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It’s hard work having fun: Wives Like Us, by Plum Sykes, reviewed
Just when you thought the Cotswolds must have peaked as a fictional setting, a new rom-com from the author of Bergdorf Blondes floats like cherry blossom onto a chalk stream. Plum Sykes has chosen a rich (as in minted) target, and she is well-equipped to take aim. As a former contributing editor of American Vogue, she might be considered part of the trans-atlantic glossy posse, but at heart she’s still an Oxford-educated Sykes – with a certain diplomatic heritage. The family seat is the magnificent Sledmere in Yorkshire, which has its own blue-tiled Turkish Room. So Plum is not your common-or-garden mag hag. But she now lives in the ’wolds, and when it comes to the lifestyles of the UHNWs (ultra-high-net-worths) of Poshtershire, she knows. And she certainly can write.
The setting of Wives Like Us is ‘the country’ (which is how people like Sykes refer to anywhere outside London), and although sex and horses feature, we are far from Jilly Cooper’s Rutshire. This is an unabashedly high-end, high-spend scenario in which helicopters are Ubers, Daylesford is a corner shop and Estelle Manor a canteen. There is ruthless competition over houses, horses, staff, outfits, children and more, until the reader longs for someone to admit how joyless the extravagant lifestyle of country princesses is – but nobody does. That’s because it’s all for Instagram. It’s life as a social media spectacular, all stiffies for ‘kitchen sups’ and tablescapes at dawn. Every night there’s a £500-a-head ‘impromptu’ birthday dinner. By day there’s a Ladies’ Hack, with wives riding out in designer equestrian onesies to a pitstop at a Marie Antoinette-style hameau where uniformed staff serve sloe gin cocktails and drones film it overhead.
Sykes is smart, and conveys the important truth about this entertainment Olympics, which is the main plot-driver: that keeping up with the neighbours, let alone in somewhere as poncy and show-pony as the Cotswolds, is tiring. Fun is more work than work (and, as I always add, work is more fun than fun). The effort and expense involved in just organising a children’s picnic makes me want to lie down in a dark room and never go out again – let alone to Sykes’s invented Cotswold village, The Bottoms.
I can tell you some more about what happens. It’s a bit Pride and Prejudice: a dark, brooding widower called Vere Osborne may be in want of a wife. Centre stage is an estranged couple – Tata (not as in steel) and Bryan – who are nouveaux riches arrivistes. There’s a American divorcée; a ghastly Tory MP and his wife; an oligarch, and local toffs. But I’d hesitate to say all human life is here. At the heart of the book is Tata’s impeccable ‘executive butler’ Ian, a maestro orchestrating everything in a Charvet tie. Which brings us to the outfits. Some novels make one’s mouth water because descriptions of food saturate their pages like butter-soaked muslin. Here it’s clothes. Designer clothes. Every garment and label is a signifier, and you begin to realise just how much the too rich and too thin communicate daily via what they wear.
The book needs a proper villain to spice up the action; but it’s cleverly structured, very well-written and has a delicious, knowing ending. I’d hazard a guess that its intended audience is not, say, my husband, who hasn’t read a novel (let alone one written by a woman) since university – but who cares?
Some might long to send Sykes’s clotheshorses straight to the glue factory – but I gobbled the sugar lumps and am leading them to the winners’ enclosure.
Edwin Lutyens: the nation’s remembrancer-in-chief
In unduly modest remarks at the opening of this immaculate book, Clive Aslet, one of our most distinguished architectural historians, notes that there have been substantial biographies of Sir Edwin Lutyens, and he does not pretend to emulate them. His achievement, however, is considerable. Aslet has spent more than 45 years in intense and enthusiastic study of ‘Ned’ and his works, and has not merely an encyclopedic knowledge of what Lutyens built, but two other invaluable qualities. First, he appreciates the sort of man Lutyens was, the influences upon him, and how he interacted with his family (especially his wife Lady Emily) and his clients. Second, he has a deep understanding of the buildings, and the techniques employed in making them, and an enthusiasm he communicates unequivocally to his readers.
Take this description of a part of Heathcote, a house Lutyens built out of his Home Counties comfort zone for the Yorkshire wool baron John Thomas Hemingway:
Beneath the cornice is rustication, which merges with the Doric pilasters: a visual caprice which Lutyens repeated in later buildings. The vigorous projections and recessions of the façade have the plasticity of sculpture. Lutyens’s assurance is breathtaking.
Lutyens grew up in the Surrey hills – an area with which some of his houses, and the style in which he built them, are closely associated – and Aslet depicts an artist struggling against his instincts to go to parts of the country, and use materials, with which he was unfamiliar.
However, Lutyens then takes on more varied projects. He helps improve a house in the French seaside town of Varengeville; in mid-career he is commissioned to undertake his magnum opus, the Viceroy’s palace and associated buildings in New Delhi; and later he evolves into the nation’s architectural remembrancer-in-chief, designing the Cenotaph in Whitehall and some of the war cemeteries on the Western Front. His other masterpiece in this genre is the Thiepval Memorial to the Missing of the Somme. Aslet says this is not a thing of beauty – lumbering brick and stone arches piled upon other lumbering brick and stone arches – but it does represent the ugliness of war. It is certainly magnificent, set on its eminence in an otherwise flat part of France – something perhaps only appreciated when one has approached from a distance, and walked inside the arches and seen the slabs with the names of the 72,000 missing incised into them.
Aslet does not veer too much into the architect’s personal qualities. He seeks to answer the question posed in his subtitle, presenting the evidence (the book is beautifully illustrated) and leaving us to decide whether Lutyens was our greatest architect. He was certainly original, and created a distinct brand, not least because of its deceptive simplicity. Rather like Vaughan Williams, his near contemporary, he created a new ‘national style’, at a time when the national consciousness was so high as to demand it. But he could also be radical as, again, the Cenotaph showed. Aslet quite rightly muses about how the elaborate mathematical calculations, required if all the vertical lines of the monument were to meet 1,000 feet up, were accomplished by a man with little formal schooling. Lutyens also created the plain Stone of Remembrance for his war cemeteries, which could embrace the spirituality of the dead of all faiths, or none.
Aslet gives us the bare bones of the Lutyenses’ marriage, which produced five children, and makes dark and discreet allusions to the architect’s behaviour in bed, which led to his wife kicking him out of it. Those who wish to know such lurid details in greater depth must look elsewhere. He is also amusing about the architect’s relations with his clients, and especially the ease with which he spent their money. Of Hemingway he says that Lutyens ‘ate him for breakfast’ in convincing him he needed ‘a place of status and comfort to reward a lifetime of toil’. And he was not a perfect engineer. The flat roofs at Castle Drogo soon started to leak, and before long the putty holding the glass in the windows decayed.
It was the nouveaux riches who supplied most of Lutyens’s domestic work, which dried up with the Great War. Luckily his friend Reginald McKenna had him build not just some branches of the Midland Bank (of which he was chairman) but also its palatial headquarters in Poultry in the City of London, which shows what Lutyens could do on an unlimited budget.
The book ends with what might have been: tantalising models of the unbuilt Roman Catholic cathedral in Liverpool, for which the money ran out. It’s not too late to build it: it would create thousands of jobs on Merseyside and make the city a place of pilgrimage in perpetuity. Perhaps one day some enlightened cardinal will make it happen, and Ned’s final triumph will be complete.
The joy of hanging out with artists
Lynn Barber is known as a distinguished journalist, but what she always wanted to do was hang out with artists. This book feels like a marvellous cocktail party, packed with the painters and sculptors Barber has interviewed over the years: Howard Hodgkin, Phyllida Barlow, Grayson Perry, Maggi Hambling. Sarah Lucas and Tracey Emin eye one another warily from opposite sides of the room; Salvador Dali’s ocelot weaves between the guests; everyone, naturally, is smoking. Lucian Freud is a no-show – though having refused Barber’s many interview requests, he did send a scrawled note explaining he had no wish to ‘be shat upon by a stranger’.
Feuds and gossip are the making of any gathering, and A Little Art Education is not a book of art criticism. Barber likes what she likes, and though she is insightful on the works which move her, comparing David Hockney’s Yorkshire landscapes to the ‘visionary’ canvases of Samuel Palmer, this series of vignettes is as much about personalities as pictures. Barber has been a fascinated champion of artists throughout her career and deplores the fact that until the 1990s the mainstream British press was hostile to modern art where it was not bumptiously philistine. Over seven years at the Sunday Express Barber was permitted just two interviews with artists, one of which was, she regrets, with Rolf Harris. She moved to the Observer as the YBA boom began, turning artists like Emin and Damien Hirst into household names.
Sarah Lucas and Tracey Emin eye one another across the room. Dali’s ocelot weaves between the guests
As a reporter, she honed a notoriously tough stance, opening interviews with a hostile perspective which aimed at compelling her famous subjects to win her over. For anyone wishing to get to grips with contemporary art, this approach might be similarly effective. Barber has loved art all her life, and her book is particularly effective on the challenges of developing a personal eye, a process seen first through her acquisition of two abstract paintings, which she is touchingly unsure how to hang, and then into her initially adversarial relationship with the contemporary. Barber admits that she failed to see the point of conceptual works, which she found estranging, if not enraging, before encountering Rachel Whiteread’s 1990 ‘Ghost’, a derelict Victorian house cast in plaster. The work catalysed a passion which resulted in Barber serving as a Turner Prize juror in 2006. In between, she couriered salami for a Lucas installation at the Cologne Art Fair, became close friends with Gilbert and George and interviewed the art scene’s most bourgeois duo, the Chapman brothers, who loathed her ‘bourgeois’ opinions so much that they sent her a death threat.
A time when artists were papped falling out of Michelin-starred restaurants and the creator of ‘Everyone I Have Ever Slept With’ scandalised the nation by swearing on the telly feels strangely distant. Barber’s book is not nostalgic, yet it evokes the loss of a kind of pre-digital innocence, and of the days when newspapers could afford to put up their writers at the Mondrian in LA. The internet hasn’t yet come for the art market, which is bigger, richer and dirtier than ever before, and it’s interesting to note Barber’s own change of heart on the relationship between artists and celebrity. Recalling an early encounter with Whiteread, who was actively distressed by her level of fame, Barber is bemused and unconvinced; but subsequent conversations with Hockney convince her that unlike the actors and personalities whose portraits formed the bulk of her career, good artists are essentially uninterested in fame. Hockney casts himself as a ‘worker’, a craftsman who has no truck with the mystique of the muse. Grayson Perry, who has, according to Barber, done more to popularise art in Britain than anyone else, is similarly unpretentious, though, as Barber adds dryly: ‘I have no idea whether he has also popularised transvestism.’
Emin is the subject of Barber’s most touching study, through her emergence, as Lucas’s partner in their influential east London collective The Shop, as something of a grande dame in British art. Emin has developed an abrasive reputation not dissimilar to Barber’s own, but here she appears as both courageous and meaningfully philanthropic with her foundation of an art school in Margate. It’s not only a moving account, but one which focuses on female networks and influence within the art world as a whole, a topic which remains relatively neglected beyond the museum.
The Chapman brothers loathed Barber’s ‘bourgeois’ opinions so much that they sent her a death threat
Barber’s tone in general is intrigued and celebratory. She quotes the abstract painter Gillian Ayres’s radical maxim that ‘beauty is very sensible’ (‘beautiful’ being synonymous with ‘despicable’ in artspeak), and admires the stately ‘precariousness’ of Barlow’s large-scale sculptures, yet she is no wide-eyed fangirl. Meeting Dali in Paris in 1969, she was treated to his opinion that sublimating the libido is the key to producing a masterpiece: ‘Zee painters are always zee big masturbators!’ Barber stops short of calling him the obvious, but she does report wearily that she was invited to join a threesome, an occupational hazard of working for Penthouse. Invited to a pre-interview private viewing by Hodgkin’s dealer, she found the ultimate client experience of being left alone with the work in a private sanctum so dull she wished she had brought a book, while a smoky session with Hambling produces a list of London sculptures that deserve to be executed. Glamorous descriptions of partying in palazzi at the Venice Biennale are offset by the admission that gallery dinners are generally dreary.
These touches of sfumato are deliciously pointed, but what makes the book so engaging is Barber’s undimmed enthusiasm for the adventure of looking. ‘I’ve never met an artist who had a hobby,’ she writes admiringly. The book concludes with the recollection of the 2004 fire at the Momart storage facility, which destroyed many infamous YBA works, including the Chapman brothers’ giant swastika diorama ‘Hell’. Unlike those grifting cynics who claimed to be producing ‘scatological aesthetics for the tired of seeing’, Barber loves artists for being artists, for committing their lives to the joy of others’ eyes.
The Tories can’t even organise a crackdown on rainbow lanyards
A suggested government ban on rainbow-coloured lanyards in the civil service has, perhaps unsurprisingly, proved divisive at the highest reaches of government. The idea for the ban came from Esther McVey, officially a minister without portfolio but more widely known as ‘the minister for common sense’.
In a speech on Monday, McVey suggested that permanent secretaries in government departments would take action against staff wearing anything other than officially branded lanyards as part of reforms to stop ‘the inappropriate backdoor politicisation of the civil service’. She accused civil servants who used messaging on lanyards of engaging in ‘political activism in a visible way’. Any offenders would be provided with new ones by their civil service bosses.
It is further evidence of an administration that is tired, out of ideas and counting down the days until the election
Plain enough, or so you might think. Yet it now turns out that new diversity guidance issued to civil servants today steers clear of any mention of lanyards, offending or otherwise. It states: ‘Civil servants must not allow their personal political views to determine their actions or any advice they give… This includes when carrying out government duties, such as developing policy, or engaging in learning and development or participating in staff networks.’ McVey has clearly chosen to interpret this directive as covering political symbols on lanyards, while other ministers believe the guidance does not oblige government departments to make civil servants remove them. In other words, confusion reigns.
According to a report in the Times, the policy was not raised with other ministers, resulting in a cabinet row over the wisdom of such a ban. This might go some way towards explaining why Grant Shapps, the defence secretary, was quick to distance himself from McVey’s criticism of lanyards in a radio interview: ‘Personally, I don’t mind people expressing their views on these things. What lanyard somebody wears doesn’t particularly concern me.’
Shapps went on to say that he was more interested in the ‘jobs that the civil service do’ than in what they wore. An eminently sensible view, even though it is one not shared by the minister officially charged with bringing common sense back to Whitehall. The Prime Minister’s official spokesman also held back from telling officials not to wear lanyards but nevertheless backed McVey’s desire to create a ‘common identity across departments’ (what does that even mean?) and avoid ‘politicisation’ of the civil service. Clear as mud then.
There is a temptation to laugh about much of this – but McVey has a point. Civil servants are duty-bound to be politically neutral when implementing official policies. Would a lanyard advocating support for nuclear disarmament be appropriate for a civil servant working in the Ministry of Defence? Would it be ok for a staffer in the Foreign Office to wear a lanyard with the colours of the Palestinian flag? It could, of course, also be argued that showing support for a cause is not always a political act. A ribbon in support of lung cancer research and funding is one obvious example; there are plenty of other ’causes’ that are not controversial or political.
The problem for the government is that this is far from the best moment to have a ministerial bust-up over lanyards. It isn’t so much the confusion and mixed public messaging – that’s bad enough – but more the idea that ministers are spending their time and energy on this of all things. It is further evidence of an administration that is tired, out of ideas and counting down the days until the election.
None of this helps Rishi Sunak either. Just yesterday the Prime Minister insisted that only he could deal with the big threats facing the country: ‘The next five years will be some of the most dangerous our country has ever known,’ he said, before going on to list the dangers posed by Russia, North Korea and Iran. A mere 24 hours later, that message has been totally undermined by the spectacle of ministerial infighting over the relatively limited threat posed by lanyard-wearing civil servants. Why would voters choose to entrust their future to a government which can’t even decide what it thinks about little ribbons? Over to you, Rishi.
Why are important Covid documents not being released?
The most important stories from the Covid Inquiry are found in the written evidence and submitted statements. However, the Cabinet Office is refusing to release vital evidence that the Inquiry isn’t interested in, in case it ‘excessively focused’ the public’s attention on lockdown-decision making. If neither side change their position, the British people will be left in the dark.
Last November, I reported in the magazine that the witness statement of Ben Warner – who had been brought into No. 10 as Head of Data by Dominic Cummings – revealed that not only was an erroneous graph used to justify the second lockdown but that senior figures, possibly including the Prime Minister, knew that the graph was wrong but decided to broadcast it to the nation anyway. What we still don’t know is how specifically this decision to hoodwink the public was made. Warner’s statement references a number of documents which might answer this question. Those documents are:
- The presentation created by Warner with projected Covid deaths that was emailed around No. 10 contained ‘a very simple story to show why we need to take action, and that doing nothing is not an option.’
- The email discussion surrounding that presentation.
- The document from Sage modellers on which Ben Warner had viewed on the same day.
- A briefing document that had been created for the Prime Minister by another aide.
- Emails between Warner and chief scientific advisor Patrick Vallance that were sent in the run up to the Halloween press conference announcing the second lockdown.
At the time The Spectator tried to obtain these documents from the Inquiry. However, the 2005 Inquiries Act only allows it to publish evidence if the Chair, Baroness Hallett, decides that a particular document should be put into evidence or if that document is shown in an open hearing. I understand that because none of the core participants at the Inquiry requested for these documents to be entered into evidence, Lady Hallett has not done so. She may change that decision in the future or include them in her final report, but this is an inquiry with no end date. The latest, I’m told, is that evidence hearings are planned well into 2026. Waiting years to see these crucial documents that played a role in locking down millions is intolerable when the next pandemic could come at any moment.
I next went to the Cabinet Office (who had submitted the documents to the Inquiry) to obtain them under the Freedom of Information Act. At first the government refused to either confirm or deny whether it possessed the documents. It used this excuse to extend its response deadline five times over six months while it sought legal advice.
Finally, at the end of last week, the government made a decision. Yes, it has some of the documents requested and yes, it agrees that publication of the documents would be in the public interest but it would still not publish them. To do so, the government said, would leave the Inquiry ‘adversely affected’. It said that publishing the documents ‘would create expectations around that topic, which could undermine public confidence in the Inquiry’. But most strikingly the government seemed to worry about the public’s reaction to the documents, saying:
There is the potential that if the material was released, it would result in public interest being excessively focused on this specific aspect of the lockdown decision-making process, to the detriment of a more holistic examination that the Inquiry is aiming for.
But the Inquiry is entirely independent of the government. So, what business does the Cabinet Office have in worrying about the public’s ‘focus’, excessive or otherwise? The FoI response suggests little confidence in Baroness Hallett too:
Moreover, [publishing] could negatively influence the ability of the Chair to decide which aspects of the decision-making process around lockdown affecting other factors of the pandemic response that will be examined in future modules.
It seems to be quite unlikely that a former Court of Appeal judge with a legal career that started in the 1970s would or even could be ‘negatively influenced’ by the public’s response to anything.
The Spectator will be appealing the FoI decision, but it seems unlikely that the Cabinet Office will budge. The Inquiry, for its part, is bound by strict legislation and only the Chair can make the documents public from their side. If the government sticks by its position then it could be years before these documents ever have a chance of seeing the light of day.
A spokesperson for the UK Covid-19 Inquiry said:
The Inquiry, which is entirely independent of government, has so far published tens of thousands of pieces of evidence and will continue to do so. The Inquiry plays no part in the response of government departments to FOIA requests.
A Cabinet Office spokesperson said:
It is absolutely right that we allow the COVID Inquiry to carry out its important work. It is for the Inquiry Chair to handle the publication of evidence relevant to the Inquiry, and the Cabinet Office will continue to assist the Chair and the Inquiry in this regard.
The Normandy prisoner escape shines a light on France’s criminal underworld
‘Sometimes when we turn on the television we get the impression that nothing’s going well in France,’ Emmanuel Macron said on Monday. ‘I don’t think it’s true.’ France’s president has developed a knack of being overtaken by events – and so it has proved once again. A huge manhunt is underway after two prison guards were shot dead near Rouen in Normandy. The security officers were gunned down as they transferred a prisoner, described by police sources as a notorious drugs smuggler nicknamed ‘The Fly’, whose real name is Mohamed A. Two vehicles blocked the prison van on the A154 motorway and, as the prisoner was sprung, two of the guards were killed and three wounded in a fusillade of gunfire. The officers were shot with ‘heavy weapons’, the French justice minister Eric Dupond-Moretti said.
The security officers were gunned down as they transferred a notorious drugs smuggler nicknamed ‘The Fly’
The attack happened as the Senate published a report about the influence of the drugs trade on French society. Shocked by what they had learned during their six months of investigations and interviews, the Senate said drugs have become a ‘scourge that is affecting our country.’
The scourge of drugs and violence now pervades every nook and cranny of France, even the remote corner of Burgundy where I live. Last Wednesday evening, two miles from where I write these lines, a man heard a disturbance on his property on which there are ponies. Going outside with his shotgun, he was attacked by a man with a knife. He parried the assailant’s thrust with his weapon, thereby suffering only a minor wound to his chest. But as the victim told the local paper he had no doubt the man ‘was there to kill’.
The assault garnered a few paragraphs in the local paper, a crime that is now worryingly common across France. In a newspaper interview earlier this year, Jean-Christophe Couvy, national secretary of a police union, said of knife crime: ‘Over the last three or four years, we’ve seen an increase in this type of attack on the ground…the violence is uninhibited and cold, with no awareness of the consequences.’
It isn’t only knife crime which is afflicting France. On Monday night, vandals used paint to cover a Holocaust Memorial in Paris with red handprints. The Wall of the Righteous lists the names of 3,900 people who risked their lives to save French Jews during the Second World War. ‘No cause can justify such degradations that dirty the memory of the victims of the Shoah,’ said the mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo.
Two Frances have emerged since Macron took office in 2017. One is the France where, for a minority, business is booming and foreign investors are falling over each other to splash money. This is also the France of the Olympics, and the Cannes Film Festival, which opens today, and where for the next fortnight the beautiful people will cavort in the sun without a care in the world. They’ll probably virtue signal about Palestine and MeToo, the two issues of utmost importance to the global elite, but they won’t give a thought to the millions of Frenchmen and women who inhabit the other France.
Two Frances have emerged since Macron took office in 2017
Macron prefers to show this side of France to the world: the country’s president was in his element at the start of the week during his ‘Choose France’ initiative. Surrounded by some of the business world’s movers and shakers, the president of France joyously announced that 56 different projects will invest in France in the coming years to the tune of 15 billion euros (£13 billion).
These include Microsoft, which is pumping into France 4 billion euros (£3.5 billion) in its cloud and AI infrastructure, and Amazon, whose 1.2 billion euro (£1 billion) investment will focus on logistics and Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) cloud infrastructure.
Macron, who came to power in 2017 with a promise to turn France into a ‘start-up nation’, wants the Republic to be at the European forefront of the AI revolution. Microsoft president Brad Smith was bowled over by the president’s enthusiasm and charisma.
But the majority of France inhabit a different place. There, standards of living have slipped in the last seven years as crime has soared, from sexual violence to burglary to attempted murder, cases of which have rocketed by 59 per cent since 2016
There is scant investment in the inner cities and rural communities. There is only despair. Over nine million people live below the poverty line in France, 14.5 per cent of the population, a figure that is also on the up in recent years.
The truth is that Emmanuel Macron is a president who governs for the few and not the many. The appalling violence that has cost two prison guards their lives today is becoming sadly all too common in France.
Labour backbenchers snub immigration questions
Dear oh dear. Has all Labour’s tough talk on tackling immigration been purely for show? That’s how things appear after a question on illegal migration today saw a grand total of, er, zero Labour backbenchers turn up. Not even Natalie Elphicke, the Dover and Deal defector who made tackling immigration her defining mission, bothered to attend. How curious.
On Friday, Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer travelled to the coastal town of Deal to bang on about his party’s immigration plans amidst the controversy he found himself in over Elphicke’s defection. He committed to scrapping the Rwanda scheme ‘absolutely, flights and all’ and instead pledged to divert £75 million to allow specialist officers ‘to break gangs’. The Labour leader was introduced by his newest and most controversial MP herself, who told supporters: ‘Nowhere is Rishi Sunak’s lack of delivery clearer than on the issue of small boats.’ And nowhere was the new Labour backbencher’s absence more obvious than in the Commons today.
While many Labour politicians have been left scratching their heads at Starmer’s baffling decision to admit his newest MP to the party (one Tory quipped to Steve Baker that ‘I didn’t realise there was any room to her right!’), others have suggested that Elphicke will make the party look serious on small boats. But Labour’s no-show during DUP MP Gavin Robinson’s urgent question today won’t have helped its case.
As the Home Secretary pondered on Twitter, how serious is Starmer’s lefty lot on the migrant crisis? ‘Not a single Labour backbencher (not even Natalie Elphicke) turned up to ask about illegal migration today. Their first opportunity to do so after their “major” announcement on Friday,’ James Cleverly wrote on X, adding: ‘Labour: empty benches, empty promises!’
Ouch…
MPs demand a rethink on mental illness
Given so many people are suffering from some kind of mental distress at the moment, many of them out of work because of it, it’s heartening to read the report from a group of MPs and peers who want to do something constructive about it. The cross-party ‘Beyond Pills All Party Parliamentary Group’ has published a report criticising the current biomedical approach to mental illness, arguing for a ‘paradigm shift in mental health care towards a more holistic and person-centred approach that addresses the social, economic and psychosocial factors contributing to mental distress’. This is a long way of saying that pills aren’t the solution. They are, in many cases, an important part of treatment, just as painkillers are often important for alleviating the symptoms a musculoskeletal problem, but physiotherapy is essential for a full recovery.
The group goes further than this, arguing that anti-depressant prescriptions are often inappropriate and unnecessary. It says: ‘While rising long-term use is associated with many adverse effects, including withdrawal effects, it is not associated with an improvement in mental health outcomes at the population level, which, according to some measures, have worsened as antidepressant prescribing has risen.’
To a certain extent, government policy has been moving in this direction anyway over the past few years, There is a greater emphasis on social prescribing in general practice, meaning patients are directed to activities that research has found can have a profound impact on mental wellbeing. This is not just something that affects mild anxiety: enlightened acute mental health trusts have occupational health as part of their treatment process. When I visited the Bethlem Royal Hospital as part of the research for my second book, The Natural Health Service, I saw how essential their walled garden was in the treatment of some of their sickest patients.
The problem is not just that clinicians are wedded to a biomedical model, or indeed that they don’t have enough time in their ten minute consultations to work out the complex drivers of someone’s mental illness. It is also that the population more generally thinks that pills are a sign their illness is being taken seriously. We see this not just in mental illness but also in physical conditions, which is why the example of painkillers for musculoskeletal conditions is appropriate: patients are good at remembering to take their pills, but often very poor at doing the physiotherapy and other recovery exercises that will mean they don’t need medication any more. There needs to be a shift in the way the public sees the treatment of mental illness, too, from thinking that a social prescription is a sign that clinicians don’t think it’s that serious, or even that it’s just something a patient should be able to snap out of, to realising how much more complicated our minds and bodies are than mere chemical processes.
Javier Milei is torn between the West and China
Javier Milei pledged to ‘make Argentina great again’ when he took to the stage in February at the CPAC meeting of right-wing thinkers in the United States. The Argentine president is a self-proclaimed anarcho-capitalist who, like Donald Trump, rose to prominence promising to deliver shockwaves to his country. The first six months of Milei’s presidential term have been notable for the sudden domestic reforms he has enacted – cutting government ministries, devaluing the peso and slashing subsidies – but he has also found himself at the heart of tensions between the world’s two great powers, America and China. On this, he is acting uncharacteristically carefully.
Ending economic cooperation with China is simply not an option
Milei has already met twice with General Laura Richardson, one of the most senior military figures for the US in the region, and announced the purchase of 24 American-made F-16s from Denmark, a move seen as deepening the growing ties between the US and South America’s second-largest economy. He has also, in the short six months since the election, taken several trips to the US, meeting Donald Trump and Elon Musk. Given Milei’s pro-capitalist views, it is perhaps no surprise that he should naturally pursue a closer relationship with the US.
Milei, however, is not just backing the US, but quietly testing how successfully Latin American governments can push back against growing Chinese influence in the region. Last year, Milei announced that Argentina would be abandoning its application to join the Brics group of countries, of which China is a founding member. In a letter to the bloc, he said the announcement by his predecessor of a desire to join was no longer ‘considered appropriate’. Last month, Milei also announced the government would inspect a Chinese military-run space facility in Patagonia, days after the US ambassador appeared to criticise the Argentine government for allowing the station to be built.
Xi’s government has been spreading its soft power across South America, as it has across the world. Argentina itself joined the Belt and Road infrastructure initiative in 2022, and Chinese companies have snaffled up contracts to exploit Argentina’s vast lithium fields in the north and its shale gas reserves in the south. Argentina is home to around a fifth of the world’s lithium, a vital component for the manufacturing of electric vehicles, but its reserves remain underexploited. Chinese companies have so far paid hundreds of millions of dollars to get a piece of the pie. China is also one of the largest buyers of Argentine exports, most notably soybeans, which make up a significant portion of Argentina’s income.
Before Milei, the most recent Peronist government – which was routed last November – instituted largely left-wing policies and deepened ties with China. (Argentina’s politics have for most of its modern history been dominated by the Peronists, a politically schizophrenic movement that defies western categorisations of left or right.) In the last administration’s final days, it authorised a gargantuan currency swap in a desperate attempt to shore up the economy.
Such ties cannot be easily walked away from, with several analysts predicting dire consequences for Argentina’s economy if it loses access to Chinese money. This places Milei in a difficult position – keen to court the US and its western allies, but reliant on Chinese money to stave off even higher inflation and poverty. ‘The country desperately needs income of US dollars in order to pay its external debt and stabilise the economy,’ says Julio Montero, an associate professor at San Andres University. ‘The relationship with China is of critical importance.’
Despite moves away from Brics, two of its most important members – Brazil and China – are Argentina’s two biggest trading partners. Ending economic cooperation is simply not an option. Similarly, Milei’s libertarian politics – which prioritise free markets – collide with the idea of blocking off trade with an entire country. Despite describing Xi’s government as ‘assassins’ during his campaign trail, Milei’s rhetoric has been decidedly more diplomatic line in the months since. In an interview with Bloomberg last month, Milei said: ‘We have always said that we are libertarians. If people want to do business with China, they can.’ In a BBC interview last week he refused to repeat his previous criticisms.
Diplomatic sabre-rattling aside, most ordinary Argentines will be forgiven for not giving too much thought to whether their country aligns with China or the US. Annual inflation has hit nearly 300 per cent, with the cost of everyday goods now proving burdensome for even some of those in the middle-classes. The most recent poverty statistics have more than half of the population struggling to make ends meet. Milei faced another general strike this week, while a new 10,000 peso note (worth slightly less than £10) has recently been launched as a response to rampantly rising prices.
Milei has rightly made reducing inflation the priority of his government. While he has had some success in cooling price rises and reigning in the runaway economy, there is still a long way to go. Waving goodbye to China, at this point, would be disastrous to this project. Minor posturing is one thing – a major change in relationship, would be quite another.
It would be ridiculous to clamp down on foreign students
Oh, the embarrassment. The government commissioned its own Migration Advisory Committee (MAC) to investigate whether graduate visas (which grant overseas students the right to stay in Britain for two years after graduation) are being exploited and should be abolished. This was seemingly in the hope of gaining some ammunition to do away with a measure which it only introduced three years ago. Trouble is, the MAC has now come back and said that the visas are not being abused and should remain.
Rather than reform the Human Rights Act to stop outrages, the government clamps down on the soft targets
The government now has a choice. It can go ahead and abolish the visas anyway, possibly adding that the MAC is made up of a bunch of pinkos and vested interests, given that its members are all academics. Or it can accept the findings and embrace graduate visas, and stop worrying that they are adding to net migration. The first option would be doubly ridiculous – not only are graduate visas one of the government’s own policies, it appointed the MAC in the first place. As for the second option, it is hard to see what the problem is. Indeed, graduate visas are one of this government’s better ideas.
When we left the EU wasn’t the whole idea that we would regain control of migration policy? The Leave campaign never said it wanted to stop all migration, only ensure that those who come here are contributing to the economy and are not being a burden on taxpayers. On that basis, we should be welcoming overseas students with open arms – including offering them the chance to work here after graduation. They are one of Britain’s most successful export industries of recent years. And yes, they really are an export – while they might physically be entering the country they are paying for a service provided by British-based universities. As well as earning the country money they are also helping to subsidise courses for UK students.
Moreover, it costs £822 to obtain a graduate visa, plus a health surcharge of £1,035 – so those who obtain them are contributing to the NHS on top of any tax they are paying while they are here. Nor are students placing an especially heavy burden on the housing stock – many are living in small student rooms which would not be considered suitable for housing benefit claimants. True there has been a large surge in applications since 2021 – with 144,000 granted in 2023, twice that in 2022. The government is quite right to restrict the number of dependents allowed to enter the country on graduate visas – 30,000 of those granted last year were to dependents rather than graduates themselves.
But the government is lashing out at students because of its impotence in dealing with the sort of migration which really is a burden on the country and which the electorate desperately wants stopped: illegal migration, much of it in the form of people abusing the asylum system. If anyone deserves to be clamped down upon it is the Albanian armed robber who lied about his nationality in order to win asylum in the UK – but who earlier this year was allowed to stay in Britain after a court ruled that it would breach his right to a family life to deport him.
Rather than reform the Human Rights Act to stop outrages such as this, the government clamps down on the soft targets, the migrants who are adding to the UK economy. It is pathetic. Brexit gave us the power to take control of our migration system – the government should use that power in a proper way.
Prince Harry’s memoir loses out on top awards
The renegade royal never manages to stay out of the news for long. Now the spotlight is back on Prince Harry and his memoir Spare, nominated for a number of prizes at last night’s British Book Awards. But, unluckily for the precious Prince, his book was beaten to first place in every category it was in. Better luck next time…
First, the ex-royal faced disappointment in the book of the year award, which saw a publication of puzzles — Murder by GT Karber — beat the Prince’s tell-all. Then Harry lost to Rory Stewart’s Politics on the Edge in the non-fiction narrative category. And, in what will surely come as a blow to the ego, the monarch of Montecito missed out on being crowned author of the year — which went instead to Katherine Rundell of the children’s fantasy series Impossible Creatures.
The pampered Prince’s raunchy tell-all takes the reader through a rollercoaster of events from the royal rebel’s past. From losing his virginity in a field to an older woman, tales of his frostbitten penis and details of his magic mushroom use, Harry’s memoir is quite the eye-opener. It’s one of a number of projects the Montecito monarchs have embarked on since escaping the UK for California — including a failed Spotify podcast deal that ended with a company exec blasting the pair as ‘f***ing grifters’, and Meghan’s lifestyle brand ‘American Riviera Orchard’ which saw an underwhelming launch on Instagram this year. The couple have also reportedly hired a PR guru to help resurrect their image — which, after the Holyrood Reporter dubbed them its biggest losers of 2023, Mr S rather imagines they’ll need.
It’s yet more bad news for the ex-royal, as the timing of his book flop coincides with Prince William’s appointment yesterday as colonel-in-chief of Harry’s old Army Air Corps unit. And the youngest Prince was snubbed by his own father during his visit to the UK some days ago after the King’s diary was reportedly too full to make space for his son. Talk about a rough week…
Rain is the biggest problem for Oxford’s Free Gaza protestors
Oxford students, like others, are protesting about Palestine, but not so much when it rains. There’s an encampment outside the Pitt Rivers museum and once the rain starts the protesters in tents disappear inside them and the others disappear indoors. But when the sun is out, they re-emerge, though not if it’s too early. Welcome to the People’s University for Palestine, a placard says.
Quite a few of the tents have LGBT flags
It’s a mixed group; some of the demonstrators are Muslim, and there are enough oldies to explain the sign saying ‘Vietnam 1975 is Palestine now’. Just over half are women. Quite a few of the tents have LGBT flags; and there’s one placard that says, ‘Queers Support Palestine; don’t use us as an excuse not to support Palestine’. A couple of days ago, there was a Jewish student, who was chatting to friends.
There’s also a sign up saying ‘please tread carefully. We want to take care of the land and the space around us!!’ Too late; the lawn has been churned up and people pick their way across it on planks. Lots of the protesters have masks and some are starting to smell, notwithstanding the Portaloo. The bins are spilling over with the residue of junk food containers. Actually, there seems to be quite a lot of food around. There’s a family tent, and a pop-up coffee tent. In one, someone had donated a cupboard and TV; they seem to be there for the long haul.
This being 2024, there’s an app to register when you come in. If you ask individual protesters why they’re there, it’s hard to get an answer except that they’re against genocide. Do they know there’s genocide? ‘Everyone knows’.
When one female friend asked a group what the protest was about, a man intervened to tell her: ‘educate yourself’, which sounded a bit sexist. If you say you’re writing, they’ll ask you to meet their media representative…yes, they’ve got one, who asks for accreditation.
There is a wall made of cardboard and plywood where you can express how you feel about the situation and write messages to Palestine. ‘Write on the Wall if you want Apartheid to Fall’, it says. There’s also a medical tent run by student medics and for those feeling upset, there’s a wellness tent.
A large billboard displays their demands: ‘Disclose all finances; Divest from Israeli genocide, apartheid and occupation; Overhaul university investment policy; Boycott Israeli genocide; Stop Banking with Barclays; Support Palestinian…’ the rest is folded on the ground.
As regards their own education, it’s still going on, if not in the subjects the students are in Oxford for. Every day they have lectures relating to Palestine; there’s also a tent library filled with Palestinian and Arabic literature.
Every so often a car honks in passing, and the protesters cheer. Peter Hitchens turned up too. He got booed.
Oh, and why the Pitt Rivers museum? A flier explains, under the headling, Welcome to our Liberated Zone: ‘We have established a Liberated Zone on the lawn of the infamous Oxford University Pitt Rivers Museum. The museum, which ‘acquired’ items from across the globe through imperial expansionism, mirrors the ongoing struggle of Palestinian people and connect us to colonised peoples everywhere’. Another says, ‘The museum displays…the erasure, dispossession, scholasticide, epistemicide and cultural pillaging that defines Oxford’s legacy.’ Poor Pitt-Rivers. Actually, you can’t see the famous shrunken heads any more.
In other words, as with any student protest, there’s any amount of virtue signalling going on as well as genuine sympathy for Palestinians. A Muslim I met complained to one Catholic that: ‘You were more bothered by a rainbow flag than people being kicked out of their own homes at gunpoint’; there’s a bit of disjointed thinking going on here.
The buzzwords are what you’d expect: ‘imperial expansionism’, ‘All links to Capitalism…’, ‘It’s the Tories’ and (my favourite) a description of the encampment as ‘a public facing global education project‘.
When you try and ask what their argument is, you get slogans: ‘genocide, occupation and ethnic cleansing‘; either you support Palestine, or you support the butchering of innocent women and children. Everyone I spoke to suggests as much. As for the business of the university? ‘There will be no business as usual during genocide’, said the press release.
The university authorities had better hope it rains.
Could Northern Ireland become a migrant sanctuary?
Yesterday, the High Court in Belfast dealt a blow to the government when it struck down several provisions in the Illegal Migration Act 2023, and declared that parts of the legislation were incompatible with the European Convention on Human Rights.
The Illegal Migration Act is a key piece of legislation for the government’s Rwanda scheme. It obliges the Home Secretary to detain and remove individuals arriving in the UK without permission and prevents them from claiming asylum. The Act also allows the government to deport illegal migrants to a safe third country. While yesterday’s ruling only applies to individuals in Northern Ireland, there are concerns that it could affect the viability of the government’s Rwanda scheme as a whole.
The ruling came after applications by the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission and a 16-year-old asylum seeker from Iran, who had arrived in the UK after travelling from France in a small boat. The applicants argued that the provisions of the Act were both incompatible with Article 2 of the Ireland/Northern Ireland Protocol to the Withdrawal Agreement (commonly referred to as the Windsor Framework) and various provisions of the European Convention on Human Rights. Article 2 ensures that in Northern Ireland there should be no ‘diminution in rights safeguards or equality of opportunity’ set out in the Good Friday Agreement as a result of Brexit.
Mr Justice Humphreys concluded that the rights of asylum seekers were protected by Article 2 and that several elements of the Illegal Migration Act caused ‘a diminution in the rights enjoyed by asylum seekers in a variety of significant ways.’ He therefore disapplied a number of provisions of the Act in Northern Ireland. He also determined that, given the ‘significant nature of the violations identified’, that the Act is incompatible with the European Convention on Human Rights.
The declaration of incompatibility will be a setback. It does not, however, affect the continuing validity of the Illegal Migration Act. Rishi Sunak has already indicated that the decision will not change the government’s plan to send migrants to Rwanda.
Article 2 of the Windsor Framework, which was implemented in domestic law by the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018, is a different matter. The way that the obligations contained in the Withdrawal Agreement have been implemented in domestic law means they takes precedence over other statutes. The rights and obligations under the Withdrawal Agreement therefore prevail over any inconsistent domestic law. This allows the UK courts to disapply inconsistent measures.
This means that, unless the judgment is successfully appealed by the government, these provisions of the Illegal Migration Act will not apply in Northern Ireland.
The practical effect of this ruling is not yet entirely clear. The judgment is unlikely to have a significant impact on the ability of the government to make removals from Great Britain (since the remedy granted by the Belfast court, under Article 2, is clearly restricted to Northern Ireland).
Nonetheless, the DUP’s leader, Gavin Robinson, has already highlighted the fact that the judgment demonstrates that the UK now has a two-tier asylum system. Robinson has argued that this could make Northern Ireland ‘a magnet for asylum seekers seeking to escape enforcement’. It has been reported that the government’s Rwanda removals scheme had already encouraged asylum seekers to relocate to the Republic of Ireland. We may now see the entire island of Ireland becoming a sanctuary.
Given that the Rwanda scheme has always been seen as more of a deterrent than a practical way of removing large numbers of asylum seekers arriving on small boats, it is hard to judge the political impact of the ruling. Clearly it is a legal headache that the government doesn’t need. But history shows that the average British voter may not take that much notice of what happens in Belfast.
Still, it would be foolish for politicians in Westminster to ignore the judgment and the underlying issues created by the Windsor Framework. This is not the first time that Article 2 has caused controversy. In a ruling in February, the High Court in Belfast disapplied provisions of the Northern Ireland Troubles (Legacy and Reconciliation) Act, which sought to bring an end to new criminal investigations, legal proceedings and inquests based on acts which had occurred before 1998. But I suspect that this is the first time Westminster has seriously thought about the impact of Article 2 on the UK as a whole.
In that context the judgment is constitutionally important. It exposes the fact that, in certain circumstances, the government’s writ may no longer run in Northern Ireland. Effectively, this means that unless the government is willing to legislate in compliance with Article 2, it may well not be able to take decisions which apply to the whole of the UK. This may come as an unpleasant surprise to some ministers who do not appear to have appreciated all the consequences of the commitments made in the Withdrawal Agreement.
Article 2 of the Windsor Framework may have once been seen as a minor matter which only affected Northern Ireland. This judgment is a wake-up call for the government and Westminster alike.
Harry and Meghan’s Archewell Foundation labelled ‘delinquent’
If there is one thing that Harry and Meghan excel at, it is snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Their much-hyped trip to Nigeria – a royal visit in all but name – had, from their perspective, gone exceptionally well. Not only did Harry manage to deliver a well-received speech about mental health to a group of students, but the pair were besieged by admirers and well-wishers everywhere they went, all desperate for a selfie, a handshake or a hug. Little wonder, then, that Meghan – never shy about jumping on a bandwagon or seizing an opportunity – solemnly declared that she had taken a DNA test that revealed that she was 43 per cent Nigerian, which she took as the ultimate compliment: ‘It is a compliment to you because what they define as a Nigerian woman is brave, resilient, courageous, beautiful.’ All seemed perfect. And then the pair’s charity was publicly castigated as delinquent, and the dream unravelled.
In fairness, such a judgement is not quite as damning as it might appear at first. The Archewell Foundation, the couple’s charitable endeavour, has been banned from soliciting or spending any money for the time being due to discrepancies in paperwork not being filed and fees not being paid on time, and therefore has earned the unwelcome tag of delinquency. The Californian attorney general has sent a stern letter telling the administrators of the foundation to put their house in order, pronto. It declared that, ‘an organisation that is listed as delinquent is not in good standing and is prohibited from engaging in conduct for which registration is required, including soliciting or disbursing charitable funds.’
It has been suggested – bizarrely, in 2024 – that the source of the difficulty has come from a promised cheque not being delivered. This has now been reissued, and so, ideally, Archewell will have the stigma of delinquency lifted from it and be free to hold out the figurative begging bowl once again before very long. As anyone who has ever had any difficulties with their bank or taxman knows, such discrepancies, while irritating and often embarrassing, are part of life. Yet it is hard not to feel that the mistake, while amusing but inconsequential on its own terms, reflects a larger attitude on the parts of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex. The reason why the Nigeria trip worked well for them both was that it was the perfect display of soft power and influence, conducted entirely on their own terms. When fantasy coincides with reality, the result is usually a let-down.
This was particularly true of Harry’s recent visit to London, where it was briefed that he did not see his father because the King was ‘too busy’ to make time in his schedule. As is usually the case now, this led to pained counter-briefings that suggested the opposite. A well-placed ‘friend’ of Charles described the situation as ‘all very sad’ and scoffed, ‘While [the King] was hardly going to roll out the red carpet the moment this Invictus trip was announced, with doctors advising him to focus on his treatment and recovery, the idea that he refused to find space in his diary… well, let’s say recollections may vary once again.’ After an emotional meeting between father and son in February when the King’s illness was made public, this suggests that the reconciliation that both publicly claim to be desperate for shows no signs of coming to fruition.
It remains uncertain what public role Harry and Meghan truly want for themselves. Perhaps they see themselves as a pair of international do-gooders, floating in and out of various countries and dispensing largesse and good cheer everywhere they go. If so, this is a commendable, if slightly naïve, idea, unless it will be paid for by jam sales of her lifestyle brand America Riviera Orchard. The age of unquestioning, fawning noblesse oblige has long since passed, and in its place are boring but necessary responsibilities that have to be faced up to. Otherwise, the tag of ‘delinquent’ is one that will hang heavy over this particular duo for a considerable time to come.
Could a Trump conviction really change the presidential election?
The first time I heard the name ‘Michael Cohen’ was in 2015, from a Republican political operative who told me: ‘It’s his job to clean up Trump’s messes with women.’ He went on to explain how Cohen, Trump’s personal lawyer and fixer, would pay a large amount in cash to whichever actress-model-stripper-pornstar was claiming to have been screwed, dumped or knocked-up by The Donald. And, crucially, Cohen – Trump’s ‘designated thug’ as he called himself – would scare the hell out of the women concerned to make sure they signed an airtight NDA (or non-disclosure agreement). Over the years, this story has turned out to be far more durable than the allegation that Trump was a Russian agent and today Cohen testified in a Manhattan court that cleaning up the ‘messes with women’ had in fact been his job, his main job, while Trump was running president.
To Trump’s most loyal supporters, killing bad stories is just what a candidate is supposed to do
In The People of the State of New York vs Donald Trump, Trump is charged with falsifying business records to cover up a $130,000 payment to the adult film actress Stormy Daniels just before the 2016 election. Cohen has already served time for arranging this hush money – it was deemed an illegal campaign contribution – and the trial turns on the issue of whether Trump ordered him to make the payment, and told his company’s chief financial officer to fraudulently bury it in the accounts as legal fees. Cohen is the star witnesses after a string of others testified that Trump was both a micromanager and incredibly cheap – all things which lend weight to Cohen’s evidence, since it appears unlikely that such a large payment could have been made without Trump’s say-so. ‘Everything required Mr Trump’s sign off,’ as Cohen testified. This, the prosecution says, is the first-hand account of how the conspiracy unfolded, as seen from the inside.
Reports from inside the courtroom – no TV cameras are allowed – suggest that Cohen was calm and measured on the stand. Reading his evidence, it seemed more like controlled anger to me. This was the performance of someone furious at having to take the fall for something he maintains was business-as-usual in the Trump organisation, and all done at Trump’s behest and for his benefit. Discussing the case with Cohen in 2018, before he served his sentence, he asked me, voice filled with disbelief: ‘I go to jail because he gets his pecker pulled by a porn star?’ Now, finally, he can even the score. Cohen told me then that Trump ran his business like a mafia don: discussions were always one-to-one, with no third person who could act as a witness if collared by the Feds. But Cohen secretly recorded some of these conversations and the tapes were played in court. Trump is heard telling Cohen to pay-off another woman, Karen McDougal, a Playboy model, ‘in green’ – cash that could not be traced.
In that conversation, Trump can also be heard saying about McDougal: ‘So, what do we got to pay for this? One-fifty?’ There is an echo here of the famous smoking gun tape of Nixon discussing paying the Watergate burglars to keep quiet. ‘You could get a million dollars. And you could get it in cash.’ History, tragedy, farce. This time, the sums – and the personalities involved – are much smaller, the cover up about some spectacularly silly sex at a Lake Tahoe hotel, where Trump was appearing at a golf tournament. In her book, Full Disclosure, Stormy Daniels relates how she spanked Trump on his backside with a copy of Forbes that had his face on the cover. ‘I like you,’ Trump supposedly said, as he fastened his belt, ‘You remind me of my daughter.’
Stormy twisted the knife in her book, writing about Trump stripping down to white briefs and socks: ‘His hard, darting tongue pushed in and out of my mouth. I thought, He’s even a terrible kisser… I’d say the sex lasted two to three minutes. It may have been the least impressive sex I’d ever had.’ On the stand, last week, she said something equally believable but much sadder. Trump had allegedly been dangling the prospect of an appearance on The Apprentice – ‘Have you seen it? It’s a big hit’ – trying to persuade her to embark on an affair with him. She said he had told her: ‘This is the only way you’re getting out of the trailer park.’
Stormy has her book to sell and Cohen now makes a living publicly lambasting the man he once said he’d take a bullet for. But despite all the caveats, most legal analysts think things are looking bad for Trump, who is of course running for president again on the Republican ticket. Cohen’s most telling evidence today was about how Trump – always the cheapskate – tried to delay paying off Stormy until after the 2016 election. Either he’d be elected president and it wouldn’t matter; or he’d be defeated and he wouldn’t care. The payment was allegedly rushed through when it seemed she might go public before voters went to the polls. Cohen said: ‘He wasn’t thinking about Melania. This was all about the campaign.’
If Trump is convicted, it is theoretically possible he could go to jail. On the one hand, the judge in the case has treated Trump with all the deference due a former president – other defendants tweeting aggressively about a case would almost certainly have ended up in the cells for contempt. On the other hand, the judge also has a record on coming down hard on white collar crime – and the prosecution argues that if Cohen has served time for this, so should Trump. Trump would, though, appeal any conviction, and that appeal would not be heard until after the election in November. And whether or not he’s convicted, it’s unlikely that a conviction would on its own sway the election. To his most loyal supporters, killing bad stories is just what a candidate is supposed to do. And no one is shocked by Trump’s private life anymore.
That’s the view of Rick Wilson, a former Republican political consultant and co-founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project. ‘I don’t think anyone in this country, who is a supporter of his is not going to be a supporter of his after this thing is over. It’s not going to break off the guy in the red hat, it’s not going to break off the hardcore Maga supporter.’ However, Wilson says it’s significant that Nikki Haley is still winning 15 to 25 per cent of the vote in the Republican primaries, despite having been out of the race for months. That’s because there are softer Republicans and conservative independents who are ‘uncomfortable’ with the latest Trump chaos, whatever that might be. Wilson thinks a conviction could edge up Trump’s numbers in red states such as Alabama but will do nothing to expand his base, which is ‘a little crazier, a little tighter than it was.’ So: ‘Don’t expect any one of these trials, no matter how consequential they seem, to change the eventual election outcome one way or the other.’
Half of Scots want Hate Crime Act repealed
Back to Scotland, where hapless Humza Yousaf is still managing to cause the SNP problems even after his resignation. It’s been over a month since Yousaf’s controversial Hate Crime Act came into force, and it still isn’t going down particularly well with the people of Scotland — to put things mildly. It now transpires that almost half of all Scots would rather it be repealed, according to a new Savanta poll for the Scotsman. Talk about a flop…
The rather revealing survey, which polled 1,080 Scots between May 3-8, found that 49 per cent of Scots thought the new law should be repealed. Only 36 per cent felt it should remain in place, while 15 per cent didn’t know one way or the other. Mr S notes a generational split in the results, with two-thirds of older people more likely to call for the law to be abolished while only a third of those between 16 and 34 years old thought the same. Rather interestingly, the polling showed a gender split too, with men a little more likely to be in favour of repealing the Act than women, by 56 per cent to 43. Three-quarters of 2019 Tory voters thought the law should be scrapped while just under half of all Labour voters agreed — and even as many as 41 per cent of SNP voters felt it should be binned. Not like the Nats to be out of touch with the rest of the country…
Within the first month of the Hate Crime Act being enforced, almost 10,000 reports were made — yet only 1,000 have been recorded by Police Scotland. The Scottish Police Federation has long warned the new law would waste time and resources, with fears the additional work will push the police to ‘breaking point‘ after the force already had to cut back on investigating minor crimes at the start of the year. Meanwhile, women’s rights groups and campaigners like JK Rowling have expressed fears that the expansion of protected characteristics to include ‘transgender identity’ and not ‘sex’ means that one side of the trans debate could be unfairly targeted. And, to add insult to injury, Mr S highlighted last month that the Scottish government had spent, er, £400,000 of taxpayer’s cash on an information campaign for the new law. Crikey.
Will the public’s low opinion of the law persuade the SNP to repeal it? Don’t expect John Swinney’s ‘continuity cabinet’ to have that much sense…
Brits won’t stop getting pay rises
Are interest rates still heading ‘downwards’ as the Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey said last week? Homeowners across the country will be hoping so as average two-year mortgages are again approaching 6 per cent.
But the latest figures on the UK job market may dampen hopes of a cut coming soon. Britons have continued to receive above inflation pay rises. Figures just released by the Office for National Statistics show that – against expectations – pay growth in cash terms is at 5.7 per cent. Even when you factor in inflation, pay is still going up and has now hit 1.7 per cent – the highest in two years.
More timely figures from HMRC’s PAYE data show April pay jumping 6.9 per cent – though this was largely an effect of the increase in the national living wage. Those pay rises were most keenly felt in the accommodation and food services sector where workers saw pay bumps of over 9 per cent.
These March figures cover a crucial month where many employees have their pay reviewed so the unexpected wage rises will concern Bank of England rate setters who have said they are looking for pay growth to slow substantially before they begin to cut rates. At the end of last week markets were expecting the first such cut to come in June and the Bank's governor Andrew Bailey said interest rates were heading on a 'downwards' path. This morning’s wage figures may change that.
In the jobs data though, also released this morning, there were signs that the heat is finally coming out of the labour market. Unemployment rose to 4.3 per cent while the number of payrolled employees fell by 5,000 between February and March. The fall in employment is quite sharp too, with 178,000 workers leaving their jobs over the three months covered by the figures. Vacancies in the economy also fell for the twenty-second consecutive period with the number of jobseekers per job hitting 1.6, up from 1.4.
Meanwhile, those out of work and not looking for a job continued to rise. A further 104,000 people became economically inactive in the three months to March – equivalent to the entire city of Lincoln giving up on work. Since the first lockdown that number has now grown by over 830,000 to just under 9.4 million.
The ONS says the recent increases in inactivity were driven by long-term sickness which remains at a near-record high of 9.8 million. An increase in student numbers also contributed to the year-on-year rise of those abandoning the labour market.
The claimant count – a measure of those on unemployment benefits – also increased by nearly 9,000 in the month to April and is now over 29,000 higher than a year ago. We'll have a clearer picture later this morning as the DWP will slip out the latest figures on out of work benefits. You can track this on The Spectator's data hub.
The EU has ruined plastic water bottles
Hurrah, the problem of plastic waste has been sorted – as of this summer all plastic water bottles sold in the EU have to come with a cap that is tethered to the rest of the bottle. If the cap comes attached to the bottle, goes the thinking, then consumers are less likely to discard it – bottle and cap will end up being recycled together.
Tethered bottle tops are yet one more example of the EU way of doing things
But don’t count on it. People have already started moaning that they are struggling to drink out of the new bottles because the cap is in the way, or that it makes it hard to pour from the bottle. There is a solution, of course, which is simply to rip off the cap – which anyone will be able to do so long as they are capable of summoning 25 Newtons of force (which is the required standard laid down in the new rules). But then that, of course, would defeat the whole object of the new rules.
Tethered bottle tops are yet one more example of the EU way of doing things. They are a pretty trivial inconvenience, and it is true that sometimes detachable bottle caps don’t always find their way into my recycling. But then they don’t really take us much closer to the very desirable objective of eliminating plastic waste in the environment; they merely please people of a bureaucratic mindset. The real problem is that plastics take far too long to degrade when they are discarded in the environment. That is what turns an irritating chronic problem – litter – into a much more serious and longer-term issue.
What the EU – and everyone else – needs to be doing is to develop, or encourage the development of, plastics which can do the job of existing materials but which will break down in the environment in a matter of weeks or months, like paper and cardboard. Once that can be achieved then we can pretty well stop worrying about single-use plastics. It won’t mean, of course, that it will suddenly become acceptable to leave litter around – but that the consequences of abandoning plastics will no longer be there for decades and centuries to come.
In the meantime, tethered bottle caps promise to become an example of the futility of Brexit when it comes to trying to escape EU product standards. It may seem a trivial thing, but as tethered bottle caps become ubiquitous in Britain over the next few months it will be a sign that manufacturers are going to go along with EU standards even when serving the UK market. If you are running a bottling plant why would you want to go to the expense of running two parallel production lines, one for products destined for the UK market and another for those destined for the EU?
If you voted Brexit because you wanted to escape from pettifogging EU rules, you may be about to be disappointed.
Is Andrei Belousov Russia’s Albert Speer?
President Vladimir Putin’s appointment of the civilian economist Andrei Belousov as Russia’s defence minister in the third year of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine is bad news for Kyiv and its allies. Replacing the unpopular Sergei Shoigu with Belousov marks a clear shift in Putin’s strategy: he views the war as a battle of economic attrition.
There is hardly anyone better suited for the job than Belousov. A Soviet-trained economist, he cut his teeth in academia before joining the government just months before Putin became prime minister in 1999. Since then, he has climbed through the ranks to become Putin’s economic advisor and, from 2020, the First Deputy Prime Minister, overseeing the country’s finances and economy.
By giving Belousov the defence ministry, Putin is telling the world that he is ready for a long, costly war
A well-mannered, well-read, suave, non-corrupt aficionado of classical music typically wearing a blue suit (the uniform of Putin’s bureaucrats), Belousov can’t be more different to the bombastic, bemedalled and uniform-clad Shoigu. Shoigu was the defence minister who oversaw the botched Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. His reputation is marred by corruption in his inner circle, clumsy attempts at self-promotion and general incompetence.
Belousov has no record of corruption and no political or business connections with the country’s mighty industrialists. He is respected for his professional ability within government and notably has Putin’s ear. Most importantly, he is competent. He famously predicted the 2008-2009 financial crisis and a slowdown of the Russian economy in 2011-2013 in 2005.
But Putin’s entourage is full of competent economists and technocrats – at the end of the day, they were the ones who saved the country from a sanctions-induced collapse in 2022 following the beginning of the invasion. What makes Belousov different is his strong belief in the leading role of the state and government spending in the economy. He has rarely advocated for free markets or private investments, even when they were popular in the Kremlin. For him, the state is the alfa and omega of the national economy, the main spender, distributor and manager. He has frequently run into open disputes with industrialists and businessmen over his ideas to impose windfall taxes on exporters or capping food prices.
But Belousov is not the wooden-headed dogmatic Soviet apparatchik he may appear to be. Rather he is statist with a whiff of Keynesianism and a taste for modern technologies. He sees little value in globalisation, and for Russia, surrounded by competitors and outright enemies, the global economy is a zero-sum game.
As state capitalism in Russia becomes more about the state and less about capitalism by the day, and the economy runs on the fumes of rising military spending, Belousov seems like an ideal candidate to take on the role of defence minister.
His job will be to streamline the 7 per cent of GDP the government spends on the war. He will likely leave the actual war gaming to the generals, instead making sure that Russia’s military-industrial complex meets all the army’s needs without bankrupting the country. War spending will probably increase, mobilising the economy and society as a whole. By giving Belousov the defence ministry, Putin is telling the world that he is ready for a long and costly war.
To appoint a complete civilian to effectively oversee the war effort of a national economy this far into a war has precedent. It’s exactly what Adolf Hitler did in February 1942 when he appointed Albert Speer as Reich minister of armaments and war production. Historians say that Speer’s shrewdness and wide use of slave labour boosted the Nazis’ arms production and prolonged the war. Speer served 20 years in prison after the German defeat.
Just like Speer before him, Belousov’s task is to ensure there is no defeat, neither military nor economic. Both he, and Putin, will be hoping they can achieve that – for both their sakes.
Farewell Nadhim Zahawi, you won’t be missed
Nadhim Zahawi’s latest resignation letter was one of the all-time classics of the genre: unctuous, preening and pretentious even by the high standard of unctuousness, preeningness and pretentiousness set by his predecessors (including him).
‘Greatest honour of my life,’ he wrote. ‘Best country on earth…it was where I built a Great [capitalisation sic] British business, YouGov, and it was where I raised my wonderful family. And it was the nation to which I was proud to return such a favour when I led the world-leading coronavirus vaccine roll-out […] called upon to serve my country […] I kept schools open […] I ensured […] I was given the unique responsibility…’ On he burbled. And to demonstrate what a classy fellow he is, he even showily quoted his ‘most famous constituent’ – William Shakespeare – not once but twice.
Most of us, in turn, responded to this effusion of misty-eyed patriotism and candid self-love with: ‘Tax blunderer said what?’
Nothing, after all, shows your selfless devotion to your country and your countrymen like paying nearly £5 million in missing taxes and penalties after making a ‘careless mistake’, trying to bully reporters legitimately investigating the matter with legal letters, and getting the taxpayer to fork out to heat your private stables.
Now the plucky little lad from Baghdad enters on a new stage in his journey with destiny. He has signed up to be chair (non-executive: he has higher things to be getting on with) of Very Group, the retail group which is the largest remaining bastion of the Barclay family business empire. The Barclays: remember them? Got in some trouble with the bank, had to sell a bunch of assets (including, hem hem, this magazine), and climbed into bed with the Emiratis in the hope of pulling their fat out of the fire.
Very Group has recently taken on £125 million of debt from Carlyle Credit and International Media Investments, which is owned by UAE vice-president Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al-Nahyan. Even before this, our Nadhim was playing middleman between the Barclays and Emiratis in the hopes of effectively putting The Spectator and the Telegraph under the control of a foreign autocracy. That was thwarted when Parliament woke up to the idea that press freedom wasn’t best served by any foreign ownership, still less that foreign ownership, so now Zahawi is cashing in with a cushy number in retail. ‘If money goes before,’ as his most famous constituent had it, ‘all ways do lie open.’
Why is it, I wonder, that the image that comes to mind when I think of Zahawi is not one of a noble patriot so much as a backstreet spiv opening his trenchcoat to offer passers-by some flitches of green bacon and a selection of hooky pocketwatches?