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The forgotten forests of Italy
Everyone knows that Italy is a boot. Many people know that the boot has a heel – the rocky, sunburnt region of Puglia. Perhaps a few know that the heel has a spur – the Gargano Peninsula. Yet virtually no one knows that the Gargano hides a magical woodland – the Foresta Umbra – a national park and treasure. And one of a dozen or more Italian parklands that are practically unvisited by foreign tourists.
Puglia is studded with eerie and beautiful castles, allegedly possessed of occult properties
My intention is to do a walking tour of the Gargano, kindly organised by a British travel company, who will ferry my luggage from hotel to hotel, and provide me with maps and picnics – so all I have to do is put one foot in front of the other, with handy compass points on a detailed guide, to make sure I don’t fall in the Adriatic.
The sacred Foresta lies ahead of me, right now I am at the tip of the spur that is Gargano. A honeyed little town called Vieste. It is almost deserted; the sun shines, lizards skitter, a girl sighs happily and orders another Aperol. She is alone but she seems garrulously happy to talk. I ask her if Vieste is always like this, she laughs and says ‘No. In July or August? Terrible. Do not come then. But, for the rest of the year,’ she gestures expansively, and grins. ‘Perfetto.’
Vieste is indeed – out of high season – perfetto. Everywhere I turn, shaded limestone lanes are hung with perfumed washing, like a miniature Naples, minus the Camorra. The lanes lead to plunging cliffs, green with pines and thorny cacti, and at the bottom of many of these precipitous drops you will find a trabuccho, a medieval contraption for catching fish.
But that is typical of Gargano, it has been doing things in its own whimsical ways since at least the 12th century days of Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor and ‘Stupor Mundi’. The ‘wonder of the world’ studded Puglia with eerie and beautiful castles, allegedly possessed of occult properties – and one of them sits atop Vieste.
Beneath the crumbling citadel you will find a dozen fish restaurants hidden down snickets or set into cliffs – the more basic are often the best. They nearly all have stupor mundi views and do great orecchiette (local ear-shaped pasta) plus octopus, tuna, squid and dewy cold bottles of the local white: verdeca. Mmm.
After my initial day of vaguely wandering around decorous Vieste, I am ready for my first big hike. Suited and booted. A handy cab driver picks me up, he has my bags and he will ferry them on to the next hotel, but he drops me long before then in a sunny glade – with my binos, guidebook, water bottle, and a heady spirit of mild adventure. And off I set: deep into the primordial forest.
How to describe the Foresta Umbra? It is English yet Italian, it is mighty yet intricate. It is the Forest of Dean mingled with the ents of Tolkien, yet in the southlands. It is also a vast green woodland where oaks and pines grow to spectacular heights because of the unusual topography: southern latitudes with northern altitudes allied with nourishing warm rains. It is genuinely strange – at any one moment you could be in the Chilterns – but then you step into a shaft of burning sun, piercing the richly dark canopy (the name foresta umbra means shadowy forest), and you see the sizzling and turquoise Adriatic a few kilometres away.
Outside very high season the majestic woodland – as with Vieste – is deserted. I walk for seven hours from a lonely spring to a lonelier rifugio (great cakes, home-made lemon marmalade, welcome Peroni beer) and in all that time I see more roe deer (three) than other humans (two). There are rumours of wild cats and wolves; the forest floor is speckled with orchids – one of the highest concentrations in Europe.
This splendid hike ends at a recently refurbed lodge, the Elda hotel. Think comfortable, wooden, Alpine and immersed in the surrounding greenery, where girls with fantastically broken English serve me fine wild boar pasta, cold beer, gorgeous olive paste madeleines, and – as is often the case in Italian hotels – decidedly mediocre breakfast. Save room for supper at the next stop instead.
But where is that next stop? The following morning I potter happily around the local lakelets, then, the day after that, I steel myself for my culminating hike: out of the forest and through magnificently empty countryside, ridged with drystone walls, like the Yorkshire Dales during a ludicrously pleasant summer. Then I see my destination on top of the next hill crest.
It’s called Monte Sant’Angelo – it’s a famous Catholic shrine once ‘inhabited by the Archangel Michael’ – and all day on my trek I’ve been mentally mocking it (‘Where did the Archangel shop? Did he pay for parking?’) but then, as I ascend the final steeps and approach the shrine, my incredulity falls away.
The Shrine of Mont Sant’Angelo is astonishing. You enter via an elegantly knackered neo-classical white portico, and you go down and down, and down – passed rock and icons – through the Baroque and the Renaissance and the Angevins and the Normans and the Byzantines and the Lombards, all the way to the late Romans. You pass the place where St Francis of Assisi came to pray because it was already famous in his time; you pass walls where 7th century Anglo-Saxon priests left graffiti in runic.
Finally you come to a halt in a sombre, candlelit cave where everyone is attending a service, and it is all quite overwhelming. Despite my agnostic mockery I end up taking mass.
After Monte Sant’Angelo everything is downhill, but in a nice way. Shrived and contented I descend the Gargano hills to the blue Adriatic and a languidly charming hotel in the little town of Mattinata. The food is superb (spaghetti in oyster sauce), the view across the bay even better. What’s more, I’ve earned every calorie, I’ve got fit, tanned and (sort of) trim, and I’ve spiritually communed with one of Europe’s great, forgotten forests. I’ve also learned that so much of wild Italy is yet to be explored – it has umpteen national parks like this. Not bad for the forgotten spur of an old boot-heel.
Inntravel (inntravel.co.uk 01653 617000) offers a one week self-guided walking holiday on Puglia’s Gargano Peninsula from £1,070pp based on 2 sharing, including 7 nights’ B&B in four-star hotels, 4 dinners, 1 picnic, luggage transfers, route notes and maps and GPS navigation. Start any day of the week. Available from 9 April to 30 June and 1 September to 31 October.
The Scottish Tories need a better election strategy
It is no surprise that the Scottish Conservative manifesto launch was centred on independence. While Scotland’s Tories talk about the SNP’s obsession with the subject, they are a little less happy to mention their own preoccupation with separatism. It’s rather more awkward for the Scottish Conservative and Unionist party to admit that, without independence on the table, their role in Scotland becomes a little less clear.
While they may rail against the topic, the Scottish Tories need the SNP – so they can put independence front and centre of their campaign to give them a bogeyman to pretend to fight
Opening his party’s manifesto launch in Edinburgh with some light football bonhomie around Scotland’s disastrous Euro’s effort, Douglas Ross – who recently made history as the first party leader to announce his resignation during an election campaign – quickly segued to the heart of his general election pitch: SNP out. While First Minister John Swinney promised his party’s manifesto would put independence ‘page one, line one’, written at the top of the Scottish Conservatives’ manifesto are the words: ‘Beat the SNP.’ In fact, across the manifesto’s 76 pages, the SNP is mentioned 88 times.
Meanwhile, Scottish Labour has been all but forgotten. In Scotland, the main rival to the SNP in the central belt is Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour party, while the Tories have always done better with rural constituents and in the borders. To retain their seats north of the border, the Conservatives know that their key battlegrounds are across the north and north east, where there will be straight fights with the nationalists. As such, Rishi Sunak made a real show of how the Scottish Tories would project jobs in the north east – as his is the only party openly in favour of new oil and gas licences.
But what else was front and centre of the manifesto? Beat the SNP, runs the Tory slogan, to get the focus on Scotland’s priorities. This should be an easy message for the Conservatives to push: polling consistently demonstrates that, at this election, the electorate in Scotland is less interested in independence as a live issue than it has ever been – despite just under 50 per cent of the nation saying they are still in favour of secession. Yet in their manifesto, the Scottish Conservatives have framed voter priorities at this election as: education (devolved), policing (devolved), tax cuts (devolved), road repairs (a council issue) and cutting NHS waiting lists (devolved). Are the Scottish Tories already preparing for the 2026 Holyrood election? Is this a sign they’ve almost entirely written off their party’s fate in the upcoming national poll?
Sunak didn’t do much to expel those theories. In what could be taken as an unconscious concession of defeat, the PM is already speaking in the past tense: ‘My most important job I had when I was prime minister,’ he told a huddle of the Scottish media, ‘was to restore economic stability back to our country’. And what about individual candidates, campaigning hard across Scotland while chaos continues to engulf the Westminster party? ‘The ambition now is to secure enough votes that our candidates move from fourth place to third,’ one wannabe MP said. Was that their ambition? ‘Oh no’, they said. ‘I expect to lose my deposit.’
While they may rail against the topic, the Scottish Tories need the SNP, so they can put independence front and centre of their campaign to give them a bogeyman to pretend to fight on behalf of voters. Yet independence is not so much a bogeyman as a monster under the bed: it may cause sleepless nights but it is not really there. There is currently no mechanism by which Scotland may have a second independence referendum and no sense that a Labour government might move on the issue. And there the Nats and the Tories share a further problem: as they each generate sound and fury over the constitutional question, Labour swerves the issue to go merrily about its business – its ‘change’ message cutting through to disillusioned voters on both sides. Meanwhile the SNP shouts loudly about independence and the Scottish Tories shout loudly about stopping independence – neither group fully understanding nor acknowledging their own symbiotic relationship.
If today’s manifesto launch revealed anything, it’s that the Scottish Conservatives need a better strategy. At the moment they are, just like the SNP, nothing without the constitutional question.
Sunak and Starmer slug out a stalemate
Tonight saw the penultimate TV exchange involving Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer. Both men took part in live-streamed interviews with the Sun’s political editor Harry Cole and a live studio audience, ten days prior to polling day. Sunak was up first and had a difficult balancing act in the 30-minute exchange, seeking to embrace the Tory successes of the past 14 years while distancing himself from its failures. ‘This election is about the future,’ he insisted at one point – moments after praising the coalition’s education reforms. Three times he repeated his seven-word defence that: ‘I’ve been Prime Minister for 18 months.’ It was a line which sounded plausible on migration, when he could claim to have cut legal numbers since coming to office. Yet on the NHS, Sunak was unable to address the case of a voter whose father recently died due to negligence in the health service.
Sir Keir Starmer in some ways got a more difficult ride from the audience. Credibility was at the core of their questioning. ‘You said you backed Corbyn because you didn’t think he would win’ said one voter. ‘That means you were lying to us. Why should we believe you now?’ Cole’s line of questioning initially focused on Starmer’s role as shadow Brexit secretary from 2016 to 2019, with the Labour leader arguing it was ‘right to fight’ from within Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet. Audience questions subsequently focused on small boat crossings, the use of private healthcare in the NHS and Labour‘s plans to make it easier to allow people to change gender. Starmer handled each of these potential hot potatoes with care, and even committed to a meeting with J. K. Rowling after she said he was ‘dismissive and often offensive’ about the concerns of women.
But perhaps the most striking contrast of the night was shown by how the two men handled their respective predecessors. Keir Starmer was able to shrug off criticism of Jeremy Corbyn by noting that he has now been both stripped of the whip and expelled from the Labour party. Rishi Sunak meanwhile delivered his best line of the night when he was pressed on Liz Truss‘s mini-Budget. He argued that he was right in the summer of 2022 to warn about Liz Truss – and that is why people should therefore trust his warnings about Keir Starmer. Yet even when Sunak was on the attack, the audience was reminded of the problems of the past.
The performance of both men tonight was sober, if not spectacular. But the fact that Starmer can escape his party’s recent history, while Sunak remains trapped by it, neatly explains why the former is on course to win a landslide victory next week.
Watch: Sunak fumes over betting scandal
‘Betgate’ might be giving us some laughs but there’s one person who clearly isn’t cracking jokes. A notably vexed Rishi Sunak gave an interview to STV this afternoon on a visit to campaign with the Scottish Conservative party. He told the broadcaster that he was ‘angry’ about allegations that Tory candidates put bets on the date of the election and that the Conservatives are now running its own probe alongside the Gambling Commission. Anyone want to place a wager on who the culprits are?
It was left to broadcaster Colin Mackay to suggest to Sunak that he should remove Craig Williams and Laura Sanders as Tory candidates before the election day. Mackay pointed out that Williams was Sunak’s trusted confidante as his parliamentary private secretary (PPS) and noted too the Prime Minister’s pledge in October 2022 to uphold the integrity of his office: ‘By your own standards you’ve failed’. The high (or perhaps low) point of the interview came in this exchange:
CM: ‘He [Williams] was your PPS. Do you think he made a huge error of judgement or not?’
RS: ‘We are conducting our own internal inquiry as we speak in parallel because I don’t have-‘
CM: ‘A lot of people will think you’re making a huge error of judgement now, you’re showing weak leadership by not suspending these people.’
RS: ‘As I said, we have been conducting our internal inquiries in parallel and will not hesitate to act on any findings or information that that brings to light.’
CM: ‘But not yet?’
RS: ‘It’s important that we conduct our own internal findings. It’s also important that we recognise that there are parallel and very serious law enforcement investigations that are happening and it is important that we don’t do anything that compromises those investigations and I am sure that you will understand that.’
How much longer will that line hold?
Who will Russia blame for the Dagestan shootings?
Twenty people have been killed – including 15 police officers and a priest – following two coordinated gun attacks in the southern Russian republic of Dagestan. The attacks began simultaneously at approximately 6pm local time yesterday in the cities of Derbent and Makhachkala, with the groups targeting two synagogues and two churches. In Makhachkala, the assailants also opened fire on a traffic police checkpoint.
According to the Dagestani authorities, at least 46 people have been injured, although unconfirmed reports suggest the true number may be higher. The church and synagogue targeted in Derbent have both burnt down.
There has been little pressure on the Russian security forces to identify and neutralise Islamist terror threats
Overnight, the Russian authorities launched a counter-terrorism operation in the region to track down those responsible. Road blocks were set up, power was cut off in central Derbent and shooting could be heard in the the cities’ streets. The head of the Dagestan region, Sergei Melikov, confirmed that six of the assailants have been ‘eliminated’. While the authorities have yet to confirm how many attackers were involved in the shootings, it is understood that several still remain at large. Nevertheless, the authorities ended the counter-terrorism operation shortly after 8:15 a.m. today. Three days of public mourning have been declared.
Dagestan is a predominantly Muslim-inhabited region of Russia where inter-ethnic and religious tensions have regularly flared over the last few decades. It is a neighbour of Chechnya, the Muslim-majority republic which has frequently rebelled against Russian rule. The city of Derbent, meanwhile, is home to a long-standing Jewish community, increasingly the targets of anti-Semitic incidents in the republic.
The Dagestan attacks come just over three months to the day after 145 Muscovites were killed in a terrorist attack on the Crocus City Hall music venue in March. The terror group Isis claimed responsibility for the attack, although that didn’t stop the Kremlin from insisting that Ukraine was, in fact, behind it. In an attempt to save face days after the attack, Putin even boldly claimed that ‘Russia cannot be the target of terrorist attacks by Islamic fundamentalists’.
As I wrote at the time, the Russian authorities’ decision to baselessly deflect blame for the attack onto Kyiv risked taking resources away from counter-terrorism efforts within the country. With the blame game focussed on Ukraine, there has been little pressure on the Russian security forces to identify and neutralise Islamist terror threats originating from within the country. Now, the results of that strategy are beginning to become tragically clear.
While no terror group has yet to take responsibility for the shootings, the Isis branch responsible for the Crocus City Hall attack posted a statement on their social media last night praising their ‘brothers for the Caucasus’ for demonstrating their capabilities. This suggests that the Islamic State’s Northern Caucasus branch Wilayat Kavkaz may have been behind the attack. In the aftermath of the Crocus City Hall attack, the Sino-Russian security and defence group Shanghai Cooperation Organization, specifically warned that Wilayat Kavkaz had stepped up their activity and recruitment efforts in the region, although it appears that the Russian authorities did little to act on this.
As in March, the official blame game over who is responsible has begun again. Overnight, Melikov released a video message in which he linked yesterday’s attack to the war in Ukraine. ‘We must understand that the war has come home to us. We have felt this before, but today we are directly faced with this war.’ The official Russian line on the attack is clearly yet to materialise as Dmitry Rogozin, senator for the Russian-occupied Zaporozhye region, has warned that ‘if we blame every terrorist attack linked to national and religious intolerance…on scheming by Ukraine and Nato, then this pink mist will lead us to bigger problems’.
Putin himself is yet to comment on last night’s attack, expressing condolences to the families of those affected via his spokesperson Dmitry Peskov. Whether he will at all isn’t clear – Dagestan is, after all, far from Moscow and the elites whose support the Russian president courts are a bigger priority. But until Russia accepts the reality of the Islamist threat growing within its borders and gets to grips with it, the tragic events of last night will not be the last likely terror attack on its soil.
Let’s hope Princess Anne makes a swift recovery
This year has been one of the worst imaginable for the Royals. The King and the Princess of Wales are both battling cancer, and now Princess Anne has been hospitalised, suffering what is said to be ‘minor injuries and concussion’ following an incident involving a horse. The Princess Royal, who is 73, was rushed to hospital after she was hurt during an evening walk on her Gatcombe Park estate in Gloucestershire yesterday. Anne, who is being treated for concussion and minor injuries to her head, is expected to recover shortly. Nonetheless, the annus horribilis for her and her family is continuing, even before we reach the halfway point of this most eventful of years.
The news that the King’s sister is currently recuperating ‘as a precautionary measure’ in Southmead hospital in Bristol, and is thankfully expected to make ‘a full and swift recovery’, according to Buckingham Palace, is cheering indeed. (She is, apparently, awake and conscious, but few further details of her condition have been released.) Since the temporary withdrawal of the King from public life for his cancer treatment, Princess Anne – always the most stoic and no-nonsense of her siblings, a trait that she seemed to inherit from her father – has been putting in overtime when it comes to undertaking as many royal engagements as she can.
When the King let it be known that he wanted ‘a slimmed-down monarchy’, it was unclear as to whether he was referring to his non-disgraced siblings or not. But the high profile of both Anne and Prince Edward this year at official events is an indication that there are currently simply not enough available members of the royal family to undertake public obligations without widening the net considerably. This explains the continual chatter about whether Anne’s nieces Princess Eugenie and Princess Beatrice are going to be brought into the fold as working royals in some capacity or another, although no formal decision has been made on this score yet.
Princess Anne will, hopefully, recover swiftly and completely
The knock-on effect of the Princess Royal’s injury is that she has had to postpone a planned trip to Canada at the end of this week. It’s a great pity. The visit would have been an enjoyable and productive one from a personal perspective. But, more importantly, it would have enabled this most popular and hard-working of royals to press the flesh in one of the few countries that not only continues to retain the British monarchy, but actually seems grateful to have it.
As the Commonwealth seems to be an increasingly anachronistic concept – not helped by the Prince of Wales’s open antipathy to its continuing existence, if his previous remarks are to be believed – it is Canada and Australia that fly the flag for the continued existence of the monarchy in other countries. Any trips made by a serving royal to either country continue to be hugely popular and valuable from a PR perspective.
Princess Anne will, hopefully, recover swiftly and completely. This is not her first injury around horses; in 1976, she was thrown from her horse Goodwill, and described the event as how ‘as far as I’m concerned, the lights went out’. She soon recovered, but her brothers responded to her predicament then with black humour, teasing her that ‘you went so much better after your fall, we ought to bang you on the head before you start next time!’
This time, the King has offered a more restrained message in which he has wished her ‘his fondest love and well-wishes’ for a speedy recovery. It would be a hard-hearted subject who did not wish the most indomitable and determined – and likeable – senior royal similar good wishes to be back on her feet once again, too.
Farage goes on the attack after Ukraine criticism
Foreign policy hasn’t featured much in this election – until now. Over the weekend, Nigel Farage’s suggestion that the West was partially to blame for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine produced an avalanche of cross-party criticism. Both Keir Starmer and Rishi Sunak labelled his comments ‘disgraceful’, while the Mail on Sunday claimed a member of president Zelensky’s staff had suggested Farage was infected with the ‘virus of Putinism’. Rather than back down, the Reform leader has opted to reprise the pugilists’ playbook and counterpunch with fire.
Speaking to supporters at Maidstone this lunchtime, he told them he would ‘never, ever defend’ Vladimir Putin before insisting he would take ‘no lectures’ from either the Tories or Labour on matters of foreign affairs and defence. In an act of political judo, he used the Russia row to turn his opponents’ attacks on themselves. Declaring that there had been ‘almost no debate’ on these policy areas, he attacked the Tories for cutting the armed forces since 2010 and claimed that Keir Starmer and David Lammy would sign Britain up to a common European defence pact. He added that there was ‘no doubt that the world is in a more dangerous place right now than it has been at any point since the Cuban missile crisis over 60 years ago’.
Broadening his assault, he lambasted the invasions of both Iraq and Libya, suggesting that the latter intervention was responsible for both Isis and the subsequent Mediterranean migration crisis. The rest of the speech focused thereafter on domestic issues, all around a shared theme: the utter incompetence and venality of Britain’s political class. Labour, he suggested, ‘will prove to be, if it is possible, even more incompetent than the Conservatives have been.’ The Tories, meanwhile, now seem to ‘resemble something of an organised betting ring’ who are using the Russia row as a ‘useful distraction’ from their election woes.
The most interesting sub-plot though was Farage’s comments about Boris Johnson. Three days ago, he was suggesting that he could work with the former premier if he repented for his migration and net-zero policies. ‘I like his personality. The more I’ve heard of him I like’, he said on Friday. Yet following Johnson’s condemnation of Farage’s Russia remarks, the Reform leader’s tone has changed. Standing in front of a giant newspaper front page which criticised Boris Johnson’s remarks on Ukraine in 2016, (when he claimed EU policies had inflamed tensions in the region) Farage suggested Johnson was a hypocrite and ought to be known as ‘the worst Prime Minister of modern times’ and the man who ‘betrayed an 80-seat majority.’ That ought to end talk of any kind of post-election pact between the two men.
The Greens’ heat pump plan won’t work
‘I’m literally in the process of getting quotes’ may well make it into the pantheon of feeble political excuses alongside ‘I did not inhale’ or ‘I was just watching badgers’. They were the words uttered by Green party co-leader Carla Denyer to explain why her home is still heated with a gas boiler rather than a heat pump – something her party advocates for others. She went on to say that she has some quotes for heat pumps in her email inbox but that she has had to put the project ‘on pause’ during the general election campaign.
When Denyer does get around to opening those emails – which I suspect won’t be in the flat above No. 10 – she may gain insight into why most homeowners have been resistant to politicians trying to persuade them to install a heat pump. She may also come to realise why her own party’s manifesto is somewhat over-hopeful in what it aims to achieve.
The Green party’s plan to transform Britain’s homes is nothing more than a fantasy
Up until the end of April this year, the government had paid out on 34,016 applications under its Boiler Upgrade Scheme – which offers grants of up to £7,500 to homeowners to install heat pumps. The average cost of installation – without reduction from the grant – was £13,318 in the case of air source heat pumps and £27,532 in the case of ground-source heat pumps. That compares with around £2,000 for purchase and installation of a new gas boiler.
Remember how the green lobby kept telling us that heat pumps were going to get cheaper as they made the transition from a niche product to a mainstream one? It isn’t happening. It may be that solar panels have come down in price sharply over the past decade, but heat pumps are on a very different cost trajectory. Someone, though, needs to tell the Green party’s manifesto-writers. The party says that in the improbable event that it made it into government it would allocate £9 billion over the next five years for ‘heating systems (e.g. heat pumps) for homes and other buildings’.
But how far would the money really go? There are 28 million households in Britain. If you divide the Greens’ £9 billion pot, it leaves you with just £320 per household – and that excludes any money for the ‘other buildings’ which the Green party wants to move onto green energy. In other words, the money allocated by the Greens wouldn’t get anywhere close to covering the cost of fitting heat pumps in all of Britain’s homes.
The Green are also promising £29 billion over five years to supposedly lift homes to a ‘B’ grading on an Energy Performance Certificate (EPC). That would work out at just over £1,000 per home. By contrast, the government quango, the Energy Savings Trust, estimates the average cost of fitting insulation to Britain’s 7.8 million homes with solid walls at between £7,500 and £12,000. And that, on its own, is highly unlikely to help an old home achieve a ‘B’ rating on an EPC.
The Green party’s plan to transform Britain’s homes with public money is nothing more than a fantasy. Carla Denyer might have realised that if she had obtained her heat pump quotes before her party wrote its policy.
The trouble with the Gandhis
What passes for democratic politics in India is something of a strange beast. Take, for example, the announcement in recent days that Priyanka Gandhi – scion of the dynasty that has produced three former prime ministers – is to run for the Indian parliament for the first time. She will stand for the main opposition Congress party (controlled lock, stock and barrel by the Gandhi family) in a by-election in Wayanad, a safe seat in the southern state of Kerala, that will be vacated by her brother and de facto leader of Congress, Rahul Gandhi. Victory is pretty much guaranteed. Rahul will continue to represent the seat of Rae Bareli in Uttar Pradesh, which was once the constituency of Indira Gandhi, his grandmother, and later of Sonia Gandhi, his mother. Welcome to party politics, Indian-style.
The family’s stranglehold on the Congress party as its route to power has proved hard to break
The latest development serves as formal notice that the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty – a family that has dominated India’s political landscape for the best party of a century – is back in the political big time. It no longer languishes in the shadow of Indian prime minister Narendra Modi and his ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), thanks to the surprise election result earlier this month. Indian voters gave Modi and the BJP a bloody nose, denying the party an outright majority and forcing it to work in coalition with other smaller parties. The outcome was widely seen as a rejection of Modi’s increasingly autocratic tendencies, and a timely reminder that voters had more important matters –such as the cost of living and jobs – on their minds.
The opposition parties, who fought a joint campaign under the acronym INDIA, did far better than anyone expected. No one more so than Rahul Gandhi, who has often been written off as a political dud with only the family name to recommend him. Even so, in no other democracy would Rahul, after losing three successive general elections, survive as de facto leader of the main opposition: only a Gandhi does that, and only in India. Bigger questions about the outsized role he and his family play in Indian politics now appear to have been put on the back burner.
The family’s stranglehold on the Congress party as its route to power has proved hard to break. It is a story that has played out across several generations. In 1929, Jawaharlal Nehru (the founding father of the dynasty) was made president of Congress – almost a century later, his descendants are still in charge. Even Nehru, who served as prime minister from
1947 until his death in 1964, might be surprised that the family’s ascendancy has lasted this long. Since 1977, barring a brief interregnum in the 1990s, the party has not had a single leader who does not go by the name of Gandhi. It is a state of affairs that normalises the abnormal. The problems are everywhere to be seen, if anyone could be bothered to look. The Gandhis have consolidated power in Congress by rewarding loyalists and sycophants. Their long period in overall control has produced a kind of sclerosis, with few lasting party reforms or changes seeing the light. Nothing really happens unless the family give it the nod of approval. It is no way for any modern political party to operate, certainly not in a democracy.
The Gandhis won’t care too much about such quibbles. They view their status and influence as the natural order of events. They may be privileged and wealthy, but that doesn’t stop them painting themselves as on the side of the poor and disenfranchised. Yet the Gandhis have little radical or new to say about India’s economic challenges, nor how they would alleviate extreme poverty in one of the world’s most unequal societies. All that they really offer is the family name and the assurance that this will be enough to cure society’s ills.
More recently, the Gandhis have presented themselves as the guardians of India’s democracy. This claim is a perversion of history for the simple reason that the erosion in Indian democratic norms preceded Modi’s appearance on the scene. Indira Gandhi, Nehru’s daughter, introduced a state of emergency for a 21-month period from 1975 to 1977. The constitution was suspended, political opponents incarcerated and widespread atrocities committed. She was eventually booted out of office. When she was returned to power in 1980, Indira picked up where she left off, launching a vicious crackdown on Sikh nationalists, which culminated in the massacre at the Golden Temple in Amritsar. She was assassinated in 1984 by her own Sikh bodyguards.
When Narendra Modi came to power a decade ago, he talked about creating an India without Congress. In saying this he didn’t mean wiping out the party, his real ambition was to sweep away the Gandhi dynasty. He can but dream on. The Gandhis are politically relevant and powerful once more. Whether this resurgence is good for Indian democracy in the long run is the question.
The myth and memory of Yevgeny Prigozhin
Yesterday was the one-year anniversary of Yevgeny Prigozhin’s mutiny, when his Wagner mercenaries seized the city of Rostov-on-Don and sent a flying column of several men towards Moscow. You would scarcely know it, though, because while Russian social media is full of discussion, eulogies and conspiracy theories, the state-controlled press is largely pretending this never happened.
The closest thing to a recognition of the anniversary has been the arrest on extortion charges of two senior figures from Prigozhin’s media – and trolling – arm. One, Ilya Gorbunov, seems to have been the coordinator of the media coverage of the Wagner ‘march of justice,’ who even tried to organise street protests in support of what was really a heavy-handed attempt to induce Vladimir Putin to abandon his erstwhile defence minister, Sergei Shoigu, and continue to allow Prigozhin to run Wagner as his own private army.
Prigozhin the trollmaster and mercenary impresario may be dead, but Prigozhin the myth is arguably stronger than ever
Otherwise, this is an official non-event, even though there was a heavy National Guard presence at St Peterburg’s Porokhovskoye cemetery, where Prigozhin’s grave has become a shrine for a growing body of nationalist critics of the regime, who smother it in flowers and even hammers, a distasteful reminder of how the sledgehammer became a symbol of Wagner when a defector from its ranks was murdered with one.
On the anniversary of Prigozhin’s birthday on 1 June, when cemetery workers were clearing away the flowers, they found a card reading: ‘Prigozhin is alive. We will take revenge.’ The most recent such note simply promised (or warned): ‘I’ll be back.’
What is striking is the degree to which there are people willing to believe such pranks or stunts. There have been various alleged sightings: amid a collection of Wagner trainers in Chad in May; laying flowers at a memorial in the Central African Republic; stepping through a school assembly in Tyumen in September. Glimpses of heavy-set bald men – not exactly a rarity in Russia – are enough to launch a new wave of conspiracy theories: when his plane crashed exactly two months after his mutiny, he had actually been replaced with a body double; the DNA tests which confirmed his corpse’s identity were spoofed; there was a second plane. And so on.
Indeed, another of his former media executives, while claiming that he was ‘an opponent of all fantasies, speculation and conspiracy theories’, publicly expressed confidence that he was alive simply because ‘working with Prigozhin, I quickly got used to not being surprised by anything’.
Hardly convincing, not least because of what has happened to Prigozhin’s empire. Wagner is no more, its African ventures rolled into the new Africa Corps – Moscow seems to have overlooked the unfortunate historical ironies of this name – and the rest of its forces now forced into the regular military or the National Guard. His troll farms have been taken over by various business rivals or the intelligence services, and without his patronage and insider connections, his ‘Concord’ business empire is in crisis. The bulk ended up bequeathed to his son, Pavel, but this proved something of a poisoned chalice: in the last year its losses amounted to something like a billion rubles (£9 million).
Prigozhin the entrepreneur, trollmaster and mercenary impresario may be dead, but Prigozhin the myth is arguably stronger than ever. As political strategist Abbas Gallyamov put it: ‘the weaker Putin’s position in this “patriotic” community, the more often Prigozhin’s name will come up precisely because Prigozhin is now perceived… a representative of a more effective and active patriotism, which is aimed at the interests of the Motherland, and not at lining his own pocket.’ Of course, Prigozhin did actively line his own pocket, making millions as he threw Wagner mercenaries and recruits from the prison camps into the meat-grinder like human ammunition.
The myth and memory of Prigozhin is of a patriot and man of the people, willing to tell it like it is and to roll up his sleeves and do what needs to be done without fear or favour. One of his former cohorts, whom Anna Arutunyan and I interviewed while working on our book Downfall. Prigozhin, Putin and the new fight for Russia’s future, was spot on when he predicted – shortly after his death – that the Kremlin ‘might end up regretting killing him. You can expose and undermine a man much more easily’ than a legend.
Putin’s regime is stable, secure – but brittle. The mutiny highlighted just how badly it could respond to a crisis, with Putin disappearing from view and then in his desperation to make this crisis go away making too generous a deal with Prigozhin such that he felt he had murderously to rescind it. The security forces largely looked on, unwilling to side with Wagner, but no more keen to intervene to stop the so-called ‘March of Justice.’
The Prigozhin myth, with its random ‘sightings,’ the odd messages from beyond the grave, the exaggerated claims as to what he could have accomplished – What Would Prigozhin Do? – are less about him, so much as outlets for frustration and a sense of betrayal from the very nationalists Putin had hoped to co-opt. In the chaotic Time of Troubles that followed the death of Ivan the Terrible, no fewer than three ‘False Dmitries’ arose claiming to be his son and heir, who had actually died years earlier. Many flocked to their banner, sometimes cynically, but often simply hoping that they had found a saviour. All those blurred videos on social media are, in their own way, signs of the ‘False Yevgeny.’
Who can blame the Greens’ co-leader for not getting a heat pump?
Far be it from me to give advice to the Green Party. From their insistence that ordinary people put up with being poorer and colder to ‘save the planet’ to the alarmingly high number of Israelophobic, 7 October-denying cranks on their candidates list, I’m really not a fan. Still, I’d gently suggest that the golden rule for any Green vying for election is to practise what you preach on climate. If you are standing on a manifesto of national immiseration, you’d better be willing to go without the fossil-fuelled comforts you want to rip away from everyone else.
The Greens co–leader has been caught out as an eco-hypocrite
Not so for Carla Denyer, it seems. The Greens’ co–leader (apparently running a party with one MP is too much work for one person) has been caught out as an eco-hypocrite. Denyer has admitted to ITV, as part of its party-leader interviews series, that she still has a gas boiler. She is ‘in the process of getting quotes for replacing it with an air-source heat pump’, natch, but Rishi Sunak’s snap poll scuppered her plans. ‘I’ve had to put that on pause during the general election as you can imagine, but I, yeah, literally have quotes in my email inbox’, she said.
This would perhaps be more convincing if heat pumps had only come to market this year, or were a relatively minor part of plans for ‘decarbonisation’. In reality, they’ve been at the heart of the discussion, given domestic heating accounts for about 14 per cent of UK emissions and the government has been throwing money at people to install them for years.
Despite this, uptake remains much slower than hoped and the Tories’ plan to ban new gas boilers by 2035 is so unpopular even the Labour party has just pledged to scrap it. No one will ‘be forced to rip out their boiler’, shadow energy secretary Ed Miliband told the Daily Telegraph last week. Given Labour is almost certainly going to win this election, I guess that’s one fewer incentive for Denyer to finally get her act together.
She’s hardly alone in failing to live her life as she expects the rest of us to live ours. ‘Do as I say, not as I do’ has been greens’ unspoken mantra for years. From Prince Harry taking private jets after lecturing others on climate change to Sadiq Khan presiding over Ultra-low emission zones while taking a three-car convoy to walk his dog to Extinction Rebellion co-founder Gail Bradbrook driving a diesel when she’s not flying off to Costa Rica, eco-hypocrisy appears to be a feature – not a bug – of elite environmentalism.
You can’t help but conclude that green austerity is just for the plebs. Even paid-up Greens are bristling at the expense and privations they claim to support. Indeed, forcing people to pay more for poorer outcomes is at the heart of the Net Zero mania. Heat pumps are a great example. They can cost anywhere between £10,000 and £15,000 to install, compared to £2,000 to £4,000 for a new gas boiler; they can cost more to run; and they aren’t particularly effective at heating your home – unless you’ve got even more cash to splash on insulation and other expensive adjustments. No wonder Denyer was putting it off.
This is the fundamental flaw of greenism – the reason it only appeals to a privileged few. It wants to rip up the unwritten contract between government and the governed. Where politicians once pledged to make life that bit easier, cheaper and more convenient for ordinary folk, now they are offering us higher bills, colder homes, fewer foreign holidays and expecting us to be happy about it. Deep down, no one – not even the co-leader of the Greens, it seems – wants to live like that.
Voting Reform will strengthen the Nats, Sunak warns Scots
Back to Scotland, where Rishi Sunak is attending the Scottish Conservatives’ manifesto launch in Edinburgh. Leaving the ongoing betting scandal in London, the Prime Minister walked into another controversy – about the football. Before Sunak launched into his speech he made a point of agreeing with Scottish Tory leader and linesman Douglas Ross that Scotland should have been awarded a penalty in last night’s Euros match. It’s certainly one way to get the Scots on side…
The issue of oil and gas a key dividing line for the Scottish Tories, Sunak highlighted how the positions of other parties on new licences could cost jobs. Slamming Sir Keir’s Labour lot, the PM claimed that Starmer’s army would ‘rather virtue signal to eco-zealots than protect jobs here at home’. Moving quickly onto the SNP, Sunak claimed John Swinney’s Nats were the ‘great pretenders’ of the North East, putting ‘radical environmentalism ahead of pragmatism’.
‘Voting Reform risks letting the nationalists off the hook. Voting Reform risks letting the SNP slide in through the back door.’
Then the Prime Minister turned his guns on Reform. Nigel Farage’s party has seen its support grow by three points over the last month in Scotland. While in the rest of the UK, the Tory message has been ‘vote Reform, get Labour’, today Sunak told his Scottish audience: ‘Voting Reform risks letting the nationalists off the hook. Voting Reform risks letting the SNP slide in through the back door.’
Getting personal, the PM nodded to Farage’s recent Telegraph piece – in which the Reform leader suggested the West helped provoke Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. ‘You all heard what Nigel Farage said about Ukraine. That plays into Putin’s hands,’ Sunak told the crowd.
Sunak’s comments follow recent YouGov polling that reveals that since the middle of May, support for Reform in Scotland has increased to seven per cent, just six points below the Tories. And today, polling guru Sir John Curtice told Channel 4 that the hardest thing to predict ahead of this national poll is ‘how bad the defeat for the Conservatives will be’. Oh dear.
The main threat to the Conservatives in Scotland remains the SNP – but with only ten days to go until the general election, Sunak is desperate to fend off any and all rival parties. Will his message cut through? Stay tuned…
Marine Le Pen’s plan for France is a recipe for stagnation
Big business will be brought onside. The bond markets will be mollified. And there will be plenty of reassuring words about dealing with the budget deficit. With the first round of voting in France’s parliamentary elections set for this week, Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National is preparing for government. This week it has set out a programme designed to keep investors, if not exactly happy, at least under control. There is just one catch. It is also a programme for stagnation – and that means France’s out-of-control debts are going to grow and grow.
Nothing that Bardella is proposing will do anything to lift France out of its rut
With only a few days left before voting, it looks increasingly likely that Le Pen’s RN will win power, with either an overall majority or a leading role in a coalition. Jordan Bardella is likely to become Prime Minister. The party has clearly decided to avoid ‘un moment Liz Truss’ by crafting an economic platform designed to keep the bond markets onside. Its wilder spending pledges, such as eliminating income tax for the under-30s, or scrapping VAT on 100 basic goods, have been dropped. Instead, it will conduct an ‘audit’ to assess the state of the national finances (which are not in a good state, in case anyone was wondering), and pledge to stick to the deficit reduction programme and the EU’s fiscal rules. The one major measure is a plan to claw back 2 billion euros a year from Brussels, a proposal that, to put it mildly, is likely to be controversial among the other 27 members.
That is, without question, smart politics. President Macron hopes the RN will crash the economy if it gets into power, discrediting Le Pen and Bardella, and paving the way for his centrist bloc to secure re-election in the presidential election due in 2027. Probably not very surprisingly, the RN has decided not to play along. Instead, it will try to stick to the spending plans, and blame a round of austerity measures on the president, while picking a fight with the EU.
There is just one snag. It is also a recipe for stagnation. Nothing that Bardella is proposing will do anything to lift France out of its rut. Indeed, insofar as it will make any difference, it will hit output even further. Replacing a property-based wealth tax with a financial one will scare off investors and entrepreneurs, while even modest concessions on the reforms to the retirement age will only worsen the long-term fiscal outlook.
France’s economy was already very weak, with growth of just 0.2 per cent forecast for this year. It already has a budget deficit of 112 per cent of GDP; some of the highest debts in the developed world after Japan and the US; and it will rack up another 5 per cent of GDP in fresh borrowing this year. With zero growth, its debt load will grow worse and worse every year. Le Pen’s programme may be clever politics, but it is terrible economics – and it will make the French financial crisis even worse when it finally arrives.
Scotland’s women face a choice on self-ID in this election
Women in Scotland have a difficult choice to make in this election. Those whoomen, that is, who are concerned about a return of any version of the infamous Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill and the policy of allowing transgender people to self-identify as another sex. It looks very much as if only the Conservative party is serious about abandoning self-ID, protecting women’s rights and asserting the primacy of biological sex, not least in what is taught in schools. Yet, very few Scottish women, and even fewer feminists, are natural Tory voters. Indeed, Scots of all genders tend to shun the party.
But women across the UK have a particular interest in this election too, because its outcome could affect their sexual and social identity, as well as their safety in single sex spaces. What do they do? What does JK Rowling do? We know who she won’t vote for. The world’s most prominent critic of gender ideology says Labour has ‘abandoned women’. She’s certainly not going to vote for the Liberal Democrats who are even woker than the SNP responsible for trying to enshrine self-ID in law.
The question is: can there be two routes to gender recognition in one country?
It was Nicola Sturgeon’s policy of self-ID that led to a double rapist, Isla Bryson, being placed on remand in Cornton Vale women’s prison. Other male-bodied sex offenders had already been incarcerated there.
Most women probably thought they had seen the end of this reckless policy after that scandal. Allowing 16-year-olds to change their legal sex without a diagnosis of gender dysphoria has been hugely unpopular in Scotland and across the UK. Indeed, most women probably thought JK Rowling had been vindicated in her insistence that biological sex matters and that self-ID is an invitation for predatory males to threaten women and girls. Surely no one would again try to frame in statute the quasi-religious belief that people can be born in the wrong body? Well watch out, because some gender critical women believe the Labour party is bent on getting self-ID back on the road.
The Shadow Education Secretary, Bridget Phillipson, says she intends to review the current UK guidelines on the teaching of gender ideology in schools. This requires teachers to state clearly that there are only two sexes and removes from them the requirement to address children by their preferred pronouns. Phillipson believe this is ‘partisan’ language and doesn’t show care for transgender children. Parents clearly do not get a look-in here.
Similarly, with the abandonment by Labour of so-called ‘spousal consent’, it is the interest of the trans person rather than his bewildered and betrayed wife (or husband) that takes precedence. Nor do children apparently have any rights when they face the humiliation and psychological stress of losing a father and acquiring two legal mothers.
The Labour party has, however, made some progress. After being lectured on human biology by Tony Blair, Keir Starmer now accepts that men have penises and women have vaginas. That I need to write that sentence shows how far politics has strayed from the path of reason. But only four years ago, Labour’s then equalities spokeswoman, Dawn Butler, told BBC radio that ‘a child is born without sex’. She is still around, of course, as are many ‘trans allies’ on the Labour benches who believe that ‘transwomen are women’ in a literal sense.
Labour says they will retain some form of medical intervention, though the medical panel that currently assesses the diagnosis of gender dysphoria has gone. In Scotland, however, there appears to be no medical intervention required at all according to the Scottish Labour manifesto. Anas Sarwar’s intention is clear. The Scottish Labour leader says he is determined to simplify and ‘demedicalise’ the process of gender transition. This looks very like GRR 2.0.
The question is: can there be two routes to gender recognition in one country? Are we back to the situation where someone could change their legal sex in Scotland only to be told they are still their old sex when they cross the border? If medical diagnosis is required in England under Labour’s plans how can a Scottish gender recognition certificate (GRC) be valid?
In 2022, Sarwar whipped Labour MSPs into voting for Sturgeon’s self-ID bill. He has never atoned for that and clearly intends to revisit the matter after the election. The Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill remains an act of the Scottish parliament. It was halted by the Conservative government in Westminster under Section 35 of the Scorland Act. Keir Starmer says he won’t unblock the bill to allow it to become law. But Sarwar hasn’t ruled out supporting an amended version of the bill.
Labour is also saying that they agree with the ‘gender critical’ interpretation of the 2010 Equality Act that it already protects single sex spaces. This remains hugely controversial. The Equality and Human Rights Commissioner, Baroness Faulkner, ruled two years ago that transwomen can be excluded from women-only groups as ‘proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim’, as the law puts it. This is regarded as offensive by many LGBT advocates, such as the Good Law Project’s Jolyon Maugham, since it implies that even transwomen with a gender recognition certificate are still biological men. Or else how could they be excluded? They may have passports and birth certificates saying they are female but if this interpretation is correct, they are still male for ‘legitimate’ aims – such as women-only support groups for victims of sexual violence. It seems clear from what Keir Starmer says about the right of trans people to be ‘recognised and accepted’ that the presumption will be that transwomen are indeed female in law.
The main risk to women’s sex-based rights, however, comes not from manifestos and what leaders say but from Labour’s possible super-majority. With another 200 Labour MPs on the backbenches, a number of whom are supporters of Stonewall, it seems highly likely that the weight of opinion in the new parliamentary Labour party will be with the likes of Dawn Butler and Lisa Nandy, who is on record as saying that trans prisoners should be placed in the establishment that confirms to their assumed gender.
So again what do women do? Do they hold their noses and vote for the gender-critical Rishi. Or do they hope for the best with Keir? It looks like the Tories are already a lost cause so in a sense the issue is academic. But the consequences for women of an epic Labour majority could be anything but.
Badenoch blasts Alastair Campbell over Brexit
Uh oh. In the latest election drama, Tory candidate for North West Essex and business secretary Kemi Badenoch has taken aim at Labour’s former spin doctor Alastair Campbell. The lefty spinner has a well-documented history of Brexit-bashing and Badenoch, it seems, has had enough.
Urging readers of the Daily Mail to ignore Brexit sceptics and vote for the Conservatives ‘to stop us going back to square one’, the minister writes in the newspaper today that voting Labour means ‘enabling a strengthened Starmer to unpick Brexit’. Slamming Tony Blair’s former spokesman, Badenoch tore into Campbell’s claims about what leaving the EU means for Britain. From securing private investment to growing the economy to exporting goods to signing trade deals, the business secretary praised what she claims are the proven benefits of having left the EU.
Taking to the Mail’s pages, Badenoch warned voters against letting ‘Remoaners like Campbell fool you’ that the Tories hadn’t delivered on Brexit, fuming:
One of my golden rules of politics is to listen carefully to Alastair Campbell – and then do the opposite. The Labour spin doctor, whose pumped out more dodgy dossiers than McDonald’s has burgers, is reliably wrong about everything. And the issue on which he’s been loudest for longest is the issue on which he’s been mistaken the most – Brexit.
Ouch. She continued:
We’ve only just started to see the benefits of leaving the EU. There is so much more to come, but a Labour supermajority in the Commons risks losing it all.
Signing off, Badenoch added: ‘These are the hard facts, Mr Campbell. The rest, as they say, is just politics.’ Burn…
England’s witless footballers could learn a lot from the Scots
Scotland 0 Hungary 1: The Guardian called the game ‘a grim slog’, presumably preferring the fare offered by the twinkle-toed Latinos. Me, I loved every deeply flawed second. This was a League One play-off final, full of fury, grit and consummate uselessness. I’d far rather watch that than Spain and Italy – and even more so awful England, with their stupid, mind-numbing, witless, languor. Hell, at least these two sides TRIED.
Far too late in the day the pundits are turning against Southgate
Hungary were marginally the more proficient and employed the tactic of making sure Scotland had lots of the ball so they could do nothing constructive with it. The jocks had few shots on goal and none that remotely troubled the Hungarian keeper whose name was, I think, Mr Goulash.
Scotland were denied one of the most straightforward penalties you will ever see. But they would probably have missed it. They would have certainly missed the scoring opportunity which presented itself to Kev Csoboth in the last seconds, so there can be no real complaints.
And you Scots fans who displayed the Argie flag? Ha. Suck it up. Tomorrow we return to consummate boredom with England. Far too late in the day the pundits are turning against Southgate: their support for him during years of exactly the same failings are why the bloke is still there. Cocooned in their bubble of delusion, the players still think everything was tickety-boo against Denmark. Perhaps Slavoj Zizek et al will disabuse them of this notion tomorrow evening.
Let’s take no lectures from Emma Thompson on the climate
The actors are out in force again, speaking politics. Only days after Brian Cox appeared on the BBC bemoaning that Brexit is reducing our GDP by 4 per cent, this weekend Dame Emma Thompson led thousands at a Restore Nature Now march in London. The protest was designed to draw attention to the plight of nature and the climate, and was attended by charities, businesses and direct action groups.
Actors at their worst are a notoriously shallow and vain lot
During the march, the national treasure, millionaire and jet-setter Thompson was asked if she supported Just Stop Oil, days after the group had vandalised Stonehenge. ‘I think I support anyone who fights this extraordinary battle,’ she replied. ‘We cannot take any more oil out of the ground. I mean, there’s much argument about it. And I know there’s a lot of very complicated economic arguments about it.’
Yes, it’s very complicated. This is especially why we shouldn’t defer to the likes of Thompson on such matters. Actors at their worst are a notoriously shallow and vain lot, and not widely esteemed for their consistency on matters cerebral. Thompson is a tireless and tiresome campaigner on climate matters, who most infamously was spotted taking a flight to New York in 2019, seated in her personal booth in the luxury cabin of a British Airways jet, merely days after backing climate protests in London, and previously exhorting: ‘We should all fly less.’
As for that convert to Scottish independence, his glorious cinematic performances notwithstanding, Brian Cox’s claim of a 4 per cent shrinkage in GDP was based on a prediction made years back. Since the referendum, the UK economy has grown faster than Germany, Italy, and Japan and at a similar rate to France
It would seem appropriate that this year of heightened political temperature and tempers, what with a wave of elections in the EU, the UK and the USA now underway, and the slew of actors making interventions – Dame Judi Dench also came out in support for Restore Nature Now – should also be the same year that the film Team America: World Police celebrates its twentieth anniversary.
This movie, featuring a cast of marionettes in homage to the oeuvre of Gerry Anderson, particularly Thunderbirds, was a satire on many things: the USA’s thoughtless foreign policy, sloganeering patriotism, the crassness of Hollywood films themselves. But like all good satire, in which those of all political persuasions are up for ridicule, it took an unforgettable swipe at vain, vacuous Hollywood actors, who believed, in the words of one marionette: ‘as actors, it is our responsibility to read the newspapers, and then say what we read on television like it’s our own opinion.’
In the film, for all the well-intentioned efforts of the eponymous, blundering Team America to rid the world of terrorists and dictators, they were forever thwarted by the efforts of the Film Actors Guild, headed by Alec Baldwin, George Clooney and Matt Damon. This cabal was beholden to childlike liberal-left ideology, and so blinded by anti-Western antipathy that one of their number, the marionette in the form of Sean Penn, spoke up to say: ‘Last year I went to Iraq. Before Team America showed up, it was a happy place. They had flowering meadows and rainbow skies, and rivers made of chocolate, where the children danced and laughed and played with gumdrop smiles.’ Such was their naivety that the Film Actors Guild even ended up fighting on the side of North Korea’s Kim Jong-Il.
Back to real life: witness the carry-on of Stephen Fry this year, who was absolutely shocked to discover that London’s exclusive Garrick Club, of which he is a long-term member, also had a long-standing rule against female membership. Fry, a former president of the Marylebone Cricket Club, also protested recently that the same institution was ‘stinking of privilege and classism’. And then we had Robert De Niro, who last month launched a tirade against Donald Trump.
De Niro, Cox, Fry, Dench, Thompson: these are all figures many of us revered and still revere for the professions which made their name, and in which they still excel. But why do they do it? Why must they make fools of themselves by spouting sometimes hypocritical and ill-informed political views?
Their carry-on is, alas, intrinsic to who they are. Actors are given to narcissism and shallowness, to public utterances that expose their vacuity and vanity. Their job is to pretend to be someone else, to pretend to be someone they are not, to have emotions that they do not have. These sweet, insecure souls love to be the centre of attention – literally. And if that involves tapping into causes that makes them appear all the more caring and compassionate, all the better for them.
Michael Gove is right to compare the betting scandal to partygate
Poor old Rishi Sunak. You would have to have the proverbial heart of stone not to feel, at least, a bat-squeak of pity for the man at this stage. First there was that poignant press conference in the rain, then the D-day kerfuffle, the flock of sheep in Devon who snubbed him when he tried to feed them, the series of ill-advised visits to chocolate teapot factories and pubs called things like ‘The Last Chance Saloon’, and now this…
It’s not a huge amount to take in exchange for humiliating your colleagues and trashing your party’s chance of winning an election
You can imagine his bewilderment, his despairing incredulity, as he discovered that the headlines for the last week of his campaign were to be dominated not by the good news about inflation but by the slow-burning story of one, two, three, four (and possibly more) of his people being accused of taking out hooky bets on the election date. His soon-to-be-former colleague Michael Gove, some will think unhelpfully, compared the scandal to partygate.
Craig Williams, the PM’s Parliamentary Private Secretary, stands accused of placing a bet on the election date just three days before it was announced; the party’s director of campaigning and his Conservative candidate wife are also under investigation; and now it emerges that the party’s data chief is also accused of placing multiple bets on the election date which (very data chief-ish detail, this) were all reportedly under £100 but could add up to thousands of pounds in winnings. (He has denied any wrongdoing.)
Meanwhile, we hear, a ‘second wave’ of questionable punters – said to be associates and contacts of those in the first wave – are to be investigated next. Hem-hemming on Sky News, James Cleverly made the weak defence that it was ‘a small number of individuals’, and couldn’t even go further than saying there was ‘no reason to believe’ any cabinet ministers had placed bets that were going to look bad. Not exactly the words of a man confident in the integrity of his colleagues.
It’s not just that these bets have about them the stink of corruption. It’s that – and as a half-billionaire Rishi Sunak will feel this especially keenly – the amounts of money that the alleged cheaty bettors stand to gain are so comparatively trivial. The Gambling Commission’s investigation into irregular gambling on the election results is looking into anyone who stood to gain more than £199 for a win. It’s not a huge amount to take in exchange for humiliating your colleagues and trashing your party’s chance of winning an election.
Or helping trash. Or – let’s be realistic – making no great difference at all. Maybe that’s the heart of it. Deciding, perhaps, that the die is cast and that whatever they now do the Conservative and Unionist party is about to be ground zero at the political equivalent of the asteroid-strike that did for the dinosaurs, and with much the same result, they thought that they might as well go down to the bookies and make the price of a decent lunch at the Carlton Club. This is, if nothing else, true in its perverse way to the cherished Conservative principles of market-incentivised individualism.
We are, this seems to indicate, in the sauve qui peut (every man for himself) phase of this election. Michael Gove – one of the tiny handful of principled intellectuals still in a senior position in a party which, until relatively recently in its history, has had a place at the top for principled intellectuals – was right to compare this scandal to partygate. The venal selfishness we see apparently on show now is cousin to the venal selfishness that got us to this position. There was a terrible human smallness – the clinking wine bottles, the shabby cover-ups, the squabbles on WhatsApp, the VIP lane pocket-stuffing, and all the rest of it – to the scandals that wrecked the party’s reputation, and there’s a terrible human smallness to the scandal now.
If you’re someone with senior responsibility for the electoral fortunes of a centuries-old political party, even if those fortunes look to be terminally on the slide, it’s a bad show to sell it out for a fistful of betting slips. It’s like going through the pockets of the dead on a battlefield. Might as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb, sure: but these people (if they are found to have done what they are accused of doing) seem to be willing to be hanged for a dormouse.
That’s none of Rishi Sunak’s doing. He may be playing his hand woefully, but he doesn’t have much of a hand to play and he’s not a crook. We can believe him when he says he’s cross. ‘If anyone is found to have broken the rules, not only should they face the full consequences of the law,’ he told a Question Time audience, ‘I will make sure that they are booted out of the Conservative party.’
You might think, mind you, that if someone’s facing the prospect of going to jail (cheating at gaming carries a maximum sentence of 51 weeks), they won’t give too much of a hoot about having their Tory membership revoked on top of that. But at this point Mr Sunak doesn’t have much in the way of further sanctions open to him. That, too, seems to me to be part of the issue: power is draining out of this government in an arterial gush.
If you’re not the sort of person for whom self-respect, or respect for the party with which you’re affiliated and its traditions, or basic moral principle have any real sway, you’re left with a cold calculation of interest. We’re seeing now that a) there look to be a dismaying number of such people in positions of trust at the top of the Conservative party; and that b) the calculation of interest they are making is that there’s nothing parliamentary Conservatism can now offer them that’s worth more than a few hundred quid from Ladbrokes.
Labour’s dreadful gender recognition reforms
Is Keir Starmer trying to snatch an unlikely defeat from the jaws of victory, or is he so confident of winning that he thinks he can ignore sense and reason – certainly on the issue of sex and gender?
When the Labour party manifesto dropped a couple of weeks ago, it included a pledge to ‘modernise, simplify, and reform the intrusive and outdated gender recognition law to a new process’. This morning we learned some of the details.
This might not trouble privileged men like Starmer but it is an issue for vulnerable women reliant on publicly funded services
According to reports, Labour will remove any need for someone to ‘live in their preferred gender’, halve the number of medical reports so that the word of only one doctor is needed, and abolish the panel that checks that applications are legally compliant. If Labour gets its way, someone will be able to change their legal sex without making any changes whatsoever to the way they live their lives, and with the support of just one doctor. With no prospect of a second opinion or legal scrutiny, that could be a nice little earner for psychiatrists happy to write what the patient wants them to write.
Make no mistake, this is self-ID in all but name. Actually, it might be even worse. Under Starmer’s watch, the concept of gender transition would be optional. James would not need to become Jenny in order to apply for a Gender Recognition Certificate. A certificate that would allow him to change all his legal documents, including his birth certificate, to show that his sex is the same as a woman.
Starmer might talk about protecting women’s spaces, and expand on his recent conversion to the truth that ‘a woman has a vagina and a man has a penis’, but if a person with a penis has a GRC then according to the law he is a woman with a penis, and providers of female services are going to have a very hard time trying to keep him out. That might not trouble privileged men like Starmer but it is an issue for vulnerable women reliant on publicly funded services.
As well as overlooking the very reasonable concerns of service providers, Labour also plan to ignore spouses. At present, husbands and wives – though it is most usually wives – have a voice when their partner applies for a GRC. If they are content for their relationship to be changed from an opposite-sex marriage to a same-sex marriage they can sign a form that goes off in the bundle to the panel. If not, the panel will issue an ‘interim GRC’ that can be used to end the marriage. Crucially, nobody in an existing marriage gets to change the nature of that marriage without the consent of the other person in that marriage. It seems that Labour plans to throw those protections out of the window as well.
Elsewhere in the news this weekend, Labour’s shadow education secretary refused to clarify whether a Labour government would uphold school’s guidance that would prevent schools from teaching that everyone has a gender identity, and presenting a smorgasbord of options to children, including non-binary, genderqueer, agender and pacman gender (I made that last one up, but it has as much validity as the rest). Asked three times whether she would keep the guidelines or bin them, Bridget Phillipson said, ‘There are trans people within society and their existence should be recognised’.
Yes, we exist, but it is not in our interest for pupils to be taught nonsense, or parents to be kept in the dark when their children change their name and pronouns in school. Neither is it in our interest for the Gender Recognition Act to be brought into disrepute by opening up loopholes that can be exploited by bad actors.
If, as Labour suggests, the GRA is outdated then there is a good argument to simply repeal it. Why should anyone need to change the record of their birth in order to live in the present. I don’t and nor do many other transsexuals. If a transition is not good enough without a GRC then it’s unlikely to be good enough with one.
With manifesto pledges, the devil is often in the detail, but we only find out these details after the election when we are stuck with the results for five years. Remarkably, this time we know the likely horrors ten days before the election. Starmer must be very confident.
Benjamin Netanyahu must decide what to do about Hezbollah
Tensions on Israel’s northern border are currently at their highest point since the outbreak of hostilities in October last year. On Friday, United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said: ‘One rash move – one miscalculation – could trigger a catastrophe that goes far beyond the border, and frankly, beyond imagination.’
The latest reports indicate that the US has declared it will give Israel its ‘full support’ in the event of war with Hezbollah. This appears to go hand in hand, however, with an American determination to prevent any Israeli action which might precipitate such a war. So what is the current situation? And where are things heading?
The decision for escalation now lies with Israel
After a short pause for the Islamic Eid al-Adha holiday, the Iranian proxy Hezbollah is now back to launching rockets and drones at targets on the Israeli side of the border on a daily basis.Israel is responding with targeted strikes on Hezbollah fighters and commanders.
As of today, the tactical advantage is clearly with Israel. This is reflected in the casualty figures. Hezbollah acknowledges the deaths of 345 fighters at the hands of Israel since October, along with dozens of civilians. (It is worth noting that in the last round of fighting, in 2006, the movement admitted to losing only 250 fighters). Hezbollah has suffered the loss of senior and seasoned commanders. On the Israeli side, losses are much lighter – 15 IDF soldiers, 10 civilians.
These figures are somewhat deceptive, however. First, because the low Israeli civilian losses reflect the fact that Israeli border communities have emptied out. To a depth of around 5km from the border, the civilians have gone. Around 60,000 Israelis have become what in other contexts are usually known as internally-displaced persons, or less euphemistically, refugees. On the other side of the border, 100,000 Lebanese have similarly left their homes.
Second, the picture of Israeli tactical advantage is deceptive because strategically the advancing party is clearly Iran, not Israel. Israeli strategists and commanders prior to October 2023 used to talk proudly of what they called the ‘war between the wars.’ This was an intelligence and air-led campaign to disrupt and frustrate Iranian efforts to equip its Hezbollah proxy. The campaign also aimed to frustrate Tehran’s efforts to deepen and consolidate its line of control between the Iraq-Iran border and Lebanon.
The campaign scored many tactical successes. Much ordnance was destroyed, many fighters were killed. But at the end of it, as may now be plainly seen, Iran possesses something close to a fully-equipped army on Israel’s northern border. It is now using that army, in coordination with its Hamas client in Gaza and proxy forces elsewhere in the region, to wage a coordinated assault on Israel and its allies.
For Israel, the long-term abandonment of the north, and the ceding of it to Hezbollah, is not tenable. Israeli civilians have made clear that they will not return to their homes if Hezbollah remains deployed along the border. There are family homes just meters from the borderline. Before October, Hezbollah members would regularly deploy along this area, with only a low fence separating them from Israeli civilian communities. The risk of a 7 October style massacre, but on a far larger scale, would be ever-present should these communities be re-populated without a change in arrangements on the other side of the border.
Despite the efforts of both the US and France, progress in this area has been elusive. Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah has made clear that his side is not currently seeking all-out war. He has also stated that his movement will continue its current wave of attacks for as long as the fighting in Gaza continues. There are no indications that he will concede to any diplomatic move which would involve the distancing of Hezbollah fighters from the border.
There is already a Security Council resolution that prohibits Hezbollah from deploying south of the Litani River. Resolution 1701, however, which ended the 2006 war, has been a dead letter from the outset. There is no force available to enforce it. The Lebanese army is weaker than Hezbollah, and is in any case heavily infiltrated by it. The United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) has no mandate to use force against the Shia Islamists and its contributor states have absolutely no will to do so. The result is that Hezbollah is there, on the border, refusing to move, and northern Israel looks set to remain abandoned until something shifts.
An additional question facing Israeli planners concerns Israel’s preferred future arrangement. Jerusalem appears to have no local allies in Lebanon. The UN has already proved itself useless in this context. So how would Israel prevent Hezbollah’s return to the border even after a successful Israeli operation?
The decision for escalation now lies with Israel. Hebrew media is reporting that plans for an Israeli operation into Lebanon to dis-lodge the situation have been completed. Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz said this week that Israel is ‘very close to the moment of decision to change the rules against Hezbollah and Lebanon’.
If war against Hezbollah begins, the Gaza fighting will have been only an overture. And if Teheran’s most prized proxy is threatened with destruction, the prospect of the direct entry of Iran and its remaining proxies into the fight will be very real. Israel has permitted the emergence of powerful Islamist armies on its borders over the last two decades. It must now decide whether the time has come to decisively reverse their advance, and whether it believes it has the strength – military, diplomatic, societal – to do so.