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Starmer may regret bringing forward Trump’s state visit
One of the most notable features of Keir Starmer’s otherwise undistinguished premiership is the bromance that he seems to have formed with King Charles. Both men seem to have a shared sense of moral values and a reticence of character that appears to have served them well in what, up until now, has been a harmonious working relationship. However, the first serious cracks in their partnership might be about to appear, and they come courtesy of none other than Donald Trump.
It was announced earlier this year that the President would be hosted in Britain on a state visit, as he had been in 2019. The major reason for this unprecedented boon being offered was to obtain preferential treatment when it came to trade deals and tariffs, and it appears that playing on both Trump’s Anglophilia and sincere love of the royal family has been successful.
Charles is said to be appalled by Trump’s musings that Canada should be turned into America’s 51st state
However, a difficulty has now ensued. It has been reported – not least by Trump, who has gleefully called it a ‘fest’ – that the state visit will be taking place relatively soon, in September. This is against the wishes of the King, who would have preferred that if such a visitation needed to take place at all, it would have been a relatively quiet and informal occasion, rather than the full bells-and-whistles pageantry that such a state visit demands.
There are several reasons for this, but the main one is that Charles, who recently conducted a successful trip to Canada, is said to be appalled by Trump’s musings that the country – which still honours the King as its sovereign – should be turned into America’s 51st state. In the pointed and decidedly political address that he made when he opened Ottawa’s parliament last month, Charles declared that the country should stay ‘strong and free’. He said
Today, Canada faces another critical moment. Democracy, pluralism, the rule of law, self-determination, and freedom are values which Canadians hold dear, and ones which the government is determined to protect.
This has been echoed in typically wishy-washy fashion by Starmer, who said last week that ‘Canada is an independent, sovereign nation, and quite right too’. Yet there are murmurings from Buckingham Palace that hosting Trump goes against this rhetoric and that a state visit should have been delayed in order to allow the President to tone down some of his more inflammatory remarks. This has not happened, and the formal document that allows for the state visit to take place, the ‘manu regia’, was delivered to the White House last week after being signed by the King.
The King had supposedly wished to meet Trump informally first, with the sop that this encounter would allow the two to plan the most successful state visit together. In his invitation to Trump in February, he supposedly wrote, ‘that is why I would find it helpful for us to be able to discuss, together, a range of options’.
These desires, however, appear to have been steamrollered so that Trump can visit the country once again in a few months and so that Starmer can have his photo opportunities, playing the international statesman once more.
If this comes at the expense of what has been, up until now, a warm and fruitful partnership with the King, then he should reflect on the wisdom – or otherwise – of jeopardising a very different kind of special relationship. As the likes of Blair, Johnson and Truss all learnt, an aggrieved monarch is not a happy one, and the consequences can be regrettable indeed.
Join Sarah Vine, Michael Gove, Rachel Johnson and Hugo Swire as they discuss what it’s like Living with a Politician. Book tickets here
Former Scottish Tory MP jumps ship to Reform
Oh dear. It’s not been a good year for the Scottish Conservatives, who have seen multiple councillors defect to Reform UK ahead of next year’s Scottish parliament elections. Now, in a further blow to the Tories, it transpires a former Conservative MP has jumped ship to Nigel Farage’s party. Talk about a sinking ship, eh?
Ross Thomson – who had formerly backed Kemi Badenoch for the party leadership – less than a year after claiming his old group was the only party able to overcome the ‘threat’ of Farage. The eighth Conservative member in the region to turn his back on the blues, Thomson revealed his new colours after appearing in a party promotional video with Reform’s new chairman David Bull at the weekend. Explaining his change of heart, Thomson told the Press & Journal:
I did so because only Reform have the courage and answers to the issues facing Scotland and the United Kingdom and Reform are best placed to beat the SNP and sort a Holyrood system that’s in desperate need of Reform. Nigel Farage leads with conviction, courage, and above all, he listens. He is the only national leader who understands the serious challenges facing the north-east of Scotland – and what it will take to make our region thrive again.
Thomson stood down as an MP for Aberdeen South in 2019 and has since stayed away from frontline politics. But within the last 12 months, the former parliamentarian has been spotted campaigning for the Conservatives on the doors and threw his weight behind Badenoch at last year’s Tory leadership contest. Thomson was also a backer of Scottish Tory leader Russell Findlay during last year’s leadership race north of the border – writing on social media that Findlay ’embodies authentic conservative values and prinicples’.
The ex-Tory MP’s move follows the jump made by a number of other Conservative councillors to Farage’s crowd in the last few months – and the party even managed to persuade a Labour councillor to join their ranks. While Reform UK didn’t win the recent Hamilton by-election, the party’s candidate Ross Lambie came third place with 26 per cent of the vote and Farage’s lot have continued to poll well. While some polls suggest Reform could pick up as many as 15 MSPs from a standing start, others have suggested the start-up is on track to become the official opposition party of Scotland next year. Watch this space…
Jenrick: Lib Dems aren’t welcome in the Tory party
Tory leadership contender Robert Jenrick has insisted that the Conservatives must not beat around the bush about what they stand for – even if it means pushing more liberal members out. The shadow justice secretary made his comments to Popular Conservatism director Mark Littlewood. Jenrick told Littlewood:
I’ve always said that a political party can be a broad church, but it’s got to have a common creed. It’s got to have some kind of religion at the heart of it, and the Tory Party hasn’t had that in recent years. It has had two diverse opinions which has meant that you’ve left the public completely confused. What does this thing actually stand for? And there’s been far too many times I’ve been on the doorstep and people have said: ‘I don’t know the difference between you and the Lib Dems and the Labour Party enough.’
The Tory party has got to be very clear what it stands for, and with the greatest respect, that means that there might be some people who conclude this isn’t the right party for them. And I mean no disrespect to those individuals, just the party’s got to believe in something. It’s got to be clear what it stands for. So the public aren’t left confused.
It may be the first time someone as senior as Jenrick has effectively told Lib Dems using the Conservative banner out of convenience to, er, go away…
Watch the clip here:
France wants to know the true cost of immigration
The right-wing UDR group in the French parliament, led by Eric Ciotti, has called for a parliamentary commission to calculate the true cost of immigration. Ciotti is demanding a line-by-line accounting of France’s spending on healthcare, housing, education, and emergency aid for migrants, alongside their economic contributions. The French left recoiled instantly and predictably. To move the debate on, the Socialists tabled a no-confidence motion against the Bayrou government, ostensibly over pension reform, but widely seen as a bid to deflect Ciotti’s challenge. In Paris, few are fooled: immigration is the real flashpoint.
When it comes to immigration, the numbers are framed as dangerous, not because they’re made up, but because they might be true
Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the far-left firebrand and founder of LFI, thundered that Bayrou must resist ‘the creeping Trumpism of public life.’ Mélenchon is deliberately missing the point. All the right is asking for at this point is a procedural commission. It would be sober and long overdue. But for the French left, the idea that immigration might be scrutinised like any other line of public spending is intolerable. Much easier to cry racism, scream Trump, and table a motion of no confidence to distract and shut the whole thing down. When something looks threatening, change the subject.
Ciotti’s proposal may be politically explosive, but it is also needed. France’s public finances are in crisis. The deficit stands at €154 billion, and the Bayrou government is scrambling to find €20 billion in immediate cuts just to satisfy Brussels. Voters are being told they must expect austerity. The question of what immigration costs, and what it brings in, is now being posed more forcefully than ever. France’s annual bill for state-funded healthcare for migrants is now over €1.2 billion. Emergency accommodation for asylum seekers and illegal migrants costs around €1 billion a year. Add to that the costs of education, unemployment, integration schemes, housing aid, child support, and criminal justice. The numbers aren’t exactly hidden, but they’re never being added up in one place. And that, of course, is the point.
For decades, France’s political class has tiptoed around immigration, treating it as a moral question, rather than a policy one. For the left, asking how much it costs the country is considered out of line. The mere act of quantifying the impact and cost of immigration they claim invites racism. There is no other area of public spending subject to such hysteria. No one accuses the state of fascism for calculating how much the pension system costs. No one calls the budget ministry xenophobic for measuring how many billions go to education. But when it comes to immigration, the numbers are always framed as dangerous, not because they’re made up, but because they might be true.
The panic now gripping the left is not really about the commission itself. It’s about what might follow. Because if the numbers are bad, the consensus begins to unravel. For years, think tanks have insisted that immigration is a net positive, citing GDP growth and demographic renewal. But these arguments are increasingly threadbare. France has among the lowest immigrant employment rates in Europe, and those in work are often concentrated in low-productivity sectors. Immigrants contribute little in taxes and draw heavily on expensive social services. A recent study by the Observatoire de l’immigration et de la démographie argued that immigration is a long-term fiscal burden, not a benefit at all. They conclude that immigrants leave the workforce earlier than previously assumed, and with much higher dependency needs.
Ciotti’s proposal is dangerous to the establishment. It threatens to turn immigration into a budgetary issue, at a time that the focus will more than ever be on the budget. It will become increasingly difficult for the left to virtue signal. In the upcoming budget debate, the right-wing bloc and the Républicains plan to treat immigration as a line item. Something with a cost, a trade-off.
Marine Le Pen has repeatedly framed immigration as a ‘financial black hole’ for the French state, singling out programmes like free healthcare for undocumented migrants as an unjustifiable burden on the taxpayer. Jordan Bardella has also repeatedly called for an audit of public spending on immigration and integration. For the time being they’ve stopped short of endorsing Ciotti’s commission, but the RN has long championed the idea that immigration is not just a cultural or security issue but has a cost in fiscal terms.
The left senses this shift and is now desperately trying to contain it. Hence the vote of no confidence. It’s unlikely that the motion will pass at this point, it’s unclear for the time being whether the Républicains will support it. But it will allow the left to take back control of the conversation. To frame Ciotti and his allies as demagogues, and Bayrou as weak for tolerating their rhetoric. In effect, the motion of no confidence is a warning shot to the centre.
Bayrou, meanwhile, is trying to keep his government afloat. He’s weakened by the coming budget shortfall. Austerity is looming. Unions are calling for strikes. Bayrou can’t afford to alienate the right, which he depends on for votes. But neither can he be seen to indulge their demands, lest he lose control of his own centre-left flank. So he’s hesitating. And while he hesitates, the right advances with growing popular support.
The question now is whether anyone in government is honest enough to admit the true cost of immigration. Ciotti has placed that question squarely on the table. The left wants to kick the table over. The coming weeks will reveal whether the Bayrou government has the nerve to let the immigration debate happen, or whether it bows once again to the forces of strategic amnesia. The numbers, meanwhile, won’t go away.
Why is the Michelin Guide launching in Saudi Arabia?
Having only a short time ago been synonymous with the terrors of its Wahabiist regime, the temptations and pleasures of Saudi Arabia now seem to know no bounds. Whether it’s Emily Maitlis crooning over the feel of her all-covering abaya as she slips into the Jeddah market, Boris and Carrie Johnson posting pics of their brood in sun-kissed repose on one of the Kingdom’s newly opened (but still booze-free) Red Sea resorts, the fanfare and billions swirling around the desert city of AlUla or any number of ‘art practitioners’ flying in for a calendar packed with Biennales, art fairs and exhibitions, you’d think this truly was the freest, easiest, and most stimulating cultural cornucopia on earth.
Michelin seems to be the latest western outfit to be drunk on generous lashings of Saudi PR
And it most certainly does not stop there. The next stop on the western breathlessness train is food. The Michelin guide, founded in 1900, has just announced that its reviewers are setting to work on rating the best the Kingdom has to offer.
To read the press release you’d be forgiven for thinking that every last edible morsel in Saudi Arabia is suffused not only with Michelin-starred quality but also shot through with gold-medal, never-before-seen warmth and friendliness. It’s a weird message: on one hand, Michelin is meant to be impartial and severe, conjuring images of dowdy podgy reviewers who care only for excellence. On the other, Michelin seems to be the latest western outfit to be drunk on generous lashings of Saudi PR. Its ‘destination partner’ is the Saudi Arabia Culinary Arts Commission, one of dozens of state-funded bodies tasked with throwing money at its global seduction campaign.
It’s working. ‘The warmth and generosity of the Saudi people further enhance the travel experience, making every visitor feel welcome and valued,’ gushes the release. ‘From the heartwarming traditional Saudi restaurants keen to preserve and showcase recipes that have been handed down through the generations, to the always-packed restaurants, and jaw-dropping malls such as VIA Riyadh that feature renowned global brands.’
If the sound of eating in a mall is of limited appeal, especially for would-be Michelin-starred diners, then do not worry. ‘Unforgettable experiences aplenty; be it kabsa in a Najd setting or Mubahar rice with the locals, fabulous mini cheese and honey glazed sambosas galore or a mouthwatering masabeeb, the generosity, pride, and hospitality remain firmly in the memory. Additionally, our inspectors observed an impressive culinary diversity, where American cuisine mingles with Japanese, Chinese, Greek, and Thai. Whether it’s exceptional Saudi dishes or global favourites, Saudi Arabia offers something for every international traveller eager to explore the captivating sights while savouring the diverse culinary offerings.’
Wow. What a place! Paradise on earth. But where is the critical voice of Michelin in this excitable blather? Perhaps, like all the other excitable western cultural outfits suddenly ‘discovering’ Saudi Arabia, it is suspending its critical faculties. I do not know what role the deep pockets of the Kingdom may play in any such suspension, but what I do know is that it has begun to sound awfully familiar.
Perhaps it’s just a mixture of good-old Arabism with a thrill of the new. I remember hearing that Abu Dhabi was paradise about 20 years ago: an expat’s dream. I went to visit a friend who had moved there for work, while briefly considering taking a job at the National, its western-style newspaper. Bottomless brunch! A hive of activity! But I found the vast apartments my friends lived in poorly built and soulless in the extreme, and the bottomless brunches, in the dining rooms of corporate American hotel chains, truly grim. I don’t think I’ve ever had a more depressing hangover than the one that crept upon me post-brunch as payback for all the Prosecco I had drunk to try to find that germ of fun.
Dubai, of course, is the biggest hype-machine in the Gulf. A few years ago, I decided to go and check it out, and see if perhaps I had dismissed it out of sheer snobbery. Maybe it would be delicious, fun, convenient, and buzzy like the world seemed to be saying. It was none of those things. It felt culturally third-rate, clapped out, held together with poor-quality materials that were ugly or bling or both; bisected by relentless overpasses and motorways, throttled with traffic, and full of expensive resorts whose raved-about restaurants served stuff London left behind in the 1990s.
Saudi Arabia may be different; its recent past is far more brutal than that of the Emirates, but it also has a longer, deeper culture beyond the frightful (and thankfully mellowing) tradition of Wahabiist Islam. I doubt the malls will be a nice place to eat, and as Saudi rides the wave of sudden admittance into the western travel and cultural canon, attention-grabbing restaurants and trend-drunk dishes will no doubt be numerous. But there will also be some interesting, delicious food that channels older skills and traditions. I just hope the Michelin guide has the time to find these amid all the dazzle.
Israel has weakened Iran – but not destroyed it
With the ceasefire between Iran and Israel so far holding, a preliminary assessment of the 12-day campaign is now possible. Jerusalem and its US ally achieved a considerable amount. Iran’s deficiencies on a tactical level were laid bare. Structural flaws in Tehran’s strategy of war by proxy have been made apparent. Both the nuclear and ballistic missile programmes have been significantly damaged. The hands of the doomsday clock, which were getting close to midnight, have been vigorously pulled back.
Unlike the actual digital clock in Tehran’s Palestine Square, however, which was destroyed by Israeli ordnance during the campaign, the Iranian strategy for the destruction of Israel has not been comprehensively defeated. Nor does the regime appear to be currently in danger for its existence. This was not a Waterloo moment. Iran has suffered a series of telling blows which significantly weaken it, without fundamentally changing the strategic picture.
Iran’s proxies were the pistol that failed to go off in the third act
With regard to the nuclear programme, the joint US and Israeli action against nuclear sites at Natanz, Fordow, Tabriz, Arak and Isfahan caused considerable damage. Precisely how much cannot yet be conclusively ascertained. A leaked defense intelligence agency report has suggested that the nuclear programme has probably been set back by only a few months. Iran’s supply of around 400 kilograms of enriched uranium remains intact. This means that Iran is likely to recommence efforts toward reassembling its capacities for uranium enrichment.
The killing of a number of the most senior nuclear scientists, again, will complicate and set back Iranian efforts to get the programme back on track. At the same time, the Iranian-based knowledge which produced these scientists has obviously not been destroyed.
Israel’s successful targeting and removal of top figures in Iran’s scientific and military establishment was one of the most notable elements of the events of the last days. Jerusalem revealed what had long been suspected: that its intelligence organisations have thoroughly penetrated Iran’s centres of government and that it possesses an organisation on Iranian soil.
This structure, apparently staffed largely by Iranians themselves under Israeli direction, can be activated at will and can then strike with telling effect before disappearing back into the shadows. The assembling of this body is a significant achievement for Israel and will be giving Iranian officials pause. It can and undoubtedly will be used again when Israel deems it appropriate. Israel has shown in recent days that this structure is able to engage in sabotage using drones and explosives, as well as the targeting of specific regime figures.
Another notable detail of recent events was the failure of Iran’s proxy strategy. Over the last forty years, Teheran has invested heavily in the building of and/or sponsoring of a number of Islamist political-military organisations across the region. The Qods Force, the external operations wing of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), was responsible for the management of this project, in accordance with the vision of its long-time leader, the late Major-General Qassem Soleimani. According to this strategy, Iran-supported organisations would become the most powerful element in their local arena, and would then be available both to advance Iranian power projection and to assist Iran when needed.
This strategy had appeared to pay dividends in recent years. On the eve of the current war, in October 2023, the Lebanese Hezbollah organisation, Iran’s prototype proxy, was the most powerful political and military force in Lebanon. The Shia militias of the Hashd al-Shaabi (Popular Mobilisation Units) dominated Iraq. The Ansar Allah (Houthis) controlled the Yemeni capital and a stretch of the coast. Hamas, Iran’s Palestinian clients, controlled Gaza and were the best organised and most popular force among the Palestinians. And Bashar Assad, Tehran’s sole state ally, had been saved by the IRGC’s methods and appeared victorious in his country’s long civil war.
Israel had long feared that the proxies, and specifically Hezbollah, would strike the Jewish state with a missile barrage in the event that Jerusalem took action against the Iranian nuclear program. In the event, however, Soleimani’s vision, like other ideological constructs before it, had evidently failed to factor in a crucial element: namely, the preference given by the various proxies to their own local interests over their supposed obligations to the Iran-led alliance.
Hamas’s independent decision to launch its war from Gaza on 7 October reflected its own independent decision-making. The half-hearted and partial response of the various proxies reflected theirs. This piecemeal response also enabled Israel to focus on the various components of the Iran-led bloc, and then on Iran itself, without ever facing a concerted effort from the alliance. The result: none of the proxies were able or willing to come to Tehran’s aid when Israel turned its attention to their patron. Iran’s proxies were the pistol that failed to go off in the third act.
Iran succeeded, nevertheless, in penetrating Israel’s air defences on a number of telling occasions. The Israeli death toll, 28 civilians killed, is considerable. A well-organised Home Front Command, which issued clear instructions and a well-prepared infrastructure of shelters, undoubtedly prevented a much higher death toll. But the damage to property and infrastructure was extensive and leaves many questions to be answered.
The US decision to rapidly force through a ceasefire and President Trump’s subsequent public berating of Israel point to significant differences between Jerusalem and Washington. While for Israel, the Iranian threat is central and existential, the US president appears to operate from instinct rather than strategy, now backing an ally with unprecedented determination, now rapidly bringing the campaign to an inconclusive halt.
Ultimately, the events of the last 12 days must be seen as an episode in a long and ongoing conflict, rather than a final or decisive moment. Israel and the United States have broken the taboo and dispelled the sense of dread that surrounded the notion of military action against the Iranian nuclear program. Iran has been revealed as far weaker than its propaganda would suggest. Nevertheless, the regime is not broken. Its ambitions remain intact. It will now set about trying to revive its capacities.
The question now remaining is whether Israel will, in line with its practice in Lebanon, Syria and Gaza, be able to commence periodic but ongoing operations against Iran in order to disrupt and frustrate Iranian attempts to rebuild the nuclear and ballistic missile programmes. Until such time as the Iranian people can organise to rid themselves of a regime which a large majority of them clearly reject, this will be the key imperative.
Is the Bank of England turning on Rachel Reeves?
Rachel Reeves does not have many supporters left. The bond markets don’t think much of the Chancellor. Business groups have rubbished her policies, and so have many of the UK’s largest companies. Meanwhile, Labour backbenchers are furious about both the chaos over the winter fuel allowance and the cuts to the welfare budget. Now, it looks as if the Bank of England may have turned on her as well, if comments from the Bank’s governor are anything to go on.
We might expect Andrew Bailey to avoid any direct criticism of the Chancellor. After all, she is his boss. What’s more, a public split between the UK’s two most important financial officials would be deeply damaging, especially given the vast amounts of money the UK has to borrow on the global markets every year. Even so, speaking to the House of Lords economic affair committee yesterday, he sounded a lot more critical than usual.
Just about everybody, except possibly Reeves, can see that the British economy is heading for big trouble
The obsession with the ‘fiscal rules’, Bailey argued, risked turning into a distraction, with too much emphasis on a single number, and not enough attention paid to the country’s longer-term fiscal challenges. Even more seriously, he argued that the steep rise in National Insurance was starting to destroy jobs. ‘We are starting to see a softening of the labour market, and that is the message I get when I go around the country talking to firms,’ he said.
These are hardly minor points. The ‘fiscal rules’ are a centrepiece of Reeves’s plans, designed to create a framework of stability that will encourage investment and boost growth. And the NI rise was meant to stabilise the public finances, as well as raise the extra money needed for investment in public services and new industries. If they are the wrong policies, then Reeves’s entire economic strategy starts to fall apart.
In reality, it is not hard to work out what is going on here. Just about everybody, except possibly Reeves herself, can see that the British economy is heading into big trouble. Reeves’s first Budget killed off growth, spending is spiralling out of control, and borrowing is soaring.
In the autumn, the Chancellor will be forced into another big round of tax increases, and that will plunge the economy into a full-blown recession. There may well be a gilts crisis as well if the markets lose faith in the Labour government’s ability to balance the books. The Bank is quite rightly trying to avoid the blame for that – and the only way it can do that is by putting as much distance between the governor and the Chancellor as possible.
Join Sarah Vine, Michael Gove, Rachel Johnson and Hugo Swire as they discuss what it’s like Living with a Politician. Book tickets here
Britain is racing towards a fresh cost-of-living crisis
The poorest Brits now owe £6.6 billion in unpaid council tax – a record high and up some 85 per cent since before the pandemic. That’s according to data released this morning by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, which suggests Britain is plunging back into a cost-of-living crisis. What’s more, a report also out today by the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) finds that between 2022 and 2024, some 400,000 more households slipped into arrears, taking the total number of people in debt to their local council to 1.8 million.
The CSJ’s report also finds that 97 per cent of those in arrears have at least one ‘personal vulnerability’ compared to 47 per cent in the whole population. Those in arrears are three times more likely to have health problems and twice as likely to be grieving or to have recently lost their job.
If spending only goes up, so too must tax
Of course there are some people who are simply dodging paying their council tax and Matthew Greenwood, author of the CSJ’s report, says they should face ‘the full force of the law’. But he goes on to say:
Our report shows that the vast majority of those in arrears are not refusing to pay – they’re simply unable to, often due to poor health, job loss or other negative life shocks. Under the current rules, missing just one payment can make someone liable for the entire year’s bill within weeks, triggering bailiff action and, in some cases, threat of imprisonment. It’s an outdated, punitive system that fails to distinguish between those who won’t pay and those who genuinely can’t.’
The CSJ would like to see that punitive system change with more help provided for those struggling to pay their bills.
The news, the CSJ says, flies in the face of the government’s commitment not to increase taxes on working people. But separate research from the Institute of Fiscal Studies finds that council tax is likely to rise at its fastest pace for two decades.
Core spending in local government rose by 3.5 per cent above inflation annually over the last two years and the spending review has it going up by 2.6 per cent a year on average for the next three years. That’s a better settlement than many central government departments were granted by the Chancellor, but rather than increased funding from the Treasury, the vast majority of this cash increase will come from a higher council tax take. The message to councils from Rachel Reeves seems to be that they should make use of the maximum allowed bill increase of 5 per cent a year.
With the squeezed and derided rich now choosing to leave the country rather than pay ever more tax, the burden for our ballooning state is increasingly going to have to fall on lower- and middle-income earners. The government has now pledged another £30 billion on defence, the winter fuel U-turn has proved ministers do not have the gumption to take on pensioners and now with a large-scale rebellion over Liz Kendall’s very modest welfare reforms – that only shave £5 billion off a sickness benefits bill that will rise to around £100 billion whatever happens in the Commons – it seems that our politicians are only prepared to take public spending in one direction.
As Paul Johnson of the IFS noted yesterday: if spending only goes up, so too must tax. What we see in today’s council tax data is a stark reminder that contrary to polling of the public – who think the rich should just pay for everything – this burden is going to have to fall on poorer and average shoulders. While Britain’s overall tax burden is now at a post-war high, individual tax levels remain lower than in many countries with comparable public spending. That gap will surely have to close if the state continues to grow.
Yet no political party seems willing to make a serious case for a smaller, leaner state – not even the Tories, who won’t support even modest welfare cuts because they’d rather see Keir Starmer lose a vote. The result? A system where even record-high taxation can’t keep pace with rising demands. If politicians continue to dodge the argument for restraint, voters will soon realise that it’s not just the welfare state that’s unsustainable, it’s their own household budgets too.
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Nigel Farage and George Galloway share a common problem
A more gracious person would refrain from saying, ‘I told you so’, but I’m not a gracious person. So, as George Galloway announces his backing for another Scottish independence referendum, allow me to say – nay, crow – I told you so.
Galloway, leader of the Workers party, says he and his party ‘support the right of the Scots to self-determination’ and that ‘the time for another referendum is close’. He adds: ‘Speaking personally, I can no longer support the British state as presently constituted.’
If you’re familiar with politics north of the border, you might be wondering if this is the same George Galloway who travelled Scotland in 2014 on his Just Say Naw tour, urging an anti-independence vote in that year’s referendum. It is indeed the man who said: ‘It sickens me that the country of my birth is threatened by such obsolescent dogma. Flags and borders do not matter a jot.’
Galloway hasn’t stopped being a Unionist; he never was one
It is also the man who was the face (though not the leader) of All for Unity, which rocked up on the scene ahead of the 2021 Holyrood elections and declared itself the anti-independence alliance that would unite the pro-Union parties. This was news to the pro-Union parties and they responded with the political equivalent of ‘new fone, who dis?’ All for Unity more than earned the disregard it received. It was essentially a Twitter account doing a bad impersonation of a political party, but what it lacked in electoral strategy it made up for in digital noisemaking.
Its social media outriders took a particular dislike to me, which is shocking because I’m lovely. All I’d done was repeatedly point out in The Spectator that they were a hopeless shower of political halfwits. Some people can be very sensitive.
I didn’t just argue that All for Unity risked splitting the anti-independence vote, I pointed out that it wasn’t all that anti-independence. For one, its tactical voting guide endorsed a Labour MSP who had called on Boris Johnson to hand powers over referendums to Holyrood.
For another, its lead candidate on the South of Scotland list was George Galloway. Just a few years earlier, he had said it would be a ‘democratic monstrosity’ if Westminster refused Holyrood another referendum. A few years before that, he had explained why he wasn’t joining the official No campaign in the Scottish referendum: ‘because it’s a Unionist campaign, because it flies the Union Jack. I hate the Union Jack.’ Galloway hasn’t stopped being a Unionist; he never was one.
Galloway has gone from opposing independence in 2014, to asserting Scotland’s right to indyref2 in 2017, to campaigning against indyref2 in 2021, to reverting to support for indyref2 in 2025. He’s pivoted more times than Mikhail Baryshnikov.
And here’s where I get to gloat. Total vindication: unlocked.
This is one of the paradoxes of populism. Voters will often say, ‘At least you know where you stand with him’, when the him in question routinely adopts stances and ditches them again without any intervening search of the soul. ‘Every politician does that,’ you might protest. ‘My point exactly,’ I would reply. Populists claim politicians are all the same, then set about proving it.
This unreliability is a hallmark not only of leftist populism but of its right-wing counterpart. Reform is an obvious example. Is Nigel Farage’s party left or right, authoritarian or libertarian, interventionist or market-driven? Is it pro- or anti-economic migration, for or against multiculturalism, all-in or sceptical on devolution? The answer is that it holds all of these positions, switching out one for another as expediency (or the leader’s whims) demands.
Populism is very useful if you aim to disrupt the status quo but its lack of ideological or intellectual moorings leaves it vulnerable to mainstream capture. When voters become anxious about political turmoil, they can turn to the reassuring and the familiar, and populists have no option but to follow them. If disruption is all you aim for, populism is all you require, but if you want to replace the established order with a new one, you also need a philosophy that is held sincerely, fiercely and with constancy.
Reform has no such philosophy and is too fragile a coalition of conflicting interests and incoherent instincts to acquire one between now and the next election. As such, the party can only be reactive, loudly opposing everything Labour does and reminding the Tories of everything they failed to do. Farage need only point to the parlous state of Britain to dramatise the ill effects of Labour and Tory governance. That might be enough to win a general election but it is not a strategy for implementing the kind of transformation (political, cultural, institutional) that national revival demands. Reform gives voters an opportunity to chuck a spanner in the gears but offers no prospect of new machinery.
Nigel Farage, like George Galloway, is a populist and populism is all you’ll ever get from him. Trust me: I told you so before.
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Starmer’s national security strategy fools no one
Sometimes it feels as if the government’s approach to defence and security could be summed up by the venerable punchline of the Irish farmer, ‘I wouldn’t have started from here’. Despite having had more than four years as Leader of the Opposition to prepare, Sir Keir Starmer never quite seems able to seize the initiative as Prime Minister, often being left puce and blinking.
Yesterday saw the publication of the UK’s national security strategy (NSS) 2025, Security for the British people in a dangerous world. It had been announced in February and promised before this week’s Nato summit (in fact, it was released on the summit’s first day). The Prime Minister argued it would pull together a number of extant reviews: the Strategic Defence Review, the AUKUS review, the Defence Industrial Strategy, the China audit, the FCDO’s three internal reviews and the strategy for countering state threats, among others.
The danger is that if everything is ‘national security’, then nothing is
It was obvious at the time that this sequencing was nonsensical. The UK’s first national security strategy, Security in an interdependent world, was a product of Gordon Brown’s government, issued in 2008, and it was genuinely innovative. It was meant to conceptualise ‘national security’ in a new and broad way, taking in not just traditional elements like military operations, diplomacy, intelligence and counter-terrorism, but ‘threats to individual citizens and to our way of life, as well as to the integrity and interests of the state’.
Brown billed it as ‘a single, overarching strategy bringing together the objectives and plans of all departments, agencies and forces involved in protecting our national security’ From it flowed a number of discrete tasks and policies. The approach was not complicated: determine the big picture, then decide how to support it in practical terms.
Starmer’s national security strategy has done almost the opposite (though that ascribes to it too much coherence). We have seen the Strategic Defence Review setting out the future shape and tasks of the armed forces, three internal FCDO reviews have reported to the Foreign Secretary (but not released) and as much of the China audit as we will see is in the National Security Strategy.
Meanwhile the Defence Industrial Strategy is a work in progress, and the AUKUS review risks being made irrelevant by the Trump administration’s own re-examination. So it is neither top-down, nor bottom-up, but rather lacking any direction at all. I wouldn’t have started from here.
One important element of the NSS is an announcement on expenditure. The Nato summit is expected to agree a spending target of 5 per cent of GDP, made up of 3.5 per cent on core defence capabilities and 1.5 per cent on ‘resilience and security’. The NSS contains an ‘historic commitment to spend 5 per cent of GDP on national security’, which is encouraging, but the detail is teeming with devils.
First, the date by which the UK is expected to meet this level of spending is 2035. That is at least two general elections away; Vladimir Putin will turn 83 and Donald Trump will be 89, if either is spared. Meanwhile, the Royal Navy’s Vanguard-class ballistic missile submarines will be coming out of service. It is a long time away, and it remains a target without any practical steps to reach it.
The NSS also widens the scope of ‘national security’ further than ever before. Including energy policy may seem defensible, but attaching the label to ‘green growth’, ‘inequality’ or ‘stripping out red tape’ starts to stretch credibility. The interdepartmental nature of the ‘national security’ umbrella is vital – but the danger is that if everything is ‘national security’, then nothing is.
This matters because if the government simply moves spending from one column on its mother of all spreadsheets to another, it does not acquire a new capability. Equally, there is no deterrent effect on Russia or China, or ‘Parma or Spain, or any prince of Europe, should dare to invade the borders of my realm’ – as Elizabeth I once so neatly put it. If the Prime Minister designates Border Security Command as a ‘national security’ asset, that is £150 million he had already earmarked, not new investment.
The 2008 national security strategy was a serious and systematic attempt, supervised and delivered by Robert Hannigan and Patrick Turner, to design an overarching framework for the defence of the UK and its interests, then develop policies to support that framework. Its 2025 successor does not –by its nature and timing cannot – achieve that same goal.
The national security strategy is not all bad; it comes in large part from the pen of the formidable Professor John Bew, who spent five years in Downing Street as foreign policy adviser to four successive prime ministers. But he has been asked to change the tyres on a moving car, creating a strategy around half a dozen other reviews in various stages of progress. There must be very serious concerns now that it is little more than a centripetal instrument for pulling in enough government expenditure nominally to meet our Nato obligations. Our allies are unlikely to be fooled, and our enemies will certainly not be.
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Why Coronation Street shows the future of TV is doomed
In what looks like an act of remarkable stinginess, bosses at ITV have reportedly cancelled the traditional freebie summer party for the cast and crew of Coronation Street. The show is still one of the network’s top-rated programmes, and the beleaguered staff are said to be ‘furious’, according to the report in the Sun. I don’t blame them.
This is trivia, yes, but I think it’s a telling moment along the pathway of television’s slow demise. The medium is contracting. Just a few months ago, ITV announced that it was reducing the number of episodes of both Coronation Street and Emmerdale to a mere five half-hour slots each per week. Cast contracts have also been redrawn to bring down the number of episodes an actor is guaranteed per year. The soaps are slowly shrinking.
What will this contraction leave us with? What will we do without television?
I worked on both these shows – getting on for thirty years ago now – at the time when the opposite was very much the case. Back then, we would often have to stick characters superfluously into scenes just to fulfil the actors’ contract guarantees. You may wonder why Rita, say, would hover with a couple of lines in the Rovers every now and then – ‘A gin and lime, Betty, after the day I’ve been having’. And I was in the room as the decrees came down from high level at ITV that the number of episodes was going up to five a week. Now I have the sensation of watching the tide go out again.
However, even in those glory days, there was often a feeling that for the biggest shows on the box, which were bringing in millions of pounds in advertising revenue, things could be surprisingly threadbare on ground level. Because production had always been achieved at the chip shop level, it was considered that a level of cheapness and haste was acceptable. Ask for any kind of complicated or specially designed prop and you were inviting trouble. There was never enough time, and so retakes – and even rehearsal in the traditional sense – were impossible. Huge amounts were spent on extraneous things – big-budget trailers and direct-to-video spin-offs – that didn’t seem to increase the ratings at all. Meanwhile, staff on the actual show were having to rush scenes at the end of the day for fear of a few minutes of overtime.
I remember looking at the rather battered third-hand car driven by the then-producer of Emmerdale and thinking, ‘I highly doubt that the person behind the second biggest show in the States is getting about in a vehicle like that’.
The increase in episodes turned the soaps from occasional treats to everyday, routine background material. Their ubiquity, perversely, made them easier to ignore; keeping up with them as they started running double episodes on top of the regular instalments required a major lifestyle alteration from viewers. Standards, inevitably, slipped. The last time I tuned in regularly, I kept noticing mismatches in continuity and a depressing uniformity of tone, with every scene played and shot in much the same way as every other one. There’s no time to do anything else.
The contraction of these shows is a sign of something wider and more significant. British TV as a whole is contracting. Revenues in ITV plummeted by 8 per cent in nine months in 2024. In March, the BBC – the begging bowl held out as per – whined that ‘without intervention, it will be difficult to maintain the current ambition and volume of UK content’. It revealed that its ‘content spend’ – what a gruesome term – for the coming 12 months will drop by £150 million.
The thinking is that the British broadcasters cannot compete on an equal footing with the high production values of the international (for which, read American) streamers. But the streamers are in trouble too, with rising subscription fees and the introduction of interruptions from adverts into their programmes. It may well be that TV streaming is itself a bubble, though a surprisingly long-lived one.
What will this contraction leave us with? What will we do without television? At what point does it stop being recognisably television? Has that, in fact, already happened?
Maybe AI will inspire new methods and new ideas? I doubt it. Old brands are already everywhere in the media – who would ever have thought that three of the big shows of 2025 would be Bergerac, Blankety Blank and All Creatures Great And Small? What next – gritty, multi-ethnic reimaginings of Rentaghost or Don’t Wait Up?
AI will surely smash straight into the TV industry’s reliance on the familiar and the very old. You’re frustrated that there are only 12 episodes of Fawlty Towers? Enter a prompt and get 100 more.
But a bespoke portfolio of AI content is conceivable. I long for a TV drama that tells its story in chronological order, and I’m beginning to think that’s only going to happen if I ask a computer to provide me with one.
I find myself strangely optimistic about this brave new world – not for the programme makers, but for viewers. The disconnect between these two groups has got ever wider and more extreme and has hastened the inevitable demise of TV. AI will, surely, be a better judge of what people actually want to watch than some spotty Herbert with a 2:1 in Diversity Studies. Roll out the robots!
No, I’m not going to bloody Glasto
‘Are you going to Glasto?’ Just the name – in that smug, shortened form – is enough to set my left eyelid twitching, the way it does when I read emails from people who still include pronouns in their signature. ‘Glasto’, trailing the self-satisfied whiff of BBC executives high-tailing it from Hampstead on a taxpayer-funded jolly, of hedgies glamping in a five-grand-a-night yurt and the sort of inherited wealth that means you crash in a mate’s eight-bedroom Old Rectory within the free ticket zone, rather than camping cheek-by-unwashed-jowl with the masses.
No, I am not going to Glastonbury. The last time I went – and I can tell you the exact year, because I found the programme while going through some boxes in the attic – was 2004. I think it was the first year the Great Wall went up to stop people scaling the fence and, getting there late on the Wednesday, we had to pitch our tents hard against it – which was like camping in the shadow of the Berlin Wall, though less convivial.
That was the year I swore I’d never go again: the crowds were insane (150,000) and just moving between stages took at least two hours. The five days were an exhausting feat of endurance with the odd highlight (James Brown on the Pyramid stage, Orbital headlining the Other Stage on the Sunday night) but it was such a crush to move around the site, you were doing well if you managed to see even a couple of bands a day.
Glastonbury also has the worst sanitation of any festival I’ve ever been to, either as a punter or when I was working for the news teams of Radio 1 and, later, 6 Music. (See Julian Temple-Morris’s 2006 documentary for a taster.) It was only bearable back in 2004 because my cousin’s band were playing the New Bands stage and I had a backstage pass so could use their loos. (Shamefully, I didn’t even watch their set as they clashed with P.J. Harvey.) Apparently there are showers at Glastonbury, but I’ve never had one – or met anyone who has.
This year a whopping 210,000 tickets have been sold. A built-up area of over 200,000 is classed as a city by the Office for National Statistics. From today, Worthy Farm in Somerset will have a temporary population somewhere between that of Reading and Wolverhampton.
Even before you look at the line-up, which is lacklustre (my only must-see would be Neil Young, but I have tickets for his Hyde Park concert next month; these days I only go to gigs where I can sleep in my own bed), just the logistics of getting around the site are about as appealing as the SAS selection march over the Brecon Beacons. You can, of course, smoke weed and take shrooms to mitigate the privation – only one of your mates will invariably do a Syd Barrett and require looking after for the rest of the weekend. And depending on the weather, there will be sunburn or trench-foot – or both – to contend with.
You should also forget any Alexa Chung-style outfits you had planned; England in June can be extraordinarily cold and unsettled (remember, D-Day had to be postponed). I vaguely recall watching Paul McCartney while I was wrapped in a damp blanket from the Oxfam stall that smelt of the old person who’d died in it.
Of course, moaning that Glastonbury isn’t what it used to be is all part of the ageing process – I get that. ‘What do you mean, you need money, darling?’ asked my mother when I wanted her to sub me for my ticket sometime in the late 1990s. ‘I didn’t pay anything when I went.’ She went to the first Glastonbury (then the Pilton Pop Festival, but that moniker was swiftly dropped, presumably being less marketable to Trustafarian twats). They watched Marc Bolan and drank free milk from the dairy. This year a pint of festival cider will cost you around £7, which isn’t outrageous – but remember to make it last because the queues for both bars and bogs will be apocalyptic. And good luck finding your friends ever again if you need to head off on your own during the 1975’s set for a pee.
Apparently there are showers at Glastonbury, but I’ve never had one – or met anyone who has
Even if you can get close enough to the stage – rather than watching on the giant screens – your vision will be obscured by the serried ranks of Palestine flags. One of the most wilful misconceptions about Glastonbury is that it’s a lovely crowd of chilled old hippies. Try sticking your head under a standpipe meant for drinking water because you just can’t go another day without washing your hair and hear the queue of knit-your-own-Guardian readers erupt with language that would make a paratrooper blush.
There’s vast cognitive dissonance between the festival giving millions to charities like Greenpeace and the grotesque amounts of rubbish and single-use plastic (mostly in the form of abandoned tents, wellies and ponchos) left behind. This year there’s added spice – in addition to the usual ‘festival flu’ and STDs – with warning of a measles outbreak from the UK Health Security Agency, due to all the unvaccinated Gen Z-ers, born in the wake of the MMR scare. There have also been thousands of cases of Covid reported by people who went to Download earlier this month.
But there’s no need to spank nearly £400 on a Glastonbury ticket (you can’t, in any case – they sold out in 35 minutes). To recreate the experience at home, just do the following: stop washing and use baby wipes instead. Retch every time you open the bathroom door and give yourself a UTI by going for as long as you can without peeing. Throw your phone in a bush. Eat a burrata and butternut squash flatbread wrap and then bin £20. Fail to find your bed and have a couple of hours of fitful sleep outside while playing industrial techno through a tinny speaker. Oh – and, crucially, watch it all on TV. That’s really what all those Glasto-goers will be doing anyway.
The chat show is dead
I’ve been having this recurring nightmare recently that involves James Corden. The year is 2045. Society has collapsed and London is under quarantine. There is no transport in the city, so survivors get around on foot – though, for some inexplicable reason, TfL workers are still on strike. I live in a bin and survive on a diet of eggshells and cold Rustlers burgers. In my nightmare, I am abducted by a gang of Mad Max-inspired bandits who take me to the Asda Superstore in Clapham Junction and torture me for information. My constitution is strong. I refuse to tell them where I’ve hidden my scarce supply of mango-flavoured vapes.
One of the bandits produces a laptop and says, grinning, ‘This will get him talking.’ They pin my eyes open and place the screen before me. After some buffering, the title of the video appears. It’s a YouTube compilation of ‘best moments’ from The Late Late Show with James Corden. ‘Please, God, no!’ I scream, thrashing around in my chair. I tell the bandits where my vapes are before Corden can finish his opening monologue. The pain is unbearable. But instead of releasing me, the bandits make me watch Corden’s Carpool Karaoke with Adele for 20 hours on repeat before putting a bullet in the back of my head – which, in this context, is a sweet release.
Watching a modern-day chat show is a bit like getting a back tattoo in Ayia Napa: fun when you’re drunk. A major problem are the hosts. To be fair to Corden, which I don’t want to be, it would also be a nightmare if the bandits forced me to watch The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel Live!, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, The Jonathan Ross Show, and just about anything that falls under the knackered umbrella of ‘chat shows’. All of the good hosts are either dead, retired or under the cosh of an executive producer who favours saccharinity over decent television. Gone are the days of Dick Cavett and his intelligent, if meandering conversational style. Lost is the ‘preposterously mellifluous’ voice of William F. Buckley. Absent are the charismatic captains of late-night television: Johnny Carson and, to a lesser extent, Michael Parkinson. These hosts weren’t always kind or warm – William F. Buckley once threatened to ‘sock’ Gore Vidal in the mouth – but they were real. And they were entertaining. The same can’t be said for the pusillanimous hosts of today. The only exceptions are Graham Norton and David Letterman, though neither of these is particularly contemporary. And perhaps Jonathan Ross was OK a few decades ago.
Now the new school of late-night chat show hosts reigns supreme. There’s Jimmy Fallon with his talent for laughing at anything, even when that thing is about as funny as a wet weekend in Bognor Regis. A guest only needs to cough for Fallon to repeatedly smash his face against the desk in a manic fit of laughter. The insincerity of it makes my toes curl. Though I urge all of you to watch his recent interview with the Costco Guys; it’s the only time I’ve seen Fallon on the verge of a nervous breakdown – perhaps his assistant forgot to give him a dose of nitrous oxide before he went on.
And then we have Jimmy Kimmel. The only time there is light behind Kimmel’s eyes is when he’s hosting Matt Damon. But the studio will never fire him. Why? Because he can’t do anything else. Stephen Colbert is more like a school chaplain than a suave media personality. Ellen had her moment in the sun, but there’s only so long that you can round up audiences from the bus stop before your shortcomings as a host are laid bare. All of the hosts are much of a muchness, as are their shows.
But the hosts aren’t entirely to blame. The guests are part of the problem too. They’re just not interesting anymore; their overlords – talent agents, managers and publicists – won’t allow them to be. In 1971, Salvador Dalí sauntered onto The Dick Cavett Show and launched his pet anteater at Lillian Gish’s lap. That would never happen today. The best we can hope for is a little jig from Tom Hiddleston on Graham Norton. The guests are carbon copies of each other. All American chat show line-ups are formulaic: an actor from a new Netflix series, an actor from a new Apple TV series, Robert De Niro being a curmudgeon, Ryan Gosling et al., and a musical guest you’ve never heard of. UK chat show line-ups are the exact same with the addition of Greg Davies.
All of the good hosts are either dead, retired or under the cosh of an executive producer who favours saccharinity over decent television
On the rare occasion that they do have an interesting guest, the host doesn’t know what to do with them. Fallon recently had author Edward St Aubyn on his show. Just two minutes and 30 seconds into the interview, Fallon turned Aubyn’s novel over in his hands, read the endorsements and mumbled, ‘These are some great blurbs for you on the back here.’ Thanks, Jimmy! I wonder how his team of writers came up with that line of thought-provoking dialogue. My favourite part of the show was when Fallon stood up and read an excerpt of Aubyn’s novel in the voice of Mick Jagger – though it was more Stella Street than the Rolling Stone himself.
The chat show is dead. It died when The Alec Baldwin Show premiered in March 2018. But perhaps it was always doomed to fail. Chat shows reflect our time. In that sense, the hosts, guests and producers are not to blame; we are. We, the public, created this rubbish because we can’t get enough of it. The bloated cadaver of the late-night chat show is also indicative of our changing understanding of celebrity. Forty years ago, you could watch Michael Parkinson interview Cher one week and Margaret Thatcher the next; Orson Welles on Wednesday and Jacob Bronowski on Saturday. All of them were celebrities – i.e. people of great import. Now, we clap and squeal when JoJo Siwa appears to talk about her relationship with Love Island alumnus Chris Hughes. These are the celebrities of the 21st century, and the chat show knows it.
I’m not sure if the chat show will ever escape this quagmire of lazy television. It might be too late. Let’s hope the demand for engaging late-night TV returns. In the meantime, I’ll be content watching reruns of After Dark on YouTube. Oliver Reed making a drunken fool of himself beats Jimmy Fallon playing ‘egg Russian roulette’ with Ryan Reynolds any day of the week.
What we’ve forgotten about intimacy
Last year one of the big oil companies informed its employees that they had to disclose any ‘intimate relationships’ with colleagues. I remain grateful that my employer has not yet asked me to do the same, because I’m not sure I could survive the embarrassment that would ensue. I don’t just enjoy ‘intimate relationships’ with numerous male and female colleagues but would also need to confess that I enjoy intimacy with multiple other people outside of work.
The fact that my life is beginning to sound like a tale of sexual perversion illustrates the point that intimate relationships are nearly always understood to be sexual ones. Intimacy is a concept, an experience, a human need, that has been cannibalised by our contemporary obsession with sex and sexuality: intimacy is sex; an intimate relationship must be a sexual one.
But I’ve never had sex, have never been in a sexual relationship. And yet I still enjoy intimacy every day – intimate relationships with other people, myself, buildings, artwork, poetry, pieces of music, God – the list could go on and on. I’m promiscuous in my search for it. I am clearly living with a different definition of intimacy to most around me. One that does not limit intense and powerful feelings of connection, of oneness, of completion, to date nights, but is finding my intimacy needs met all over the place.
I recently enjoyed an overwhelmingly powerful experience of connection – of oneness between myself and creation – as I swam off Herm in the Channel Islands. The sun was rising on the horizon, the sea was golden as a result, and I plunged in and deepened my intimate relationship with a place. I have never felt more alive, even as I feared freezing to death.
I’ve felt similar levels of connection, oneness, intimacy, reading the poetry of my fellow celibate, gay Christian, the Roman Catholic priest Gerard Manley Hopkins. Discovering his ‘The Lantern out of Doors’ was like meeting a friend who sees what I see, feels what I feel, and wants to process it all in the same way as me. I felt known by him.
And then there are my real, still living and breathing, family and friends. People who have known and loved me for decades, who know me intimately. Women and men who could tell you what makes me cry and laugh, my weaknesses and strengths, how I like my tea, my latest crush, some of my more disgusting habits. Single people like me can be starved of intimacy – but we can also enjoy more numerous, deep connections than many of our married friends.
The loneliest people I’ve met in my life as a pastor are the married ones who have thought all their needs for intimacy could be met by just one other person: such marriages are soon crushed by the weight of unrealistic expectations.
The loneliness crisis we are living through would end if we all stopped searching for the mythical person – ‘my other half’ – who will complete us
Why share all of this? Why push back on our culture’s narrow use of a word? Because of the self-harm that is done when we limit intimacy to sex. We human beings are clearly wired for intimacy – we need it, crave it, must find it to thrive. Without feeling other people, our lives will be incomplete. When we are told we will only find intimacy in one way, one limited context, numerous human beings are wrongly made to feel incomplete without it.
This is not good for us. It helps explain why sex is being seen as a human right by many young men, to the detriment of many women: google ‘incel’. It leads to hook-ups where more bodily fluids are exchanged than words: I recently read a tragic interview with a woman who craved the intimacy of a meaningful conversation with a boyfriend who could only conceive of intimacy through sex acts. It fuels the porn epidemic in which false intimacy enslaves countless victims, who would be much better off experiencing a deep connection with the physical beauty of creation.
We need to free intimacy from the bedroom. We need to encourage the development of deep connections – a sense of oneness – in relationships and activities that can be enjoyed in every room of our homes, and further afield. The loneliness crisis we are living through would end if we all stopped searching for the mythical person – ‘my other half’ – who will complete us, and instead found completion in a whole world of intimate relationships. That is how I have met my own intimacy deficit. If my employer ever asks me to let them know of any ‘intimate relationships’ I’m in, I hope they leave plenty of space on the form.
Has Trump brought peace to the Congo?
It remains to be seen whether Trump’s ceasefire between Iran and Israel will hold, but on the other side of the world he has showcased his deal-making prowess in a very different conflict. In a few days, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo are set to sign a peace agreement, under US auspices, to halt the bloodshed in eastern Congo. The deal was classic Trump – blunt, transactional, and built on leverage. He applied pressure, offered incentives, and out of it came a deal.
His approach delivered results where traditional diplomacy failed
For years, Eastern Congo has been one of the most violent regions on earth. Earlier this year, the city of Goma in Congo fell to M23 rebels backed by Rwanda. When Trump came into office the conflict appeared on the verge of spiralling into a wider regional war unless serious pressure was applied on Paul Kagame. During the Second Congo War over five million died. Over the past year, Rwanda’s fingerprints have been all over renewed violence, its motives economic. Kigali’s claim to be protecting Tutsi communities was a fig leaf. This was all about access to mineral wealth.
The international response to the escalating crisis was weak. Condemnation, concern, the usual diplomatic fog. The UN dithered and European governments fretted helplessly. Trump offered something far more effective than diplomatic condemnation. He focused on leverage and offered investment.
Trump sent a family confidant, Massad Boulos, to Kinshasa to challenge China’s grip on the country’s critical minerals. Boulos began work directly with President Tshisekedi on a minerals-for-assistance arrangement aimed at reversing China’s dominance in the region. The approach tied military and political support to access and investment. Sources tell me that in anticipation of the peace agreement, Boulos set up meetings with mining groups and with investment funds. The approach formed part of Trump’s broader strategy to dislodge China from Africa’s mineral supply chains. That effort now appears to have paid off.
The agreement, set to be formally signed this coming week, commits Rwanda to withdraw troops and end M23 support, while Congo addresses Kigali’s concerns about Hutu militias. It promises the return of refugees, regional security coordination, and billions in investment for Congolese mines. Rwanda will keep a role in processing minerals like tantalum.
This was diplomacy, Trump-style. Congo gets the prospect of stability and foreign capital. Rwanda gets a way out of a proxy war without having to admit defeat. A summit in Qatar in March between Presidents Tshisekedi and Kagame laid groundwork for the deal, but Trump’s team is said to have driven it forward with sanctions on Rwandan officials and promises of Qatari-backed funds.
The logic was simple. Kagame’s government relies on aid and image. His aggressive posture in eastern Congo risked unravelling both, with Rwanda accused of supplying arms, training and logistics to M23. Sanctions were being discussed. Meanwhile, his troops were overextended. Trump’s deal gave him a way to climb down. On the other side, Congo’s President Tshisekedi badly needed a win. His military was outmatched. His international reputation was sliding. The fall of Goma in January was a humiliation, as were the rebels moving steadily deeper into the country. This peace deal allows him to claim credit for restoring control and inviting investment.
The contrast between the US and the UN and western European approach to peace in Congo was stark. The EU continued working with Rwanda, even as Kigali backed the rebels in the DRC. The UN was paralysed. Its peacekeepers in the DRC were under siege. The British government issued travel warnings, and that was pretty much it. Trump, by contrast, moved quietly and effectively.
As the crisis escalated through the early months of the year, the evidence of human rights abuses was overwhelming. Yet Brussels and Whitehall showed little appetite to act. Kagame was courted by global donors and think tanks, even as he destabilised an entire region. The deal reached proves what the earlier inaction failed to recognise. It’s leverage, not platitudes, that change behaviour. What matters is the cards you hold.
The humanitarian impact of the conflict has been catastrophic. More than six million people are displaced inside Congo. Hundreds of thousands fled in the last year alone. Camps are overflowing. If the arrangement holds, it will be the most significant breakthrough in the region since the Sun City Agreement of 2003.
Trump’s approach to Congo and Rwanda was unapologetically transactional, indifferent to process, and focused on leverage. His approach delivered results where traditional diplomacy failed. This peace agreement was shaped through pressure, backed by cash, and sealed with blunt realism. It may not have followed the rules of traditional diplomacy, but it produced what years of UN resolutions and peacekeeping deployments did not, namely a real chance at ending the bloodshed.
This was Trump in full negotiating mode. Focused on leverage, uninterested in process, and determined to extract results. It worked. In a week dominated by missile strikes and deepening crisis in the Middle East, Congo is a reminder of what’s still possible when diplomacy looks more like deal-making.
The Church of England needs to lead
There was a unique focus on life and death in parliament last week, with critical votes on the decriminalisation of abortion and legalisation of assisted dying. Both propositions affect the interests of the most vulnerable. So what, I wondered, was the Established Church’s take on them?
In recalling the now-retired Archbishop of Canterbury’s strident interventions on matters for elected politicians – from benefit cuts and border control to a ‘no deal’ Brexit – not to mention the Church’s costly self-flagellation over reparations, one might expect its leadership to be equally robust in defending the unborn, the sick, and the welfare of mothers. But truth be told, as I began my search, I was actually seeking confirmation. Confirmation of a suspicion I have had since the pandemic (when church doors stayed closed rather too enthusiastically) that on the crunchiest spiritual and moral issues of the day, the Church of England’s leadership finds it all a bit uncomfortable.
On decriminalisation, I looked for public proclamations emanating from the offices of both Canterbury and York – since we are currently in an archbishop interregnum. There were prayers for Ahmedabad, the Middle East and Father’s Day. There was a daily exploration of the Lord’s Prayer, and a post heralding Refugee Week 2025. In advance of last week’s votes, however, there was not even a gentle, opinion-free prayer for parliamentarians ahead of some challenging decisions.
Perhaps those abortion votes were so briskly whisked through that the Church’s leadership missed that they were coming. Backbench MPs were granted 45 minutes to state their views on three amendments that had been hooked onto the Crime & Policing Bill. The first of them was voted through with a stonking majority and amounts to the biggest change to abortion law in 50 years.
A woman will now be able to end her pregnancy herself – beyond existing limits and at any stage up to birth – without legal consequence. It is a profound change that leaves the unborn child and women themselves extraordinarily vulnerable. The combination of the rushed decriminalisation amendment with the ‘pills by post’ regime is highly dangerous. This temporary regime was imposed during the pandemic but made permanent after another last-minute parliamentary ambush. It means that women can access tablets to abort a baby in the womb at ten weeks’ gestation through just a phone or video call with a medic. Evidence now suggests that these pills have on several occasions got into the hands of abusive partners or been taken by women well beyond ten weeks, with grim results. The tiny number of criminal investigations of women that have ensued have been used as justification for last week’s sweeping amendments.
Decriminalisation campaigners counter that existing abortion limits remain enforceable because medics and others are still bound by them and can therefore be prosecuted for carrying out or coercing someone to have an abortion. But the decriminalisation of the woman herself changes the game, just as previous incremental abortion reforms have brought us to this point.
There was a near total absence of any discussion of morality in relation to the unborn child
It will be incredibly difficult to prosecute a partner who has coerced a woman to abort her child if the act of that abortion itself is no longer a crime. What’s more, I suspect these laws will result in some tragic cases of women aborting babies at home alone, with the babies surviving for some hours after birth or being terribly injured. The woman herself will risk life-threatening complications like postpartum haemorrhage. At which point the cry will understandably go out for such procedures to take place under supervision without medics being criminalised either – making legal time limits redundant.
It is not often that I cannot sleep for fear of the consequences of what parliament has done. However, this week I have lain awake imagining the horror of those situations, yearning for the protection of those tiny bodies and traumatised women.
I noticed in the debate that there was a near total absence of any discussion of morality in relation to the unborn child. In my speech, I pointed out the inconvenient truth for proponents of decriminalisation, that abortion does not just involve one body – it involves two. I hold the seemingly controversial view that those unborn children deserve recognition in this debate. I was outnumbered, so it is now over to the House of Lords, where I hope the decriminalisation amendment receives the scrutiny it failed to get in the Commons.
It will be interesting to see now whether the Lords Spiritual, including the Church of England’s senior leadership, choose to engage in its consequences. I find it curious that, at least publicly, there is no evidence that ahead of these votes there was any vigorous debate or soul searching in the upper echelons of the Church. After the vote, a Church House spokesman came out to say that women ought not to be criminalised but that this very significant change was ‘worrying’. In the vacuum, a call went out from Revd Richard Bastable, Vicar of St Luke’s, Hammersmith, for clergy to message him if they wished to sign up to a more robust position. Published a couple of days on, his letter attracted the signatures of several bishops and made clear that clergy were troubled by the amendment and want to see it modified. But it appears to be the view of a faction rather than officially sanctioned.
Which returns me to my original search – the spark, I suppose, to a deeper question I have been subconsciously asking about the Church of England’s role in public life in recent years. My hunt led me to the Church’s public statement that the Archbishop of Canterbury is there to ‘give a voice to people who are easily ignored by the powerful’ and set out what Christianity has to say about the big questions we all face.
When challenged by MPs on his political interventions, Archbishop Welby previously said in this magazine: ‘It goes so far in history, basically back to Thomas Becket. Don’t be political means be political, but not in a way I don’t like.’ I think Welby was missing the point. If the Church is going to move into the arena of elected politicians, it surely ought not to vacate the spiritual and moral space that gave cause for its privileged voice in the first place.
I confess that, as a politician, I have watched with much irritation as the Church leadership has made its pronouncements on difficult government decisions with enthusiastic piety and moral surety. I am tempted to observe in return that there seems not to be equivalent enthusiasm to get stuck in on the tricky life and death stuff that it once regarded as central to its mission. I am sure much of that reticence derives from a genuine desire to empathise and refrain from casting judgement, but it is a choice nonetheless – one which calls into question the Church leadership’s stated purpose to give voice to the voiceless.
If whomever is appointed as the new Archbishop of Canterbury makes that same choice – intervening and emoting over tough political choices while ducking tougher moral ones – the Church may find even its supporters begin to question its privilege.
Nato should not ignore Russia’s ‘coalition of murderers’
This week’s Nato summit could not come at a more pivotal moment. As recent months have shown, the challenges to contemporary global security are no longer limited to the individual threats posed by Moscow, Tehran, or Pyongyang. What makes the current situation even more concerning for the West is the multiple threats posed by the heightened bilateral and trilateral collaborations between these actors, alongside those with Beijing. Whilst the so-called CRINK (China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea) does not yet constitute any formal strategic alliance, it would be naïve and dangerous to dismiss their ties as merely superficial.
On his visit to the United Kingdom on Monday, Volodymyr Zelensky called Russia, Iran, and North Korea a ‘coalition of murderers’ after Russian drones and ballistic missiles struck Kyiv hours after his arrival in London. Ukrainian intelligence reported that half of the 352 drones used were Iranian Shahed drones, and many of the ballistic missiles were from North Korea.
The authoritarian axis between Russia, Iran, North Korea, and China will be just one global security concern
Within this ‘coalition’, there is ample room for China, which enables Moscow’s war through providing dual-use technologies to Russia. Akin to its Russian counterpart, Beijing has also violated United Nations sanctions which it previously supported. Tens of thousands – if not more – of North Korean workers remain in China and Russia, and for all Beijing’s supposed nausea at Pyongyang’s rapprochement with Moscow, such emesis is not severe enough to prevent the middle kingdom from aiding its naughty nuclear neighbour by smuggling oil and petroleum.
Since Russia’s initial invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, mutual support between China, North Korea, Russia and Iran have gone beyond mere words of affirmation. Whether the development of Russian weapons factories in China; the cash-for-munitions (and manpower) exchange between Moscow and Pyongyang; or the sharing of ballistic missile technology between Pyongyang and Tehran, bilateral cooperation has reached new heights. Who can forget when Russia and North Korea signed a ‘comprehensive strategic partnership treaty’ on 19 June last year, within which was contained a mutual defence clause? Or when this year began with Moscow and Tehran signing a treaty of the same name, albeit this time lacking such a commitment to mutual defence?
These four countries do not possess identical interests or ideologies: one need only compare the theocracy of Iran with the atheistic nature of China and North Korea. Nevertheless, their unity in their opposition to the United States and the US-led international order would be perilous to ignore.
After the first week of the current Israeli-Iranian conflict, Putin mentioned that Russia had no intention of providing military assistance to Iran. But when the Russian President hosted the Iranian Foreign Minister, Abbas Araqchi, yesterday, days after the US’s successful precision-guided strikes on three Iranian uranium enrichment sites, he made clear how the attack had ‘no basis and no justification’. Even if Russia does not get involved directly in supporting Iran, we all know which team it bats for.
For all their differences, these states can also learn from each other. The US’s air strikes on Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan have only underscored how Iran is the weakest amongst this quartet of chaos. Yet, Trump’s hardly unsubtle hint at regime change in Iran will do little to convince what is left of the crumbling Iranian regime to renege on their nuclear aspirations. Tehran needs only to look nearly four thousand miles eastwards, to Pyongyang, for inspiration.
As world leaders meet today for the two-day Nato summit in The Hague, the authoritarian axis between Russia, Iran, North Korea, and China will be just one regional and global security concern during a time of ‘polycrisis’ across the globe. Despite such interconnectedness, out of the so-called Indo-Pacific Four (Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand), only the New Zealand Prime Minister, Christopher Luxon, has agreed to attend the summit. The leaders of the other three states, including the newly-elected South Korean President, Lee Jae-myung, have opted to send senior officials (in South Korea’s case, National Security Advisor, Wi Sung-lac), in their places.
That three out of the four leaders have chosen to sit out this week’s gathering – which they had attended (as non-Nato members) since 2022 – could be seen as a snub to US President Donald Trump, in disapproval of his intervention in Iran. But Tokyo, Seoul, and Canberra may also be motivated by great power politics.
If no bilateral discussion with Trump – who has imposed sweeping tariffs on all four Indo-Pacific states – is on the cards, then summitry remains firmly off the cards. It is perhaps ironic that the Japanese Prime Minister, Ishiba Shigeru, has chosen not to attend what would have been his first Nato Summit, given his past calls for an ‘Asian Nato’. Japan has also been hesitant to support the US’s stance towards Iran, not least given Tokyo’s dependence on the Middle Eastern region for over 90 per cent of its crude oil imports. For a country whose economy is hardly blossoming, any closure to the Straits of Hormuz – which Tehran has threatened – will rub further salt into Tokyo’s economic wounds in addition to causing catastrophic global impacts.
One of the nicknames bestowed upon the loquacious former Japanese prime minister, Junichiro Koizumi, was Nato: ‘no action, talk only’. With a coalition of anti-Western states strengthening their bilateral – if not multilateral – ties, the need for talking to lead to action has never been greater. Last night’s ceasefire between Israel and Iran lasted barely a few hours, and if Iran is successful, a world of nine nuclear-armed states may soon get its tenth member. And by then, who knows how the other rogue states will seek to benefit from the newest member of the nuclear club.
Trump shouldn’t blame Israel for the ceasefire skirmish
After President Trump announced a ceasefire between Israel and Iran on Monday, Iran launched missiles at the Jewish state. To justify this, Iran accused Israel of conducting an assault on Iranian territory until 9 a.m. on Tuesday, after the ceasefire went into effect. Later, Israel undertook a symbolic strike on a radar installation north of Tehran as a reprisal for its defiance of the agreement.
President Trump, visibly angry, told reporters before he headed to today’s Nato summit that he was displeased with both countries, especially Israel as it ‘unloaded’ on Tehran right after he declared a ceasefire.
Israel did unleash a thunderous final salvo against Iran in the final moments before the ceasefire went into effect. But this is a common practice in conflicts in the region, and has been the case during multiple rounds of fighting between Israel, Hamas, and Hezbollah. Israel’s entire Operation Rising Lion against Iran has been conducted in much of the same manner – relying on targeted precision airstrikes focused on degrading military assets and decapitating Iran’s leadership.
In the conflict between Israel and Iran, peace is not on the menu
President Trump wants to be seen as a dealmaker and peacemaker. He likely was concerned that after he greenlighted Israel’s military operation against Iran and bombed its nuclear facilities himself, that another Israeli display of strength risked making a peaceful solution impossible. But in the conflict between Israel and Iran, peace is not on the menu. There are limits to what can be achieved between the two countries diplomatically. The Islamic Republic is ideologically committed to the destruction of the State of Israel. This is a core pillar of the regime. This enmity will continue irrespective of a ceasefire. From Tehran’s perspective, it is not ‘peace’ but a tactical pause.
In 2013, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei used an analogy to describe Tehran’s negotiations with Washington, another sworn enemy: ‘sometimes a wrestler shows flexibility for technical reasons, but he doesn’t forget who his opponent is and what his real goal is.’ This can be applied to the current context with Israel. Iran will use the ceasefire period to rearm, rebuild, refinance and revive its conflict with Israel. It plays a long game and does not adjust its strategy in four- or eight-year increments to coincide with the American political calendar. Tehran thinks in decades, and this latest volley of missiles and drones between Iran and Israel is only the end of one chapter in the ongoing conflict between both countries.
As long as the Islamic Republic remains in power and Khamenei or a likeminded successor is in his chair, the struggle between both countries can only be managed and deterred. There are no more durable solutions.
Being stalked by a murderer was just one of life’s problems – Sarah Vine
Hermione Eyre has narrated this article for you to listen to.
Private Eye asked last week:
Which of Michael Gove’s luckless staff at The Spectator will be assigned to review this grisly account of their editor’s marital woes?
Reader, it’s me! I’m happy to do this, though, because I have an interest in how to be a political wife (I am married to Alex Burghart MP), and perhaps have something to learn here, though I’m struggling to understand, eek, ‘lesson seven’:
Realise… that when you step over the salt circle into the five-pointed star coven of politics, you have ceased to become a person. You are now a c**t.
There’s a feeling that the author still has a touch of PTSD. Readers with expectations of schadenfreude will not be disappointed.
Sarah Vine shoots thunderbolts. She writes like she’s just sat down at your kitchen table, poured herself a big glass of vino and let fly. It takes huge skill to blow off copy like this, accurately channelling the voice of Middle England, and since 2012 she has been a prize-winning columnist on the Daily Mail. But the Cameron elite could not understand her popular touch or value what she did, and when they took different sides over Brexit they fell out forever. We find her here looking back over the wreckage: ‘This is my story, written with no fear, no favour – and, frankly, no fucks left to give.’
The mood is quite Thelma & Louise. Scorched tyre tracks are left across David Cameron for his shock resignation the morning after the referendum (‘what a massive man-baby’), as well as for offering the Goves an Admiralty flat that they could not accept (‘another dick-move, Dave’). Theresa May is branded ‘utterly graceless’; the journalist Emily Sheffield is told that ‘not everyone has a baronet for a daddy’; and even Vine’s own father is thanked for ‘fucking me up so brilliantly’. But she never turns on Michael, ‘the best ex-husband a girl could ever ask for’.
She does tease him throughout, though. He is her ‘goofy, incorrigible genius’, unable to ski when they met on a group skiing holiday; legendarily clever, although not always gifted with foresight – she rags him for having written Michael Portillo: The Future of the Right. One gets the sense she was fun to be with, while also fiercely loyal.
She eye-rolls, yet there’s more than a hint of pride when she recounts how, while she was in labour with their first child for 23 hours, her husband spent the entire time reading Robert A. Caro’s biography of Lyndon B. Johnson, only once complaining about the discomfort of his given seat, a bean bag. But when the Daily Telegraph drip-fed leaked MPs’ expenses claims, aiming to damage Gove, she saw red. She would never work with the editor Will Lewis again, branding him ‘the man who tried to ruin us’, and noted the hypocrisy of Andy Coulson, too, later imprisoned for 18 months for phone hacking, yet hanging Gove out for claiming allowable expenses. Vine felt, during her husband’s anguish, her ‘tiger wife’ awakening. ‘From this point on, I became obsessed with convincing people to see Michael as the kind, serious, intellectual, public-spirited campaigner that I knew him to be.’
She describes her father, a Welsh Del Boy-type, as Roger the Dodger, Mr Boom ’n’ Bust – yet she has surely inherited a touch of his risky charisma. She rolls like a fighter, carelessly swaggering et tu, Pontius Pilate at David Cameron and gaily mixing metaphors: ‘…the potassium-on-water conflagration that happened when politics and media collided – would ultimately be the grim reaper of all that had come before’.
When Vine started work at the Daily Mail in 2012, Samantha Cameron felt betrayed.
The truth was that at the paper I was her and her family’s staunchest advocate. I was forever putting my neck on the line to defend the Camerons, both politically and personally… What annoyed me even more was the notion – unspoken but very much implied – that I should somehow act as an unpaid spokesperson for the Cameron government, that I should be a sycophant and courtesan.
Some of Vine’s anecdotes are so vivid, we feel we are there. During dinner at the Johnsons’ house in Islington, Boris and Michael discussed whether or not to join the Leave campaign, thrashing out the implications over slow-cooked shoulder of lamb:
Timescales, economic consequences, trade options, regulations, Northern Ireland: these were all in the mix. Boris sought the counsel of various third parties – a cabinet minister, a lawyer – barking loudly into his mobile (on speakerphone) in between mouthfuls, Michael listening in and occasionally contributing.
Meanwhile, Vine, Marina Wheeler and Evgeny Lebedev were left making conversation ‘in stage whispers’.
Vine writes candidly about money worries and feelings of social inadequacy – difficult topics, bravely broached. She puts herself down wittily throughout. The stock image of a collapsed woman on the cover has a jokey deadpan feel, but there is a genuine undertow of sadness.
At times one cannot believe what the Gove family endured during frontline political service. The angry dinner lady, sending their young son to the back of the line because he was a Gove. The jolly-looking 18th birthday card with a badge that their daughter Bea excitedly opened, only to find it contained a death threat for her father. And the knowledge, gleaned by security services from phone locations, that the murderer of David Amess MP trailed the Goves around, spending days lingering on the street where they lived.
Politics gets the blame for a lot of the fall-out:
Ultimately, I don’t think many couples would have survived what we went through… George and Frances did not; Boris and Marina did not; Kate Fall and her husband did not; Matt Hancock’s marriage did not. The mechanisms by which these marriages fell apart may all be different. But there is one common denominator: politics.
Vine says that the Turkish Delight the White Witch offers Edmund in The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe represents the intoxicating taste of political power:
Power is the ultimate drug. Those who are hooked on it will, like any addict, go to almost any length to get their fix, prioritising it above all else – friends, family, colleagues.
She might have added that the power of the press, her own personal creative outlet and addiction, can be just as damagingly sweet.
What was millennial girl power really about?
The 1990s and the following decade were, it is widely agreed, a bad time to be a girl. Which is strange, because a girl seemed like the best thing you could be then. Certainly better than being a woman. Not as good as being a boy or a man, of course, but since those were out of the question (gender fluidity was still a nascent proposition), you might as well lean into girlhood.
For millennial girls like me and Sophie Gilbert (a Pulitzer-nominated staff writer on the Atlantic), this was a confusing period. On the one hand, girls were everywhere. We became teenagers to chants of ‘girl power!’, and later we got our vision of young adulthood from the Lena Dunham series Girls. ‘Girl’ was an identity with potential. On the other hand, it’s hard to avoid just how porny a lot of the uses of ‘girl’ were. The Girls Gone Wild softcore DVD series turned young women’s drunken lapses into permanent, purchasable shame. The phrase ‘girl on girl’ comes from pornography, where it denoted lesbian scenes. Gilbert uses it here to refer to the self-loathing and anti-sisterhood this period inculcated.
‘Empowerment’ was the watchword of the millennial girl, but what exactly was she empowered to be? Primarily to be sexy – as Gilbert lays out in this comprehensive analysis of the era’s pop culture. A girl could be anything as long as she was pleasing to a man. And God forbid she do anything so crass as grow up. Good girls stayed young.
Gilbert acknowledges that this isn’t a simple story of backlash. The teen comedies of the period, for example, really were a step up from the 1980s versions, when even the sainted John Hughes played rape as a punchline. American Pie (1999) was crude but charming, and its makers by their own account were trying to write girls with ‘more depth’. But that could still mean ‘as shallow as a teaspoon’.
The female characters of American Pie are all, as Gilbert points out, porn archetypes: sexy cheerleader, hot nerd, horny exchange student (who ends up a victim of revenge porn before revenge porn had a name, something the film treats as a joke). The girls act as the obstacles between the fratty heroes and their objective: sex. They are the gatekeepers of virginity, ‘the ultimate prize for any man worthy of claiming it’.
In fashion, statuesque supermodels such as Naomi Campbell and Cindy Crawford were dislodged by the often underage and always underfed waifs. ‘Fashion designers grew tired of dealing with the top models, who knew what they were worth and whose fame often overshadowed the clothes. Designers preferred girls.’ So did photographers like Terry Richardson, who brought porno chic to high fashion and liked to photograph himself in flagrante with the models. His aesthetic – ‘not quite art or porn or fashion photography but a hybrid of all three that kept insisting it was also a big joke’ – defined the look (and the moral tone) of the era.
Meanwhile, the advances that women had made in the music industry in the early 1990s were abruptly reversed. The punky, confrontational Riot Grrrl movement collapsed under hostile media coverage but lived on when their ‘girl power!’ slogan was hijacked by the male-svengali-manufactured Spice Girls ‘in such a way as to neutralise feminism’.
It’s worth noting that the Spices ditched their management to successfully and profitably control their own careers, which sounds powerful to me. Nonetheless, Gilbert is right that they represented the renewed dominance of producer-led pop (meaning male-led, because most producers were male). Music channels became a ‘gateway to porn. The more sexualised female artists were, the better’.
All of which makes it rather surprising that when writing about the porn industry itself in this period, Gilbert steps away from her argument to reassure the reader: ‘I’m not interested in kinkshaming, and I’m not remotely opposed to porn.’ To which, given all the evidence she arrays in this book, a reasonable person might respond: why not?
There’s a similar moment of liberal etiquette overwhelming political nous in a chapter on reality TV. Gilbert astutely notes that in these shows, ‘exterior womanhood is work’ – something constructed through clothes and procedures. But then she argues that this made the genre welcoming to trans women, as though this is an entirely positive feature rather than a vivid illustration of gender identity’s misogyny.
It’s depressing that even now a critic as wide-ranging and incisive as Gilbert can be seen flinching at the acceptable limits of the discourse. In a book that argues convincingly that millennial pop culture conditioned women to ‘meticulously present themselves for mass approval’, it’s a shame to find the author still occasionally contorting herself to avoid upsetting men.