The Battle for Britain | 30 March 2024

Easter, my grandmother and the trouble with caraway seeds

Which items of food from your childhood did your parents force you to eat which now, blessed with the gift of choice, you wouldn’t touch with a proverbial bargepole? Pig trotters, cow heels and various items of offal, such as hearts, brains and ‘lights’, may spring to mind. Brussels sprouts, of course, and possibly dubious seafood such as cockles and whelks. Some may also rejoice that tripe and onions and beef dripping rarely feature on the menu these days, outside of Michelin-starred restaurants that really should know better.

As I mull over these delicacies, all of which I have consumed reluctantly, my mind wanders back to Easter visits to my grandmother’s spick and span council house on the other side of the Pennines. Both my mother and grandma were good cooks, but prone to using ‘unusual’ ingredients.

Breakfast was a highlight, as daily I woke to the tantalising smell of homemade hot cross buns, to be bathed in golden butter. Lunch was always the same; a stew, heavy on potato and light on the meat, followed by tinned rice pudding. Tea was often tongue sandwiches or brawn followed by strawberry jelly and evaporated milk.

This being Easter, however, it was only a matter of time before my grandma’s festive offering of caraway seed biscuits made their annual appearance. The caraway seed was as near to exotic, foreign or inventive as my grandma’s modest baking aspirations ever got, and she was proud of stepping out of her comfort zone, as a later generation might have remarked.

For the uninitiated, caraway biscuits are made from shortbread flavoured with seeds which taste of aniseed and liquorice with a peppery undertone, as Nigella might say. The problem is that the tiny splinter-like seeds find their way into every crevice and crack between your teeth and have a tendency to stick in the palate. Consequently, for an hour or so after tea my brother and I had to pick seeds from our mouths, which was impolite.

So we didn’t love the biscuits. As a six-year-old, I was unaware that the caraway seed represents the virtue of faithfulness and that in medieval Germany they were placed under a child’s crib or sprinkled on coffins to keep away wicked spirits. Neither did I care that the caraway cross is popular at Easter time in Sweden, and that the Poles lovingly add the seeds to bread, vodka and soups. Caraway allegedly enhances the flavour of savoury dishes and goes well with vegetables such as cabbage, although I was spared this culinary invention.

Why caraway seeds are associated with Easter is unclear, although some say that caraway cake was made to celebrate the sowing of spring wheat, and so it is seen as a welcome sign of warmer months to come.

I haven’t had to eat one of my grandma’s biscuits for nearly 60 years now. Nevertheless, if I could go back in time and sit at that teatime table, with its immaculate tablecloth and omnipresent jar of beetroot, with a roaring coal fire behind me, I would. I would also try to redeem my previous poor manners – after all, Easter is the season of redemption. Even for caraway seed biscuits.

Braverman to headline NatCon with Orban

Ping! An email arrives in Steerpike’s inbox. Some happy news for headline-starved hacks at last: the National Conservatism conference is back! After last year’s Westminster offering brought with it quotes galore from Miriam Cates and Suella Braverman, this year’s event in Brussels promises more of the same. For Braverman is now being billed as the ‘keynote speaker’ alongside one other name: controversial Hungarian premier Viktor Orban.

The two-day jamboree begins on Tuesday 16 April: just two weeks before much of the UK goes to the polls in local elections across England and Wales. And Labour will no doubt be rubbing their hands with glee at the prospect of Braverman’s jibes against Rishi Sunak, since he liberated her from high office back in November. A snazzy online video from the NatCon conference berates the European Union as a ‘combination of an oligarchy and a tyranny of the majority’ while quotes from the accompanying press release give a taste about what to expect. According to Anna Wellisz, conference chair:

For too long, EU officials have been abusing their power to control rather than serve the nations of Europe. Unelected bureaucrats and their international tribunals are now dictating how nation-states should think, conduct policy, and even vote to silence opposition, they accuse dissenting individuals and groups of being ‘anti-democracy’ or ‘semi-fascist. We aim to empower European citizens to make sure their voices are heard, despite the smears they face when they stand up for national interests.

Get the popcorn in…

2644: Joinery – solution

Twelve unclued entries comprise six ‘joined’ pairs which are symmetrically placed in the grid: FLESH & BLOOD, CHEAP & NASTY, TIME & TIDE, SLINGS & ARROWS, ALPHA & OMEGA and WEAR & TEAR.

First prize George Walker, Romiley, Stockport

Runners-up Susan Hay, Perton, Wolverhampton; Jake Mermagen, Conches, Geneva

2647: Pabulum’s last bow

This is Pabulum’s last regular puzzle, though he will continue to appear from time to time. Two pairs of unclued lights give examples of the theme word. Remaining unclued lights each contain a thematic element: a relevant name (6) will appear in the completed grid and must be shaded.

Across

4    Coccid growing short wing (3,6)

10    Bowman supporter backs with a spear I dropped (10)

11    Named Tory youths pelt maniac (6)

14    Scotch swagger (5)

15    Brass pipe they installed (5)

16    A casual drive also cycling allowed (6)

23    Maybe Archie arrests badly hurt Atli’s killer (7)

24    At first lathyrus then tare (4)

25    Chart sailor starts to amend carefully (4)

27    Sober pair of unionists fondly offering lots of milk (7)

29    Much electric potential gave Tom lead in lively plays (8)

32    Flute’s role in truth is bellows-mender (5)

35    Musical pipe senior minister curses (5)

36    Innkeepers line and iron dresses (7)

37    With lost power to breathe I turn blue (6)

38    Ritualistic finance minister one almoner riled (10)

39    Henry’s rude reply to blacken cross-reference (9)

40    Welshman in river terrapin crosses (5)

Down

2    Minister snubbed page (5)

3    Fury over English snowdrift (6)

4    Painter and engineer, each posh (7)

5    Scarily China keeps preparing for war (10)

6    Particular atom exists, too odd to classify briefly (7)

7    Person with base in Asian city (5)

8    Chieftain in chariot cheers up a stunted stubborn type (9)

9    Electronic fan rotating air (4)

13    Dwelling too much in prison (7)

15    Fixer educated in banks (6)

17    Censure American for one surgical task (10)

18    One OTT sim spread type of communist rule (7)

19    Subtle sour lunatic is noisy (10)

20    Empress of India or orange-wife? (5,4)

21    Fashion house takes against newspaper (6)

30    Spoiler ruined current drama (3,3)

34    Heartless Marx pulled up large fish (4)

Download a printable version here.

A first prize of £30 for the first correct solution opened on 15 April. There are two runners-up prizes of £20. Please scan or photograph entries and email them (including the crossword number in the subject field) to crosswords@spectator.co.uk, or post to: Crossword 2647, The Spectator, 22 Old Queen Street, London SW1H 9HP. Please allow six weeks for prize delivery. The dictionary prize is not available at present.

Spectator competition winners: marriage proposals in the style of famous writers

In Competition No. 3342 you were invited to submit a proposal of marriage in the style of a famous writer.

The overall standard was high, and entries that impressed and amused include Bob Trewin’s Hemingway, Dorothy Pope’s Larkin and Nicholas Lee’s Conan Doyle. Janine Beacham’s Masefield’s also shone:

I must go down on one knee again, if you’ll wed
      me on the fly,

And all I ask is an office do, with no friends or
      family by…

The most prizeworthy are printed below and earn £25 each.

Because thou hast not nam’d the Day
Such Task doth fall – to Me
Am I too late? – I cannot wait
For all Eternity

My Heart is nigh to Overflow
A Reservoir – of Love
Must thou eschew Commitment still –
May Push ne’er come – to Shove?

Be thou my Soul’s – Fulfilment
Else am I incomplete
Wherefore thy limp Timidity –
What mak’st thou so effete?

O dire Despair – thou dost not care
One Jot! I’ll seek no Other,
Unwif’d, Unlif’d – I fear I should
Have listen’d to – my Mother

Mike Morrison/Emily Dickinson

Had we but world enough and time,
This urgence, lady, were no crime.
Yet, young, hot-blooded, still unwed,
We may be by temptation led,
Seek actions carnal and profane,
Defying edicts that constrain
To spoil our virtuous, virgin state –
To name it plain, to fornicate,
Unhallowed, fleshly, skin to skin.
Lust is, we know, a deadly sin.
Only the marriage bed can bless
Desire with seemly Godliness.
Dear heart, forgive my pressing haste,
But I would not have thee unchaste.
God speed the day when we shall be
United pure and lawfully!

Basil Ransome-Davies/Andrew Marvell

My dear, dear Mr Darcy,

Won’t you marry me? For it is a truth universally acknowledged that an impecunious gentlewoman with ambitions to establish herself as an Author must be in want of a rich husband, and preferably a handsome one. I often imagine – though I dare not write – a scene in which you come to me having swum a lake, in a tight and quite voluptuously wet shirt. But I am all too conscious of the impediments to any proposed matrimonial union that would present themselves, were such a match to be proposed. First, the difference in social level; and secondly, the fact that in reality you do not actually exist. Regrettably it seems that you shall have to wed one of the Bennet sisters, though which I have yet to ascertain, since thus far I have devised only three.
Would that I might have been
Yours eternally

Brian Murdoch/Jane Austen

I’ve messed aboot, I’ve wooed and played.
Before ye noo ma heart is laid,
Nae mair I’ll mess ye,
I won’t be happy till we’re wed,
Ma bonnie lassie.

I’ll hae ye sittin’ on ma knee,
A faithful Rabbie you will see,
There’s nae one else but you for me
Ma lovely Jean.
I’ll love you till the day I dee.
So be ma queen.

Max Ross/Robert Burns

In the great, grand compass of personal affinities, dear lady, there are gradations at once clearly discernible and yet shifting and elusive. But we may, I sense, agree that one’s advances through life, occasionally triumphant, too often hobbled and bathetic, are ever enhanced by the presence of a companion, a person alongside whom we break the bread of mutual sustenance as we travel. With such a companion there is no yoke of kinship or duty, simply an acknowledged thread of settled connection. However, a time may come when a fear of that link’s being adventitiously broken outweighs any residual yearning for untrammelled independence. Then it is that a public avowal is required of the desire to seal that precious bond in human permanence. In such a spirit, my dear, dear lady, you see me here supplicant for your hand in the sanctity of marital union.

W.J. Webster/Henry James

Will you, for God’s sake, marry me, woman? Don’t just stand there, looking pulchritudinous: reply! Not with some string of noncommittal, middle-class, Sunday supplement homilies, semi-digested Liberal party manifesto commitments and a lifetime of miseducation at the hands of your hidebound Mummy and Daddy and their complacent, sherry-sipping dinner-party guests. No, let me hear a full-throated, molten affirmation sufficient to echo down through whatever joint future of passion, acrimony, even alimony our union might result in. Whether we wring out our fate in this dead-and-alive hole or at some country fastness beyond our wildest imaginings, let this be the living, breathing, seething moment you risked your fluttering heart on the one, single person in your hitherto circumscribed, cosseted little life who, heart fluttering synchronously, might actually be able to reach right in through those flaming, blazing eyes and touch you, as you do me, to the very offal.

Adrian Fry/John Osborne

No. 3345: This sporting life

The 19th-century critic and journalist William Hazlitt wrote a celebrated account of a boxing match. You are invited to submit a report on a popular sporting event as it might have been written be someone who is not first and foremost a sportswriter. Please email entries of up to 150 words to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 10 April.

No. 794

White to play and mate in two moves. Composed by Sam Loyd, Baltimore Herald 1880. Email answers to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 1 April. There is a prize of £20 for the first correct answer out of a hat. Please include a postal address and allow six weeks for prize delivery.

Last week’s solution 1 Rf3! Kxf3 2 Qe2# or 1…Nxe6 2 Qa8# or 1…Nc6 2 Ng5#
Last week’s winner Casper Kwiatkowski, Twyford, Winchester

Game without end

It is just over a week since Elon Musk’s company Neuralink livestreamed an interview with Noland Arbaugh, who was paralysed from the shoulders down in a diving accident eight years ago. Following the implanting by Neuralink of a chip in his brain, he is now able to control a mouse cursor on the screen by thought alone. The 29-year-old described his joy in being able to stay up all night playing the computer game Civilization VI, for which he would previously have needed human support. (As a former Civ fanatic, I know how fast those hours go by!)

Noland showed off his new ability by playing a game of online chess as he chatted. It was the perfect way to demonstrate the technology’s potential to enrich his life. And it was cheering to reflect on the game’s resonance, with countless instances of the game being deployed, in one form or another, to showcase some novel technology.

Chess is sometimes described as the Drosophila of artificial intelligence, i.e. the game was as fundamental an object of AI research as fruit flies are to biologists. In 1948, Alan Turing and David Champernowne devised a chess-playing computer program called ‘Turochamp’ as a proof of concept. They were not able to run it on the computers of that time, but did play a game by following the algorithm manually. In 1997, it was a major PR coup for IBM when their supercomputer Deep Blue defeated the reigning world champion Garry Kasparov. More than two decades later, AlphaZero’s chess skills showed the potential of neural network technology to simulate intelligent behaviour, just a few years before ChatGPT brought the AI frenzy into mainstream news.

But even absent a direct link with the technology, chess is a cultural touchstone. William Caxton’s The Game and Playe of the Chess, published in 1474, was one of the first books published in English. After the invention of the telegraph, the first long-distance line, between Baltimore and Washington DC, was completed in 1844. Soon after, apparently as part of a promotional effort for the new line, several games of chess were played between the two cities. In 1845, another cable-chess match took place, between Gosport and Vauxhall, where the involvement of Howard Staunton, perhaps the world’s strongest player at that time, attracted considerable interest.

In 1970, the Soviet Soyuz 9 astronauts played a game of chess against their associates at mission control. Fifty years on from the Soyuz game, the Russian cosmonauts Anatoly Ivanishin and Ivan Vagner teamed up to play a match from the International Space Station in 2020. Their opponent on terra firma was Sergey Karjakin (nowadays widely censured for his cheerleading of the war against Ukraine). The game was perfect for a publicity stunt, with brevity, wit and a diplomatic conclusion, though I can’t help but wonder how much was choreographed in advance.

Anatoly Ivanishin and Ivan Vagner-Sergey Karjakin

Space vs Earth match, 9 June 2020

1 e4 e5 2 Nf3 Nc6 3 Bb5 a6 4 Bxc6 dxc6 5 0–0 Be6 6 b3 c5 7 Nxe5 Qd4 8 Nc4 Bxc4 9 bxc4 Qxa1 10 Nc3 Karjakin has snatched a rook, but his queen is in grave danger. b5 11 Qh5 Nf6 12 Qf3 b4 13 e5 (see diagram) White’s 11th move was ostensibly a loss of time, but now this advance attacks both Ra8 and Nf6. 0–0–0 14 Ba3 Qxf1+ 15 Kxf1 bxc3 16 exf6 cxd2 17 Qa8+ Kd7 18 Qd5+ Kc8 19 Qa8+ Kd7 20 Qd5+ Ke8 21 Qe4+ Kd7 Draw agreed

Watch: Stephen Colbert grovels for Kate joke

Oh dear. In his never-ending quest to prove that he’s almost as funny as Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert has tripped up again. The late-night American TV host was last night forced to issue a humiliating apology to the Princess of Wales after he produced a segment mocking her ‘disappearance’ and marriage – shortly before it emerged that she had cancer. Classy.

Colbert began his Late Show on 12 March with a two-minute-long monologue ‘spilling the tea’ on the Royal Family in which he made a series of not-especially-funny jokes about scurrilous rumours involving William and Kate. Unfortunately for Colbert, they aged so poorly that he was forced to make the following statement at the top of his show yesterday:

I don’t know if you have noticed, but we we do a lot of shows and, and, and I tell a lot of jokes and I tell jokes about a lot of different things, mostly what everybody’s talking about. And for the last six weeks to two months, everybody has been talking about the mystery of Kate Middleton’s disappearance from public life.

And, uh, two weeks ago, we did some jokes about that mystery and all the attendant froufrou in the reporting about that. And when I made those jokes, uh, that upset some people and even before her diagnosis was revealed. And I can understand that. I mean, a lot of my jokes have upset people in the past, and I’m sure some of my jokes will upset people in the future.

But there’s a standard that I try to hold myself to, and that is, I do not make light of somebody else’s tragedy. Now, I don’t know whether her prognosis is is a tragic one. She’s the future Queen of England, and I assume she’s going to get the best possible medical care.

But regardless of what it is, I know, and I’m sure many of you, far too many of us know that any cancer diagnosis of any kind is harrowing for the patient and for their family, and tough I’m sure they don’t need it from me. I and everyone here at the Late Show would like to extend our well wishes and heartfelt hope that her recovery is swift and thorough.

Lot of words when a simple ‘sorry’ would suffice. And as royal expert Valentine Low noted, the Palace had already said she had surgery when Colbert made his comments: she had hardly ‘disappeared’ and was clearly not in a good place.

Stick to politics next time eh Stephen?

How much more expensive have houses got?

Lock, stock and barrel

Jeremy Hunt committed the Conservatives to maintaining the Triple Lock in their manifesto. How much is the policy costing taxpayers?

– The Triple Lock – which guarantees a rise in the state pension equivalent to the Consumer Prices Index (CPI), average earnings or 2.5 per cent, whichever is the highest – was introduced in 2011. Since then the state pension has increased with CPI six times, average earnings three times and 2.5 per cent three times.

– The basic state pension is currently £156.20 per week. Had it increased only with CPI it would now be worth £140.90 and had it increased only with average earnings it would be worth £141.20.

– The total state pension bill this year is £124.3 billion. Had pensions gone up with CPI it would be £114.3 billion and had they gone up with earnings it would be £114.5 billion.

Source: House of Commons Library

Home truth

How has affordability of houses changed over the past quarter-century? Ratio
of median house sale in England to median salary:

1997 – 3.54

1999 – 3.96

2001 – 4.5

2003 – 5.93

2005 – 6.79

2007 – 7.15

2009 – 6.4

2011 – 6.8

2013 – 6.76

2015 – 7.52

2017 – 7.91

2019 – 7.88

2021 – 9.06

2023 – 8.26

Source: Office for National Statistics

Waiting women

Several members of the Garrick Club resigned after its membership list was published by the Guardian. Where do the other London clubs stand on female members?

– No women members: Beefsteak; Boodles; Brooks’s; Bucks; East India; Portland; Savile Club; Travellers; Whites.

– Women members allowed: Army and Navy; Athenaeum; Cavalry and Guards; Lansdowne; Oxford and Cambridge; Oriental Club; Pratts (women admitted in 2023); Reform; Royal Automobile Club; Royal Overseas Club.

– Women only – no male members: University Women’s Club.

Why the WHO’s pandemic planning poses a threat to Britain

The fall-out from Covid continues. Its latest manifestations on the international stage are a draft pandemic preparedness treaty, soon to be formally published and opened for signature by the WHO, and an upcoming vote on proposals to amend the organisation’s International Health Regulations 2005 (IHR). The latter is a set of internationally binding rules for dealing with, among other things, pandemics.

Neither text makes for gripping reading; both might look innocuous and almost uncontroversial. In fact, however, as a group of Tory MPs and peers from the all-party parliamentary group on pandemic response and recovery pointed out this week, they could carry considerable dangers for Britain’s sovereignty, freedom and democracy. 

Of the two, the proposed IHR amendments are the more drastic. Apart from widening the WHO’s discretion to declare a public health emergency, they include a reference to measures to be taken to ‘counter misinformation’. More radically, there is also a proposed new article that would unequivocally require all states to ‘recognise WHO as the guidance and coordinating authority of international public health response during public health emergency of international concern and undertake to follow WHO’s recommendations in their international public health response’.

Potentially, this could give the WHO the power, at least as a matter of international law, to require measures such as lockdowns, and to dictate the distribution of medicines and the like. Even if this was strongly opposed by both voters nor and their representatives.

The proposed pandemic preparedness treaty is, to be frank, mainly hot air. It boasts plenty of references to such things as human rights, equity, solidarity, and an ‘integrated, unifying approach that aims to sustainably balance and optimise the health of people, animals and ecosystem’. But this too has the potential to constrain governmental freedom of action. It would require them, for example to take into account WHO recommendations in the development of national policies, the assurance of ‘equitable’ access to medicines and vaccines, both domestically and globally, and the consideration of such things such as no-fault compensation schemes for when things go wrong.

Just how far the requirements of these documents go is admittedly unclear, as is often the case with international agreements. They nevertheless remain highly problematic. Depending on their interpretation by a highly politicised WHO, their very presence as instruments agreed by Britain could have the potential to afford opportunities for mischief by countries looking for a stick to beat the UK with. They could constrain our own government’s freedom to act (or, importantly, not to act) in important ways when faced with a new pandemic. 

Despite these hazards, the government is at present still in the thick of the UN negotiations on their final wording, and pretty clearly wants to sign whatever comes out. True, Andrew Stephenson, minister of state in the Department of Health, promised formulaically in a Commons debate just before Christmas to preserve ‘red lines’ as regards handing over sovereignty to the WHO or anyone else. But one wonders how much this means in practice. 

Here, however, is a radical suggestion. Why not politely withdraw from the entire negotiations? Standing back, it is actually hard to see any good reason – aside, perhaps, from an obsession about the UK being seen to be doing its bit – for signing anything whatsoever that comes from the WHO.

We don’t need a treaty commitment, or formal acceptance of technical changes to the IHR, to let us play our part as a good global citizen when the next pandemic arrives. All we need is a dignified announcement that in that event we will co-operate with other states and the WHO to do whatever we see as necessary. If this was forthcoming, would other states care about the lack of a formal signature from London? It seems highly unlikely.

The advantages for the UK and its citizens from such a move would be considerable. The lack of any treaty commitment would neatly neutralise the prospect of lawfare by lockdown fanatics and others seeking to overturn democratically accountable ministers’ decisions. They wouldn’t be able to argue that they had paid insufficient attention to the UK’s international commitments. 

It would also have a salutary political effect. For example, the reference in the IHR to countering misinformation and disinformation could easily be used by a future authoritarian government as an excuse to introduce large-scale restrictions on social media or the internet as a whole. You can easily see a minister piously telling MPs not to argue because the UK could not be seen to be acting ‘contrary to international law’. It could also be used as a reason to pre-empt opposition to seriously restrictive lockdown measures with weasel words such as that ‘the UK’s international agreements, and our commitment to the international rule of law, mean our hands are tied’. Were we not to sign, both these pleas would be effectively stymied, to everyone’s benefit.

Will the government be persuaded to avoid leaving these hostages to fortune out of a misplaced desire not to seem standoffish in the corridors of the WHO? It’s too early to say, and it’s certainly a disappointment that no-one from the Labour side of the parliamentary group saw fit to join the call for it to think again. But let’s hope this document from the intelligent side of the Tory party concentrates a few minds before it’s too late. 

You’re not being paranoid: smart meters are out to get you

If anyone was still in doubt as to why the government is keen to press ‘smart’ meters onto us, those doubts will surely now be dispelled by the latest intervention of Ofgem, which has proposed abolishing the current electricity price cap and replacing it with a cap which varies throughout the day in response to the wholesale price of electricity. No, the smart meter sitting in your home is not there just to help you manage your electricity use – it is there to facilitate a future ‘dynamic’ pricing structure for electricity consumers. It is there so that we can be offered cheap electricity when wind and solar power is plentiful – and be hammered with Uber-style surge pricing when it is scarce.

Customers of some energy companies have already had a foretaste of this. In January 2023 they were offered – through the National Grid’s Demand Flexibility Service – the chance to earn £10 or so back on their electricity bills if they agreed to turn off appliances between 4 p.m. and 6 p.m. during a spell of sunless, windless weather.

In future, however, we are not just going to have a carrot dangled between our eyes, we are going to be regularly struck by a walloping great stick too. Pricing which is sensitive to demand is not necessarily a bad thing in itself; we are all used to paying more for a peak-hours train ticket or buying our budget airline ticket far in advance. For decades electricity customers have been able to save money at night by fitting an Economy 7 meter. But the constant changing of electricity tariffs – which Ofgem says could vary by the half-hour – threatens to upset budgets for millions of households.

Here is the scale of the problem. Britain already has enough wind turbines and solar panels theoretically to meet the country’s average power demand of just under 37 gigawatts – at least on a windy and sunny day. But on calm winter evenings the output from wind and solar can fall away to less than one gigawatt. Moreover, that is often when electricity demand is highest, because calm winter evenings tend to be cold, too.

At present, we balance intermittent wind and solar with gas power, but both main parties want to remove all unabated fossil fuels from the national grid – by 2035 in the Conservatives case and by 2030 for Labour. What happens then when wind and solar farms are able to meet only a fraction of demand? We could possibly store large quantities of energy – albeit at enormous cost – use gas power stations fitted with carbon capture and storage. Or we could import electricity – as we already are doing. All solutions threaten to drive up electricity prices to eyewatering marginal levels. This already happens in the wholesale market, but consumers are protected from it because consumer tariffs don’t change.

In July 2022 the wholesale price of electricity briefly reached £9,724 per megawatt-hour – over a hundred times its average level. And that was when we have gas power available to back up the wind and solar farms. God knows what level wholesale prices will reach when gas is gone, and what pain it is going to inflict on households once those spikes in wholesale prices start to be passed onto the retail market. At least with Ryanair surge pricing we can look up the price in advance and decide whether or not we want to pay it. If electricity prices swing wildly by the half hour it will be extremely difficult to guard against a surge in prices. Many washing machine cycles, for example, last over two hours, and would end up being spread over several different charging periods. Moreover, we might book a budget airline flight once or twice a year – whereas we use electricity constantly.

When the implications of decarbonising the national grid, and the surge pricing which will be used to achieve it, become clear, electricity consumers are not going to like it.

Letters: Rod was right about Bob Marley

Copping out

Sir: Both the Police and Crime Commissioner Dr Andrew Billings and your recent correspondent John Pritchard are partly right (Letters, 16 and 23 March). Policing has gone wrong for two reasons.

First, the massive cuts in staff instigated by Theresa May as home secretary resulted in a large number of the most experienced officers leaving. Even the replacement of these officers under Boris Johnson took time and could not make up for the loss of experience. Secondly, the inspection regime under the Inspectorate of Constabulary fails to address the crimes that matter to the public. During the years I was PCC for the Thames Valley, I made household burglary, theft, violence on the streets and rural crime our priorities. That was what the vast majority of the public wanted. We would then get castigated by the Inspectorate for lack of effort on such nebulous things as diversity. What communities want above all is security in their houses and on the streets. The Inspectorate forgets that, and many chief constables seem delighted to abandon proper policing.

Anthony Stansfeld

Kintbury, Berks

Marley and me

Sir: It’s not often I find myself in agreement with Rod Liddle, but the day has come. He has articulated what so many music (especially reggae) fans have long believed, but never dared declare: that Bob Marley is ‘perhaps the most overrated songwriter in history’ (‘The greatness of Steve Harley’, 23 March). Songs such as ‘Three Little Birds’, ‘One Love’, ‘Turn Your Lights Down Low’, ‘Is This Love’ and ‘Iron Lion Zion’, are so bland, banal and puerile –both musically and lyrically. And they’re not only overrated but also tediously over-played on Radio 2 and Greatest Hits Radio.

While we’re on the subject of overrated songwriters: I see your Bob Marley, and raise you Freddie Mercury. ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ doesn’t make up for the likes of ‘Bicycle Race’, ‘We Are the Champions’, ‘Crazy Little Thing Called Love’ and ‘Good Old-Fashioned Lover Boy’. I’d like to know which other overrated songwriters Spectator readers would nominate.

Rose Collis

Seaford

What fools these mortals be

Sir: Lloyd Evans writes, inter alia, of gender-swapping in modern productions of Shakespeare (‘As you like it’, 23 March). The daftest example – and they are legion – was the 2018 Hamlet at the Globe. Ophelia was played by a 6ft man, her brother Laertes by a woman a foot shorter. There didn’t seem to be any advantage in this casting, though the Guardian was all for it.

Tom Stubbs

Surbiton, Surrey

A criminal law

Sir: Lucy Hunter Blackburn’s story (‘Last words’, 23 March) should make everyone in Scotland more than uneasy. Humza Yousaf’s divisive Hate and Public Order Act is more in keeping with the Third Reich or Soviet Union, both of which encouraged informers. I also wonder if Yousaf’s call to ‘wipe the Tories off the map’ should now be considered a hate crime?

Doug Morrison

Cranbrook, Kent

Dutch treat

Sir: It is always pleasing to read about Johan Cruyff, the greatest footballer many of us saw in the flesh (‘Total eclipse’, 23 March). But while Sam McPhail is right to say Cruyff’s Ajax team changed the way football is played, he is wrong to suggest the AC Milan team which walloped Ajax in the 1969 European Cup final represented the grim face of the old order. That Milan side was led by Gianni Rivera, at the time the most handsome inside forward in the world. It was Milan’s other team, Internazionale, which preferred to lock the door, on the instructions of their coach, Helenio Herrera.

Nor is McPhail correct to say Cruyff ‘was never the most athletic player’. Brian Clough, the most remarkable of all English managers, called him ‘the human Catherine wheel’. And Cloughie was rarely wrong.

Michael Henderson

Bamford, Lancs

Loos news

Sir: David Mitchell laments Britain’s lack of public toilets (‘Letter from Japan’, 23 March), but as a council employee once employed to clean them, I can understand why so many were closed down. Apart from the cost of cleaning and maintenance, we were forever faced with mindless vandalism: smashed toilets and sinks, disgusting graffiti, damaged plumbing – and plenty more besides. They were also a focal point for cottaging, drug-taking and drug-dealing, as well as a hangout for drunks and miscellaneous undesirables. Unless the toilets were monitored all day – adding to the cost – they were health and safety hazards of the worst kind.

The council, constantly throwing good money after bad, gave up and introduced a far better scheme. It negotiated with local businesses to allow the public to use their existing toilets for free. This was a win-win situation. The toilets are often more hygienic, and a percentage of the users stay to provide custom for the business.

Mark Graham

Milnthorpe, Cumbria

Plane speaking

Sir: Keith Miller’s comment that ‘real pressure is when you’re in a Spitfire with a Fokker up your arse’ (The Turf, 16 March) reminded me of a similar tale. A Battle of Britain pilot was giving a talk at a prim girls’ school. ‘There I was in the clouds,’ he told them, ‘when suddenly these two Fokkers appeared right behind me.’ The headmistress hurriedly assured the girls that a Fokker was a make of aeroplane. ‘That’s right, ma’am,’ replied the ace, ‘only these fokkers were in Messerschmitts.’

Paul Kirkham

Farnham, Surrey

Why Rome didn’t need the Garrick

What fun to mock the elite in the Garrick! But there were no Garricks in Rome: clubs were for those lower down the scale.

They were called collegia and consisted of citizens, freedmen (ex-slaves) and in some cases slaves. All usually had some religious connection and were properly organised with presidents, treasurers and so on. Some were dedicated to maintaining ancient cults; others served the locality; then there were burial clubs, dedicated to appropriate gods, providing (for a regular fee) monthly group dinners and a guaranteed urn for their ashes in their private facilities (for their slaves and freedmen Augustus and his wife Livia provided buildings with 6,000 urns). The rules of one club include: ‘Any member abusing another or becoming obstreperous shall be fined 12ss, any member insolent to the club president, 20ss.’

Then there were guilds, associations of workers. At Rome’s port Ostia, we hear of shipbuilders, dock hands, warehouse guards, grain measurers, caulkers, ropemakers and urinatores (‘divers’, rescuing cargo lost overboard). Electioneering graffiti from Pompeii record e.g. fruit sellers, mule-drivers, carpenters, innkeepers, bakers, porters and chicken sellers urging passers-by to vote for this or that candidate for office. That makes the political point. Such groups could wield influence, which might attract patrons to support them in the town council. That said, the elite were always wary of the collegia concept, because they could become forces for political change (Trajan told the governor Pliny not to allow firefighters to start a club in his province for that very reason). So they would calculate carefully if it was in their interests to become involved with any such group. Some did indeed use them to cause political chaos.

These guilds underpinned the Roman economy, and the whole club culture provided the underclasses with mutual support, welfare, a sense of belonging and the possibility of influencing policies. But why no clubs for toffs? Because they all knew each other already and had their own private villas where they could meet. Cicero is said to have had seven.

The utter horror of UHT milk

00:00 09:56

Candida Crewe has narrated this article for you to listen to.

On a trip to Italy via Paris last month, my travelling companion and I went to the Gare de Lyon at sparrows to catch a train to Rome. We badly wanted coffee.

I came to coffee late in life and am infantile and uncool in my love of frothy buckets of what is effectively a hot coffee milkshake. It is almost all about the milk, preferably whole and organic but, at the very least, fresh. So it was that Starbucks – which uses conventional milk in the UK – twinkling
and open in the middle of the freezing station, made the heart lift.

I took one sip and nearly spat it out. That inimitable taste and stench of UHT, or ultra-high temperature processed milk, made me heave. Coffee snobs who complain about disgusting coffee may be blaming the wrong element of their flat white.

Pasteurised milk, which has an official shelf life of four to six days (but in reality, lasts several days longer), is heated to no more than 70°C. This kills off bacteria to the extent that it prevents people getting stomach bugs. But the 135°C demanded of UHT desecrates every bug, several enzymes and a few vitamins besides. This means UHT milk doesn’t have to be refrigerated, and an unopened carton will last till your dotage (OK, nine months), but it also wipes out the whole joy of milk’s original incarnation and transforms it – and in turn your coffee – into something monstrous.

I have no beef with the Starbucks bean. But that morning, the milk threw me straight back to my childhood holidays in France. I recognised then that the French did everything better than we did except for two things: loos (those urine-drenched Yeti footprints with a hole in between them over which you had to squat) and milk. They may have mastered mousseline de grenouille and mocked our Spotted Dick, but even devoted Francophiles like me knew that their milk was rat’s piss.

Theories are that the bastardisation of the taste might be caused by Maillard browning, the chemical reaction normally associated with turning food brown. This works wonders with seared steaks, biscuits, bread, peanuts, whisky – and French fries and coffee beans indeed. But the complex interplay, caused by high heat, between amino acids and the reduction of sugars which creates the compounds that make some things delicious is, in my snooty opinion, ruinous when it comes to milk.

The ultra-zapping is a more advanced form of its gentler predecessor, pasteurisation, which was invented in Lille by Louis Pasteur in the 1880s. So UHT was indirectly invented by the French, though it was not widely available till after the aseptic containers in which it must be stored (and which made Tetra Pak immortal) were invented. Even so, what on earth induces the French – and indeed so many other European countries – to put up with such pap and not start another revolution?

French loos have improved, but French milk manifestly has not. Odd, considering that France has the biggest dairy industry in Europe after Germany, that their landscape and weather are conducive to dairy production, and that the French are the world’s leading consumers of dairy products per capita. Dairy Global states that France produced 1,794 billion litres of cow’s milk last August  alone, presumably in its raw form every bit as delicious as our own. It is the only country on the planet boasting 1,200 different types of cheese, butter and cream, often from raw unpasteurised milk, since pasteurised doesn’t work for lots of cheeses. France has about 60,000 dairy farms and many of its products display a recognised quality label. But its actual milk, in its ubiquitously ultra-treated form, deserves no such accolades. Granted, in French supermarkets you can lay your hands on the odd bottle of fresh milk these days, but their default milk remains UHT.

I asked Jane Scotter, the distinguished owner of Fern Verrow, a biodynamic farm in Herefordshire, and head market gardener at Heckfield Park Farm near Basingstoke. She was partner for 16 years at Neal’s Yard Dairy. ‘The French don’t eat breakfast,’ she says. ‘I think maybe because they drink a lot so might be hungover. They have black coffee. They don’t drink milk or have porridge and cereal like we do. It’s all about a big lunch. The French are obsessed with their health but don’t value normal milk enough. They save it for their cheese.’

As for British milk: ‘In British supermarkets, it can be poor quality but it’s still better than UHT. My personal theory is that people who are lactose intolerant are less allergic to the milk itself than to the poor quality of so much of it. Milk isn’t dangerous but it is volatile. Unless there’s some crisis, there’s no chance we’ll take UHT up wholeheartedly in this country.’

Scotter believes sales of quality milk are on the rise. Raw – unpasteurised – milk, though still niche, has become a thing among the wellbeing crowd. The global organic milk industry is set to be worth $32.8 billion in 2032, up from $23.2 billion in 2022, according to Future Market Insights.

Meanwhile in France, the market share last year for Frankenstein milk, as opposed to even bog-standard pasteurised fresh milk, stood at 95 per cent, according to the Centre National Interprofessionnel de l’Economie Laitière. Fresh milk, organic or not, is available, but the French persist with their baffling preference, and they are by no means the only ones. Fresh milk accounts for only 33 per cent of total liquid milk sales in Italy and a derisory 2 per cent in Spain.

To give this lot their due, UHT is practical, economically sensible and increasingly necessary as a means of feeding the world safely, especially in rural and remote regions, because it doesn’t require refrigeration during transportation or at home (until after it’s been opened). And, by God, the stuff lasts. The execrable taste does, however, remain a sticking point for populations in some hot countries, most notably the sensible and discerning Greeks, who tend to drink more fresh milk. 

It may seem logical that colder nations choose fresh milk because they have that luxury. Very few people buy UHT milk in Sweden or Denmark and, while it is available in Finnish supermarkets, it’s not something people regularly consume.

It is somewhat surprising that UHT never caught on in the USA. The world’s leading UHT processor, Parmalat, tried to introduce it to the US market in 1993, and it effectively tanked, which is odd considering that Americans are hardly notable for eschewing ultra-processed food. But that is to underestimate the closeness of their relationship with their Tardis-sized fridges, and their ingrained habit of drinking cold fresh milk, as Scotter observes, ‘because they think it makes them grow’. They are wary of milk that can live in a cupboard.

The brains wishing to peddle UHT keep trying to wean us onto it. They began selling it in normal-looking milk packaging and put it in the chiller aisles. It still couldn’t disguise what they call the ‘high cooked’ – but I would call the synthetic sulphur – flavour. They’ve fiddled with it a bit and tried several methods (such as adding a compound to the milk before furnacing it) to minimise the demonic taste and smell. And, I suppose, just as a child comes to like broccoli in the end, market forces and technical tweaks have encouraged people to become accustomed to UHT’s convenience and, in turn, desensitised to its nastiness.

So to travel by train to and from Italy, ordering coffee along the way in France and Switzerland, is to play a game of latte roulette. Geneva’s Starbucks: fresh milk; Basle’s station cafés: all UHT (and incomprehension at requests for lait frais: ‘Oui, c’est frais!’ The hell it was!). Thankfully, fresh milk is still to be found in cafés in Rome and Milan, less so in Bari. My European jaunt was in every respect bliss, except for the milk. There is a lot wrong with Britain, but I will say this: we still win gold for our gold top.

A Christian revival is under way in Britain

Tom Holland recently invited me to attend a service of Evensong with him at London’s oldest church, St Bartholomew the Great.

Holland, who co-hosts the phenomenally popular The Rest is History podcast, has been a regular congregant for a few years. He began attending while researching Dominion, his bestselling book which outlined the way the 1st-century Christian revolution has irrevocably shaped the 21st-century West’s moral imagination. It also recounts how Holland, a secular liberal westerner who had lost any vestige of faith by his teenage years, came to realise he was still essentially Christian in terms of his beliefs about human rights, equality and freedom.

Holland is not alone as an agnostic trying out church again. In contrast to the usual ageing demographic of many Anglican churches, the congregation of St Bart’s seems to mainly consist of young professionals, both male and female. I noticed a famous politician among the gathered faithful, and was told that a well-known melancholy rock star has also been frequenting the church of late.

Despite the fact that ‘smells and bells’ aren’t part of my own church tradition, I found the blend of sacred choral music, candlelit arches and incense-infused worship to be an intoxicating experience. I imagine that many people in the pews are likewise turning up for a mystical encounter as much as the preaching and prayers.

I also believe Holland’s journey reflects a wider turning of the secular tide in the West, a phenomenon I document in my book The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God.

The New Atheists of the early 2000s – led by Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and Daniel Dennett – predicted a utopia founded upon science and reason once we had abandoned religion. But their bestselling books proved to be full of empty promises. All that our post-Christian society has delivered so far is confusion, a mental health crisis in the young and the culture wars. It’s not surprising then that a movement of New Theists has sprung up.

Influencers such as Joe Rogan and Douglas Murray are increasingly talking about the value of Christian faith and the dangers of casting it off. The former new atheist Ayaan Hirsi Ali has been praising the virtues of our Judaeo-Christian heritage, after becoming convinced that secular humanism cannot save the West. The women’s rights campaigner Louise Perry has been advocating for a return to traditional Christian morality since writing her book The Case Against The Sexual Revolution. The evolutionary biologist Bret Weinstein often describes religion as ‘metaphorically true’. Secular psychologists such as Jonathan Haidt and John Vervaeke have written extensively about the value of faith in the midst of a ‘meaning crisis’ in the West.

Another significant voice speaking about the value of Christianity is the psychologist Jordan Peterson. In November I attended a lecture by him at the O2 Arena. As he often does, he pointed his vast audience of mainly young men back to the Bible as a source of deep wisdom about the human condition.

It was clear, though, that while Peterson thinks of Christianity as useful, he struggles to believe that it is true. He applies his Jungian eye to the Bible and detects ‘deep patterns of symbolism and meaning’. Yet, as is also the case with Weinstein, Haidt and Vervaeke, such an appraisal of faith still only amounts to regarding religion as a ‘useful fiction’ for making sense of life.

But Christianity is not just a useful lifeboat for stranded intellectuals. If it isn’t literally true, it isn’t valuable. Whether Jesus Christ actually rose from the dead matters. It mattered to St Paul. ‘If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins.’ And it should matter to us.

C.S. Lewis wrote: ‘If you read history, you will find that the Christians who did the most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next.’ The impact of Christianity on the West is intrinsically linked to the living faith of those who established its institutions and values. If people hadn’t actually believed in the Christian promise of redemption and if they hadn’t been able to hope in the face of death, they wouldn’t have had the courage to change the world in Jesus’s name.

If conservative-leaning intellectuals only ‘cosplay’ at Christianity (Tom Holland’s phrase) without really believing it, then this ‘New Theist’ movement will inevitably fade away. Co-opting Christianity in the cause of an anti-woke agenda or in order to fend off radical Islam turns it into a useful political tool, but drains it of any life-giving power. A Christian nationalism of the right will become as pallid and pointless as the Christianity of the progressive left that parrots the latest politically correct talking points.

However, they say God moves in mysterious ways. As a believing Christian, I see signs that he is moving in the minds and hearts of secular intellectuals. Many of them are recognising that secular humanism has failed and, against all their expectations, seem to be on the verge of embracing faith instead.

Some have actually become Christians. The author and poet Paul Kingsnorth surprised his readership when he announced his conversion in 2021. Russell Brand is now calling himself a Christian and says he plans to get baptised. Ayaan Hirsi Ali says she has embraced Christianity after realising she was ‘spiritually bankrupt’. The tech pioneer Jordan Hall recently went public about his conversion to Christianity. Significantly, both Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Jordan Hall have mentioned the influence of Tom Holland’s thesis that Christianity is the foundation on which the ethics of the West sits.

Then there’s Holland himself. A few weeks after our church outing, we engaged in a public conversation in which Holland gave the most personal indication yet of his current spiritual trajectory. He related how, while filming a documentary in northern Iraq, he stood horrified at the carnage wrought by Islamic State in a town where men were literally crucified. Seeing crucifixion used for its original purpose opened up an ‘existential abyss’. This was followed by a profound experience in an abandoned church systematically desecrated by Islamic State. Holland says he experienced a ‘thin place’ between heaven and earth as, amongst the rubble, he discovered a smashed picture of the Annunciation – the Virgin Mary being visited by the angel Gabriel.

The historian was tempted to put it down to dehydration and nausea, but couldn’t dismiss it so easily. ‘It was a kind of sweet sense of intoxication,’ Holland told me. ‘Perhaps everything was weird and strange. And the moment you accept that there are angels, then suddenly the world just seems richer and more interesting.’

Holland also spoke candidly for the first time about a cancer diagnosis he received in December 2021, which would have necessitated the removal of part of his digestive system. The news came at a time when hospitals were being overwhelmed by a Covid spike, and a clear picture of the diagnosis was hard to come by. Reeling from the news, Holland attended midnight mass at St Bartholomew the Great, where he prayed a desperate prayer.

Within a couple of weeks, it appeared his prayer had been answered. A set of unusual circumstances led to the diagnosis being reversed. No surgery was needed after all.

Holland freely admits that neither of these examples are likely to sway a hard-headed sceptic. But they’ve affected him. He also admits the answered prayer story won’t fit neatly into every Christian box either.

The lady chapel at St Bart’s commemorates the only place in London where a Marian apparition is purported to have occurred. Holland says that his desperate prayer was directed towards the Virgin Mary. Holland says he was as surprised as anyone that this was the circumstance to persuade him that Christianity might be true. ‘God must have a sense of humour,’ he laughed.

Where this movement is headed remains to be seen. The statistics show an overall picture of continued decline of religiosity. Churchgoing in some denominations has been in free fall for decades. Yet one recent piece of research has given me pause for thought. In Finland, church attendance among 18- to 29-year-old men more than doubled between 2011 and 2019. The same uptick applies to their prayer habits and belief in God. The stats might just be a weird anomaly (this hasn’t been recorded in other Nordic countries), or it may be a canary in the coal mine.

As a Christian I believe things that are dead can come back to life. That’s the point of the story after all. As G.K. Chesterton wrote: ‘Christianity has died many times and risen again; for it had a God who knew the way out of the grave.’

In praise of Andy Street

Commentators like me often lament the lack of business experience among leading politicians – but also observe how few business leaders ever make successful transitions into the political arena. Archie Norman tried his hand as an opposition front-bencher, didn’t like it, and returned to the boardroom, latterly to lead the revival of Marks & Spencer; Digby Jones moved on from the CBI to serve uncomfortably as a trade minister under Gordon Brown. But there’s one obvious exception to the rule that politics and corporate life require totally different skill sets: Andy Street, who is campaigning for a third term as Tory mayor of the West Midlands, the UK’s second-most populous city-region after London.

We’re so used to seeing Street championing his territory and outplaying Westminster and local opponents that his previous 31-year career with the John Lewis Partnership has been largely forgotten. But his tenure there as managing director from 2007 until his resignation to fight the 2017 mayoral election is remembered as an era of golden and relatively stable growth for the employee-owned retailer, which has been rocky ever since.

Having snatched unexpected victory over Labour by the slimmest of margins in his first poll, Street returned with a handsome majority in 2021 and has built a record of achievement that’s notably businesslike – in attracting inward private-sector investment as well as billions from central government, in achieving affordable housing targets, in local transport projects, and even in trying to negotiate a version of the botched HS2 project that will finally take it northwards from Birmingham to Manchester.

And all this at no extra cost to residents, since there’s no mayoral levy, while Birmingham’s bankrupt Labour-led city council imposes a 21 per cent emergency council-tax hike. Street himself is credited with operating largely above tribal politicking and – according to my saloon-bar source in those parts – ‘many local lefties last time round sneaked down to the polling stations and voted for him’. This time they have the choice of a Labour candidate whose biggest idea, straight back to the 1970s, is to nationalise the buses.

For the West Midlands’ sake – and for the defence of the idea that some elected officials actually do more good than harm – I hope voters of all stripes stick with the incumbent mayor on 2 May. If Rishi Sunak and his predecessors have done so much damage that even Andy Street can’t hold on, their party really has reached a bitter end.

Ground rent rip-off

I’m sorry to hear that Michael Gove’s proposed reform, or even abolition, of the archaic leasehold property system in England may be about to fall by the wayside. The conversion of all leaseholds to freeholds at the stroke of Gove’s pen was perhaps too much to hope for, and would have needed new co-ownership solutions for flats. But his intention to restrict all ground rents to ‘peppercorn’ levels was a good one and would have done away with the developers’ scam of upward-ratcheting ground rent clauses that are so punitive to leasehold owners.

The suggestion from lobbyists on the other side of this equation is that relief for leaseholders might be outmatched by pain for pension-holders – who would suffer if Gove’s proposals had the effect of diminishing the value of freeholds owned by large pension funds. Seriously? Is that really a thing – or are there perhaps some large-scale freehold property investors out there who also happen to be potential Tory campaign donors?

I think we should be told – but as the sands of destiny race through the egg-timer of electoral oblivion, as it were, it may well be too late anyway.

Boeing gone?

This column is written in the Dordogne, where I’ve just arrived and haven’t had time to find a restaurant to tip: I’ll focus on finding one for next week. I flew with Ryanair – yes, guess what: cheap, full and on time – in one of its 600 identical Boeing 737s, about which no regular passenger I know has qualms. But here’s news that Boeing’s chief executive, chairman and commercial president are all on the way out in the aftermath of safety criticisms, most recently over the Alaska Airlines 737 Max 9 whose door blew out in mid-air thanks to missing bolts. I hope the whole company isn’t heading for collapse, if only because I’d hate to see my favourite airline having to buy a whole new fleet from Airbus.

Spoons boom

I’ll buy a pint for the Sun sub-editor who came up with ‘Boozing boom £1bn for Spoons’ as an encapsulation of JD Wetherspoons’ interim report for the six months to 31 January. The vital statistic was an 8.2 per cent year-on-year increase in total sales to £991 million across the company’s 814 pubs, with profits before tax up from £4.6 million to £36 million. That’s a tribute to the robustness of the business built by founder Sir Tim Martin – but also confirmation of the case I made a fortnight ago that hospitality chains with scale can still do well in current conditions of patchy consumer spending, while cost-crippled independents struggle.

But even ‘Spoons’ (which collected £193 million of VAT in the six-month period) is at the mercy of a tax and business-rate regime that has fuelled a huge long-term shift of revenues from pubs to supermarkets, whose food profits and low overheads allow them to slash booze prices. Mind you, Sir Tim knows how to go low too: online answers to the question ‘What’s the cheapest way to get drunk at Spoons?’ suggest cocktail pitchers or cut-price cider for maximum buzz per pound. Or join a Facebook group that lets you post your location and sob story (‘My wife’s run off with the plumber’) and wait for fellow customers to send drinks to your table.

Come to think of it, that last trick might even work at the Garrick Club these days. You could try posting ‘My wife says she’ll leave me if I don’t resign: pass the port.’

Could I find love at the British Museum?

Mirabile dictu, as we Latin lovers like to say. In other words, wonderful news! Attractive women have fallen for ancient Rome – and for classicists.

Well, that’s what the British Museum thought when it cooked up its advertising campaign for its new show, Legion: Life in the Roman Army, about Roman legionaries. The Museum put up a controversial social media post, promoting the exhibition as an opportunity for single women to find single men.

The post read: ‘Girlies, if you’re single and looking for a man, this is your sign to go to the British Museum’s new exhibition, Life in the Roman Army, and walk around looking confused. You’re welcome x.’ It added: ‘Come for the Romans, stay for some romance.’

The museum said the post was a reference to the viral TikTok trend of women asking their boyfriends, husbands and fathers how often they thought about the Roman Empire. The video has now been deleted after women objected to its sexism.

But in the Socratic spirit of curiosity, I set off for the museum to see whether it was true: do male classicists exert an irresistible magnetism on female Latin lovers?

The setting of the show is suitably romantic. I plumped for the last slot of the day, when the tourists flee to the gift shop and only the passionate classicists remain. The exhibition is drowned in sepulchral gloom – perfect for illicit assignations in hidden corners. It’s nearly quiet, apart from the crunch-crunch audio track of legionaries marching – more like someone munching their way through an unending bowl of bran flakes, my friend Quentin Letts says.

All the same, as soon as I entered the show, bingo! There, standing alone, was a trim thirtysomething woman with a fashionable, cropped haircut, like Jean Seberg in À bout de souffle.

What’s more, she was staring, with locked gaze, into the eyes of a devilishly good-looking young man. The only trouble was, the young man was made of bronze and he was 2,000 years old. This Jean Seberg look-alike had excellent taste. She was transfixed by the bust of a young man with a griffin-topped Phrygian cap, from the late 1st century ad, found in Cumbria.

I took a breather on one of the show’s benches, perfectly built for two. Seconds later, a young blonde in a floral dress, with big black glasses – real specs appeal! – sat down right next to me. She got out her phone – perhaps to take my number? Perhaps not. She started looking up the history of one of the show’s tombstones – of Aurelius Nepos, a centurion of Legio XX, and his ‘devoted wife’, from the late 2nd century ad.

It wasn’t just young women at the show. There were young men, too, including one in his twenties, with Byronic curtains of hair framing Greek-god features. He seemed to have a burning interest in pegging. He stared for several minutes at a vitrine of tent pegs, from the 1st century ad, found at Vindolanda camp in Northumberland.

Next stop, the show’s battle section. Surely the young women would flock to see hunky legionaries in fighting mode. There indeed stood a striking young American brunette, chatting to a group of adoring men with a note of joyful rhapsody in her voice. Which lucky man would she choose as the Paris to her Aphrodite?

Erm, none of them. As I got closer, she turned out to be an exhibition guide, praising the 3rd-century ad scutum of Dura-Europos – a rare Syrian wood and leather shield.

Finally, I spotted a lissom blonde in green T-shirt and tie-dye trousers. We fell in step as we approached the gift shop. When I held open the door for her, she said the one word I heard spoken to me in my entire afternoon at the museum. ‘Thank you,’ she whispered in a soft, siren voice – and then raced off to look at a 2nd-century ad Egyptian mummy portrait of a young woman with pearls, emeralds and a carnelian. And that was that.

In my hour at the show, I didn’t see a single man approach a single woman – or vice versa. Yes, they were all in love… but with Rome. Who needs a soulmate when you’re immersed in a lifelong love affair with the greatest civilisation of all time?

Going electric requires electricity. Who knew?

A lead article in the sober-sided New York Times is seldom funny. Yet ‘A New Surge in Power Use is Threatening US Climate Goals’ earlier this month cracked me up. Check out this sternly dramatic first paragraph: ‘Something unusual is happening in America. Demand for electricity, which has stayed largely flat for two decades, has begun to surge.’ Personally, I’d have headlined that article ‘Well, duh’ – perhaps with the subhead ‘Aw, shucks’.

Lo and behold, when you push people to electrify everything in their lives – cars, cookers, heating systems – while bribing them to go all-electric with lavish government subsidies, it turns out they use more electricity. Who would have thought? I guess this is why we need all those brainiac experts to analyse the ultra-complicated technical details of environmental policy.

One such expert worries in the Times: ‘The numbers we’re seeing are pretty crazy.’ America’s paper of record warns that in the past year the nation’s utilities have nearly doubled their estimates of how much more power they’ll need to provide in the next five years, during which an extra California’s worth of demand will be dumped on the US grid. So allow me to lead you through all the ‘well, duh’ bullet points of this hugely entertaining piece.

Electric vehicles need electricity. Surprise! Apparently simply stippling the landscape with new EV chargers, which Joe Biden’s farcically titled Inflation Reduction Act is meant to finance, isn’t quite enough. Gosh, darn it. Nobody pointed out that the chargers have to be connected to actual electricity. So far, it looks as if no one in government has worried about where it will all come from. Oh well. That’s understandable. These important people have so many other weighty matters on their minds.

Burning fossil fuels to not burn fossil fuels is a tad inconsistent. Utilities all over the US are busy building gas-fired power plants to meet rising demand for electricity, when the whole point of this exorbitant energy ‘decarbonisation’ is to stop burning the likes of gas. The Times calls it an ‘ironic twist’ that the demand for electricity from green technology is imperilling the whole point of green technology, but I call that instead ‘wholly foreseeable’. And I call this comical: one Kansas utility is keeping a coal-fired plant online that it had planned to retire – the better to power a giant EV battery factory.

Making electric vehicles, solar panels and wind turbines requires electricity. In calculations of these technologies’ carbon-emission savings, rarely do we see the considerable emissions from the production of all this hardware subtracted. Neither do we see subtracted the energy required to junk or recycle all this hardware once it’s defunct. Much less do we hear mention that much of this equipment (see ‘a tad inconsistent’ above) is made in China with power generated from coal.

When you throw trillions of government dollars at reviving manufacturing, you get more manufacturing. Biden’s Inflation Reduction and Chips Acts, intended to incentivise more production at home, seem to be having unintended consequences: more production at home. That’s a problem because none of the geniuses at the White House have been accounting for the fact that, wait for it:

Manufacturing requires electricity. Investment in American manufacturing is hitting a 50-year high, thanks in part to Biden tax breaks for chip and clean-energy production. Good economic news; bad news for the grid. California has already seen blackouts. The North American Electric Reliability Corporation recently reported that unless more power comes online pronto, whole swaths of the US could soon go dark. Yet everything new-fangled seems to draw ever more juice. Another NYT headline from October: ‘AI Could Soon Need as Much Electricity as an Entire Country’.

Intermittent wind and solar power require fossil fuel backup. Now, most of us are bored witless from reading repeatedly that ‘when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine’ some unreasonable people still expect to flip a switch and have a light come on. But NYT journalists haven’t been reading the same tiresome articles we have. ‘In interviews,’ our article explains, ‘utility executives say gas is needed to back up wind and solar power, which don’t run all the time.’ See, to come to this astonishing conclusion, they had to conduct interviews.

Besides panels and turbines, green energy needs other stuff. Connecting solar and wind farms to the grid (which can take five years or more) requires expensive, environmentally intrusive high-voltage transmission lines, only 251 miles of which were completed last year (mind, the US is 2,800 miles across), a rate that’s been steadily trending downwards. The US has neither the cables nor the transformers required to even begin to meet rising electricity demand with clean energy. Getting approval for transmission lines is complex and time-consuming, as they often meet fierce local opposition and cross state lines, thereby involving multiple bureaucracies. Which brings us to a less obvious ‘well, duh’:

When you install shedloads of regulations, you obstruct your own policies. Generating enough electricity for net zero is frustrated by the very protracted, paperwork-laden processes that America’s Democratic governments are so fond of. Nuclear power plants can take 20-25 years to build in the US because the onerous approval procedures are antagonistic. Biden has pledged, absurdly, to generate all America’s electricity from wind, solar and nuclear by 2035. The infamous ‘administrative state’ stymies its own lofty objectives.

BTW, any Britons inclined to smugness should talk to Ross Clark, because the cart-before-horse idiocy of going electric-everything without the, ahem, electricity is even more irresponsible in the UK.

We’re all being victimised by denial, wishful thinking, dogmatism rather than idealism, and rank incompetence. To forestall climate change, wildly impractical energy policies jeopardise the very populations they’re meant to protect. An executive at Grid Strategies says, ‘Right now every-one’s getting caught flat-footed’ by a rising demand for electricity that a five-year-old child could have predicted years ago. At least I’ve found an article on a conventionally dry subject that makes me laugh. But laughter comes in different flavours, and this har-har-har is bitter.

Why the British think differently from Americans

When I first started teaching undergraduates at Harvard, the grading system the university employed struck me as very odd. Even ambitious students at top colleges in the United States see it as their job to answer any essay question in the most thorough and reasonable way. They regurgitate the dominant view in scholarly literature in a competent manner. If they pull this off without making major errors, they fully expect to get an A. And with grade inflation rampant in the Ivy League, they usually do.

This attitude has had a significant influence on American public life. If you read an opinion piece in the New York Times or the Washington Post, its basic thesis is often utterly unsurprising. But writers will usually argue in support of their uninspired conclusion in a painstakingly logical manner, building their case by placing one square block atop the other. In American journalism, to be right – or, at any rate, to argue for the position that the right people consider to be reasonable at the time – is much more important than to be brilliant or entertaining.

This stands in stark contrast to the grading scheme – and the implicit value system – I learned as an undergraduate at Cambridge. There, my teachers explained to me that the earnest and methodical essays I initially submitted as an overseas student fresh off the boat (or, rather, fresh off the Ryanair flight) from Germany would, at best, qualify for a high 2:1. To contend for a first, I needed to learn to be ‘brilliant’.

Now, it’s basically impossible for any 20-year-old to give a series of brilliant responses to questions he or she has never seen before during a high-stakes three-hour exam – especially if these essays also have to be correct. And so the most common strategy for getting a first was to argue for positions that are deeply counter-intuitive.

These counter-intuitive answers were often plain wrong, sometimes for reasons that would have been evident to anybody who had studied the topic at hand for more than a week. But that, we were given to understand, wasn’t so grave a sin. As long as we argued for our wrong positions with flair and panache, we had a chance of that coveted first.

Just as in America, this grading system conveyed a particular set of values to students, one that they carry with them as they enter their professional lives. It seems to me, for example, that, for better and for worse, the ingrained habit of proving that they are worthy of a first has shaped the style of many British journalists. Even as the country is getting more polarised, opinion writers care more about being entertaining than about being right. Across the political spectrum, from the Guardian to the Telegraph, columnists have far greater freedoms than their American counterparts to adopt a -chatty tone, to float a half-baked idea, or to go off on an entertaining tangent. For American journalists, the cardinal sin is to be wrong. For British journalists, the cardinal sin is to be boring.

It is perhaps inevitable that this attitude has not remained confined to the world of British journalism – and not merely because many journalists, from Winston Churchill to Michael Foot, have gone on to be influential politicians. Take the case of Boris Johnson. Before he became an ardent Brexiteer, he famously hesitated about whether he should join the remain or the leave campaign. And to figure out which way to jump, he wrote two newspaper columns: one supporting and one denouncing the European Union.

Whatever one thinks of the merits of the case, it isn’t hard to see what drove Johnson’s decision. The case for remaining in the EU was dutiful and boring. It listed economic benefits from which Britain already profited and contained words like ‘integration’ and ‘geostrategic anxiety’.

The case for leaving the EU, by contrast, was bold and boisterous. It harked back to emotive values like national sovereignty and looked forward to a fresh, golden future. Right or wrong, it would have been far more likely to have got a first.

A few years ago, a viral article claimed that one Oxford degree runs – and perhaps ruins – Britain.

As Andy Beckett pointed out in the Guardian back when David Cameron was prime minister and Ed Miliband led the Labour party, the upper ranks of the country’s political and journalistic class were filled to the brim with people who, like them, had studied philosophy, politics and economics (PPE) at Oxford. However, it was speculated at the time that the age of PPE might be coming to an end: ‘In the new age of populism, of revolts against elites and “professional politicians”,’ Beckett wrote, ‘Oxford PPE no longer fits into public life as smoothly as it once did… [it] has lost its unquestioned authority.’

But this prediction, like so many others made over the past decade, has turned out to be mistaken. For in the intervening years, the list of powerful PPE graduates has continued to grow at a rapid pace. There’s Rishi Sunak, the current Prime Minister, Liz Truss, his predecessor, and Jeremy Hunt, the Chancellor. On the opposition benches, PPE graduates include Rachel Reeves, the shadow chancellor and Yvette Cooper, the shadow home secretary. Take the most recent Budget: it was (to adapt a similar enumeration from the Guardian’s original criticism) delivered by Hunt (PPE) for Sunak (PPE), reported on by the BBC’s Nick Robinson (PPE), criticised by Reeves (PPE), and commented on by the head of the influential Institute for Fiscal Studies, Paul Johnson (PPE).

More broadly, while PPE graduates are indeed phenomenally influential, the influence of the PPE degree seems to me to be overstated. For the most part, its prominence is a result of a selection effect. For the past century, the degree has attracted a large share of the most talented and, well, the most cravenly ambitious people in the country. It is little wonder that many of them went on to win positions of influence and responsibility, with some acquitting themselves admirably, and others failing upwards, blunder after major blunder.

The theory is also far too simplistic. Like virtually all monocausal theories, it implausibly ascribes complicated phenomena like the strengths and shortcomings of Britain’s governing elite to a single origin. And if we do have to engage in such simplistic theorising (and doing so is admittedly a lot of fun), the habits ingrained by the grading systems at all British universities, not just Oxford, seem to me to be much more plausible candidates.

Each grading system communicates a set of deeper values. And each set of values has both benefits and drawbacks.

America’s value system has helped to create a deeply conformist elite. As early as college, the best-credentialled people in the country learned that the benefits of brilliance or contrariness were low and the best way to get ahead was to be both competent and compliant. This created the Democratic party of people like Hillary Clinton: candidates and advisers who were deeply fluent in the received wisdom of their time yet failed to appreciate the pulse of their own population. Ones who barely made any misstep but sounded so scripted that they ended up alienating millions.

Another drawback of the American system is that it leaves little room for rebellion within the ranks of the country’s elite. Since there is no way to assail the prevailing consensus within the idiom of the elite, any attack on it has to come from the barbarians at the gate. Donald Trump thrives in part because the American political system leaves no space for a Boris Johnson.

A third drawback, of mostly parochial concern, affects the dwindling few of us who still read or write for the mainstream press: the ethos of being accurate and reasonable – which aspiring journalists start to learn in college when they write up an email from the assistant dean for housing for their student newspaper in the exact same tone and diction in which they will, if all goes according to plan, as it often does, one day write up a presidential press conference at the White House – makes for dreadfully dull and often painfully incurious journalism.

But the value system implicit in Britain’s grading system also has serious drawbacks. It creates a culture in which charismatic amateurs are nearly always prized over earnest professionals; a political system in which cabinet ministers rarely have any deep knowledge about the subjects for which they are responsible; and a broader public culture in which the art of spin is often prized over the imperatives of substance.

If you are the ‘right sort’, you can get a first in PPE – or many other degrees in the humanities and social sciences – by blagging it. But it turns out that an elite that has become habituated to blagging it isn’t always good at running major companies, making important inventions, or governing a country.

Is this argument wholly convincing? Would the United Kingdom really be a vastly different country if only its leading universities had happened to adopt a different grading system?

Well, no. Monocausal explanations, as I said, always fail to fully explain complicated phenomena. But even as they short-change reality’s complexity, they can give an argument a run for its money, exposing both its limitations and, sometimes, its kernel of truth.

There is a value in student essays – and even in magazine articles – that shoot for a first. And that is why Britain should, despite its drawbacks, never fully let go of the instinctive preference for the thought–provoking over the reasonable that – along with an allergic reaction to highfalutin rubbish – characterises its public culture.