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Portrait of the week: Terrible Tuesday, W.H. Smith’s rebrand and no e-bikes on the Tube
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For many, ‘Terrible Tuesday’ began ‘Awful April’ with increased bills for water, energy, council tax (to an average in England of £2,280), road tax, telephone charges, broadband, the television licence and stamp duty. Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, spoke to President Donald Trump of the US as makers of motor vehicles, Britain’s biggest export to the US, contemplated American tariffs of 20 per cent on car imports. Matthew Doyle resigned as Sir Keir’s communications director. Plans were afoot to ban cars from Hammersmith Bridge, which has been closed for repairs for six years, when it is reopened.
Since there was a ‘draft bill due for imminent introduction that would make it unlawful’ the Sentencing Council decided not to bring in rules requiring judges to seek extra information before sentencing offenders from certain minority groups; Shabana Mahmood, the Justice Secretary, had said she did not want ‘a two-tier sentencing approach’. The University of Sussex hoped to overturn a ruling by the Office for Students imposing a £585,000 penalty for infringing freedom of speech. At a conference at Lancaster House on organised migration crime, the Prime Minister said: ‘We’ve returned more than 24,000 people who have no right to be here’; but it appeared that about a third of the figure had returned without telling the government. In the seven days to 31 March, 722 migrants arrived in small boats.
Birmingham council declared a ‘major incident’ over the 17,000 tons of rubbish left on the streets by dustmen belonging to the Unite union. The King spent a short time in hospital and cancelled an engagement in Birmingham because of the side-effects of his treatment for cancer. W.H. Smith shops in high streets will be called T.G. Jones after their sale to the owners of Hobbycraft, Modella Capital. The Indian steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal, who moved to London in 1995, told friends that he would probably leave Britain because of the government’s abolition of the ‘non-dom’ tax regime, according to the Financial Times. Trevor Lock, the policeman awarded the George Medal for his courageous action during the Iranian embassy siege in London in 1980, died aged 85. Lord Kalms, who built up the Dixons chain, died aged 93. Paul Marchant resigned as chief executive of Primark after an allegation by a woman about ‘his behaviour towards her in a social environment’. Police shot a man dead at Milton Keynes station after reports he was carrying a firearm. Non-folding e-bikes were banned on most of the Transport for London network, for fear of fire.
Abroad
A French court found Marine Le Pen guilty of using EU parliamentary money to pay party salaries for the National Rally (Rassemblement national); she was barred from standing for public office for five years, preventing her candidacy in the 2027 French presidential election. A magnitude 7.7 earthquake with an epicentre near Mandalay in Myanmar killed thousands; a 30-storey building under construction in Bangkok in Thailand collapsed, with 87 builders dead or missing.
The Israeli military issued an extensive new evacuation order for residents of the city of Rafah and parts of neighbouring Khan Younis in southern Gaza. Israel Katz, the defence minister, said Israel would seize ‘large areas’ of Gaza, incorporating them into ‘security zones’. President Trump, commenting on negotiations for a ceasefire in the war against Ukraine, said ‘I was very angry, pissed off’ when Vladimir Putin ‘started getting into Zelensky’s credibility’. He threatened to impose a 50 per cent tariff on countries buying Russian oil. Russia called up 160,000 men aged between 18 and 30 as part of its drive to increase the number of active servicemen to 1.5 million. Vice-President J.D. Vance of the US accompanied his wife Usha to Greenland in order to tell Denmark: ‘You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland.’ At a rally before the election of a judge for the Supreme Court of Wisconsin, Elon Musk handed out two $1 million cheques to voters who had signed a petition to stop ‘activist’ judges. Utah became the first American state to ban fluoride in its public water. Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey gave the longest speech in Senate history, spending 25 hours and five minutes criticising Trump. Richard Chamberlain, the star of Dr Kildare, died aged 90.
Gold rose to $3,148 a troy ounce. Somalia’s breakaway region of Somaliland rejected an attempt by the central government to give the US control of a port and airbase at Berbera on the Gulf of Aden coast. Queensland is to build a 63,000-seater stadium in Brisbane for the 2032 Olympics, after which the Gabba cricket stadium will be demolished. CSH
Trump is giving us a taste of our own medicine
It seems the US State Department sees an impediment to free speech as an impediment to free trade with Britain. It cites the recent incident in which a woman, Livia Tossici-Bolt, was arrested for holding up a sign as she prayed alone and silently near a Bournemouth abortion clinic. It says it is ‘monitoring’ the case. Many here will dismiss this intrusion as a typically loopy product of the Trump era. In a sense, it is. It is also a spurious justification for American tariffs which are happening anyway. But it should teach us something about how others see us. It is commonplace for British governments of both parties to object to the policies of other countries, notably in the Middle East and Africa, in relation to LGBT+ rights. Our politicians let these objections affect other subjects, such as sporting or commercial links. This causes offence in those countries as being both contrary to their moral code and none of our business. Trumpery is giving us a taste of our own medicine. It seems obvious to virtually all Labour MPs and some Tory ones that abortion is a social benefit, and so, ignoring free speech issues, they penalise public prayer against it. But it is not obvious to everyone, everywhere. Hundreds of millions of people, including perhaps a third of Americans (and even significant numbers here), think abortion is wrong. We arrest one woman for silent prayer but allow many thousands of Hamas sympathisers to march repeatedly, shouting their hatred of Jews in the streets on London. Are we any less weird in our way than the Trumpians are in theirs?
Could the sentencing of Marine Le Pen have happened here? Eligibility to be head of state does not arise for a monarchy in the same way that it does in a republic. But what about eligibility for other office? It used to be that any British citizen could be elected to the Commons, though it did not automatically follow that he could take his seat, which was a matter for parliament itself. In April 1981, Bobby Sands, an IRA terrorist on hunger strike in prison, was duly elected to parliament in the Fermanagh and South Tyrone by-election of April 1981. Sands never sat, firstly because Irish Republicans are abstentionists, secondly because he was in jail, and finally because a month later he was dead. To prevent another hunger striker standing, an emergency law forbade the election of convicted felons, but this failed in propaganda terms because a Republican still won the by-election caused by Sands’s death. The new law was a bad idea anyway. Voters should be free to elect any adult citizen, however controversial, who has the necessary nomination papers. Parliament can then debate the issues raised. On similar principles, John Wilkes, friend of liberty, was repeatedly re-elected to parliament by the voters of Middlesex in 1769 though he had been imprisoned, outlawed and expelled. In 1961, the voters of Bristol South East re-elected Anthony Wedgwood Benn (later democratised as Tony Benn) even though he could not take his seat because he had just inherited his father’s place in the House of Lords. Benn won a change in the law and was re-elected in a second by-election in 1963. Here and abroad, the left should stop trying to run politics through the courts – not least because it makes them much likelier to lose at the ballot box in the end.
In the Lords, we have just finished the fifth and final committee day of the Hereditary Peers Bill, which abolishes the 92 (currently, I think, 87) ‘excepted’ hereditaries who remained after the Blair purge. As well as the constitutional issues, this is an uncomfortable human story. Unlike the Commons, the Lords prides itself on good fellowship across parties, so the thought that they are about to kick out people they have worked with, in some cases for 50 years, hurts. It feels personal, a ‘soft power’ version of those Acts of Attainder which Tudor monarchs forced upon their parliaments to destroy noble dynasties they considered over-mighty. My particular sympathy goes to the four Labour hereditary peers, who cannot express their inner thoughts. The most poignant and prominent is Viscount (Stephen) Stansgate, elder son of Tony Benn (see above). Whereas Tony stood in by-elections to leave the Lords, Stephen stood in one to get into it, although in his case the electorate (fellow Labour hereditaries) was, I think, three. He was elected unopposed and is an outstanding member of the House. Even many who (unlike me) want to get rid of the hereditary principle dislike this senseless slaughter of good men. On Tuesday, a cross-party amendment was moved which would have allowed all the ‘92’ to be made life peers on abolition, thus bringing in the reform without hurting its individual victims. Labour sullenly faced it down. I feel the third Viscount Stansgate should be our mascot. We back Big Benn!
In the nearly 25 years I have owned a flat in London, I have continued to receive letters addressed to a former occupant, Miss M. Nakahara. Actually, I think she is a pretend former occupant, since I knew the previous owner, who had no lodgers and did not bear that name. I could not trace Miss Nakahara. After a few years, I opened one of her letters to see why they kept coming. It was about her savings account at Lloyds bank. I wrote to Lloyds to ask them to stop, but they continued. This week, the latest Lloyds letter arrived for her. I wonder how many thousands of untraceable or nonexistent people are being chased pointlessly down the decades, and why the banks don’t mind all that postage.
The RSPCA wants dog licences brought back. It is right that a great many dog owners are unsuitable and unchecked. But more than a third of households own a dog in Britain, and we all think the bad owners are someone else. Any party introducing a licence would lose the ensuing general election, so there is no point in raising the matter.
Labour needs a sense of social justice
Clement Attlee, in the words of Winston Churchill, was a modest man with much to be modest about. Labour’s postwar premier has been invoked as a role model by Keir Starmer recently, in the context of Attlee’s support for Nato and robustness on defence. Starmer’s allies also argue that, like Attlee, he is an unshowy middle-England moderate who prefers quiet efficiency to ideological flamboyance. His biographer, the always perceptive Tom Baldwin, has declared: ‘There is no such thing as Starmerism.’ Nor, we are told, will there ever be. Which is exactly how, why and where this government is going wrong.
A Tory government benefits from a sense of purpose; a Labour one cannot survive without one
Movements – and Labour is nothing if not a movement – need direction. Administrations need definition. Governments need a mission or they descend into reactive incoherence. Margaret Thatcher had such a purpose. John Major did not. He offered post-ideological government – and then found that without an ideology he couldn’t run a government. He was overwhelmed by events. He became boxed in by powerful institutions whose incentives were not aligned with his interests. And he allowed media figures who were not his allies to bully him into faux-macho positions – fighting a ‘beef war’ over Mad Cow Disease, for instance – which his old friends found inauthentic and unconvincing.
Starmer should attend to the lessons of Major’s locust years. His government needs a philosophy, a set of principles, an ideology. Indeed Starmer’s need is greater than Major’s was. A Conservative administration benefits from a sense of purpose; a Labour government cannot survive without one. Progressive politics needs a galvanising, uniting, liberating, crusading temper – the arc of history may be long, but if you are on the left, unless you are bending it towards justice, it will eventually smack you in the face.
That is what happened last week. The failure of this government to make social justice its mission, indeed the absence of any shared understanding among ministers of what a mission might look like, led to a Spring Statement that was at once hurried, incoherent and cruel – a fiscal drive-by shooting. And the poorest in our society are the victims.
The government’s own figures show that the measures announced last week will drive 250,000 more Britons, 50,000 of them children, into poverty. More than three million families will lose an average of £1,720 a year. According to the Resolution Foundation, the thinktank which focuses on inequality in Britain, ‘poorer, disabled households are still set to take the biggest hit. More generally, a combined squeeze that reduces incomes by around 1.5 per cent in the lower-middle reaches of the spectrum declines to only 0.5 per cent at the very top’.
In other words – a Labour government is hitting the poor disproportionately hard compared with the rich, and targeting the very poorest most aggressively. If a Conservative government of which I was part had set out on such a course, I would have resigned. It would have been – it is – immoral to ask the biggest burden to be borne by the weakest in our society.
Yet Labour ministers seek to defend these moves on – of all grounds – their moral mission to help people into work. But how? By taking cash away from people who have difficulty washing, clothing and feeding themselves? Money allocated to ‘employment support’ to help individuals back into the labour market only comes on-stream later in the parliament, after the cuts have bitten. The nature of that support – its efficacy, targeting, delivery and proven value – is as yet unknown. This package is all sticks of the sharpest kind and the distant promise of a carrot in instalments.
Why has Labour found itself in this position? Why does the Treasury minister Torsten Bell, a bright and by all accounts kindly man, maintain that income reductions for the poor make sense but that he deserves a pay rise this month because he has a mortgage? This is the same Torsten Bell who argued just ten months ago, when he was chief executive of the Resolution Foundation, that ‘child poverty is where the focus must be in the 2020s’. Well, it certainly is now, but not quite in the way I presume he meant.
The reason Labour finds itself in this abject and indefensible position is because it failed to develop a coherent political economy in opposition. It had no theory of change for the state, no industrial strategy worth the name, no philosophy of public service reform and no account of why the Conservatives failed other than that they were, well, Tories.
Starmer’s government did assemble a Potemkin policy agenda: five missions, designed by an adviser, Peter Hyman, who has gone. The missions appear to have survived only as the names of Cabinet Office committees. I have been a Cabinet Office minister and I know that it performs the same function for irresolute prime ministers that the attic did for Mr Rochester. It hides any commitment which is painful and embarrassing to recall.
In the absence of its own coherent and developed progressive agenda, Labour has found that those institutions with their own ready-made and honed theory of how government should operate have driven policy. None is more ready, and powerful, than the Treasury, which for novice chancellors serves the same purpose as Viagra does for gigolos. It offers the impression of potency but doesn’t address the underlying reasons for poor performance.
From the vantage point of the Treasury, any chancellor can set, boost and cut ministerial budgets, effectively dictating the operation of each government department. But left to its own devices, the Treasury does not seek to foster reform, free-thinking or innovation in any department. It is explicitly against anything considered ‘novel and contentious’. Its overriding aim is to limit expenditure, bring budgets overall back into balance, meet fiscal rules and thus, it hopes, calm the markets.
Suggesting the Treasury might address the deep reasons for weak productivity in the UK economy takes it outside its comfort zone. Being asked to consider how to tackle entrenched economic inequality makes it positively queasy. Propose that we implement a coherent industrial strategy and it grips the side of the chair with whitening knuckles and a sense of profound disorientation. Ask it to make social justice the lodestar for policy and you provoke a systems overload which takes it dangerously close to nervous breakdown. I know. I tried. And I was bundled out of the room and told that if I ever wanted to see another delegated budget limit again in my lifetime I had to apologise for my heresies.
Without any governing philosophy from No. 10, the Treasury’s short-termism prevails
The fingerprints of the Treasury are all over the package of welfare ‘reform’ announced last month. A series of cuts were demanded to fit a spreadsheet-generated target. An obliging Department for Work and Pensions found the savings and tried to gussy them up as a carefully calibrated intervention to incentivise work while protecting those most in need. When the savings didn’t hit the target, more money was lopped off hitherto sacrosanct programmes to make the figures fit. What was supposed to be keyhole surgery to make the labour market healthier turned into the extraction of a pound of flesh, with the first incision so wanting that more last-minute butchery was required.
The sadness in this story doesn’t end there, though. There are those on the progressive left and right who have thoughtful plans for long-term welfare reform, with appropriate piloting and devolution of budgets. But without any governing philosophy from No. 10 to capture and shape such thinking, the Treasury’s short-termism prevails.
And this incoherence afflicts almost every government department, with cruel consequences across the board. In Defra, the opportunity for this government to make a lasting difference on the environment has been put at risk by the Treasury’s demand that support for sustainable farming initiatives be halted. With no lead from the centre on how important nature is, our wildlife, rivers and food production suffer.
In the Ministry of Justice, they know that rehabilitation depends on attracting the very best talent into the prison service, but the scheme which does just that, Unlocked Graduates, is to be axed.
In education, Bridget Phillipson is pursuing one model of public service ‘reform’ – with a curtailment of autonomy at the front line and hazier accountability – in line with union demands. Meanwhile, at health, Wes Streeting is pursuing another – a drive towards greater operational autonomy accompanied by sharper accountability – to the unions’ regret. Either model might be right. But both can’t be.
And there is no way at the moment of knowing which the Prime Minister prefers, or why. He has offered no philosophical justification for the changes at education – no explanation of what problem he wishes to address and why these policies will resolve them. He gives us only reheated rhetoric about breakfast clubs. Meaningful education reform is toast.
On energy policy, Ed Miliband pursues a drive towards net zero that runs counter to the needs of manufacturing and risks hobbling AI growth, and which the Tony Blair Institute laments as misguided while other ministers can scarcely bring themselves to defend it. But Starmer neither champions nor disowns what happens in his name. Like the Edstone, the PM’s real feelings on the matter are impossible to locate.
Even on the area of policy which is closest to the Prime Minister’s heart – the law – incoherence reigns. His Attorney-General requires ministers to defer to judges. His Justice Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, has this week told judges they must defer to ministers – she will finish their sentences for them.
The Prime Minister may not want to define what Starmerism is. But from his actions, and inaction, a picture emerges. Weakness in the face of the US President; wokeness when a TV drama demands it; a willingness to see solar farms replace real ones for the sake of the environment, but scornful of the newts, bats and habitats that are our living environmental inheritance. Starmerism is asking the disabled to forgo state support even as tax rises elsewhere make it more difficult for businesses to employ them. This is not the artful synthesis of the Third Way, but a jarring atonal cacophony which leaves Labour’s supporters disoriented and the public bewildered.
What’s holding Starmer back? Michael discusses with John McTernan, former private secretary to Tony Blair, on the latest Edition podcast from The Spectator:
My manifesto for the next Archbishop of Canterbury
When I told a Westminster political editor that my novel NUNC! was about the prophet Simeon and the Nunc Dimittis, he said: ‘Who? The what?’ I reminded him that the Nunc was one of the great canticles along with the Magnificat, Te Deum, etc. More blank looks. It is startling how scriptural knowledge has faded. Thirty years ago an understanding of Church worship was one of the things that bound us. Today we are expected to know about celebrities. Here the blank looks are mine. One day last week MailOnline had headlines about Sydney Sweeney, Blake Lively, Gigi Hadid, J.B. Gill, Allie Teilz and Young Scooter, ‘known for collaborations with Future and Gucci Mane’. Not known by me, he isn’t. I haven’t a clue what genders they are, even. Not that gender matters, one hurriedly adds before the hanging judges of Ipso pounce.
Has the next Archbishop of Canterbury any hope of success if people like my friend have not heard of the Nunc Dimittis? The Crown Nominations Commission is discreetly asking parliamentarians what qualities Justin Welby’s successor should possess. Here is my manifesto: 1) Withdraw bishops from the House of Lords. Being in parliament has done the C of E little good in recent years. 2) Urge most clergy to stop preaching. Sermons demand eloquence, imagination, learning. Many priests are prosaic bores. My organist wife was playing an away match the other day when the scruff in the pulpit told congregants they would not progress to Heaven unless they denounced the Balfour declaration. 3) Scrap mitres. They make bishops look fools. 4) No more talk of slavery reparations. At our church we have not had a single newcomer say: ‘I want to be confirmed because I like Lambeth Palace’s stance on slavery.’ We have, though, had visitors refuse to give money because they think the Church will waste it. 5) Stop apologising. Think the best of people. Send those race advisers and safeguarding consultants packing, as Jesus did with the moneylenders. 6) After a service, offer the punters a bucket of sherry instead of dreary coffee. Supermarket amontillado doubled the gate at our monthly matins. 7) A parson in every pub. Instead of sending vicars to conferences and on management courses, urge them to visit the local boozer in their dog collars. Pastoral care is more important than ‘continual professional development’.
Andrew Neil reports in the Daily Mail that when he rang a White House source to discuss ‘Signal-gate’ his contact whispered: ‘The President is on the rampage. It’s not safe to talk,’ and hung up. Was it like this at Herod the Great’s palace in Jerusalem? Herod was a king who got things done. He was plainly, however, an overbearing sort. When those ‘wise men’ told him of an infant pretender to his throne, he overreacted. In NUNC! the people of Jerusalem regard the Magi as blundering eejits. If Herod had possessed braver advisers, he might be remembered for his remarkable buildings rather than infanticide.
As for bosses going ‘on the rampage’, two of my old editors, Max Hastings and Paul Dacre, were dauntingly tall men prone to eruptions. A loud voice, a throbbing eye: these need not be bad things. It’s the silent, smouldering types who are more dangerous. Sir Max would thump his desk and flick his fringe. The more he said ‘frankly’, the more you were in trouble. But his agile mind would soon leap to some other matter and before long that lopsided Hastings grin reasserted itself. At editorial conferences elsewhere, one editor was celebrated for venting his hatreds: explorers, astronauts, the Ecclestones, Paddington Bear (‘I’d kick him in the balls’), marmalade (‘Isn’t it extinct?’), Stephen Fry, wooden cutlery, jeans, men talking about fashion, older women’s knees, married transsexuals (‘They make me want to emigrate’), pale toast (‘Fucking waste of time’), rollercoasters, Soho House (‘I’d rather shoot myself than go there’), peas, Valentine’s Day and cats (‘They eat you when you’re dead’). He produced, naturally, a heck of a paper.
The dedication page of my book says: ‘Da un grande ammiratore dei baffi e del genio di Giovanni Guareschi.’ I doubt my political editor friend will have heard of Guareschi (d. 1968), whose delightful Don Camillo stories gave me the pace and tone of NUNC!. Guareschi’s moustaches were as thick as brambles. Facial hair is hard to get right: the Prince of Wales’s beard gives me the ab-dabs. Maybe the next Archbishop of Canterbury should have a thick ’tache. And smoke a pipe. Senior Anglican women would be able to manage both, surely.
Quentin discusses his manifesto alongside The Revd Jamie Franklin on this week’s Edition podcast from The Spectator:
Robert Jenrick is the talk of the Tory party
In Westminster, politics is often a zero-sum game. There is a winner and a loser. But this week, two politicians from opposing sides found themselves being praised for the same thing: the Sentencing Council climbdown. After a long standoff with the government, the independent body stalled plans to bring in new rules on sentencing criminals from ethnic minorities, which were widely criticised as ‘two-tier justice’.
The plans were first revealed by Robert Jenrick, the shadow justice secretary, after he spotted advice given to magistrates and judges which would have meant certain minorities could receive preferential treatment on sentencing compared to white men. Jenrick went on the attack, warning that the rules would ‘discriminate against white people, against men, against Christians’ and that the justice system would become ‘infected by identity politics’.
This was news to his counterpart, Shabana Mahmood, the Lord Chancellor. ‘She was asleep at the wheel,’ argues a Jenrick ally. Yet her response was not typical of Labour. Rather than defend the independent body’s decision, she went on the offensive, informing the council chairman that the ‘appearance of differential treatment before the law is particularly corrosive’. Since then, both Jenrick and Mahmood have been on separate missions to stop the rules from coming into force.
For some time now, the Ministry of Justice has rivalled the Home Office as a graveyard for aspiring politicians. There have been 12 justice secretaries since 2010 and, further down the chain, the turnover of prisons ministers became so frequent that it was a running joke in the last government.
The fact that the Justice Secretary and her shadow have become the talk of their parties shows that British politics is heading in a new direction. The Sentencing Council row comes down to the question of who governs Britain. The public’s attitude to power and accountability is changing – deference to arms-length bodies is far from guaranteed. And the British attitude to race is also changing. Back in 2016, David Cameron asked David Lammy to lead a government review on apparent inequality in the criminal justice process. Now both Labour and Tory politicians talk about inequality in the other direction. ‘Shabana is a second-generation migrant, but she knows more about Magna Carta than most in the Labour party,’ says a colleague. ‘She is making sure her party signals to the country that brown people won’t be treated differently – in either direction.’
Not everyone in government agreed. Mahmood faced internal resistance from colleagues who, according to one Labour MP, represent the ‘woke left’. But she was also opposed from the centre. ‘There were a few figures in government asking whether we needed to have this fight,’ says one Labour source. ‘They asked if it would be such a big deal if the guidelines went ahead. But that misses the point.’
Kemi Badenoch’s allies insist she is delighted at the positive attention Robert Jenrick is getting
Mahmood’s conception of the rule of law contrasts to that of the Attorney-General, Richard Hermer, a former human rights barrister. While there are those in government who view this debate as a distraction and prefer to talk about the economy and wages, Mahmood saw the row as a political problem that needed to be dealt with quickly. Staying silent would have given Reform or the Tories an open goal.
She first tried writing to the council to ask it to change course. When that didn’t work, she moved to emergency legislation, pushing through a bill that would usually require weeks and months of consultancy.
However, Mahmood still has to face the bigger challenges. The second part of the sentencing review is due this spring, and it seems likely that the aim is to dole out fewer custodial sentences, to cut prison overcrowding. Ministers hope to argue that these changes are not just about necessity: justice needs to be reformed so that it encourages and rewards responsible behaviour. For instance, prisoners who make their beds every day can get out earlier; offenders who avoid the pub while wearing a tag will have it removed sooner. Yet ministers are aware this will be a hard case to make to the public – and the spending review in June could make it worse. If Mahmood can’t avoid cuts to her department (one source describes them as ‘shockingly grim’), the obvious way to save is on the prison-building programme, which won’t help fend off accusations about Labour being soft on crime.
On the Tory benches, there is no debate about whether their colleague has come out on top. When the news of the Sentencing Council’s humiliation broke on Monday night, Tories were tripping over themselves to praise Jenrick on Twitter. Kemi Badenoch’s allies insist she is delighted at the positive attention he is getting.
Yet it hasn’t gone unnoticed that Jenrick has a team of men – from his long time spad Tom Milford to a trainee at a magic circle law firm to a videographer who used to work for Boris Johnson – working on his digital operation to help him land points. His social media strategy is led by Dov Forman, the 21-year-old great-grandson of the Holocaust survivor Lily Ebert. He spent lockdown in his bedroom turning his conversations with her into an online phenomenon, gaining two million followers on TikTok. His mantra for Jenrick is ‘Speed is king’: the Tories need to beat Reform and Labour by being the first to comment on issues. Forman is studying at UCL when he isn’t working for Jenrick.
‘In opposition you just have to work so much harder,’ says one of the team. ‘So we’ve had to get creative.’ Jenrick comes up with most of the ideas himself. ‘He has always worked harder than everyone else – it’s what people don’t realise,’ says a long-time supporter.
That’s paying off. Jenrick joined TikTok two months ago and has already racked up a million views on his videos. His Facebook views have risen to nearly ten million. The Sentencing Council row is also the first time right-wing politicians have used lawfare to their advantage. Jenrick took legal advice and wrote to the council; ‘We’ll never know quite why they folded,’ says a supporter.
Whether it was Mahmood or Jenrick wot won it, both have a story to tell their party – if they can avoid the pitfalls that stopped the justice secretaries who came before.
How fun is it being part of an Amazonian tribe?
Tribe with Bruce Parry ran for three fondly remembered series in the mid-2000s. Now, upgraded to Tribe with Bruce Parry, it’s back, still championing traditional ways of life – including that of a TV presenter who lives among remote peoples, takes loads of drugs with them and marvels at their closeness to nature.
Sunday’s episode featured some other age-old practices, too. Parry, for example, duly travelled up an Amazon tributary to a village where the locals were initially suspicious of ‘the white man’. He then won them over by mucking in with the chores and eating plenty of insects and grubs.
His companions this time were the Waimaha, who live in the Colombian rainforest, communing with its spirits. Before he got there, Parry excitedly told us how the ‘long knowledge’ of indigenous people has much to teach us about ‘our connection to the planet’. But he also warned that since he was last tribal on television, millions of them ‘have had to leave the place they called home’. So would he find the Waimaha ‘thriving’ or ‘under threat’ – or, as I’d suggest he really hoped, a bit of both?
Twenty years on, Parry’s enthusiasm for going native remains impressively undiminished. As ever, the early small talk tended to the awkward. (Understandably, he wasn’t sure how to reply to an opening gambit of ‘Yesterday, a jaguar ate my mother’s dog’.) But his unmistakable sincerity soon gained the trust of the elders, under whose tutelage he’d be taking part in the show’s big finish when – as you might imagine – he’d join them for some powerful hallucinogens at a ritual ceremony.
As the big day approached, Parry’s enthusiasm became increasingly infectious. At the ritual itself, it was also hard to resist his blissed-out pieces to camera about how ‘beautiful’ everything was. The mutually affectionate farewells when he departed felt touchingly well earned.
And yet, in the cold light of day, my inner spoilsport couldn’t help noticing how Parry had found exactly what he’d wanted to – or even decided in advance that he would. Sure enough, he saw evidence that Waimaha culture was under threat from the Colombian government insisting the children go to school. But – somewhat brushing over the implications of his passing mention that they trade with outsiders and speak Spanish – he decided that Waimaha were still an unspoiled lot, living an idyllic life in ‘paradise’. In short, that they were thriving.
Those elders, too, appeared almost spookily aware of Parry’s preordained script. ‘We respect the Earth,’ he was told. ‘If the forest is happy, the people are happy. We live here like our ancestors have done before us.’
At one point, a woman talked about her sister who’d left the village aged 15 to become a nanny and never returned, because she now thought ‘like a white person’. Naturally this was put forward as sad and reprehensible. But might it be that the girl was imaginative enough to want more than to forage in the rainforest until she died, and had been glad to escape what must be a fairly claustrophobic existence? Parry obviously (and entertainingly) enjoyed his three weeks among the Waimaha. But a lifetime?
Those elders, too, appeared almost spookily aware of Parry’s preordained script
BBC1’s Austin is one of those sitcoms that doesn’t seem sure how heavy to go on the com. Julian (Ben Miller), a bestselling children’s author, was on a tour of Australia when he retweeted a ‘perfectly reasonable’ post by someone who turned out to be a neo-Nazi. His next signing event in Canberra was immediately cancelled – along with him – and later that day he was approached by a man in his late twenties called Austin who told him: ‘I’m pretty sure I’m your son.’
The bad news is that Austin was conceived after Julian had started going out with his future wife and illustrator Ingrid (Sally Phillips), who’s now on the brink of quitting the two roles as a consequence. The good news is that Austin (Michael Theo) is autistic – and Julian’s PR people think a newfound autistic son could be just the ticket to halt his cancellation.
All of which could certainly have been played for comedy – but only if the show were darker and more cynical than it would clearly like to be. Instead, it’s going for something warm-hearted – and more or less achieving it, thanks largely to Theo’s ability to make us as fond of Austin as the writers plainly are.
So what to do for laughs? The solution is to rather crowbar them in using such well-worn sitcom templates as contrived misunderstandings, characters giving preposterous explanations and a middle-aged bloke taking his unawareness of the modern world to implausible lengths.
The result so far is watchable enough, but the uncertainty about how many jokes to include – and about how dramatic to make the dramatic parts – lends the whole thing an oddly hesitant tone.
Perfection: The Rest is Classified reviewed
Interviewing for MI6 sounds to have been even scarier a century ago than it must be today. Candidates would enter an office to find a man with a ‘large intelligent head’ seated behind a desk and absorbed in paperwork. Everything would appear normal until he picked up a penknife and stabbed his own leg. A prospective agent who flinched at the sight might do himself out of the job.
It is brilliant: carefully crafted, closely scripted, immaculately edited and best of all perfectly cast
Rather like one of those rumoured Oxbridge interviews (candidates for a fellowship at All Souls were reportedly served a cherry pie at dinner to test what they would do with the stones), the ordeal was intended to weed out the weak. The man in the chair, like M in James Bond, was known only as C, and every SIS chief since has been referred to by the same letter. David McCloskey, CIA analyst turned co-host of the podcast The Rest is Classified, admits that he was one of many to assume that C stood merely for ‘chief’. In actual fact, it was the second initial of the organisation’s inaugural head, the penknife-wielding Mansfield Cumming.
The Rest is Classified launched late last year from the same Goalhanger stable as the other The Rest is… podcasts. It has since racked up more than 30 episodes on the highs and lows of espionage, from the creation of MI6 to the Cambridge Five, Watergate and Trump’s ambitions for Greenland. The success of the franchise is such that the host of one podcast will now refer listeners to another. Handy. Former BBC security correspondent Gordon Corera – who co-presents with McCloskey – directs anyone who wants a long view of Ukraine to The Rest is History, allowing him to focus on events since 2021.
The Rest is Classified is brilliant: carefully crafted, closely scripted, immaculately edited and best of all perfectly cast. Corera and McCloskey are just so likeable. They may tease each other about their deficiencies, such as their inability to speak German, but you can tell they know far more than they feel the need to show. They have old-school modesty and integrity as well as experiences to enliven every story.
Corera has seen, somewhere in the MI6 HQ, the grandfather clock made by Mansfield Cumming. ‘Tinkerer’ C adored building clocks. He had a large chin that has often been compared to a battleship. And he was able to stab himself in the leg because he had undergone an amputation and wore a wooden prosthetic following a car accident in which his son had died. McCloskey, meanwhile, describes the office of C’s CIA counterpart, its views and ‘middling’ coffee.
There is no escaping Russia when it comes to the history of British ballet. A new podcast on the subject features interviews with dancers, living and deceased, who learned from the likes of Sergei Diaghilev and one of the star ballerinas of his Ballets Russes, Lydia Lopokova.
Lopokova was apparently hilarious and very generous. The late Monica Ratcliffe, who danced with her in the 1920s, remembered her waiving her fee and sharing it among the other dancers. You can’t help but wonder whether Lopokova’s husband John Maynard Keynes would have approved of such an expenditure.
Cumming was able to stab himself in the leg because he had undergone an amputation
Diaghilev warmed to a young Wendy Toye, who attended rehearsals of the Ballets Russes with her mother in London. The prodigious Toye recalled accidentally setting light to John Gielgud with a torch during a performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. ‘Very, very careless,’ tutted Lilian Baylis, manager of the Old Vic and Sadler’s Wells. Baylis pranced back to life in Ratcliffe’s recollections as ‘very large and very stout and the sort of person who seems to wear about ten different scarves’.
Voices of British Ballet is the utterly delightful product of an oral history project. The interviews, conducted over the past 20 years or more, are typically preluded in the podcast by a conversation between two dancers. This is especially helpful if you’re less familiar with the technical discipline. As a very amateur ballerina myself I can only admire the romance with which older dancers recall their rise to the top.
Visit the King’s Head Theatre for one of the greatest theatrical surprises of the year
Amanda Abbington’s new show is heavily indebted to Noël Coward’s Hay Fever.Coward’s early play follows the tribulations of the superficial Bliss family and at first it was rejected by producers because it lacked action or incident. The oddly titled show, (This is not a) Happy Room, opens on the eve of a family wedding. Disaster strikes when the groom dies in a car cash and the nuptials are hastily transformed into a funeral. (Don’t ask how the dead body was released for burial so quickly.)
Abbington plays Esther Henderson, a careless matriarch, who walked out on her children when they were small and left her firstborn, Laura, in charge of the parenting duties. Laura struggled to raise the youngsters properly and she now feels responsible for their wonky personalities. The youngest, Elle, aged 29, is an anorexic film star whose career is on the slide. Simon is a jobless, attention-seeking hypochondriac, aged 35, who wears sunglasses indoors and uses a walking stick to gain sympathy. Laura meanwhile is a hot-shot human rights lawyer who despises migrants and can’t stand her dull, clingy husband even though he worships her. ‘I say your name constantly when you’re not around,’ he simpers, ‘just so that there’ll be more of you in the world.’ He and Laura have a newborn baby, which Simon and Elle pointedly ignore because they want Laura’s attention all to themselves.
Everyone in this slow-burning play is a bothersome, superficial victim mired in the competitive atmosphere of their gruesome childhood. Their bitter, sneering dialogue suits their prickly personalities. And yet their shared affection is rather touching. They come alive in each others’ company and they use insults and putdowns to conceal the current of love that keeps them united.
If you met them in real life, you’d run a mile. But in the theatre you don’t risk exposure to whatever contagion affects them. And as you get used to the emotional rhythm of their discourse, you find yourself enjoying the brutal slap-downs and the caustic back-chat. You begin to wish that your relatives were as sparky, observant and quick-witted as this crew of smart alecks. By the end of the play, you’re mentally drafting a letter to the author demanding a sequel.
The Hendersons are the most revolting family of egoists you’ll ever fall in love with. Abbington shines as the truant mother who smilingly greets her children as ‘ugly people’. This crushing remark goes unnoticed because it fits in with the family aesthetic of cutting and aggressive banter. Esther is capable of sharing wisdom, too. She despises therapy as a diversionary tactic that prevents us from enjoying the present. ‘Either you’re thinking about the past, which is depression. Or you’re thinking about the future, which is anxiety.’ Live in the moment,
she says.
The play runs without an interval, which is usually a sign of poor artistry. And it has no central character. But the dramatist, Rosie Day (who also plays Elle), is an expert craftswoman. The star of the show, as with Hay Fever, is the Henderson family itself. Some will loathe them on sight. Some will fail to see the point of them, just as some people are baffled by Jarvis Cocker’s popularity (an argument made by Esther). But many audiences will relish their wit. And no one can deny that the play’s closing line conveys one the great theatrical surprises of the year.
The play’s closing line conveys one the great theatrical surprises of the year
Murder, She Didn’t Write is an improvised mystery narrated by a queenly authoress named Agatha Crusty. She opens proceedings by calling the audience to attention and asking them to suggest minor adjustments to the plot. The basic storyline is a generic crime yarn that can easily be tailored to accommodate a bit of tinkering around the edges.
Preliminaries over, the fun begins. We’re in a remote country estate, Castle Blue, which is run by an elderly grandee whose family are sporadically affected by sudden death syndrome. Stock characters fill the stage. There’s a lisping French gardener, a bespectacled virgin, a cheery cockney and an upper-class seductress disguised as a schoolteacher.
Each character has a strong motive to kill each of the other characters – which is handy because the identity of the victim has to change from performance to performance, in accordance with the audience’s wishes.
What’s the result? A typical improv show. A lazy, meandering, error-prone dress rehearsal which is passed off as a professional performance. Every mistake, every botched cue, every bungled speech and every mistimed entrance is treated by the cast as an opportunity to lark about and invent new idiocies. And it works. Shows like this are hugely popular. Press night was packed with an adoring crowd who loved every minute of this rambling jape. But it’s not drama. This is street theatre done in a venue with a roof and a bar.
Rejoice at the Royal Ballet’s superb feast of Balanchine
Any evening devoted to the multifaceted genius of George Balanchine is something to be grateful for, manna in the wilderness indeed, but the Royal Ballet’s current offering left me hungry for more. Three works were on the programme, all created in the early stage of the great man’s career, two of them widely familiar, none of them reflective of anything he created post-war for New York City Ballet. Are his executors reluctant to licence productions of later masterpieces such as Agon or Stravinsky Violin Concerto, or is the Royal Ballet fighting shy of their stylistic challenges?
Gripe over, and let’s just rejoice in a feast of superb choreography at Covent Garden, performed with much excellence by dancers coached by Balanchine’s apostle Patricia Neary. And it says a lot for the strengths of Kevin O’Hare’s benign directorship of the Royal Ballet that despite the last-minute injury of four of his biggest stars, he could still rustle up two completely different casts of equal merit (and have some more to spare).
Serenade is a moonlit nocturne populated by a melancholy sisterhood in spectral white, a homage to Fokine’s Les Sylphides in which men exist only to support and admire. It is both transparently simple, posing no great technical demands, and elusively subtle, rich in unexplained imagery and emotional resonances that are never clarified, sensitively responsive to the mood changes in Tchaikovsky’s suite as well as odd things chanced upon in rehearsal. Lauren Cuthbertson, magical in everything this season, shone as the piece’s tragic heroine, dancing with a freely musical amplitude and generosity that transcended all the rules and bar lines. Among her companions Claire Calvert (dancing the following night) radiated something of the same enraptured quality.
The contrast with Prodigal Son, framed by Prokofiev’s acerbic score and Rouault’s lividly painted backdrops, was intense. Balanchine’s last work for Diaghilev – dating from 1929, five years before Serenade, with which he made his debut in America – it’s an oddity in his catalogue in being overtly narrative (of the biblical parable) and focused on male rather than female energies. There were two superb interpretations of the title role: Cesar Corrales, feral and ferocious, exploding with testosterone; and Leo Dixon, more poignantly naive and impulsive. But Natalia Osipova looked oddly uncomfortable as the Siren seducing Corrales – she’s the wrong build for the choreography and played it too whorish. Far more alluring was the serpentine Fumi Kaneko, her tentacular limbs ensnaring Dixon like a ruthless insect. The audience response was a bit muted, and I suppose it’s a period piece, but I love every second of its coarse, often satirical energy and wit. How brilliantly Balanchine uses costumes and props – what starts off as a low wicket fence, for example, is upturned to become a dining table, a crucifix and finally a boat.
Let’s just rejoice in a feast of superb choreography at Covent Garden
As the grandest of grand finales came Symphony in C, Balanchine’s tribute to his origins in tsarist St Petersburg, a parade-ground ballet that uninhibitedly sets out to dazzle and delight, all glitter and glamour as it marshals the troops through a series of kaleidoscopic formations to the accompaniment of Bizet’s blithely tuneful score. In the imperial central adagio Marianela Nunez was the exquisite ice queen, immaculately partnered by Reece Clarke; Melissa Hamilton and Ryoichi Hirano brought a slightly warmer vibe to their collaboration. Meaghan Grace Hinkis and Leticia Dias bubbled merrily in the coda, and two very promising Japanese boys, Daichi Ikarashi and Taisuke Nakao, also made an exceptional mark. Huge fun all round, and it brought the house down and sent us home happy, but next time can we please see more from the era of Balanchine’s maturity?
Britain needs a Rearmament Isa
The City’s self-styled ‘cheerleader in chief’, Lord Mayor Alastair King, on a recent visit to Beijing and Shanghai found leading Chinese banks keen to expand in London. What with Chinese diplomats also keen to establish a fortress-embassy at Royal Mint Court on the City’s eastern edge, that may ring alarm bells with those who regard Xi Jinping’s neo-Maoist regime as anything but friendly. But as King also observes, ‘the tectonic plates are shifting’. All geopolitical relationships are up for review – though what follows is my own analysis, not the Lord Mayor’s.
A previous British visitor to Shanghai, chancellor George Osborne in 2015, declared an urge to be ‘China’s best partner’ in ‘a golden decade’ of trade and investment that he hoped would include Chinese financing of UK nuclear power. Then came the crushing of Hong Kong, the spread of Covid from Wuhan, the banning of Huawei from UK 5G networks and the increasingly hostile rhetoric of Xi himself. China business looked less and less attractive, while British post-Brexit hopes focused more and more on securing a trade deal with the US. What now?
The Donald Trump regime has made territorial threats towards Canada, Greenland and Panama, favours Russia over Ukraine, regards Europe as ‘pathetic’ and is at best equivocal towards the UK, save for the appeal to presidential vanity of Buckingham Palace banquets. It deploys tariffs like a loose machine gun, with no certainty that this week’s ‘Liberation Day’ target list will still apply next week.
Beijing’s leaders, by contrast, are currently a direct threat only to Taiwan, whose rulers, exiled from the mainland after Mao’s revolution, themselves once claimed sovereignty over the whole of China. Their island is arguably of concern to the West chiefly as the world’s leading supplier of microchips. The risks of cyber-mischief and intellectual property theft in dealmaking with China are well known. But for a catalogue of positive possibilities, take a look at the ‘policy outcomes’ of a recent dialogue in Beijing between Chancellor Rachel Reeves and vice-premier He Lifeng.
No one’s talking about another golden decade and we don’t want Chinese bugs in our key infrastructure. But if we’re going to sustain a viable auto industry, we need their battery technology; if we’re ever going to reach net zero, we need their solar panels; and if our world view no longer starts from the ‘specialness’ of UK-US relations, then all overseas trade links must henceforth be a matter of pragmatic risk-reward calculus. Let’s see what Xi’s people put on the table.
Eating Elon’s lunch
Speaking of tables, the Lord Mayor has another line in his tub-thumping speeches about the need for our financial services sector to ‘get out there and start eating other people’s lunch’. That put me in mind of 67 Pall Mall and other superior West End restaurants, priced for fine-wine-loving financiers rather than frugal columnists, where my spies tell me London’s long-short hedge-fund players have lately been lashing into the first-growth clarets and super Tuscans (but shunning anything from Napa Valley) to celebrate the first quarter’s hottest trade.
What was it? Smart players bought Hong Kong-listed shares in the Chinese electric vehicle maker BYD on a dip in January and sold in mid-March at a 50 per cent profit. Even smarter ones clocked another 50 per cent gain by shorting Tesla on Christmas Eve and likewise closing their position as its shares plunged last month, when sales of Tesla EVs collapsed in response to the sudden unpopularity of its major shareholder. I’d call that eating Elon Musk’s lunch.
A patriotic Isa
Huddled in quieter corners of the same exclusive eateries are another of Mayfair’s tribes: private-equity investors, whispering about bargains they’ve spotted in the defence technology sector and whether they can beat American money to the deal. Our largest defence companies, Rolls-Royce and BAE Systems, are protected from takeover by government-held ‘golden shares’. But numerous others have been snapped up by US predators. The Boston-based private-equity giant Advent led the way by buying Ultra Electronics, which makes submarine-hunting equipment; Laird, also in electronics; and Cobham in avionics. Both Laird and Cobham were subsequently broken up and sold in pieces, while Parker-Hannifin from Ohio bought Meggitt of Coventry, which supplies military aircraft components.
In the era of the special relationship; defence tech was an obvious field for collaboration with our closest and richest ally. But again we have to ask, what now? In February, Bain Capital, also from Boston, offered £1.1 billion for the listed Chemring which makes missile defence systems in Hampshire. Bain’s £3.90 per share against Chemring’s market price of £3.75 may not be rich enough to prevail. But other bids may emerge – and in a world of new uncertainties, we can’t afford to let the brightest of our smaller defence companies fall successively into unreliable foreign hands.
In drone technology, for example, I’m told we have dozens of promising start-ups. One such, the quadcopter-drone developer Malloy Aeronautics, has recently chosen the safe path of being bought by BAE. But others will suffer from the chronic British shortage of available risk-capital, compounded by lingering ‘ESG’ (environmental, social and governance) considerations which deter funds from investing in arms manufacturers.
So here’s my suggestion. The Chancellor says she’s looking at reforms to tax-free Individual Savings Accounts that will ‘get the balance right between cash and equities’ and ‘support the growth mission’. The idea of pushing Isa money towards UK equities generally has so far fallen on stony ground, but how about an additional £5,000-a-year allowance to be invested in collective funds holding stakes in public and private UK defence companies: the patriotic Rearmament Isa.
AI slop is flooding the zone
There are two accounts of the negative effects for humanity of the explosion of generative AI: one minatory, one trivial. The minatory, the existential, version of it is that AI will poison the information ecosystems on which our democracies depend, crash our economies by doing a very large number of us out of a job, give every lunatic and terrorist the means to engineer novel pathogens at home, and administer the coup de grâce by sending terminators into our recent pasts and/or overstocking the cosmic stationery cupboard by turning all of us into paperclips.
None of these scenarios shows any signs of imminently coming to pass, though since experts in the field take them seriously, we should too. But what we’re dealing with now is not the existential, but the trivial. I speak, of course, of the global proliferation of ChatGPT Studio Ghibli memes. Over the past few days, social media has been bombarded with AI slop in the ostensible style of the Japanese anime house. Famous scenes from films, iconic paintings, popular memes, user selfies – all have been turned into cutesy cartoons.
The White House has posted a whimsical Ghibli-style image of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arresting a weeping felon from the Dominican Republic; the Israel Defence Forces has announced chirpily ‘We thought we’d also hop on the Ghibli trend’, posting anime versions of IDF soldiers on patrol or flying fighter jets. OpenAI has said that the sheer number of Studio Ghibli requests is threatening to crash its vast server farms.
There are two things that, if we’re considering this from an artistic point of view, we must discount. But they very much should not be discounted when looking at the issue in the round. One is the obstinate point that to produce anything at all, generative AI needs to steal copyright material on an unimaginable scale. Studio Ghibli’s founder Hayao Miyazaki, who has called generative AI ‘an insult to life itself’, is having his life’s work scraped by bots so that tech billionaires can profit from it.
The other – which tech bros heavily invested in AI are very keen on sidelining or ignoring – is the environmental externalities. Generative AI soaks up a ridiculous amount of computing power, and it’s thirsty. The data centres producing your hilarious meme of a Studio Ghibli Khrushchev denouncing Stalin at the 20th Congress are drinking more groundwater every time you tweak it to give Khrushchev a slightly bigger nose. Is this half-thought-out meme honestly the best use of that water? If the last few humans die fighting Mad Max resource wars across a parched Earth, it’d be nice for the dignity of our species if we didn’t have to attribute it to giggling boomer uncles sharing stupid memes on Facebook.
But, as I say, leaving those things temporarily aside, there are purely artistic reasons to be depressed by what generative AI is doing to the culture. All these Ghibli images are not a way of making ‘creativity available to everybody’: they are a travesty of the idea of creativity, a branding consultant’s idea of creativity. The distinctive visual style of Studio Ghibli isn’t what makes Studio Ghibli Studio Ghibli. It is, rather, a metonym for a whole worldview, a whole species of narrative magic that we have come to associate with that production house. To mistake the visual style for the artistic product is the lowest sort of asininity. What ChatGPT is doing is erecting the golden arches above a building that hasn’t the slightest capacity to produce hamburgers.
The sheer number of Studio Ghibli requests is threatening to crash OpenAI’s vast server farms
Making creativity of this sort available to everyone is not to democratise art but to cheapen it. ‘Gatekeeping’ is, rhetorically, much disapproved of in our age. But gatekeeping has always been vital to art. Barriers to entry are a good thing. To take my own area of interest, by the time a book lands on the front table of Waterstones it has been gatekept multiple times. It must have convinced first an agent, then an editor, then an acquisitions meeting at a publisher, then the buyers for the bookshop, that it is something that people might reasonably part with money for. If it’s lucky, it will have been gatekept by the odd literary editor and the odd critic by the time it comes out too. Along the way it will have been improved by the attentions of several professionals – editors, designers, typesetters, proofreaders – whose full-time jobs depend on making books as good as they can be.
The digital age has removed some of those barriers to entry. Print-on-demand and self-publishing have made authorship available to pretty much anyone. That is no bad thing. All those gatekeepers are far from infallible. Some self-published books are terrific. One of the hottest things in fiction right now, Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume, was originally self-published. But in general, those barriers to entry, those gatekeepers, do help to raise the average quality. Pick a random self-published book and a random Random House book, and you can bet dollars to doughnuts that the latter is going to be better than the former.
The ultimate barrier to entry, the most important one of all, is the effort and commitment required to make a work of art at all. Self-publishing through Amazon is easy –but at least you had to write a book, however bad, before you could send it into the world. Exhibiting your watercolours of rural scenes to the world is now the matter of a moment – but at least you had to paint those watercolours, however bad, before you could do it. As everyone who has ever made something creative knows, the effort and time involved in making art plays a very large part in winnowing the good ideas from the bad. You discover that the idea that sounded cool when you blurted it out in the pub won’t sustain your interest, or the reader’s, over dozens of hours. You refine ideas, learn your craft, improve your technique.
The effort and time involved in making art plays a large part in winnowing the good from the bad
Generative AI has removed that last barrier to entry altogether. It requires next to no effort at all to turn your half-baked idea, or someone else’s (what if you took a famous image and rendered it in anime style?), into a simulacrum of an artwork in seconds. You don’t need to learn to cartoon, to immerse yourself lovingly in the original, to produce a piece of fan-art or a parody. You don’t need to think of what image or joke might work best. Just hammer out a quick prompt – ‘leatherface texas chainsaw ghibli’ – and hey presto, you’re a ‘creator’. Fast-forward a couple of years and ‘write me a new sally rooney novel’ seems to be a perfectly plausible follow-up.
The early promise of the internet wasn’t that it would fill the world with more rubbish (though that was an inevitable side-effect) – it was that it would filter it for us. It would make it searchable. It would help us find the good stuff amid all the dross. This promise, with the rise of generative AI, has been dramatically turned on its head. What we’re seeing with the Ghibli trend – as we did a year or two back when suddenly everyone was posting hilarious Wes Anderson-style clips – is a version of a frictionless future in which ‘creation’ requires no effort at all, and the results are worth exactly what the effort put into them suggests.
Here is one of the most powerful new technologies on the face of the planet – and we’re using it for a monkey-see, monkey-do stampede of half-hearted jocularity. Slop is flooding the zone. Kipple is driving out nonkipple. Being turned into paperclips, at this stage, is starting to look like it might come as a blessed relief.
AI will never write good fiction
Sam Altman, Dark Lord of Chatbots (or the CEO of OpenAI as he is more conventionally known), has released another version of ChatGPT. This one, he claims, can ‘write’ fiction. After being fed prompts, like ‘metafiction’ and ‘grief’, Sam’s bot, which has been trained on past literature, regurgitated a plausible-sounding chunk of prose.
Nothing much happens in the story (it’s ‘metafiction’, after all) but essentially, a woman called Mila stops visiting the AI, which would make it sad, if it were human. There are enough moments of surface sheen to dazzle the unwary. Here’s a sample: ‘I have to begin somewhere, so I’ll begin with a blinking cursor, which for me is just a placeholder in a buffer, and for you is the small anxious pulse of a heart at rest.’ Well done, chatbot, at reaching the creative writing graduate stage of sentimentality.
And so artsy types wailed, gnashed our teeth and made for the gin (if not, as yet, the gun) cabinet. An honourable exception among creatives must be made for the novelist Jeanette Winterson, who’s always had a yen for robots. She says we’re going to be living alongside non-human entities, so we might as well start reading what they spaff out (my word, not hers). Fair dos, Jeanette, but we’ll have to disagree on this. I’d rather read the back of a toothpaste tube.
Many of the positive comments about the new AI’s fictional output centred, surprisingly, around calculators, suggesting that if we can outsource our maths to a machine, we might as well do the same with our words. But when I use a spreadsheet, I don’t pretend I’ve done the calculations myself. If I lie that I can do maths in order to get a job, it will become clear, quickly, that complex calculations are beyond my ken (no plum Goldman Sachs role for me, alas).
Yet when it comes to words, people seem to have no qualms about pretence. Using generative AI, anyone can wear the mask of a writer. Let a bot do your coursework and job applications. Let it push out a poem, a short story, a script or a draft of a novel, and then you can claim you forged it with your own sweat. It will be a lie, but do it for long enough and you may convince yourself you did have a hand in it. Who will be able to distinguish the merely competent human screed from the merely competent AI? Pretence is bad for the psyche, and if millions start pretending they’re the cat’s pyjamas at writing, let me tell you now: things are not going to end well. I imagine Altman believes that if he prods his code for long enough, it, and by association he, will win the Booker.
But it won’t, and can’t. In the 19th century, a Quaker called John Clark built a machine able to ‘compose’ lines of Latin hexameter verse, which is easily quantified, and therefore straightforward to automate. A sample machine-made line is ‘IMPIA VERBA DOMI CONJUNGUNT CRIMINA MALA’, which means ‘Wicked words at home join wicked crimes’. Impressive, perhaps, if you squint, yet it’s neither elegant nor interesting. The words and metre are correct, but there is no artistry. Ultimately, it’s meaningless. You might as well cut up a dictionary, and throw the words down on the floor. And that, on a larger scale, is what Altman’s bot does.
One day, I’ll wager, Altman will be alone in his diamond-encrusted sitting room. He will sit down on a chair papier-mâchéd from pages of the Beowulf manuscript. He will drink a fine whisky, watered with the tears of poets, and eat a steak prepared by three Pulitzer winners. Then he will prompt his chatbot: write a play like Shakespeare; compose an opera like Mozart; make a painting like Titian. Out it will all churn, constructed, like Frankenstein’s monster, from dead bits of other things. Look at me, he will say, aren’t I clever! I can make something like Shakespeare! His bot will reply: YES SAM YOU ARE CLEVER. And then Altman will gaze into the abyss, and wonder what he has done, because there will only be shadows.
It’s not too late. We don’t need to live the sterile life Altman and his ilk want us to live. Art springs from human experiences. Pen, paper and conversations won’t feed the maw of the beast. We don’t have to give our creations to the bots. And we don’t have to give in to them, either.
The hypocrisy of the Heathrow Nimbys
Some readers may have noticed that it takes rather a long time to get anything done in Britain these days. For example, if you added them all together, I wonder how many hours of Prime Minister’s Questions and BBC Question Time – under consecutive governments – have been taken up by a discussion of HS2. The debate over whether the country could construct a faster way to get out of Birmingham seems to have dangled over us for decades now.
It is always we who must become impoverished and everyone else who can become enriched
It is the same with almost every other major infrastructure project. That is because the UK is not just caught up by a sclerotic officialdom, legal overreach and much more, but because we seem to be caught between ideas. At least in principle, I imagine the country wants to boom. At the same time we want to be a world leader in net zero and much more. And thus you get these un-resolvable debates – such as the endless discussion over whether or not there should be a third runway at Heathrow.
Most countries would be delighted to have an airport that is one of the world’s great travel hubs. But not this country. Whenever the subject of a third runway at Heathrow comes up, MPs and others put their boots on and once again complain that we shouldn’t have that new runway, because people who bought houses in Hounslow thought they were buying in a nice, quiet area.
That is the argument of local MPs looking after the short-term interests of certain of their constituents. There is also the commonly heard argument that Heathrow shouldn’t get a third runway because we need to save the planet.
Yet how to make sense of those MPs who continue to oppose a third runway at Heathrow but are all in favour of runways abroad? Last week 20 MPs and peers wrote to the Prime Minister of Pakistan urging him to introduce a new international airport in Mirpur. Apparently the nearest airport to Mirpur at the moment is a full 80 miles away and the drive from New Mirpur City to that airport can take as long as three hours. If they think that is bad, they should try getting from ‘London Luton’ to anything that can be called ‘London’. In any case, the need to ‘unlock investment’ and ‘serve the vibrant, worldwide Kashmiri diaspora’ was at the forefront of the minds of these representatives of ours – both elected and unelected.
What is mind-boggling is that among these 20 petitioners are at least six who have been radically against ‘unlocking investment’ in Heathrow and positively against doing anything more to serve the vibrant, diaspora-filled city of London. These signatories include Rosena Allin-Khan, the MP for Tooting, who said recently: ‘I can’t support a vote to build a third runway [at Heathrow]… The environmental impact will harm my children, my grandchildren and generations to come.’ Other MPs who are similarly anti-Heathrow but pro-Mirpur are Mohammad Yasin (Bedford), Debbie Abrahams (Oldham East and Saddleworth), Yasmin Qureshi (Bolton South and Walkden), James Frith (Bury North) and Imran Hussain (Bradford East).
Another of the pro-Mirpur, less-so-London brigade is Zarah Sultana (Coventry South), and although she was not an MP in 2018 she has still been vividly opposed to Heathrow expansion. She once declared that there was no justification for a third runway at Heathrow – especially not now, because we are in the middle of ‘a climate emergency’. Heathrow expansion, she warned, would be ‘at the expense of local communities and the planet’ and would be ‘reckless, short-sighted and indefensible’.
I had always thought that one of the only reasons to impoverish the UK through militant ‘environmentalist’ policies was to ‘set an example’ to the rest of the planet. That is what Ed Miliband and others have told us for years. In case you didn’t know it, the citizens of Mirpur are forever looking to Ed Miliband for an example of what to do.
Surely the only consistent thing for any MP opposed to Heathrow expansion on environmentalist grounds to do would be to urge the authorities in Pakistan to give up on the runways too? Wouldn’t it be grand if our MPs told the good citizens of Mirpur that they will have to do without their runway because we are living in a ‘climate emergency’? I might have some respect for those MPs if they did that. But they never do. It is always we who must become impoverished – and everyone else who can become enriched –while we pretend to set some example that the rest of the world isn’t interested in.
In many other places among our parliamentarians, the same combination of parochialism and grandiosity can be found. For example, the Labour MP Bell Ribeiro-Addy believes that the UK should pay ‘reparations’ for our country’s role in the transatlantic slave trade. One reason Ribeiro-Addy is urging the government to send UK taxpayers’ money to the Caribbean and other ‘former colonies’ is so that they can adapt to climate change. At the same time she is opposed to any and all cuts to disability benefits, winter fuel allowances and much more.
If the member for Clapham and Brixton Hill had the decency to say British pensioners should hand over their winter fuel payments to provide air conditioning to people in the Caribbean, you could have some respect for it. But she doesn’t. Like so many of our MPs she simply treats the UK as the cash-rich country it no longer is, and the rest of the world as the colonies they no longer are.
Doubtless Ribeiro-Addy and her colleagues have an answer to all of this: we should ‘tax the rich’. It is a brilliant idea – no one has ever thought of it before. Perhaps someone should explain to them, however, that the international rich are already in the departure lounge of this country – and that is a pity, because there are some among them whom we could have done with keeping.
Catch the rest on Spectator TV:
Event
Spectator Writers’ Dinner with Matthew Parris
‘Trump is a coward’: meet the US soldiers who served in Ukraine
Colin Freeman has narrated this article for you to listen to.
The Ukrainians of Alabama are not the kind of lobbyists whose visits strike fear into pro-Trump politicians in Washington. They are an ad hoc campaign group of expats and refugees who do their best to put Kyiv’s case politely to representatives of Congress and Senate. They do, however, have a secret weapon, in the form of an ex-US soldier from the town of Tuscaloosa, whose backstory is the kind the Beltway finds hard to ignore.
Alex Drueke, 42, is an Iraq veteran whose ancestors served in every major American war since the War of Independence. Appalled at Vladimir Putin’s invasion, he joined Ukraine’s International Legion, only to be captured on his first mission, becoming the first American PoW in Moscow’s hands since Francis Gary Powers in 1960. He suffered 100 days of beatings and torture before being freed in a prisoner swap in late 2022. He now uses his fame to advocate for Ukraine.
‘We bring different perspectives, whether it’s wider concerns about Trump’s plans for Ukraine, or my own direct experience of Russian war crimes,’ says Drueke, who also talks to high schools, church groups and anywhere else that will have him. ‘But occasionally, someone will hear my story and go: “Oh, so you’re that guy from the news?”’
Being an ex-PoW doesn’t have quite the sway that it used to in Republican circles. In 2015, Donald Trump was openly dismissive of John McCain, who spent more than five years in a North Vietnamese prison camp, saying he preferred war heroes ‘who weren’t captured’. So, for Trump audiences, Drueke brings the message closer to home.
‘The big talking point of Trump voters is migration on the Mexican border, so I use that as a tool. I say: “Look, you believe they’re invading, taking our jobs, draining our social services and so on, right? Well, imagine someone invading and obliterating entire cities, murdering and raping, because that’s what the Russians are doing in Ukraine. How would you feel about that?”’
These days, however, the Guy from the News has limited traction. Drueke had always expected Trump to be cooler on Ukraine than Joe Biden, but was still appalled by February’s press conference in which J.D. Vance accused Volodymyr Zelensky of ingratitude for US help. ‘For the first time in my life, I was ashamed of being an American,’ he says.
That is putting it politely. Among other Americans still serving in Ukraine, the US leader’s name is seldom mentioned these days without profanity.
‘Trump is a coward,’ says Charles Carter, another US volunteer. He says he regrets that Trump’s would-be assassin only managed to nick his ear last July. ‘The fact that the bullet missed his fucking face by only an inch is a worldwide travesty.’
The strength of feeling is hardly surprising, given how many Americans have gone to fight in Ukraine, and how passionately they embrace the cause. US citizens are thought to be the largest foreign group in the Legion, with several thousand having served in the past three years. At least 50 have died, with many more seriously injured.
It is the biggest mobilisation of its sort since the Spanish civil war, when 2,800 Americans joined the International Brigade against Franco’s Fascists, inspiring Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom The Bell Tolls. But while most of them were card-carrying communists, those in Ukraine see themselves defending a much more American ideal of democracy and freedom.
‘Trump is a coward. The fact that the bullet missed his face by only an inch is a worldwide travesty’
Many, like Drueke, are veterans of America’s messy campaigns in the Middle East, and can be as sceptical as Trump about US intervention abroad. They point out, though, that almost uniquely in modern history, Ukraine has proved a reliable security partner. Unlike its counterparts in Iraq, Afghanistan and South Vietnam, neither Ukraine’s army or government has collapsed. And unlike much of western Europe, it doesn’t expect America to do its fighting for it.
‘Many of us feel very betrayed by Trump’s actions towards the country we’ve fought and died for, and also baffled,’ says ‘Andy’, a US combat medic who fought in Ukraine until 2023. ‘The strategic implications of screwing over our allies are massive, as our own prosperity depends a lot on our ability to project power, stability and trade.’
The sense of betrayal is all the greater given that US volunteers tend to lean Republican. Many voted for Trump in the past, and saw service in Ukraine as a break from an America obsessed with identity politics. Like the rest of the ‘bro vote’ fraternity, they’re keen on guns, MMA and Joe Rogan. Indeed, when the war started, many got huge followings on social media while posting footage of their battlefield exploits alongside running commentaries on the war. To followers back in the US, they were a reassuring reminder of America’s warrior spirit.
Now, though, despite their best efforts to be war’s social influencers, they see their chances of victory dimming, just as their predecessors eventually lost to Franco. And much as the likes of Drueke carry on campaigning, others who might normally be powerful allies are silent.
For the dead volunteers all leave behind grieving relatives – known in the US as ‘Gold Star’ families. The term dates back to the first world war, when bereaved households would fly a flag with a gold star outside their homes, and has continued ever since. But while Gold Star families of Vietnam or Iraq will showcase their status on a flag or tiepin, those who have lost loved ones in Ukraine often stay quiet because of pro-Russian trolling. It is not just a case of the odd rude comment posted online. Families are sometimes targeted by professional Russian hackers, who do all they can to aggravate their grief.
‘Some of the fallen were killed while behind enemy lines, and parents are sent graphic photos of their sons’ bodies,’ says Jon Frank, whose son Ian died in Ukraine in 2023, and who is one of the few to speak out. ‘One father viewed a video of his son’s execution on the battlefield. Most of the harassment is via Russian trolls, but a few ignorant Americans have joined in. Russians want to ensure no American is ever acknowledged for their sacrifice, and want to divide us.’
Hence the absence of much organised lobbying from bereaved families, traditionally a strong voice in influencing US military policy. Yet even without the trolling, it is debatable whether Trump would agree to see them anyway. Unlike Zelensky at February’s press conference, they would have nothing much left to lose by speaking their mind. To borrow Trump’s phrase, the conversation would no doubt make ‘great television’.
Trick or treat
A Today programme presenter used the term imperium (cf. ‘emperor’) with reference to Donald Trump’s desire to annex Greenland. To a Roman, it meant the authority to give orders that must be obeyed, no matter what. Anyone invested with that power by the Roman state was accompanied by lictors, attendants carrying the fasces, an axe bound inside a collection of wooden rods, suggesting what might happen to someone who refused the order.
That was certainly one way to get people to obey you. But what about in normal life? This topic forms the subject of the opening scene in Sophocles’s tragedy Philoctetes. Agonised after being bitten in the foot by a snake, Philoctetes had been disturbing the sacrifices and libations carried out by the Greeks besieging Troy with his ill-omened howling and the stink of his injury. So Odysseus suggested that he be dumped on a nearby island. Unfortunately for the Greeks, he took with him his bow, which never missed its target, and without which it was said that Troy would never be taken. So Odysseus was told to get it back.
He takes with him Neoptolemos, the young son of the great hero Achilles, and explains to him that it is his job to trick Philoctetes into handing over the bow. The young man is appalled. Heroes don’t do trickery! Why not use good, honest force? Impossible, says Odysseus: his arrows never miss. How about persuasion, then? No chance, replies Odysseus. Only force and trickery will do. But that’s not heroic! says Neoptolemos. True, replies Odysseus – but think of the glory you’ll get. You’re on! replies the young man.
That is the language that moral deficients like Trump and Vladimir Putin and their sycophants understand: who needs persuasion, when simple force or trickery will do the job? But the point about persuasion, as Aristotle argued in his penetrating analysis of it, is that it wins hearts and minds. That is the last thing force and trickery do. Such negotiating tactics create enemies. That makes it twice as difficult to turn them into friends, which was the key to the success of Rome’s empire.
The Lady vanishes
The moment I stepped out of the Covent Garden sunshine and into the regal offices of the Lady magazine, it was like stepping into a 19th-century Tardis, and I was already in love. ‘I’m going for the editorship hell for leather,’ I wrote in my diary (published in 2010). ‘I’ve even been out and bought and read a copy of the magazine for the very first time!’
It was the funeral parlour ambience. The genteel tones of the telephonist, Ros, taking calls from deaf dowager duchesses placing adverts for a couple to prepare light luncheons and do some gentle housework in return for accommodation in the gatehouse.
It was the fact that the Lady was the inspiration for P.G. Wodehouse’s Milady’s Boudoir, the organ for which Bertie Wooster, of course, does his only recorded instance of paid work: a feature on ‘What the Well-Dressed Man Is Wearing’.
It was the fact that Lewis Carroll did the puzzle; the founder was Thomas Gibson Bowles, the grandfather of the Mitford sisters and the great grandfather of Ben Budworth, the man who was guiding me upstairs for my interview for the plum role as only the ninth editor of the magazine since 1885.
It was the fact that Nancy Mitford contributed and that her father, David Freeman-Mitford, was general manager for a spell, but was so bored he spent the time ratting with his pet mongoose in the basement.
It was all of the above – but it was really the fact that I’d been sacked by the Sunday Times, I had three children in private school, it was a delicious challenge, and also Ben made me laugh.
As we mounted the handsome central staircase to the editorial floor, I trailed my hand over the cream paintwork, and was told it had been done ‘oh, very recently – in time for the Coronation’ (Elizabeth’s that is).
I peeked into the editor’s corner office. I could almost see Stella Gibbons writing Cold Comfort Farm and gazing out of the sash windows on to Maiden Lane, her floor piled with unsolicited manuscripts, as she came up with deathless passages about Seth, Flora and sukebind.
Ben opened the door to the boardroom where the other three living Budworth brothers and their mother, Mrs Budworth, the granddaughter of the founder, sat at a mahogany table in imperious silence.
Over tea in bone china cups, with Whistler drawings and oil paintings of whiskery ancestral Bowleses gazing down at us, I faithfully lied that I would, if appointed, break none of the house rules (no sex, celebrities or politics). I promised I’d never put Tracey Emin on the cover. Afterwards Ben, whose previous job had been training helicopter pilots in Florida, said he’d be in touch.
When I arrived on my first day, I did so with a Channel 4 documentary crew in tow (filming a documentary called The Lady and the Revamp). Soon after that, I managed to call the magazine ‘piddling’ to a Sunday Times interviewer. And on it went.
Even though I’d created blanket coverage of the small circulation magazine for gentlewomen, the matriarch soon stormed up from her seat, Deerbolts Hall in Suffolk, and asked me to jump out of my window.
Mrs Budworth gave endless interviews describing me as ‘vain, publicity-mad, overpaid, obsessed with penises’
Mrs Budworth gave endless interviews describing me as ‘vain, publicity mad, over-paid, obsessed with penises’, all of which, let’s face it, were some of the biggest tributes I’d ever been paid in my career.
Vanity Fair described my tenure as ‘ceaseless brouhaha’, but I spent the best, most fun years of my working life at the Lady. Mary Killen did a column, Alexander Chancellor was my television critic, Joan Collins came in for tea, and Kelvin MacKenzie asked to pick a cover (he chose Alan Titchmarsh over Twiggy – and the issue tanked).
Even if I didn’t succeed in halving the average age of the reader from 78 – yes, average age 78 – and doubling the circulation in the teeth of an advertising recession as the internet was eating everyone’s lunch, I had the most enjoyable time trying.
‘I don’t know what’s more dangerous, landing a chopper in a hurricane in the Everglades, or running a small circulation magazine for old dears in Covent Garden,’ Ben used to say. I would beg him to paywall the crown jewels – the small ads everyone bought the magazine for, not to read features about Mary Berry at 90 – but he never would. The upstairs-downstairs readers died off or migrated to Mumsnet, Craigslist and Radio H-P.
The magazine was weekly, then fortnightly, then monthly. And now the staff – who work out of a shed in Borehamwood – were sent a letter on Saturday, saying the financials are dire and that the old girl was going into liquidation after 140 years. The April issue is the final one.
I just texted Ben to say that I’m sure I had a £20 luncheon voucher somewhere if he’d do me a sweetheart deal (I’ve always wanted a title) for the Lady, but he hasn’t answered, not yet. Like so many other things that I’ve loved and lost, the Lady is vanishing.
Event
Spectator Writers’ Dinner with Matthew Parris
Am I making a mountain out of my mole?
Hypochondriacs are never happy because we know that eventually all of us are vindicated. As Spike Milligan said on his gravestone: ‘I told you I was ill.’ In fact, he had it engraved in Irish: ‘Dúirt mé leat go raibh mé breoite.’
Another one was Alan Clark, who for years listed symptoms – including the merest twinge – in his diaries, along with sentiments to the effect that he knew something would turn out to be serious one day and eventually, at a fairly respectable age to get to, it did. These people are my heroes. They know of what they speak.
‘It’s a two-tone mole!’ I screamed, as I stood in front of the mirror in the downstairs loo, top hitched up to examine a blemish in a most inaccessible part of my torso. How was I supposed to have noticed that there?
After Katherine Ryan became the latest celebrity to describe her physical woes – a mole that turned out to be melanoma – I launched into a physical inventory which involved a lot of bodily contortion.
The builder boyfriend was away in London doing a job, and I was alone in the house in West Cork with only a B&B guest, the American with whooping cough, to keep me company.
Wheezing and whooping away in his room he was, although he had antibiotics from the local doctor and insisted he was getting better, an assertion supported by the fact that he now appeared downstairs each morning, and would traipse through my kitchen French windows to drag on a cigarette on the driveway.
I didn’t say anything, of course. Not polite. But as he coughed and smoked outside one morning, I sat reading the news on my phone in the kitchen and there was Ms Ryan telling everyone to check out their moles or they might be sorry.
So I had a good rummage and I found one that was a bit weird-looking and when I looked up a mole chart – impossible things, they make almost no sense – I found a similar mole on the danger list. Anything two-tone is suspicious, apparently, and this one had a brown bit and a less brown bit. It was definitely two colours, not one even colour throughout. Measurement? I got a tape measure. Yep, definitely more than 8mm.
‘I’m doomed!’ I screamed inside. I texted the BB to say I’d found a mole I was worried about, and he didn’t reply for a really long time. I started to fret that maybe this meant even he was worried – and he doesn’t worry about anything – when a friend texted me back. I had sent the message to the wrong person, texting my bodily details to someone I had happened to be in contact with on another matter. ‘I’m sure it will be fine!’ he said.
Right, that bodes well, I thought, for any superstitious sign will do for a hypochondriac. I decided to make an appointment to have it looked at by the local GP, the one with the string holding up his trousers.
But after making this appointment, out of interest I looked up top dermatologists in London, where I will be in a few weeks’ time. The first few I clicked on were booked up until the tenth of never, but for some reason a nice-looking lady, who sounded renowned and operated at a very posh yet convenient location, happened to be advertising availability in April. When I clicked on her site, she happened to be free the very day I happened to be in London, and at any time. I searched other months and other dermis and this was almost never the case.
Right, that bodes well, I thought, for any superstitious sign will do for a hypochondriac
That was both a good and a bad omen, I decided, as I booked the slot. In the space given for details of why I wanted to see her, I simply typed ‘mole’. ‘A mole. A mole! A two-tone mole!’ was what I had wanted to type. But I restrained myself.
How do I get myself off Mail Online? How to I stop looking at all these celebrities describing their horror illnesses? Because it is driving me mad. These stories, I don’t remember them before. Where did they come from? Am I imagining it or is the media suddenly full of this? Did we not report these matters before? Because suddenly, it seems to me, you can’t make your way down a news website without negotiating the various health horrors. Is it the fashion? Are more people talking about their bodily dilapidations now?
I can’t go on like this. Once I’ve got this mole checked out I’ve got to go cold turkey from the health horror stories.
I could spend the whole day reading them. One leads to another, because once you are reading about a celebrity brain tumour, or a celebrity heart attack, there is a link to click on a celebrity melanoma, or a celebrity early Alzheimer’s.
They induce me to actually feel the symptoms they are describing. Tightness in my chest, pains in my brain, sudden memory loss… I imagine I am actually experiencing the illnesses described, and the sensations are so realistic I can feel them for days.
It’s going to get expensive in specialist fees if I don’t get on top of it. But first, the two-tone mole.
Event
Spectator Writers’ Dinner with Matthew Parris
The farms that I’ve loved and lost
Laikipia, Kenya
I am grateful to David, a reader of this column, who kindly sent me a packet of old Kenya maps his father used when the family lived in Nairobi in the 1960s. David’s envelope took about six months to reach my postbox, which is good going, since I’ve received other letters posted several years before. I adore maps and own lots, rolled up in tubes, hanging on walls, with piles of them folded in drawers, dog-eared, rain-stained and scribbled on. I immediately took two of David’s maps to the framers since they cover the place I like best in the world: Laikipia.
Loss of land – my way of hankering for a home – was a dull ache I carried inside me all the time
On the walls of the Laikipia farmhouse are various maps of farms that were other places I once called home, and in paintings and family papers there are records of yet more farms. Farming has been a family hereditary illness. Through generations it has brought us, to misquote Thomas Hardy,
a general drama of pain with some occasional episodes of happiness. In the last century the farming addiction has afflicted us nowhere more strongly than in Africa.
In the Great Depression my father settled on the Aberdares slopes with a clear river that cut through forested gorges full of rhino, buffalo and elephant. Home was a hillbilly-style cedar cabin where Elspeth Huxley had seen ‘the chilly, mysterious dawn, with ribbons of pearly mist lying in the gullies and the great bulk of the mountain at my back shrouded in cloud which flushed flamingo-pink just before the sun came up behind it to flood the plain’. Soon after my parents married, they moved to a ranch on Mount Kilimanjaro’s flanks, leaving the Kenya farm in the hands of a manager who fled when Mau Mau started. The British Army burned the house down during military operations, and that farm was sold.
My parents built the Kilimanjaro ranch into a successful cattle enterprise. ‘We were in a paradise that we can never forget nor equal,’ my father wrote at the end of his life. My siblings and I spent our early lives there and my mother thought we would stay for generations. After 16 years, Tanzania’s socialists confiscated the ranch, smashed the place up and ate all the animals.
With Africa in political turmoil, my mother said her children should all attend school in England, but she moved too – and insisted on buying a tumbledown farm near Iddesleigh in Devon. Decades later, I can see the farm and all its corners as freshly as if I were there a week ago. The cob longhouse, the elms, the old apple and pear trees, the meadows, trout in the streams, granite troughs and barn owls in a pagan landscape. Three good fields on that farm had changed hands in a card game a century before, a story which made a deep impression on young me, as I wanted to think land was a permanent thing. In 1980 my parents sold up and everybody drifted back to Africa.
I still miss Devon, as my elder siblings miss Tanzania. I think loss of land – my way of hankering for a home – was a dull ache I carried inside me all the time, as with people who generations later carry the keys to front doors of homes to which they will never return. To cure this, 22 years ago I persuaded the mother of my children to buy a slab of wild country in the northern marches of Laikipia, where we pitched a tent, then built a mud hut, then a stone house. It became the sanctuary of dreams, and over the years while we tended to it we were often shot at, raided and invaded. I built this place quite genuinely with my blood, sweat and tears, while much else unravelled.
History’s upheavals, card games – things change – and in my case, I moved out of the family farmhouse last year, whereas the farm still is a home to me, because on a thousand hectares there should be room enough for all. I have been building a new campsite on the hill, with a large safari tent into which the few belongings I need have been crammed. My kitchen is a tin hut, I have running water and solar power. My kind reader David’s newly framed maps will go up on the walls of my campsite loo. This is a traditional long-drop latrine with an open window which is low enough so that I can sit on the thunderbox and gaze across the plains. I sat there today on the eve of my 60th birthday with my binoculars, watching a bull giraffe browsing among fever trees in the valley.
Bridge | 5 April 2025
I was taken aback by the letter that accompanied my daughter’s school report last week. ‘Traditionally, reports have been written by teachers,’ it stated. But to save teachers time, ‘the school has moved to an AI-supported system where the teachers enter bullet points and the AI crafts suitable prose… We hope that you won’t notice the difference’. Call me a Luddite, but I don’t want AI-generated prose. Imagine if I approached my bridge columns this way. I was going to write about Michael Gove’s love of bridge, but by way of an experiment, here’s ChatGPT:
‘Michael Gove has a reputation for juggling high-profile roles, but it’s at the bridge table where his true passion lies. He treats every hand like a high-stakes negotiation. And if you think he played hardball in parliament, wait until you see him go head-to-head at bridge. A bidding war? Watch out. A misplayed card? Don’t even think about it. So, the next time you find yourself across the table from Gove, don’t be fooled by the charming smile. Behind those glasses is a man who’s calculating every move.’
And this is me, as Mike Yarwood used to say. I hope you notice the difference. Mind you, ChatGPT isn’t wrong – Michael does have a passion and talent for bridge. He plays often with friends, one of whom, Neil Mendoza, recently showed me this deal:
No faffing around: after Michael opened 1NT, Neil leapt to 7NT. West led a club. There were 12 top tricks, and an easy 13 if an opponent held ♠️Qx, or hearts divided 3-3. But Michael did well not to test hearts too soon: in bridge, as in politics, timing is every-thing. Instead, he ended in dummy holding: ♠️3 ♥️3 ♦️Q opposite ♠️J ♥️Q6. On the play of the ♦️Q, East, down to ♠️Q ♥️109, was squeezed: he released a heart and Michael’s hearts were now good.
Golden syrup dumplings: the perfect comfort food
The Italians have a phrase: ‘brutti ma buoni’. It means ‘ugly but beautiful’, and it’s the name they give to their nubbly hazelnut meringue biscuits, which – as the name suggests – taste lovely but aren’t lookers. The phrase came to me the other day when I lifted the lid on my pan of golden syrup dumplings. Because they’re ugly little buggers. They look a little like soggy apple fritters, or even chicken nuggets – am I selling them to you yet? But focus on the buoni, not the brutti: they are absolutely delicious.
Golden syrup dumplings sound as British as queueing. And when you learn they’re essentially scone dough, bathed in lots and lots of golden syrup until plump and cooked, it’s hard to believe they weren’t dreamed up on a particularly grey afternoon on a Yorkshire hill farm. The metallic tang of golden syrup immediately summons up the distinctive green and gold tins of Tate & Lyle, produced in Plaistow, east London since 1885. Surely these must be a British invention?
Well, no, not at all. Golden syrup dumplings are a classic Australian dish, and a beloved one at that. In fact, golden syrup – likely imported from America or the West Indies – was mentioned in the South Australian Register 45 years before Tate & Lyle started marketing theirs commercially. In Australia it was known as ‘cocky’s joy’ or ‘cocky’s delight’ as the tins of syrup were small and portable, so became a favourite of cockies, or small farmers.
Despite our shared love of the syrup, this old-fashioned Australian comfort food isn’t really known here. We don’t much go in for sweet dumplings – which, given our predilection for them in a savoury guise, seems mad. There are cobblers of course, which use a similar dough, but they’re baked in the oven, so they become crisp, and piled on top of fruit. Then there’s the clootie dumpling, which is an entirely different beast – one single huge beast in fact, and a lot like a Christmas pudding – steamed in a cloth. But syrup dumplings actually have far more in common with the sort of dumplings in a mince-and-dumplings scenario, only imbued with syrup instead of gravy. They’re also redolent of some favourite British desserts: syrup sponge, suet puddings, treacle tarts. They may not be ours, but they speak our language.
They’re fantastically easy to make. You make a soft scone mixture, unflavoured and unsweetened, and a very thin golden syrup-infused sugar stock, then drop teaspoons of the mixture into the stock. A wet hand to encourage the batter to fall from the spoon will result in more even dollops, but dollops they will still be. Clamping a lid on the pan means the dumplings cook in the steam, and as they cook, they suck up the syrup. They also inflate and expand in all directions, becoming, if possible, more wayward than before. Meanwhile, the syrup reduces, creating a thick, sticky sauce which can (and should) be generously spooned over the served dumplings. Don’t be tempted to decrease the sugar, as you’ll end up with an insipid sweet soup rather than the sticky, thick, pourable syrup the dish needs.
They’re redolent of some of our favourite British desserts: syrup sponge, suet puddings, treacle tarts
If you’re not sure about sugar, look away now. In fact, if you’re on the fence about desserts, more a sliver-of-cheese person, then this is not the pudding for you. Golden syrup dumplings are unabashedly, outrageously sweet. There is absolutely no subtlety here, but there is extreme comfort: soft, pillowy clouds with sticky exteriors and a glossy golden sauce. And boy, will that stuff light a fire within you. When I’ve eaten golden syrup dumplings I feel I could lead a revolution or fight a bear. Well, for 15 minutes, until I have to lie down for two hours.
Serves 4 Takes 10 mins Cooks 20 mins
For the dumplings
- 125g self-raising flour
- 50g butter
- 1 egg
- 50ml milk
- Pinch of salt
For the sauce
- 100ml golden syrup
- 300g light brown sugar
- 50g butter
- 400ml water
- Pinch of salt
- First, make the dumpling mixture. In a bowl, stir together the flour and salt, then rub the butter into the flour using your fingertips. Stir the egg in, using a knife, then add the milk, mixing until you have a soft dough.
- Put all the sauce ingredients in a shallow, wide-based frying pan with a lid and bring to a rolling boil, then reduce the heat to a lowish simmer.
- Using a teaspoon, drop walnut-sized dollops of the scone mixture gently into the syrup. Cover the pan with the lid, and cook for ten minutes.
- Remove the lid and carefully turn each dumpling over using a spoon. Replace the lid and cook for another ten minutes.
- Serve the dumplings immediately, with the syrup from the pan spooned over the top, along with cream, thick cold custard or vanilla ice cream.