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Labour’s grants won’t save the electric car market
Keir Starmer’s government continues to show off its remarkable ability to please absolutely no one. Reintroducing grants for electric cars (EVs) always was an outrage. Why is a government which rails against privilege when it comes to public schools, second homes, etc., splashing out taxpayers’ money to subsidise the second cars of relatively well-off motorists? Most people I know with electric cars also have a petrol or diesel car for longer journeys. Moreover, if you are going to chuck a bung worth thousands of pounds at people who buy a car a little less polluting than a petrol or diesel car, what about people who don’t buy a car at all and walk and cycle everywhere? They are being far more friendly towards the environment, so shouldn’t they get an even bigger handout?
But it seems that fans of electric cars aren’t too happy with the new grants either. The government has now published a list of the cars which are eligible for them. And it turns out that there is not a single model which qualifies for the full £3,750. The 22 models listed only qualify for the lower £1,500 handout.
UK governments have always been drawn to trying to bail out the car industry
To qualify, a car must be priced below £37,000, have a battery range of at least 100 miles and fulfil sustainability requirements which are somewhat opaque but which are supposed to take in, for example, the sustainability of the energy used in manufacturing the vehicle and transporting it. The result is a bare-faced protectionist device. Every single model eligible for a grant is a European-made car. Thirteen of the 22 models are made by Stellantis – the beleaguered parent company of Vauxhall, Citroen, Peugeot and Fiat which has closed its Luton plant, blaming the government’s Zero Emission Mandate (ZEV). The mandate demands that 28 per cent of vehicles sold this year by each manufacturer active in the UK market be pure electric.
Sorry, but bungs of £1,500 a time are not going to save the European car industry from the ZEV, not when new electric cars still typically cost significantly more to buy than the nearest petrol equivalent. True, Peugeot and Citroen are offering large discounts which bring the list prices of their cheapest electric cars down to a similar level to petrol and diesel models, but given that Stellantis managed to lose €2.3 billion (£2 billion) in the first half of this year you wonder how sustainable this is.
Manufacturers face £15,000 fines for every vehicle by which they fall short of the ZEV target. Meanwhile, Chinese manufacturers continue to enjoy a large cost advantage over European competitors owing to sky-high energy prices in Britain and the EU, and their cornering of the EV battery market. While the government is now trying to prop up a flagging European car industry, ministers did nothing to stop the closure of a bioethanol plant on Humberside which has been undermined by high UK energy prices and the removal of tariffs on US imports under Starmer’s trade deal with Donald Trump. That will mean the loss of 270 jobs and yet more reliance on imported fuels.
UK governments have always been drawn to trying to bail out the car industry – it is a very visible industry with which the public can identify, unlike boring old chemical plants. Yet decades of government favours ultimately failed to save British Leyland. Don’t expect EV grants to be any more successful.
Lisa Nandy, Nigel Farage and a tale of two silly political shirts
Two shirts were in the news at the weekend, both worn by politicians. In the light blue corner, we had Nigel Farage launching his personally branded football strip top – in Reform colours, with the name Farage and the number 10, a bargain at £39.99 (£99.99 if you want it signed by the man himself). In the red corner, meanwhile, Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy attended Wigan Pride – one of the never-ending LGBTQ+ moveable feast days that populate the calendar on either side of the holy Pride month itself – wearing the official t-shirt of the event, emblazoned with a ‘trans rights’ slogan.
Farage’s football top has gone down very well with the people it was intended to go down very well with, selling 5,000 units in its first day on sale. And it put ants in the pantaloons of Reform’s detractors – another intended outcome, one suspects – who spent Sunday on the socials spluttering about how this was the acceptable face of the hard right, etc etc.
Today, silly emblems and slogans and campaigns abound in public life
Some sniff a whiff of burnt horsehair whenever Farage appears. This derangement, strangely, increases whenever he does something naff, like launching personalised schmutter. It’s much the same syndrome as when Boris Johnson’s slapdash demeanour was vaunted, often by the very same detractors, as the lid on a pot of simmering evil. People on the right aren’t allowed the leeway of just being corny or erratic.
The Reform FC shirt provided a tiny morsel of levity, which in these doomy times is much needed. A friend of mine has many of the same misgivings about Reform that I have, but thinks that while we wait we might as well vote for what is, undoubtedly, the campest of the political parties.
You’d think Wigan Pride, festooned with the glitter and bunting that decorate all things LGBTQ+, might be a rival for the camp crown, but – as ever with such events – the sparkle was dimmed by shadows of contention, in this case Nandy’s ‘Protect The Dolls’ t-shirt. This slogan, for those of you who are unaware, is an American rallying cry to extol the ‘rights’ of men who claim to be women to vault over the barriers placed around all other men. The ‘dolls’ in question are those chaps who make a better fist of convincing anybody that they might actually be ladies. (The ones who don’t are known as ‘bricks’.)
So to sum up, this is the Culture Secretary taking a position aligning herself with the extreme fringes of a deeply unpopular campaign that her own administration is now trying, somewhat cackhandedly of course, to back away from.
You may remember how Nandy declared, on being appointed to her cabinet role, that the culture war was now over. Peace in our time! Here she is, a year later, still fighting it, the Neville Chamberlain of 2025. Nandy is a born follower of whatever her milieu considers right and proper on a given day, however bizarre. She has form on this issue, telling an audience back in 2020 that rapists should be accommodated in women’s prisons if they fancy it.
And here she is again, doing and saying what is politically expedient, slipping on the Wigan Pride t-shirt. As Philip Patrick noted here the other day with reference to Nicola Sturgeon, one of the big problems with the trans issue is the enthusiasm for it from party workers and staffers. Added to this, Nandy, as an MP, has to engage with ‘communities’ and ‘stakeholders’ – which means wearing an item of their choosing and posing for photos wearing it.
These are not the parish pump affairs of the old local politics. Political figures of all the main parties have been beclowned at Pride events, from Boris Johnson in a Pink Stetson to Keir Starmer swathed in glitter – which just made him look as if he’d contracted a particularly nasty case of psoriasis.
I can’t imagine someone as toxically agreeable as Nandy handling the awkwardness of the T-shirt situation in any other way but acquiescence. She shouldn’t have had to. There should be a simple rule for politicians on their visits to Prides, mosques, or anywhere else: no merch, no slogans, no cultural frills or campaigning furbelows. This rule would enable the politician, when presented with a hat marked ‘UP THE TALIBAN’ or a badge marked ‘DOWN WITH KITTENS’ to sigh and say ‘so sorry, obviously I’d love to don this tasteful item, but it’s against the rules, I’m afraid; my hands are tied’.
Today, silly emblems and slogans and campaigns abound in public life, and this rule would at least take politicians out of that loop. Another news story at the weekend, for example, informs us that the BBC has purchased 10,000 badges, 7,000 mugs and 6,000 lanyards branded ‘Call It Out’, at a cost of £61,000, in an effort to remind their staff not to harass and abuse each other.
There is something quintessentially perfect about this story – a modern British institution thinking it can solve a serious problem of criminality with branding. The Blairite consensus smashed up our common culture and morality, forged after centuries of trial and error, and now seeks to replace it – with merch.
Politicians should, if they absolutely must, slip into their own silly campaign wear, but they shouldn’t go near anybody else’s.
Hamas’s hostage deal is a catch-22 for Netanyahu
The fragile negotiations between Israel and Hamas have once again entered a decisive phase, marked by the unveiling of a new ceasefire-hostage release proposal brokered by Egypt and Qatar. This proposal, which Hamas has reportedly accepted, includes notable shifts in its previous demands. Yet the core dilemma confronting the Israeli leadership remains unchanged: whether to accept a partial agreement that could save lives in the short term but risks undermining its broader strategic aims.
According to multiple sources, Hamas has moderated two of its key positions that previously stalled talks. It is now seeking the release of 140 prisoners serving life sentences instead of 200, and has agreed to a slightly wider Israeli buffer zone along Gaza’s border. The television channel Al-Mayadeen reports additional concessions: a 1,000-metre IDF withdrawal in most of northern and eastern Gaza (excluding Shuja’iyya and Beit Lahia), the release of ten living hostages in exchange for 140 life-term prisoners and 60 others serving long sentences, as well as the release of all female and minor prisoners. It is also demanding a change in IDF deployment maps and substantial humanitarian aid, to be delivered by the UN and Red Crescent.
Israel must ask not only if Hamas is willing to make a deal, but whether it is capable of enforcing one
While these adjustments suggest a degree of flexibility, the broader picture points to a different calculus. According to Arab and Israeli sources, Hamas’s sudden willingness to compromise follows intensifying military pressure and credible threats of an Israeli ground offensive into Gaza City. As Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich noted:
Hamas is under great pressure due to the conquest of Gaza because it understands that this will eliminate it and end the story. Therefore, it is trying to stop it by bringing back the partial deal.
This observation aligns with a pattern long evident: concessions from Hamas arise not from diplomacy but from duress. The paradox of Western recognition initiatives for a Palestinian state is that they often relieve pressure at precisely the moment it must be maintained. When Britain, Australia, Canada and others rushed to endorse Palestinian statehood in the wake of stagnated negotiations, they unintentionally signalled to Hamas that maximalist demands could be rewarded without compromise. Only when the IDF renewed its offensive posture, preparing for a move on Gaza City, did Hamas inch toward realism.
Israel now faces a high-stakes decision. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, following a visit to the Gaza Division, later addressed the nation, lauding the IDF’s achievements and affirming the military’s commitment to defeating Hamas and freeing all hostages. He spoke of the ‘fighting spirit’ of the troops and claimed that ‘Hamas is under atomic pressure’. And yet, behind the rhetoric lies ambiguity. A senior political source maintains that Israel’s official position demands the release of all hostages and the fulfilment of previously defined conditions. However, Netanyahu’s own remarks do not explicitly rule out a partial agreement, and political observers note that if a deal approximating the ‘Witkoff formula’ emerges, it will be politically difficult to reject.
Domestically, the prime minister’s manoeuvring space is enhanced by the Knesset recess, which suspends immediate parliamentary scrutiny. Among the families of the hostages, there is no single voice. The Tikva Forum, known for its more hardline and pro-government stance, has denounced any partial deal as a ‘disgrace’, accusing Hamas of mockery and Netanyahu of fearfulness. But many other hostage families – those more prominently represented in public discourse – have expressed support for a deal that could return their loved ones alive, even at great cost. Their anguish is genuine, their moral authority undeniable. Yet the government must consider a broader matrix of responsibilities: to hostages, yes, but also to future victims should Hamas be allowed to regroup.
At issue is not only the number of hostages returned, but the legitimacy of the war’s strategic aims. If Israel accepts a deal that leaves Hamas’s core leadership intact and its military capability partially restored, it may achieve tactical relief at the cost of long-term security. Worse, it may reward the very behaviour it seeks to deter.
There is also a perceptible gap between Palestinian negotiators and their own fighters. At various times, there have been signs that commitments made by Hamas delegates in Doha or Cairo are not always clearly aligned with the actions of combat units within Gaza. The grotesque propaganda spectacles staged by Hamas during previous hostage releases underscored its disdain for international norms and the suffering of those involved. In one instance, the group returned an incorrect body; in another, it attempted to substitute agreed hostages with others not included in the talks.
Such conduct reveals not only a breakdown in internal coordination, but a willingness to degrade and mock the very process to which it nominally consents. This structural ambiguity within Hamas complicates any agreement’s enforceability. Israel must therefore ask not only whether Hamas is willing to make a deal, but whether it is capable of enforcing one.
The current moment is shaped by a collision of imperatives. The moral imperative to save lives. The strategic imperative to dismantle a genocidal militia. The political imperative to maintain domestic unity. And the diplomatic imperative to navigate global scrutiny. A partial deal may deliver immediate humanitarian relief and limited hostage returns, but it risks preserving Hamas as a political actor and inviting future bloodshed.
The abolition of stamp duty can’t come soon enough
A rare kernel of hopefully good news has been circulating the Treasury. No, we haven’t yet paid off the £2.7 trillion debt, and the state pension is still on path to imploding in a decade’s time. Instead, Britain’s most destructive and ambition-killing tax is for the chop and is to be replaced with a much more sensible system.
Property prices have risen by 259 per cent since 1997, with wages only rising by a lowly 68 per cent
Stamp Duty Land Tax has its origins in Regency England, and as the name suggests, it originally was levied on stamped documents in order to fund Britain’s war against Napoleon. In 1815, the stamp duty on a newspaper was an extortionate 4d – James Mill, father of John Stuart, wrote that the tax amounted to censorship by taxation. Thankfully, this form of journalistic tariff has been consigned to the history books. What remains is the tax on property transitions, and it is partly responsible for the housing market being the great antagonist of the British economy today.
As any homeowner knows, stamp duty is levied on property transactions and must be paid in ‘cash’ within 14 days of the purchase to the taxman. This means on top of deposits, an additional savings pot needs to be accrued. If a seller spends a little too long advertising through an estate agent, their stamp duty pot could be entirely eroded through a couple of months of slow housing market performance. We would not rationally collect any other tax in this way.
It is an enormously complex tax, having gone through five total revisions since 1997, and with its bands shifting inexorably as various lobbying organisations rise and fall in prominence. In 2016, for example, the charge was levied at 1 per cent between £125,000 and £250,000, yet by 2025, this threshold has grown to 5 per cent between £300,000 and £500,000. There are different rates for additional homeowners (landlords and, historically, prudent investors), nil-rate-bands shifting, and under the Conservatives, for first-time buyers. Tax holidays come and go, and there are additional calls to exempt new builds from stamp duty (by this author and others).
Adam Smith, back in 1776, lamented that taxes:
Upon the transference of property of every kind, so far as they diminish the capital value of the property, tend to diminish the funds destined for the maintenance of productive labour.
He argued further that they are ‘unequal’ and that ‘the buyer is scarce under the necessity of buying’. He said in a few words that if the transactional tax is messy, expensive, and irrational, it is bad. Research from his eponymous think tank shows that stamp duty destroys 75p of wealth for every £1 raised and that it was eight times more destructive than VAT. Both the benchmark Australian Henry Tax Review and the IFS’s Mirrlees Review found that the tax is essentially meritless and provide little argument as to why it should remain in place.
Stamp duty contributes to the dreadful labour mobility we experience, whilst also destroying the ambition of those grasping at the housing ladder as property values exceed salaries and inflation. It also ensures that wealth is captured in unproductive bricks, mortar, and glass, instead of in productive capital such as machinery and investments.
So, what is posed to replace it? Proportional property taxation is common, although implementation differs – our European neighbours and American cousins use these taxes to sustain a healthy but fair revenue for government expenditure. This tax would be levied on only a fifth of extant properties, obviously the most expensive, compared to the 60 per cent which stamp duty covers. It is based on a property’s value and can be estimated annually. It is a form of Georgism (looking at the Spectator’s own Wikiman, Rory Sutherland) and cogent with our understanding that land is the least acknowledged of the three core factors of production, as Mike Bird argues in his forthcoming book on land.
Readers will be forgiven for thinking me a champagne-swilling communist for advocating for this tax as a replacement for stamp duty. However, it cannot be ignored that the housing bubble through which the older middle classes enriched themselves, and younger generations have been immiserated with, has yet to be fairly compensated for in our economy. The ONS states that property prices have risen by 259 per cent since 1997, with wages only rising by a lowly 68 per cent. This cannot continue, and with a house-building revolution on the back burner, we can only hope that the ending of terrible taxes comes to the rescue.
The remarkable life of Peter Kemp, warrior and Spectator writer
Today is the 110th anniversary of the birth of a former Spectator correspondent who took part in and survived more wars than any other English writer in modern history. Yet he is practically forgotten today because he fought all his life for unfashionable conservative causes.
Peter Kemp, the son of a judge in the Indian Raj, was born in Bombay on 19 August 1915. Educated at Wellington, and destined for the law like his father, he went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, the alma mater of the notorious Communist sympathising Soviet spies Kim Philby, Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt.
He remained utterly unashamed of having chosen the ‘wrong’ side in Spain and was proud of fighting for Franco
Kemp gravitated to the polar opposite of his leftist contemporaries and became a right-wing Tory. As such, he abandoned his studies and determined to fight for the Nationalist side in the Spanish civil war when it broke out in the summer of 1936. Pretending to be a journalist, he obtained a press pass as a correspondent for the Sunday Dispatch newspaper, and entered the war-torn country from Portugal.
Disliking the Falange, the Spanish fascist party, Kemp preferred to enlist in the cavalry of the Carlists, a monarchist faction noted for their staunch Catholicism and bravery in battle. But however romantic, these horse soldiers weren’t of much use in modern warfare, and Kemp was thirsting for action, so he transferred to the Spanish Legion – the Iberian version of the French Foreign Legion – a brutal and tough outfit whose motto was ‘Viva la Muerte!’ (Long live death!)
The Legion gave Kemp invaluable experience in the savage realities of modern warfare.
Fighting alongside the Moors who were the mainstays of General Franco’s army in the battles for control of Madrid’s university city, Kemp was kept awake all night by the screams of a captured Republican militiaman being tortured to death by his Moorish comrades in a neighbouring lecture hall.
Another time, Kemp unsuccessfully pleaded for the life of a fellow Briton, a member of the International Brigades from Belfast, but was ordered to command the firing squad at his execution instead. Wounded on several occasions, and promoted to command a whole bandera (battalion) aged only 24 – an unusual honour for a foreigner – the Spanish war ended for Kemp when his jaw was shattered and his hands were crippled by an exploding mortar bomb.
The outbreak of the second world war saved Kemp from the humdrum boredom of peace, and he lost no time in signing up for a special force, the precursor of the Special Operations Executive (SOE), specialising in cross-Channel raids on isolated Nazi outposts in France. On one such raid, Operation Dryad, Kemp took a group of Germans prisoner who were garrisoning a lighthouse off Alderney.
His next SOE assignment was to parachute into Axis-occupied Albania in support of partisans supposedly struggling to liberate their homeland. But these guerilla bands were divided between nationalists and communists and Kemp’s anti-communist convictions were reinforced when he realised they preferred to fight their rival compatriots rather than the Nazi and fascist enemy.
Kemp collided once more against his lifelong communist foes on his next mission when he was dropped into Poland to help the anti-communist home army in the 1944 Warsaw uprising against the Nazis. After the rising was crushed – partly because Stalin refused to let the Red Army intervene – Kemp surrendered to the Russian ‘allies’ but found himself in Moscow, imprisoned and interrogated by the notorious NKVD, Stalin’s murderous secret police.
He was finally freed after several months and ended the war in Indochina helping France against the VietMinh communist revolutionaries. By now, Kemp was a hardened Cold Warrior, and as that global ideological struggle began, he found himself again and again battling his old Red enemies.
He was in Budapest in 1956 when Russian tanks put down the anti-communist revolution there and he helped smuggle young Hungarian rebels to safety in Austria; and he was present in the Congo in 1960 as that vast country gained independence from Belgium while dissolving in chaotic civil strife. It was in Africa that Kemp became a special correspondent for The Spectator.
In the 1970s, The Spectator’s editor, Alexander Chancellor, was persuaded, despite his liberal tendencies, to employ the old warrior (who had passed his pensionable age) as a special correspondent in Rhodesia to report on the bitter bush war between the minority white regime of Ian Smith and Robert Mugabe’s black guerilla army. As might be expected, Kemp’s sympathies lay with the embattled Smith regime, but he continued to file insightful pieces sporadically until the Lancaster House agreement ended the conflict in 1979.
In 1957 Kemp had discovered his gift for writing when he published Mine Were of Trouble – a vivid memoir of his time in Spain and the first in an autobiographical trilogy covering his eventful life. He remained utterly unashamed of having chosen the ‘wrong’ side in Spain and was proud of fighting for Franco. He continued to believe that it was the Basques themselves rather than the Nazi Condor Legion aircraft who had destroyed the ancient Basque capital of Guernica.
Intrigued by an article by Kemp in a History magazine frankly titled ‘Why I fought for Franco’ I sought an interview with him in the 1980s. Given his amazing military record I was expecting a fire breathing volcano but was surprised and impressed by his gentleness of manner. For someone who had spent so long in situations of extreme violence, he exuded a calming sense of peace.
Even in old age, Peter Kemp couldn’t resist a final campaign and his last battle, when he was already in his 70s, was on the side of the anti-communist Contras in Nicaragua. He died in October 1993 – an unfashionable hero to the last.
I can’t help liking Bonnie Blue
Bonnie Blue is an It Girl. But she’s not an It Girl in the way we used to recognise them. Bonnie Blue is an It Girl because she’s written about as a thing, not a person. She’s an object, everything that’s bad about women, sex, modern life. She’s not really considered to be a human being, with hopes and fears and desires; her pronoun is It. But I can’t help liking her.
I’m not lying, and I’m not trying to be controversial; I’m just really keen on honesty, and so few people are really honest, even – especially – when they identify as honest. My own trade, journalism, is rife with faux-honest types – mostly female, with the odd over-sharing man – who, sell themselves on confessional writing, present a highly ‘curated’ version of the truth, usually one in which they are either poor little victims or adventurous vamps. When someone actually tells the truth about themselves – as I believe Bonnie Blue does – there is an outbreak of mass moral panic, as those who lie in order to live with themselves feel the sting of seeing what raw truth looks like.
In the interests of complete candour, I’ll reveal my own history with pornography. As I’m so old, there obviously wasn’t much of it around when I was a kiddy apart from the legendary top shelf magazines; you sometimes found them in fields where someone had obviously enjoyed a bit of solitary self-abuse and then guiltily abandoned the source of their pleasure, left to blow across scrubland like tit-tumbleweed. I grew up and in my twenties wrote a dirty book, Ambition, the paperback edition of which became a number one bestseller; it was very racy – somehow, I’d developed a pornographic imagination. (Getting married to the first man you have sex with will do that to you.) Then came the internet – I couldn’t believe what I was seeing! I became particularly enamoured of a performer called Mika Tan; I enjoyed watching pornography alone, but also while I was having sex with my new young boyfriend (now husband). I only realised I had a bit of a problem when one day he said politely ‘Julie, does it ever occur to you that we could have sex without pornography on?’
I’ve never had many sex fantasies because if I fancied doing a sex thing, I did it. But the one recurrent one I had in my twenties and thirties was what I thought of as The Queue; a parade of faceless men lining up to do the deed with me. I was hazy about the actual number; somewhere between 12 and 20, I’d guess. (Not a thousand – I was a good girl!) I never got around to it and in my fifties, what with the menopause and deciding against being pumped full of hormones to keep me ‘do-able’, I lost interest in That Side Of Things. It didn’t bother me; the vast majority of women by the time they get to 50 have had all the sex they wanted and some they didn’t, whereas men – unless rich, handsome and/or famous – have not. I’m convinced that this disparity is what makes so many men hostile towards women, and is at the root of the incel movement.
Another reason I stopped watching pornography is the same reason I stopped taking cocaine ten years ago. Everyone wants to believe that regardless of the misery and broken lives which litter the production of everybody else’s kicks, the source we alone opt for is magically free of exploitation. Like most purchasers of illegal drugs, I was partly responsible for the untold misery – probably even the deaths – of impoverished strangers, just for some fleeting fun. I got away from cocaine without doing lasting damage to myself – but I’ll never know what I did to others by creating the demand, and that’s something I’ll just have to live with. The pornography trade is far worse, preying as it does mostly on poor, vulnerable girls; the trafficking, the torture, the average age of death for a performer in pornography being 37 with a suicide rate six times higher than a civilian.
But none of that is true of Bonnie Blue. I’m pretty damn sure she’ll live to a ripe old age. Not trafficked, not tortured, not bothered by feelings of shame or sorrow; maybe that’s exactly what bothers some who pretend to criticise her on moral grounds. There was a lot of twaddle talked about ‘ethical porn’ and ‘feminist porn’ awhile back; though the phrases are up there with ‘friendly fire’, no one can deny that she is her own boss.
When someone actually tells the truth about themselves – as I believe Bonnie Blue does – there is an outbreak of mass moral panic
I believe that Bonnie Blue – who comes from a loving and respectable family, unlike many porn performers – is doing what she does partly because she enjoys it and can make masses of money from it, but partly as a flight from boredom, the fear of which is so extreme in some people that they will do anything to avoid it. I have a friend who spent quite a lot of time in the place where Tia Billinger (Blue’s real name) was raised, and describes it as ‘a very traditional area – the whole place is full of wedding-dress shops and wedding venues.’ (Lily Phillips, Blue’s less interesting competitor in the head-count sex racket, comes from around there too.) Billinger was by the age of 22 a married woman working in recruitment for the NHS; she has said that she was ‘bored of living in the nine to five.’ She’s not bored now. She is filthy rich, rich enough at 26 to never work again, but you sense that she’s having the time of her life. I can imagine her retiring at 30, utterly triumphant and smug.
Maybe there is a tiny bit of envy in some of the criticisms? This may cause some commentators to say the silliest things. ‘She’s set feminism back a hundred years’ say people who hate feminism anyway. Others shockingly compare it to the Gisele Pelicot case; the crucial difference being consent, or else one may as well compare one-on-one sex to rape. When she announced that she planned to put herself in a glass-box petting zoo and have sex with 2,000 men, an OnlyFans creator, of all people, called it ‘a circus.’ ‘Dead behind the eyes’ is another accusation – what exactly does it mean? She has nice eyes; she invariably looks back boldly at her questioners because she has nothing to hide. The idea that she is OK seems to perturb people enormously; the journalist Sophie Wilkinson wrote of her: ‘She is a cog in a far bigger machine, and I just want to know who hurt her.’
If you don’t use – and what a giveaway the word is – pornography, you can criticise Bonnie Blue all you like and not be ridiculous. But if you use it and criticise her, you’re a clown. An addle-pate. A pitiable, illogical hypocrite. I’ll bet you’ve watched gang bangs – if not four men, why not five? If not ten men, why not 11? At what head count does consensual adult pornography stop being acceptable? (I’m reminded of the story about George Bernard Shaw and the actress. Shaw: Madam, would you sleep with me for a million pounds? Actress: My goodness. Well, I’d certainly think about it. Shaw: Would you sleep with me for a pound? Actress: Certainly not! What kind of woman do you think I am?! Shaw: Madam, we’ve already established that. Now we are haggling about the price.) And who are you to judge, sitting there self-abusing yourself into stupefaction like a blank-eyed ape?
You’d think that Bonnie Blue invented pornography, the way she’s being castigated. But the industry was fully formed, built on the random desires of men, long before she was born. All she’s done is use it for her own ends. Do I think the availability of online pornography has made society worse? Yes. Do I think it has made the relationship between the sexes worse? Yes. Do I think it has scarred childhoods, blighted marriages, ruined lives, made young men impotent with young women when they should be having the best sex of their lives? Yes. But still, I can’t help liking Bonnie Blue.
The myth of the relaxing beach holiday
Picture the scene: you’re on a sun-drenched tropical island surrounded by azure waters and dazzling white sand. A lone palm tree casts shadows across your lover’s bronzed skin as you sip an ice-cold Campari Spritz. It’s a scene pictured a million times a day on Instagram feeds and the biggest holiday cliché of them all. But does the reality of an exotic island paradise live up to the fantasy peddled by popular TV shows such as White Lotus?
T.S. Eliot wrote that ‘humankind cannot bear very much reality’. I would argue that humankind cannot bear very much fantasy either. Yes, turquoise oceans, sugar-white sand and tropical flora are all pleasing to the eye, but are they enough to sustain one’s interest for an entire week, let alone two? It’s depressing how quickly we acclimatise to even our wildest fantasies.
If, like me, you find lounging on a sunlounger for hours on end mind-numbing in the extreme, it doesn’t really matter how gorgeous the sand is or whether the ocean is of the deepest hue, you’re still essentially lying around doing nothing – something you could just as easily do in Felixstowe and for a fraction of the price.
Moreover, in the tropics all that nothingness is done in sweltering 35°C heat with a billion grains of sand pricking your sunburnt skin while swarms of mosquitoes suck the blood from your dehydrated ankles. It’s hardly my idea of paradisiacal bliss, especially when you consider how much you’ll pay for the privilege. Maybe it’s true that only boring people get bored, but being bored and uncomfortable is surely no way to spend those precious two weeks away.
Another issue for me is the authenticity of some of the more remote and exclusive islands. In an effort to live up to guests’ Robinson Crusoe fantasies, the five-star hotels that largely dominate the more inaccessible islands often feel they must engineer the experience to such an extent that you may as well be on a cruise ship. Nothing is left to chance and every square foot of sand is carefully prinked and preened for the delectation of the billionaire class. And as with cruise ships, once you’re on there’s no getting off. But it’s the promise of unimaginable luxury that keeps the yacht-owning contingency coming back for more.
In 2021 Waldorf Astoria, part of the Hilton Group, took over the tiny island of Platte in the Seychelles and turned what had once been a small coconut plantation into a playground for the super-rich. The 0.8-mile stretch of land is so remote you have to take one of those hair-raisingly noisy propeller planes from the capital Mahé. Guests are then greeted by beaming members of staff doing their best to appear thrilled to see you. Each £12,000-a-night family villa has its own butler and an immaculately groomed garden with private pool – think Dubai but without the skyscrapers. Even the palm trees had to be specially imported to give the place just the right desert island vibe.
Other than burning to a crisp, activities on these isolated outposts are somewhat limited – no ancient ruins or quaint markets to tickle the senses – so in order to give shade-dwellers something to do, the hotel chains have all landed on the same set of ‘experiences’ (travel agent-speak for getting off your arse).
T.S. Eliot wrote that ‘humankind cannot bear very much reality’. I would argue that humankind cannot bear very much fantasy either
Like Platte, the minuscule Lhaviyani Atoll in the Maldives is dominated by a single five-star hotel, Le Méridien, part of Marriott International. And as is the case with so many of these island retreats, extra-curricular activities include eating, drinking, snorkelling and… turtles.
Unfortunately, in 2016 a survey indicated that more than 60 per cent of the Maldives coral had been affected by bleaching, a phenomenon often linked to pollution and rising sea levels. As a result, the reef is no longer a thing of vibrant beauty. When you consider that snorkelling is the primary draw for many visitors it seems somewhat remiss not to consider this before booking.
Platte has brought the whole turtle experience back to shore by notifying guests whenever a pregnant female shuffles onto the island to lay eggs. Fascinating though it is to watch these creatures give birth, it can feel a little voyeuristic.
When it comes to getting away from it all, these sanitised versions of paradise are all very well, but for me the perfect example of heaven on earth is that rugged, deserted beauty that Tom Hanks landed on after his plane crashed in the movie Castaway. Surely the real appeal of these inaccessible slices of wondrousness is their raw, untapped beauty unsullied by human design and hordes of sweaty Instagrammers? How thrilling to find oneself grappling with raw, unforgiving nature, utterly adrift with only seabirds for company. Now that’s what I call an experience.
Childfree zealots are anti-humanity
Few things in life are more French than a dispute animée about holidays. While the Spanish enjoy an easy relationship with mañana and the Italians savour il dolce far niente (sweet idleness), the French will incite a riot over any threat to their leisure time faster than you can say faire une pause.
It’s therefore little surprise to witness the ardourof government officials in condemning childfree resorts, a rare but growing feature of French holidaymaking. Saint-Delis in Normandy is but one hotel offering an ‘ever more exclusive and peaceful experience’ with ‘absolute relaxation’ for only €334 a night.
Much of this comes downstream of intellectual attempts to paint child-rearing as a quirky personal interest, rather than the only reason any of us are alive
The existence of such facilities has prompted Laurence Rossignol, a former families minister, to propose that adult-only venues should be banned. The Socialist party senator claimed that they ‘institutionalise and legitimise intolerance’, adding for good measure that ‘to not like children is to not like humanity itself’.
With rates of childlessness only climbing worldwide, it’s a debate that will only become more pertinent. France’s fertility rate is a mere 1.66 births per woman, according to the World Bank, with birthrates at their lowest ebb since the second world war. In Britain (1.56 births per woman), the Office for National Statistics recently revealed that a slender majority of women turned 30 without having had their first child in 2020, for the first time in history.
Such is the scale of the childlessness that even the bien pensants are spooked. Last year French president Emmanuel Macron called for ‘demographic rearmament’, offering six months parental leave for both parents, free fertility checks for 25-year-olds, and more funding for reproductive technology.
The vogue for childfree hospitality indicates this is as much a cultural problem as a financial or even technological one. Earlier this year France’s high commissioner for childhood, Sarah El Haïry, felt obliged to publicly rebuke anti-child attitudes, arguing that the country must resist the notion ‘that children aren’t welcome on a restaurant terrace’.
To some degree the reaction is overwrought. One travel company group reckons that only 3 per cent of France’s hotels and resorts qualify as childfree, and many of those visiting will be parents who have dropped Josephine and Gabriel off at the in-laws for a weekend of amour – or at least a few nights of unbroken sleep.
Having the odd pub that bars patrons still in primary school is likewise no great crisis if there’s a more family-friendly alternative nearby, nor should there be any objection to the curfews imposed in many British venues, ordering children home for bedtime. Even if we’re allowing kids to vote, there’s no need to have them hogging the barstools.
But there is a darker side to these reasonable requests. While the decision not to have children is a legitimate exercise of personal agency, the emboldened childfree movement – who dislike the more exposing ‘childless’ description – are increasingly arguing that other people’s children should be neither seen nor heard.
I’ve visited cafes – a trade heavily reliant on mothers of young children – who will post signs declaring that dogs are allowed, but children merely tolerated. See also the growth in childfree weddings: as if a marriage without children isn’t basically a tax avoidance scheme.
Public transport is another battleground, with a viral TikTok clip from April 2023 showing a man throw a hissy fit over a baby crying on a plane stuck in a holding pattern. This June an American sports pundit called for parents to ‘brain rot the baby on TikTok’ if it starts crying in the sky, and only a few days ago the Standard reported that a fight broke out on a Ryanair flight in response to infant tears. This is all to say that childfree zealots are as prone to temper tantrums as the toddlers they despise.
Much of this comes downstream of intellectual attempts to paint child-rearing as a quirky personal interest, rather than the only reason any of us are alive.
No doubt all parents enjoy a slither of solipsism in replicating their genes. But this is rather undercut by the self-sacrifice of raising the pickles, as many childless people cite when justifying their decision not to have any. Still, the childless are happy to draw from the welfare state when they reach their autumn years, funded, naturally, by other people’s children.
All of that is anyway besides the point. At the risk of sounding like a heartbleeder, what matters is that children are people like any other. They can be loud, annoying and inconsiderate, much like adults. Both deserve a place in public, even if it upsets those with dual incomes and no kids.
Goodbye to the letters of introduction
Re-reading Agatha Christie’s A Murder is Announced this week (it’s the summer holidays! I can relax like anyone else!), I was struck by one of Miss Marple’s wise pronouncements:
And that’s really the particular way the world has changed since the war. Take this place, Chipping Cleghorn, for instance. It’s very much like St Mary Mead where I live. Fifteen years ago one knew who everybody was. The Bantrys in the big house – and the Hartnells and the Price Ridleys and the Weatherbys… They were people whose fathers and mothers and grandfathers and grandmothers, or whose aunts and uncles, had lived there before them. If somebody new came to live there, they brought letters of introduction, or they’d been in the same regiment or served in the same ship as someone there already. If anybody new – really new – really a stranger – came, well, they stuck out – everybody wondered about them and didn’t rest till they found out.
Since 1950, when the book was published, letters of introduction have all but vanished, as anachronistic as spats and stove-pipe hats. I wonder when the last one was written, gravely bestowed on its recipient, and carried reverently (in a battered briefcase, no doubt), bearing hopes of social or financial success.
Decorous and polite, they hark back to an ordered world, and the exchange of reliable information about identity. A tip from the right person could be a conduit into Society, or smooth your way into a job. They boast an ancient lineage: the Ancient Egyptians used them; the Greeks had a manual which explained how to write them; Cicero got worked up about their formulaic nature. Important figures such as Benjamin Franklin were besieged by suppliants desiring their recommendations.
A good letter of introduction was like a passport. If a young man pitched up on your doorstep bearing one from your aunt or a bishop, you’d have a solid indicator of his trustworthiness. Further afield, they really were passports: the travel writer Patrick Leigh-Fermor bore letters which granted him passage to the crumbling palaces of Middle European aristocrats. In practice, they weren’t always successful: there’s a 19th-century painting by the artist David Wilkie which shows him approaching a potential patron with a letter of introduction. It’s worthless, as the patron has no interest in him.
A more sinister application of this custom enabled the introducer to keep tabs on the introduced: an early form of an AirTag. When Lord Chesterfield gave letters of introduction to his son, Philip Stanhope, he warned ‘at Leipsig I shall have an hundred invisible spies upon you; and shall be exactly informed of everything that you do, and of almost everything that you say.’ They could have fatal consequences, at least in fiction: in The Iliad, the hero Bellerophon carries a missive to a king, which he believes is a letter of introduction. In fact, it contains instructions for his murder.
Benign or not, their absence, says Marple, is a factor of instability. In A Murder is Announced, identity is fluid. Various suspects present themselves as one thing, only to be revealed as impostors. In Miss Marple’s pre-lapsarian world, this would have been nigh on impossible (although her view may be rosy-tinted). Even so, that ordered, hierarchical universe, in which you knew everyone from lord of the manor to muck-spreading labourer, has been smashed by the vast machinery of war.
Printed on headed writing paper, or even hand-written, and sealed in a thick envelope. These may be the only reliable way to confirm your bona fides
Letters of introduction still eke out an existence in electronic form, though, like everything technology touches, they are much debased. In my twenties, if you were visiting somewhere new, whether in the UK or across the world, you’d be cc’ed into an excitable email from a mutual friend. ‘Hi John, Philip’s staying in Dorset for three weeks, it would be lovely if you could see him! He’s not a murderer!’ You would reply, ‘Nice to e-meet you!’, which is one of the cringiest phrases to have been spawned in recent times. Worse are those now conducted via a hurried WhatsApp: ‘Just introducing Whizz here, who was at nursery school (I think???) with me. He’ll be in London for two days in October. Have fun!’ Little real information is given; we rely on the probity of the mutual friend and, if we are snoopy, on the internet.
Indeed, even sage old Marple could not have foreseen that. We have a much stranger situation than the one she bewails. Despite the reams of information available online, we have little to no guarantee of its truth. People lie on their CVs (even, or perhaps especially, prominent ones: ahem, Rachel Reeves). Curated or locked social media posts baffle and frustrate the inquisitive. Some people eschew social media altogether. Does that make them suspicious, or not? A message purporting to be from ‘someone who wants to connect’, or even one from a close friend or relative, could be written by an LLM, or be a front for a crook waiting to siphon off your life savings.
How then, are we to know when a new person in our lives is the real deal? Perhaps we will be reverting to St Mary Mead (though the people in ‘the big house’ are now more likely to be London blow-ins, and the plumbers will be earning more than the toffs). Maybe the physical letter of introduction, as opposed to its ersatz electronic counterpart, will return. Personal connections will become even more important than they already are. Aunts and bishops will once more be in high demand, while high-profile figures may once more be inundated with claims for their (literal) seal of approval.
Printed on headed writing paper, or even hand-written, and sealed in a thick envelope. These may be the only reliable way to confirm your bona fides. And who knows, they might gain their own social cachet, too. Time to start investing in sealing wax.
The Ukraine summit ignored the difficult questions
What a lovely meeting Volodymyr Zelensky and his European allies had with Donald Trump. The US President complimented Zelensky on his outfit, German Chancellor Merz on his ‘great tan’, and said that Finnish President Alexander Stubb was ‘looking better than I’ve ever seen you look!’ Everyone – especially Zelensky – laughed uproariously at all Trump’s jokes. And all eight leaders present were at great pains to pretend that they were on the same page when it came to achieving peace in Ukraine.
But there was one small thing missing from this White House festival of bonhomie and mutual flattery, and that was a substantive discussion of the actual nuts and bolts of a deal that Vladimir Putin would be prepared to accept.
One of the elephants in the room was the question of whether Zelensky would be prepared to cede more territory in the Donbas as the price of peace. Another was whether Zelensky was ready to formally recognise part or all of the territories occupied by Putin since 2014 as parts of Russia. Indeed any questions to which Zelensky would be likely to say ‘no way!’ remained tactfully un-discussed.
Trump seemed to have taken a page from the great diplomatist Bing Crosby’s playbook – you’ve got to accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative and (preferably) not mess with Mr In-Between. Which is preferable, all agreed, to the course Trump took during Zelensky’s last visit to the Oval Office in February where the Ukrainian President was browbeaten, talked over, insulted and then dismissed. So in that important sense relations have improved considerably. True, unlike Putin Zelensky got no red carpet, nor a ride in Trump’s presidential limousine. But he did at least receive a warm welcome and immediate words of praise for having worn a suit this time.
Anyone who hoped that Monday’s meeting would achieve a major breakthrough was disappointed. Trump repeatedly made it clear that it was he and Putin who were the main deciders of the peace process, Europe’s leaders the subordinates. He told his European visitors that he had spoken to Putin just before their meeting and would be calling him again right after. Trump was in his element as he acted as master of ceremonies, treating the European leaders like a CEO consulting his board members before top-level negotiations with a rival company.
There was one clear signal, though, of the key issue which will be pivotal in the endgame of the war – security guarantees for Ukraine from its Western allies. Putin, in his remarks after his meeting with Trump in Alaska, mentioned that he was ‘naturally prepared to work on’ security guarantees to Ukraine. Trump later claimed in calls to his European colleagues that Putin had ‘agreed’ to such guarantees – and later leaks from the White House suggested that the US would also be amenable to signing up too.
In the White House on Monday Georgia Meloni led the charge on trying to define what those guarantees would look like, suggesting that they should mirror Nato’s Article 5 that calls for (but, importantly, does not oblige) members to regard an attack on one as an attack on them all. Sir Keir Starmer suggested that ‘we‘re talking about security not just of Ukraine, we’re talking about the security of Europe and the United Kingdom as well.’
Trump forbore from browbeating the Europeans
In TV appearances, both Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Trump’s special envoy to Russia Steve Witkoff have emphasised the idea of security guarantees to Ukraine as a major breakthrough. In truth, such proposed covenants are nothing new. In Istanbul in April 2022, several draft agreements drawn up in the course of talks between Ukraine and Russia included detailed clauses on the scope and nature of possible western security guarantees outside the framework of Nato. But those peace talks were abandoned in favour of isolating Russia and encouraging Ukraine to defeat Moscow’s forces in the field.
Crucially, in Istanbul the Russians had – absurdly – demanded to be a guarantor of Ukraine of future security, just as they had been in the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, and to have a veto over any international intervention. That would obviously have rendered the whole idea of a security guarantee ridiculous. It remains to be seen if Putin chooses to reprise that extraordinary, deal-breaking demand. But more likely the Kremlin will suggest that China be one of the future guarantors of Ukraine’s security, which will pose a mind-bending new set of challenges for Ukraine’s allies.
Overall, though, all sides can be content with the Washington conference. There was no breakthrough, but neither was there a train-wreck. Importantly, Trump forbore from browbeating the Europeans for freeloading on US military budgets, for failing to pull their weight in arming Ukraine, or for failing to stop the war when they could have – all previous MAGA talking points. And Trump also did not push back on a single European argument, even when France’s Emmanuel Macron and Merz both spoke of returning to the idea of a ceasefire before final peace talks. That point had already been jettisoned by Trump at Anchorage when he bought into Putin’s new timetable, but he was tactful enough not to remind his guests of that.
The Europeans, for their part, did not blast Trump for abandoning Ukraine by cutting off weapons and money, nor accuse him of selling Kyiv’s interests down the river. Nor did they denounce him for giving an indicted war criminal the red carpet treatment or demand why Putin had not been arrested on arrival in Anchorage. In short, everyone in the room – including Trump himself – was on best behaviour.
Is best behaviour the same as actual western unity? It is as long as nobody raises the difficult questions such as land giveaways, Russian language rights, return of stolen children, payment of reparations, lifting of sanctions on Russia, unbanning pro-Russian political parties and TV stations, lifting Ukrainian sanctions on 5,000 of Zelensky’s political opponents, or holding long overdue elections, to name just a few of the thorny issues that stand on the road from war to peace .
Trump’s next step, he says, will be to organise a trilateral meeting with himself, Putin and Zelensky. It’s a tall order – not least because Putin has made it clear that he doesn’t consider Zelensky a legitimate leader and Zelensky passed an actual law in 2022 forbidding negotiations with the Putin regime. And if it does happen, we can be sure that all the thorniest of questions will be asked right up front – and nobody will be on their best behaviour.
Donald Trump was on his best behaviour in his meeting with Zelensky
It was back to black for Volodymyr Zelensky. After the Trump White House asked whether he was going to wear a suit for his Oval Office meeting, the Ukrainian president showed up in a dark military-style jacket, pleasing his hosts to no end. Even Brian Glenn, boyfriend of Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene and reporter for Real America’s Voice, who had dissed Zelensky in February, commended him on his habiliments, declaring ‘you look fabulous in that suit.’ Zelensky was pleased. So was Trump.
The biggest obstacle to a peace deal, of course, is whether Putin even wants one
In fact, Trump was on his best behaviour. After ranting earlier in the morning that he didn’t need all the experts to tell him what to think and that Ukraine should essentially prostrate itself before Russia, he avoided any verbal fisticuffs with Zelensky or talk about exiting Nato. Instead, Trump breathed optimism about where the negotiations, which he hopes will secure him a coveted Nobel Peace Prize, were headed. ‘I think it’s going to be when, not if,’ Trump said about a trilateral meeting between him, Putin and Zelensky.
He may not have rolled out a red carpet for Zelensky when he arrived in Washington, as he did for Putin in Alaska, but he treated him with unwonted respect. According to Trump, ‘I have a feeling you and president Putin are going to work something out. Ultimately, this is a decision that can only be made by president Zelensky and by the people of Ukraine working also together in agreement with president Putin. And I just think that very good things are going to come of it.’
If the meeting with European leaders that took place later in the afternoon was anything to go by, Trump’s eupeptic push for a peace deal is not meeting with overt resistance. Quite the contrary. Zelensky indicated that territorial concessions would be discussed should he meet Putin. It was clever of Zelensky to put the onus back on Putin rather than rejecting out-of-hand the prospect of land swaps.
‘If we played this well, we could end this, and we have to end it,’ Nato Secretary-General Mark Rutte said. Indeed, he called Trump’s offer of security guarantees for Ukraine a ‘breakthrough.’
What those guarantees would look like remains unclear. European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen, who appears to have established a good working relationship with Trump, indicated that it was imperative to provide ‘Article 5-like guarantees’ to Ukraine. What this will amount to is an open question – Germany announced today that it was already overstretched with its stationing of a Bundeswehr brigade in Lithuania and that it is unlikely to put any boots on the ground in Ukraine.
But the biggest obstacle to a peace deal, of course, is whether Putin even wants one. ‘President Putin wants to find an answer, too,’ Trump said. Does he?
So far, as he launches fresh fusillades of missiles and drones at Ukraine, the Russian tyrant appears to believe that he has more to benefit from continuing rather than halting the war that he, and he alone, launched in February 2022.
For all the bonhomie that existed between him and Trump in Alaska, it may be replaced by a more adversarial relationship in coming weeks should Putin maintain his obduracy about reaching an actual deal.
Trump-Zelensky II went off without a hitch
Not since Barack Obama held a press conference dressed as the Man from Del Monte has a suit played such a critical role in US politics. But there it was, after the spring press conference incident, President Zelensky arrived in Washington DC wearing a suit. The YMCA-loving Trump administration is hardly batting off the accusations of campery given its fixation with menswear. Still, Zelensky came, as did all of Europe.
All the handshakes went off without a hitch, although the size difference meant that the visuals were slightly more redolent of panto than high diplomatic drama. Zelensky handed a letter from his wife to the First Lady, thanking her for her intervention on behalf of Ukraine’s missing children. During Trump’s monologues on foreign policy he has often let slip that his wife has been a driving influence in favour of a more compassionate attitude towards Ukraine. Whether the Secret Service can deliver it to the right Melania remains to be seen.
Trump specialises in the diplomatic theatre of the absurd: Samuel Beckett meets Metternich meets the cast of the Jersey Shore. He duly boasted of solving ‘six wars in six months’, including in a place he called the Republic of the Condo – which sounds like a pseudonym for Florida. This was a press conference through the looking glass.
Meanwhile the President kept his audience guessing: ‘We have great people up here’, he said, gesturing at the assembled press pack. ‘We also have terrible people’. Nobody does scattered insults quite like Trump – he makes the Gatling Gun look like a close-range precision missile.
He treated Zelensky to a long and very involved monologue about the virtues of paper ballots – by far the lengthiest answer of the day. It was a bit like one of those sections you have to skip in a Victorian novel, as when Anthony Trollope does one of his three-chapter sequences about a fox hunt or spends 100 pages waxing lyrical about cheques.
In the midst of this, the President insisted that only America uses paper ballots. For all his comedy it is worth remembering that Trump includes provable untruths in most of his monologues. Of course it isn’t only America which uses mail-in ballots: just ask the electors of Tower Hamlets!
As ever, Trump’s press conference was like watching a mime show. It was wild, confusing and seemingly irrelevant at times, and yet when it was over you had a sense that you’d seen something impressive.
All in all, as good as it could be expected for Ukraine. JD Vance – unusually silent today – had apparently been neutered and, for all the Trumpian weirdness, the exchanges yielded a more concrete level of support than last time. On security, said Trump, ‘there’s going to be a lot of help, we will be involved’.
For now, at least, it seemed President Zelensky had figured out the winning formula; nod, smile and say as little as possible. Perhaps he’d been taking tips from Sir Keir.
Why are the young turning to God?
There are opinion polls that are so striking they change history. Many Britons will remember the YouGov poll in September 2014. It was the first poll in the Scottish independence referendum campaign to show the Yes side ahead by 51 per cent to 49. That poll shocked SW1, panicked the Cameron government, and led to ‘The Vow’ – the last-minute promise of further devolution if Scotland stayed in the UK. And lo, ‘No’ scraped home, and Britain staggered on.
Then there are polls that go beyond striking into ‘whoah, can that possibly be true?’ territory. Polls so unexpected they feel world-changing. The same company, YouGov, has produced just such a poll. It shows that religious belief among 18 to 24-year-olds has tripled in just four years, from 16 per cent to 45 per cent.
Can that possibly be true? And if it is true, what in God’s name is going on? Most of us have spent our lives in a world of increasing secularism and irreligion: if that is abruptly reversing, what might it mean? Scrying deeper into the polling entrails – this is a biannual poll of British religious belief – throws up caveats. Firstly, the sample of 18 to 24-year-olds is actually a small subsample of the wider British population. Such subsamples are notoriously wobbly – but not without utility.
Also, it seems like some publications have cherry-picked the data. They have chosen to highlight January 2025 as the endpoint, yet the most recent poll (6 August 2025) is less startling: the 45 per cent of ‘believers’ comes down to 37 per cent. Meanwhile, significant questions have also been levelled at YouGov’s earlier claims of increased churchgoing – which derive from this same sequence of polls.
Nonetheless, the basic data show that something holy is going on. Look at the overall figures. In August 2019, a total of 39 per cent of young people believed either in God/gods or a ‘spiritual greater power’. At the same time 42 per cent declared total atheism – no beliefs at all. The youthful atheists had a narrow but clear majority.
Now, in August 2025, a total of 55 per cent of young people believe in God/gods or a spiritual greater power, and just 32 per cent are convinced atheists. The believers are in the majority – by some distance. And this is not just a shift in polling maths, but in conviction: a recent report, separate from YouGov, found young believers are now significantly more zealous and personally committed to their faith than their grandparents’ generation.
Verily, there is something afoot, so we need to explain it. Given the timespan involved, 2019–25, one obvious contender is Covid. A worldwide plague that killed perhaps 20 million people, and terrified billions – leaving economies reeling – was bound to shake minds. There is evidence that previous plagues increased religious devotions. After the Black Death, parts of Europe saw spikes in sacred fervour – penitential processions, flagellant movements, apocalyptic cults.
However, the Black Death, according to some historians, also left survivors more cynical and anticlerical, more willing to experiment with heterodox ideas. At the same time, the common people saw priests dying in their dozens – and wondered why God did not save them. A few thinkers (e.g. Norman Cantor) have argued that the Black Death sowed the ideological seeds of the Reformation.
Other plagues display similar patterns: increased devoutness in some, yet a new aversion to the church (or the synagogue, temple, mosque) in others. Maybe plagues simply amplify tendencies already in place.
Maybe we really are seeing young British people – depressed by the bleakness of materialism, alienated by AI and smartphones – returning to spirituality
What else could be at work? The 2020s have not lacked for mind-bending and often depressing drama, from Ukraine to Gaza to Trump/Biden. Then one can look at the climate-changing planet – and the misgoverned UK – and see chaos, and hopelessness. The one sovereign remedy that religion offers is hope.
Others would point to large-scale immigration of people from more religious cultures – but even migration on the biblical scale of the Boriswave – when His Majesty’s Government used the Book of Exodus as a policy document – does not explain the extraordinary leap of faith in the YouGov data.
Finally, we live in an age of wild, weird fashions which sweep around the world with passionate intensity, sped by social media and TikTok influencers, which then fade just as fast. These fashions can be as bizarre as fidget spinners or Labubus.
Perhaps all this sudden desire for higher powers and whispered prayers is Labubus elevated into a lifestyle: smells and bells for some, Zen and ayahuasca for others. It is noticeable that if you break down the increase in religious belief by class, it is the affluent and the fashionable – ABC1s – who have become more susceptible to faith. The working-class CDE have not budged, and remain stubbornly sceptical. Maybe we have here the ultimate in luxury beliefs: when you run out of sourdough ideas, you consider your soul. And all that velvet and incense is a seductive aesthetic.
However, given that this is an article on religion, I prefer to end on a piously upbeat note. It is, after all, quite possible that the YouGov polling is correct, and is showing a genuine revival in religiosity. Maybe we really are seeing young British people – depressed by the bleakness of materialism, alienated by AI and smartphones – returning to spirituality, and perhaps to the storied and consoling Christian faith of our ancestors.
If that is happening: praise be. The United Kingdom is in a tight old spot, as we all know. We face a long road to regaining our cultural self-confidence. But if we are to retrieve our national purpose, a crucial element of this will be rediscovering what it means to be Britons, what makes us special – and part of that is our identity as an offshore Protestant island with noble Catholic roots. Put it another way, we need to notice, once again, that on our extraordinary national flag there are three Christian crosses: exquisitely unified into a fourth.
Why killer drivers escape lifetime bans
Tracy Bibby had already been banned from driving in 2006 and 2016. In 2019, while her second driving ban was still in effect, she got behind the wheel of a van and began driving dangerously. While, according to the judge, ‘behaving like a Formula 1 driver’ in order to ‘show off’, Bibby crashed the van into a house, killing its occupant, a 90-year-old woman.
Bibby consistently lied to the police after the crash, telling them she had not been the driver. But CCTV evidence showed that she had in fact entered the van on the driver’s side. Found guilty of causing death by dangerous driving, Bibby was jailed for four years but banned from driving for only six. As of 2025, Bibby is legally allowed to drive again.
In late 2023, Terry Colley was driving while high and drunk when he swerved onto the other side of the road and crashed head-on into the car of a 29-year-old woman, seriously injuring her.
Colley blamed his victim, repeatedly claiming that she had been driving on the wrong side of the road, which CCTV evidence showed to be false. He was sentenced to four years’ imprisonment and a six-year-and-one-month driving ban. The presiding judge in the case described Colley as not having ‘shown a shred of remorse’, yet in 2031 he will once again be able to legally drive a car.
The law allows lifetime driving bans to be handed out to offenders convicted of the crimes that Bibby and Colley were, but the lenient driving bans they received are the rule, not the exception.
Lenient driving bans are the rule, not the exception
The think tank Onward’s report, ‘Cleared to Kill’, finds that in the year ending June 2024, only two people found guilty of causing death by dangerous driving, out of a total of 202 offenders, were given lifetime driving bans. In the same period, 351 people were found guilty of causing serious injury by dangerous driving, a crime which includes causing life-changing injuries such as paralysis. Again, only two of these offenders were given lifetime bans, with an average driving ban lasting only two or three years. Incredibly, of the six people found guilty of causing death while driving disqualified – in other words, driving during a ban – none were given a lifetime driving ban.
This leniency reflects statutory minimums and Sentencing Council guidance. The minimum driving ban for causing death by dangerous driving – the most serious motoring offence someone can commit – is five years. If an offender has ignored a driving ban and then killed, but is not deemed to have been driving dangerously, the minimum ban is a mere two years.
Between 2000 and 2021, 9 per cent of people convicted of a criminal offence accounted for more than half of all convictions. It is likely that in the case of serious motoring offences, a similarly small number of offenders represent a much larger proportion of offences. Lenient driving bans are almost certainly making the roads significantly more dangerous for everyone.
When lethal and irresponsible motorists are found guilty of dangerous driving repeatedly in a court of law, we should respond by taking away their licences for ever. If someone is found guilty of causing serious injury or death by dangerous driving more than once, they should never be allowed to drive again. If they hurt or kill someone while driving during an existing ban, again, their driving ban should be made permanent. Unlike a prison place, a permanent driving ban is a cost-free way to keep the public safer and be tougher on serious offenders.
Last week, the Government announced that it will put out a new road safety strategy. Proposed policies include reducing the drink-drive limit from 35 micrograms of alcohol per 100 millilitres of breath to 22 micrograms. Before tinkering with these rules and cracking down on law-abiding motorists, we must ask why the Government is failing to prevent repeat killer drivers from getting behind the wheel.
This can be achieved with simple changes to sentencing guidance, as already endorsed by the shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp. As a first step, the Lord Chancellor Shabana Mahmood has the power to request the Council review its guidelines formally. She should write to them immediately. Every week of delay means more of the country’s most dangerous drivers being given a free pass to return to our roads in just a few years’ time.
Reform has to distance itself from extremists
According to the National – a worrying phrase, I admit, given the Scottish newspaper’s obsessive adulation of anyone pro-Scottish independence and its obsessive hostility to anyone who opposes it – this weekend saw a Scottish Reform councillor share a platform with a member of a far-right group at a protest outside a Falkirk hotel housing asylum seekers.
While Cllr Mackie-Brown may have been out of her depth and blindsided by what she heard, one might expect that Reform itself would have a ready-made response to such issues
What is most interesting about this story is not the protest itself, or even the Reform councillor’s presence. It is the response of Reform to one of its councillors sharing a platform with this person and saying or doing nothing about it.
Despite the widespread labelling of anyone who believes that our borders should be controlled as far right, and despite the usual bias of the National, the facts it has reported seem clear. At the protest, Claire Mackie-Brown shared a platform with one Richard McFarlane, a member of Patriotic Alternative, which describes itself as a ‘ethno-nationalist organisation that campaigns for the rights and wellbeing of White Britons.’ Last year, the government’s anti-extremism advisor described Patriotic Alternative as ‘a racist and anti-Semitic far-right group founded in 2019 by former BNP youth leader Mark Collett.’
Cllr Mackie-Brown can be forgiven if she had no idea who McFarlane was when he began to speak. But once he did, no one could have been in any doubt about his views. In his seven-minute speech he asserted that, ‘we need to give them the fingers, and say we are white, we are British, we are proud’. He concluded: ‘Keep Britain white, keep Britain British.’
According to the protest organiser, neither the Reform councillor nor the Patriotic Alternative member were invited to speak: ‘The microphone was open to anyone who wished to share their personal concerns or experiences. No speakers were formally invited or endorsed by the organisers it was a platform for local people. If individuals with affiliations to political groups or outside organisations chose to speak, that was entirely their choice and not something we had pre-arranged or promoted.’ That’s fair enough, and in those circumstances it’s easy to see how a local residents’ protest was overrun by the far-right.
But that is far from being a one-off. One of the recurring themes of these protests up and down the country is how they attract the far-right. Which makes it all the more obvious, and all the more important, that mainstream politicians from mainstream parties should have a serious and convincing response when the far-right are present. At the very least, that needs to involve denouncing the racism and the white nationalism of extremists. Otherwise, it becomes easy to label all the protests as being far-right, and to label representatives of parties such as Reform which stand alongside them as being part of the far-right.
As far as one can tell from reports, which have not been contradicted, that did not happen this weekend in Falkirk. Cllr Mackie-Brown appears to have said nothing in response.
But while Cllr Mackie-Brown may have been out of her depth and blindsided by what she heard, one might expect that Reform itself would have a ready-made response to such issues. And it has: but the response is useless. Reform told the National:
‘Councillor Claire Brown was there to represent Reform and her concerned constituents, she is not responsible for the other people attending and will continue to stand up for residents on this extremely important issue.’
Of course she isn’t responsible for the other speakers. No one has suggested she is. But as a representative of Reform, she – and anyone else in a similar situation – has to react. You can’t simply pretend you are in a bubble, removed from scene, when someone you are standing with is ranting ‘Keep Britain white.’
It’s a similar point to what has been happening on the ‘Free Palestine’ hate marches. The argument is made that the majority present are ordinary, decent people simply concerned about the deaths in Gaza. They may indeed be. But if you turn up at a march to discover that a proportion of your fellow marchers are Jew haters, chanting anti-Semitic slogans and waving anti-Semitic banners, then you have a choice. You can leave, distancing yourself. Or – as has been happening – you can continue on the march and, even worse, come back the following week, again saying and doing nothing to condemn the hate around you. And in doing so you not only remove any claim to decency, you become part of the problem.
Reform has the same choice to make. Does it pretend that it is not part of the same protest when the far-right arrives? Or does it denounce and condemn racists for leaching onto a legitimate protest by ordinary and decent local residents?
This will be a recurring theme for Reform as its elected officials and members – entirely legitimately – attend protests outside asylum hotels and are joined by far-right agitators. Unless Reform finds a way to properly distance itself from them, it will be tarred with their brush.
Why Nigel Farage should go big on nature
Dear Nigel Farage,
We haven’t met, but I have a great idea for you. I head the Zoological Society of London. We’re a conservation charity, not party political but dedicated to protecting wildlife. You might approve – we’re a venerable national institution, 200 years old next year and still proud of our royal connections (though so is the RNLI, and you’ve gone off them).
Anyway, here’s the idea: go big on nature. Make protecting Britain’s natural heritage one of your things. Outflank the government on bats and badgers. Become Swampy in red trousers. It makes sense in all sorts of ways.
What could be more conservative than protecting the landscapes and wildlife that define our identity?
Politics first: nature is popular. Millions of voters are members of the National Trust, the RSPB and the Wildlife Trusts. Nine out of ten British adults say that they feel a responsibility to look after nature. Protecting nature is not a niche issue; it is a deeply held conviction across the electorate.
You’re not a great fan of the overseas aid budget, but guess which bit of it consistently polls as the most popular? Yep, the bit that protects nature around the world.
It’s not just the avocado toast-eating wokerati like me who care about nature. In a recent poll over two-thirds of your own voters agreed that a law should be passed significantly increasing the area of protected woodland and wildlife habitats. Another one found that almost half of Conservative voters believe the government isn’t doing enough to safeguard nature.
But it goes deeper than that. At the heart of your appeal is the notion of a threatened sense of identity and nationhood and little evokes that sense of identity more than the countryside. Ask an Englishman to close his eyes and think of England and he will see a meadow and an oak tree. From the Highlands to the South Downs, our landscapes are etched into our collective consciousness, a defining source of our quiet national pride. This isn’t sentimentality; it’s a profound connection to place, to history and to identity.
Conservatism, at its heart, is about preserving what is good, what has stood the test of time, what connects us to the past and binds us to the future. The destruction of nature is a radical act, a rupture with tradition, an irreversible loss of something precious. What could be more conservative than protecting the landscapes and wildlife that define our identity?
It is no coincidence that the early conservation movements drew heavily from those who valued tradition, stewardship, and the preservation of national character. Teddy Roosevelt was a titan of conservation, setting up many of America’s national parks. In Britain, the 11th Duke of Bedford championed wildlife protection in the late 19th and early 20th centuries long before it became fashionable and was president of my organisation, the Zoological Society of London, for 36 years. Their motivation was an appreciation for their country’s natural heritage and a sense of duty to pass it on intact.
There is even a Brexit angle. Thanks to you separating us from Brussels, Britain now has the opportunity to forge its own path to combine the protection of nature with the production of food, rather than remain in a system of subsidies designed for industrial-scale French farms. The UK can let our own farmers look after the countryside, understanding that they are often the best stewards of the land. Empowering them, rather than dictating to them, to manage their land in a way that benefits both production and nature is a quintessentially conservative approach.
I think this is why that other towering figure of the humorous right, Jeremy Clarkson, has hit such a chord with his everyday story of country folk. Clarkson’s Farm is more than just a reality show; it is a modern parable about how we can live alongside nature that ought to appeal directly to your base.
Going big on nature should appeal to your inner economic hawk. You like successful businesses, and businesses are now seriously worried about biodiversity loss. 80 per cent now say they regard it as a critical threat. Damage to nature affects the whole economy, from pharmaceutical companies, which find new drugs in nature, to fashion, which depends on nature for their supply chains, to food, where cocoa prices have been put up because deforestation and pollinator decline have reduced yields.
For free marketeers like you, the good news is that progress can be made in protecting nature simply by removing the subsidies that prop up uneconomic industries. Across the world, governments are subverting the market by treating nature as a limitless free good and pumping money into dying or ought-to-be-dead activities like the floating fish factories that are bottom-trawling the oceans. Nature will thrive when mechanisms are in place to ensure it has its actual economic value; the market will take care of the rest.
Your inner security hawk should also care. The Illegal Wildlife Trade, valued at £15 billion annually, funds transnational criminal networks linked to drug trafficking and terrorism. And damage to nature causes population shifts and instability. The 2010 floods in Pakistan – exacerbated by deforestation – displaced millions and fuelled Taliban recruitment.
You can make this issue your own. Boris Johnson really ‘got’ nature, and the UK led the world in this space under his leadership. His two successors didn’t. Keir Starmer hasn’t yet shown much interest in the issue. Rachel Reeves has picked a fight with bats and newts. There are bright spots: David Lammy is clearly passionate about nature, and Environment Secretary Steve Reed is playing a blinder with the water companies. But if you stood up for nature, you would tap into a rich seam of public anxiety.
I suspect we won’t agree on much, but we might agree on nature. You might remember one British politician telling the UN that humanity was conducting a ‘vast experiment’ with the planet and telling the world that ‘we must remember our duty to nature before it is too late’. It was your one-time hero, Margaret Thatcher. You could follow her lead. As the head of a conservation charity that is not on the left or right, but focussed single-mindedly on protecting nature, I hope you do.
Revealed: Mental health claims see Foreign Office absences soar
Back to the UK’s bloated civil service. As if the government didn’t have enough on its plate trying to slash Whitehall red tape, the number of sick days taken by civil servants won’t help Sir Keir Starmer’s army pick up the pace on progress. Civil servant absences are on track to reach a record high – and the Foreign Office is no exception to the trend. Mr S can reveal the number of sick days taken by FCDO mandarins shot up by more than 50 per cent in the financial year ending March 2024 compared to the previous year – while the number of days lost to mental health issues soared by more than three-quarters.
A Freedom of Information response has shown that in the period from April 2023-March 2024, almost 30,000 days were lost to sick leave within the Foreign Office department, a rise of 51.4 per cent on the previous year. 8,400 days were lost to mental health issues within the department – a surge of 77.3 per cent on the year before – while those civil servants requiring sickness leave on mental health grounds rose to 254 in 2023-24, a 65 per cent increase on the previous financial year. These rather staggering absence rises are despite the total number of Foreign Office staff increasing between the years by just 500 people. Good heavens…
Remarking on the revelation, the TaxPayers’ Alliance’s investigations manager Joanna Marchong noted:
While families up and down the country are working hard and paying their bills, civil servants are increasingly absence for any reason in the book. Ministers must get a grip and ensure that the Foreign Office is run with the same discipline expected in private sector workplaces. It’s unacceptable that civil servants don’t show up.
The findings come after central department data published earlier this month found that mandarin absences in 2025 could work out at more than eight days a year per employee. Last year, the average number of days off per worker was 4.4 – but this year, departmental reports are suggesting that the number of average days lost per worker could soar past the all-time high of 8.3 days per person, reached in the post-pandemic period of 2023. Staff sickness rates increased by 11.8 per cent in the year to March 2025 at the Home Office, while the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government saw absences shoot up by 12 per cent. Perhaps Starmer had a point when he insisted ‘too many people in Whitehall are comfortable in the tepid bath of managed decline’, eh?
Will Zelensky’s dash to see Trump pay off?
Volodymyr Zelensky is in Washington today to debrief with Donald Trump following the US President’s meeting with Vladimir Putin in Alaska on Friday. The purpose of today’s meeting at the White House will be to discuss the parameters of a potential peace deal in Ukraine. The last time Zelensky came to Washington was in February, when Trump and his vice president J.D. Vance berated the war-time leader for not being sufficiently ‘grateful’ for America’s support in the conflict with Russia. Once again, there is every possibility today’s summit will turn out as tense as it did six months ago.
Zelensky and his allies have a tall task ahead of them today
Trump reportedly wants to discuss the territorial concessions demanded by Putin during Friday’s tete-a-tete. The Russian president is said to have pushed to be given full control of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions during the closed-doors meeting between the two. While Luhansk is almost entirely under Russian occupation, Ukraine still holds about 30 per cent of the Donetsk region. Zelensky’s position on land swaps has thawed somewhat over the past month – over the weekend, he said the front line’s ‘contact line is the best line for talking’. But he has repeatedly rejected handing over any Ukrainian territory not already occupied by the Kremlin’s troops.
Instead, the Ukrainian President’s aim for today is to once again try and extract security guarantees from Trump for Ukraine in the event of a peace deal with Russia. While the US special envoy Steve Witkoff – who travelled with Trump to Alaska last week – has said the President had agreed to offering Zelensky ‘Article 5-like language’ mirroring the Nato principle of treating an attack on one state as an attack on all, many questions remain over what such security guarantees would look like in practise.
Helping Zelensky make his case to Trump today – and hoping to protect him from the worst of his wrath – is an assortment of his largest European allies. They include Keir Starmer, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, French President Emmanuel Macron, Italian premier Giorgia Meloni, Finnish President Alexander Stubb, and Nato and EU chiefs Mark Rutte and Ursula von der Leyen. Many of this cast of characters have been present at various hastily arranged virtual and face-to-face meetings with Trump and Zelensky over the past week or so. In the face of Trump’s cosier than was comfortable overtures to Putin in Alaska, these meetings show how anxious Zelensky and his allies are about the likelihood of the American president forcing Ukraine into signing a deal with Russia it doesn’t want to.
Zelensky and his allies have a tall task ahead of them today. Taking to his social media platform Truth Social overnight, Trump once again put pressure on the Ukrainian president to accept the as yet unclear peace terms being cooked up between the American president and his Russian counterpart. He also ruled out a number of Ukrainian demands, including returning Crimea and ‘NO GOING INTO NATO’.
Trump’s aggressive haste to secure a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine has seen him increasingly bend towards giving in to Putin’s maximalist demands to end the conflict – rather than securing an agreement that would benefit and deliver justice for Ukraine. While Zelensky’s European allies were quick to recognise this, they have so far failed to produce sufficient carrots and sticks of their own with which to bring Trump onside. There is little to suggest any of them will succeed in producing any white rabbits today that will conclusively sway Trump away from bullying Zelensky into accepting the terms of a treaty hashed out with Putin behind Ukraine’s back. Europe’s armies and finances inspire similarly little confidence that, should Zelensky walk away from discussions, his allies have the means to sufficiently support his country in the conflict with Russia without America’s backing.
Tonight’s events will start at 5pm BST, when Zelensky’s European allies are scheduled to arrive at the White House. This will be followed by a one-on-one between Trump and Zelensky in the Oval Office, before all parties are due to meet at 8pm British time. What, if any, press conferences will be held afterwards are currently unknown.
Ever confident in his own abilities to strike a deal, Trump has made it known that should things go well, he wants to bring Zelensky and Putin together in person within the next week. And yet even his own secretary of state Marco Rubio has said yesterday that ‘we are not at the precipice of a peace agreement. We are not at the edge of one’. The path to peace for Ukraine – and a Nobel peace prize for Trump – appears longer than the American president may be bargaining for.
Is Italy really doing better than Britain?
Dante’s Beach, Ravenna
News that Italians now enjoy a higher standard of living than the British made me think: my God, life must be truly awful in Britain.
Yes, the Italians do have much to feel good about in terms of the quality of their lives thanks to the beauty of their country, the splendour of their history, culture and cuisine, and their impressive defence of the traditional family and way of life from the threats to them of the modern world.
When I’m drinking, I buy a superb local Sangiovese for €2.60 a litre dispensed into plastic mineral water bottles from a huge cask in a wine shop in Ravenna run by a man whose nickname is God
But on the face of it the Italians would seem to have precious little to crow about on the economic front. Italy is the only G7 country, for instance, where real wages have not increased at all, and in some cases decreased, since the launch of the Euro in 1999.
I speak from personal experience. I gave up being a freelance journalist in Italy in 2015 because we ended up like hand-loom weavers in the industrial revolution with the arrival of the Spinning Jenny in 1764, paid worse than dishwashers and bog cleaners.
It happened overnight, more or less.
In 2003, when I first began a weekly column called Fumo di London (London Smoke) for an Italian national newspaper they paid me €350 net per column which was not bad by Italian standards. I also worked for a regional newspaper that paid much more because, in addition to a more frequent column called Zuppa Inglese (English Soup, a.k.a Trifle), I had an editing role as well.
But as a result of the internet revolution and the collapse of print journalism, accompanied as they were by the global financial crash, and then the Euro crisis, my national newspaper fee was halved, then slashed again.
So I quit. The regional newspaper, meanwhile, went bust.
Yet, apparently, regardless of tales of woe such as mine, Italy’s GDP per capita, when adjusted for the difference in the cost of goods and services, has overtaken Britain’s.
Last year, it rose to $60,847 (£44,888) ahead of Britain’s $60,620 (£44,721) for the first time since 2001, according to World Bank figures. Prior to that, measured by this key yardstick, the Italians had enjoyed a better standard of living than the British since 1987 when their GDP briefly overtook Britain’s. But that was before they signed up for the Euro.
The technical name for this standard of living yardstick is GDP per capita at purchasing power parity (PPP) and it measures purchasing power per person. GDP per capita, on the other hand, measures economic output per person.
But trust me. I speak as one who has lived in Italy for nearly 30 years: there is no way that the superior purchasing power of Italians is related to their wages.
This can be seen by looking at jobs which have not suffered devastating change, as has freelance journalism, such as waitering.
My eldest son Francesco Winston, 20, is working this summer as a waiter in a restaurant by the sea in the village a mile from our house. He does a five-hour evening shift, five days a week, a double shift on Sundays, and has one day off. He gets €1,400 (£1,208) a month net for this and it’s regarded as a good wage in Italy, especially as he has a proper contract. Such contracts are like gold dust because they guarantee national insurance contributions and tax are paid and employers try every trick in the book to avoid handing them out.
He’s certainly far better off than my second eldest daughter, Magdalena, 17, whose summer job this year is in the village bakery, where she does a seven-hour shift, six days a week, She gets paid an obscenely low €5 (£4.32) net an hour for four hours of each shift in regola – i.e on a proper contract, however inhuman – and for the other three hours €9 an hour in nero, i.e. contractless. But Francesco Winston’s wage, let alone Magdalena’s, would be regarded as a pittance in Britain.
So the most important reason why Italy’s GDP per capita at PPP is higher than Britain’s is because the cost of living in Italy is much lower.
Things that matter, especially, are far cheaper. When I’m drinking, which I am not at the moment, I buy a superb local Sangiovese for €2.60 a litre dispensed into plastic mineral water bottles from a huge cask in a wine shop in Ravenna run by a man whose nickname is God.
On a rare visit to London the other day, I went to El Vino’s in Fleet Street for old time’s sake where I used to be a familiar face in the 1980s and 1990s. I can’t for the life of me remember what it cost in those days to get sloshed in EV1, as we used to call it, but nowadays a bottle of house red costs £28.95, a glass £7.80. I struck up a conversation with a striking blond-haired woman from New Zealand at the next table, a university lecturer specialising in the rights of rivers, as it happened, and her friend, a Maori tribal leader, who spent his time punching my arm and hugging me, as if he were itching to get me on the ground for a spot of wrestling.
I used to smoke 60 a day – Camel Yellow soft pack – until they took me to death’s door and I stopped in 2019. In Italy they still only cost €5.70 a pack, compared to £17.75 at Tesco’s.
In the bar we frequent in the village, where my youngest daughter Rita, 16, is working (she’s paid €9 net an hour in regola), an espresso brought by her to your table will cost you €1.20 and a cappuccino €1.50, compared to £1.95 and £4.40 at a Costa coffee shop in Britain.
The most expensive fish dish on the menu at Francesco Winston’s restaurant, a grigliata mista di pesce, costs €28, an entrecote steak €18, a plate of taglietelle al ragù €8 or spaghetti con vongole €13. The most expensive pizza is €9, the cheapest €5.50. A litre of house red or white (still or fizzy) is €10, and bottles €14 to €22.
Unquestionably, that’s a heck of lot cheaper than an equivalent restaurant in Britain. On my recent trip, I had dinner with my niece in the village pub near my recently-deceased father’s home in Limpsfield Chart, Surrey, and it cost £106 for what looked like a regurgitated beetroot salad and a burger which was as black as the plague plus a couple of bottles of sort-of-okay wine (my new rule is I am allowed to drink when away from Ravenna).
What else? A second-class train ticket from London to Edinburgh costs £162 to £253, the equivalent ticket from Rome to Milan a mere €102 to €139.
Italy’s health service is far more efficient than Britain’s, though only treatment is free, not tests.
Okay, so the Romagna where I am is not Tuscany which pullulates with foreign-owned stone farmhouses. But a pleasingly spacious restored one in the countryside in my neck of the woods will cost you just €350,000 (£300,000). In Ravenna itself, outside the old city, one bed flats can be rented for €500 a month.
Italy’s economy remains very sluggish – but so does most of Europe’s. GDP grew in 2024 by only 0.7 per cent and this year is forecast by the OECD to grow by only 0.6 per cent (compared to 0.6 per cent in France, 0.4 per cent in Germany which last year was in recession, but 1.3 per cent in Britain).
At 136 per cent, Italy’s public debt as a proportion of GDP, remains astronomically high (second only to Greece in the EU and in the world’s top ten) but remains relatively static while France (111 per cent) and Britain (97.6 per cent) steadily catch up.
But since Giorgia Meloni’s right-wing coalition came to power in October 2022, one million full time jobs have been created in Italy, by among other things cutting taxes and abolishing long-term unemployment benefit for all except those with non-working dependents.
The all-important spread between the interest rates paid on Italian and German government ten-year bonds has plummeted from 236 when Meloni came to power to just 83. The lower the spread between the Italian and the German bonds the more confident the markets are in the stability of Italy’s economy.
Italy’s first female Prime Minister already heads the fourth longest lasting of the country’s 69 governments since the fall of fascism in 1945 – just over one a year. If she survives another year, as looks likely, her government will become the longest lasting of all.
Significantly, her government has also slashed the budget deficit from 8.1 per cent when she came to power to 3.4 per cent in 2024.
Italy’s inflation rate at 1.7 per cent is much lower than Britain’s which is 3.6 per cent and expected by the Bank of England to increase to 4 per cent in September.
Unemployment among young Italians under the age of 24 is still very high at around 20 per cent nationwide and much higher in the deep south. But overall unemployment has decreased to a historic low of 5.9 per cent – 1.6 million people – compared to only 4.7 per cent in Britain – 1.7 million people.
But that unemployment figure for Britain is deceptive because in total 6.4 million are on out-of-work benefits: and the unemployment figure only includes those looking for work.
The other reason for Italy’s higher standard of living is that while Britain’s population has rocketed by ten million (17 per cent) since 2000 as a result of mass immigration, most of it perfectly legit, Italy’s has declined by 1.5 million since 2014. Italy has far more migrants arriving by boat and pretending to be refugees than Britain but the number of legal immigrants it takes in is dwarfed by the millions who have arrived in Britain. Britain’s fertility rate, like that in most European countries, is not much higher than Italy’s but its population, thanks to immigration, is expected to grow to 78 million by 2050.
If a country’s GDP remains the same, and its population goes up, then its GDP per capita goes down, as it is measured by dividing GDP by population. But if its population goes down then its GDP per capita goes up.
I’m not an economist, as is obvious, but this does seem to challenge the default view of the experts that without a growing population a country is doomed.
Of one thing, I am sure. I would not come back to Britain – even if you paid me. I’ll just have to make do with working for British and foreign newspapers and magazines from Dante’s Beach.
Wayne Rooney is a disaster on Match of the Day
Match of the Day is back and, for the first time in a quarter of a century, without Gary Lineker. That’s the good news. Saturday night’s anchorman, Mark Chapman, is so much better than his smug, virtue-signalling predecessor. Perhaps it’s because he’s a professional broadcaster rather than an ex-player. This means he asks questions that fans want to hear answers to, rather than sharing some anecdote about when he was playing the game.
However, not even this could save MotD’s return from being car crash TV. No matter how good Chapman is as a host, there remains a problem: Wayne Rooney. Now carrying even more timber than he did in his playing days, he sat rigidly in his seat like a man facing a firing squad.
Great footballers do not always make great pundits (nor do bang average ones such as Jamie Redknapp and Robbie Savage) but are often hired because they have played the game at the highest level. Not unreasonably, one would expect them to be able to provide some kind of insight into the mind of the professional player, how managers work and so on. But the BBC would have got more out of Mickey Rooney than Wayne Rooney, who is being paid an estimated £800,000 of licence-fee money. He was a great footballer, a rubbish manager and now a pretty awful pundit.
It would be easy to put it down to nerves but as the programme wore on (and at one hour 20 minutes, boy did it wear on), instead of settling in to his expert role, Wayne simply got worse.
At first he spoke too quickly, tumbling over his words more clumsily than a Jack Grealish dive in the penalty area, before slowing down to an almost catatonic state. So much so that even Alan Shearer helped out his pal by finishing his sentences. It comes to something when an analyst is so bad they make Alan Shearer look like Sigmund Freud.
Last November, when Lineker announced he was leaving the BBC to concentrate on podcasts and Palestinian propaganda, I wrote that Match of the Day was largely an irrelevance, though I hoped Mark Chapman would take over. I saw little on Saturday night to change that view. The theme tune remains. One suspects there would be Epping-style riots if they scrapped it. There are more fancy graphics on the opening along with some bizarre sound effects, possibly done by a 15-year-old son of a BBC executive, and the usual studio set with three middle-aged white men in nearly ironed casual clothing. There always was a ‘19th hole at the golf club’ look to the show. This may change as the programme now has a rota of presenters with Gabby Logan and Kelly Cates, both experienced presenters and both daughters of top-level footballers.
Chapman is very good. More so considering he had spent the best part of the day anchoring BBC Radio 5 Live’s sports coverage too. Rooney was awful and Shearer was, well, the same as ever. But none of this matters. Whatever the BBC does to shake up the programme, it won’t make any difference. There is a hardcore of traditionalists who will watch it. Then there are the younger generations who get their football through other means.
The BBC would have got more out of Mickey Rooney than Wayne Rooney, who is being paid an estimated £800,000 of licence-fee money
I suspect the BBC keep MotD because it’s part of the furniture more than anything else. Sky and others get the live games and anyone who wants to watch their team simply visits one of the many streaming sites. I’d spent the day making my usual 250-mile round trip to see Spurs – my 43rd year as a season-ticket holder. On the train journey home I had enough time to go on YouTube and see all the goals, incidents and other talking points, not just from the Premier League but from other games too.
With so few games now being played on a Saturday, Match of the Day is often reduced to featuring fewer than half the weekend’s fixtures – and on Saturday that included the stupefying 0-0 draw between Villa and Newcastle. However it still manages to ramble on for 80 minutes, getting close to midnight.
Many of those who watch Match of the Day do so on iPlayer because they can fast-forward the analysis and the fancy graphics and the meaningless stats (on Saturday this included the revelation that Sunderland had scored two goals with a header in the same match for the first time since 2014). Others just tune in to see their team – if they win – or simply turn off when they realise the commentator on the next set of highlights is the insufferable Jonathan Pearce.
Every week the presenter of the BBC news programme immediately before MotD turns to the day’s football with the half-hearted warning ‘if you don’t want to know the score, look away now.’ Except everyone already knows the scores. Like West Ham’s start to the season, Match of the Day is all rather pointless.