Grotesque vignettes: The Body in the Mobile Library and Other Stories, by Peter Bradshaw, reviewed

There’s a face I found myself making again and again when reading Peter Bradshaw’s short stories, and it was not pretty: top half screwed up in incredulity; lower half slack with bovine confusion. What, my expression said, just happened?

What indeed? Bradshaw is best known as the Guardian’s chief cinema critic, but this isn’t his first foray into fiction. The collection comes in the wake of three novels; but he’s admitted that ‘the short story form has always obsessed me’. That fascination with the form has given him the confidence to play with it, and us, and my confusion was deftly engineered from the start. In the opening story ‘The Kiss’, boy meets girl in a Hendon pub in 1951. Then what? Nothing really. It’s a compellingly gruesome nothing, but the rug feels sharply pulled from under your plodding expectation of exposition, climax and resolution.

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It’s not that there’s no pay-off in these funny, improbable vignettes. There are indeed moments of realisation, or dénouement, but they’re truncated, subverted or blink-and-you-miss-it casual. Some stories are marginally more conventional than others. ‘Loyalty’ (the longest and last, set in a Piccadilly coffee shop), and ‘Career Move’ (in which Satan, who looks ‘like a Canadian academic’, makes a violent pact with a playwright) come closest to offering a beginning, middle and twisted end. But others are all twist, no story. ‘Srsly’ is genuinely one of the weirdest things I’ve ever read (and I’ve been in regular correspondence with the Belgian tax authorities since 2007). I don’t know how to explain it other than to say it starts with an east London content-streaming company employee making an obscene gesture at a work rival’s Twitter post and ends with childbirth in feudal Japan, all within six pages.

Bradshaw relishes the grotesque and improbable; his set-ups are outrageously inventive. Pope Benedict XVI writes a (very good) high-school comedy screenplay about twins; a gangland plot is mounted around a lost section of Wordsworth’s Prelude, featuring ‘drug-fuelled three-way conjugal congress’; an apparent auto-erotic asphyxiation in the tight confines of a mobile library becomes an unlikely whodunnit.

But the stories don’t tip so far into absurdity as to feel unconvincing. In a few economical paragraphs, characters are sympathetically drawn and their longings, insecurities, vanities and weaknesses feel all too credible. That’s what makes the rug-pulling moments so effective. Contemporary communication and its failings are also at the heart of many, grounding them in a recognisable reality. ‘Fat Finger’ features multi-faceted digital duplicity among pilates instructors. In ‘Appropriation’, the son-in-law of Benin’s minister of mines is sincerely on the digital lookout for an Englishman with whom to deposit a large sum of money. It’s our world, but a bit off somehow, compounding the confusion. That doesn’t make for a simply pleasurable read, but it does make for a face-pullingly interesting one.

Watch: Labour MPs mock NatCon shutdown

It’s a sad day for lovers of personal freedom. Not only is Prime Minister Rishi Sunak pressing on with his smoking ban — the second reading of the Tobacco and Vapes Bill is taking place today — but now the Belgian authorities are attempting to shut down the National Conservatism conference in Brussels. Nigel Farage and Suella Braverman are among the attendees while a number of speakers, including MEP Patricia Chagnon and Eric Zemmour, have been denied access to the event. So much for freedom of speech…

It’s all a big joke to Labour MPs, though, who giggled their way through a fiery speech by shadow health secretary Wes Streeting this afternoon. Streeting started by impersonating Boris Johnson — who, by the way, believes the smoking ban is ‘nuts’ — before his colleagues burst out laughing as Streeting mocked Braverman’s current predicament. The former home secretary is currently in Belgium attending NatCon with, according to the Labour frontbencher, ‘some far-right fanatics’. ‘She said she is not a fan of the bill,’ said Streeting, adding: ‘Well, now she knows how the rest of us feel about the right honourable member for Fareham.’ The claws are out…

Watch the clip here: 

Britain needs more than tinkering to get growth going

It’s not just Britain that has a growth problem. Today’s release of the IMF’s April 2024 World Economic Outlook report argues that the global economy is following the lacklustre trend. Global growth is expected to sit at 3.1 per cent by 2029: ‘at its lowest in decades’. Global growth is forecast to move at the same pace this year as it did last year, growing at 3.2 per cent in 2024 and 2025. This year’s forecast is a small, 0.1 percentage point uplift from the IMF’s January prediction, yet the forecaster warns that higher interest rates, weak productivity, and ongoing international insecurity will all continue to combine to suppress growth.

Within this bleak picture, how does the UK look compared to its counterparts? As has been the case for some time now, the IMF’s outlook for Britain isn’t great – but is not the worst among advanced nations. The IMF predicts the UK economy will grow by 0.5 per cent and 1.5 per cent in 2024 and 2025 respectively, a 0.1 per cent downgrade in both years compared to its predictions at the start of the year. 

This is notably lower than the G7 predicted averages over the next two years, which show an uptick of 1.7 per cent and 1.6 per cent. But Britain’s prospects look stronger than Germany’s 0.2 per cent growth forecast for this year, and by next year the UK will sit more comfortably in the middle of the pack, with slightly higher growth expected in the UK than in Japan (1 per cent), Germany (1.3 per cent) or France (1.4 per cent). 

For some, the IMF’s predictions will be far too gloomy. After all, the organisation has a rather mixed track record when it comes to making predictions about the UK economy, insisting at the start of last year that Britain would have the worst growth figures among the G7 in 2023 (a label that, in the end, belonged to Germany). The slight problem for the optimists is that the IMF’s calculations are not too far off the most recent set of forecasts from the March Budget. The Office for Budget Responsibility calculated a slightly better outcome – 0.8 per cent growth this year and 1.9 per cent growth next year – but nothing too spectacular. 

Meanwhile the IMF’s forecasts for the UK’s inflation trajectory are broadly similar to what the Bank of England expects will happen this year, with inflation ending the year slightly above target (the IMF predicts 2.5 per cent), as the headline rate is expected to slow to target (or below) this spring thanks to falling energy prices, but then tick up slightly in the autumn. 

The real problem for Britain – and indeed many developed countries – is not whether these forecasts are on the nose, but rather that they are all very far off a meaningful ramp up in economic growth. The best forecasts for Britain are that it skims the surface of 2 per cent growth in the medium term, generating still not nearly enough additional activity and revenue to make good on the many spending promises that have been made (and continually ramped up) to the public. Staying on the right side of the recession line (where the UK likely is now) is simply not going to cut it. Far more spectacular growth rate is needed to get Britain’s economy, and finances, on a sustainable track.

The Spectator’s 2024 no-CV internship scheme is now open

The Spectator runs the UK’s only double-blind internship scheme. We don’t ask for a CV, we don’t use your name. We don’t care where (or whether) you went to university, we anonymise your application. We give each applicant a city name, mark out of 100 and give offers to the best ones. You’ll come in for a week of your choosing. It’s a useful window into journalism and gives us the chance to meet new talent. When jobs come up, as they do in various fields, we look to hire past interns.

About a third of our editorial staff came through this way: online (Gus, John and Max), broadcast (Cindy and Oscar), management (Lukas), data (Michael), Ukraine (Svitlana – we made a job for her), social (Margaret) and tech (Fabian, a former chef). Full list below. This year, we’re adding marketing and tech. No other publication goes to such lengths to find interns, which is perhaps why those who make it on our shortlist are often snapped up by other publications. 

We anonymise after the best intern one year was Dan Hitchens. He is indeed son of, nephew of. But he is also a superb journalist, as is often the case with those with writing in the family – from Auberon Waugh to Dominic Lawson. 

We don’t use CVs because we regard that means of recruitment as stale and unfair, reflecting not much more than whether you were good at exams aged 18. Many brilliant journalists did excel at school and university, but others – like Frank Johnson, a former Spectator editor – took different routes. Looking at The Spectator’s senior editors now, one left school aged 16 and another is an alumnus of Eton and Oxford. None of that stuff matters here. Only talent does.

We typically get 200 applications for about 12 places. So why apply against such odds? It’s fun, fair and genuinely open: Katherine Forster, a 48-year-old mum who had never had a full-time job, came through on our scheme and ended up at the Sunday Times and is now a television reporter. Fabian Carstairs was a chef before he joined our tech team. When Svitlana Morenets arrived, displaced by the war in Ukraine, she knew no one in Britain. She’s sitting next to me now as a staffer, and has been nominated for Young Journalist of the year at the UK Press Awards on Thursday. Their breaking into UK journalism would only have been possible through the Spectator scheme, perhaps the most meritocratic of any publication. 

If you have applied before, then please do so again: James Heale, now our political correspondent, applied three times. Email entries to internship@spectator.co.uk, deadline 31 May.

Choose a category (or more than one if you like) and for each one do three or more of the following:

Magazine and online

• Suggest three cover stories for The Spectator with authors.
• Suggest three potential diarists or interview subjects. Explain your choice.
• Make this into a 1,000-word Spectator article. We’d assume you’d liaise with the author throughout the process and he’s approved any edits. (Extra points as this is super hard.)
• Find three articles from the foreign press (a fortnight before your application) that have not been picked up by the UK press and say how The Spectator could expand on it.
• Suggest three articles for Spectator Life.
• Write a ‘Notes on’ (500 words).

Broadcast

• Produce a short video (no more than five minutes) explaining a recent article you read in The Spectator.
• List potential podcast guest line-ups for two stories found from recent issues of The Spectator (one must be current affairs). Briefly explain why you chose each guest.
• Imagine that Sally Rooney is coming on Women With Balls. Come up with ten questions for Katy to ask her…
• Point to two things we’re doing wrong with our current podcasts or Spectator TV.
• How can we make our broadcasts more discoverable?
• Suggest two ways in which we can improve our social media outreach for both podcasts and TV.

Steerpike Political Mischief

• In a general election campaign which five constituencies would you choose to cover – and why?
• You’re on the political mischief internship and are told you need to find a Steerpike story. How do you spend the next 60 minutes?
• What was the best political interview of 2023 – and why?
• Write a 300-word Steerpike on a subject of your choice.
• How many members of the Tony Blair Institute now work for the Labour party? And vice versa. (Extra marks: who is the dodgiest donor to TBI?)

Marketing

• Produce a full-page subscription ad for The Spectator, which would be placed in a national newspaper.
• Suggest a new product for The Spectator shop. Say how you’d market it.
• Look at one of our current marketing campaigns. What do you like? What would you change?
• How would you sell a student subscription to The Spectator?
• Write a letter to a former subscriber persuading them to resubscribe. 

Tech

Complete at least one of the following tasks (if you have to ask what any of the terms mean, this one isn’t for you).

• Write a script that identifies the number of times Taylor Swift says ‘love’ in her back catalogue.
• Write code which will trigger a banner that tells a user to continue reading an article upon revisiting the website. Please use PHP or Javascript. 
• The Spectator offers a wide range of content areas. How could we personalise it to what readers are interested in? Write a custom script which sends Rod Liddle articles to interested users.
• Find three issues with our subscription purchase journey and explain their significance.
• Create a game for The Spectator app.

Data journalism and research

This is only open to those who have at least basic competence in Python.

• Replicate any chart on the markets page of our data hub, using Datawrapper and Python so that it updates automatically.
• Replicate this in Datawrapper, show working and links on a Google Sheet.
• Create a chart showing air pollution in London, Liverpool and Glasgow over the last 30 years (we think this is impossible, it’s a bit of a sword-from-the-stone task).
• Find two errors in any opinion column in a UK newspaper (excluding academics and Polly Toynbee)
• How would we make our data hub feed available on an API?

And for all applications…

Send a covering letter, saying why you’d like to apply. No coded references to where you went to uni please (i.e. ‘I edited my student newspaper, Cherwell’). If you have been accepted on a journalism postgrad (like City) or vocational course (such as the News Associates course, which four of my colleagues have been through), then do mention this. It shows commitment and any journalist will need plenty of that.

There is an advantage to sending your application in early as we start processing and even making offers quite early. The internship pays (although not very much). We do ask that you only apply if you’re available for employment in the next two years. Remedial support is provided for PPE students. 

And some previous interns:

Currently at The Spectator…

• John Connolly (news editor) 2018
• Fabian Carstairs (tech exec) 2023
• Gus Carter (deputy features editor) 2019
• Lukas Degutis (editorial manager) 2022
• Oscar Edmondson (broadcast producer) 2021
• Max Jeffery (online commissioning editor) 2018
• Margaret Mitchell (social media) 2023
• Svitlana Morenets (Ukraine reporter) 2022
• Michael Simmons (data editor) 2021
• Cindy Yu (assistant editor, broadcast) 2015

Out, and into the world…

• Sam Holmes (comedy producer, BBC) 2021
• Tali Fraser (Daily Mail, House magazine) 2019
• Poppy Greenwood (Spectator video editor, who then went to the Times) 2019
• Sophie Jarvis (former political secretary to the Prime Minister) 2019
• Katherine Forster (the Sunday Times, GB News) 2018
• Madeleine Kearns (National Review) 2018
• Eleni Courea (the Times, Politico, the Guardian) 2015
• Seb Payne (WashPo, FT, ‘Onward’) 2014

Watch: Truss on Sunak’s smoking ban

It’s going to be a long day for Rishi Sunak. It’s the second reading of the Tobacco and Vapes Bill and the Prime Minister is expecting to see a number of his own politicians vote against his smoking ban this evening. Opponents of the bill include Sir Simon Clarke and Sir John Hayes while Penny Mordaunt and Kemi Badenoch are understood to be considering voting against Sunak’s proposal. And now former PM and passionate libertarian Liz Truss has made her intervention in the Chamber.

Blasting the government for trying to make the decisions of adults for them with its ‘virtue-signalling piece of legislation’, Truss voiced her concerns that the smoking ban proposals were ‘emblematic of a technocratic establishment in this country that wants to limit people’s freedom’. She slammed the freedom-quashing ‘agenda’ of the ‘health police’ in the Chamber, before turning directly on the Labour party. 

Truss lambasted Starmer’s MPs for filibustering about ferrets some weeks ago to, she says, stop her private member’s bill on banning puberty blockers from being heard. Why ban cigarettes and not puberty blockers, Truss quizzed her opponents, before lamenting that ‘too many members of parliament have gone along with this orthodoxy’.

Then the former PM turned her attention back to her own benches. ‘Disappointed’ that a Conservative government is moving forward with the smoking ban, Truss concluded with a message for her colleagues:

If people want to vote for finger-wagging, nagging control freaks, there are plenty of them to choose from on the benches opposite — and that’s the way they will vote. And if people want to have control over their lives, if they want to have freedom, that is why they vote Conservative. 

Watch the full clip here: 

Khan changes his tune on fact-checking

There’s 16 days to go until the London elections and Labour is comfortably in the lead. But is Sadiq Khan now feeling the heat? Perusing Twitter/X this morning, Mr S could not help but notice a new account has sprung up, under the name of ‘London Tory Fact Check’. Its bio reads simply ‘Exposing London Tory lies all day, every day’ and its cover image bears the name of London Labour’s regional director.

Such tactics are usually considered part and parcel of normal political life. But Khan has form for being holier-than-thou on such matters. Back in 2020, he publicly attacked the Conservatives for spreading ‘fake news masquerading as “facts”‘ after the party set up their own fact-checking website. The Mayor’s then spokesman urged the Tories to take down their site and accused the party of ‘masquerading’ as fact-checkers. So why the sudden change of heart now?

Mr S asked Sadiq’s team but, alas, answer came there none. Perhaps he will tweet the facts out in due course…

The Michaela court ruling is a victory for all schools

A school should be free to do what is right for the pupils it serves. The court’s decision is therefore a victory for all schools. Schools should not be forced by one child and her mother to change its approach simply because they have decided they don’t like something at the school.

At Michaela, we positively embrace ‘small c’ conservative values which millions of people, including so many of our families and pupils, also value. Those values enable extraordinary academic progress. But they also promote a way of living, where gratitude, agency and personal responsibility, refusal of identity-politics victimhood, love of country, hard work, kindness, a duty towards others, self-sacrifice for the betterment of the whole, are fundamental to who we are. Multiculturalism works at Michaela not because we’ve emptied the identity space of the school in order to accommodate difference, but because we have a clear identity which anyone can sign up to, if they are willing to compromise.

Michaela is a school that works miracles in London’s inner city, achieving on average nearly two and a half grades higher at GCSE, with the best Progress eight score for two years running, out of all of the 4,000 secondary schools across the country.

But our families choose Michaela not just because of the extraordinary learning and access to social mobility that we provide. They choose Michaela because they recognise that our traditional values create a school environment that is a joy to be in. Our children are happy and are friends with each other across racial and religious divides. Our 800 visitors a year can attest to this. All anyone needs to do to see this for themselves is sign up on our website for a visit.

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Gus Carter

Welcome to Scuzz Nation

Rod Liddle

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Mary Wakefield

Why don’t men ask questions?

Ever since the idea of Michaela began in 2011, our detractors have railed against our strict rules and traditional values. Their patronising, paternalist, ‘we know what’s best for you’ progressive thinking goes like this: ethnic minority families cannot possibly know what they want and have chosen and continue to choose for their children. Those choices must be made for them. We need to have the honesty to call that out. A deep-seated progressivist racism fuels the condescending belief that ethnic minorities cannot think and choose for themselves. It is what has allowed a particular kind of bullying ty politics to take such a grip of our country.

More than 40 per cent of our pupils are siblings. In 2014, 30 per cent of our intake was Muslim. It is now 50 per cent. We are over-subscribed. If our families did not like the school, they would not repeatedly choose to send their children to Michaela.

At the two welcome events that all parents must attend before sending their child to Michaela, I run through everything that makes Michaela different to other schools: constant supervision, family lunch, silent corridors, no prayer room, easy ways to get detention, strict uniform etc.

If parents do not like what Michaela is, they do not need to send their children to us.

Can it be right for a family to receive £150,000 of taxpayer-funded legal aid to bring a case like this? The judge is clear that the child’s statements were not written by her alone. Indeed this mum intends to send her second child to Michaela, starting in September. At the same time, this mum has sent a letter to our lawyers suggesting that she may take us to court yet again over another issue at the school she doesn’t like, presumably once again at the taxpayer’s expense.

People of all religions tell me that Michaela is more Christian, more Catholic, more Islamic, more Jewish, or more Hindu than schools they have seen elsewhere. The reason for this is because our robust yet respectful secularism is allied to those traditional values which all religions share. We all believe in the Michaela Way. In institutions where secularism has come to mean an absence of belief, often identity politics fills the vacuum. Every ‘community’ is catered for in a way which emphasises differences between people and can unwittingly encourage victimhood. Ours is very much a strong belief in ‘small c’ conservative values where we all move towards a shared goal, rejecting victimhood, together. In our ever-more diverse society we at Michaela stand for those values which save us from the worst of the divisiveness which identity politics engenders. Last year, we watched our Muslim pupils put under pressure by a tiny number of others to fast, to pray, to drop out of the choir, to wear a hijab. I watched one of my black teachers racially abused and intimidated, another teacher who had her personal home nearly broken into, and another with a brick thrown through her window. I have a duty of care to protect all of our pupils but also to my staff. There is a false narrative that some try to paint about Muslims being an oppressed minority at our school. They are, in fact, the largest group. Those who are most at risk are other minorities and Muslim children who are less observant.

What does it mean to be the Headmistress in a school which tries to uphold our shared British values when different constituencies within our diverse society want different, sometimes opposing things, in the name of their religious commitments? It means offering what unites us – those shared values I list above – and then asking everyone to compromise for the sake of that shared communal project. To the Jehovah Witnesses: we teach Macbeth as a GCSE text, even though it has witches in it. To the Muslims: we don’t have a prayer room. To the Christians: we will offer revision classes on Sundays. To the Hindus: the plates will have been touched by eggs. We are always clear about this: our restrictive building, strict ethos and desire to see multiculturalism succeed, mean that self-sacrifice is required. Parents, knowing this, have the freedom to make informed choices. This is who we are.

At Michaela, we expect all religions and all races to make the necessary sacrifices to enable our school to thrive. The vast majority do so without complaint. We make the sacrifice of eating vegetarian food at lunch to enable us to break bread with each other across racial and religious divides.

For those of you who take a dim view of Muslims or multiculturalism, I would urge you to remember our hundreds of Muslim families who love our school. When we were in court, we fought to retain the media ban — because the threat of harm and the danger of violence were clearly very real. The member of the press in the courtroom who showed me the most compassion was Muslim.

It is more of a challenge for a multicultural school to succeed. One need only look at the schools that top the Progress 8 chart: the vast majority are faith schools of one religion. Schools that are secular and multicultural must be allowed the same right that religious schools have: the right to unity, the right to reject division, the right to not have the black group, the Hindu group, the Muslim group, the LGBT group etc. Everyone is welcome in our community but our community isn’t an empty space — it has its own identity which we invite everyone to belong to. So we sing God Save the King because our country and our flag unite us. Ethnic minorities should be able to identify as British. If we are saying that being an ethnic minority and being British are incompatible, then as a nation, we are in deep trouble.

At Michaela, we want our children to live lives of dignity, whether they end up poor or rich later in life. In 2024, we tend to believe that a school is successful according to its exam results alone: the better the results, the better the well-paying job. But a life of meaning is not about being rich. At Michaela we believe that purpose and moral character matter, that there is such a thing as moral truth. Without moral truth, all you have is evolutionary biology in a brutal world where there is no obligation for the strong to help the weak.

When we tell our kids to be ‘top of the pyramid’, our goal for them isn’t to be the richest or the most famous or even the cleverest. It is to be someone who lives a life of moral worth shaped by self-sacrifice, filled with gratitude for what they have, and doing all they can to help those who have not.

For 25 years I have been in school at 6.45 a.m., working 12-to-15-hour days, always with mainly brown and black kids from the inner city. Our detractors’ narrative that I hate children, that I hate Muslim children, despite more and more Muslim families choosing our school over the years and my own grandmother being Muslim, is clearly nonsensical. I could easily do something less stressful and earn more money or seek promotion elsewhere. But I have chosen to stay with the Michaela project for 13 plus years and I continue to fight to defend our way of life.

Why? Because I believe in something bigger than myself.

Michaela stands for values that provide us with a way of living through the good times and the bad, whether we are rich or poor, with GCSE grade nines or grade fours, whether we are white or black, tall or short. At Michaela we cherish and embrace these values for all of our pupils, whatever their race, whatever their religion.

Strength and Honour. God save the King.

Brussels police move to shut down Farage at NatCon

Happy NatCon day, one and all. Yes, it’s that time of year again, when some of Europe’s most vocal right-wing exponents get together in a room for the annual National Conservatism conference. Last year’s shindig was in Westminster and spawned numerous headlines about Miriam Cates and Lee Anderson. This time though it’s being held in Brussels: home of well-paid Eurocrats and overzealous officials. Where better to make a stand for conservatism?

Among those flying the flag for Britain is keynote speaker Suella Braverman and longtime MEP Nigel Farage. But the former Ukip leader encountered some difficulty this morning after arriving on stage at the Claridge venue in the Belgian capital. For the Brussels police then turned up to try to shut NatCon down, with organisers claiming they had been given just fifteen minutes to stop the conference on the grounds of potential ‘public disorder.’

The Claridge was already the conference’s third venue, after its first space – Concert Noble – turned them away under pressure from the Socialist Mayor of Brussels Philippe Close. The liberal mayor of Etterbeek then put pressure on the luxury Sofitel hotel to cancel it at the second attempt. Police are now lining the door, preventing people entering, including MEP Patricia Chagnon and, most recently, Eric Zemmour, leader of French right-wing party Reconquête. The NatCon organisers have since announced they will be legally challenging the order to shut down the event. Farage has meanwhile left the stage and is now doing a media tour, comparing the shutdown to Soviet Russia.

Even the Prime Minister of Belgium, Alexander De Croo, was outraged, tweeting on Tuesday evening:

What happened at the Claridge today is unacceptable. Municipal autonomy is a cornerstone of our democracy but can never overrule the Belgian constitution guaranteeing the freedom of speech and peaceful assembly since 1830. Banning political meetings is unconstitutional.

See below for the bizarre scenes that unfolded today…

And there’s more…

And more…

Watch footage from outside the conference here:

When will Prince Harry admit defeat in his ‘frankly hopeless’ legal case?

Many of us believe that Prince Harry and his recent actions could fairly be described as ‘frankly hopeless’. Now, a High Court judge can be added to their number. Mr Justice Lane has dismissed Harry’s appeal against an earlier judgement that he was not entitled to automatic police protection when he moved abroad. The latest court documents, released yesterday, do not make happy reading for the Duke of Sussex.

The judge has ordered Harry to pay 90 per cent of the government’s costs in the court case (well over £500,000, apparently) and has delivered a stinging rebuke to the Duke and his legal team. Not only did Mr Justice Lane remind Harry that his original case was ‘comprehensively lost’ and ‘failed on all of the pleaded grounds’, but he went on to damn the appeal that his lawyers had put together. He remarked that it relied upon ‘a great deal of unsupported speculation’, and that it continued to ‘[display] precisely the same kind of errors’ that the original application had demonstrated, such as a ‘formalistic’ and ‘inappropriate’ attitude towards the submission. The judge concluded – and it is possible to hear his exasperation here – that: ‘There are no ‘other compelling reasons’ for an appeal to be heard.’

This withering verdict is, of course, unlikely to stop the clown prince. Harry is now considering heading to the Court of Appeal, so that his lawyers can charge him yet greater sums and so that he can be humiliated all over again. It did not help that it emerged this week that Harry emailed confidential details of the case to his buddy, the Tory MP Johnny Mercer, which has resulted in his having to apologise.

The overall impression given is that the Duke has focused upon this ‘frankly hopeless’ case as the hill on which he is determined to die on, and he is willing to do whatever it takes to carry on the ‘comprehensively lost’ campaign. For someone who has served in the military, and should know the importance of a tactical retreat when faced with overwhelming odds, Harry has once again demonstrated that his pride and arrogance trump any kind of good sense.

As usual, his actions have brought embarrassment upon his family and his name, but if Prince Harry had an ounce of common sense and compassion, he might take a moment to consider whether his vanity has overtaken him. His sister-in-law and father are both suffering from cancer, and the royal family are currently facing a reputational crisis brought on by the continued disgrace of the Duke of York, which the recent Netflix drama Scoop served to remind us all of once more.

The year 2024 has, so far, been an annus horribilis for the royals. What all of those around the royals can only pray for is that, after a truly ghastly first few months, matters settle down and that business as usual can resume in the second half of the year. Yet while Harry continues to spend his Netflix and Spotify millions on ill-fated and hubris-laden court cases, there will always be the ongoing reminder of the disastrous events that have befallen ‘the Firm’ over the past few years; the legacy of Spare is never far away.

Still, there is one small upside. It was announced recently that his wife will be featuring in a new Netflix series, no doubt designed to coincide with her new America Riviera Orchard brand, and that the show will ‘celebrate the joys of cooking and gardening, entertaining and friendship’. It will not be filmed in their Montecito home, but in another rented property nearby, meaning that, as the Duke pores over yet another legal submission, he will not have to contend with a Netflix camera crew dogging his every move. He must be thankful for small mercies; the rest of us might suggest that it is time for him, and his wife, to consider gracefully backing out of the spotlight before this frankly hopeless duo test our patience one time too many.

SNP ditches public trust question from national survey

If you don’t want to know the answer, don’t ask the question. That seems to be the mantra by which the SNP is currently abiding. Careful analysis of the many, many years of the ferry fiasco to the recent confusion over former health secretary Michael Matheson’s iPad bill has shown that important queries haven’t always been voiced when they should have been. And now, the latest example of question avoidance relates to a rather sensitive matter for the Scottish government: public trust. 

It transpires that SNP ministers have quietly scrapped a question on this very issue from the Scottish Household Survey. The poll asks the public to rate their trust levels on everything from the civil service to local councils to the police. And, in every other year, the survey has also asked participants to rank their trust in the Scottish government. But not this year. This particular item has been ditched from the annual poll — and will be asked every 24 months instead. The move means that the next data release on this issue will come in 2026, after the upcoming general election. How very curious…

Are the Nats expecting poor marks in this category? Mr S wouldn’t be surprised: voters are looking less and less favourably upon the SNP and a series of recent polls have reflected this. In the month of April alone, one survey suggested Labour could become the biggest party in Scotland after the next general election, another showed Labour overtaking the SNP in the polls for the first time since the 2014 indyref — and just yesterday, the latest questionnaire revealed that First Minister Humza Yousaf now has negative approval ratings among, um, SNP voters. Ouch.

Steerpike hates to break it to the Nats, but ignoring a problem doesn’t make it go away. In fact, it usually makes things worse — which might explain why Scotland’s public services are in an increasingly dire state…

How many MPs will reject Sunak’s smoking ban?

A fag-end measure for a fag-end government? That’s how Labour are keen to present Rishi Sunak’s plans to stop young people born after 2008 from ever being legally allowed to smoke. The Commons will tonight debate the second reading of the Tobacco and Vapes Bill, with Tory MPs being granted a rare free vote. With dozens of Conservatives expected to vote against the legislation, Wes Streeting and others are keen to depict themselves as riding to Sunak’s rescue by lending him Labour votes.

‘Rishi Sunak might be weak but Labour will not allow the Liz Truss wing of the Conservative Party to choke off the Smoking Bill today’, the Shadow Health Secretary tweeted this morning. ‘We will give our full support to this Bill so that the next generation are even less likely to smoke than they are to vote Conservative.’ With Labour backing the change and the bulk of the government offering their support, the legislation should become law later this year. The real question is therefore not whether the measure will pass but how many Tory MPs refuse to back it.

Most reports put that number as somewhere around 50, with one government source only describing it as a ‘moving picture.’ There is little real enthusiasm for the Bill among Conservative backbenchers, with Jesse Norman among the few to publicly tweet his support. ‘It’s a gradual long term reform that doesn’t affect anyone now smoking, protects young people from a dangerous addictive drug, supports the NHS and saves the taxpayer and society a fortune,’ he said this morning.

Wes Streeting is naturally seeking to exploit Rishi Sunak’s party tensions with his comments. ‘How many Trussites does he actually think there are?’ remarks one Tory. But Conservatives both inside and outside parliament will be watching today to see which among their number backs a measure that lacks grassroot support. Particular attention will be paid to likely future leadership contenders. Kemi Badenoch, the Business Secretary, is among those considering voting against the ban.

Ten years ago, Truss distinguished herself as one of only two cabinet ministers to vote against the Coalition’s plans for plain-packaging of cigarettes. That free vote offered her a chance to demonstrate her libertarian instincts and signal her disdain for the ‘nanny state’. Tonight’s division could offer the chance for Sunak’s would-be successors to do the same.

When will the Rwanda ping-pong end?

MPs once again rejected all the changes made by peers to the Safety of Rwanda Bill last night, with the ping-pong continuing this afternoon. There were six votes yesterday on amendments the Lords wanted to keep in the bill, and a pointed weariness from Home Office minister Michael Tomlinson at the start of the debate. He said:

‘Here we are back again debating the same issues and amendments we have already rejected. We are not quite at the point yet of completing each other’s sentences, but we are almost there.’

The government won all the votes last night with a clear majority, though that was shaved down to 59 on an amendment protecting asylum seekers who had served with the British armed forces from deportation to Rwanda. Only Robert Buckland voted against his party on two amendments: the other rebels abstained. Buckland continued to criticise the drafting of clause 1 of the bill, saying he thought it was ‘an abomination’ and that ‘the attempt by the Lords to amend it probably makes the situation even worse’.

Peers will return to the legislation this afternoon, with the government hoping it can gain Royal Assent later this week. The particular bones of contention are over whether the legislation can declare Rwanda a safe country, preventing judges from considering that question if an asylum seeker appeals against their deportation. There is more Commons time for consideration of Lords’ amendments on Wednesday, and neither Labour nor the crossbenchers currently seem in a mood to soften their position today, which means the bill will likely take up all the time allotted to it. 

The question once this legislation is enacted is whether the policy itself still has a deterrent effect. Tomlinson warned last night that amending the bill to create an independent committee on whether Rwanda is a safe country ‘would render the Bill utterly pointless and would not enable us to create the deterrent that we need to stop the boats and get flights off the ground’. So far, internal government monitoring of small boats crossings suggests that the bill has not had a deterrent effect in prospect. But once it is enacted, Rishi Sunak will be able to blame no-one but himself if there is no change in the number of crossings, even as the government spends hundreds of millions of pounds deporting a small group of asylum seekers – provided, of course, that it can find a plane to take them.

Worklessness hits eight-year high

Britain already has the worst post-pandemic workforce recovery in Europe. New figures out today show the problem is getting even worse. The number of those ‘economically inactive’ (not in work or looking for it) rose by a remarkable 150,000 in the last three months to 9.4 million – equivalent to the adult population of Portsmouth and some 850,000 since the first lockdown. Taken as a share of the working-age population, it’s now at an eight-year high – and significantly worse than it was during Covid or its aftermath.

What’s driving the worklessness? The biggest single factor is long-term sickness, also at an all-time high.

Is this just economic long-Covid, the after-effects of the virus that struck four years ago? If it were that simple, this trend would be seen worldwide: in fact, the UK is one of the few countries in the developed world to have its workforce below 2020 levels. 

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) offers a breakdown behind the cumulative change in economic inactivity, with the rise in long-term sick as the single biggest factor:

One upside for the government is that wages are now climbing higher than inflation, although not by much (1.3 per cent). The below, while welcome, may not be enough to create a feelgood factor by the general election:

In his resignation letter last week, energy minister Graham Stuart told Rishi Sunak that 'under your leadership, the UK is at near-full employment'. That Tories can speak this way to each other after 14 years nods to the state of denial with which the party views the worklessness crisis which shows no signs of being addressed before the next general election.

The Sydney church terror attack is a wake-up call for Australians

Sydney has been rocked by another stabbing rampage – just days after six people were murdered in a knife attack in the city’s Bondi Junction. A bishop of the Assyrian Orthodox Church, Mar Mari Emmanuel, was knifed at the altar during the incident yesterday afternoon in the working-class suburb of Wakeley. Several other parishioners were also injured as they sought to disarm the attacker. Police have arrested a teenager and are treating it as a terrorist attack.

The horror was broadcast on the livestream of the Assyrian Christ The Good Shepherd Church, meaning that thousands of followers witnessed the attack. News of the stabbings spread fast among the local Assyrian community, and an angry mob descended on the church. Several hundred police officers were called in as the atmosphere rapidly became febrile; the alleged offender was given sanctuary in the church for his own safety. Even after the bishop was stabbed, remarkably he urged his congregation and followers to pray for his assailant.

An arch-conservative in a conservative church, Bishop Emmanuel is known for attracting controversy. His views on social issues, notably homosexuality, are biblically hardline and, while having been supportive of Palestinians in the war in Gaza, he is on the record as having questioned the validity of Islam as a faith. During the pandemic, the bishop expressed scepticism about vaccines and lockdown restrictions.

Whether any of these views motivated the still-unidentified 16-year-old boy to attack Bishop Emmanuel remains unclear. But a video of the alleged attacker appears to show him calling out, in Arabic, ‘if he (the bishop) didn’t swear at my prophet I wouldn’t be here.’

As with last Saturday’s knife rampage, the attacker is considered a lone assailant. Thankfully, unlike the horrors of Bondi Junction, the injuries sustained by the bishop and his parishioners are lacerations and not serious or life-threatening. But two very public stabbing outrages in a matter of days has rattled and angered Australians.

That’s because such incidents have become very rare in Australia, When a mentally-disturbed man killed 35 people and wounded 23 others at Tasmania’s Port Arthur historic site in 1996, then prime minister John Howard earned the gratitude of all Australians by pushing through tough new gun laws in the face of determined resistance from his own gun-owning conservative supporters. Since then, Australia has been relatively safe.

As a result, Australians have been accustomed to think that mass killings and attempted killings are things that are, tragically, commonplace elsewhere, but unlikely to happen Down Under. Our successes in criminal and anti-terror intelligence and, especially, gun control, have made us too complacent to address holes in our containment of violent risks. The view that these tragedies happen to other people, not us, has been the collective mindset. Now, that perspective has been shattered.

The Bondi Junction offender had a long history of mental illness, and he was long known to police in his home state of Queensland. It may well be the case that the boy in the Sydney church stabbing also has mental troubles. Yet whether or not that is the case, it’s already clear that Australia’s mental health services, and federal and state authorities’ ability to cooperate with each other to protect the wider community, are proving inadequate. A major inquiry is being established to learn the lessons of Bondi Junction, and should now include the Wakely church stabbing.

Lessons need to be learned quickly. Australia has ridden its luck as a relatively peaceful society for too long: we are simply unready and unprepared to deal with mass killings that we have foolishly considered unimaginable here.

Australians have been blessed for two generations to be free of mass murderous events like Bondi Junction and, potentially, Wakeley. But when the American embassy in Canberra now warns its citizens that travelling to Australia carries US-style safety risks of random violence, they are giving Australians a wake-up call that can’t be ignored. Our complacency must end.

Why can’t Stonewall’s ex-boss come clean about its trans obsession?

The few days since the publication of the Cass report – the probe into ‘gender identity’ services for young people – have been a revelation. The report, compiled by Dr Hilary Cass, has at long last, and so publicly it couldn’t be ignored, blown some of the gilt off the trans gingerbread, confirming that medical interventions on minors weren’t backed up by solid research. This has woken up some of the great and the good, who have finally realised that parroting phrases like ‘trans women are women’ might not have been such a wise idea.

One of those who used those four words beloved of activists was Education Secretary Gillian Keegan. Back in 2020, Keegan told her constituency LGBT Forum in Chichester that ‘trans women are women’. For that stance, PinkNews praised Keegan as a ‘rare LGBTQ+ ally in Rishi Sunak’s cabinet’. But following the report’s publication, the Tory minister sounded a more sceptical note: ‘We must not let the gender ideology of a small but vocal lobby push their agendas at the expense of young people’. I couldn’t agree more – but it’s a pity it took Keegan so long to wise up to what unfolded under a government of which she is a part. At a recent select committee on the subject, Keegan seemed breathtakingly lightly-informed, uninterested, and apparently thinking longingly of knocking off and getting the train home. ‘Damn, now I’ve definitely missed the 15:35 – but I could still catch the 16:02 …’

Then there’s pop science rent-a-sceptic and the president of UK Humanists Adam Rutherford. In response to a tweet from women’s rights campaigner Maya Forstater suggesting that he could use his role to educate those criticising the methodology of the Cass report, Rutherford meekly replied, ‘It’s not something I know much about’. It must be galling for Rutherford, as the foremost communicator for science and a critic of bad research and quackery, to have – somehow – missed the big medical/scientific scandal story of the age.

Keegan and Rutherford aren’t the most egregious examples of people who appears to have been woken up by the intervention of Cass. Under the watch of Ruth Hunt, Stonewall was transformed from a gay rights charity into a organisation that focused on ‘trans inclusion’. In doing so, the concerns of lesbian and gay people were pushed aside. For her troubles, Hunt was made a life peer by Theresa May in 2019. Now, from her perch in the House of Lords, Hunt insists she is ‘absolutely someone who has always been working in the middle ground, trying to build consensus’.

Really? That stance comes as a surprise to gay folk who felt excluded by Stonewall’s near obsession with the T in LGBT. It is also hard to square the view of Stonewall as an organisation seeking ‘consensus’ with what Hunt said in October 2018 to a petition asking Stonewall to acknowledge there was a conflict around transgender rights and sex-based women’s rights. She wrote back then: ‘We do not and will not acknowledge this. Doing so would imply that we do not believe that trans people deserve the same rights as others. We will always debate issues that enable us to further equality but what we will not do is debate trans people’s right to exist.’

Hunt now seems to be trying every tactic in the ‘wriggling on the hook’ book; ‘I think there was a responsibility [regarding puberty blockers etc] on the NHS, schools and social services. So it wasn’t in my gift to either make this better or worse … I trusted the experts, and I think we all did that. And that is something we regret.’ But Miss, everyone else was doing it, Miss!

Stonewall’s former boss should come clean about what really unfolded under her watch: the Times reported over the weekend that the charity tried to suppress early warnings to schools about the shaky evidence base for medical transitions for children. Back in 2018, campaigners sent out resource packs to schools warning teachers there was little medical evidence to support puberty blockers. Stonewall’s response was to brand the pack ‘dangerous’ material, ‘masquerading as a professional, ‘evidence-based’ advice’.

Hunt has denied that Stonewall suppressed debate around transgender healthcare. But something doesn’t quite add up. Perhaps we should welcome Hunt’s reaction to the Cass report. This, after all, was someone who said in 2020 that ‘bad-faith transphobia manifests itself by presuming that trans women are inherently out to deceive, and that trans women are men’. But even if Hunt has changed her tune, I am wary of declaring that this battle is over.

If Cass is at least the beginning of the end of this madness, I think what we need to talk about and learn from is fear. I strongly suspect that these three, and many others, were afraid, and reasonably so. I think they saw what was happening to people who did speak up – the intimidation and career/financial ruin wrought on Allison Bailey, Rosie Kay, Christian Henson, Graham Linehan – and they were terrified of that happening to them. So they went along with something that was obviously horrific. 

Unlike Hunt, Linehan, Bailey and the other critics of the trans movement haven’t landed a cushy seat in the Lords. And what about those young people who ended up going down the medical route in the mistaken hope that it would alleviate their gender-related distress?

The days of NHS England handing out puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to children are thankfully at an end. But in order for any proper lessons to be learned from this gender scandal, those who failed to call out the trans mob – or even ended up parroting their words – should take some time to properly consider where they went wrong.

If Apple loses against China so will the West

It has been a long time since the West dominated shipbuilding, or steel making. We are already aware that we are losing ground in consumer goods, as well as in finance and transport. Add it all up, and we no longer expect the US, Europe or its allies to control the global market in most major industries. Still, even as other industries lost ground there was one thing most economists and industrial experts would have felt sure we could rely on: Apple. Whatever else happened, nothing would knock its world-beating iPhone – without question the world’s most profitable product – off its well-secured perch. But hold on. Apple’s market share is now falling at an accelerating pace, and its Chinese rivals are rising fast.

According to figures out on Monday, Apple is no longer the world’s biggest manufacturer of smartphones, after a steep fall in sales in the first quarter of the year. Apple took only 17 per cent of the market in 2024 so far, compared with 20 per cent for its great rival Samsung. But it was the rising share recorded by its newer Chinese rivals that was more eye-catching, with Xiaomi, the country’s leading domestic brand, taking third place, with almost 15 per cent of the market, not far behind Apple, and with a revived Huawei also making big gains. With the CCP clamping down on Apple’s access to the vast Chinese market (hardly surprisingly given the protectionism of the Biden administration), that will continue for the rest of this year and beyond.

For the last 20 years Apple owned the market for high-end smartphones, with Samsung, running Google software, in second place. China’s rise in smartphones, however, is a snapshot of what is already happening in many other industries. In automobiles, with electric vehicles as a way into the market, China is now the world’s largest exporter, with plenty more brands entering the market (including Xiaomi, fast becoming a household name). It is starting to happen in microchips, as China is forced by American technology bans to make its own semiconductors; in pharmaceuticals; and it may happen in aerospace very soon as well, with the Chinese-made Comac C919 passenger plane already operational, and set to take market share from an increasingly troubled Boeing.

In reality, China is turning from a supplier to western companies into a direct competitor. The days when western companies could use cheap Chinese components, and its hyper-competitive factories, to lower their costs and fatten their profit margins are long over. Instead, they face increasingly brutal competition from aggressive, well run Chinese rivals now moving into mainstream consumer markets. Even the mighty Apple may not be strong enough to withstand the onslaught. If Apple loses the economic war with China, so will the West – and right now its prospects are not looking good.

My old friend went viral for all the wrong reasons

Last week, an old acquaintance went viral. Charles Withers had, according to his pregnant wife, disappeared around a year ago, leaving her to bring up one young child alone with another on the way. The pretty Massachusetts blonde posted a plea for information on Facebook. It was, she wrote, surprisingly difficult to divorce someone who refused to return your calls. 

Not long after the story surfaced, I received a message from a friend. ‘Do you remember Charlie Withers?’ he asked. I did. He had been part of our wider social circle, one of the boys at the neighbouring school. I was added to a WhatsApp group – ‘The Talented Mr Withers’ – of people from my childhood, some of whom I’d not spoken to in years. We were transfixed, searching through old messages, picking over teenage photos and sharing anecdotes that may have betrayed a hint of where he might have gone.   

We weren’t the only ones looking. It took the internet little more than 24 hours to track the chef down, thousands of miles away in Texas. Women replied saying they’d matched with him on dating apps around Dallas and he’d been spotted in a video taken by the wife of Taylor Sheridan, creator of Yellowstone. Withers has, finally, contacted his estranged spouse. Too late. One TikTok user, whose videos on Withers have been viewed millions of times, branded him ‘America’s scumbag’. He’s actually from England.

Amateur sleuths are not always bad news. In the case of Gabby Petito, a 22-year-old American who disappeared during a road trip with her fiancé, internet users found clues that ultimately helped police find her remains. Curiosity is only human and, despite the sad conclusion in the Petito case, the curiosity of strangers can be useful. 

There’s a fine line between truth-seeking and vigilantism, however. In India, there has been a rise in violence in connection with whisper networks on WhatsApp groups. Gossip leaks and is shared until it’s almost unrecognisable. There were 40 deaths and hundreds of injuries which stemmed from this kind of mob justice in 2018 alone, according to one LSE report. 

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In this case, if the original post is true, what Withers did was wrong and deceitful – not to mention cruel to his wife and children. But in an age of near-constant surveillance, how does it feel when the choice to disappear is taken from you? And when does the accused become the victim? I’m not sure I’d like to find out for myself. 

One prolific TikToker, Jay Megan, who describes herself as an ‘internet sleuth’, has devoted a whole series to tracking and digging up dirt on Withers. Even after he had been tracked down, she continued to post videos accusing him of lying, stealing, having a cocaine habit and getting his ‘rich daddy’ to bail him out of trouble. In one video, she encouraged her followers to find his former employees (who, she claimed, he had ‘stiffed’) and offered to work with lawyers on their behalf. She threatened: ‘Charlie, if you think I’m playing with you, have you seen what I’ve been able to do in a day?’ 

Internet notoriety can be devastating: the organiser of a widely mocked Willy Wonka ‘immersive event’ in Glasgow said the coverage ruined his life. During the mass investigation into Withers, a man who was filmed singing karaoke was wrongly identified as my old friend, and had his face plastered across online gossip boards the world over. It’s hard to set the record straight once millions of people think they know something about you. Harder still to outrun a version of your life narrated by the vitriolic chorus of the internet.

Italian food purists need to calm down

Last year, a large group of young people gathered outside the Trevi Fountain, one of Rome’s most popular attractions, to protest against ‘food crimes’ committed by tourists in Italy. Armed with signs reading ‘No more cream in carbonara’, ‘No more cappuccino with pasta’, and ‘Putting chicken in pasta is a crime in Italy’, they drew the attention of a large crowd of tourists. The protest was sparked by complaints from a number of the city’s restaurant owners about non-Italians (Americans in particular) asking for unorthodox ingredients to be added to the classics. 

The organiser, Nicolas Calia, coordinated the protest because, he said: ‘I live in New York and I see the ruination of Italian cuisine every day, so I can’t accept seeing that here in Italy.’ A YouGov survey in 2022 found that the gastronomic habits most hated by Italians include ketchup on pasta, pineapple on pizza, putting pasta into a pan of cold water and breaking spaghetti before cooking. But to many Italian chefs and aficionados, the most heinous food crime of all is messing with carbonara. 

Carbonara is made by whisking eggs, guanciale (an Italian cured meat product prepared from pork jowl or cheeks), and pecorino cheese, served with spaghetti. Shock, horror, some restaurants use bacon or other pork cuts, and have even been known to substitute pecorino for parmesan. I can live with these changes – after all, it is still basically the same type of dish. And while the authentic Italian version is good, perhaps chefs do need to chill out about bastardised versions of their food? Pasta is bastardised noodles, after all.

I freely admit to being the first person to drone on about authenticity where it matters, and have written in these pages about the impossibility of effectively importing an Italian restaurant to, for example, London. Certain details matter, including the ambience. Italian food is mainly about letting ingredients speak for themselves – as opposed to French cuisine where it is often tweaked and manipulated beyond recognition. But pasta is pasta, and – as my good friend James Chiavarini, owner of the iconic Il Portico restaurant in west London, told me: ‘If my customers want chicken in their pasta, and to them it tastes nice, then they will have it.’

Not so at the trendy Bottega Prelibato in Shoreditch, east London, where carbonara was taken off the menu for causing controversy. The front page of its website states, ‘No, we don’t serve carbonara’. Talk about off-putting. It reminds me of a café in a north London park that has a chalkboard outside, not with drinks and food on the menu, but a ‘No crisps, no Coca-Cola, no meat’ warning to any plebs fancying a hangover cure. 

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Owner of Prelibato, Gianfillippo Mattioli said of carbonara-gate, ‘We do it the right way, because I am from Rome and I actually know how to do it, and my chef does as well’. A number of customers had asked the chef to add cream, mushrooms, chicken, or other ingredients to the carbonara. 

Earlier this year, an Italian academic caused a kerfuffle by claiming in a newspaper article that carbonara was an ‘American dish born in Italy’. Alberto Grandi, a professor at the University of Parma, said: ‘Everything I, an Italian, thought I knew about Italian food is wrong,’ and continued, ‘from panettone to tiramisu, many “classics” are in fact recent inventions.’

In 2017, former Bake Off judge Mary Berry was criticised for adding thyme, garlic and white wine to her bolognese sauce. But what if it tastes good? Maybe she could just call it ‘meat sauce’ and be done with it? 

In one of the most ridiculous examples of purist high-handedness I have ever heard of regarding the Italian way of eating, a restaurant in Florence – tired of debating with tourists asking for a cappuccino before, during or after lunch and dinner, simply removed its coffee machine. Now, that really does strike me as cutting off il naso to spite la faccia.

The Third Man fan’s guide to Vienna

The greatest movie ever made celebrates its 75th anniversary this year and I’ll be watching it – for the umpteenth time – with appropriately fine fizz at hand. Sorry, what? Oh, come on, I’m talking about The Third Man. There’s no finer film. I thought everyone knew that.

You know, written by Graham Greene, directed by Carol Reed and set in a battered, broken, postwar Vienna. It stars Joseph Cotten as Holly Martins and Orson Welles as Harry Lime and there’s sterling support from Alida Valli, Trevor Howard, Bernard Lee and Wilfrid Hyde-White, whose comic cameo almost steals the show. Vienna is the real star of course, shot in brooding black and white at unsettling angles by Robert Krasker (who won an Oscar for his efforts), and you’ll recognise Anton Karas’s haunting ding de ding de ding de-ding dum dum dum zither music if nothing else.

The Third Man is part thriller, part romance, part mystery, part comedy and wholly brilliant. If you haven’t seen it, please do. And if you have seen it, please see it again for it reveals something new with each viewing as, indeed, does Vienna itself, a famously inscrutable city.

I never knew the old Vienna before the war with its Strauss music, its glamour and easy charm… (Sorry, couldn’t help myself, that’s the film’s first line.) Nope, I don’t go that far back but I do know it a bit, having stayed there often with my bonkers, beloved late godmother, Sarah Gainham, once of this magazine and author of a much-lauded Vienna-set novel: Night Falls on the City.

Prompted by TTM’s anniversary, I went back the other day and stayed at Hotel Die Josefine, a deliciously eccentric boutique hotel on Esterhazygasse, blessed with a fabulous roaring twenties-style basement cocktail bar – Barfly’s. I barely made a dent in its list of 400 cocktails, 500 rums and over 1,200 whiskies, but knew in a trice that it was my kind of place. I couldn’t stop smiling.

My first stop was the Prater with its giant Ferris wheel (once the world’s tallest), upon which Martins and Lime ride and where Lime delivers Welles’s famously improvised lines about Switzerland and cuckoo clocks. I did one gentle circuit on the wheel, hummed a bit of Karas and bought myself a disgustingly tasty käsekrainer at Bitzinger’s Würstelstand before heading off to meet Gerhard Strassgschwandtner, founder and proprietor of The Third Man Museum near the Naschmarkt.

It’s a bit homespun, the museum, but for Third Man obsessives like me, utterly absorbing. There are over 3,000 original items on display, including shooting scripts, cameras, props, costumes and clapper boards, Karas’s original zither and uniforms, posters and literature from the Four Power occupation of Vienna. It’s gripping stuff.

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Few Viennese have seen – let alone heard of – The Third Man, but the delightful Gerhard knows it inside out and has developed a walking tour, complete with invaluable paperback guide, that takes in all its major locations. I begged him to show me just a couple and saw the manhole through which Lime scrambles down into the sewers; Lime’s apartment at 5 Josefplatz and – most thrilling of all – the doorway in which we first glimpse Lime in the shadows, the cat toying with his shoelaces. I felt childishly excited.

So excited, in fact, that I had to ground myself with some fine Viennese beer and so made straight for the Gösser Bierklinik in Steindlgasse. This is as trad a Viennese restaurant as you will find (in business since 1566) and something of a place of pilgrimage for me. I first went with my godmother when I was ten and go back whenever in town. The menu of Wiener schnitzel, sauerkraut, duck and red cabbage, liver and onions, never changes and nor does its dusty décor. There’s a cannonball embedded in the wall (supposedly from the Ottoman siege of Vienna in 1683) and a model dragon whose mouth opens and eyes flash when you pull its tail. It delights me to do this as much at 64 as it did at 10.

I also like to discover new Vienna and did so via cocktails at Das Loft, a trendy bar on the top floor of a swanky hotel with gorgeous views of the city; the Leopold Museum (the Belvedere ain’t the only place that boasts fine Klimts) and C.O.P. – Collection of Produce – a stunning modern restaurant where I had one of the most enjoyable meals of my life, dining on fire-roasted bone marrow on charred bread; burned beetroots, pickled chicory and labneh; egg yolk raviolo, Jerusalem artichoke cream and sage butter and dry-aged ribeye washed down with 2012 Sonntag geschlossen Grüner Veltliner (I had no idea GV could age so well) and 2022 Markowitsch Pinot Noir.

‘A person doesn’t change just because you find out more,’ says Lime’s abandoned lover, Anna Schmidt (Alida Valli). Well, nor does a city. Vienna remains as beguiling as ever.

Watch: Lloyd Russell-Moyle called out over his behaviour in gender debate

Lloyd Russell-Moyle, Labour MP for Brighton Kemptown, received a rather humiliating dressing down in the Commons today. His ticking off followed the Health Secretary’s statement on Dr Hilary Cass’s report into gender services. During his intervention, a holier-than-thou Russell-Moyle welcomed the report for moving the discussion on but claimed that his reading of the review found fault with people being ‘particularly nasty and vicious on all sides’. The Labour MP spoke of how he had faced abuse himself over the trans issue, and posters with ‘rude words’ had been put outside his house.

What Mr S can’t quite comprehend is that this MP — who appeared to be lecturing the Chamber on common courtesy — is the same Russell-Moyle who, after shouting down Tory MP Miriam Cates during a discussion on Scotland’s gender bill in January 2023, was accused of trying to further intimidate the vocal women’s rights campaigner by going to sit by her on the Tory benches. The hypocrisy is galling…

And today Health Secretary Victoria Atkins decided she’d had enough too, telling the MP:

I’m sorry, but I think there is a certain amount of disbelief in the Chamber because I cannot be the only one who remembers the debate of January 2023 where the member opposite not only tried to shout down female colleagues on his side of the house but felt so exercised about the debate which was to do with the Scottish gender recognition act, he crossed the floor of the house to come and sit on the bench next to my honourable friend for Penistone and Stocksbridge. And I remember, those of us on this side of the house were genuinely surprised that a Member of Parliament would think it was appropriate to behave in that way when debating something that we are entitled and should feel free to debate. I’m sorry to hear that he has suffered the abuse he describes, but setting a good example starts at home.

See the camera pan back to a much humbled and rather red-faced Russell-Moyle.

Watch the clip here: