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Democracy dies in Romania
If the vote in the first round goes the wrong way, cancel the second round. If the ‘wrong’ candidate is still likely to win the rescheduled election, then detain him before he can register to stand and then ban him. Then hold the election again, this time with a stronger ‘independent’ candidate who with media support can defeat the ally of the ‘wrong’ but more popular candidate you have banned. This is exactly what has happened in Romania.
If ‘democratic values’ trump democracy then you open the door to barring candidates who espouse the ‘wrong’ positions, according to the powers that be
Democratic? Well, if it happened in an ‘official enemy’ country, we can be sure ‘centrists’ would be falling over themselves to denounce it. But when it happens in an EU or Nato member state, in the immortal words of Leslie Nielsen in The Naked Gun, it’s a case of ‘Nothing to see here!’.
The hypocrisy is truly off the scale. The man who should be Romanian president now, if genuine democracy had been allowed to run its course, is Calin Georgescu. He was the winner of the first round of the original presidential elections and looked to be in a good position to win the second round too. He was popular for the reasons I outlined here.
But then in an unprecedented move, just two days before the December run-off, Romania’s constitutional court annulled the entire election, citing declassified intelligence which alleged foreign interference chiefly through Tik Tok videos. Now if you’re going to take the drastic step of cancelling an election 48 hours before it is going to be held, you better have cast-iron evidence and make that cast-iron evidence public. But that hasn’t been done. ‘Authorities still haven’t provided any concrete evidence of Russian interference in the election, frustrating many Romanians’, admitted Rowan Ings of the BBC’s Global Disinformation Unit on 25April.
You don’t have to support or endorse all or even any of Georgescu’s policies or statements to acknowledge that what happened in December was outrageous. Cancelling the second round of a presidential election because the candidate likely to win is a critic of both the EU and Nato (which, let’s be honest, is the real reason it was scrapped) is the antithesis of democracy. To her credit Elena Lasconi, Georgescu’s pro-EU second round opponent thought so too. ‘The constitutional court’s decision is illegal, amoral and crushes the very essence of democracy, voting’, she declared.
Things got even worse in February. Georgescu was detained by police and indicted on his way to register his candidacy for the rescheduled presidential election. The most popular politician in Romania was forbidden to leave the country. There were huge street protests, but guess what, no condemnation from the EU. Instead it was left to US Vice President J.D. Vance to criticise the cancellation of the election – and even for that he was attacked.
And now, in May we finally get the result the bigwigs of Brussels wanted all along. The Romanian people have at last voted the ‘right’ way, for a nice, sensible, pro-EU, pro-Nato ‘centrist’ candidate, the ‘liberal’ mayor of Bucharest, Nicusor Dan, who defeated the boo-hiss, nasty nationalist-conservative and ally of Georgescu, George Simion. There’s no need to annul this election. The result can stand. Crisis over. Ursula von der Leyen and Guy Verhofstadt are ecstatic. Europe has won! Like the Irish who had to vote again after they first rejected the Treaty of Lisbon, the Romanians got there in the end. But what happened in Romania should concern us all. If we genuinely believe in democracy, then votes are everything. If voters want to elect a candidate labelled ‘far-right’ or ‘far-left’, it is entirely up to them.
But note how elite ‘liberal’ discourse has shifted to talking about ‘democratic values’, instead of ‘democracy’. There is a crucial difference. If ‘democratic values’ trump democracy then you open the door to barring candidates who espouse the ‘wrong’ positions, according to the powers that be.
And it’s not just Georgescu. Another populist-nationalist Eurosceptic Romanian politician, Diana Sosoaca, was barred from standing in both the original November presidential election and the re-run. She was banned in November, for making declarations – wait for it – ‘contrary to democratic values’.
Of course, Orwell would have a field day with all of this doublespeak. But it’s happening in real time, in front of our very eyes. In Europe. Today.
Ask yourself this question. Do you really believe that in 2025, a candidate who espouses anti-EU, anti-Nato views in a strategically important country in Europe will be allowed to win an election? Marine Le Pen? She’s been banned too. We routinely criticise other countries for sham elections where only officially ‘approved’ candidates can stand and win, but aren’t we, in the ‘democratic West’ at least halfway there already?
Under Labour, Britain is living beyond its means
The bleak future of the UK’s public finances can be summed up in a few statistics. For the financial year just ended, the Office for National Statistics’ provisional estimate for the government’s deficit – the gap between income and expenditure – is £151.9 billion. The Office for Budget Responsibility’s estimate is that spending on welfare (including the state pension) will rise from £313 billion in 2024/25 to £377 billion in 2029/30 in today’s money – an increase of £64 billion. The government, meanwhile, has proposed changes to the welfare system, reducing Personal Independence Payments (PIPs) which it hopes will save £4.8 billion a year.
The electoral winners will be the party which promises to bring order back to the public finances
These changes have been opposed by 42 Labour MPs who have written to the chief whip to object, although it is reported that a further 100 of them – more than enough to wipe out the government’s majority – have also expressed their intention to rebel. The government also intends to spend £1 billion a year on a back-to-work scheme which it claims will mitigate the fall in benefits for many people. But, like the government’s other efforts to grow its way out of fiscal disaster, it looks like under-delivering: the Learning and Work Institute claims that it will only help 70,000 people back into work by the end of the current Parliament in 2029.
The government, in other words, is only fishing around in the shallows when it comes to trying to rein in public spending. The savings it aims to make will hardly make a dent in the expected increase in the welfare bill.
And yet even those modest savings seem to be politically impossible. We have a party in power, many of whose MPs will not tolerate any cuts to welfare whatsoever. They are not interested in the figures showing that the government is living well beyond its means. They are driven purely by emotion, and by the sense of entitlement and rights. Inasmuch as they are interested in the public finances at all, they imagine that the vast gap can be filled by more taxes where ‘those with the broadest shoulders bear the burden’, especially a wealth tax – in spite of gathering evidence that many of those with broad shoulders have been fleeing the country.
Look rationally at the figures above and there is only one reasonable conclusion: that, barring a sudden change of attitude on the part of those in power, Britain is heading for national bankruptcy. We are going to be in the position that Greece and Spain were in back in 2011. Only in our case there will be no European Central Bank to bail us out.
Maybe the IMF will help, just as it did in the 1970s, but if it does, any rescue package will come with demands for very serious cuts which will make the ‘Tory austerity’ of the 2010s seem extremely mild. Benefits will have to be slashed and whole areas of government spending abandoned.
Global bond investors have already shown signs that they are losing faith in the ability of the UK government to repay its debts. They are demanding interest rates which exceed those demanded in the wake of Kwasi Kwarteng’s infamous mini Budget in 2022. At some point they will call time for good on Britain’s loose fiscal policy – at which point the political landscape is going to change totally. As in 2010, the electoral winners will be the party which promises to bring order back to the public finances and help Britain recover from what will be a very deep national embarrassment. I don’t think it will be the Labour party.
Is Starmer’s EU meeting a ‘surrender summit’?
Ed Miliband’s team appear to have also achieved their goals
A pragmatic ‘reset’ or a ‘surrender summit’? The spin has already started ahead of today’s big UK-EU jamboree at Lancaster House. Three main items are expected to be announced today: a security pact, a declaration on global issues, and a ‘common understanding’ of future topics to be negotiated. Expect plenty of the greatest hits from the Brexit years: cries of ‘betrayal’, talks going ‘down to the wire’ and endless cliches about how ‘nothing is agreed until everything is agreed.’ As with every negotiation, there are likely to be both winners and losers from today’s conference.
A defence deal is likely, enabling greater co-operation and, potentially, further UK access to EU databases too. Britain’s main ask is for its defence companies to be able to bid for contracts under the EU’s new re-armament scheme – ‘Security Action for Europe’. The French want to severely restrict non-EU companies while the Nordics, Baltics and Germany favour greater openness. Future defence talks between the UK and EU will likely be put on a more structured basis too.
Holiday-makers look set to be a winner too. The surprise revelation in the Sunday Times that Britain has secured access to EU E-gates, could help cut looming summer passport queues. However, that comes at a price: Jonathan Reynolds, the Business Secretary, has confirmed this morning that the UK will be signing up to a youth mobility deal for students and others under 30. Numbers will be capped – but Reynolds refused to tell broadcasters the number.
Ed Miliband’s team appear to have also achieved their goals. Britain looks set to merge with Europe’s emissions trading schemes, under which companies can buy and sell permits for their level of carbon emissions. The government says that this will serve a dual purpose: reducing households bills by operating at scale and boosting the net zero transition.
Among the likely losers are British fishermen, with the existing arrangements in Boris Johnson’s Brexit deal due to expire next year. Paris has led demands that the UK now grant a new, very long deal on fishing rights while London is insisting on just four or five years. The EU’s response was to use the bargaining chip of checks on the sale of food, animal and other agricultural products. The UK wants these lifted; Brussels argues that fish should be pegged to the same timescale.
A more surprising loser is the UK university sector. European students will receive a discount on the current international fees they paid to attend UK universities. Currently, one in eight overseas students is from the EU: if they pay fees closer to the £9,250 demanded of UK undergraduates, it will hit many struggling universities. The UK is also likely to rejoin the Erasmus student exchange scheme and scrap the entry fee levied on EU nationals for using the NHS.
The bulk of today’s business will be concluded this morning. The summit starts at 10:15 a.m, ahead of a press conference at Lancaster House at 12:30 p.m ahead of a classic slap-up lunch on the Thames. After that, it will be back to the spin wars as Starmer tries to sell his big Brexit ‘reset.’
Could Bruno Retailleau become France’s next president?
Emmanuel Macron appeared on French television last week and spoke for three hours without saying anything of interest. It was a damning indictment of his eight years in office. The country is up to its eyes in debt, ravaged by insecurity and overwhelmed by immigration, but Macron told the country that none of it is his fault. On the contrary, the President scolded the French for being ‘too pessimistic’.
The disdain is mutual. A poll conducted in the wake of the President’s interminable television interview found that 71 per cent of the people consider him to be a ‘bad’ president. As to the idea that Macron might stand for re-election in 2032 (the French constitution precludes an incumbent serving three consecutive terms), 84 per cent of people expressed their opposition to the idea.
Yes, Retailleau says, mass immigration has not been a success
‘Macronism’ is on its last legs and the question for France is what follows. The polls indicate that the National Rally are still favourites for the 2027 presidential election, but rumours are growing that all is not well within the party. Marine Le Pen is in political limbo after a judge ruled in March that her punishment for misusing EU funds is a five-year disqualification from politics. Her appeal will be heard in the summer of 2026 and Le Pen is confident she will be exonerated.
But in the meantime? The party’s president, Jordan Bardella, appeared on television and described himself as the ‘plan B’, causing some of the National Rally’s senior lieutenants to ‘choke’ with astonishment. Was this Bardella beginning to ease Le Pen out of the frame?
The left is not in much of a position to gloat over the tribulations of the National Rally. The coalition formed a year ago during the campaign for the legislative election is cracking, with the centre-left Socialists troubled by the radicalism of many within the far-left la France Insoumise. At a recent rally in Paris, the Jewish Socialist MP Jerome Guedj was chased away with cries of ‘Zionist bastard, get out!’.
If, as Macron claims, the French are pessimistic, it is because of the political class. Never has there been such a dearth of talent across the spectrum. Macron, often described as a ‘spoilt child’, has turned parliament into a playground.
This in part explains the rise of Bruno Retailleau in recent months. A long-serving Republican senator, the 64-year-old was named Interior Minister last September when former prime minister Michel Barnier was asked to form a government. Barnier didn’t last long as prime minister and his successor, Francois Bayrou, has been equally impotent, but Retailleau’s popularity continues to soar.
This is because he tells the truth. Yes, Retailleau says, mass immigration has not been a success, and it is one of the reasons crime is so rampant. He wants a referendum on immigration – as do the majority of the country – and it is said that his conservative views make Macron ‘ashamed’.
They don’t make Republicans ashamed. That proof came on Sunday, when the party’s members nominated Retailleau their new president. He thrashed his challenger, Laurent Wauquiez, winning 74 per cent of the vote, and in his acceptance speech, Retailleau expressed his belief that all was not lost for the Republican party.
Eighteen years ago they were the dominant force in French politics with 345 MPs out of 577 in the National Assembly; today they have sixty. Like the Tories, the Republicans believed what mattered most was pleasing the chattering classes. They moved to the centre, embraced mass immigration and the rest of the progressive dogma that swept the West in the 2010s. Retailleau promises to return the Republicans to the right. ‘I think that what gives structure to political life is convictions,’ he said on Sunday evening.
The left-wing Le Monde reacted to his victory with the headline: ‘Anti-immigration minister Retailleau becomes leader of French conservatives’. There are other reasons the left hate Retailleau; he is a practising Catholic, a man opposed to gay marriage and assisted dying. As is the wont of some of the French media, Retailleau is now described in some quarters as ‘extreme right’.
It won’t only be the left who are troubled by the rise of Retailleau. His growing influence is also a problem for the National Rally, regardless of whether Le Pen or Bardella runs for the presidency in 2027. In the last three years the National Rally has attracted significant support from two demographics that were traditionally hostile: the retired and white collar graduates. This is largely down to Bardella, who is more economically liberal than Le Pen and isn’t burdened by the family name.
Retailleau will seek to lure these voters back to their former home – the Republicans – while also reaching out to the legions of the disillusioned centre right who feel betrayed by Macron. He will do this by portraying himself as the antidote to the President and also to Bardella. Both rely heavily on image: dapper men who communicate best on social media. Style but little substance.
Retailleau looks like a maths teacher, but he insists that what he lacks in style he makes up for in substance. He has two years to convince voters he is the man to solve France’s myriad problems.
Labour’s defence review is anything but strategic
Fans of the classic British sitcom will feel a warm glow, as details of the forthcoming strategic defence review (SDR) were revealed this weekend. It leads with a proposal for a ‘home guard’ of civilian volunteers to protect the UK’s critical national infrastructure of power plants, airports, telecommunications networks and subsea connectors. Predictably, this cued up references to Dad’s Army, Captain Mainwaring and the Local Defence Volunteers (LDV) raised in the dark days of 1940.
The SDR, commissioned within weeks of the government taking office last July, has been drafted by a team led by former Nato secretary general Lord Robertson of Port Ellen, assisted by General Sir Richard Barrons, ex-head of Joint Forces Command, and County Durham-born Dr Fiona Hill, previously director for Europe and Russia at the US National Security Council. There has been an alarming number of iterations, with a fourth draft presented to ministers in February, but publication is finally believed to be imminent.
Lethality cannot always substitute for numbers
Although the SDR ‘focuses heavily on homeland security, national resilience and the need for the public to realise that Britain has entered a pre-war era’, focusing on the ‘home guard’ proposal seems a peculiar distortion. The wartime LDV, renamed the Home Guard, quickly grew to 1.5 million strong, made up of those ineligible or unfit for military service, at a time when 11,000 British servicemen had been killed and another 40,000 taken prisoner during the Battle of France. The comparison with the small force of several thousand reportedly proposed in the SDR is very loose.
This must not obscure other elements. There seems to be no prospect of a significant increase in the size of the British Army, at 67,107 trade-trained regular personnel (as of 1 January), the smallest since the Napoleonic Wars. The Royal Navy is reportedly demanding a dozen new nuclear-powered hunter-killer submarines, partly to protect underwater cables which are vulnerable to sabotage. A defensive system to defeat ballistic and hypersonic missiles is also believed to feature.
The SDR is entirely theoretical without adequate resources. The government eagerly points to the impending increase in defence spending to 2.5 per cent of GDP from 2027, an additional £13.4 billion, and its ‘ambition’ – remember that word – to go further to 3 per cent in the next parliament. Yet 18 months ago the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee concluded that the Ministry of Defence’s Equipment Plan 2023-33 had a £16.9 billion shortfall between requirements and resources. As I pointed out in February, a larger budget will make good existing shortfalls, rather than leading to a spending spree.
The Ministry of Defence’s response is a predictably robotic and empty exercise in buzzword bingo:
The UK’s strategic defence review sets out a path for the next decade to transform the armed forces to ensure we’re prepared for emerging threats – making Britain secure at home and strong abroad while transforming defence to drive innovation and economic growth as part of our Plan for Change.
In fact, the review seems positively un-strategic. There is no suggestion of any fundamental change in force size or structure, nor any major alteration in the UK’s global posture or the tasks expected of the armed forces. The Chief of the General Staff, General Sir Roly Walker, spoke last year of doubling the army’s ‘lethality’ by 2027 and tripling it by 2030 – essentially, using advances in technology to allow fewer soldiers to kill more of the enemy. But lethality cannot always substitute for numbers.
The Royal Navy was already expecting new hunter-killer submarines. The current Astute class will gradually be replaced by a joint US/UK/Australian design under the AUKUS agreement, beginning in the late 2030s. But note that the sixth and seventh Astute-class boats, HMS Agamemnon and HMS Achilles, have not even entered service yet. Even if joint procurement means that the AUKUS submarines are no more expensive than the Astutes they replace, they will cost around £1.6 billion each, so the idea of buying twelve of them to replace seven Astute-class boats seems financially implausible.
Earlier this month, the Prime Minister told the London Defence Conference that the review would be a ‘first-of-its kind, root and branch’. Unless there are major surprises, it is hard to see how the armed forces will look radically different after its implementation from their current size and shape: slightly bigger, perhaps, and marginally better equipped, with a greater emphasis on UK resilience.
This was always a possibility. The review’s terms of reference placed so many issues outside its scope that the ability to change either roots or branches was very limited. The additional resources are welcome if urgently needed, but so many questions are unanswered: we must also wait for a new National Security Strategy, due before the Nato summit on 24-25 June, and a defence capability command paper in the autumn. At the moment, the strategic defence review feels more like a tactic to get through the next few months.
The far right is gaining footholds across Europe
The relentless rise of the populist right in Europe has been confirmed by provisional first results of elections held yesterday in three different countries: Poland, Portugal and Romania.
In Poland, there will be a run-off in the second round of the presidential election. This is after Rafal Trzaskowski, the centre-left candidate close to the Civic Coalition government of Prime Minister Donald Tusk, was run to an unexpectedly close second place by the ultra-conservative candidate Karol Nawrocki, who is backed by the former ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party. Ominously for the Left, the third and fourth places were also taken by ultra right-wing candidates, whose votes are now likely to go to Nawrocki in the second round.
The political wind in Europe for the past decade has been blowing strongly to the right
In Romania, there was better news for the pro-EU centre. With 90 per cent of the vote in the final round of the presidential election counted, the centre-left mayor of the capital Bucharest, Nicusor Dan, was enjoying a comfortable surprise seven-point lead over the ultra-right populist Georgei Simeon, who won the first round and who polls had predicted to win. Both Simeon and the Polish ultra-right candidates campaigned on a programme of patriotic nationalism and are sceptical of Europe’s support for Ukraine’s resistance to Russia’s invasion. An earlier presidential election in Romania was cancelled by the country’s Supreme Court late last year after another ultra-right candidate’s winning campaign was accused of being funded by Putin’s Russia.
In the third of the weekend’s elections – a snap parliamentary general election in Portugal – the ruling centre-right Democratic Alliance (AD) government was returned with around 32 per cent of the poll. But in a shock result, an ultra-right populist party called Chega, was running neck and neck in second place with the opposition Socialists. Both polled around 23 per cent: the best result for the far right in Portugal since the overthrow of the Salazar dictatorship half a century ago. Like its sister parties across the continent, Chega had campaigned against mass migration and the EU.
The political wind in Europe for the past decade has been blowing strongly to the right, with declining support for old, established left-wing and liberal centre parties. The issue of uncontrolled immigration – especially from the Islamic world – which has fuelled the rise of the right is not going to disappear any time soon.
Starmer’s EU e-passport plan is the ultimate Brexit win
As I was passing through Stockholm’s Arlanda airport last week, a WhatsApp from a colleague pinged into my phone as I came through arrivals, so I’m able, as it happens, to quote verbatim my thoughts at the time: ‘Just in the arrivals hall now, and as I queue in “all other passports”, I am once again reminded of what a stupid [expletive deleted] idea Brexit was.’ I may, indeed, to my shame, have added some unflattering reflections on the policy of the magazine I have the honour to work for.
For most people, it’s only in that passport queue that they will think about Brexit much at all
It strikes me that my experience in that passport queue, and the experience of many like me, was one of the last real Brexit noticeables. For as time goes on, the effects of Brexit – both positive and negative – become less and less visible to most of us. Sure, we can argue until we’re blue in the passport about whether we are significantly poorer than we would have been had we stayed in the EU, or whether we have, conversely, been showered with ‘Brexit dividends’. Nobody who takes either position will be remotely persuaded by the arguments of those who take the other, and most people of sound mind won’t take much of a position at all. The jam has been stirred through the semolina. Economics is a fuzzy discipline at the best of times, and economic counterfactuals are fuzzier still. The moment someone pulls out a slide deck of pie charts and starts burbling on about rates of change in GDP and hypothecated tax spending, all normal people glaze over and turn their attention to Gardeners’ Question Time.
Tangible benefits and harms – the ones you feel in the heart and gut if they are symbolic ones, or in the pocket if they are material ones – are what move elections. And much as the likes of me will regret it, the further that 2016’s climacteric recedes into the past, the thinner and less persuasive arguments about Brexit’s economic harms become – and as Project Fear’s defeat by Project Take Back Control showed, they weren’t all that persuasive at the time.
Shoulda beens, mighta beens: all in the past. There is no control experiment. We are where we are. The shuttered fishmonger reopens as a bakery or a Ladbroke’s. Steve Bray eventually gets tired of shouting, or the batteries in his megaphone run out, and peace descends again on Parliament Square. Inertia favours the status quo.
There’s the odd patriot who, no doubt, rubs the cover of his blue passport with a proud thumb and feels a swelling of pleasure in the knowledge that Brexit gave him that passport. Such a person will no doubt stand waiting for a stamp for 45 minutes in ‘All Other Passports’ with bulldog stoicism while Johnny Foreigner whizzes through the e-passport gates smugly. He will account his wait as a price amply worth paying for the privilege of Taking Back Control.
But for most people, I suspect, it’s only in that passport queue that they will think about Brexit much at all. It will indeed be their once or twice a year chance to be once again reminded of what a stupid [expletive deleted] idea Brexit was. This is not insignificant. I’ve long thought that perhaps the most profound and enduring effect of the 11 September attacks in New York in 2001 was the tightening of airport security.
How many trillions of hours of wasted time, how many human lifetimes, cumulatively, has the post-9/11 regime in almost every airport cost the western world? In lost time, in discontent and annoyance, in hours of productive work forgone in airport queues? Those billions of boots wearily unlaced and shucked, those laptops removed from hand luggage, those bottles of cosmetics sealed in transparent bags, those belts rolled and placed in jacket pockets. One doesn’t like to say ‘the terrorists have won’ but in this respect, they undoubtedly did. The response to their barbarism continues to affect millions of people every single day, a quarter century after a handful of jihadi nutbags flew those planes into those buildings in New York.
So if Sir Keir Starmer’s new deal with the EU does, as has been trailed, contain a provision that Britons will be able to use the e-passport gates in European airports like everybody else, that’s a huge thing. (Leave aside for the moment the question of why, if the technology has always been completely compatible anyway, EU countries were sending us to have our documents manually stamped in ‘all other passports’ anyway. Post-Brexit spite?)
We can argue back and forth over whether, for instance, alignment on EU trade standards is a Sickening Betrayal of Brexit (the inevitable Tory position) or a Thrillingly Independent Sovereign Decision to do exactly what the EU would have us do anyway (the already stated Labour position). But what most people will notice, or now cease to notice, is the length of the queue in the arrivals hall as they set off on their holidays. If they’re not noticing that – if they’re not getting a once- or twice-annual tangible, material reminder of what a stupid [expletive deleted] idea Brexit was – they will tend to forget that Brexit happened at all.
In this respect, far from betraying Brexit with his trade deal, Sir Keir may indeed for a generation, woe though it causes me to say so, be putting the last nail in the coffin of Rejoin.
How to save Britain’s pubs
In Bradford a few weeks ago, I popped into a pub called Jacobs Well. It’s a squat old building, all but submerged behind the stultifyingly ugly road that grinds around the edges of the town centre. The Well was fairly quiet on a Monday night, but everyone there was congregated around the bar and it was immediately apparent that this was a place where long friendships are nurtured and strangers are welcomed. There were interesting cask ales, free hotpot and doorsteps of bread on a side table for anyone who fancied a meal, wonderful photos of old Bradford on the walls and a blackboard chock-full of handwritten notices advertising upcoming band nights and quizzes.
The Jacobs Well probably doesn’t make huge profits. But, as a northerner who has lived in London for 25 years, it made me feel almost tearfully atavistic. ‘Yes,’ I insisted to my fiancée, who grew up in Chelsea and has never lived outside of the capital, ‘this is a pub that knows how to be a pub.’
Contrast this to my last London pub experience in a hostelry which seemed entirely baffled by the concept of an individual wandering in and sitting down with a drink spontaneously. Broadsided by staff wearing basilisk stares, my path was blocked as they interrogated me as to whether I had a booking. When I stated that I hadn’t – and that I had no wish to order a meal – it was as if I’d asked them to solve cold fusion on the spot, or if I could rummage through their house while they’re on holiday.
Depressingly, I (along with many Londoners I suspect) have become used to this kind of hostility from boozers that yearn to be restaurants but have grudgingly settled for gastropub status. Islington seems to be the worst neighbourhood for this long-established landlord trend of hoping that, by charging £32 for a plate of fish, mere drinkers and peanut-munchers will get the message and seek their pint elsewhere.
But the Stasi-esque collaring I recently received was in an entirely mediocre Streatham boozer that harboured no culinary ambitions beyond serving up flimsy looking burgers. I suspect it won’t be long before this pub ‘does an Islington’ and ups its epicurean game to the point where the remnant locals flee to another pub, if they can find one, or simply decide to drink beer in their living room of an evening from now on.
Even if a pub has a posh kitchen, handwritten menus and doesn’t smell of Embassy tips, it is still a pub, and the point of pubs is that you should be able to saunter in at any time you please and be served a pint of beer to sip while propped against the bar counter. Yet despite the desperate state of the UK pub economy, the strategy now seems to be that of excluding anyone who isn’t prepared to shell out three figures on a bottle of Pouilly-Fumé and a three-course meal of game meat, ‘sustainably caught’ fish and organic cheeses.
The point of pubs is that you should be able to saunter in at any time you please and be served a pint of beer to sip while propped against the bar counter
Incredibly, it’s far easier to wander into a restaurant without a booking than into many pubs in London at the moment. But, and sorry if this sounds axiomatic, if I want a restaurant meal then I’ll go to a restaurant. The contrapuntal fraud of London pubs in 2025 is their desire to charge restaurant prices while only offering lackadaisical grog-shop levels of service
I played a game with some friends the other Sunday after having, grudgingly, booked in advance for a roast in one Tooting boozer. We counted seven members of staff who were either chatting among themselves, picking their noses or chugging energy drinks. We were the only people left in the dining area, which, inevitably, now spans 90 per cent of the entire pub space. After spending close to £200 between the four of us, we decided to see how long it would take for any of the seven staff members to come to clear our table.
After 50 minutes we gave up and called them over to ask if they wouldn’t mind doing a tiny bit of work. Would this happen in a restaurant? Unlikely. And the cost of our roast wouldn’t have been much more if we’d decided to dine at the Goring.
We bemoan, quite rightly, the shocking acceleration of pub closures in this country. But what we’re not talking about as much is the pitiful, bowdlerised state of the pubs that remain and the mean processes of faux-gentrification and status-shifting they are so badly attempting in order to stay in business. If it’s a choice between a pub turning into a block of flats or turning into a place that is actively scornful of anyone wandering in off the street with the urge for a seat, a pint and a bag of crisps, then I’m not entirely sure that the flats option is any more nefarious.
If pubs (in London in particular) want to make a comeback then the only way to do it is to make them places that don’t seemingly aspire to the exclusivity (and prices) of Scott’s or Wiltons. Wetherspoons has shown that, with low prices and long opening hours, pubs can still look pretty busy most of the time. How difficult would it be for traditional inns, taverns and hostelries to swap larcenous prices for the few into lower prices for the many?
Start opening for breakfast; make sure at least 50 per cent of the pub is for drinkers; encourage community meetings, book clubs, acoustic sessions and so on to be held in the vault rooms. Have all the daily newspapers splayed out at the bar; let dogs drink water out of old ashtrays; have a liberal approach to smoking in the beer garden; have some basic homemade sandwiches priced at £3 each on sale every lunchtime; and don’t get all antsy if someone accidentally sits in the ‘dining area’ but only wants a gin and tonic.
These are the simple, albeit hardly innovative, tactics that landlords of free houses urgently need to start deploying, rather than putting wood pigeon on the menu for £35 and snarling at anyone who didn’t book a table for seven two weeks ago.
Pubs won’t die if they remember what they’re here for in the first place. But the current identity crisis and panicky tactics are only going to make it even more likely that the last orders bell gives way to a clanging death knell.
The unfashionable truth? Early motherhood is wonderful
At the end of last year I developed a pathological aversion to going to my local supermarket, owing to a garish sign in the window counting down the number of ‘sleeps’ until Christmas. The twee Americanism was grating enough, but I had another reason to feel queasy: I was heavily pregnant with my first baby and my due date was Christmas Day.
Of course, my husband and I were longing to meet our much-wanted son. But as the day drew inexorably closer and I dived ever deeper into the ubiquitous ‘exposés’ on early motherhood, I began to feel afraid. Is it any wonder? To read pretty much any book, magazine or internet forum about becoming a mum in 2025 is to be told that it is an ordeal to be dreaded. If you are lucky enough to escape your body and soul being torn apart by a horrific birth, the fate awaiting you is the total erasure of your ‘pre-baby self’ through the drudgery and isolation of caring for a newborn.
Well, if any pregnant women are reading this, let me write what I dearly wish I could have read last December. Early motherhood is brilliant.
At this point, tradition dictates that I should backpedal and caveat that sentence with some ghoulish stories about bleeding nipples or months of sleep deprivation-induced delirium. But I won’t. In part because women know that having a baby isn’t a walk in the park, and it’s patronising to assume we don’t understand what we’ve signed up for.
But also because, truthfully, that hasn’t been my experience. Once, women who had a terrible time with birth and early motherhood felt unable to talk about it. That taboo, thankfully, has lifted. But the pendulum has now swung too far the other way. Afraid of seeming smug – or perhaps simply out of a fear of boring a society determined to bash parenthood – women who’ve had an easier, or even enjoyable, ride on the motherhood rollercoaster stay silent.
Of course, there have been moments of stress and embarrassment. I had to break off writing this piece because my darling son had an epic screaming tantrum, ending in him passing out semi-naked in my arms like a tiny drunk after a huge pub session. Just yesterday, he mastered the art of rolling over – which would have been cause for celebration, had he not mastered it directly onto another baby in our mum-and-baby group – and proceeded to throw up all over her beautifully smocked dress.
But in the round, unfashionably earnest as it is to say so, Wilfred has made both my husband and me happier than we’ve ever been. There are the obvious joys: the glorious gummy smiles, the gurgling giggles or the fun of dressing him up in silly outfits (he made a very fetching Easter chick).
Wilfred has made both my husband and me happier than we’ve ever been
Then there are the pleasures no one really mentioned. Yes, being a new mum makes you vulnerable – that classic image of a harassed young woman apologising while trying to feed or change a wailing infant in public holds water. But when you’re in that moment, you see another, wonderful side to friends, neighbours and strangers.
There was the older woman in a café who told me I was doing a brilliant job, even while a three-week-old Wilfie attempted to burst her eardrum. And the waiter who, on seeing me breastfeed alone, cut my meal into bite-size chunks I could eat with one hand. I’ve even made friends with my next-door neighbour but one – a lovely mum of two whose name I didn’t even know until this year.
Increasingly, we seem to be a society which sees value only in independence. The most vociferous proponents of the assisted dying bill argue, for example, that feeling like one is a burden is a good enough reason to end one’s life. But having a baby has made me realise that independence isn’t the be-all and end-all, and that being vulnerable and needing help opens the door to the sort of everyday kindnesses.
Or at the very least, a screaming baby in urgent need of a feed is a great excuse to nip into the nearest pub. So, little Wilfie, I hope you’re enjoying your time as an only child. Because I have a funny feeling it won’t last long.
The semicolon had its moment; that moment is over
Rend your cheeks and rub ashes into your hair; for that most elegant, elusive of punctuation marks – the semicolon – is, if not yet quite dead, at least fairly close to being on first name terms with St Peter. Research from Babbel, a ‘learning platform’, shows that usage of the semicolon in texts has plunged by 47 per cent over the past two decades. I would be more surprised if the Pope turned out to be Catholic. These days, students struggle with commas and apostrophes. How can the poor milquetoasts be expected to grasp the finer usages of semicolons?
This is all a terrible shame. Good punctuation is a balm for the soul. As punctuation (or ‘pointing’, as it used to be called) orders sentences, so this relates to the order of mind, body and the universe itself. I do not exaggerate; Cicero himself thought so.
We can thank Aldus Manutius for introducing the semicolon into Venice, in the 1490s (though its previous life, in Ancient Greek, was as a question mark). What better birthplace than La Serenissima? Where brackets, or lunulae, remind us of the moon, simply using a semicolon in a sentence links us to gondolas, to the Bridge of Sighs; to sunlight shining on the waters of the canals. The typesetter Nicolas Jenson used a star in place of the point; I wish this had become common usage. Its first appearance in English – its debut, perhaps – came in the highest possible authority: the Coverdale Bible, printed in Paris in 1538.
Sure, Theodor Adorno thought it looked like a drooping moustache, but I disagree: formed, from two other punctuation marks, it is a gorgeous, enigmatic, humanist chimera. It more closely resembles a gentleman, on the edge of his chair, leaning slightly forwards, poised to hear the aphorism fall from your learned lips. It is the jewelled hand, held out to be kissed; it is the tactful recognition of a guest in the glittering salon.
This, I’m afraid, is why modernity despises the semicolon. It is too courtly, too refined, too subtle. I blame the democratic, cow-steering Americans, who shun it. They think of it as King Lear did the letter zed: unnecessary. For them it is a foppish aristo sipping absinthe, while the plebeian comma sweats beneath. Computers can’t stand it, because its proper usage refuses strict rules. Deploy it and their horrible, bossy ‘writing’ programmes become confused. (Which, to my mind, is more than reason enough to carry on with them.)
Indeed, the semicolon is useful, unlike the poor old punctus percontativus, ⸮, or rhetorical question mark, which vanished along with ruffs. Who needs a mark to tell us a question is rhetorical, I ask you⸮
The semicolon’s role, on the other hand, is manifold. It is caesura; it is release mechanism; it both divides, and connects
The semicolon’s role, on the other hand, is manifold. It is caesura; it is release mechanism; it both divides and connects. ‘It was the best of times; it was the worst of times’ is rendered much better with a semicolon. Witness this gorgeous specimen by Christopher Marlowe, in ‘Hero and Leander’:
Come thither; As she spake this, her toong tript.
For vnawares (Come thither) from her slipt.
And sodainly her former colour chang’d.
And here and there her eies through anger rang’d.
That slight, erotic pause after the first ‘thither’; it’s heavenly. Daniel Defoe’s usage of the semicolon threw Samuel Taylor Coleridge into raptures. When Robinson Crusoe returns to his ship for the final time, he finds a large amount of gold; now all useless and for a moment he wants to let it sink with the ship. Defoe then writes: ‘However, upon second thoughts, I took it away; and wrapping all this in a piece of canvas…’ For Coleridge, this semicolon was ‘exquisite and masterlike… A meaner writer… would have put an ‘!’ after ‘away’. It rendered Defoe, he said, on the same level as Shakespeare. (Incidentally, the original Robinson Crusoe doesn’t have a semicolon there, since it was inserted by a later editor. But still, the point, if you’ll excuse the pun, holds.)
We must resist this decline. Like napkins, black tie and having a glass of champagne before lunch, the semicolon remains a bulwark against civilisational decline. We mustn’t let a generation ape the meaner writers (!) Pause, rest, think; and encourage this most noble of punctuation marks to flourish anew.
Gary Lineker quits the BBC amid antisemitism storm
Good riddance, Gary Lineker. The ex-England striker has now quit the Beeb in a huff, having presented his final Match of the Day show on Sunday. It comes after Lineker shared a social-media post featuring an ‘anti-Semitic’ rat emoji and declared that Israel’s response to the October 7 terrorist attacks was ‘beyond depraved’. Lineker – the Corporation’s highest-paid ‘star’ – had been due to host the BBC’s coverage of the 2026 World Cup but has now ended his contract early. Talk about an early bath…
The Sun got the scoop on his departure, reporting that ‘Gary agreed to leave the BBC for good after meeting bosses last week’, having realised that ‘his position was untenable.’ The paper quotes a source as saying: ‘It is a heartbreaking end to an extraordinary broadcasting career… He remains absolutely devastated by the recent turn of events and is deeply regretful about how his post was interpreted. His last Match of the Day will air on Sunday now and he won’t be back.’ Heartbreaking? Look on the bright side: that’s £1.3 million saved off the Beeb’s salary bill.
Back of the net!
Joe Biden diagnosed with prostate cancer
Joe Biden has been diagnosed with an ‘aggressive form’ of prostate cancer, according to a statement released by his office on Sunday. Biden, 82, was diagnosed on Friday, after he saw a doctor last week for urinary symptoms. The former US president and his family are now reviewing treatment options, with the cancer cells now having spread to the bone.
Prostate cancers are ranked on a ‘Gleason score’ that measures, on a scale of one to 10, how the cancerous cells look compared with normal cells. Biden’s office said his score was nine, suggesting his cancer is among the most aggressive. Metastasised cancer is much harder to treat than localised cancer because it can be hard for drugs to reach all the tumours and completely root out the disease.
However, the former president’s office says that ‘the cancer appears to be hormone-sensitive, which allows for effective management.’ Biden, of course, has dealt with cancer before. Prior to being inaugurated in January 2021, he had several non-melanoma skin cancers surgically removed, and he had a cancerous lesion removed from his chest in February 2023. He notably made cancer a priority of his administration, declaring in 2022 that he wanted to halve the death rate within 25 years.
The news of Biden’s condition follows a Democrat war-of-words over his so-called ‘redemption tour.’ In recent weeks, the ex-President has given his first interviews since leaving office. The octogenarian has tried to defend his legacy, amid a wave of damning accounts on his mental decline in office. Now, all that will be brought to a halt by the news of his latest diagnosis.
A Dad’s Army won’t save Britain
Eighty-five years ago, on 14 May 1940, Anthony Eden, newly-appointed secretary of war in Winston Churchill’s government, went on the radio to appeal for volunteers to join a newly formed defence militia to guard against a German invasion. Originally called the Local Defence Volunteers, this force later became the Home Guard, immortalised on our TV screens as ‘Dad’s Army’.
As things turned out, the Battle of Britain ensured that Operation Sealion, the Nazi invasion plan, never took place, but the Home Guard remained in being, and while never tested in combat, they were a morale-boosting reminder that Britons old and young were ready to do their bit in defending the country. According to the Sunday Times, the idea of reviving the wartime Home Guard forms a central part of the forthcoming Strategic Defence Review of Britain’s military response to a menacing new world order.
Is the government admitting that we just don’t have enough trained soldiers?
The job of guarding our nuclear installations rests with the Civil Nuclear Constabulary, a specially trained and armed branch of the police who have for more than 50 years carried out their job with exemplary efficiency. It is far from clear why they should need the assistance of a scratch force of untrained and inexperienced civilian weekend volunteers to carry out their work.
In the event of a terrorist assault or cyber attack, either the professional army is on hand or the expert advice of IT experts can be called upon – or is the government admitting that we just don’t have enough trained soldiers to do the job?
The still unexplained breakdown in an electricity generating sub-station that caused the closure of Heathrow Airport earlier this year illustrates just how vulnerable our complex network of power and energy supply is, but it is hard to see how an untrained force of well-meaning amateurs can make that shaky situation more stable.
Starmer’s unconvincing portrayal of himself in a military flak jacket may raise the odd mocking snigger, but for a genuine belly laugh we should watch a re-run of Dad’s Army, rather than endure this weak imitation of the real thing.
Let Gary Lineker host Eurovision
So, the foreigners still hate us then. That was the first lesson to take away from the Eurovision Song Contest as our benighted entry, ‘What The Hell Just Happened’ by Remember Monday received not a single vote from the public, after being nestled in the top half via the jury vote. Mind you, it was an object lesson into how not to write a song: a reasonably interesting chorus spavined by a dull verse and inappropriate changes in time signature, which robbed it of all momentum. A lazily written song. So maybe the public was right – although throughout the voting there was the usual evidence of national enmities and friendships.
Once again Graham Norton failed to say anything funny
I don’t believe anybody seriously thought the Israeli dirge was remotely listenable, for example – it came second because people who like Israel voted for it, which is at least a signal to Hamas that they do not enjoy a monopoly of support among the European public. The winner, an Austrian castrati who could sing but had not been given anything resembling a song to perform, came first. In truth, there was not a single memorable tune the entire evening – Italy, I think, came closest.
I wonder if Eurovision has passed its peak popularity, having been embraced by the gay community who now seem to be tiring of it. There was evidence in some of the songs last night – the various chunky caterwauling blonde hags, the stupid novelty song from Sweden – that the contest is settling back to what it was pre the 1990s: a demonstration that mass popular culture is truly awful, with almost no redeeming features. And once again Graham Norton failed to say anything funny and was wildly wrong with his predictions. Give the gig to Lineker.
Nick Thomas-Symonds: ‘We won’t go back to freedom of movement’
The government is currently in the final hours of negotiations with the EU over a new deal that Keir Starmer has said will create a ‘strengthened partnership’ with the bloc. The specifics of the deal are not yet revealed, but it is thought that a youth mobility scheme is on the table. On the BBC this morning, Laura Kuenssberg told Minister for European Relations Nick Thomas-Symonds that some people might feel betrayed by the new deal. Thomas-Symonds told Kuenssberg that it would include a ‘smart and controlled scheme’ and that going back to freedom of movement was a ‘red line’ the government would not cross. The minister claimed the new deal would be ‘absolutely consistent’ with the government’s goal of bringing net migration down, and suggested they wouldn’t discount students in immigration statistics to meet their targets.
Thomas-Symonds: ‘It’s about making Brexit work’
Over on GB News, Camilla Tominey pointed out to Thomas-Symonds that himself and Starmer had previously campaigned for a second Brexit referendum, and asked if he really knew ‘what’s in the national interest’. Thomas-Symonds argued that it is Starmer who has delivered on the promise of a post-Brexit independent trade policy, in achieving deals with India and the US. Tominey suggested that the imminent EU deal might go too far, and that the country will be ‘rule takers and not rule makers’. Thomas-Symonds said the government had ‘moved on from the debates of the past’, and were acting on a ‘hard-headed assessment’ of the UK’s interests. The minister claimed the UK would not be providing troops for an ‘EU army’, but said it was in our national interest to be working closely with the EU at a time of war.
Alex Burghart: ‘We’re on the brink of this big capitulation’
Also on GB News, Conservative MP and shadow chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster Alex Burghart criticised Labour’s deal, telling Camilla Tominey that the government is agreeing to ‘dynamic alignment’ with the EU, meaning the UK will ‘have to follow the EU’s rules on a whole host of regulations’. Burghart argued that the British public had voted for ‘independence and sovereignty’ in 2016, and described the negotiations as a ‘roll over’. Tominey pointed out that the Boris Johnson’s Brexit deal had led to issues at the border, and had reduced exports and imports. Burghart said that since Brexit, the UK’s trade with the rest of the world has increased significantly, and described the ‘remainer’ argument that Brexit would kill UK trade as ‘total rubbish’.
Sir Elton John: ‘The government are just absolute losers’
Speaking to Laura Kuenssberg, Elton John described government plans to allow AI tech firms to use copyrighted creative work without permission as ‘a criminal offence’. This week, the House of Lords backed an amendment to the data bill which would force AI companies to reveal which copyrighted material was used in the training of their models, but the government invoked ‘financial privilege’ to block the amendment. Elton John said he was ‘very angry’ about the government’s position, and told Kuenssberg that AI would rob young artists of their ‘legacy and their income’.
Centrica CEO Chris O’Shea: ‘Inevitably… this asset will be decommissioned’
Centrica, the company which owns British Gas, has asked the government for help in order to invest in its Rough storage facility. On the BBC, CEO Chris O’Shea told Laura Kuenssberg that the site would lose £100 million this year, and that without a plan to expand it, Rough would eventually be decommissioned. Kuenssberg asked why taxpayers and the government should step in, when Centrica is a ‘huge business’. O’Shea said the company wasn’t asking for government money, but they needed help to create the ‘conditions which will unlock £2bn of investment’. Rough represents around half of the UK’s gas storage capacity, and O’Shea claimed that if gas prices stay the same, the facility would become unsustainable and the country would lose energy resilience.
Elton John: Labour are ‘absolute losers’
From Runcorn to Durham, Labour is losing their core vote everywhere. Now, even the luvvies are turning on them. It was less than a year ago that Elton John headlined a celebrity rally, held in the final week of the general election campaign. ‘Let’s get behind Labour to win on July 4!’ the singer declared. But, nine months on, it seems that the Tiny Dancer star has now changed his tune…
Appearing on the BBC’s flagship politics show this morning, John launched a savage attack at ministers over its plans to regulate AI. Describing the government as ‘absolute losers’, he said he felt ‘incredibly betrayed’ over plans to exempt technology firms from copyright laws. He told Laura Kuenssberg that if Peter Kyle, the Science Secretary, goes ahead with plans to allow AI firms to use artists’ content without paying then he would be enabling ‘theft, thievery on a high scale.’
It comes after ministers this week rejected an amendment to the Data Bill to force companies to notify copyright holders if their work is used to train generative AI models. Sir Elton warned that the government is on course to ‘rob young people of their legacy and their income’, telling Kuenssberg that the Prime Minister needed to ‘wise up’, with Kyle singled out as ‘a bit of a moron’.
Talk about giving them a rocket, man…
Why Reeves should be wary of changing cash ISAs
Shrewd parents extol upon their children the importance of stashing away some cash. Unfortunately, they rarely offer much guidance on what to actually do with that money. As a result, much of it gets squirrelled away in pink, ceramic pigs where inflation eats it up.
Many adults make the same mistake as these young savers. The more savvy ones opt to invest, perhaps in an Individual Savings Account (or ISAs), which are tax free savings accounts that let you save up to £20,000 every year, usually in the form of cash or stocks and shares. But it’s widely reported that the Treasury is considering a radical shake up of the market by lowering the amount savers are allowed to deposit in cash.
We Brits tend to opt for the cash ISA. Some 31 per cent of us have one – a whole lot more than the 16 per cent who use the stocks and shares variant – and we commit a lot of money to them. In March alone, £4.2 billion was stashed away, up 31 per cent from the year before.
The problem with this is that it’s widely believed we’d mostly be better off opting for the alternative. Leave the money long enough and stocks and shares generate a better return by riding out the bad times into the good, whereas cash rises at a fixed and predictable rate but fails to benefit from any magic the market brings.
It’s also believed that if the government is going to spend £8-9 billion a year subsidising tax free savings, it might be more worthwhile if more of that money went into British companies rather than being ported over to other parts of the world that generate better returns. Indeed, all this appears to be believed so strongly that the government is actually set to do something about it.
Plans currently being put forward include anything from merging all the different ISAs into one, to sharply reducing the amount of money you can keep in cash to just £5,000 in the hopes that the rest of it will be put into stocks and shares.
The important question of course is will it actually work?
Some of the large fund managers certainly seem to think so. They argue that re-orienting ISAs towards UK equities will encourage an investment culture while also giving our ailing equity markets a much-needed boost.
But should we be so sure? Others are rightly more pessimistic. AJ Bell points out that only one in five people would invest more in the UK stock market if the cash ISA allowance was reduced or abolished. Fear not, however, because fortuitously another idea doing the rounds is simply to require them to by also limiting the amount that could be invested in overseas stocks and shares.
If the everyday saver might not win, who could? The Treasury, probably
But what if savers simply won’t partake? The whole reason many consumers opt for their Cash ISA is because they either don’t consider themselves to be competent investors – accounting for some 22 per cent of Cash ISA users according to the Investment Association – or approaching old age means the time horizons they’re operating on result in fear about losing money.
Restricting the ability to access tax free savings seems entirely unlikely to win over the over 50 per cent of Boomers who hold Cash ISAs – but no other investment product – who feel that no amount of savings would make them feel comfortable investing. Instead, it’s entirely possible that this money stacks up in easy access savings account earning derisory rates that may as well be zero.
So, if the everyday saver might not win, who could? The Treasury, probably. If people across the country put less money into ISAs because they don’t wish to brave the stock market, then those savvy enough to get good rates will be obliged to pay tax on their savings as the personal savings allowance – the amount of money you can earn in interest before paying tax – gets increasingly inflated away. Already tens of thousands face hefty HMRC fines as higher interest rates push them over the personal tax allowance and the automated tax process doesn’t work because the government can’t match about one in five bank accounts with a taxpayer record. Of course, the Treasury would also save money on subsidising ISAs in the first place.
Banks would probably also be in line for a boost as people leave cash in easy access savers or worse their current accounts.
In any event, it seems like we’ll find out in due course. Whatever the government decides to do with the results of its forthcoming consultation, the increasing momentum behind calls for change means we’ll likely get some and it will probably be announced at the Autumn Budget. Undoubtedly, given the popularity of Britain’s beloved Cash ISA, someone at the Treasury will anxiously scrutinise whatever comes in knowing full well the ire of savers that awaits them if they get it wrong.
Second man arrested over Starmer fires
Counterterrorism forces have arrested a second man in connection with arson attacks on two homes and a vehicle associated with Keir Starmer. The Metropolitan Police arrested a 26-year-old man – whose nationality remains unknown – at Luton airport on Saturday afternoon on suspicion of conspiracy to commit arson with intent to endanger life.
In a statement the Met said: ‘The arrest was made by counterterrorism officers from the Eastern Region Special Operations Unit. The man has been taken to custody in London.’
The latest arrest follows that of a 21-year-old man who was charged with arson with intent to endanger life over attacks at properties linked to the Prime Minister. Roman Lavrynovych, a Ukrainian national living in Sydenham, London, is accused of starting fires outside two properties and burning a vehicle in north London. He has been charged with three counts of arson with intent to endanger life and appeared at Westminster magistrates’ court on Friday. Prosecutors said Lavrynovych had denied arson when interviewed by police.
It comes after the London Fire Brigade and the police had attended the property shortly after 1:30 a.m. on Monday. While the door to the four-bedroom home was damaged, no one was hurt. Later in the evening it emerged that counterterrorism officers were also investigating a blaze at a second property linked to Starmer as well as a vehicle fire. The vehicle fire occurred just before 3 a.m. last Thursday and it was on the same street as Starmer’s home.
Starmer is letting out the house, thought to be worth £2 million, to his wife’s sister after he and his family moved to Downing Street following Labour’s election win last summer. It is not clear if the prime minister’s sister-in-law was at the property at the time of the attack.
Why are today’s MPs so incredibly drab?
Current MPs in Britain seem, at times, a drab and depressing bunch. ‘The quality of parliamentarian,’ Ann Widdecombe said on a recent podcast, ‘is the lowest I can ever remember.’ It was not just the reluctance most sensible people feel about exposing themselves to such overwhelming and intrusive media focus, she explained, that was putting better candidates off. It was also down to the identity-driven shortlists all three main parties have embraced in the past few decades.
It’s all too easy for ministers to forget what a strong economy, a robust education system, or a love of free speech are actually for
‘They began to select on identity rather than merit,’ Widdecombe pointed out – adding that if you do that ‘for a quarter-century odd, then it’s going to have an impact on the quality of people in parliament.’
As a new political play, the ‘Gang of Three’, opens at the King’s Head theatre in London, about the relationship between Denis Healey, Roy Jenkins and Tony Crosland – three Labour MPs from the past who were anything but dull – the gap between now and then seems painfully wide.
The trio, taken together, make an interesting study. All had served in the war, all known each other at Oxford, and all had intense cultural interests – what Edna Healey, Denis’s wife, called ‘hinterland.’
Healey, when he wasn’t serving as a reforming Defence Secretary or beleaguered Chancellor in a time of sterling crises and rampant industrial unrest, had numerous interests to keep him going. As a teenager he loved film, paintings, music and photography, and was a voracious (and serious) reader. At the age of 19, he cycled across Europe merely to see a production of Faust at the Salzburg Festival, and at Oxford (where he took a double-first) organised exhibitions of Picasso and the Surrealists.
‘Even my family,’ Healey wrote, ‘would not have been sufficient to reconcile me to a life in politics if I had not also been able to refresh myself with music, poetry, painting.’
Later in life, surrounded by his library of 16,000 books and over a thousand films, he would produce, alongside his acclaimed autobiography, two volumes of travel photos (Healey’s Eye and Healey’s World). He would also publish My Secret Planet, an anthology of his favourite writers, of which Edward Pearce wrote that it should be circulated among ‘the entire fourteen-year-old nation, and the next generation will grasp not one man’s hinterland, but the purpose of books.’
Keir Starmer, a man reported as having no particular favourite novel or poem, and who chose as his special book on Desert Island Discs ‘a big atlas, with real details,’ should perhaps take note.
Meanwhile Roy Jenkins, son of a Welsh miner, was known for his grandiloquent skills as parliamentarian and a love of fine dining, good claret and continental travel. Yet he also wrote heavyweight biographies of Gladstone, Churchill and Roosevelt, and his numerous liberal reforms as home secretary largely created the world we live in today.
The third of the trio, Tony Crosland – ‘the most exciting friend of my life,’ Jenkins said – was perhaps best known for his drawling, donnish air, his bohemian parties of film stars and literati, for reckless womanising and his determination, as education secretary, ‘to destroy every f***ing grammar school in England.’
Yet he also wrote The Future of Socialism, probably the most influential post-war book on Labour thinking, in which he rhapsodised over ‘the cultivation of leisure, beauty, grace, gaiety, excitement, and of all the proper pursuits, whether elevated, vulgar, or eccentric, which contribute to the varied fabric of a full private and family life…We need not only higher exports and old-age pensions, but more open-air cafés, brighter and gayer streets at night, later closing-hours for public houses…better designs for furniture and pottery and women’s clothes….’
As biographer and fellow MP Giles Radice said of the trio, ‘They were big men, larger-than-life personalities who could light up a room or gathering by their presence. And their extensive “hinterlands” serve as a valuable reminder to the present generation of politicians that there is more to human affairs than politics.’
Nor was this confined to the Labour party. Tory PM Edward Heath had his championship yachting, his organ-playing and conducting. Anthony Eden was a specialist in Persian and Arabic studies and – irony of ironies – able to converse with arch-enemy Nasser, Egyptian Premier during the Suez Crisis, in the latter’s own language. A professor of Greek at 25, fellow MP Enoch Powell would campaign in his constituency in English, French, Italian, German, modern Greek and Urdu, all of which he spoke. ‘No other politician,’ said Lord Annan of Powell, ‘had the ability to translate the law book of a medieval Welsh king, edit Greek texts with a dryness that made Housman look gushing, master the intricacies of the medieval House of Lords, and reinterpret the New Testament.’
Are these things important? These politicians’ private interests gave them a separate world to retreat to – the cultural equivalent, you might argue, of f***-you money when the going got rough. As Harold Macmillan, famous for ‘going to bed with a Trollope’, put it: ‘You should read Jane Austen… then when they come in with some awful crisis, having read about Pride and Prejudice and so on, you’ll feel better.’
Without an appreciation of such things, it’s arguably all too easy for ministers to forget what a strong economy, a robust education system, or a love of free speech are actually for. You may disagree with Jim Callaghan’s 1971 reluctance to join the EEC, but still have admiration for his reasoning. Fearing French would be the dominant language, Callaghan remarked: ‘Millions of people in Britain must have been very surprised to hear that the language of Chaucer, of Shakespeare and of Milton must in future be regarded as an undesirable American import from which we have to protect ourselves if we are to build a new Europe…I will say it in French in order to prevent any misunderstanding: Non, merci beaucoup.’
It is not an argument one can imagine a politician like Rishi Sunak, with his fabled emphasis on STEM subjects and hostility to degrees that do not ‘grow our economy,’ ever making.
As for the Starmer administration, with their apparent dearth of private passions, it can take heart from perhaps one thing: the Gang of Three’s erudition did not often translate into effective government. The Wilson and Callaghan cabinets in which they served were fractious, knotty things, slipping and sliding through crisis after crisis, riven not least by the clashing egos of these three men.
‘With hindsight,’ Healey later reflected of Jenkins, ‘I regret that, though we often worked closely together, an element of mutual jealousy prevented us from co-operating more effectively.’ Nor, when Michael Foot took over the party, did things improve. Foot may have been brimming over with interests – penning excellent biographies of Byron, Bevan and H.G. Wells – but made a woeful opposition leader, taking Labour down to one of its worst election results in history. Yet without these men, the political landscape of the past fifty years would be a much poorer place.
For politics is not just in the here and now, but in the legacy of inspiring ideas, breadth of vision, and juicy personalities it leaves behind it. The sense that the ‘boiled rabbits’ of the Starmer government, like Tory governments immediately before it, seem to lack anything resembling a hinterland should depress us all. As journalist Finn McRedmond put it in the New Statesman last year, ‘Politics needs complex ideas and ambition to work beyond the short term; without it, we risk managing our own decline through the fear of intellectual imagination.’ As the summer recess in parliament approaches, there is ample chance for MPs to do some holiday reading. A trip to the local branch of Waterstones (or even to the King’s Head Theatre) would seem to be in order for them all.
Don’t mourn the death of cash
‘Cash is king,’ grinned the bartender as he handed me two pints of dry cider at a music festival I attended several summers ago. Since I’d paid in cold, hard cash, he’d agreed to a discount suspiciously in line with VAT. With nearby food vendors struggling to connect their payment terminals to the internet and fellow festival-goers queuing for cash, I gladly handed over the tenner and glugged down the goods.
Such a bargain is not uncommon. I’ve seen the odd hospitality worker offer a cash discount so they can pocket the takings themselves. After a removal quote once went awry, a surly van man demanded extra cash to shift my piano. Newsagents, meanwhile, tend to set a minimum card payment lest they get scalped on fee charges.
Carrying cash is a pain, the breaking of each note a shard in the soul
It’s such transactions – minus, I suppose, the tax dodging and petty theft – that the Treasury Committee is hoping to encourage. Only last month, the committee warned that Keir Starmer risks creating another ‘two-tier society’, this one divided between those who qualify for an Amex card and those who exchange coppers for the morning coffee. As the committee chair, Dame Meg Hillier MP, argued:
A sizeable minority depend on being able to use cash and they must not be forgotten by Whitehall. As a society, we must avoid sleepwalking into a situation where cash is no longer widely accepted.
The report was coaxed out of the committee by advocacy groups increasingly hostile to the presence of cashless businesses on British high streets. The Payment Choice Alliance has been especially vociferous, throwing a hissy fit over the Treasury Committee’s reluctance to recommend that businesses be forced to take cash.
‘For the Treasury Committee to basically simply ask HM Treasury to report annually on how bad cash acceptance has become is patently unacceptable and clearly against the interests of the British public,’ the alliance fumed. It added that many neighbouring governments have intervened – though Europe is not known as the world’s regulator for nothing.
For all the fury, the alliance’s summary of the committee report is not unfair. The top-line conclusion is a masterclass in official inactivity: ‘The government must act to manage the decline in cash acceptance.’ Institutions as storied as the Treasury, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and the Bank of England will sit and take notes while cash fades into obscurity, at which point the Treasury Committee might finally recommend that something be done.
This would suit the government, which has already announced that it has ‘no plans to regulate businesses, big or small, to compel them to accept cash‘. In March it also revealed that it would be folding the official payment systems regulator into the FCA in an attempt to reduce regulatory burdens.
When you consider who Labour will be courting in 2029, one can understand why the cash splashers aren’t a priority. The most devout adherents to the ‘cash is king’ mantra tend to be libertarians. Deeply suspicious of fiat currencies, they like cash because it prevents the government from monitoring their purchases.
To be fair to the libertarians, banking services have proven vulnerable to political tampering of late. Only three years ago Canada’s government froze the bank accounts of truckers who had joined the anti-lockdown Freedom Convoy, affecting $8 million (£4.3 million) across 200 accounts. The year after in Britain, Nigel Farage lost his Coutts account because his politics didn’t align with the alleged values of the bank for the super-rich. Perhaps that’s one reason why he was photographed with a ‘cash is king’ shop sign last year.
Labour doesn’t care about such people, of course. But it will be more sympathetic to the vulnerable groups that the Treasury Committee warns are being excluded as cash recedes from view: the poor, elderly and disabled who are unable or unwilling to take up Mastercard, Apple Pay or Bitcoin.
Some of these people argue that physical cash is better for budgeting. As the report notes, it is easier to teach children about the limited supply of money when they can see it disappearing into a till. You can understand why a pensioner can’t be bothered to embrace the exciting world of contactless mobile phone payments.
But we should not be humouring these luddites. Carrying cash is a pain, the breaking of each note a shard in the soul, your pockets weighed down until you empty the contents down the back of your sofa. Shops must employ men in motorbike helmets to ferry it around town, and write signs to thieves assuring them that none is kept on site overnight. It is only convenient as a choking hazard for over-inquisitive toddlers.
For related reasons, nobody knows how much cash they have. In any British household the amount may stretch from the value of one Freddo to a night at a Premier Inn on the outskirts of Slough. This is in an era where you can look at charts on your monthly spending habits from the comfort of the bog before you return to scrolling TikTok clips.
Indeed, the pairing of payment cards with smartphones means that debit cards accounted for 51 per cent of the country’s transactions in 2023, according to UK Finance, with credit cards accounting for 10 per cent. Cash was used in only 12 per cent of transactions, with the industry body predicting this would halve by 2033. The government was sufficiently confident in this trend that it declined to order new coins in 2024, a historical first.
Far from reversing the trend of declining cash use, the government should be accelerating it. As the Treasury Committee recommends, somebody should be keeping an eye on Mastercard and Visa’s opaque processing fees, the subject of many a class action in the US. IT infrastructure must continue to be strengthened, not least because of the kind of outages that can prevent thirsty festival-goers from acquiring West Country cider on a hot summer’s day.
As for cash, like the British monarchy, it could still enjoy a ceremonial function. The Royal Mint can continue to issue commemorative coins, enjoyed for a moment before being consigned to the back of a drawer. The cash king is dead; long live the plastic king.