’t take too much to work out that if a population is going to sustain itself in the long term, women will have to bear an average of at least two children. In an advanced industrial society with a low rate of infant mortality, demographers tend to work on the assumption that a Total Fertility Rate (TFR, the average number of children born to a woman during her childbearing years) of around 2.1 is replacement level.
In the early 2010s, Bristol’s TFR was running at around the then national average, at 1.89. By 2023 it had plunged to 1.14. But Bristol isn’t quite the lowest. In Norwich it is 1.09, Oxford 1.07. In Camden, where the Royal Free Hospital announced the closure of its maternity unit for want of business, it is 1.0. In several districts the TFR has dropped below one – in other words the mother isn’t even replacing her place in the population, let alone her partner’s. In Brighton and Hove it is 0.98. Cambridge – where my children were born – comes bottom at 0.91.
There is one thing which links these places: they are hotbeds of green politics. True, Bristol, Brighton et al have high house prices and large numbers of professional women who may prioritise careers over family, but they are also the places where eco-zealotry reigns. People in these green ghettos are likely to be susceptible to the much-quoted figure among environmental absolutists (which can be traced to a paper published in the journal Global Environmental Change in 2009) that a woman who has a child will be responsible for a remarkably precise 9,441 tons of carbon emissions. That is 5.7 times the emissions she directly causes during her lifetime. The guilt, therefore, runs to subsequent generations.
For those in thrall to green dogma these calculations are existential. Some have argued that the figure should be amended to take account of cascading generations of carbon-emitting children and grandchildren. To this, in a lightbulb moment which will surely challenge Descartes in its significance, a PhD student at the LSE, Philippe van Basshuysen, has come up with a compromise: parents should be held accountable for their children’s carbon emissions only until the age of 18.
Whatever the risks to humanity from carbon emissions, it is certain that refusing to breed doesn’t help the human race survive. There are some on the extreme fringes of the green movement – such as the self-styled Voluntary Human Extinction Movement – who would welcome a complete collapse of births as a big gain for the planet. But they, and more moderate greens, who think couples should, say, limit themselves to a Maoist single child, are overlooking something: maybe their actions will merely reduce the reproduction rate of eco zealots. This could be nature’s revenge – Darwinism in action, in which people with loony ideas shrink their gene pool before they can do too much damage. Perhaps we should welcome collective guilt sessions for green activists, even make them compulsory. The fewer children to whom they can impart their way of thinking, the better for the rest of us?