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In defence of teenage boys
Horatio Nelson passed his examination for lieutenant on 9 April 1777 (possibly with a little help from his uncle, who was one third of the examining panel). He was then just 18 and a half years old, and yet he already had six years of naval experience. The man who was to become England’s greatest fighting sailor had served in the West Indies and the Arctic, and had spent two years on the India station, at a time when sea voyages to India could take as much as six months each way. He had seen combat, albeit a brief and insignificant skirmish, and had recently recovered from a serious bout of malaria. All this before he reached the point at which most modern youngsters leave school. His was not an especially unusual trajectory for the time. It was common for boys to go to sea around the start of their teens and to have obtained an officer’s commission by their early twenties.
There were of course many cruelties and horrors attendant on teenage boys going to sea in the 18th century navy. But equally, that old system did provide an outlet for boys’ natural desire for adventure, achievement, responsibility and excitement, and to induct them into the world of men in a meaningful way. It is also an excellent illustration of the extent to which our expectations of what boys can and cannot do are very strongly shaped by the arrangement of society, rather than by any inherent physical or mental limitations. There is a fantastic scene in the film Master and Commander in which the very young midshipman Lord Blakeney – who has already endured the amputation of an arm sans anaesthetic with barely a whimper – dines with Captain Aubrey and the other officers, all older men, and the viewer can see that through his shared experiences and adversities with them, and his growing mastery of himself and his skills, he is being inducted into the world of adult male comradeship.
The values, aspirations and behaviour of teenage boys have been the subject of much debate and discussion in the last few weeks, following the release of the Netflix mini-series Adolescence. The whole machinery of official concern has sprung into action. Keir Starmer has been perfecting his worried face behind a podium in Downing Street. Newspaper columnists have demanded change. Questions have been raised in the House, by MPs who insist that the government must act to address the made-up events performed by actors that appeared on the screen in the corner of their living-room. Should we ban phones? Should we ban Andrew Tate? Should we have special lessons for boys where they are taught how not to be misogynists? Something must be done.
No doubt there are many problems in contemporary youth culture. I have my own concerns about smartphones and social media. However, I would like to put those to one side for a moment and say a word in favour of teenage boys, who have been the target of so much direct and indirect opprobrium in recent weeks. They have been slandered as ticking timebombs of misogyny and sexual entitlement, full of rage and violence, unable to cope with the changing modern world.
Beyond these panicky stereotypes, there is another, very different story about teenage boys. We should cherish their love of scabrous and iconoclastic humour, because we will always need to puncture the hectoring piety of complacent establishments. And what about their admirable impatience with humbug, and their restless energy? These are the kind of characteristics typical of young men that other eras seem to have worked out how to channel and honour, in ways that we have often forgotten. Our society is dominated by labyrinthine speech codes, by policies and procedures, by a political-legal culture that prioritises safety, comfort and consensus over action, agency and robust but impersonal disagreement, which is to say that it penalises and suppresses a classical male mode of existence and discourse.
Instinctively, teenage boys value strength, humour, courage and prowess. They want, consciously or not, to prove themselves to one another and to the adult world, especially the adult male world. Any boy who has played on a sports team with men will understand this instinctively. When I was 15, I went to the Yorkshire Dales on a winter walking trip with my older brothers, who were then 27 and 23, and one of their friends. We climbed several peaks in heavy snow, with a freezing wind slicing through us. The zips on my rucksack froze solid. But the thing I remember most of all is wanting to demonstrate my endurance, like most boys of that age. And this is a good impulse. It is good that young men prize stamina and skill. It is good that they want to push boundaries and impose themselves on the world and impress girls. Their disdain for nagging, their reluctance to be scolded and boxed in, is commendable, even if it sometimes causes problems for the adults around them.
If you read biographies of men who have distinguished themselves in some field of human endeavour, especially ones requiring physical bravery and mastery, it is common to come across incidents of adolescent rule-breaking. It seems like war heroes and pioneers of mountaineering were forever sneaking out of their boarding school dormitories to test their nerve by ‘roofing’ or getting into fights. George Mallory, who very nearly reached the summit of Everest in 1924, honed his climbing skills by sneaking out of Winchester College to clamber about on the ruins of the bishop’s palace. It is near-compulsory nowadays to tut at the saying that ‘boys will be boys’, on the grounds that it allegedly excuses bad behaviour. But the basic truth of this expression – that we should give young men a certain amount of leeway as they develop their ambition, their drive and their abilities – is highly important. The world needs men, and if we want good men who will do great things, we need to salute the fiery, irreverent, independent spirit of the teenage boy.
China is wary of American intentions
In 2024, China exported three times more to the US than the US did to China, and President Donald Trump’s aim is to get this trade balance down to zero. On ‘Liberation Day’, Wednesday 2 April, Trump announced that Chinese goods coming into the US would now have an additional tariff of 34 per cent imposed on them, added to an extra 20 per cent imposed earlier this year. This means that those goods are now subject to an overall rate of 54 per cent. China has now lodged a complaint at the World Trade Organisation, declaring: ‘This practice of the US is not in line with international trade rules, seriously undermines China’s legitimate rights and interests, and is a typical unilateral bullying practice.’
Can China force the US to change direction? It’s unlikely in the short term. Jude Blanchette, director of the Rand China Research Centre in Washington told me that ‘the Chinese counter-tariffs in themselves are unlikely to force a course-correction from the Trump administration, especially as Trump is clearly less bothered by market movements than he was during his first term.’
Beijing’s sharp language, there’s wariness and uncertainty about American intentions. Things seem to be moving in American China policy, but not all in the same direction. According to some reports, a deal had finally been agreed with Bytedance, the Chinese owner of TikTok, to sell the wildly successful social media app to an American buyer. When the tariffs were announced on Wednesday, the deal was called off by Beijing. This was unsurprising: most diplomats would realise that China could hardly make a major concession on TikTok that looked as if it had been forced on them by US tariffs. But there was also wider confusion about what these contradictory events said about the connections between policymaking on trade issues and security.
Beijing may also be scratching its head at mixed signals on another issue central to its relationship with the US: Taiwan. The Financial Times reported that Joseph Wu, Taiwan’s top security official, was due in Washington last weekend for talks. The talks, referred to as the
‘special channel’, have been public knowledge since 2021, but are generally kept low-key to avoid provoking Beijing. Yet this meeting comes on the same weekend that several senior US figures involved with national security policies, including on China specifically, have been fired by the administration. It’s not clear yet whether their views on China and Russia contributed to their axing, but it leaves Washington’s attitude toward China still unclear. Discussions in policy circles on the direction of travel range from the possibility of a confrontation over Taiwan to a ‘grand bargain’ which divides up the world, with the western hemisphere under US influence and the eastern shaped by Beijing.
Meanwhile, China’s policymakers are still puzzled by a US administration dissimilar to any other they’ve encountered. As a result, they have restrained their public pronouncements, sticking to declarations that sound fierce but are boilerplate in language. However, Beijing is preparing its own shifts in policy. In March, EU trade chief Maros Sefcovic met Chinese vice-premier He Lifeng in Beijing; the latter declared that they must ‘jointly resist unilateralism and protectionism to protect the multilateral trading system.’ Ironically, Hungary’s prime minister Viktor Orban, one of the closest figures culturally to the new US administration, is also one of the most enthusiastic advocates for closer economic ties between China and the EU.
Other major liberal economies, including the UK and Australia, are also being pushed to seek new economic opportunities from Chinese investment. Both countries are deeply wary of the security implications of closeness to China in areas of sensitive technology, but also know that if trade with the US is now in danger, China is one of the few large markets where there might be a chance of expansion. ‘China’s response,’ Blanchette notes, ‘if coupled with strong reactions from the EU and other key economies, might in the aggregate effect so much pain on the US economy that Trump is forced to declare his tariffs an early success and find a quick path to de-escalation.’
China’s economy is still underperforming, and remains highly dependent on exporting. Being forced to charge American suppliers and consumers more for their goods will undoubtedly cause short-term pain for China’s economy, but in the years since the first Trump administration, China has leaned into policies of ‘self-reliance’ (zili gengsheng), and Xi Jinping and the politburo are likely to have calculated that they can make their way through it. In fact, it might stimulate a policy that China’s economists have been advocating for years: an encouragement to Chinese savers to spend more and stimulate domestic consumption. It would be ironic if one effect of the tariff policy was to prevent Chinese exports growing and instead force Beijing to rebalance its economy to make it more sustainable over the medium term – but everything is possible.
Should Marine Le Pen step down?
It was a rally for Marine Le Pen billed as a rendez-vous historique. In the end, barely a few thousand people showed up on Sunday afternoon in Paris. In a city where more than a million marched after the Charlie Hebdo attacks, and where hundreds of thousands protested against racism and police violence in recent years, Sunday’s rally for Marine Le Pen barely registered.
The Rassemblement National had promised a great mobilisation to denounce Le Pen’s recent conviction and her five–year ban from public office. What it delivered was a media production surrounded by journalists and padded out by militants bussed in from the provinces. The rally failed to convince or to inspire. The RN had called on supporters to mobilise en masse to defend ‘democracy’ and protest the ‘political elimination’ of their leader. But the promised wave of indignation never came.
The atmosphere at the scenic Place Vauban, with views of the Invalides, was choreographed down to the last chorus. I attended and walked in through security and past a long line of parked coaches. The loudspeakers played a curated mix of patriotic pop: the Marseillaise, and a sweep of French sentimental hits from the 1970s and 1980s. On the big screens came messages from Viktor Orban and Matteo Salvini. It had the feel of a Trump rally – but without the excitement. The stage was set against the Invalides, echoing grandeur but highlighting the mismatch between the setting and the turnout. ‘The hour is grave when we lose television channels,’ said Jordan Bardella, referring to the right–leaning C8 channel recently losing its licence. ‘The hour is grave when we lose candidates.’
When Le Pen took to the stage, she looked exhausted. ‘You are wonderful,’ Marine Le Pen told her supporters. ‘I will not give up.’ The crowd replied with a half–hearted chant: ‘Marine Présidente.’ But the square never filled and there was no excitement whatsoever. TV cameras were positioned to capture the dense centre of the audience and crop out the empty space behind. I was handed a tricolore flag and told to wave it with enthusiasm. I was asked twice by reporters if I wanted to be interviewed.
Le Pen’s remarks were defiant, but flat. ‘This isn’t a legal decision – it’s a political one,’ she said. ‘That decision trampled the rule of law and the democratic state.’ She condemned threats to magistrates and insisted, ‘We are not asking to be above the law – but not beneath it either.’ Before she had finished speaking, many were already leaving.
If this rally was meant to reassert Le Pen’s leadership, it failed. What it highlighted instead was an increasingly urgent question: it raised the question of whether Marine Le Pen’s era is ending, and whether Jordan Bardella has already become the RN’s de facto candidate for 2027.
Across town, Jean–Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise attempted a counter–demonstration at Place de la République. I went there too. It was even smaller – disorganised, meandering, ignored. The Socialists stayed away. The Communists stood around looking uninspired. There were no speeches of note, no clear demands, and no discernible energy. It had the feel of a student protest assembled over WhatsApp – aimless, awkward and instantly forgettable.
If Le Pen’s rally underscored the limits of her appeal, the polls suggest the RN’s momentum may be shifting directly to Jordan Bardella. Although he’s just 29 years old, he has already led the party through European elections and into national prominence. He polls competitively with or higher than Le Pen in first–round scenarios, with Harris Interactive placing him at 35–36 per cent post–ban, compared to Le Pen’s 34–37 per cent from Ifop pre–ban. An Odoxa poll showed that two–thirds of French voters – and 69 per cent of RN supporters – believe Bardella could equal or surpass her performance if he ran in 2027.
Bardella is young, sharp, and social media fluent. He has no legal baggage. And crucially, he seems capable of attracting support beyond the RN’s core electorate. Le Pen’s strength was always her tenacity, her sense of timing, and her ability to rebrand the party her father founded. But now – facing a ban, presiding over a half–empty square, and speaking to cameras rather than citizens – she looked spent, as though the weight of the moment and the years behind it were finally beginning to show.
Marine Le Pen may not be ready to step down. Sunday suggested the public might make that decision for her
Meanwhile, President Macron’s former prime minister Gabriel Attal was in Saint–Denis, trying to claim the middle. His speech was textbook Macronism – earnest, institutional, oddly sterile. But he delivered it to a well–organised, receptive audience. ‘Let us not cede a centimetre of our values… Marine Le Pen and the RN were convicted after ten years of investigation and procedure, after embezzling millions of euros in public money,’ he said. ‘The only thing we should be glad about is that we live in a country where the judiciary can judge political figures independently.’
Attal doesn’t inspire, but he doesn’t implode either. He is betting that by calmly occupying the centre, he can reach the second round – whether that’s against Mélenchon, Le Pen or Bardella.
Marine Le Pen may not yet be ready to relinquish her role. But Sunday suggested that the public might already be making that decision for her. The RN’s narrative of victimhood failed to mobilise. The message didn’t land.
Le Pen’s instinct has been to double down – to claim persecution, to attempt to rally the faithful, to cast herself as wronged. But the faithful barely turned up. Bardella, by contrast, doesn’t need to invoke victimhood. He doesn’t need to shout. He just needs to appear young, presentable, unburdened. Sunday marked not only the failure of Le Pen’s rally, but perhaps the passing of her strategy. If the RN is serious about power, it may soon conclude that its future lies not in relitigating the past, but in letting it go.
The return of the Young Fogey
At a recent lunch where I was sitting next to A.N. Wilson I couldn’t help but take a good look at his suit. After all, this was the man often described as the original Young Fogey. He was dressed perfectly well in an austere two-piece, though while I (ever the try-hard) was sporting a pocket square, he was without one. On another occasion, chatting to Charles Moore in the colonial surrounds of the Foreign Office’s Durbar Court, the Lord was indistinguishable in dress from the other mandarins and journalistic bigwigs there. In bygone days, a Young Fogey such as he would have donned a seersucker suit and shantung silk tie for the occasion. The Young Fogeys’ flamboyance of dress evident in their heyday is gone. Though thank heavens that the marvellous Simon Heffer’s portliness enables him to still pull off a pocket watch.
This all got me thinking: 40 years on from the publication of The Young Fogey Handbook (1985), is the persona dead? Harry Mount, writing in these pages in 2003, thought so: he had ‘pedalled off into the sunset on his sit-up-and-beg butcher’s bike, broad-brim fedora firmly on head’. But I am not so sure.
The term Young Fogey was popularised by Alan Watkins in a Spectator diary in 1984. Attempting to put his finger on this curious breed that he encountered at the Spectator offices and among most of his friends, he mused that it was a conservative type defined by his politics (‘libertarian but not liberal’), but also by his aesthetic and interests:
He is a scholar of Evelyn Waugh. He tends to be coolly religious, either RC or C of E. He dislikes modern architecture. He makes a great fuss about the old Prayer Book, grammar, syntax and punctuation. He laments the difficulty of purchasing good bread, Cheddar cheese, kippers and sausages – though not beer, because the cause of good beer has been taken over by boring men with beards from the Campaign for Real Ale. He enjoys walking and travelling by train. He thinks the Times is not what it was and prefers the Daily Telegraph.
So does he exist today? Young men’s drift to the political right is well-documented. And that social and cultural conservatism is cultivating what has been described as a ‘right-wing retro revivalism’. Its adherents run popular accounts on X putting out Roger Scruton quotes as daily sustenance, or beautiful film reels of British life in decades past. They decry modern architecture and building regs restricting window size. While they respect the Victorian Society they are more likely to follow Create Streets. The planned razing of M&S’s art deco flagship saddens them; the proliferation of American candy stores maddens them. I christen this new tribe the ‘Trad Lads’.
The Young Fogey was a traditionalist, holding out against modernity. His heart was not in the city but in the countryside. He cooked on an Aga, or at least wanted to. The Trad Lad is much the same. He wishes he liked sherry, and Gentleman’s Relish. He drinks Ovaltine in the evenings and takes a hot water bottle to bed. And even if he doesn’t, he thinks he jolly well ought to.
He will try, where possible, to still write in fountain pen and doesn’t think pencil sharpeners are redundant. Should he stumble across a drawing compass in his nephew’s pencil case he is likely to want it for himself, and might be prompted into wallowing in nostalgia about his school days.
He spends time on social media in spite of himself; his iPhone is an ugly intrusion of the modern world but most of his kindred spirit are to be found through X. Clubland still appeals, but one can no longer always rely on bumping into the right sort at the Travellers or the Carlton. Besides, have you seen what the prices jump to when you reach 25?
The Trad Lad is an aesthete who would like to visit National Trust properties at the weekend, but the train fares are too high so he watches the latest video from Great Houses and Estates on Instagram, and campaigns for Restore Trust instead. Like the old Young Fogeys, he likes the idea of great British breaks in lieu of holidaying overseas, though whether out of love for Blighty or a shortage of annual leave it’s not clear.
What does he read, apart from his X feed? The Spectator is of course a stalwart, but he is likely also to peruse the occasional article from the Idler, and wants to know more about Chap magazine. Of what does he dream? Affording the house he’s seen with Inigo estate agents, and covering its walls with Colefax and Fowler. Something in him died when Plain English discontinued their British Standard Cupboards range. He asked for a subscription to World of Interiors for Christmas. ‘Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, Or what’s a heaven for?’
What of his aesthetic? The original Young Fogeys embraced the Brideshead look. They loved a four-piece in heavy tweed and might have travelled in a Morris Minor. The Trad Lad is more likely to be found in a simple navy two-piece than a westkit. If, as Port magazine has written, the Young Fogey’s utopia was all ‘Laura Ashley dresses and Tricia Guild wallpaper’, the Trad Lad is always on the lookout for second-hand Aquascutum, and a partner who shops at Boden. He is to be found travelling into central to visit Sir John Soane’s museum on the Elizabeth line. A traditional push-bike would be nicked in today’s London, so the Trad Lad must settle for a Lime bike instead. At least they have a basket.
The Trad Lad wishes he liked sherry, and Gentleman’s Relish. He drinks Ovaltine in the evenings and takes a hot water bottle to bed. And even if he doesn’t, he thinks he jolly well ought to
Where have these Trad Lads come from? Plenty of commentators have remarked on young people’s newfound wholesomeness. Hedonism is unfashionable; researching Isa providers is cool. Cigarettes, sex and alcohol are out; in are jigsaws, baking and a quiet night watching Peaky Blinders. Here is sown the pining for a traditional, homespun life that was the Young Fogey’s USP. It is not quite ‘old maids bicycling to holy communion through the morning mist’, but it’s not far off.
It seems to stem more from anxiety than exuberance. Wilson, Moore and their fellow travellers were flashy dressers, if still in a buttoned-up sort of way. But whereas the Young Fogeys sported frockcoats and fasteners, the Trad Lad does not seem to have the same confidence. Instead he shelters from the modern world in a simple, albeit well-structured, jacket.
Disillusioned by modern life, some young men are retreating into a past world. It is not yet a mainstream movement among youngsters; rather still a tribe, a cabal. But it’s growing. Harry Mount suspected that the Young Fogey, croquet mallet in hand, died because there was nothing left to fight for. It was a rebel movement that developed in reaction to bohemianism and to the naked materialism of the early 1980s. Perhaps youngsters once more feel the need to rebel: this time, against wokeism and tracksuit WFH-ism. In their own gentle way, the Trad Lads are readying themselves for the fight.
Save the Red Arrows!
You will be aware that we face a national emergency. I’m not referring to the fact that our closest ally has seemingly taken leave of its senses or the astonishing news that apparently one in four Britons is now disabled – nor that more than nine million of us of working age are economically inactive. I’m not even talking about the parlous state of the NHS.
The national emergency I’m referring to is one that trumps even Trump, so brace yourselves. Soon we are going to run out of Red Arrows.
The jolly red-painted planes they fly – the Hawk T1s made by BAE Systems – are now so old, they’re even older than Putin’s fighters. And while you can’t tell because of the highly polished crimson livery, they are increasingly expensive to maintain and probably getting a wee wobbly on their feet too. As a result of their extreme age, these methuselahs of the air are due to be retired in 2030 or soon after ‘in the 2030s’, presuming that a few more years can be eked out of their weary airframes. Already these iconic jets have been phased out of routine RAF training work – that happened in 2022. And that’s a problem because there is no replacement. Not a British one, anyway.
There is the Hawk T2, brought into service in 2009, of which we have some 28, on paper at least. However, these are needed to train our fighter pilots on the Typhoon or the new F-35 Lightning II – and already we have trainee pilots reportedly facing lengthy waiting times to get the cockpit hours in because we don’t have enough of them as it is. And we can’t get any more Hawk T2s because BAE Systems has stopped making them. This is an interesting decision for BAE to have taken since it boasts that it’s sold more than 1,000 Hawks to nations around the world since their introduction in the 1970s, making it their most successful plane.
So what are we going to do? Because it’s unthinkable that the Red Arrows could fly anything that wasn’t British, isn’t it? The ‘oohs’ and the ‘aaahhs’ just wouldn’t be the same if the world-renowned Diamond Nine was made up of Saabs, Dassaults or Lockheed Martins. The red, white and blue smoke would lose all its integrity if it emerged from the rear end of a Korean Aerospace Industries T-50 or an Aermacchi MB-339, perfectly serviceable though they doubtlessly are. It would be a national humiliation. After all, if the Americans, the Germans, the French, the Japanese, the Koreans, even the Italians, can muster a plausible national air display team furnished with jets made in their own countries, then why can’t we? Particularly when it’s the RAF’s world-famous Red Arrows that have performed some 5,000 displays in 57 countries since their formation in 1964. And aviation is still meant to be something we are ‘world class’ at.
If the Americans, the Germans, the French, the Japanese, the Koreans, even the Italians, can muster a plausible national air display team furnished with jets made in their own countries, why can’t we?
The question is why did BAE stop making training jets in the first place, given the enormous commercial success of the Hawk? One can only speculate that the combination of higher development costs and the dramatic retrenchment in defence spending after 1990 – when we spent 5 per cent of GDP – followed by the even more drastic cuts after the global financial crisis convinced them that there would never be a sufficient home market for the product.
But there is now. Because with the Red Arrows’ ageing Hawk T1s about to be grounded for good and with the number of Hawk T2s limited and due for retirement themselves in 2040, it’s easy to see the RAF ordering in a load more training jets soon. For a clue to the number, consider that as recently as 2017 the RAF had no fewer than 75 Hawk T1s in service.
Last month in the House of Commons the defence procurement minister Maria Eagle said that the government was ‘taking steps to consider what the alternatives might be’ for replacing the Hawk and that it would ‘consider any UK options that exist’. The good news is that there is at least one British-built version waiting in the wings – the Phoenix, a modular light jet made by a Bristol-based firm called Aeralis – but given how long these things take to get off the ground they would surely have to get their skates on to hit the early 2030s. Another option mooted is a trainer spin-off from the sixth generation fighter called Tempest that BAE is working on in partnership with firms in Italy and Japan, but that is surely a long way off – too long to help the Red Arrows.
So the race is on. What we know is that in five or six or seven years from now the venerable Red Arrows will be grounded or forced to rely on foreign-bought jet unless something is done. We can only hope that some of the £2.2 billion extra funding for defence announced by Chancellor Rachel Reeves last month is going towards a British-built replacement. Because if it’s not, then the ice creams of childhood won’t taste as sweet and, sure as eggs is eggs, that Buckingham Palace fly-past with the red, white and blue vapour trails won’t quite cut the mustard.
This is all besides the bigger point, of course: that our RAF fast-jet pilots need something really good to train in.
Why ladies love the Land Rover
It was when I nearly reversed into two brand new Land Rover Defenders in the car park at my daughter’s prep school that I realised something was going on. Of course, I had seen them before. I live in Oxfordshire where the A-roads are one long parade of Land Rover Discoveries, Range Rovers and Volvo SUVs from one junction to the next. But recently Defenders seem to be the ‘it’ car on the block. Land Rovers used to connote a certain kind of rarified upper-class masculinity – think Prince Philip, think chins hanging out of them on a shoot – but the new Defender, puffed-up and boxy like a fat peacock, unintentionally parodies what marketeers might pompously call its ‘brand heritage’. One senses that Prince Philip, one of the few to have actually been seen dead in a Land Rover, wouldn’t be having any of it.
Like a Chippendale stripper on wheels, the Land Rover Defender hints at robust masculinity and functionality but delivers on none of it because it doesn’t need to. It is a preening object that works on titillation alone. Just as a stripper touts sex, the Defender advertises something – rugged landscapes, a certain idea of escapism, bizarre off-roading fantasies – that it will never have to make good on. It is what the French philosopher Jacques Derrida would call a ‘floating signifier’. The fact that it has taken root in Oxfordshire, where there is no real mud, says it all.
This fundamental redundancy is at the heart of the SUV philosophy and is nothing new. Think of the term ‘Chelsea tractor’, first coined in 1994 to describe the use of Range Rovers exclusively by women in West London doing the Thomas’s school run. Such is the continued ire directed at Chelsea tractors that London councils have now slapped a surcharge on parking permit fees for owners of SUVs. It doesn’t matter; the side roads of Chelsea and Notting Hill are still stuffed with them, their parking sensors beeping into the void.
But this mismatch of an object to its intended use is not what interests me. Rather, I am interested in the take-up of the new Defender by women. It is largely women that I see driving them today, not men. This could be the time of day at which I travel – when mothers are deployed to the wheel while men are long gone to their offices – but I sense it is something more. Research confirms that in the UK, the number of women buying SUVs has significantly increased, driven, according to car sales website Autotrader, by a preference for higher seating. Women have been consigned to the family Volvo estate for years while men drove sports cars for all sorts of sublimated Freudian reasons. Now they want status cars. And ‘higher ground clearance’, whatever that means. Barely a week goes by when the Telegraph or the Mail do not run an article with a woman defending her Defender as the ‘ultimate midlife crisis vehicle’ with ‘its muscular stance and sculpted lines’, which sounds just as Freudian a predicament as her husband’s Porsche.
Look at the Defender’s advertising, though, and it doesn’t seem to be targeted at women at all – just the usual rather stale pictures of Defenders parked in desert terrain at death-defying angles. Are Land Rover’s advertising brains missing a trick? Why not go the whole hog and advertise the Defender in its true natural habitat of Soho Farmhouse, parked up for a yummy mummy lunch?
On Instagram, vintage Land Rover enthusiast Tati Reed has amassed an enormous following by driving her old Landy ‘Blue Tit’ around the country, riffing on the unlikely juxtaposition of a young woman dabbling in a formerly strictly masculine pursuit. Reed’s charm, of course, is her insouciance – nothing like the knowing menopausal lady motorist at the helm of a new Defender – but it is no coincidence that her star has risen as women take more control in the purchase of cars, particularly SUVs.
School’s out now and the volume of Defenders on the roads near my house has decreased dramatically. I’ll just have to wait for everyone to get back from their ski trips to have another go at reversing into one. Before I do, though, I’ll take a good hard look at my own motivations: am I having a midlife crisis and not-so-secretly longing for a muscular Defender myself, am I affronted on Prince Philip’s behalf, or am I just a woman desperately looking for a kind of metaphorical ‘higher ground clearance’? Definitely the latter.
Is Trump stoking a global recession?
This week, Donald Trump steered the global economy away from the free trade era that has underpinned growth for decades. Within hours of his announcement of tariffs on what looked like a bookmakers board from Aintree, China had responded with its own: a 34 per cent tax on all US imports starting next Thursday.
The markets were horrified. US stocks suffered their worst week since 2020, with the S&P 500 shedding over $5 trillion in value. Over the course of the week, the index fell just over nine per cent. For context: at this point after their election wins, the S&P was up 9 per cent for Obama’s second term, 10 per cent for Trump’s first, and 19 per cent under Biden. Under Trump 2.0, it’s now down 7 per cent.
The fear of contagion is spreading. Germany’s main index has entered correction territory – down 10 per cent from its peak – while eurozone stock market volatility surged by its largest single-day jump in nearly three years. Barclays has halved its euro area growth forecast for 2025 and now predicts a recession lasting the rest of the year. Oil markets aren’t spared either: West Texas Intermediate barrels fell 14 per cent in just 48 hours, while Brent crude hit its lowest price since 2021. The global economy is bracing for impact.
Behind the market panic lies a blunt truth: these tariffs, effectively the largest US tax hikes in nearly a century, threaten to strangle global demand.
Recession is now firmly on the table. JP Morgan titled their latest client note There Will Be Blood, raising the probability of both a US and global recession from 40 to 60 per cent. Goldman Sachs upped theirs from 20 to 35 per cent. And as one investment banker put it to me: ‘The market is pricing in the worst-case scenario, which is a US, and maybe global, recession.’
Britain might avoid the worst if it doesn’t retaliate. But for Rachel Reeves, hopes of meaningful growth now seem dashed. Oxford Economics has slashed its UK GDP forecasts to below 1 per cent this year and next, down from 1.5 per cent. Barclays is even gloomier: just 0.5 per cent growth in 2025, as a result of weaker global demand.
With even poorer forecasts for the US it’s difficult to understand why Trump’s White House is prepared to stomach such economic cost. Aside from the immediate impact of a recession, the US unemployment rate is now forecast by some to surge from the 4.2 per cent it sits at now to 5.3 per cent. That’s nearly two million more Americans out of work or a city the size of Phoenix or Houston.
Part of the answer lies in America’s deep political polarisation – which now extends to economic perceptions. In the UK, economic sentiment cuts across party lines: a recent YouGov poll found 79 per cent of Tory voters and 77 per cent of Labour voters believe shop prices are rising faster than wages – even though wages are, in reality, rising nearly twice as fast as inflation.
In the US, perceptions diverge sharply depending on political allegiance, as the below graph shows. Democrats now expect inflation to soar to nearly 6 per cent – a spike since Trump’s reelection – while Republicans are bracing for deflation.
Two tribes living in two different worlds perhaps goes someway to explaining Trump’s confidence – or disregard – for the damaging impacts of taking the US’s effective tax rate to the highest level in a century. But it may also be part of the plan. His top officials aren’t exactly denying the risk. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessat saying he ‘can’t guarantee’ there won't be a recession and that prices could go up, but they ‘don't have to’. While Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said a recession that balances trade would be ‘worth it’. Trump, for his part, remains bullish: he claims the tariffs will raise $6 trillion in revenue, make America richer, and bring inflation down.
His next goal – and battle – appears clear: push the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates. On his Twitter rip-off, Truth Social, Trump declared:
This would be a PERFECT time for Fed Chairman Jerome Powell to cut Interest Rates. He is always “late,” but he could now change his image, and quickly. Energy prices are down, Interest Rates are down, Inflation is down, even Eggs are down 69 per cent, and Jobs are UP, all within two months – A BIG WIN for America. CUT INTEREST RATES, JEROME, AND STOP PLAYING POLITICS!
Markets are listening. Investors now expect more aggressive rate cuts – not only in the US, but also in Britain, where three 25 basis point cuts are now priced in for 2025, up from two just a week ago.
But it won't be so easy for JEROME (Powell) and his Fed. The market pricing of more rate cuts is the obvious response to recession fears, but the Fed is unable to ignore rising inflation expectations too. Survey respondents now expect inflation of 5 per cent compared with the 2.5 per cent prices are rising by now. Even if expectations turn out to be over-egged, they have a real impact because workers see them and are encouraged to seek better pay rises – turning expectation into reality. What's more, US jobs data released on Friday saw 228,000 new jobs created – far higher than analysts’s estimates of 140,000. A resilient labour market and sticky inflation may leave the Fed little room to bend to Trump’s demands.
The Bank of England’s rate setters now face a similar conundrum between speeding up their rate cuts in the face of trampled growth or slowing them down as the inflation risk lingers on.
As for Rachel Reeves, it now seems that her Spring Statement was, in the words of Oxford Economics a ‘stopgap’, and she’ll have to come back in the autumn to balance the fiscal books again. The Oxford economists say the Office for Budget Responsibilities’ central forecast on the effects of tariffs now looks most likely. In that one, almost all of Reeves’s £9.9 billion headroom is wiped out and she’ll have to come back either with an announcement to ditch her fiscal rules or with a tax hiking plan so that she can meet them.
So how are investors responding? In the City, analysts are beginning to make bets based on a certain reading of Trump’s plan. One international banker tells me:
Some investors also subscribe to the view that this is exactly what Trump has been trying to do. Fuck the equity market short-term, cause a recession so the Fed cuts rates, get investors to move money from equities to government bonds to reduce the cost of US borrowing to make it cheaper to service their ballooning debt.
Equities then become an opportunity: ‘On Thursday’, the source noted, ‘there was record amount of retail buying in US equities, going back for the past decade.’ In other words, punters are buying the dip.
Given how aggressive the sell-off has been – covid-level losses. I think it should be a good opportunity in equities soon. Especially if you’re thinking long term, I think there are decent entry points soon.
Still, with Trump, the only certainty is uncertainty. JP Morgan now believes a recession is more likely than not. But that outcome hinges on these tariffs being implemented in full, no meaningful trade deals emerging, and the rest of the world retaliating. If history teaches us anything, it’s this: when it comes to Trump, all bets are off.
My Eton tormentor has been jailed
Seeing the mugshot of Old Etonian Douglas Clifton Brown following his conviction for attempted murder, transported me straight back to 1986. We were in the same house and the same year at school: Clifton Brown and his friend bullied me regularly, making my life hell. Triggered, I went into the attic and found an old image from my schooldays:
Even in this supposedly formal house photo, the camera shows him elbowing me out of the way. He sports a smug smile and stares straight at the camera, whereas I didn’t dare to acknowledge the photographer.
My house, particularly when I first arrived, suffered from endemic bullying. Young for my year, small and an only-child, I didn’t stand a chance against these predatory abusers. While I never saw myself as a victim, I do think of myself as a survivor of a less enlightened era, albeit one without the provocations offered by online content creators.
As my father used to say, ‘If you think you are beaten, you are.’ Or, as my mother more maternally said on those desperate journeys back to school down the M4, ‘Believe in yourself, but keep it a secret.’
Indeed, it is these ‘little and often’ parental conversations that represented the upside of my own experience. Young people then, as now, need to feel that they have somewhere safe to turn to, in order to navigate the inevitable opportunities and challenges of modern adolescence in an increasingly complex physical and online world. They were ‘it’ for me, not the school.
Eton’s incoming Provost, Nicholas Coleridge, recently gave a talk in which he said that, for most Old Etonians, the school was at its best the summer they left. That was emphatically untrue in my case. I was glad to see the back of the place.
Yet I have much to be grateful to Eton for. My closest social and business confidantes continue to be Etonians, and I daresay the trials and tribulations I suffered were character building. I doubt that I would have started my own investment firm by the age of 30 without the fire that the likes of Clifton Brown put in my belly.
Being relentlessly bullied in the way I was made me quite resilient. Watching Sky’s recent portrayal of Dr Jim Swire’s dogged approach to his daughter’s murder in the Lockerbie atrocity, I wasn’t in the least bit surprised to discover he was an Etonian.
I left Eton with low expectations of life and a willingness to ‘swing the bat’, which turned out not to be bad strategies – ships are safe in a harbour, but it is not where they’re meant to be. When I told my investors in 2007 that I had positioned their money for an imminent Financial Crisis by selling bank stocks that I didn’t own in the first place, many of them ran for the hills. One told me I should think about an alternate career selling flowers at Paddington Station. Certainly, no one thanked me for the stellar returns I produced the following year.
If you are not being criticised in life for your results, it would appear you will be for your methods. Without the resilience that Clifton Brown taught me, I doubt very much that I would have been able to stand my ground. Success is not often doled out to well-adjusted people.
So, while I applaud the modern obsession with ‘safeguarding’ that would have spared me the worst excesses of the bullies’ attention and perhaps helped the perpetrators to find an alternative path, it is no solution to simply wrap people up in cotton wool.
Etonians are, without a doubt, perceived as among the most privileged people on the planet, regardless of their ‘lived’ experience. Clifton Brown – who threatened to throw his ex-partner down a disused well – represents a double tragedy: not just for the visible decisions he took, but also for the invisible choices he had and squandered.
For my part, the school made me a fierce competitor, as well as highly appreciative of small acts of kindness and loyalty. My school days were emphatically not the happiest of my life, but they certainly set me up for it.
The bullies that I went on to meet in later life were simply taken in my stride. After all, as I used to nonchalantly say on being asked about a well-known workplace tyrant I had first hand experience of, ‘I’ve met harder people at Eton.’
Showing Adolescence in schools lets parents off the hook
Parents are up in arms. The Prime Minister’s decision to allow all state secondary schools to screen Adolescence, the scary Netflix series about a 13-year-old murdering a classmate for taunting him online as being undesirable, has parenting groups fuming.
Keir Starmer believes that showing the drama will teach adolescents about the dangers lurking online which are driving toxic relationships. Parents argue instead that the move risks subjecting school children as young as 11 to violent and sexual content. The roll-out has the potential to harm those children who have experienced similarly abusive relationships, alienating and retraumatising them. The content, they say, is age-inappropriate and messages misconstrued.
No matter how well-meaning, teachers cannot oversee a young person’s online engagement
These parents are right: this is no way to teach children about relationships. But not for the reasons they give.
One in three 11-year-olds admits to watching porn – and these days, that means almost inevitably violent images, with strangulation a routine if illegal practice. Contrary to the concern of parents, Adolescence is not normalising porn or sexual violence – that is already the status quo. As Baroness Bertin shows in her recent parliamentary review into pornography, there is increasing evidence that ‘choking is becoming a common part of real-life sexual encounters, despite the significant medical dangers associated with it’. Or think of what Laila Mickelwait, tireless campaigner against Porn Hub, found: ‘hundreds of pieces of evidence of sexual abuse’ including a man preying on homeless black teens.
Thought-provoking and compelling, Adolescence captures the brutal reality of today’s adolescents, who regularly visit a seedy underworld peopled by incels and girls who preach the 80-20 rule: 80 per cent of women go for 20 per cent of men. That leaves a lot of young boys feeling dangerously inadequate. ‘Lost’ boys can grow up to be killer boys: both Axel Rudakubana, who stabbed three little girls to death in Stockport last summer and Nicholas Prosper, who murdered his mother, sister and brother in September, spent their teenage years watching online violence. Adolescent girls fare no better: one in three, according to a University College study, feel unsafe in the classroom.
But Adolescence also exposes the alarming ignorance that parents have of their children’s experience – on and offline. Fathers and mothers who suffer their child’s locked bedrooms without daring to challenge them; parents for whom the emojis constantly shared among young people are like so many hieroglyphics; fathers and sons who never really speak.
This is the real reason the PM’s move will not serve his purpose. By proposing that schools show the drama as an educational resource, Starmer is allowing parents to dodge their responsibility. They can continue to live in la la land, pretending that their children spend their time playing hop-scotch rather than brooding over violent sexual images. They can continue to avoid conversations about sex, or explanations about consent, dismissing the first as cringe and the second as woke.
Instead, they will continue to palm off on schools the ‘tricky’ lessons about relationships: schools deliver PSHE, these parents argue. Surely one hour a week is enough to instill values like respect, empathy and compassion in relationships, right?
Wrong. Adolescence shows how, no matter how well-meaning, teachers cannot oversee a young person’s online engagement. Nor can they supervise budding friendships or enmities, rivalries or sexual experiments. ‘The view that it is for schools to pick up the baton on this is misguided,’ argues Julian Tomkins, a psychotherapist specialising in adolescents. ‘It lets parents off the hook when, in fact, what this drama shows is that this is a crisis parents must face up to.’
Setting boundaries. Constant communication. Routine and consistency. Validation. Parenting guidance is clear. But, as GK Chesterton said of Christianity, ‘it has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried’.
The terrible two tantrums and the teenage rage alike call for steely resolve and absolute unwavering confidence. Neither comes easily to parents who feel adrift in an alien digital culture. Mentoring and monitoring are tough roles for parents to play, but play them they must, from the very early years: ‘The relationships children need to help them navigate their teens are rooted long before they get their first iPhone,’ says Felicity Gillespie, CEO of Kindred2. ‘Strong familial attachments from birth lay the foundations for our social, emotional and physical development.’
A pity that watching Adolescence didn’t trigger a eureka moment for Starmer, leading him to ban phones from schools, or tackle porn content providers. But then, both are difficult measures to implement – and unpopular with Big Tech. Easier instead to force yet another duty on schools to perform. ‘In loco parentis’ now applies too often to too much.
Oxford is right to remember its German war dead
The Queen’s College, Oxford, has put in a planning application to add the names of five alumni who died fighting for the Germans to its first world war memorial. Richard Tice, deputy leader of Reform, expressed his outrage at the plan earlier this week. ‘Where will this wokery end?’ he told the Telegraph. ‘War memorials in the UK should be to remember those who paid the ultimate sacrifice to protect and defend the Allied nations.’
The Great War hit Oxford colleges particularly hard. 20 per cent of the 15,000 who enlisted died. Officers led from the front, which was reflected in their mortality rate – almost double the overall average.
‘There is some corner of a foreign field’ runs in both directions
William Spooner, warden of New College, took a stand. He ensured that German alumni were included alongside their colleagues on the running list of the dead, which was kept on the chapel door while the war was fought. Even within the college, this inclusion was controversial. One member defended the practice, asking, ‘Do not those three dead Germans need our prayers more rather than less if we believe that they died fighting for a wrong and mistaken cause?’
A supporter from Keble wrote in defence of New College’s actions. He argued that those who couldn’t understand the reason for including the German names ‘will certainly never understand why our public schools and universities have sent out so many thousands of young men to fight’. Spooner himself pointed out that the first German on the list had ‘died in the act of carrying a wounded comrade’ and that ‘to carry on a spirit of hate against those who passed into another world can make us neither better patriots nor better men’.
When memorials were first raised in the years immediately after the war, no college – not even New College, where Spooner still presided – included their German members who were among the fallen. By 1930, however, New had added a plaque to make good the omission. A Canadian lieutenant visiting in 1941 whilst on leave thought it ‘a quiet manifestation of what I have found to be a typical English characteristic’. Wokery – if it is what Reform believe it to be – has a long history.
In 1994, my own college, Magdalen, joined this crashing wave of political correctness. ‘Poet, Scholar, Soldier’ is inscribed above the tablet commemorating Ernst Stadler’s death at Ypres in 1914, with a line of his poetry beneath. No controversy accompanied the plaque’s installation, only a visit from the German ambassador. ‘In memory of the men of this college who coming from a foreign land entered into the inheritance of this place,’ reads New College’s memorial to its central powers alumni, ‘& returning fought & died for their country’. (The lack of punctuation makes more sense engraved in the block capitals of a memorial.)
I recently read Patrick Leigh Fermor’s account of kidnapping General Kreipe from Crete in the second world war. Some of the tension comes from the mutual respect evident between two men who might at any moment be the death of each other. Fermor believes Kreipe an honourable man, aghast at some of the actions of his country’s military. Easy to remember, or it should be, that the simplistic claim – ‘the only good Nazi is a dead Nazi’ – is dishonest in a way that dishonours reality. Their leaders’ philosophy was unforgivable, as were the actions of many of their compatriots, but plenty of individuals, like Kreipe, were decent men trapped in a terrible conflict.
Nevertheless, it remains hard to imagine British memorials to the second world war including those with roots in this country who fought for our enemy. But it is easier – or it should be – to accept that the bravery of those who fought in the Great War, on both sides, was undiminished by the utter evil of the war that followed.
I would be doing a disservice to Richard Tice, about whom I am content to know little, if I were to give the impression I thought him a monster for what he said. I don’t know how much the Telegraph told him, or how much time he had to consider. Perhaps Tice, influenced by the Telegraph’s framing or a focus on the second world war, simply mistook a historical correction for a betrayal of memory. To think the worst of people we do not know is not the lesson taught by a cenotaph.
Wilfred Owen returned to the Western front in 1918 not because he hated the Germans, or approved of the continuance of the Great War, but because he felt it was the only way to do his duty by the men who fought. We do not need to approve of the politics of their leaders to recognise the valour of those who risk their lives.
Our war memorials honour the dead and honour our history. These men are not being added to British memorials as an act of self-hating political correctness. Their omission is being corrected because, in a way that mattered then and matters now, they had roots in our country. ‘There is some corner of a foreign field’ runs in both directions.
The action proposed by Queen’s is an affirmation of our better values, not a mockery of them. After the American civil war, Lincoln was criticised for respecting his old foes. ‘Do I not destroy my enemies,’ he answered, ‘when I make them my friends?’ Having said that it remains hard to imagine include German enemies of British memorials to the second world war, it is worth adding that Magdalen did exactly that. When they belatedly raised a plaque in 2001 to the alumni who had fought in that conflict, they included Helmuth von Waldthausen, who fell while involved in the horrors of Ukraine in 1943.
It was reasonable not to have included German names when the memorial first went up and wounds were fresh. But if there is anything wrong with adding the names now proposed, it is the fact it has taken a century to do so, and that those who could have read thesm, and remembered the men, are no longer here.
The Judgment of Berkshire
Almost 50 years ago, in a hotel bar in central Paris, French wine faced a reckoning. Steven Spurrier, a British wine merchant, decided California deserved a spell in the sun: at the time French wine was the dominant force in Europe, with bottles from the New World – Australia, New Zealand, the US and the like – considered their poor cousin. Spurrier came up with the idea to pit the very best French Bordeaux against Californian cabernet sauvignons and chardonnays against white Burgundies, and have a panel of experts – all French – rank them in a blind tasting that came to be known as the Judgment of Paris.
California won both categories. Odette Khan, a well-known critic, reportedly demanded her scorecard back so news of her grave error wouldn’t reach the papers. She was right to be worried: when word got out, the scandal was so great that some of the participants lost their jobs. Aubert de Villaine, the co-owner of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, described it as a ‘kick in the rear for French wine’.
It’s a kick in the rear that has been immortalised over the years on film (in 2008’s Bottle Shock, starring the late Alan Rickman as Spurrier) and in a book by George M. Taber, who reported on the tasting at the time. But the most imposing portrayal of the event is surely ‘After the Upset’, a six- by three-metre canvas reminiscent of Da Vinci’s ‘Last Supper’ that dominates the atrium of The Vineyard hotel. (It’s accessed by crossing a large glass floor suspended over the white wine cellar below. This isn’t a subtle hotel.)
The piece by London artist Gary Myatt, commissioned by The Vineyard’s former owner, Sir Peter Michael – himself a vintner in California – shows on the critics’ faces embarrassment thinly disguised as outrage. Scorecards flying, glasses scrutinised and tablecloths askew, it captures a moment of madness and incredulity.
Though I must have tasted as least as many wines as they did, my visit to The Vineyard, in Newbury, Berkshire, was rather more sedate. At check-in, I was immediately handed a glass of white wine, a blend of grenache and viognier from the southern Rhône that tasted, in exactly this order, of citrus; cherry blossom; holidays. We may have started off in France, but I was soon led through a long, winding corridor lined with huge, atmospheric black-and-white photographs of Californian vineyards – Sir Peter’s, it turned out. In a matter of metres, I was firmly in Wine Country.
As we neared the rooms, John – the hotel’s host and self-taught art historian – invited me to take part in a guessing game: each room is named after a winemaker, and the decor fits the colour and characteristics of their bottles. I was staying in Domaine Roulot, which I’d never heard of. I guessed red; they do Meursault. John was kind enough to forgive my mistake.
Draining my first glass, I wandered back along to reception, the corridors morphing into an Escher woodcut as I followed signs up and down stairs and along landings that seemingly led nowhere. I didn’t mind. Every flat surface is a gallery here. In the ladies’ – with its padded, patterned walls, like a very beautiful asylum – Grace Kelly peered down at me, regal and pristine in a sketch by Boris Smirnoff. (No relation to the vodka, disappointingly.) At the bar, a gaggle of children caught between pointillism and impressionism giggled in the corner, sharing secrets on a picnic blanket in Philip Wilson Steer’s ‘Chatterboxes’. And how many diners can say they’ve had a meal under the watchful eye of a Degas – or even two?
Over a glass of Armenian voskehat – a bold, intense white that lingered on the tongue – Romain Bourger, the hotel’s director of wine and the UK’s top sommelier last year, explained that while the 15,000 bottles in the cellar championed Californian wine, he sought to give a platform to bottles from lesser-known countries, deepening and challenging guests’ tastes and preconceptions about wine and who gets to make it.
At dinner an Argentinian white was followed by a blanc de noirs from New York; we then flitted between New Zealand, Italy and France before topping off the evening with a Royal Tokaji. The Hungarian wine was liquid sunshine.
But if the wine pairings were worldly, the tasting menu was firmly based in Berkshire. Crunchy pastry cups of cured trout tasted exactly like the best fish and chip batter you’ve ever tried. (I mean this as a huge compliment.) The spring lamb and asparagus were so beautifully presented that I didn’t know whether to eat my food or frame it. Perhaps it was because I was dining with a group of influencers. They were immaculate. Their insistence on getting the perfect shot, however confected, made me self-conscious of the messy way I dipped my bread and slurped down every last drop of my wine. But it was too good for me to care.
Chef Thomas Scade’s plates were a riot of colour. While Heston Blumenthal-esque ‘food as other objects’ trickery can often come off as forced, the replica of a cork that followed the intricate puddings was a genuinely tasty brownie. Although by that point, such was my trust in Scade’s cooking that had he toasted a real cork, plated it and told me to eat it I probably would have, and thanked him for the experience.
Four hours at the table flew by. New World wines more than held their own. Spurrier would have been proud.
Luxury double rooms at The Vineyard start from £295 per night, or £336 with breakfast. Prices at The Tasting Room start from £115 for five courses, with paired wines for an additional £85.
I’m woke right. Maybe you are too
Has the very online left, the bane of our times, been usurped by the very online right? It’s a poetically appealing idea, for sure – an amusing conceit. But I really don’t think so. Purity spirals and internecine denunciations have been a feature of the last decade or so in the era of woke. This seems to have been mainly fostered by women, for which Louise Perry persuasively makes the case here. Perry argues, convincingly, that a lot of the progressive censoriousness was female-led – or at least female-coded – and introduced using passive-aggressive HR ‘guidelines’, office politics, etc.
There’s recently been some concern that a similar mode of operations is emerging on the so-called ‘woke right’, but with a difference: that there are new resurgent reactionaries on the block who want to ban stuff – smartphones for kids, DEI initiatives, even TV – and that these tend to be men, and a lot more blunt in their tactics. Are these chaps the new Mary Whitehouses, and guilty of something we might dub paternalism? Is the new right essentially a new version of online-only identity politics?
I think this is a slightly misleading way to frame the situation. There is, in fact, a marked squeamishness on the right – a desire to play the game by rules that were last observed in about 1990. In Britain, we’ve witnessed the clumsiness and vindictiveness of Rupert Lowe’s expulsion from Reform, and the attempt to smear this loveable sexagenarian buffer as an internet-crazed loony, despite him being in much closer alignment with public opinion on many key issues than pretty much anybody else.
This middle ground fallacy is, perhaps, an inevitable product of democracy and its compromises. Maybe a few stabbings is tolerable? Maybe a few (million) unidentified migrants could illegally enter the country? Maybe ‘there’s nothing wrong with being woke’, as Boris Johnson said, as he blew his historic victory by backsliding into soggy consensus?
But the level playing field that underpinned the system is long gone. Every gender-related employment tribunal, for example, reveals that very basic assumptions have been overturned. Then we have the grotesque Attorney General Lord Hermer, who brazenly assumes that the judiciary is infallible and must never be criticised – and the Sentencing Council, who have set themselves above parliament. How, exactly, do you deal with crushing, unaccountable state power like that by using the rules of liberalism and playing nicely? It’s a rigged board, a marked deck.
The temptation is always to say ‘ah well, things aren’t so bad, must play a straight bat’. When you’re appalled by the state of the country, it can be tempting to check yourself – oh no, maybe I’m being very online? Are the stakes really that high? You look away from your screen at the real physical world. Things seem like they’ve always been, sort of, if you squint. Sunrise, sunset. Perhaps we’ll just muddle through. No need to get het up – or worse, shrill and hysterical.
Then you are brought up short by something so hideously, outrageously wrong that this understandable desire for normality and quiet turns to ashes. This turning of blind eyes – to asylum hotels, to net zero, to blatant anti-Semitism, to a hundred and one other piecemeal degradations – is exactly how we got into the terrible mess we are in now.
Playing fair with people that have never played fair and never will – how does liberalism get us out of that?
Playing fair with people that have never played fair and never will – how does liberalism get us out of that? I would like that liberal world back too, but I have a creeping, creepy feeling that it isn’t coming back.
Sometimes a very firm ‘no’ is necessary. That’s why we have a state, to regulate our society and to stop those who might cause harm. Some things do indeed need to be banned. I’m afraid I think the sight of a smartphone in a child’s hand should be regarded in the same way as a wrap of crack cocaine in a child’s hand. If that makes me a very online woke right male Mary Whitehouse, fine.
Adults have to take responsibility for children. I don’t want a world where it’s even a consideration for any child to be put on puberty blockers. It was very online people who made that possible – and it might take very online people of another kind to put it right.
But the kerfuffle about the ‘woke right’ is, ironically, itself extremely online. In Britain for the foreseeable, at least, there is no chance of the right – of any kind – getting anywhere near the actual levers of power. The disparity is enormous. The woke left control every institution; the woke right are having little spats on Twitter.
What this situation does need is more thought and direction. The laser focus of effective American fighters against the culture war – Chris Rufo or Jonathan Haidt, say – needs to be emulated. It is important to fight the battles that really matter, and concentrate on exactly how to begin to turn things round, if the opportunity ever comes. There may be a time when things are different; that chance must be taken firmly – not wasted on embarrassed backsliding or worse, silly internet squabbles.
Labour MP arrested on suspicion of rape
A former Labour minister was arrested on Friday on suspicion of rape and child sex offences. The Sun on Sunday tonight reports that Dan Norris, 65, MP for North East Somerset and Hanham, was arrested on Friday over claims of historic sexual offences against a girl and a rape allegation from the 2020s. Avon and Somerset Police confirmed he had also been held on suspicion of misconduct in public office.
Labour has now confirmed that Norris has been suspended from the party and lost the whip in parliament. A party spokesman told the Sun that: ‘Dan Norris MP was immediately suspended by the Labour party upon being informed of his arrest. We cannot comment further while the police investigation is ongoing’.
Norris was reportedly arrested and interviewed at a police station near his constituency home before being bailed. Avon and Somerset Police confirmed detectives were carrying out a ‘sensitive’ investigation after the case was referred by a different force.
A spokesman for the force said:
In December 2024, we received a referral from another police force relating to alleged non-recent child sex offences having been committed against a girl. Most of the offences are alleged to have occurred in the 2000s, but we’re also investigating an alleged offence of rape from the 2020s. An investigation, led by officers within Operation Bluestone, our dedicated rape and serious sexual assault investigation team, remains ongoing and at an early stage.
Norris is yet to comment on the allegations at the time of publication.
Why did the BBC say ‘Muslim reverts’?
‘Revert’ as a noun rather than a verb sounds like one of those Victorian terms that went out of fashion in the 1960s and is now considered a slur. However, this was the term that the BBC website felt was appropriate to describe people who had converted to Islam, in an article published on Friday, before hurriedly amending it on Saturday morning.
As it happens, this is the term used by some converts to Islam to describe their status within their new faith, based on the theological principle of fitra; the innate predisposition within all humans toward recognising the oneness of God. By this way of thinking, one does not become a Muslim, one ‘reverts’ to one’s true natural state.
Nevertheless, it is not a term by any means in universal use. In years of working in the Middle East, I have known dozens of people who have converted into the religion because of marriage, contract law and for ease of doing business, and even a few who have done it sincerely. I have come under gentle pressure to do so myself on innumerable occasions. In none of these cases have I ever heard such people described as ‘reverts’ either by themselves, or by their far more pious spouses or friends who called them to the faith.
Instead, they have used the word ‘convert’; the universally acknowledged term in the English language for those who embrace a religion other than that of their upbringing later in life. It’s unclear how many normal people read such articles on the BBC website, rather than those seeking the cathartic joy of mild irritation on social media, but if they did, I expect they will once again have come away with a skewed impression of Islam from our national broadcaster.
There are, in my view, a variety of explanations for why the BBC does this kind of thing. Partially, it’s a tendency among some of their staff to pass off esoteric vocabulary or neologisms as a form of signalling. It’s the same impulse that makes them occasionally switch to spelling the country ‘Brasil’ during football tournaments.
Partially it is down to the preoccupation, occasionally bordering on the morbid, that the BBC holds for the minutiae of the lives of Muslims in Britain. Previously this usually centred around apparently spontaneous gestures of intercommunity altruism by Muslim groups, until the status of the Ahmediyyah community, who were inevitably at the centre of such stories and whom most mainstream Muslims regard as heretics, made this too awkward.
Nowadays such stories tend to focus more on the tribulations of those trying to combine mundane aspects of daily life in modern Britain with strict observance of religious precepts, such as playing football while wearing a hijab. This particular article falls into the latter category, but there is something else going on as well.
While the headline and opening paragraphs focus on the story of a particular individual experiencing social isolation as a result of her decision to convert to Islam, the substance of the story is the work of a local charity that supports Muslim converts in Peterborough and surrounding area. This may seem an oddly specific story for a website that supposedly covers national and international news for a global readership, but understanding why it is there explains a lot about how the BBC functions.
This article demonstrates the editorial reticence to look too closely at anything connected to Islam
Much of the vast output of the BBC website originates, as this story does, from its network of local reporters across the country. Like local reporters around the world, they are always on the hunt for inspiration, and often this can present itself in the form of a local organisation, or a charity with a particular story to tell. We live in an era with no shortage of people with ample university training in public relations and media, who can package up a human interest story for easy consumption by a reporter, in which the organisation’s mission can be encapsulated. These are bundled up into neat little puff pieces, requiring minimal editing and seemingly very little investigation, to be pumped out onto a website that appears to value quantity above all else.
This pattern is replicated with reporters who cover subject specific areas, who often rely on university departments and the PR departments of NGOs for similar output. The language of press releases is often included in the text of articles almost verbatim, which an observant reader can identify by the inclusion of the preferred buzzwords of activists and campaigners amidst the neutral voice of the BBC. In recent years, many terms have entered the mainstream in this way, and eventually become used by everybody from the civil service to the Tory front bench.
That the phrase ‘climate crisis’ has moved so rapidly from the fringes of the green movement to official usage is testament to this phenomenon. That normal people are now comfortable with things like cheese being described as ‘junk food’ is another example, this time courtesy of the irredeemable neurotics in nutritional science. Sometimes, these terms can become the victims of their own success, as in the case of the ‘living wage’ which has become interchangeable with the concept of the minimum wage it once stood in contrast with.
This article also demonstrates the apparent editorial reticence to look too closely at anything connected to Islam, in the way that the BBC certainly would for other faith groups. There is nothing inherently sketchy about the concept of fitra, but it has been used by fundamentalist and extremist Islamic groups to undermine the legitimacy of other religions and to justify violence against non-Muslims. If an organisation for Christian converts used a term suggesting that we had an innate tendency toward monotheism, the BBC would rightly cast a critical eye over anything else it said. But like many institutions in modern Britain that are outwardly very keen on multiculturalism, they lack the cultural awareness to make the link between that and using a term like ‘revert’.
It’s a fairly minor error and it feels slightly obsessive to get too upset about it. But it highlights the failure of modern mainstream journalism; not necessarily in institutional partisanship, but lacking the collective critical faculties and curiosity to analyse their own prodigious output.
Will more Tories defect to the Lib Dems?
Crossing the floor of the Scottish Parliament – moving around the arc is perhaps a better description – is highly unusual. Several MSPs have become independents, for one reason or another, but swapping one party for another had only been done by Alba’s Ash Regan, formerly of the SNP, until yesterday.
Jamie Greene is a one-time Scottish Tory leadership contender who resigned the Conservative whip with an excoriating letter to his leader Russell Findlay on Thursday. The very next day, the ex-Tory turned up at the Scottish Liberal Democrat annual conference in Inverness to announce he would be joining the party. It was a genuinely significant Holyrood moment.
More importantly, though, it looks to be a genuinely significant moment in the fortunes of the Scottish Tory party. Even before Greene’s departure, Findlay had a tough gig. He took over a party last autumn whose UK counterparts had polled less than 13 per cent at the general election. It was quite the change in fortune from previous elections the party had contested north and south of the border. The last time there was a Holyrood election, for example, Douglas Ross recorded the party’s best ever result in the 2021 Scottish Parliament elections, with 31 seats and 24 per cent of the vote.
It is against this watermark that Findlay will be judged – and the situation isn’t looking promising for the new Scottish Conservative leader. Since the general election, the Tories’ best outcome in any Scottish parliament poll is 16 per cent, while a recent Survation poll suggested the Conservative party could almost halve in size next year – and come away with just three more MSPs than Reform UK.
Nigel Farage’s Reform party is now pretty much neck-and-neck with the Conservatives and polling suggest it will split the unionist vote north of the border – to the detriment of both the Tories and Anas Sarwar’s Labour party. There have been several councillor defections already, most prominently Glasgow’s Tory pin-up Thomas Kerr. But as well as losing people on the right, the Tories are at risk of losing people on the centre ground too.
Despite the new leadership of the SNP being a more centrist, more pro-economy outfit, there remains a gap in Scottish politics for a party which embraces free-market liberalism and can also claim to put Scotland first. Findlay will inevitably feel compelled to follow his UK leader Kemi Badenoch to a more populist right position in an attempt to win back voters leaking to Reform, which leaves this soft-right liberal territory wide open for the Scottish Liberal Democrats.
The sort of Tory who is more interested in lower taxes, infrastructure and using net zero as an economic opportunity might feel quite at home in Alex Cole-Hamilton’s party. And with half the Tory MSPs at risk of losing their seats – while the polls suggest the Lib Dems will win a seat in every Holyrood region – it might not be the worst career move for those keen to stay in Holyrood. We’ve all been watching for Tory MSPs to defect to Reform – but the Scottish Liberal Democrats may be the more significant threat.
Why does Labour assume AI is good?
In close to 30 years in political broadcasting, I’ve never had the faintest idea of what was coming around the corner. I might have guessed whatever it was would probably be bad, but that’s about it. Apart from once, in Brighton, at the Labour party conference in 2005.
Tony Blair, still then master of all he surveyed, was delivering his leader’s speech. His theme was familiar – Labour values of solidarity and social justice in a changing world – and about halfway through, he turned to globalisation. Blair could be very persuasive, but on this occasion, he was blunt.
‘I hear people say we have to stop and debate globalisation,’ he said. ‘You might as well debate whether autumn should follow summer. They’re not debating it in China and India.’
There was an unmistakable irritation, impatience and intent in the line and its delivery. He was saying: this thing – globalisation – is coming and will change your life and we can do nothing about it. I may be your leader but I can’t ameliorate its impact. And no, I don’t want to know your opinion on it if you don’t mind. They aren’t worried about opinions in Beijing.
I’d like to claim I had premonitions then of what would follow from this high-handed ‘no debate’ approach, but my internal response was more prosaic. ‘That’s going to bite him on the arse,’ I thought. It seemed particularly peculiar to me that a ‘progressive’ politician was ruling out any engagement with the question when the bedrock of Labour support were those most likely to feel the downside of insecure work and low wages.
It wasn’t just Blair. In the United States, Bill Clinton pushed through Nafta, and jobs were lost; Barack Obama stuck with TPP, and both Democrats were seen to have sided with corporate America against ordinary workers at a significant political cost. The winning acronym? MAGA.
On globalisation, people demanded a debate even though Blair had told them it wasn’t worth having. And when it came, it turned out that nothing was inevitable after all: not free trade, membership of superstates or free movement of people.
But globalisation is small potatoes compared with artificial intelligence, where a lack of debate will have even more severe consequences. McKinsey expects 375 million jobs to be lost globally by 2030 and Goldman Sachs think Europe and the US will account 300 million of them. And that’s not all; back in 2023 Rishi Sunak – remember him? – hosted a summit on AI security in the wake of warnings from some of its founding fathers about the potential of the technology to wreak havoc either in the hands of an aggressor or when the AI itself surpasses human intelligence (a day rapidly approaching) and becomes a threat to humanity.
No wonder the government’s own research reveals just how concerned people are. Asked to react to the word AI, the most common responses are: ‘robot’, ‘scary’, ‘worried’, and ‘unsure’. These are rational responses to a complex and unpredictable technology. But instead of recognising this, there are echoes of that 2005 premonition in the air whenever I hear Labour talk about AI.
The Cabinet minister responsible, Peter Kyle always makes a point of the urgency of getting on with it – ‘we are in a race, let’s not kid ourselves’ – and emphasises that the change coming is inevitable. His interviews resemble motivational pep talks more than any sort of serious grappling with the implications of such enormous change as it appears to an ordinary citizen. Those concerns about job losses and security don’t really feature. Like Blair, his message is clear: get on board, you’ve got no choice.
We do have choices to make about how we approach AI
But we do have choices to make about how we approach AI and that’s where things get really rotten. The Labour government has subcontracted its position – on how we balance safety concerns with maximising profits and how much regulation is required – to J. D. Vance. The Vice-President is not subtle. He told the Paris AI Summit that lucrative partnerships with the US would require an approach to ‘this new frontier with optimism rather than trepidation’. Kyle certainly does optimistic, and what looks like obedience too: the UK joined the US as the only two countries who refused to sign up to the Summit’s declaration calling for AI that is ‘open, inclusive, transparent, ethical, safe, secure and trustworthy’.
On AI and, alongside it, the Online Safety Bill and the Digital Services Tax, it seems Labour have thrown their lot in with the White House. It is the price that must be paid for the trade agreement they hope to strike with Trump. A real debate about the wisdom of this puts that prize in jeopardy. Kyle has already come a cropper over his plan to grant tech companies access to copyrighted material unless copyright holders opt out. The policy – part of a ‘consultation’ but one which clearly expresses a government preference for the most tech-friendly option – alienated a supergroup’s worth of national treasures, including Sir Elton John, Sir Paul McCartney and Kate Bush. The only consolation for Kyle is that he’s unlikely to get in trouble for accepting any freebie concert tickets any time soon.
If, when the reality of the change that the AI revolution brings is felt in terms of real lives and real livelihoods, the public feel sold out by politicians who made long-term decisions in service of short-term interests, they can expect more than just a bite on the arse.
Javier Milei has cut poverty
Javier Milei has reduced poverty in Argentina. This week brought the publication of a tranche of government poverty figures, covering the period from July to December last year. Much had been made of the immediate surge in poverty that occurred in Milei’s first six months in office. The fall – down to 38.1 per cent from 41.7 per cent in the same period last year, when the country was governed by the Peronists – would seem to be a vindication of the chainsaw-wielding libertarian and his policies. But is there more to it than that?
Milei came into office promising to shatter the country’s economic approach and bring the country’s inflation crisis – which had been teetering on the edge of disaster – under control. He has been successful at doing this. The headline annual inflation rate is now 66.9 per cent, down from its previously mammoth 276.2 per cent.
But it would be wrong to consider that the work is done. While a reduction of this magnitude is clearly an achievement, inflation at current levels would still be considered a full-blown crisis in Europe, likely toppling governments. Many Argentines have also been somewhat baffled by the new poverty figures. They don’t feel that their lives have become any easier. ‘There are more and more people rummaging through dumpsters here, foraging,’ Jorge Silvero, a Buenos Aires resident told Reuters. ‘There is a terrible hunger.’ Thousands of people have lost their jobs – particularly as part of Milei’s trimming of the public budget – and there has been a noticeable increase in people selling items in the street.
Nearly one in ten of Argentina’s 46 million people – 8.9 per cent – is still living in extreme poverty and there are fears that, while poverty is falling, inequality could be on the increase. Incomes for informal workers fell by 22 per cent in the first quarter of 2024 compared to 14 per cent for formal workers, according to consultants Equilibra. This suggests that the poorest are bearing the brunt of Milei’s austerity programme. The Gini coefficient, which measures income inequality, also spiked to its highest level since 2005 during the same period.
Debates about poverty aside, Milei faces another major challenge in the months to come. Argentina has long been subject to currency controls. Citizens are restricted on the amount they can save or withdraw in US dollars each month in a bid to avoid capital fleeing the country. This has led, in part, to Argentina’s infamous system of black market currency exchanges which operate on numerous different exchange rates. Foreigners – and locals returning from overseas – have long endured the experience of changing currency on Florida Street in central Buenos Aires with men shouting ‘cambio cambio’ to advertise their services.
Milei has promised to remove the currency controls. Aside from being an obvious step for any true libertarian economist, doing so is highly likely to be a key condition put in place by the IMF which has once again agreed to extend credit to its biggest debtor. But the potential impact of doing this has been described as a ‘time bomb’ threatening to derail the president’s reputation for economic success.
The removal of currency controls and a return to economic chaos looms
Cutting the currency loose is likely to lead to an immediate devaluation of the peso, a return to increasing inflation, and, perhaps most concerning of all in Argentina, the return of economic uncertainty. Milei’s deputy economy minister has acknowledged that the government has been ‘left with a weakness’ in the form of negative Central Bank reserves.
The supposed economic stability Milei has achieved – not to mention the offer of massive tax breaks – has investors sniffing around Argentina and its cache of natural resources. On the other hand, the removal of currency controls and a return to economic chaos looms. As one analyst, who works with large investors, told me: ‘Poverty going down contributes to the [perception] of sustainability of the Milei project. But the bar has been raised. The sequence should be: an agreement with the IMF, win the elections, and lift the capital controls by the end of the year. They want those results.’
This year is a vital one for Milei. While he won the election his party still has virtually no representation in congress, something that has proven a challenge in his first year in power. Mid-term elections in October could change all that. For now the future looks rosy.
What happened to the Birmingham I love?
My beloved Birmingham, the city I called home for 26 years and where my children grew up, is drowning in a sea of black bin bags. It’s a shocking sight to see this once proud city, that was arguably the centre of the industrial revolution, in such a state. Thousands of tonnes of rubbish is piling up, rats are everywhere – and the stench is dreadful. As the weather warms up, life in Britain’s second city might become unbearable.
It wasn’t always like this in Birmingham. Two hundred years ago, great thinkers met here: Erasmus Darwin, Joseph Priestley, Josiah Wedgwood, James Watt and Matthew Boulton among them. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, George Cadbury established his Bournville ‘factory in a garden’. Later, the British motor industry set up shop in the city. There are more miles of canal than Venice and almost as many trees as people. But this spring, Birmingham is an embarrassment rather than something to be proud of.
The current rubbish crisis arises from a dispute between the city and its binmen over the council’s decision to scrap waste recycling and collection officers. Walkouts started in January, but since 11 March there has been an indefinite all-out strike, five days a week. On Monday, Birmingham City Council declared a major incident. It’s about time: the city’s rubbish-strewn streets are reminiscent of the 1970s. But don’t expect this dispute to be resolved any time soon.
The sad fact is that Birmingham is broke. The city declared itself effectively bankrupt in 2023. After ending all non-essential spending, the council issued a Section 114 notice to say that they didn’t have the means to meet its financial liabilities and could not commit to any new spending. Council tax went up almost 10 per cent last year; this week, it was hiked by another 7.5 per cent. These are grim times for my former neighbours.
Birmingham’s woes stem back years. A troubled IT system – originally expected to cost £19 million –could cost more than £90 million to fix, and might not be up and running properly before 2026.
Hosting the Commonwealth Games in 2022 was never going to be a route to riches. The financial contribution from Birmingham City Council and ‘a number of its key partners’ was set at £184 million; the benefits are rather harder to quantify.
But it was an equal pay claim that brought the city to its knees. In April 2010, 5,000 mostly female council staff won their case for equal pay at an employment tribunal. Their claim was that teaching assistants and catering staff had missed out on bonuses given to workers in jobs traditionally done by men, like refuse collecting and street cleaning. Equalities legislation demands equal pay for equal work, and the courts deemed that getting up at the crack of dawn in all weathers and dealing with who-knows-what in the next black bag is comparable to serving school dinners.
Make no mistake, both jobs can be too easily undervalued and underpaid, but they are not the same. Bonuses that were paid to drivers of large vehicles as they navigated narrow residential streets, and those engaged in heavy manual labour, were not applied to the jobs mainly done by women. Having been ordered to make good the discrepancy, the council initially sold off assets. By 2023, the council had shelled out £1.1 billion with another £760 million outstanding. The cupboard is now bare. Ultimately, the bill will be paid by the residents of the city through soaring council tax, amid piles of rubbish uncollected by disgruntled binmen.
Politicians from all three major parties have had a role to play in the mess. Labour is in charge now, but prior to 2012 the city was in the hands of a Tory-Lib Dem coalition, and had been since 2004. Finger pointing hardly helps those unlucky residents who are living on streets that resemble a rubbish dump. One resident told the BBC that the rats were ‘having parties on the grass’. I didn’t spot any revelling rodents when I visited Birmingham last week, but the city I love is in a sorry state.
Israeli students aren’t troubled by ‘microaggressions’
Jerusalem’s Shalem College should have been brimming with life when we visited last month. But this leafy campus was oddly empty. The reason, of course, is that a large contingent of its students are currently serving in the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) as part of the war effort against Hamas.
Away from campus, the young Israelis that we met on our trip were of similar age and appearance to the undergraduates I taught in Cambridge as a doctoral student. But the similarities stopped there. For these young people were about as different to their contemporaries in the West as it is possible to be.
We met a girl in her early twenties who was serving in a female observer unit at the Gaza border on October 7 and had witnessed the murder of many of her friends by Hamas terrorists. Her courage and sense of duty were unthinking and her character showed a maturity well beyond her age. She was both exceptional and at the same time representative of so many other young Israelis. There is a seriousness in their generation, and an earnestness about why their way of life is worth defending.
Young Israelis have developed a vastly different perspective on how to deal with hardship or adversity compared to their western counterparts. British and American universities increasingly wish to protect students from exposure to challenging experiences or difficult subjects. Students feeling anxious are encouraged to intermit and retreat from the strains of their course. Content warnings are being used more frequently with course material. Some academics and administrators are pushing for open-book examinations on the basis that they are less stressful for students.
Israel’s young men and women do not have the luxury of such safetyism. As one of Shalem’s vice presidents put it to me, most Israelis do not even understand the modish language of their western counterparts. For those called up to fight, a ‘microaggression’ means small arms or sniper fire, not an unintended slight or unconscious bias. Their concern is the ‘macroaggression’ of a rocket-propelled grenade or a Qassam missile.
The term trauma is not used lightly either. It describes the experience of those who witnessed the massacre of 350 young people at the Nova music festival, one of whom we met. Every young Israeli knows of someone who was either killed by Hamas, raped, tortured, or taken hostage.
But despite the scars this war will leave, Israeli society is currently experiencing something closer to ‘post-traumatic growth’ than ‘post-traumatic stress disorder’. The existential threat and burden it is placing on its people has not caused its young citizens to shrink as some older Israelis had worried, but rather to grow spiritually and morally.
Acute hardship, combined with national self-confidence and an awareness of the complexities of their shared history and identity, has made these young Israelis more resilient and psychologically robust than their contemporaries across the globe. Institutions like Shalem College serve a vital civic function that western universities have long since abandoned.
Britain is immensely lucky that it does not face a comparable direct external threat. But this may be precisely the reason for our own, distinctive crisis. Young Brits seem more brittle, struggling to manage the human condition, either ignorant or ashamed of their national inheritance, and vastly less prepared for their, or our, future. With many notable exceptions, too many young people in Britain shrink on contact with modern life, entering school and then work almost predisposed to become ‘disordered’.
It is true that younger generations haven’t inherited the material conditions and opportunities their parents and certainly grandparents enjoyed. The barriers to becoming a responsible homeowner, the shortage of jobs which provide not just an income but a vocation, and a tax system that cripples those that simply want to save and become self-reliant: all these contribute to young people’s economic and social infantilisation.
Young Brits seem more brittle and less prepared for their, or our, future
But this is only part of the problem. For decades, we have let the moral and cultural reserves that underpin any healthy society atrophy. Young Brits are growing up without the shared, confident vision of our collective past, or a moral compass for our future. They are taught to fear risk, to hide away from pressure and adversity, and to believe that the most effective response to mental strain is to shrink and withdraw from the world.
Israel’s example reminds us of an important historical reality: that great societies grow up and mature in the face of crisis. It was the case for the United States after independence, or Singapore after separation from Malaysia – as it was for Poland after the fall of communism.
In the UK, we have had numerous such crises out of which national renewal might have ensued, from the 2008 financial crash to Brexit or the pandemic. In each instance, we have appeared to retreat back into ourselves, rather than rise to the occasion.
There is no essential reason why this should be the case. But creating the conditions in which our young people thrive and mature in the face of adversity will require a politics that pays far more attention to those qualities and characteristics that the staff at Shalem College are so eager to foster.
Hardship need not be of the existential sort currently faced by Israeli society to generate growth in character. It can just as easily be the everyday challenge of becoming a self-sufficient and responsible person. But if we want our young people to grow up to be proud and contributing members of society, we need to give young Brits the moral resources required for that development again. In this, our country has much to learn from Israel.
Spare us from ‘nobituaries’
Sometimes it seemed to me as a young hack that writing obituaries must be the best job in newspapers. You can’t get sued – though people tend not to take the gloves off out of ‘respect’ and use ancient phrases like ‘bon viveur’ and ‘did not suffer fools gladly’ when everyone knows you mean ‘well-connected drunk’ and ‘ill-tempered’.
It’s only once in a blue moon that someone really says what they think, like when the ‘social influencer’ Jameela Jamil barely waited until the fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld was cold in his casket before X-ing that the capering clown – widely being celebrated as a ‘genius’ – was in fact ‘a racist, misogynistic, fat-phobic rape apologist who shouldn’t be posted all over the internet as a saint gone-too-soon’. There’s a lot to be said for speaking ill of the dead; it’s a good corrective to the laws which make libel a rich man’s hobby and a bracing palate cleanser during the inevitable deluge of tributes insisting that there’s another twinkling star in heaven tonight no matter how dodgy the character.
But reading the recent write-ups of Val Kilmer’s death, I realised it’s a job that wouldn’t suit me at all. It’s all very well going gaga when a person of great importance meets their maker, whether that importance is measured through fame, achievement or both. But often we weren’t even aware that the subject was alive any more. The death of anyone is sad for those who love them, and if they’re a famous entertainer, it’s sad for a whole other level of people, their fans. But when someone well-known but unremarkable dies, there’s a gap between the obits and the reality. With Kilmer, it boiled down to ‘Was in a film with Tom Cruise, married British stunner Joanne Whalley, played Jim Morrison’ – and then a bunch of bumpf to make up the word count.
One newspaper went for the glory-by-association angle, the headline recalling that ‘Tom Cruise “cried” during emotional reunion with Val Kilmer on Top Gun: Maverick’. Those quotation marks, by the way, somewhat comically imply that Tom Cruise may well have been pretending to weep – or maybe that’s just me being mischievous. Another newspaper carried a series of ‘snaps’ picturing in close-up Kilmer’s ex-wife and his adult daughter ‘sharing a tender hug outside a home in West Hollywood, just a day after she confirmed that her father passed away from pneumonia’. For some reason it was vital that we knew how the two grieving women were attired: ‘Kilmer’s daughter was pictured in a black sweatshirt, Ugg boots and sunglasses as she carried two large tote bags on her shoulder while moving items into her car. Joanne wore a long red cardigan over a black top and pants and was pictured embracing her daughter in a moment of shared grief.’ One almost expected the additional cheery fashion tip: ‘Why not zhuzh up your trad mourning black with accents of spring-fresh yellow and green?’ As the best-rated comment put it: ‘What parasites to camp outside their private residence to catch and photograph them in grief.’
It’s all very well going gaga when a person of great importance meets their maker, but often we weren’t even aware that the subject was alive any more
The BBC decided that repeating tattle-tales of on-set beefs would be an eye-catching angle: ‘Kilmer’s reputation for being difficult on set had reportedly exploded into open warfare with the director, Joel Schumacher, normally the most temperate of men, who called his leading man’s behaviour “difficult and childish”. John Frankenheimer, who directed Kilmer in The Island of Dr Moreau, was even blunter. “I don’t like Val Kilmer,” he said. “I don’t like his work ethic and I don’t want to be associated with him ever again.”’ (He went on to add a zinger elsewhere: ‘Even if I was directing a film called The Life of Val Kilmer, I wouldn’t have that prick in it.’) Even the serious-minded Guardian seemed mainly interested in his extra-thespian antics: ‘Temperamental on-set behaviour by successful actors is common, but rarely made public. So it takes a particular type of performer, or one with poor PR defences, to become notorious for tantrums or capriciousness.’
Merriam-Webster define an obituary as ‘a notice of a person’s death usually with a short biographical account’. I’m keen on the phrase ‘death notice’ myself; nice and plain. But what happens when a famous person kicks the bucket these days is either just an excuse to rake up as much scandal as possible – ooh, I’d forgotten they were banging X! – or to totally lose perspective on both the stature and the talents of the person involved. Because most obituaries are, rather, ‘nobituaries’.
Nobituaries feed and are fed by the phenomenon which my husband, with admirable masculine brusqueness, calls ‘tearleading’: large groups of people getting together on social media to competitively mourn dead celebs. With grief at full throttle, anything less than full-on canonisation or excoriation seems difficult to manage. Though it happened before social media: in 1999, I remember one public figure, perhaps even the Prime Minister of the time, saying of the late Jill Dando’s shocking and horrible death that she had been at ‘the height of her powers’. Sorry, but how? She read the news from an autocue. Some clown wrote in an obituary of Paula Yates that she was ‘a survivor’ – she’d just died at the age of 41!
‘When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything,’ G.K. Chesterton famously said, and the death of faith appears to have left us far less calm and composed than we once were about death itself. We no longer see it as a simple matter of ‘joining the majority’; it leaves us all a-fluster, not knowing whether we should use it as an excuse to drag out wagonloads of juicy gossip or attempt to sanctify the passed soul – so long as it’s big and noisy. Personally, I hope my death notices are short, sharp and unsentimental: she came out of nowhere, she made it all by herself, she was a good writer and a great tipper. That’ll do me – keep your nobituaries in all their fussing and flurry and very modern foolishness.