Hope for Russia has died with Navalny

It was brave. It was foolhardy. It was almost unbelievable. After his near-fatal poisoning by the Russian Federal Security Service, Alexey Navalny returned to Russia. He was taken away as he disembarked from the plane in Moscow, and thrown into prison on a made-up pretext. After three years of torture, Navalny has been done away with. The Russian prison authorities have reported his death from an unspecified cause. 

Putin’s regime has murdered another opposition leader, and not just any. Navalny, like no one else in Russia, stood for the unlikely promise of change. His charisma, his humour, his clarity of vision, and, above all, his awe-inspiring disdain for Putin’s gangster state, made Navalny into a larger-than-life figure, a David, laughing in Goliath’s face. ‘I am not afraid,’ he would say. ‘And you: do not be afraid.’ And his words reverberated like those of a prophet, albeit a prophet unwanted by his homeland. 

Most who will mourn Navalny have fled abroad. They will sigh sadly from their permanent exile about roads not travelled, secretly glad all the same that it was he and not them that paid the price. 

Some may protest or hold public vigils in major Russian cities. It is a dangerous idea, and most mourners will dismiss it out of hand. They will go back to their families, huddle together, grateful that they can at least think freely, even if they no longer can freely say what they think. 

For the vast, tired, apathetic, silent majority, Navalny’s death will barely register. ‘Who? Navalny? He knew what he was getting himself into.’ He knew.

‘Seeds of tyranny’, President Harry S. Truman once said, ‘spread and grow in the evil soil of poverty and strife. They reach their full growth when the hope of a people for a better life has died. We must keep that hope alive.’ This of course was from an age when American still bothered. Now its commitment to freedom has waned. And it’s questionable in any case whether America, or the West, or anyone else but the Russians themselves, could have done anything to save Russia. 

Navalny tried. He kept that hope alive. Now he, too, is dead. He is neither the first nor the last. Putin has tasted blood, and found the delicacy appealing to the palate. He does not just kill opposition activists. He has already killed hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians and Russians. Drenched in the blood of his victims, Putin talks history. In its murky annals he finds those worthy of emulation, those who ruled with an iron fist and built vast empires. 

Exactly a month from now, the Russians go to the polls to reanoint the tsar. He is genuinely popular with the meek, slavish populace. They love him for his brutality. They prostrate themselves willingly before his awesome power. They march to the tsar’s orders, unable or perhaps unwilling to understand that it is they who enabled tyranny because they never cared. Most still don’t. 

As Putin’s regime grows more bloodthirsty and more arrogant, there are yet those in the West who want to reason with the dictator. They bury their heads in the comforting sand in the hope that Russia will somehow sort itself out, one day returning to normalcy. It won’t. 

With Navalny’s death, Russia has symbolically turned the corner. There is no more faith, nor any more hope, and no longer any prospect for that ‘beautiful Russia of the future’ that Navalny tried so hard to keep alive in our collective imagination. He died trying. 

Putin remains, savouring death.

Could Harry become an American citizen?

If I was the producer of Good Morning America, I would feel disappointed by today’s appearance of Prince Harry on my show. The Duke of Sussex came on television for his first major broadcast interview of the year, and it was inevitable that the major topic of interest was not going to be his time in Canada to mark the Invictus Games competitors’ training, or his family life in Montecito, or indeed the forthcoming paperback publication of Spare. Instead, it is his father’s health, which saw Harry drop everything and return to Britain last week for a private meeting with the King estimated to have lasted between 30 and 45 minutes.

Naturally, Harry was asked about this by Will Reeve, the Good Morning America presenter. Harry refused to go into details of ‘his outlook’ on the King’s prognosis, politely but firmly saying ‘That stays between me and him.’ He also divulged that ‘I love my family [and] the fact that I was able to get on a plane and see him and spend any time with him, I’m grateful for that’. But apart from that it was clear that there was not going to be any further revelation. Nevertheless, Harry did express his intention of returning to the UK, although whether to visit his family or to see the outcome of the various court cases that he is participating in he didn’t say.

Reeve, spotting an opportunity, asked whether Charles’s illness was likely to have a ‘reunifying effect’ on the family, to which Harry replied ‘Absolutely, yeah, I’m sure’. He gave no further details as to whether there was likely to be a reconciliation with his brother, or indeed any other members of the Royal Family. 

Just like that the topic was then left in favour of soft-serve questions, in which the Duke was asked what it was like to be ‘Harry the Dad’. To this he replied that that information was ‘classified’, although he did allow that ‘the kids are growing up like all kids do – incredibly fast’ and that ‘I’m just very grateful to be a dad’. This was hardly Frost/Nixon in its perspicacity.

Reeve broached a more interesting and revelatory area when he asked him whether he was thinking about becoming an American citizen. Harry admitted that ‘I have considered it, yeah’, although he stopped short of saying that he was all but a naturalised American anyway these days, only remarking ‘I don’t know how I feel’. Still, life in California seems to be suiting him, as his healthy complexion shows: he said that he was ‘loving every single day’.

He went on to stress that his interest in Invictus came about through his ‘always [having] had a life of service’ and that being with the sportsmen was his ‘annual fix to have fun’. He stated ‘There’s no version of me coming here, watching them and not getting involved myself’.

All very noble and commendable. But there was a sense once the interview finished that Reeve had missed an opportunity to elicit anything other than the obvious – bar the detail that Harry has considered becoming fully American. It was swiftly noted that United States immigration policy states that ‘any applicant who has any titles of heredity or positions of nobility in any foreign state must renounce the title or the position’, meaning that he would assume his new life as plain old Harry Windsor.

Is this likely to happen? Somehow, it is hard to see him abandoning his titles and accompanying privileges altogether. Combined with his (admittedly understandable) recalcitrance on the topic of his father’s health, and the general lack of rigour in the rest of the questions – it made the Tom Bradby and Anderson Cooper interviews from last year look hard-hitting – this has to be put down as a missed opportunity to elicit any interesting opinions or answers from Harry. Which may, of course, have suited him just fine.

The tragedy of Alexei Navalny

I knew and greatly respected Alexei Navalny. The news (as yet not independently confirmed) that he died in prison came today as a physical blow – sickening, but at the same time tragically unsurprising. Navalny’s passion, his intelligence and his refusal to make compromises with the Putin regime made him a colossus in a world of opposition politicians filled with moral pygmies. The Soviet Communist party once claimed to be the ‘intelligence, the honour and the conscience’ of the Russian people. But that title properly belongs to Navalny, whose life and career were living proof that Putin had not yet entirely extinguished Russians’ spirit of freedom and defiance, even in the face of terrifying odds. 

Navalny’s bravery and chutzpah were his trademarks. Even as the window for opposition tolerated by the Kremlin dwindled, Navalny inspired thousands of volunteers across Russia to document corruption, waste and abuse by the ruling United Russia party – an organisation he dubbed ‘the party of Thieves and Crooks’.

As late as the summer of 2020 Navalny was traveling around Siberia promoting a campaign of ‘smart voting’ that united all opposition votes behind specific candidates and gave them a real chance of winning regional council seats. Russia’s Federal Security Service put paid to that idea by poisoning Navalny with a nerve agent in Tomsk in August 2020, an assassination attempt he survived only thanks to quick action on the part of local medics. After an international outcry the Kremlin allowed him to be medevaced to Berlin’s Charité hospital, where then-Chancellor Angela Merkel visited him several times. But Putin’s assassins failed to dent Navalny’s legendary chutzpah. As brilliantly documented in the Oscar-winning documentary Navalny, he and a team of open source intelligence investigators from Bellingcat tracked down not only the identities but even the phone numbers of his would-be killers. Impersonating a senior FSB official, Navalny called them up and, amazingly, persuaded one of them to discuss the exact details of how the poison had been applied to his underpants in a hotel wardrobe. 

But it was exactly that chutzpah that killed him in the end. After recovering from the poisoning Navalny insisted on returning to Russia. His team publicly deny that there were any private debates about the wisdom of this move – but off the record it’s clear that several of them attempted passionately to dissuade him. As is clear from the documentary, Navalny took a calculated risk that the Kremlin wouldn’t dare to imprison him. He was very wrong. 

One is not meant to speak ill of the dead. But for what it’s worth I believe that Navalny was wrong to return. Instead of leading Russia’s anti-Putin movement from abroad, Navalny’s imprisonment and subsequent tortuous incarceration served only to underscore the helplessness of Russia’s opposition and the power of the state.

Many of his supporters argue that by remaining in exile Navalny would have lost ordinary Russians’ respect, and that he would have declined into irrelevance. I disagree. Exiled Belarusian opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, who left Minsk around the time of Navalny’s poisoning, now lives in Vilnius and heads an opposition council recognised by Lithuania as the legitimate government of her country. She gives regular addresses to the European Parliament, meets heads of state and organises practical support for opposition inside and outside Belarus. Navalny’s decision to return into the belly of the beast in January 2021, by contrast, allowed Putin’s regime to decapitate his own movement and rob Russians of their best and brightest hope for the future. 

The last video of Navalny – filmed just two days before his death as he joined a court hearing by video link – is heartbreaking. Navalny looked gaunt with his hands handcuffed behind his back, but his trademark good cheer and charm were intact. He jokingly suggested sending his bank details so that the judge could give him some money ‘from Your Honour’s enormous pay as a regional judge, as I’m running out of cash.’ The joke was a wry comment on the notoriously tiny pay in the Russian judicial system, and both the prosecutor and the young judge laughed good-naturedly along with Navalny as they packed up their papers. Forty-eight hours later, the authorities of the notorious Arctic Wolf penal colony announced that he had been taken ill during a walk and collapsed with an apparent blood clot. We may never know the truth – but Navalny did recently report being attacked by guards, and prison authorities had earlier refused him treatment for a chronic back condition. Whatever really happened, we can be sure that the prison service will bury the facts deep. 

The Russian internet is already filling with conspiracy theories about why the Kremlin chose this moment to assassinate Navalny. But politically, there’s no obvious motive for Putin to order the murder of his imprisoned critic. If anything, Navalny was much more valuable to the Kremlin alive, a grim reminder of the extreme vindictive ruthlessness of the regime and a living warning to others. Now he has become a martyr. 

Not that Navalny, dead or alive, was by the end any kind of threat to the regime. His imprisonment definitively neutralised him as a gadfly and practical campaigner. After his arrest Navalny’s political network inside Russia was utterly razed. His closest allies fled into exile, along with an estimated one million anti-Putin Russians. And though his team continue to release videos on the corruption of Putin’s cronies – including one on Putin’s Palace on the Black Sea which was viewed 130 million times on YouTube – that was no substitute for the energy, the inspiration and the leadership of the man himself. 

Many hope that Navalny’s death will trigger a wave of outrage and anger that will spur Russians to take to the streets in protest and topple the murderous Putin regime. Alas, that is a vain hope – not least because so many of the young, Western-minded and educated Russians who might have spearheaded such protests are in exile or in jail. The greatest tragedy of Navalny’s life and career is that he was killed – if not directly then certainly indirectly – at the darkest, bleakest, most hopeless hour of the Putin regime. Perhaps one day we will live to see a monument raised to Navalny in Moscow. But that day so far remains invisibly distant. 

Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny dies in prison

Just over three years after he was imprisoned in Russia, the Putin critic Alexei Navalny has died. The news was announced by the local administration of Russia’s Federal Penitentiary Service shortly before 2:30 p.m. Moscow time.

In a statement, the prison service said: ‘In correctional colony No. 3 the convict A.A.Navalny fell ill after a walk and almost immediately lost consciousness. All necessary resuscitation measures were carried out, but did not yield positive results. Emergency doctors confirmed the death of the convict. The causes of death are being established.’

It was not stated when Navalny is reported to have died. Navalny’s team say they have yet to receive any official confirmation of his death. His lawyer is currently en route to the Polar Wolf colony where he was being kept, with the team promising to convey any updates they have. According to the Russian state news agency TASS, Putin has been informed of his death. Just yesterday he appeared in a court hearing via video link seemingly in good health. He can be seen laughing and confidently addressing the court.

At the time of his death Navalny was serving out a 15-day period in a punishment cell. According to his press secretary Kira Yarmush this was the 27th time he had been sent into isolation since he was imprisoned – he had, she said, cumulatively spent 308 days of his imprisonment in these punishment cells.

Naturally, speculation is already beginning as to what caused Navalny’s premature death. According to the Russian TV channel RT and the Telegram channel 112, a ‘detached blood clot’ was responsible – with no other details given. He leaves behind a wife and two children.

It is too early to say definitively whether Navalny’s death occurred naturally or with the backing of the Kremlin. It is no secret that Navalny has long had a target on his back for his vocal opposition to Putin and his regime. In 2020, Navalny was poisoned with the nerve agent Novichok by FSB agents sanctioned by the Kremlin, and after three years spent in harsh punishment cells, his health had significantly weakened and medical attention denied to him. In court appearances over the past few years he was gaunt and had lost a significant amount of weight, but made an effort to appear cheerful and joke with the court.

In December, the 47-year-old disappeared in the system for nearly three weeks after his lawyer was told he was no longer at the penal colony in Vladimir where he was previously being held. Navalny resurfaced on Boxing Day in the notoriously brutal Polar Wolf colony in the Arctic Circle. Appearing in person for the first time in January since being transferred, he was able to give a little detail about his situation, saying he was ‘fine’ and being kept in conditions ‘much better than in Vladimir’.

For a long time, Putin was said to fear Navalny so much he refused to use his name when he spoke about him. Many of Navalny’s supporters also believed he had a level of protection due to his fame for speaking out against the Russian president. Sadly that appears to no longer be true.

After Navalny’s imprisonment in 2021, and subsequent extensions of his sentence, hundreds of Russians took to the streets in protest. Following the repression introduced by the Kremlin since the invasion of Ukraine, times are now different. But nevertheless, all eyes will be on Russia to see whether ordinary people believe the Kremlin’s story of how Navalny died – and how they react to the news.

Will the Ukrainian army retreat from Avdiivka?

The battle for Avdiivka in Donetsk Oblast is a bloodbath. The city, which is also called the ‘gateway to Donetsk’, is semi-surrounded. Some 50,000 Russian troops are trying to advance from three sides while they keep the main supply route into the city under artillery fire. At least 15 per cent of Avdiivka has been captured – and battles are being fought in urban areas. ‘We are forced to fight at 360 degrees against more and more brigades that the enemy is bringing in,’ said Andriy Biletskyi, commander of the 3rd Assault Brigade, which was deployed to rescue Avdiivka last week.

Russia has sufficient manpower and artillery superiority, so its army is less keen on sending wave after wave of poorly trained troops into battle. Instead, it is deploying assault groups supported by tanks, armoured vehicles and aviation. Russian units are trying to seize the Industrial Prospekt road – the Ukrainian army’s vital logistical artery – to split the city in two. This would force Kyiv to rely on field roads to get supplies to both the northern and southern areas of the city. The morale among Ukrainian troops is deteriorating as they become exhausted and frustrated over a lack of weapons. It appears that Russia’s decade-long campaign to capture the city will culminate in weeks, if not days.

But rather than retreating, Oleksandr Syrsky, the new head of the Ukrainian army, has sent assault forces to Avdiivka in an attempt to push the Russians back to positions they held at least two weeks ago. History is repeating itself: Syrsky earned the nickname ‘butcher’ after he led Ukrainian soldiers to death in Bakhmut last year. Back then, both he and Volodymyr Zelensky argued that holding the city for more than ten months, even when Ukraine’s allies recommended retreating, was a strategic move. But, they said, it allowed them to destroy the most combat-capable units of the Russian forces, thereby bolstering Ukraine’s position for future battles. Eventually, the city was captured by Kremlin-backed Wagner Group mercenaries, at least 20,000 of whom died in the process. The number of Ukrainian deaths is unknown.

Now Syrsky is grappling with a familiar dilemma: holding Avdiivka halts Russian advances, but prolonging the battle for the devastated city may no longer justify the sacrifice of Ukrainian fighters. The fighting will continue until Zelensky and Syrsky believe that they are inflicting more damage on the enemy than on their own soldiers. There is also a political angle to it: another Russian victory could fuel US aid cuts and bolster Donald Trump’s idea that, if he were elected as president in November, he would urge Ukraine to agree to negotiations with Russia.

Soldiers I spoke to say while they are under orders to fight, they will do their best – but they doubt that clashing head-on with Russia is the best available option. ‘Cut off the advancing enemy forces from the flank!’ said Bohdan Krotevych, a major in Ukraine’s National Guard. ‘All assault and mechanised units will better carry out offensive actions in a direction where the enemy is not expecting it, than they will suffer under constant fire, not being able to do anything at all, except just to delay time.’ Others believe that decisions to remain encircled should be made by the generals on the ground, not from offices in Kyiv. Ukrainian fighters defending Avdiivka can only hope that when the order to retreat comes, it won’t come too late.

Two bets for Ascot and Haydock

The run-up to the Cheltenham Festival is a quiet time for many punters with some of the best horses in the land effectively wrapped-up in cotton wool so as not to sustain an injury that would keep them out of their big-race targets next month. However, there is plenty of competitive racing on offer at Ascot, Haydock and Wincanton tomorrow.

The Thoroughbred Industry Employee Awards Handicap Hurdle (Ascot, 2.25 p.m.) has certainly attracted a decent field of 16 runners, all hoping to land a pot of more than £26,000 for the winner. My preference is for BAD from the in-form Ben Pauling yard. This is a horse that, 11 months ago, was backed into odds of just 5-1 for the fiercely-competitive Boodles Juvenile Handicap Hurdle at the Festival. Those bets, including some significant punts, stayed in the bookmakers’ coffers when Bad’s performance matched his name and he finished a disappointing 13th of the 21 runners.

His four runs since then have been more promising but without requiring a visit to the winner’s enclosure. Two of his last three runs have been in competitive Ascot handicaps, finishing third on both occasions. I am hoping tomorrow’s step up in trip, plus a lovely racing weight of just 10 stones 4 lbs, sees this grey gelding, who is still only five years old, land this decent prize. Back him 1 point each way at 7-1 with SkyBet, paying six places.

There are plenty of dangers, including Monviel who is highly-rated by his trainer Harry Derham. This horse, however, was a distant last of four on his most recent run at Ascot in November when he went off favourite but suffered from an irregular heartbeat and a lost his left-fore shoe. He is clearly much better than that but he is short enough odds at around 6-1  for a horse that needs to bounce back from such a poor run.

The Virgin Bet Grand National Trial Handicap Chase (Haydock, 3.15 p.m.) is poorly named given that none of the 11 runners has much chance of winning the big Aintree spectacle. Indeed, only five of the runners have an entry in the April 13 contest and the shortest price on any of these horses for the Randox Grand National is 66-1.

I have already put up one horse for the Haydock race tomorrow – Credo each way four places at 14-1 and he is now generally half that price or less. However, he now faces a better level of opposition than I was expecting, notably form the likes of Iron Bridge, Famous Bridge and, in particular, MY SILVER LINING.

In a recent interview, trainer Emma Lavelle said that her eight-year-old was being lined up for the Sky Sports Racing Sky 415 Eider Handicap Chase on February 24. However, her grey mare has been diverted from her original target at Newcastle in order to run at Haydock tomorrow.

My Silver Lining, a fine jumper, has been raised only 5 lbs in the ratings for her win in the Wigley Group Classic Handicap Chase at Warwick when she gave her jockey James Best “the best day of my career”, and had Credo more than 13 lengths back in third.

With Cornish-born Best back in the saddle tomorrow, I want to back the improving My Silver Lining too. The suggestion is 1 point each way at 6-1 with bet365, SkyBet, William Hill or BetVictor, all paying four places.

Pending:

1 point each way Bad at 7-1 in the Thoroughbred Industry Employee Awards Handicap Hurdle, paying 1/5^th odds, 6 places.

1 point each way Credo at 14-1 in the Grand National Trial, paying 1/4 odds, 4 places.

1 point each way My Silver Lining at 6-1 in the Grand National Trial, paying 1/5^th odds, 4 places.

1 point each way Stumptown at 12-1 NRNB for the Ultima Handicap Chase, paying 1/5^th odds, 5 places.

1 point each way Jetara at 14-1 NRNB for Close Brothers Mares’ Hurdle, paying 1/5^th odds, 3 places.

1 point each way Giovinco at 20-1 for the Brown Advisory Novices’ Chase, paying 1/5^th odds, 3 places.

1 point each way Djelo at 20-1 NRNB for the Turners Novices’ Chase, paying 1/5^th odds, 3 places.

1 point each way Home By The Lee at 28-1 for the Paddy Power Stayers’ Hurdle, paying 1/5^th odds, 3 places.

1 point each way Mahler Mission at 20-1 for the Randox Grand National, paying 1/5^th odds, 5 places.

1 point each way Vanillier at 16-1 for the Randox Grand National, paying 1/5^th odds, 5 places.

1 point each way Panda Boy at 40-1 for the Randox Grand National, paying 1/5^th odds, 5 places.

Settled bets from last weekend:

1 point each way Brentford Hope at 14-1 for the Betfair Hurdle, paying ¼ odds, 4 places. Non Runner. – 2 points.

1 point each way Brentford Hope a 14-1 for the Betfair Hurdle, paying 1/5 odds, seven places. Non Runner. Stake returned.

1 point each way Altobelli at 8-1 for the Betfair Hurdle, paying 1/5 odds, seven places. Unplaced. – 2 points.

2023-4 jump seasons to date: + 3.21 points.

2023 flat season: – 48.22 points on all tips.

2022-3 jumps season: + 54.3 points on all tips.

My gambling record for the past eight years: I have made a profit in 14 of the past 16 seasons to recommended bets. To a 1 point level stake over this period, the overall profit of has been 475 points. All bets are either 1 point each way or 2 points win (a “point” is your chosen regular stake).

Peter Bone’s partner vows to stand again

She may have lost the Wellingborough by-election by more than 6,000 votes but Tory candidate Helen Harrison is determined to show there’s no dampening her quest to become an MP. Exiting the vote count after the by-election results were announced, Harrison declared she would ‘absolutely’ run again and stand at the general election. 

Pressed by journalists on why she thought she didn’t win this time, Harrison acknowledged that ‘I think that Reform is a bit of a threat to us Conservatives’ but deflected the question when asked if she thought Richard Tice’s party was the reason she lost, saying ‘there are probably lots of different issues as to why I lost’. Harrison then refused to say whether it was Rishi Sunak’s fault that she lost. Gotta keep CCHQ on side eh?

Despite her efforts, Mr S wonders whether Harrison will enjoy Tory high command’s backing next time around. After all, it was her partner, Peter Bone, who caused this by-election, having been ousted from the Commons after an investigation into allegations of bullying and sexual misconduct. Quite difficult to run on a change ticket if that’s your predecessor…

At the next general election the boundaries of the Wellingborough constituency will change slightly to create the new constituency of Wellingborough and Rushden. Should Harrison choose to stand in the area then, it won’t entirely be the same group of voters that she’ll be trying to win over. And if not Wellingborough, she is an approved candidate so could try her luck elsewhere across the country.

If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again – eh Helen?

Shoppers are falling out of love with online shopping

Maybe the Office for National Statistics should stop seasonally adjusting its data. That is the lesson from today’s retail sales figures, which show a strong rebound in sales volumes of 3.4 per cent in January. All areas of spending were up except clothing, which was down by 1.4 per cent.

The overall figures might sound promising, but all they really do is to cancel out December’s fall of 3.3 per cent. Look at the figures for the past three months and sales are pretty flat, falling by 0.2 per cent in that time. The high street is in a stupor, just like the economy as a whole.

Why did retail appear to fall into a deep hole in December? The answer lies in the seasonal adjustment. December is a month when we are expected to spend with abandon as we buy Christmas presents and stock up on food for the festive season. Seasonal adjustment, therefore, will act to revise downwards what we actually spent in December, and then revise upwards what we actually spent in January, so as to smooth out the figures.

But what if we don’t go on quite such a spending spree in December? What if we buy a few more of our Christmas presents in November, taking advantage of Black Friday deals, and left a little more of our personal shopping to January? Then seasonal adjustment will give us what we have had this year: an apparent dip in sales in December followed by a rebound in January.

It is hard not to conclude that Christmas simply is no longer quite as important to the British public as the statisticians seem to think it is – in which case they need to start thinking about revising their method of seasonal adjustment. Or why not just give us the raw, unadjusted figures and leave us to work out what is going on?

One thing which does come out of this month’s figures, however, is a remarkable fall in the amount of money spent on online retail. Online clothing sales were down 15 per cent and online sales of household goods down 13 per cent. We seem to be losing our taste for shopping online and going back to shopping on the high street instead. Why? These figures might be looked at in conjunction with figures last month from the British Retail Consortium (BRC) which showed that use of cash had rebounded for the first time in a decade, up from 15 per cent of all sales in 2021 to 19 per cent in 2022. As the BRC suggests, this may well have something to do with people wanting to budget more carefully. It is easier to lose track of what you are spending when you are buying stuff with a card than it is when you have to break into cash.

It seems as if some shoppers may be keeping a closer eye on their spending by rebelling against online retail as well as against contactless cards. Either way, the pandemic trend towards more online retail appears to be in reverse.  

The Tories should be worried about Reform

And with one bound he was free. In fact let’s make that two. A pair of whopping by-election wins in seats the Tories held at the last general election with five-figure majorities have brought to a close a torrid fortnight for Labour leader Keir Starmer.

His U-turn on green policy can now safely gather dust, or perhaps moss, in the public mind. The Rochdale anti-Semitism row is more serious. But Starmer reached the right position in the end and unless the Conservatives can exploit it by performing strongly in the Rochdale by-election at the end of the month (spoiler alert: they won’t) it will come to be seen as a containable difficulty.

Worse still for Rishi Sunak’s Tories was the buoyant performance of the Reform party – double figure vote shares in both Wellingborough and Kingswood. That’s twice as big a percentage as they have ever scored before in a parliamentary by-election. And it wasn’t Labour supporters that they were converting.

A cloud on the Conservative horizon that was once no bigger than the proverbial man’s hand coming up from the sea is looming very much larger. Reform is now firmly in a political sweet spot – for them, success is breeding success and their brand awareness is soaring just as deeply disenchanted former Tory voters are looking around for a new political outlet. And all this with the electoral ace that is Nigel Farage still up its sleeve.

The brutal truth is that Sunak and his party now do not own a single significant political issue. In the eyes of many traditionally Tory-leaning voters, they don’t even appear preferable to Labour on anything important. They have failed on all the traditional vote-winning concerns: on the economy and taxation, the state of the NHS, the criminal justice system.

Most of all of course they have failed, wilfully, on immigration of both the legal and illegal varieties. And this is not just down to Sunak, but down to his predecessors too. The socially and culturally conservative electorate – including many former Labour voters – demanded much lower immigration from them and that they stop the boats. Instead they arranged for much higher immigration and have offered half a decade’s worth of ‘dog ate my homework’ excuses for failing to deport those who have gate-crashed into Britain.

Almost nobody expects Sunak to remedy this. In fact he was installed by liberal-leaning Conservative MPs precisely to ensure a ‘business as usual’ approach to government and then made that explicit via a cabinet reshuffle that brought back David Cameron and dispensed with Suella Braverman.

As the slow learners of the Tory establishment must now realise, the much-derided Mrs Braverman was the only senior Tory to have built up sufficient credibility on desiring immigration control to combat the appeal of Reform and Farage. The fact that the rather faster learning Robert Jenrick chose to follow her out of the government rather than remain in Sunak’s tent was very telling.

Will there be a substantial new attempt by the Tory right to oust Sunak and find a new prime minister to give the party a fighting chance at the general election? Probably not. Too much of the electorate now appreciates that what it wants is not on offer from this cohort of Conservative MPs. It is the MPs, and especially the 106-strong ‘One Nation’ block of establishment centrists, who need to be changed, not merely the leader.

That is beyond the scope of any plotters inside the party. But as we shall see soon enough, it is most certainly not beyond the scope of the great British public at a general election.

After last night Sunak is heading for electoral wipeout

And so Keir Starmer’s bad week comes to an end, just like that. Labour has won two by-elections in a single night in seats that had Tory majorities of over 10,000 after the 2019 general election. The heat now returns to Rishi Sunak, as inevitably it was always going to.

To be fair, no one expected the results of these by-elections to be any different. For that we should credit No. 10 with decent expectation management, if nothing else. In fact, let’s not credit No. 10 with anything else here: most of the way these by-elections were run looked shambolic from beginning to end. There are many things to pick on, yet in a week where Labour has been lambasted for its poor candidate choice in the upcoming Rochdale by-election (fairly, it must be added here), the Tories decided that picking the girlfriend of the MP who had to resign from one of these seats after a scandal was a good idea.

The Kingswood by-election loss will be a painful one for the Conservative party for several reasons. The first is that it didn’t really need to happen. It was the result of hubris in the wake of the Uxbridge by-election victory last July, one that in retrospect the Tories should have chalked up to luck and good local campaigning and left it at that. Instead, they decided the anti-Ulez messaging could be rolled out nationwide. In the ensuing revolt against anything Net Zero related, Chris Skidmore resigned and caused this by-election to occur. It was an unforced error by Sunak.

But taken in isolation, at least the party can console itself that the loss in Kingswood wasn’t as bad as might have been expected. They can look at Labour’s 10 per cent majority and perhaps, in their most optimistic mood, feel like that’s winnable at the next election. The swing against the Tories here, combined with where Kingswood would have sat in the Labour target list, implies only a thin Labour majority, one No. 10 might feel could be turned into a hung parliament with a great election campaign.

However, it’s much harder for the Tories to find any consolation in the Wellingborough by-election result. The swing here was a massive 28.5 per cent, with Labour securing 46 per cent of the vote. This should be a safe Tory seat and indeed, it has been one since 2010. It was only a Labour constituency following the 1997 and 2001 general elections at the very height of New Labour’s reign, and even then, it was only held with thin majorities both times (they won it in 1997 with a tiny majority of 187 votes). The toppling of Wellingborough, with an eye-watering majority of 6,436 on a 38 per cent turnout, really does feel like the end of an electoral era for the Tories and the passing of the torch to new New Labour.

This is because Wellingborough implies something much worse for the Conservative party than Kingswood. It seems to suggest that not only are the national polls and seat predictions putting the Tories in wipe-out territory after the next general election, possibly down to below 100 seats, largely correct, they may even be understating the size of loss the governing party is facing. If this by-election result was replicated nationally, Labour would be looking at 450+ seats and a majority of over 200.

But that won’t happen, right? It couldn’t happen, surely. Spokespeople from both parties will be massively playing the results down today. Labour will because they don’t want complacency to set in, either amongst their supporters or the voting public at large. Having lost four general elections in a row, Starmer and those around him know that the biggest danger they face right now is the assumption that they are going to win a massive majority, destroying the possibility of that result occurring. Meanwhile, the Tories need to keep hope alive somehow in the face of results which imply not only a general election loss, but a huge one. We’ll hear a lot about turnout and the supposedly special circumstances at play in both places; how by-elections are just ‘protest votes’ and everyone will come back to the Tory fold come the real event.

Yet any sober analysis must conclude that Downing Street’s current 80:20 strategy – spending most of their campaigning time and money on the 80 most vulnerable seats the Tories hold currently, while attacking 20 Labour held constituencies – looks remarkably naïve this morning. Those 80 marginal seats look long gone; as for gaining double digit numbers of seats off the Labour party, that feels like a drunken fantasy.

Perhaps the one positive thing Sunak and those around him can take from this double loss is that they need to adjust their election strategy. Forget about the red wall or taking Labour seats, they need to be fighting battles way further down the target list, in places that have 10,000, 15,000, perhaps even 20,000 Tory majorities right now. Places like Kingswood and Wellingborough were like prior to yesterday, in other words.

The BBC’s betrayal of Steve Wright

Radio is my favourite medium. Always has been. It doesn’t shout ‘Look at me! Look at me!’ in the way newspapers and screens do. Radio informs and entertains as you drive a car, paint a ceiling or perform open-heart surgery. And there was no finer, more creative and more enduring radio entertainer than Steve Wright, who died on Monday.

His afternoon show made Radio 1 in the 1980s. When Wright moved to Radio 2 in the late 1990s, it was a stroke of genius by the station’s then controller Jim Moir, reviving Steve’s – and Radio 2’s – anarchic glory. There, The Big Show remained a hugely popular and always evolving stalwart of the schedule.

That was until the current controller, Helen Thomas, made one of the Corporation’s most egregious errors of recent years: she axed Steve Wright. It wasn’t the first time she’d applied her ‘if it ain’t broke, break it’ approach to Radio 2. She’d already overseen the departures of Ken Bruce and Simon Mayo and watched them take their listeners with them. Though there was something particularly cruel about axing Steve Wright. Reacting to his death, she issued a disingenuous and onion-eyed tribute in which she described the man who’s job she’d scrapped as ‘second to none’. 

It was an odd comment. She had clearly regarded him as second to Scott Mills, otherwise why hand Steve’s slot to such a bland replacement?

Countless friends and fans have already paid tribute to his unique talent and dedication to his craft. Much has also been written about how his show was his life and about the care he took to do the best possible work for his listeners. My old friend Danny Baker, another brilliant broadcaster for whom the BBC ruthlessly sharpened its scythe, put it perfectly:

Ninety-five per cent of the people on the radio are just that – on the radio. To work the radio, to master and elevate radio, play with and extend the possibilities of radio, swoop and soar with the medium. That’s the trick. Steve Wright knew that. Steve Wright did that.

Which is why the whole country listened to his show. No programme on British radio was more unifying, welcoming or broader in its appeal. If you wanted to find the most authentic and diverse cross-section of the UK population, you’d find them listening to Steve Wright in The Afternoon. So why would Radio 2 want to wreck that? The excuse trotted out was that they were trying to attract a younger audience. That audience, however, didn’t seem particularly interested in being attracted, as is evident from the huge drop in listeners.

Does anyone honestly think that Vernon Kay was an improvement on Ken Bruce? Is Sara Cox as good as Simon Mayo? I think we all know the answer. Bruce and Mayo are now on commercial radio but their new shows are pale imitations of their old ones. Commercial radio is the most uniform and tightly controlled sector of entertainment. Woe betide any presenters who chooses not to play exactly what they’re told to play. Paul Gambaccini once said of commercial radio: ‘They want your name but they don’t want you’. I think that’s about right.

Steve Wright was smart enough to know this, which is why he stuck with the BBC, even when he was demoted from six days a week to one. He kept faith in the Corporation because, with fewer commercial imperatives, it can still employ inventive, freewheeling broadcasters if they wanted to. Except they don’t. Certainly not on Radio 2. There was always the sense that Steve thought he might be called upon once again to enliven our afternoons. That never happened. One close friend described the consequences of that decision: Steve died alone, ‘of a broken heart’.

One wonders what Tim Davie, the director general of the BBC, will make of all this. He’s a smart operator and, after a career in marketing and advertising, I’m sure he’ll be dismayed by the damage Helen Thomas has done to Radio 2. He once interviewed me for a job and although I don’t know him all that well, I reckon he won’t have been impressed with the unnecessary loss of successful presenters, the type whom listeners loved and paid for. Perhaps he’ll finally stick up for the listeners – those of us who loved Steve – given that they pay his wages too.

Labour triumphs in by-election brace

Labour has won both the Kingswood and Wellingborough by-elections in another night every bit as bad as expected for Rishi Sunak. The Tories saw majorities of more than 11,000 and 18,000 respectively easily overturned. It means the Conservatives have now lost ten by-elections in a single parliament, a worse run than any government since the 1960s. Labour’s double triumph mean it has taken five seats off the Tories since 2019.

Kingswood declared first. Labour’s Damien Egan won with a majority of 2,500 in a place where the Tories won by more than 11,000 in 2019. He polled 11,176 votes compared to 8,675 votes for the Conservatives, on a swing of 16 per cent – some way above the 11-point swing the party needed to win. ‘Fourteen years of Conservative government have sucked the hope out of our country,’ Egan declared in his victory speech.

A poor Tory result in Kingswood was followed by an abysmal one in Wellingborough. Labour’s Gen Kitchen (who cut her Suffolk honeymoon to join the campaign trail) won 13,844 votes compared to just 7,408 for Helen Harrison and the Conservatives. CCHQ expectation management was that the Tories would lose but hoped the swing would be less bad than Tamworth and Selby. Yet Wellingborough dwarfed both of them, with a 28 per cent swing being the second biggest such from the Conservative to Labour since the Second World War.

It shows that many 2019-Tories are directly switching to Starmer and his party and will temper Labour fears after a difficult week for the party on the abandoned £28 billion pledge and Rochdale rows. It is a reminder that, for all their internal difficulties, Labour are still on course to win a big majority at the next election with an opinion poll lead larger than almost any previous Opposition has seen in an election year. Sir Keir Starmer was certainly quick to credit Tory switchers, telling broadcasters that ‘The Tories have failed. Rishi’s recession proves that. That’s why we’ve seen so many former Conservative voters switching directly to this changed Labour party.’

In both seats, the size of Labour’s increase was roughly half the size of the Conservative decrease. This suggests, in the words of psephologist Sir John Curtice, ‘more about the way in which the Conservatives are in deep trouble, rather than necessarily an indication of the extent to which the electorate have necessarily bought into Labour as the preferred alternative.’ It is unlikely to offer much hope to Tory high command whose line is that ‘both of these seats have been Labour recently.’ The Peter Bone scandal in Wellingborough is understood to have been a drag on the ticket too.

Reform meanwhile secured their best results in by-elections thus far. In Wellingborough, they took 13 per cent of the vote and in Kingswood 10 per cent. It is, at last, evidence that the Reform surge in recent months is real, with the party finally matching the double digits that they have been polling since November. Needless to say, Reform threw considerable resources at both campaigns: Ukip finished second in Wellingborough in 2015, with almost 20 per cent of the vote. Few seats are unlikely to be more fertile territory for Richard Tice’s party.

As for the Conservatives, where do they go from here? There was a deliberate choice by CCHQ to run a low-key campaign, mindful of the likelihood of defeat. Many MPs and members were struck by how few resources were dedicated to both contests, as compared to by-election campaigns of the recent past. But the Wellingborough will result disappoint even the most ardent Sunakites. For them, it will likely be a question of claiming these results were ‘priced in’ and hoping that Jeremy Hunt can deliver in his Budget in three weeks’ time.

Why is John Lewis selling sex toys?

Well, for the Waitrose classes, it seems you can get all the accessories for middle class eroticism at John Lewis. The store has started selling sex merchandise and the good news is that there’s been a restock this week for Valentine’s Day, which used to be sacred to roses, Charbonnel et Walker chocolates and scent – though excitingly, I was sent an offer of 30 per cent off a subscription to the Economist, billed as the perfect Valentine’s gift (funny people at that magazine).

Anyway, at the John Lewis website, ready to be put in your basket with the 200-thread sheets and the Joseph Joseph nest sets of plastic kitchen containers, there’s a Divine Aqua Glow lubricant for £30 and a Pure Delight Orgasmic balm for £25 and a range of expensive sounding sex toys – I mean, £165 for a G-spot massager? You can get a couple of tickets to Paris for less.

I’m afraid what it all goes to demonstrate is not just that the taboos have been lifted on stuff that you’d once have to go to dodgy dives in Soho to pick up, but the grimly un-erotic quality of the sex merchandise industry. It happened long before Fifty Shades of Grey was on sale in supermarkets (I saw several instalments of that terrible book in the Arklow branch of Supervalu) and on mainstream television (a friend of mine slept all the way through it at the cinema). And before the success of the brand had been translated into a range of products from throws (as in rugs) to pyjamas to horrid masks to bad wine.

Kelly Wright, the retailer’s spokeswoman, said, inevitably, that sexual wellness – the sanitised description – ‘is a much more mainstream market. The outdated stigma has been broken, and it’s very much about prioritising wellness and pleasure’. Actually, the John Lewis brand of eroticism demonstrates that it is simply not possible to combine the notionally subversive, and would-be pervy with the ethos of a ‘never knowingly undersold’ retail outlet. Whatever may have been the transgressive qualities of masks, they will not easily survive being billed as Everyday Essentials. But really, the commodification of eroticism… it’s a bit grim in general. It looks either redundant, tacky or mildly ridiculous or uncomfortable. Sometimes all the above. I write as an outside observer, but I’d say, all the kit and paraphernalia doesn’t actually translate into a rush of pheromones; what it suggests is tired libido.

And I’m not sure that the democratisation of the products is preferable to Coco de Mer’s reassuringly expensive sex toys in John Lewis. It seems Ann Summers is entering a partnership with Deliveroo: can you think of anything more grim than a Domino’s pizza with a side order of that really hideous underwear?  It’s five years since Sainsbury’s announced that it would begin stocking a range of budget sex toys and Tesco entering the market for ‘adult devices’, including lubricant and vibrators. Adult? I may be way out here but my guess is that the more punters are having to buy stuff to make sex satisfactory, the less sex is actually taking place. I feel sorry for young men, if they feel they have to navigate a whole retail product category as well as the intimidating business of making overtures to girls – and that at a time when, not joking, first years at universities have to sit through a class on consent before they start lectures. No wonder lots of them back away from the minefield.

Certainly there’s way less procreation going on. This week we found that one in three teenagers doesn’t want to have children. Fear of childbirth, fear of environmental catastrophe plus, I surmise, the atomising effects of online pornography. All this translates into a dystopian scenario of women turning into what Julie Burchill once called ‘sterile little sex dolls’ who may be able to satisfy their solitary sexual needs courtesy of the merch, but who are less and less up for the natural purpose of at least heterosexual sex, viz, children. The more we spend on sex toys – and the global market is worth billions – the worse the outcome of all that sexual wellness for society in terms of actual babies.

Obviously, this is a view from the outside, but my advice is, pass on the Pure Delight Orgasmic Balm. For £25 you can get a decent bottle of Montrachet. I bet that would work better.

Historian’s notebook: What the Dean of Westminster would save from a burning Abbey

Last Wednesday morning, the Cellarium Café of Westminster Abbey was filled with excitable French visitors. It was the press preview of Notre-Dame de Paris, The Augmented Exhibition. ‘What do you make of our croissants?’ I ask the sharp suited French curator. ‘Comme ci, comme ça’ he chuckles, taking another bite.

While Notre Dame undergoes restoration following the 2019 fire, its stewards have toured the world via an immersive digital exhibition, now doing a stint in the Chapter House of Westminster Abbey. With an iPad-like device in hand, visitors become une mouche sur le mur of major events in the cathedral’s story: the 12th century building site, Napoleon’s coronation, Viollet-le-Duc’s creation of the iconic 19th century spire.

Visitor engagement differs from country to country, the PRs tells me. In the US, average visitor time was 60 minutes. In Germany, it was 96 minutes. In China, they adored the jewel-like rose windows. I wonder what London stats will skew towards. The medieval tavern, perhaps? Of course, the Notre-Dame fire has forced the Westminster Abbey team to review their own evacuation procedures. I press the Dean of Westminster, Dr David Hoyle, about which treasure he would save, if – God forbid – the abbey was in flames. ‘The Coronation Chair’, he answers, ‘it’s closest to the door’.

Today, the options for conspicuous consumption are endless. The home cinema. The Model Y Tesla. The spa complex. For our Georgian ancestors, it was gauged brickwork. It’s perfectly precise, with immaculate joints and clean lines, was made from fine, soft bricks called ‘red rubbers’. Just a small section – to accent a window or garden wall – was guaranteed to impress.

Earlier this month, I watched a section of gauged brickwork being completed by the expert hand of Charles Reily, a man with 35 years of experience. It wasn’t his usual setting. We were at Olympia, London, at the Listed Property Show, a gathering of heritage experts showcasing their work and offering free advice. Displays pose pressing questions such as ‘Do you find insects boring or do you find boring insects?’ Talks on offer include ‘Control of Dampness’ and ‘Insulating Historic Roofs’.

Though the trades are varied, and approaches differ, there is a common enemy here: Portland cement. Since the mid-19th century, and particularly after the world wars, Portland cement became the go-to miracle material, quick to prepare and cheap. But unlike traditional lime-based mortar, it’s hard and impervious, forcing water through masonry rather than joints. The result is spalling: the stone or brickwork crumbles away.

By the 1990s, the terrible damage to centuries-old churches, cathedrals, and country houses became clear, and a reversion to traditional lime-based techniques gained momentum. It was this ‘lime revival’ which I chatted about at the Rose of Jerichostand, a company who supply traditional paints and mortar. Their name reflects the mission. The Rose of Jericho is a resurrection plant, which springs back to life after years of neglect. What’s more, some of the earliest surviving lime mortars were found in the ancient city of Jericho.

From their colour chart, I learn that ‘Apple Green’ was first recorded in English in 1648, ‘Lilac’ in 1775, and ‘Pistachio’ in 1789. Today, neutral colours are most popular and numerous: ‘Linen’, ‘Parchment’, ‘Fresco’ – and certainly no ‘Portland cement’ to be seen.

‘It’s basically a massive vape,’ the curator, Rupert, explains. I’m on a research trip, and we’re gazing into a fireplace in the Great Hall of Dyrham Park, a large country house near Bath. There is no heat, nor flame. It’s an illusion, created using a combination of orange light and water vapour creates. ‘You’d be amazed how many visitors still gather here and warm their hands’, Rupert adds, chuckling. Dyrham was built between 1692 and 1704 for William Blathwayt, King William III’s Secretary of State. Today, it’s a gem in the National Trust portfolio, having one of the best Baroque interiors in the country. Each room is sumptuous, with oak wainscoting, walnut panelling, leather-hung walls with gilt detailing.

Fake fires aren’t the only trick of the eye here. I sit to play a harpsichord, stumbling through a Bach Prelude in B flat. As the plucked broken chords echo brightly around the hall, I notice the makers marking: ‘Colin Booth MMXIII’. How remarkable that – despite the 1680s design – this instrument was built a decade ago, by an expert in Wells. Nearby is more intrigue: a long corridor with a caged bird, a dog, a broom leaning on the wall, and a love letter dropped on the stairs. On closer inspection, this is also an illusion. It is a magnificent two-dimensional trompe l’oeil painting from 1662. The word Baroque derived from the Portuguese barroco, or ‘oddly shaped pearl’. Exploring the rooms at Dyrham, with their curious surprises, it’s not hard to see why.

Sadiq Khan’s dreadful new Overground line names

By and large the London transport system is pretty unremarkable in terms of names. Unlike the Paris metro on which stops are sometimes named after battles (like Sébastopol) or individuals (Franklin D Roosevelt) a line or a stop in the London network is normally noncommittal.

The Northern line, self-explanatory; the Metropolitan for the oldest line. The nearest anyone got to politicising the network was Waterloo station and the naming of the Jubilee line after the late Queen’s Silver Jubilee, and the Elizabeth line also after her. 

That was, until now. TfL has named six of its hitherto anonymous overground lines – the twin objectives being to help passengers get round the system and ‘showcasing London’s rich diversity.’ 

So, what do we get? We’ve got the Lioness’s line, running through Wembley, to celebrate the women’s team winning the Euro Women’s final in 2022, an event that few can now remember but is somehow good enough to immortalise with a railway line. There were other events at Wembley… the 1948 Olympics and the 1966 England world cup match, say. But they didn’t make it.

Then there’s Weaver line from Liverpool Street to Walthamstow to celebrate everyone from the Huguenot silkworkers to Jewish clothworkers ‘fleeing anti-semitism in Eastern Europe’ to Bangladeshi textile manufacturers. 

There’s something called the Liberty line to celebrate the status of Havering as a royal Liberty – think Passport to Pimlico and you’ll get an idea of the status of the place under Edward IV, with its own tax system and magistrates etc. It also celebrates the ‘independent spirit of the Havering community’, which somehow conjures up GK Chesterton’s Napoleon of Notting Hill.

The Mildmay line commemorates the hospital of that name, originally founded by an Anglican clergyman and his wife in the 1860s for the sick of the area, but more importantly in this context, it is better known as a hospital for people with HIV Aids which Princess Di visited no fewer than 17 times. So that ticks two boxes – it ‘cherishes the role of the NHS’ and references ‘a valued and respected place for London’s LGBTQ+ community.’

Still more diversity comes with the Windrush line – Islington to Crystal Palace – which runs through areas with ties to Caribbean communities, like Dalston. Often met with prejudice, ‘these communities played an important part in our vibrant, multicultural city that we celebrate today’ and contributed, we’re told, to the musical tradition of hip hop.

But the most contentious is possibly the Suffragette line, which frankly could have been situated everywhere, given that nowhere was safe from the WSPU militants in their heyday. But this celebrates the East London Federation of Suffragettes, including the long lived Annie Huggett, who lived in Barking. Trouble is, the movement’s bombing campaign included setting up explosives on or near trains, with one bomb nearly killing the driver of a passing locomotive. Today, we’re told, ‘women continue to campaign for equal rights’, so there’s another box ticked.

This exercise, which can’t have been cost free – there was an extensive consultation with stakeholders, staff, passengers and local communities – comes at a time when TfL has a black hole in its accounts, yet it serves to co-opt even the rail network into the equality and inclusion agenda. It’s a way for the Mayor to demonstrate his credentials in this important area ahead of the May election and it serves to raise the humdrum business of getting around London into an exercise in celebrating its vibrant diversity. It’s something you can’t get away from, these days. 

Obviously selecting these names excluded other possibilities – engineering feats, military victories, arts, philanthropy – but what we’ve ended up with is a snapshot of the sensibilities of the political class in 2024. Me, if I’m going to be politically conditioned when I get on a train, I’d rather it were the Paris way, with the Metro immortalising writers (Dumas, Anatole France), artists (Pablo Picasso), statesmen (Clemenceau, Charles de Gaulle) and wars (Crimée). Lionesses? Doesn’t do it for me. Sorry.

Britain’s economic pain started long before the recession

The Tories have had a tax problem for quite some time. But news of a recession at the end of last year has made matters much worse. 

It has been an uncomfortable position, for Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt, to defend the Conservative party taking the tax burden to a post-war high. The political defence has been that it was necessary to prove to markets that the UK took the state of its finances seriously, and that cutting tax was only an option when inflation meaningfully slowed down.

Reasonable points – but there’s a catch. Now, in the light of a recession, Hunt is insisting the remedy is tax cuts: ‘I do believe’ he told Sky News, ‘that if you look around the world, that the economies like the United States and Canada which have lighter taxes, particularly lighter taxes on business, tend to grow faster.’ The follow-up question, however, is always going to be: who fostered the UK’s high-tax culture in the first place?

That question has many answers, including every prime minister going back for several decades. But that is not going to be a satisfactory answer for those who are dealing with the consequences of a stagnant (and briefly contracting) economy. As I note on Coffee House this morning, it was always a curious decision for the government to pledge to ‘halve inflation’ at the same time it was going to ‘grow the economy’. The method for achieving the former – higher interest rates, set by the Bank of England – are designed to stop an economic boom, not to start one. 

Yet promises were made – and they weren’t kept. The UK’s recession is very likely to be short and shallow – and anyone who wants a job is still in a great position to get one – but these graphs from The Spectator data hub illustrate why people are bound to feel the pain. Even if headline GDP figures are only taking a temporary knock, GDP per capita (which measures how prosperous, on average, a country’s residents are) has been falling for almost two years now – never properly recovering from the pandemic.

While GDP has seen a very modest increase of 1 per cent since the pandemic, GDP per capita remains 1.5 per cent lower than where it sat pre-pandemic. The latter has been contracting for seven consecutive quarters: in other words, the technical recession may have started at the end of last year, but the painful hit to economic prosperity started much earlier.

What are the solutions? Of course the government wants to highlight the Bank of England’s role in the growth figures – and the tools it holds which are out of the government’s hands. Speaking this afternoon, Hunt noted that ‘whilst interest rates are over 5 per cent, the highest in 15 years, of course growth is going to be weaker’ – a rather gentle, but still pointed reminder of what might be possible so long as the Bank keeps rates at (historically average, but these days) high levels.

The government is desperate to address the tax squeeze, too, but that is looking to be a more difficult task than was predicted a month ago. Despite both Sunak and Hunt using the Sunday papers last month to announce another round of serious tax cuts were coming; but reports today suggest the Office for Budget Responsibility has told the Chancellor overnight that there is less fiscal headroom for him to cut taxes again than there was in the Autumn Statement. 

The task for the Treasury isn’t simply to cut taxes, but to change the trajectory of the tax burden, so the government can meaningfully boast that the high-tax consensus has changed. But with less money to put towards cuts, Hunt will have to decide between holding back on the tax cuts or announcing more spending cuts (for after the next general election, of course), for which there is growing scepticism any government would ever really deliver.

Hamas can’t hide behind hospitals anymore

Israeli special forces are operating in Nasser hospital, one of the main hospitals in the city of Khan Yunis, where the Israel Defence Forces have been fighting Hamas for several weeks.

IDF spokesman Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari explained that the raid is based on ‘reliable intelligence’ about terrorist activity in the hospital. According to Hagari, there is also information, based on accounts given by released hostages as well as other sources, that several bodies of Israeli hostages abducted into Gaza during the 7th October attack are being kept there.

The IDF has been searching for the Israeli hostages in Gaza since the war began. It has managed to extract three hostages alive in complicated and dangerous operations. It has also found several bodies and repatriated them. Tragically, the IDF accidentally killed three hostages after mistaking them for enemy combatants.

The IDF has notified the hospital about the raid in advance, and taken measures to minimise harm to civilians, hospital staff and medical equipment. But the hospital still houses thousands of patients and refugees, making the raid extremely risky. This is happening at a time when Israel is under considerable international pressure to show restraint and minimise casualties among civilians.

This isn’t the first time the IDF has operated inside a Palestinian hospital since the war started. Many Gazan hospitals have dual uses. As well as treating patients, Gaza hospitals have tunnels under them into which terrorists can enter through different areas. Hamas have established command centres in or under hospitals, and have used them for hiding weapons and firing missiles into Israel or against military forces.

The use of hospitals serves Hamas well. Vulnerable patients make effective human shields, and attacking them makes Israel look bad. Some international commentators have suggested that Israel’s actions violate international laws. Although hospitals are considered protected civilian objects under international humanitarian law, if they are used by a party to a conflict for ‘acts harmful to an enemy’ they are no longer protected by law. In other words, Hamas’s cynical use of hospitals has turned them into valid military targets. Israel has to raid them in order to destroy Hamas infrastructure and communications abilities, confiscate weapons and to look for hostages.

Hamas has been using hospitals in this way for many years, knowing that Israel prefers to refrain from attacking them – which used to be the case, until the war made it a necessity. Al Shifa hospital in northern Gaza, for example, was found to be the hiding place of Hamas’s internal security command centre and was regularly manned by armed terrorists. The command centre was used to direct rocket attacks and Hamas ground forces. The hospital was also used for hiding a large arsenal of weapons. According to American and Israeli intelligence, Israeli hostages have been held in Al Shifa and other hospitals in Gaza.

Similarly, the IDF has uncovered tunnels, weapons and evidence that hostages have been held in Al-Rantisi hospital in Gaza city. The IDF also discovered Hamas tunnels under the Qatari Hospital and apprehended terrorists operating from the Kamal Adwan hospital – with the hospital’s director revealing to Israeli interrogators that Hamas has turned his hospital into a military facility. 

Hamas has been denying using hospitals for military purposes for years. But now the abundance of evidence not only exposes their lies but also indicates that medical staff and mangers must have been aware of this too, despite their denials. Hospitals didn’t just house armed Hamas terrorists, they also supplied water, power, petrol and air-conditioning to the vast array of tunnels, control rooms and living quarters built by Hamas.

Hamas has embedded their operations deep within Palestinian civilian life. This includes not only hospitals, but schools, religious institutions and UN facilities. It plays a major part in their modus operandi.

The secret’s out now. Hamas has been using international aid money to build tunnels and arm itself. It has been taking cover behind civilians, turning otherwise protected objects into legitimate targets. Nasser hospital, where Israeli forces have already detained several terrorists, is no different.

Tan Ikram and the corruption of the justice system

The case of the ‘paraglider girls’ just keeps getting worse, exposing a criminal-justice system that seems to have become riddled with bias and Israelophobia.

On Tuesday, a judge at Westminster Magistrates Court essentially let three women – Heba Alhayek, 29, Pauline Ankunda, 26, and Noimutu Olayinka Taiwo, 27 – off with a slap on the wrist, after they were charged with terrorism offences. 

Last October, they were spotted on a Palestine protest displaying images of paragliders, just seven days after Hamas fighters on paragliders flew into southern Israel before murdering and raping their way through a music festival and several kibbutzim. 

The women were found guilty. But the judge – deputy senior district judge Tan Ikram – showed considerable leniency, sparing the trio prison and giving them a 12-month conditional discharge. The maximum sentence would have been six months in prison. ‘You crossed the line, but it would have been fair to say that emotions ran very high on this issue’, he said.

This was bizarre, to put it lightly, given the British state’s – and this particular judge’s – increasingly punitive behaviour where offensive speech is concerned. In 2022, Ikram sent police constable James Watts to prison for 20 weeks after he shared racist jokes in a WhatsApp group. It seems that disgusting jokes made in private are worthy of jail time, but what the CPS described as the ‘glorification’ of racist terrorism on the streets of London is not.

Those of us who were cynical enough to imagine that some political bias might have played a role here have now, it seems, been given further reason to believe this. Ikram, it turns out, ‘liked’ an anti-Israel post on LinkedIn three weeks ago. The post, shared by a man with a fondness for spouting anti-Israel conspiracy theories, called Israel ‘terrorist’ and repeated the ‘Free Palestine’ slogan. 

Ikram may now face disciplinary action, given judicial guidance plainly states that judges who are known to have strong views on a particular subject should consider recusing themselves from related cases. Social-media guidance also warns that liking posts ‘can convey information about yourself and your views’.

He says that he liked the post by accident. Even so, this isn’t the first time that he has chosen to express his views. As Laurie Wastell noted on Coffee House yesterday, Ikram gave a talk to American law students in February 2023, in which he appeared to boast about the harsh sentence he handed down to Watts: ‘I gave him a long prison sentence. The police were horrified by that.’ 

In that talk, at College of DuPage in Illinois, he went further, airing all the fashionable talking points about race, policing and the justice system. According to a write-up in the student newspaper, Ikram even – hilariously – raised the issue of ‘how judges, like him, could be suffering from unconscious bias when sentencing people’. 

Of course, the bias Ikram is alleged to have shown in the case of the ‘paraglider girls’ doesn’t appear to be ‘unconscious’. This looks very much like a judge punishing some racist speech crimes more leniently than others, based on his publicly expressed views and sympathies.

Look, I’m a free-speech absolutist. Short of direct incitement to violence, I don’t think any statement – no matter how disgusting – should land someone in the dock. But the double standards stink to high heaven. They reveal a two-tier criminal-justice system that treats anti-Semitic speech with kid gloves, while coming down ever-harder not only on other forms of racist speech, but also on relatively innocuous, un-PC speech.

This isn’t just about one judge or one case. In 2020s Britain, you can call for jihad against Israel on the streets of London without having your collar felt. But if you’re a feminist misgendering someone, or a veteran sharing a spicy anti-Pride meme, you can count on being manhandled into the back of a police van.

The soft touch applied to London’s pro-Hamas – sorry, ‘pro-Palestine’ – demos isn’t an accident. A mixture of bias, ignorance and cowardice has been exposed at every level of the criminal-justice system. People who have made openly anti-Semitic statements have even been found to be working with the authorities.

In November, the Metropolitan Police were forced to cut ties with Attiq Malik, chairman of the London Muslim Communities Forum, after he was revealed to have chanted ‘From the river to the sea’ and railed against ‘global censorship by the Zionists’. (The Met is reportedly still working with his organisation.)

How all this must horrify British Jews, as they reel from the anti-Semitism that has flooded Britain, online and on the streets, since 7 October. The message from our criminal-justice system is now loud and clear: all forms of racism are awful, but some are less awful than others.

Who could object to the Windrush line?

Sadiq Khan has announced six new names for the previously boringly-named Overground. The practical point of it is that the Overground goes everywhere and is quite confusing to navigate if you’re an occasional visitor. Breaking up the orange (which only stayed that way because Boris Johnson liked it being the same colour when he was shown a draft map) isn’t particularly disputed, but what has excited interest is the choice of names. Lioness, Mildmay, Windrush, Weaver, Suffragette and Liberty have a certain progressive ring to them. They’ve been received in some quarters as names that are seeking a reaction rather than just reflecting London’s heritage.

Interestingly, Khan isn’t the only politician who has been after a ‘woke’ update to the tube map: when Rory Stewart was running for Mayor of London in 2020, his team drew up a list of new Overground line names, including Seacole, Pankhurst, Brunel and Churchill. That last would also have provoked a reaction from a different noisy group in politics.

We like to create a sense of place by naming lines, streets and areas after our history, and famous figures or moments are often much more appropriate than the names you find in housing developments: ‘Primrose Avenue’ or ‘Beech Road’ always sound so hollow when those plants have had to make way for some identikit homes with artificial grass in the back garden. The Lioness line goes through Wembley, and while the Lionesses haven’t yet won a World Cup, they have won the Euros, which is a darn sight more recent than the men’s team, so why not? We have plenty of places named after famous sportsmen, and that’s as it should be, but the Lionesses will be no more or less forgotten in the public consciousness than, say, Marcus Trescothick, who has two roads named after him in the Bristol area. Is it really all that ‘woke’ to have a football line, or is it only ‘woke’ when it involves women who’ve achieved a great deal?

Windrush similarly has as much of a place in our sense of self as a nation as Waterloo, or Queen Victoria. There are roads named after Windrush, often in the towns where the Windrush generation came to live and contribute to the Mother Country. It also happens to be a beautiful name that lends itself well to a train line, unlike say, Suffragette, which will sound terribly awkward if you’re stuck on it. ‘Suffragette’ has had a number of goes at getting on the map, including back in 2012 when MPs were considering what new name to give to St Stephen’s Tower. A group of Labour MPs including Paul Flynn and Jeremy Corbyn tabled an early-day motion calling for it to be called ‘Chartist Tower, Suffrage Tower or Big Benn’. That last suggested the group, who never got more than seven MPs signed up to their campaign, were not being entirely serious, but either way the tower ended up becoming the Elizabeth Tower.

New names are always fraught with difficulty, especially when the political authority choosing them is trying to send a message. When I lived in High Wycombe, we had our fair share of Windrush roads, to reflect the make-up of the community in the Buckinghamshire town. But there was at one point an hilarious attempt to rename a road of nail bars and kebab shops the ‘cultural quarter’, which wasn’t so much sending a message as it was forcing an identity on an area which didn’t fit any more than me calling myself a Lioness would.

Some of the names do smack of trying too hard. But there is still a possibility that the ‘this-is-woke’ brigade are reading a little too much into this: I’m not sure that weavers are necessarily that provocative a bunch, with the line between Liverpool Street and Chingford getting that name to reflect the textile history of the area. Textile artists can be pretty radical, but not necessarily in a ‘woke’ way, as Jess de Wahls found when the Royal Academy temporarily stopped stocking her work after a handful of people complained that she was transphobic for believing that biological sex was real and for stitching depictions of uteruses. Perhaps the Equality And Diversity Initiative Line would have been more provocative than the actual choice of Liberty. Similarly, given Liz Truss named one of her kids Liberty, she’d be as likely to be riding that newly-named line between Romford and Upminster, possibly providing some busking entertainment in the form of listing everyone who got in the way of her mission to save the West.

Speaking of getting in the way, the greatest travesty of this update is that it doesn’t take into account the fact that the Circle Line has not been that shape since 2009 and is in fact a very slowly-chugging spiral out to Hammersmith. Perhaps that’s the next mission for Khan, who enjoys provoking a reaction as much as those getting steamy about today’s names enjoy supplying it. Suggestions on a postcard please.

Starmer’s favourite pub struggles under Khan’s comrades

How much longer can Sir Keir Starmer’s local survive under the ever-blundering regime of Sadiq Khan’s City Hall? As every Westminster obsessive knows, Starmer’s favourite pub is The Pineapple in Kentish Town – a site ‘woven into the fabric of the community since it was built in 1868.’ Yet the battle-class boozer is struggling to survive: all thanks to the incompetence of Transport for London, responsibility for which sits with the capital’s Mayor.

Kentish Town station has been shut since June to fix two escalators and carry out ‘wider work’ on the station. But sadly, the effect on local business has proved to be catastrophic. The Lady Hamilton pub, located just a two-minute walk from the station, closed down permanently in August, with owner Paul Davies telling the Camden New Journal that:

There was no real warning and it has just wiped out the trade – and it has hit The Pineapple too. The High Street has been killed: we are not the only ones. We were hoping to soldier on, but we just could not with the Tube closing.

As well as the closure of the Lady Hamilton, managers have also seen sales at The Pineapple – which is five minutes away from the station – suffer from a lack of Underground access. And on the same day Khan pleged to splurge £6 million on renaming the Overground lines, it was announced that Kentish Town station will remain shut for even longer because of TFL delays.

The new target date has been pushed back to September, with local businesses furious. TfL have confirmed to the Camden New Journal that ‘no compensation paid to businesses who had been hit by the tube closure.’ One enraged resident told Mr S:

It took a year to build the Empire State Building, but it’s taking TfL longer to put in some escalators and now we are told it’s being delayed. The local Labour representatives, including Sir Keir have been silent about it meaning Sadiq Khan and TFL are able to get away with it all while our community and local businesses suffer.

Let’s hope, for Sadiq’s sake, there’s still a pub for Sir Keir to enjoy when/if the works are eventually finished…