Stop sending Christmas cards! 

Christmas cards are the pits, aren’t they? A positive engine of seasonal ill-will. They take hours to do, if you do them properly, and wing across the country (and have you checked the price of a stamp lately?) to be received by people you like but don’t see, or people you see but don’t like – and to find themselves consigned to the recycling bin, in many cases, within thirty seconds of being opened. You feel guilty when you get a card from people you failed to send one to; and resentful when you don’t get a card from people you remembered to send one to.

It strikes me, though, that we civilians have it positively easy on the Christmas card front. Imagine what it must be like being a member of the royal family. It’s enough to cause pity to well in the heart of even the most fervent of republicans. If you’re the King or the Prince of Wales, you have to send hundreds and hundreds of the wretched things. Thousands, probably: many to people you actively loathe and institutions you’ve barely any memory of being involved with. More than that, you’re expected to lose what I imagine will be a full day of your life to a professional photoshoot: not for you, unfortunately, the bumper pack of Oxfam cards decorated with a generic robin redbreast.

Then, which is even worse, the moment the first one lands on the first doorstep, they are all over the papers. Your choice of clothes, your expression, the setting, the arrangement of your family in the frame: these things are parsed for meaning with the sort of hermeneutic energy otherwise only reserved for the discovery of some long-lost gnostic gospel turned up in a dig in Alexandria.

So, this year, we were informed at some length that the Prince and Princess of Wales were projecting ‘undone glamour’ in this year’s seasonal snap. Undone glamour? No, me neither. Implies a magic spell that’s been disenchanted, or a 1940s actress after a casting couch incident, if you ask me. Or maybe it means that they’re looking glamorous but have the top buttons of their shirts loose, which is sort of the case here. I mean, it’s a perfectly normal family photograph, or as perfectly normal as a professionally styled black-and-white family photograph of a Prince and Princess of Wales is likely to look. The couple are smiling. Their three kids are smiling. Everyone’s in a matchy-matchy pale shirt and jeans. The kids are in plimsolls. HRH has his sleeves rolled halfway up his forearm.

Yes, yes, but what does it mean? Could it be that in channeling ordinary folk – who are presumed to appear in photographs without ties – it’s a sign that the future of the monarchy is in reforming hands? Or is it, as one critic earnestly contended, ‘a visual powerplay that attempts to bring some of the gloss that has been lacking from the monarchy in recent years back to public view’? Or is it a brazen challenge to the Montecito cool of the estranged brother and sister-in-law? Another such critic: ‘there is one California couple, all too eager to show their warts of late, that this can’t help but seem like a reference to. What new front this Christmas vibe-snatching opens up in the war between the brothers and their wives is anyone’s guess.’

Comparisons are, of course, made to the parental Christmas card, which came out on the same day. His Majesty wasn’t having any of that unbuttoned glamour stuff. He appeared with the Queen, photographed in full colour, positively festooned with Royal bling: coronation tunic and robe of estate, topped for monsieur with the Imperial State Crown and for madame with Queen Mary’s Crown. There’s all manner of gold-trimmed, red velvet swag in the background and it looks as if they‘re standing in great pools of fabric as their robes spill past them and down two or three steps in front. Very much not your classic ordinary folk family snap.

So, is Prince William’s unbuttoned look a shocking challenge to his father’s traditionalism? Or is this a carefully co-ordinated one-two punch drawn up by the Way Ahead Group – showing the younger generation that Princes of Wales can be groovy while reassuring older monarchists that there are still plenty of crowns and diamonds in the Buck House dressing-up box?

Me, I think that we can and should apply Occam’s razor to the problem. They’re just sodding Christmas cards. The King is a stuffy old thing, and he’s also the King, so you can expect him to have a slightly stuffy Christmas photo, and that’s cool. The Prince of Wales is a Sloane Ranger married to another Sloane Ranger, and he’s in his early forties, so he’s likely to look a bit more Boden catalogue than his seventy-something dad. If either of them wanted to send an important message to the public, or to their estranged relatives on the other side of the Atlantic, there are easier ways to do it than through the medium of highly ambiguous fashion statements that need to be picked apart like entrails by the haruspices of the popular press.

My advice to them, not that I flatter myself they will take the slightest interest in it, is to stop sending Christmas cards altogether. Getting Christmas cards only encourages people. It takes five or ten years for your friends to get the message, become former friends and stop bothering to send you cards at all. Plus, if you’re the Prince of Wales, you will be spared opening your morning paper to discover that you’ve apparently been sending coded messages through your family snap like someone blinking in a hostage video. Time, money and face saved, you can concentrate on the important things in life: eating mince pies and snoozing in front of a Bond movie like everyone else.

How the English invented champagne

Is champagne a wine region or a state of mind? The small bubbles have a way of getting into the bloodstream and the imagination, creating a slightly euphoric sensation which encourages pleasant chatter. But who put the sparkling genie in the bottle? Who pioneered the intricate process of secondary fermentation in a bottle strong enough to withstand six atmospheres of pressure and contains all those wonderful bubbles of CO2, about 20 million per bottle? 

In France, it is claimed that it was Dom Perignon (1638-1715), ‘Come quickly. I am tasting the stars,’ he is supposed to have said. Very romantic, a convenient sales pitch. The only problem is that the story is cobblers. Even eminent French wine historians now agree that there is no written evidence for it. 

Events in Hereford, Oxford, Somerset and London suggest a very different origin story. In the 1620s, strong dark green bottle glass, known as Verre Anglais, was invented by Huguenot glassmakers who had fled France. The onion shaped bottles had necks with a string lip for tying down the cork and a punt or kick in the bottom to make them stronger. In a legal judgment of 1662 given by the attorney general, four Huguenot glass makers made a sworn affidavit that Sir Kenelm Digby had invented this type of bottle while they were in his employ ‘neere thirty years earlier’.  

One cidermaker well-known to Sir Kenelm was a Hereford man, Lord Scudamore. In his 1631 to 1632 household accounts, he bought six dozen bottles from glass merchants in London and Gloucester and six dozen corks. He even has a ‘new lock for ye Sydar house door’ where he carried out his experiments in fermentation. After four years as Charles I’s ambassador in Paris, Scudamore returned and in 1639 he took six bottles of cider up to London. He also had a 14-inch-high cristallo glass flute made for drinking sparkling cider, engraved with the royal coat of arms on one side and his own on the other. This glass is now in the Museum of London.   

The glass looks very much like a champagne flute and yet, in 1639, Dom Perignon was only a one-year-old. So all the pioneering work – learning how to control the effervescence and the naughty little dregs was done in England by these cider makers with new-fangled tough dark bottles. Scudamore also had ‘rare contrived cellars’ with running water and he is credited with turning cider from ‘an unreguarded windy drinke fit only for Clownes and day labourers into a drink fit for Kings, Princes and Lords’. Sadly the civil war intervened and Scudamore’s lands in Herefordshire were sequestered.  

Another cider maker, Ralph Austen, an ardent parliamentarian from Leek, had a large walled garden on Queen Street in Oxford which contained the world’s first cider bottling factory. In 1653 he wrote:  

Cider maybe kept perfect a good many years, if being settled it be drawn into bottles and well stopt with corkes and hard wax melted thereon, and bound down with pack thread, and then sunke down into a well or poole, or buried in the ground, or sand laid in a cellar.

Crucially, a note was printed in the margin of a book he published in 1657: ‘Put into each bottle a lump or two of hard sugar or sugar bruised’ – a crucial part of the champagne-making process. He was also on the right track. 

Next John Beale, fellow of the Royal Society and Vicar of Yeovil wrote many aphorisms on cider published in Pomona in John Evelyn’s Sylva. In a paper of 10 December 1662, John Beale mentions ‘A walnut of Sugar’ being added to every bottle of cider, something around 18g sugar per bottle which is spot on. The astronomer Sir Paul Neile uses a ‘nutmeg of Sugar’ playing on the safe side. Here you will find ‘Potgun Cider’ which flies around the house from the addition of too much sugar. Sir Paul also advises that bottling in the manner of cider ‘may doe good to French Wines also’. A crucial step forward. The first time that bottling with the addition of sugar has been articulated for French wine. This is 1663. Wine buffs take note: it is all about technique and méthode. Dom Perignon only enters Hautvillers Abbey in 1668.    

But did this cider fully sparkle? The key is in the word mantle, forming a vigorous head or froth. To mantle or not to mantle, that was the real question. In 1657, a letter from John Beale to Samuel Hartlib illustrates the point: ‘We will rather drinke pure water, than the water of rotteness, as we call all drinke that does not mantle vigorously.’

So mantling cider was de rigueur by 1657 or as the French would say, mousse. Royalist youth wanted to put a bit of sparkle back into life under Puritan rule. John Beale’s letter continues: ‘Our Cider, if it bee brisky, will dance in the cup some good while after it is powred out. They will not drinke cider, if it be no soe busy, as thoroughly to wash their eyes whilst they drinke it.’  

Now enter Silas Taylor, a parliamentarian captain of horse, with a family estate near Hereford and one of Pepys’s spies in Harwich and a composer to boot. It is Silas Taylor’s 1663 descriptions of cider in a letter to the Royal Society which gives real colour to the sparkling debate.  

I have tasted of it, three years old, very pleasant, though dangerously strong. The colour of it, when fine, is of sparkling yellow, like Canary, of a good full body and oyly: the taste of it like the flavour or perfume of excellent peaches, very grateful to the palate and stomach.

Excellent. But does it really sparkle? Silas Taylor then gives advice on how to bottle cider and the great care needed to get the timing right.  

This makes it drink, quick and lively; it comes into the glass not pale or troubled, but bright yellow, with a speedy vanishing nittiness (as the vinters call it) which evaporates with a Sparkling and whizzing noise.

The Oz Clarke of his day… So sparkling cider was not only on par with wine at this time, it was streaks ahead. They even had wooden racks for storing bottles with the necks pointing downwards. My hypothesis is that the cidermakers passed their knowledge onto the London wine merchants who perked up their flat champagne wine. That knowledge slowly filtered back to France. Viva Lord Scudamore. Ruinart, the first French champagne house was not founded till 1729. Voila! 

Letting go of my mother’s house

My mother passed away last year and it fell to me to sort out her house. Returning from four years in Russia and the Caucasus, I moved into her Suffolk home to get it ready for selling. There was a huge amount to do. Alongside organising my mother’s headstone – no small or hasty business – there was an entire house and a life to sort through. This involved going through endless knick-knacks, glasses, crockery, clothes – and 15 or more rubble sacks of papers and old letters. The last was both cathartic and disconcerting. These are written relics of a life that existed before I came along, one that may well have been richer and more hopeful. I found mountains of love letters to my mother from luckless suitors, good luck telegrams from her family as – in her early twenties – she’d set out on her big trip to America, and notes from university theatre directors begging her, as a young woman, to audition for their latest play. A life I’d dimly known about but had never seen evidence of before.   

But there was too much to do to brood on it. We’d released equity, the interest was rising day by day, and a local-handyman-who-knows advised us to sell the house immediately in its shopsoiled state before the downturn came. But it was my mother’s home – she would, I knew, have wanted it passed on in decent condition. Thus began a learning curve I’m sure is second nature to most homeowners – finding gardeners, plants, carpets and carpet layers, learning to sand and paint woodwork, buying one of those special roller extensions to reach ceilings (I tell you now, redecorators, stick to white walls, or trying not to botch the joins between wall and woodwork is a nightmare). We finally found a buyer last month and ended up getting the exact amount we were quoted last January before the great sprucing up began. There’s a lesson in that, though too late for us.   

Yet I can’t regret the time or money invested. If my mother’s Alzheimer’s was a five-year goodbye, this period in her home has been the final letting go of a parental hand. I wake up in the same house she did, walk the same streets, make a cup of tea with the same kettle – and though I don’t feel her presence here (that went with much of the furniture) and wouldn’t want it to go on forever, it’s all been very comforting. It has also allowed me, after 30 years of coming here, to finally get to know Newmarket, the racing town she settled on as her home.  

Newmarket wasn’t a place I would ever have chosen. Horses leave me cold – I’ve had an aversion to them ever since, as a child, I got kicked hard by a chestnut one called Modger.Horses are the business of this town – if they’re not crossing the road in front of you, you can hear them whinnying and stamping in nearby buildings. World-class racecourses are a mile or so away, and in the morning dozens of trainers and stable hands go cantering over the local heath. This presumably would be manna to some people. But if you’re not into racing, then Newmarket – as my sister is fond of saying – is a bit of a one-horse town. There’s no theatre, cinema or dedicated bookshop, no pub with roaring fireplace or crackling logs. To get any of these things you have to take a train to Cambridge or Bury St. Edmunds. Apart from the horse people – for whom this is the centre of a spinning world – Newmarket is a dormitory town for bigger, starrier places nearby.  

Yet I have, over the last year, grown cautiously fond of the town and got used to it. It’s not much more than a long high street – the usual hardware and betting shops, a faintly retro W.H. Smiths, a Starbucks and a Caffe Nero and, in the Rutland Arms, a once fine, now defunct old hotel. Amid the statues of horses and equestrians, there’s every kind of restaurant: the residents of Newmarket could eat their way around the world seven nights a week. But rising above those low buildings you can see the land beyond and a furze of far-off trees and at the end of the road, just beyond the clocktower, open country begins. This, along with those uncluttered East Anglian skies, gives a feeling of space and freedom. Sometimes, when the sky’s overcast, the air is damp and the wind is gently blowing, you get an atmosphere and a smell that you could bottle and sell as ‘Englishness’ – what I’ve occasionally longed for in the time I’ve lived abroad.  

I know few people round here, but it doesn’t matter. I have a friendly neighbour called Roger, a biochemist in his 70s, a man who has lived abroad, travelled extensively and is brimming with good will towards his fellow man. Next door is Helen, a wonderfully organised woman (her lawn puts me to shame) who’s willing to stop and chat and feeds my cats when I’m away. And that – barring the nice couple at number 3 – is about it. There’s a freedom, too, in popping out to Waitrose without the threat of being seen unshaven or sloppily dressed by anyone you know. I’ve found I’m quite easy to keep happy too – a pub breakfast, a visit to a garden centre, the occasional afternoon walk to the local Spa Hotel a mile away for coffee and biscuits. There’s a nearby museum of horse-paintings and though the subject matter is of little interest to me, I like the feel of a gallery with its gift-shop and café. If you’re not out to build a roaring social life, what more do you need?  

Besides, I have memories here. Revising for a Shakespeare exam 30 years ago, going swimming in the (now closed) high street pool, thinking about the History Plays while doing lengths, following it with a doorstep cheese and bacon sandwich at the Clock Tower Café (also gone). Talking to my mother over one of her roasts, visiting farm shops in her Nissan Micra, walking her dog. I have taken the train from Cambridge countless times, emerging onto the platform of its sweet, one-track station, to make my way home through the evening backstreets. I like the solid, pebble-clad old buildings, and can finally see why she loved the nearby heath so much – a wonderful, vast, rolling sweep of pure green, mown into clean stripes beneath a cloudless blue sky, with a kind of 1930s austerity to it. All these things I might well miss.  

Come February and completion dates, it will all be over. There will be nothing to drag me back here except my mother’s burial plot, with the huge East Anglian fields swelling gently beyond. I have no clear idea yet where I’m going when I leave this house for the last time and life’s perhaps the more bracing for it. As they probably shout at those racehorses from time to time: ‘Come on, y’old bugger! Jump!’ 

Teenage teachers won’t fix Britain’s classroom troubles

Teaching in the UK is in trouble. Less than half the number of secondary school teachers required this year, a record low, have been recruited, according to government figures released last week. STEM (science, engineering, technology and maths) subjects are particularly struggling: we only have 17 per cent of our target number of physics teachers and 63 per cent of maths teachers (down from 88 per cent last year). Yet this is a problem across the curriculum: the only subjects where the government met its targets were classics, PE and history.

Teach First, the largest teacher training programme in the UK, announced this weekend that in order to tackle this recruitment crisis it will consider being part of a new apprenticeship scheme for trainees as young as 18. The idea is that these trainee teachers would pay no tuition fees and earn a salary as they worked, thereby hopefully attracting school-leavers who are put off by the cost of a degree. Teach First itself has been struggling in recent years: last year it recruited the lowest number of trainees in four years, missing its target by one-fifth.

There are obvious safeguarding issues with this proposal: having teachers and students who are potentially only a few months apart in age is a very strange relationship dynamic. I remember when I first started teaching, aged 21, that I thought my relative youth would make it easier for me to build relationships with the students. To some extent this was true, yet it also made it harder for me to exert authority. My relative lack of life experience did not help matters either.

Teaching apprenticeships could also erode the status of the profession even further. Teachers should be, fundamentally, subject specialists, not teenagers who have had no further education than the one they are instructing. Having a degree, for all of its financial downsides, gives you a lot of weight in the classroom, and students are much more likely to look to you for expertise – and to see you as an aspirational figure – if you have been to a good university yourself. The ever-widening roles teachers take on, particularly in terms of pastoral responsibilities, means that the importance of subject knowledge has been sidelined for other skills, but surely we need to re-establish teaching as a more academic profession, not less? We already have lower entry requirements than many other OECD countries: for example, in Finland, France, Portugal and Spain, graduates need a masters degree in the relevant subject to become a secondary school teacher, whereas in the UK 22 per cent of maths teachers and 43 per cent of physics teachers have no relevant post A-level qualification.

The other fundamental problem is that this will do nothing to help retention. The largest workforce survey by the Department for Education found that 40,000 teachers resigned from state schools last year, while the number of teaching vacancies have doubled in the last two years. Shockingly, 40 per cent of teachers leave within five years of qualifying. Teach First also has a particularly high turnover: only 69 per cent of Teach First teachers continue for more than one year after qualifying (compared to 88 per cent who train through other routes). The government is therefore literally paying hundreds of millions to train up staff who will simply not stay. Why should we assume the same thing won’t happen with apprenticeship teachers?

There are many reasons for this mass exodus: poor behaviour in schools, the pressures of Ofsted, other careers being able to offer more flexible, family-friendly arrangements like working from home. Ultimately though, the two main factors are pay and workload. According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, salaries for more experienced teachers have fallen by 13 per cent in real terms since 2010. Graduates in STEM subjects can command much higher salaries in the private sector, and so are particularly hard to recruit and retain: in the early 2010s, maths teachers accounted for nearly 30 per cent of its secondary cohort, but this declined to 18 per cent by 2018. Unless we can address this, then we will continue to experience a brain drain of the best and brightest into other professions.

If we can’t give teachers more money, then we could potentially give them more time. Due to increasing pupil numbers and decreasing staff levels, teacher timetables in most schools are made up of 90 per cent teaching time and 10 per cent PPA (planning, preparation and assessment time). We need to ease some of these pressures and allow for more good old-fashioned thinking space. This might, ironically, mean recruiting more teachers: at an extreme end, allowing for 50 per cent PPA would require about a third more teachers coming into the system. Yet if this increased quality, standards and job satisfaction, then it would also increase recruitment and retention. This would be a long-term investment; apprentice teachers, on the other hand, are a short-term band-aid.

Nigel Farage has left the jungle. What now?

Nigel Farage has left the jungle. For a brief moment it looked as if the original Brexiteer might pull off yet another electoral upset. Instead, he finished a creditable third on I’m a Celebrity… one of the biggest popularity contests on TV.

Throughout the series, left-leaning commentators have accused ITV of deliberately ‘fun-washing’ (a depressingly 2023 phrase) Farage’s reputation. The comedian Stewart Lee wrote an especially humourless piece for the Guardian, which included a passage implying that because of Farage’s appearance in the jungle, Ant and Dec were somehow sympathisers of the Norwegian white supremacist Anders Breivik (yes, really). I have little doubt that alongside an army of GB News viewers and hardcore Brexit supporters, there will also have been those who voted for Farage simply to enjoy the crescendo of hysteria from left-wing social media every time he survived a vote-off.

And yet, it would be a mistake to assume Farage’s podium finish is a sign that viewers have fallen in love with either his personality or politics. For those of us who have followed the series closely, he has made for surprisingly lacklustre television. As Gareth Roberts correctly observed on these pages a few weeks ago, Farage has revealed himself to be a really rather boring man. He has largely (and perhaps deliberately) avoided any blazing political rows with his campmates, and shown little of the roguish bonhomie one associates with him. Aside from a brief glimmer of jocularity, when he performed Right Said Fred’s ‘I’m Too Sexy’ during a karaoke session in the Jungle Arms, he has been a peripheral figure, reduced to wandering around camp muttering about the litter. 

This time last year, on the same programme, the former Health Secretary Matt Hancock surprised the nation by also finishing third. Twelve months on, has it led to a fundamental reappraisal of Hancock the man, or the politician? Absolutely not. If anything, it has only added to the existing narrative that he’s a somewhat pitiful figure desperately craving validation and attention. Farage’s motivations are just as transparent. Early in the series, he complained to fellow campmate Grace Dent, naively believing he was off camera, that he was disappointed not to be doing that day’s bushtucker trial, because it accounts for ‘25 per cent of the airtime’. It’s a comment Ant and Dec have enjoyed poking fun at ever since. On another occasion he was asked if he wanted to be Tory leader or prime minister one day. He gleefully responded ‘never say never’. This is not a man who is disguising his true intentions. 

What happens next for Farage? Given the current state of the Conservative party, it is entirely conceivable that Farage may end up as its leader within a few years, whatever the consequences will be. Or perhaps he will re-engage with Reform UK, previously known as the Brexit party, whose polling numbers have risen in recent months. Either way, this won’t be the last we hear of Nigel Farage. Throughout his time in the jungle, he has given the impression of an opinionated man choosing to hold back, desperate to avoid causing too many rows with his campmates or alienating ITV viewers. Now he’s left the confines of the Australian rainforest, he won’t have any such qualms. Nigel Farage is out of the jungle. His third act starts now.

Nigel Farage comes third on I’m A Celeb

It’s been a highly anticipated finale of I’m A Celebrity, not least because of the staying power of Brexit mastermind Nigel Farage — who tonight made third place in the series. For weeks, viewers have been glued to their screens, delighting in seeing the controversial GB news presenter squirm. From eating pig’s anus on pizza to being filmed in the nude, it’s certainly tested Farage’s humility. 

But while no one could accuse Farage of being camera shy, ITV insiders have complained that the ex-MEP is ‘one of the least interesting campmates ever’. Others have criticised the former Brexit party leader of tactically stripping and wearing his shirt backwards to better display his voting information. Footage played back tonight by Ant and Dec showed him whispering to a fellow campmate that ‘if you do the challenges, it’s 25 per cent of the airtime.’ Once a politician, always a politician… 

Though not quite King of the Jungle, a beaming Farage told the presenting duo that ‘if the public have put me in number three, I couldn’t be more thrilled’. His mission in image rehabilitation well underway, Farage will now return to much less exotic surroundings. It’s back to the real world, where he’ll be pressed to address rumours about whether this has all been part of a grand scheme to return to frontline politics.

And maybe he will. After social media hashtags evolved over the course of the series from #BoycottImACeleb to #NigelFarageToWinImACeleb, the former Ukip leader has shown that when it comes to his infamous campaigning charm, he’s still got it…

Tory tribes gear up for Rwanda clash

The next 48 hours could be among the most important of Rishi Sunak’s premiership. His flagship Rwanda Safety Bill will get its second reading in the House of Commons on Tuesday, with MPs expected to vote on it in the evening. But before that there will be a day of tense meetings in rooms across the parliamentary estate as various Tory tribes gather to discuss the Bill and whether they can support it.

Much of the attention is focused currently on the right of the party. A quintet of factions will meet at noon on Monday under the auspices of the European Research Group to hear the conclusions of its ‘Star Chamber’ of lawyers. They have already given the legislation a ‘thumbs down’ with chairman Sir Bill Cash writing in today’s Sunday Telegraph that the legislation is insufficiently ‘watertight’ to avoid protracted legal challenges by illegal migrants.

Such a conclusion is hardly surprising, given the trenchant criticisms of the Bill by Robert Jenrick – the man who, until Wednesday, was charged with piloting it through the Commons. More worrying for party managers is the turnout expected, with representatives from the Common Sense Group, New Conservatives, Northern Research Group and Conservative Growth Group all expected there. The aforementioned encompass cultural conservatives, social conservatives, Red Wallers and Trussites too.

In the evening, attention will likely switch to the centrist wing of the party. The One Nation Group will meet Monday night and release a statement at around 7 p.m. Chaired by Damian Green, this caucus claims more than 100 members and are mindful of what the legislation would mean for Britain’s international obligations. Downing Street will be relieved that thus far, key members of the group appear to be remaining onside and could begrudgingly back the Bill despite reservations. 

What is telling is how few Tory MPs outside the government have said that they will either support or vote against the government – most are keeping their powder dry. Both David Davis and Dominic Raab, two solidly centre-right figures, have today signalled their support for the Bill, with the latter penning an op-ed for the Telegraph that urges MPs to not ‘let the best be the enemy of the good.’ It follows a joint article on Friday by James Daly and Philip Davies which notes that ‘we don’t have long left.’

The magic figure this week is 29 – the number of Tory MPs needed to vote against the Rwanda Bill to remove Sunak’s majority. But the last time a government Bill was defeated at a similar stage was in 1986 on Sunday trading. That fact is indicative of the government’s likely approach: convince MPs to abstain or vote for the Bill reluctantly, knowing that they can amend it further down the line.

Robert Jenrick, for instance, told Laura Kuenssberg this morning ‘I won’t be supporting this Bill, but I do think we can fix this.’ Sir Bill Cash meanwhile argues the government can ‘work respectfully’ with colleagues to amend the Bill. With Christmas looming, entreaties for a compromise could allow a tired party to make it through to recess and resume battle after a much-needed break.

But away from parliament, the most consequential event of all could happen tonight when Nigel Farage is released from the jungle. After a brief recuperation from his Australian ordeal, expect him to be vocal in his criticism of the government’s failure to deliver on its pledge to ‘stop the boats.’ His choices in the coming months could have more impact than any manoeuvrings from the various Tory tribes. 

Wes Streeting’s ‘tough love’ approach to saving the NHS

The NHS faces an institutional and structural problem in the way it works, Wes Streeting believes. ‘Unless it changes, it’s not going to survive.’ The shadow health secretary’s ‘tough love’ philosophy suggests NHS bosses are very much mistaken if they expect much more generous health spending under a Labour government. Instead, Streeting has slammed the health service for using winter crises as an ‘excuse’ for funds. 

Streeting’s interview in today’s Sunday Times comes as the health service is facing record high waiting lists of over 7.5 million and record waiting times (with 3.2 million waiting over 18 weeks for care). More junior doctor strikes have been announced as medics remain unhappy with their pay and working conditions – which inevitably means many more appointments and procedures will have to be rescheduled. The hospital system is congested: patients arriving in A&E are having to wait too long before they’re seen, while those fit for discharge from wards are left languishing as the country’s social care services have less and less capacity to cope with demand. But Labour doesn’t see the answer as simply funnelling more money into the system. 

Part of the reason for this is it can’t. Keir Starmer has said Labour won’t turn on the spending taps while the tax burden is on course to hit its highest level since the Second World War. In accepting the financial predicament it looks likely to inherit, Labour has had to reconsider its approach to the crisis in the NHS. Streeting’s ideas are radical, but not in the way you might expect. Instead of planning to completely reorganise the NHS, he’s more interested in specific areas of inefficiency. 

One example is GP time. Taking inspiration from Singapore, Streeting wants to move back to a ‘family doctor’ system where every patient is anchored to a GP, removing the ‘red tape’ that slows community doctors down and improving on the current system of funding allocation for practices. He also plans to cut unnecessary referrals so that patients aren’t bounced between GPs and hospitals, and back again. And the shadow health secretary is keen to make community healthcare a seven-day operation, with neighbourhood health centres open in the evenings and on weekends. 

In terms of the bigger picture, Streeting wants to ‘get rid of the stupid stuff that is holding the system back’. He pointed to the lack of communication between different hospital services, meaning patient records aren’t immediately available when a patient moves. There are less obvious inefficiencies too: different hospital trusts are all run in slightly different ways, which can cause issues for staff moving between them as well as affecting the transfer of patient information. Technology will play a crucial role here. Streeting wants to replicate Singaporean health apps to improve links between GP and hospital services and encourage patients to make better lifestyle choices. One points-based app awards users who improve their fitness with supermarket discounts – which could be one way of dealing with the UK's £100 billion-a-year obesity crisis. 

Many of Streeting’s proposals will be welcomed by clinicians, who – as Streeting tells the Sunday Times – ‘can see the examples of waste and inefficiency’ in the service. His plans to both regulate and improve the quality of NHS managers (essential particularly after the revelations of the Lucy Letby case) would mark an important development in the role of non-clinical NHS staff. The shadow health secretary points to the ‘dead weight of management bureaucracy’ that medics feel prevents them from being able to adapt to a changing patient population – with ageing patients the 1948 national health service was never built to manage. 

But while Streeting talks about the need to ‘adopt a culture of innovation’, his support of the NHS workforce plan concerns some medics. They worry an already crippled system will become flooded with physician associates (healthcare workers with advanced responsibilities without a medical degree) in place of qualified doctors. Promising innovation is one thing, but NHS staff are growing increasingly disillusioned with their workplace. Streeting has hinted a Labour government would offer striking doctors a more generous deal than what is currently on the table (a 6 per cent rise plus a payment of £1,250) – but this is still likely to be much lower than the full pay restoration to the 2008 levels the BMA are looking for, and may not stop the strikes.  

The shadow health secretary has become bolder in expressing his feelings about NHS reform. In October he talked of ‘rewiring’ the health service – now he’s clear that it’s ‘a service not a shrine’. His pragmatism will help him, he appears to think, mould a system that is more patient-centric and doctor-led. Will Streeting be the health secretary that saves the NHS on a budget? He’ll certainly have his work in government cut out, if he does indeed get that far. 

Sunday shows round-up: Robert Jenrick says the Rwanda bill won’t work

Speaking to Laura Kuenssberg after resigning on Wednesday, former immigration minister Robert Jenrick was disparaging in his assessment of the government’s new Rwanda legislation. Explaining his resignation, he said he couldn’t be the minister guiding the bill through parliament. Jenrick implied he had a better understanding of the issue than the Prime Minister, and that a ‘political choice’ had been made to bring forward a bill which wouldn’t do the job. Jenrick claimed that under the proposed legislation, the Rwanda scheme would be bogged down by migrants’ potential legal claims and would not act as an effective deterrent.

Michael Gove: ‘this bill is the robust measure required’

In defence of the government’s plans, Levelling up Secretary Michael Gove argued that the scheme would not be mired by legal claims. He told Laura Kuenssberg that there were only ‘narrow exemptions’ to the policy, and individuals could only challenge their deportation if there was ‘an immediate risk of serious… harm’ to themselves personally. Gove claimed Rwanda was ‘clearly a safe country’, but also suggested that the fact the bill was being criticised on one side of the debate for striking out human rights legislation was evidence that it was sufficiently ‘robust’.

Liz Kendall: Home Secretary’s immigration plan has a fundamental flaw

On Sky News, Trevor Phillips asked Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary Liz Kendall about James Cleverly’s recently announced five-point plan to cut legal migration. Kendall claimed Labour had been calling for some of the Home Secretary’s proposals for some time, but said the government was not dealing with the crucial issue of skill shortages. Kendall told Phillips that Labour would have ‘fundamental reforms’ of apprenticeships and training to cut immigration in a way that works for the economy.

Olena Zelenska: ‘If the world gets tired, they will simply let us die’

Finally, Ukrainian First Lady Olena Zelenska spoke to Laura Kuenssberg about the worsening plight of her country, in the face of an ammunition shortage for the Ukrainian army. Zelenska made an impassioned plea for the continued support of western countries, saying a lack of support would be a ‘mortal danger’ to her people.

SNP probe investigates £95,000 Jaguar

It’s safe to say that it’s not been a great year for the SNP. For 2023 ends as it began – with questions being asked about the long-running investigation into the party’s finances. And while a luxury campervan sparked headlines earlier this year, attention has now alighted on the purchase of a luxury £95,000 Jaguar car. Can’t beat buying British, eh?

As part of Police Scotland’s ongoing probe, the cops are investigating the purchase of a top range electric vehicle. It is alleged to have been bought by Nicola Sturgeon’s husband Peter Murrell – the SNP’s former chief executive – from a dealership in Edinburgh in October 2019. A car of the same description as the Jaguar, registered in 2019, was photographed on the couple’s driveway in March 2021. Now, it has been sold, with questions being asked as to its sale history.

A source told the Sunday Mail:

Police have interviewed at least one worker at the dealership about the sale. This is an extremely high-end vehicle, one of the most expensive electric SUVs on the market. The basic price start at around £80,000 and optional extras can get you up to £95,000 if you are going for all out luxury. It goes without saying that it is completely out of the price range of most people, especially in a cost-of-living crisis.

It’s the second notable vehicle to be investigated as part of Operation Branchform, following the discovery of the £110,000 motorhome languishing in Murrell’s mother’s drive. The police investigation into the party’s funds — to find where the ‘missing’ £600,000 of indyref2 donations went — remains ongoing. All this at a time when donations to Humza Yousaf’s party are drying up, with a paltry £7,400 received in six months, according to public accounts.

Talk about a car crash…

The French elite have realised that Marine Le Pen might win

You can tell that French elections are in the air because legal proceedings are being taken against a leading figure of the French right. So it was with François Fillon of the Républicain party, a key contender in the 2017 presidential elections, whose hopes of winning were dashed during the campaign by legal investigation into alleged misuse of parliamentary funds, subsequently ending his political career. So it is now with Marine Le Pen of the Rassemblement National, as France gears up for the 9 June 2024 European parliament elections, for which her party is the clear front-runner. This week, French investigating magistrates scheduled a hearing for 27 March 2024 to determine whether Marine Le Pen, the Rassemblement National and 27 members misused EU funds in the payment of parliamentary assistants between 2004 and 2016. If found guilty they risk ten years imprisonment, a fine of one million euros and, most significantly, ten years of ineligibility for public office.

A charitable mind might venture that this is merely the work of an overzealous self-confessed left-wing judiciary. In 2013 photographic evidence was published of a notice-board in the premises of the Syndicat de la magistrature – the leading trade union for French judges – entitled the ‘mur des cons’ (literally ‘wall of c****). It displayed pictures of leading right-wing politicians such as Nicolas Sarkozy. This summer the same trade-union was present at the French Communist party newspaper’s annual political jamboree, where it participated in a debate on institutional police violence following the June riots. Any pretence of the judiciary’s political neutrality was discarded years ago. 

Yet if one adds public service broadcasting, France’s leading newspapers like Le Monde and the metropolitan elite, there is a growing panic-stricken realisation that in the near future Marine Le Pen and the Rassemblement National may be heading for power. Until now France’s elite has been in denial about this prospect, in the deluded belief that this could not happen in the country of the Rights of Man. But the writing has been on the wall for years. With the victory of nationalist right movements across the EU, from Sweden to Italy and the Netherlands, it only seems a question of time.

The EU itself is petrified at the prospect. In preparation for the 2024 elections in which the Rassemblement National is expected to wipe the board, Paris has been peppered with EU posters displaying carefree young individuals with the words: ‘Democracy, diversity and climate protection. Europe is you.’ Or ‘Unity, security and renewable energy. Europe is you’. All feature the slogan (in English): ‘You are EU’. The fear is poor youth turnout, especially the youth demographic that doesn’t yet vote for the RN (as many over the age of 25 do).

This week Le Monde featured a longitudinal study on how French attitudes to the Front National/RN have evolved over the last 40 years. The yearly barometer of French opinion shows for the first time a majority believing that the ‘extreme right’ party will soon participate in government. Le Monde with customary self-delusion puts this down to the political configuration from the 2022 legislative elections: the RN being the second largest party in an Assemblée Nationale in which President Macron is devoid of an overall majority. The paper then insists on an ‘acceleration’ since the summer: what it calls ‘the urban riots’ (when studies show the riots to have been far more widespread encompassing small market towns), the terrorist attacks in France, the reinforcement of the RN party’s president (the 28 year old, articulate, telegenic, Jordan Bardella, from an immigrant, banlieue, single-parent, background), and the national impact of the Middle East conflict. All, according to Le Monde, have given the ‘extreme right’ pride of place in public debate making its victory in the 2027 presidential election so much more likely. In short, adherence to the RN’s ideas, notably on public safety, immigration and Islam, has climbed, as has its ‘normalisation’ and credibility. What is more, the study reveals the porosity between the electorate of the traditional centre-right Républicain party and that of the RN, now viewed as the only opposition to Emmanuel Macron, even by left-wing sympathisers. The number of French who disagree with the RN’s ideas is the lowest ever at 54 per cent, while most people believe the party is no threat and 65 per cent believe it will come to power.

Now that the denial is lifting amongst France’s elite, be prepared for more dirty tricks to block Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella from power.

Does Macron want to make France more multicultural?

Emmanuel Macron will address France in the coming weeks in what is being billed as a ‘Message of Unity’ speech. According to Le Monde, the president is aware that the country is in turmoil but he believes he can make France great again. ‘The role I have assigned myself is to hold the country together,’ Macron is quoted as saying. ‘Between denial and over-dramatisation, there is room for lucidity that involves examining the country’s problems but also not letting it fall apart.’

Those problems are many, from a cost of living crisis to violent crime and much in between. The French have a reputation for not looking on the bright side of life, but there is little to be cheerful about these days in the Republic. Even the Olympic Games, which are coming to Paris next summer, have turned into a source of anger and embarrassment for millions. 

Much of the discontent is directed towards Macron. His enemies sense that he is floundering. The swagger has gone, and with it much of his authority. So, too, the respect of his adversaries, domestically and internationally. Macron talks but no one listens. 

Last week encapsulated his diminishing stature. The president became embroiled in a row after he hosted a Jewish ceremony at the Elysée Palace. Didn’t he or any of his advisors anticipate the furore that would erupt? Admittedly, much of the outrage was faux, manufactured by politicians – mainly on the left – who accused him of betraying France’s cherished laicite, or secularism. But that’s not the point. In inviting France’s Chief Rabbi, Haïm Korsia, to light the first of eight candles and mark the start of the Jewish festival of lights, Macron was also inviting criticism.  

A president of the Republic should not be seen to favour one religion over another. ‘Will Macron now do the same for other religions?’ wondered Alexis Corbière of La France Insoumise. ‘It’s a dangerous spiral.’ 

Jewish groups also expressed their unease about Macron’s gesture. ‘This is something that shouldn’t be allowed to happen again,’ said Yonathan Arfi, head of the Representative Council of French Jewish Institutions (Crif). ‘French Jews have always considered secularism as a law of protection and of freedom. Anything that weakens secularism weakens Jews.’

What made Macron’s invitation to the chief Rabbi all the more inexplicable was the fact that last month he excused himself from joining a march against anti-Semitism precisely because he said that the president of the Republic should not be seen to take sides. France is about universalism, as Macron explained to the New York Times in 2020.  

He contacted the newspaper to rebut criticism of French secularism in the wake of the murder of the schoolteacher Samuel Paty. ‘There is a sort of misunderstanding about what the European model is, and the French model in particular,’ Macron said. Describing the model as ‘universalist, not multiculturalist’, he added: ‘In our society, I don’t care whether someone is black, yellow or white, whether they are Catholic or Muslim. A person is first and foremost a citizen.’ 

Does Macron still adhere to that view? The French left doesn’t think so, and nor do some on the right, particularly after his government launched an initiative last week called ‘The New Generation’.  

The objective, outlined by Rima Abdul Malak, the Minister of Culture, is ‘to better represent social and geographical diversity in the cultural professions’. This will be achieved by identifying, training and appointing 101 young professionals, between the age of 25 and 40, to positions of power in cultural institutions. These people will ‘reflect the diversity of society in all its dimensions (social origin, geography, disability, etc.).’ 

Eric Zemmour’s Reconquest party was quick to express its outrage, and according to a Sunday newspaper, they will take legal action against the Minister for Culture, who they accuse of embracing a ‘woke ideology’ that promotes ‘anti-white racism’. More to the point, they claim, the initiative is ‘illegal as it constitutes racial discrimination on the grounds of skin colour, which is prohibited by our laws and our Constitution.’

Macron wants to use his upcoming address to the nation to ‘restore hope’ and remind France ‘what makes us who we are’. But what is that? It is universalism or is it multiculturalism? Macron seems unsure, a leader who has lost contact with the people he leads. 

Six English sparklers to enjoy this Christmas

Before I started researching my book Vines in a Cold Climate, I had a particular image of English sparkling wine as consistent but rarely that exciting. It was all a bit formulaic, like big brand champagne but leaner. I am pleased to say that I could not have been more wrong as the wines now made all over southern England are incredibly diverse, offering a wide array of styles for every palate. If you’re spending between £25 and £50 then England actually offers, on the whole, much more interesting wines than Champagne. Here are six wines that show how different English sparkling wines can be.

Westwell Wicken Foy NV (Westwell £27.50)

I’m a big fan of Westwell not least because it’s one of the nearest vineyards to me. It produces a range of still and sparkling wines but this might be my favourite. It’s made from a blend of roughly equal parts pinot noir, pinot meunier and chardonnay, and aged for 18 months so it’s still quite youthful. For me, the smell is of cider apples and then it’s saline and lemony on the palate with richer notes of yeast and toffee. Huge fun.

Coates & Seely NV ( The Champagne Company £29.50) 

The Coates & Seely in question are Christian Seely who works for French wine giant Axa Millésimes overseeing its prestigious wineries in Portugal, Bordeaux and Hungary, and former banker Nicholas Coates. This Hampshire sparkler is definitely the one to give to Champagne lovers to see if they can tell the difference. There’s green apple fruit with delicate floral, biscuit and hazelnut notes; subtle wine with a beautiful balance that gets better with each sip.

Everflyht Rosé de Saignée 2020 (Grape Brittania £40)

Rosé de Saignée is made using the technique of letting a little of the colour from the red grapes leach into the wine and then drawing some of the now pink liquid off. It’s then fermented in a mixture of wood and stainless steel and the results are wild: crunchy raspberries on the palate with woody oaky flavours and a little tannin. It’s so vivid and alive. You’ve never had fizz like this before.

Domaine Hugo 2020 (Hawkins Brothers £50)

This comes from a tiny biodynamic vineyard in Wiltshire run by Hugo Stewart who had made wine in the Languedoc before returning to his family farm to plant grapes. This is a blend of chardonnay, pinot noir, pinot meunier and pinot gris and, unusually, it’s fermented with wild yeasts and has no sugar added once secondary fermentation is complete. Risky in England’s marginal climate but in this vintage, it’s an absolute triumph, making a wine that tastes intensely rich and vital. Bravo!

Gusbourne Blancs de Blancs 2018 (Grape Britannia £65)

This is probably the English sparkling wine I know the best, mainly because it’s so often available by the glass in Kent. It’s always a great wine but I think this vintage might be the finest yet. It’s made entirely from chardonnay from Kent and Sussex and has that electric English freshness combined with a richness of fruit and irresistible baked croissant notes. 

Ridgeview Chardonnay Oak Reserve NV (Ridgeview £85)

Ridgeview is one of the biggest producers in the country. Everything in the range is consistently good but this shows what winemaker Simon Roberts can do when he lets his hair down a bit. It’s made entirely from chardonnay grown on the estate in Sussex and then fermented and aged in a mixture of old and new oak barrels, before undergoing secondary fermentation in bottle and aged for around six years. The result is something decadent and heady like a sparkling Meursault.

An election campaign is still dangerous for Putin

It was elaborately staged precisely to try and look unstaged. After a medals ceremony at the Kremlin for Heroes of the Fatherland day, Vladimir Putin joined an oh-so-unchoreographed gaggle of participants. One, Lt Colonel Artem Zhoga, appealed for him to stand for re-election. Although Putin admitted he had had second thoughts, he accepted ‘that there is no other way,’ and would indeed be running. This is, it is fair to say, not much of a surprise. Nor will it be a surprise if Putin wins in March. But that doesn’t mean there won’t be upsets along the way.

There was some sense that Putin may have been toying with stepping down in 2021, even though in a system like Russia’s, where law takes second place to politics, that is always a leap of faith, as it means putting your future and maybe even freedom in the hands of your successor. Ask Kazakhstan’s long-time autocrat, Nursultan Nazarbayev, who thought he had this sorted by hand-picking his successor and giving himself the key job of chair of the powerful Security Council for life – until his crony turned on him and he was forced ‘voluntarily’ to give up his position and be sidelined.

Ever since the invasion of Ukraine, though, there was no way Putin could risk stepping down, so the only question was when and how he was going to announce his run. Instead of staging a glitzy event for the announcement – he didn’t have to, when the full panoply of state-controlled media would blast the news to every corner – he took this approach with two goals in mind.

First of all, Putin is trying to present himself not simply as the people’s choice, but their servant. He has, in the past, complained of how hard he works for the Russian people, as a virtual ‘galley slave’ – it is clearly tough shuttling from palace to palace and sending men to die in an imperial war – and this is a similar gambit. Aware that there are signs of ‘Putin fatigue,’ his political technologists are trying to portray him as acting from duty, not ambition.

Secondly, the war is not actively popular with most of the electorate, and so Putin is faced with the challenge of being a wartime leader without being able to talk too much about the war. By surrounding himself with soldiers – Heroes of the Russian Federation, at that – he is seeking to invoke the needs of the war by osmosis.

Why does any of this matter? Surely Russian elections are stage-managed frauds, not real democratic processes? Of course – but that doesn’t make them wholly meaningless. They are essentially legitimating rituals, meant to try and persuade the masses that their vote counts and the regime deserves their loyalty and obedience, and make dissenters feel they are in a small minority and better keep quiet. To this end, they matter not for the outcome, but how much effort the political machine needs to put into manufacturing the planned result.

Rig it too much and too obviously and this defeats the object and risks – as happened in 2011/12 – triggering popular protests. The Russian presidential administration apparently plans an overwhelming win with 75-80 per cent of the vote on a 70 per cent turnout, to give a sense that the nation is united behind both Putin and his war. Avoiding protests will be a huge challenge.

To this end, there will be considerable efforts to ‘pre-rig’ the vote as far as possible. Favourable constituencies such as pensioners and factory workers can expect to be bought off. The minimum wage is already going up in January, and we can expect other sectors to get promises and maybe even real payoffs, all at the cost of an overstretched federal budget already supporting 30 per cent defence spending.

The Kremlin, meanwhile, will try to neutralise hostile constituencies. While the liberal opposition leadership is exiled or imprisoned, there is still life in the opposition, with Alexei Navalny’s team pushing an ‘anyone but Putin’ campaign. This may acquire greater significance as a nationalist ‘turbo-patriot’ opposition also emerges, with outspoken Kremlin critic (and likely war criminal) Igor Girkin, also in prison, campaigning to get on the ballot – already with unexpected support from the leftist Red Front.

Of course, it is unlikely any genuine opposition candidates will get on the ballot – another way of managing the result is to make the others standing even more unattractive than Putin. Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov will be standing, even though his brand of paleo-Marxism doesn’t appeal to many in his own party. Caricature nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky used to be a fixture to make Putin look statesmanlike, but he died last year and while his successor at the head of the LDPR, Leonid Slutsky, has suitably unpleasant views, he’s no showman. The real question will be who they can dredge up to be the token liberal, and whether anyone with any even limited credibility will be willing to play this compromised role.

Above all, elections are inherently destabilising, even sham ones. There has to be some kind of disagreement and debate, even if scripted, and this can create space for more discussion. The war, growing authoritarianism, the scope for civil society, environmental worries, economic dislocation: all of these will creep into the discussion, even if cautiously and often coded. So while the outcome is a given, the process is worth watching.

‘Rizz’, ‘vibes’, and what we lose with Very Online language

Welcome to our language: ‘rizz’. Here’s the OED definition: colloquial noun, ‘defined as ‘style, charm or attractiveness; the ability to attract a romantic or sexual partner’. It was announced on Monday as the Dictionary’s word of the year, and it’s here to stay sadly, because that’s how language works. That’s why we don’t speak like George Eliot characters.

Rizz became popular the way all words do nowadays: they start somewhere opaque online, then filter effortlessly into real life. As a 23-year-old, I hear it semi-frequently, although I kind of wish I didn’t.

What does it mean for a word to go ‘viral’? It means that everyone starts using them, and then we get a stale monoculture. These words, by definition, become clichés immediately. The worst example of this zombie language is the decline of adjectives, and the replacement of descriptive terms by saying something has ‘X’ vibes. ‘Vibes’ is a linguistic cop-out. You don’t have to explain anything, because saying ‘vibes’ will do the trick. Some other horrendous examples include: ‘it’s giving cringe’ – which is similarly vague – or saying that something ‘hits different’ if you can’t place why Coca Cola tastes better in the cinema. Listen to the mood-based names of the playlists that the Spotify bots are recommending me: #lightacademia, #duvetday, #serotonin, #bottomlessbrunch. Then scream.

It would be fine if this language was plain, intelligible or funny. Instead, it is neither creative nor accessible. In its airy talk of ‘energy’ and vibes’, it’s occultist: hard proof we’re dealing with pseudo-profundity here. 

The internet is hollowing out our language. The language we use matters, because it is the basis of all thought. If we speak worse, we think worse. And ‘rizz’ is speaking terribly. Martin Amis’s famous argument was that clichés of language are clichés of the mind. He wrote that ‘style is morality’, since elegant style reveals elegant thinking. Amis’s floweriness is sometimes juxtaposed to the plainness of Orwell, but the two men had the same belief in the essentialness of good language. In Politics and the English Language, Orwell wrote that:

When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases – bestial atrocities, iron heel, blood-stained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder – one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy, the appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved.

We’re all those ‘kind of dummies’ now, evoking buzzwords with little thought behind them. A right-wing politician that merely says the word ‘community’ will have post-liberals jumping up and down. Stock phrases such as ‘decolonisation’ and cynical theories like postmodernism become applied to almost anything regardless of the context, because they are a faux-clever substitute for original thought. It’s how you end up queering boats, as Portsmouth museum workers did to the Mary Rose earlier this year. It’s how you end up with Phoebe Bridgers calling Queen Elizabeth II a war criminal. It’s how you end up with Israel being called a ‘Nazi’ state in infographics. ‘Nazi’ = worst thing, ‘Israel’ = worst thing, so Israel = Nazi! It’s not thinking, it’s memeing.

The internet should have exposed all of us to a much more diverse culture, but it’s done the opposite. As we spend more time online, we’re catching the same patterns of speech and the same patterns of thought. Bad vibes.

The Tories aren’t being honest about foreign marriages

Western liberalism was built on the principle of marrying out. Our beliefs about the freedom of the individual ultimately stem from the Catholic Church’s ban on cousin marriage, which helped create a worldview that was open, trusting and opposed to both clannishness and xenophobia.

The medieval Church’s insistence that marriage be consensual was revolutionary and strange; back in the 13^th century a romantic poem, The History of William Marshal, has the protagonist coming across an eloping couple who have defied their parents to seek true love. Our hero then robs them, and since the story was commissioned by Marshal’s sons to glorify him, we can assume that public opinion might have thought this the right thing to do.

Yet three centuries later a popular playwright was able to write a story in which the audience sympathises with star-crossed lovers defying their parents’ wishes. Czech social scientist Karl Deutsch called this change of attitude ‘the Romeo and Juliet revolution’, and romantic freedom was intimately tied up with individualism – the idea that a person must be free to make their own life choices, rather than doing what is best for their clan.

Because the right to marry for love is central to our idea of individual liberty and personal happiness, many people strongly object to anyone who might stand in the way, whether it’s the Montague and Capulet patriarchs or the Conservative party.

So the government’s new marriage restrictions for foreign spouses have been harshly criticised, with many couples now denied a chance of happiness. The reason for this change of policy is that the Tories are at disastrous polling levels, almost bad enough to send them into Canadian-style extinction at the next election. They are even losing votes to the tiny protest party Reform – and were Nigel Farage to return from the jungle to lead that movement, the Conservatives might well come third.

The biggest headache is the huge rise in immigration post-Brexit, carried out both for economic and ideological reasons, but extremely unwise politically. After 2016 Tory and Labour voters realigned considerably on the issue of immigration and multiculturalism, and yet despite this the governing party ramped it up.

Immigration salience tends to rise and fall with immigration numbers, and while Brexit briefly took the wind out of the issue, public concern has once again followed the underlying figure.

It is not just that the numbers are large, but unselective. In the Telegraph, Sam Ashworth-Hayes writes that:

Just 335,000 of those coming in the year to September arrived on work visas. The numbers were made up by their 250,000 dependants, some 486,000 students, 153,000 dependants of students, and a surge in humanitarian and family visas (a little under 200,000)

This is not immigration as economic rocket fuel, but as a short-term patch. The dependants of people brought in to avoid paying British care-home workers more are unlikely to add significant economic value, and we can see this in the data; only 25 per cent or so are in work.

People arriving on social care visas are exempt from paying the NHS surcharge, and tend to work in low-paid roles. There is a good chance that they are a net fiscal drain even though they cannot claim benefits; the rest of the country pays for the schools their children attend and their healthcare, too. Other indicators bear this pessimistic perspective out. Despite many theoretically being selected for their ability to work, foreign-born residents are more likely to live in social housing than those born in the UK. In a country with a chronic housing shortage worsened by immigration, this is adding insult to injury.

So like panicking pilots heading towards the ground, the Tories are desperately pushing at any button, hoping one will magically save them from oblivion, and have hit on marriage. Yet while this new rule would have prevented low tens of thousands out of last year’s 1,180,000 migrants from arriving, at the same time potential migrants can still apply for a skilled worker visa if their salary is less than £26,000 but their job is in a ‘shortage occupation’ – and also bring dependents. (Although the government has also outlined plans to restrict other routes, which one must treat with a certain scepticism.)

This means that, perversely, the new rules may give foreigners more rights than British citizens in bringing a partner. According to the Migration Observatory at Oxford University, ‘in some circumstances, British workers would face more restrictive rules on family than migrant workers in the same job’ and ‘health professionals in the NHS who come to the UK on skilled work visas would be able to bring their non-UK citizen partners with them.’ So foreign nurses can bring over a spouse but British nurses can’t.

The new rules also mean that British professionals working in places like Singapore, Australia or the US are going to find it very difficult to move back with foreign-born husbands or wives, and these are just the people we want to return. The cost of compliance is already quite a burden, with various fees involved in trying to win over the Home Office.

The rule is particularly onerous becauseit only measures UK earnings. If you have a job in the US and marry an American, for example, you can’t get a British visa for them based on your American salary, but first have to move home, get a job, pass the earnings threshold and then apply for them to join you.

This seems both personally cruel, and unhelpful for the British state – so why has the government pushed this particular button? Firstly, when it comes to immigration, numbers attract headlines, and the numbers are astonishingly high. Yet while crude measurements are better than none, numbers are not the only problem – it’s just easier for the government to reduce this particular inflow, even if it means punishing high-productivity white-collar professionals based abroad.

On top of this, it’s also a good example of immigration concern being driven by taboo, and an unwillingness to say who we don’t want arriving. Instead the system tries to be ‘fair’.

British citizens marrying foreigners is not a problem, sham marriages within particular communities are. It is chain migration, through family reunion, which has the most negative social and economic effects.

When Labour came to power in 1997 one of the biggest mistakes they made was to abolish the ‘primary purpose’ rule, which required that newlyweds show that immigration was not the primary purpose of their marriage. This, activists complained, was racist. Indeed, it was designed to specifically stop members of minority groups using marriage to obtain British citizenship. And it was a good policy.

Abolishing the primary purpose rule led to a situation where, according to Christopher Caldwell, ‘Fully 60 per cent of Pakistani and Bangladeshi marriages [were] to spouses born abroad, a major factor in the roughly 50 per cent growth of the Pakistani population of Manchester, Birmingham, and Bradford over the 1990s.’ This not only sharply increased the size of these communities but also reinforced the culture of the old country and reversed integration. Often not only were spouses from the same ethnic group, they were from the same family, with UK citizens married off to cousins from the old country.

The most segregated Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities in Britain have not fully undergone the Romeo and Juliet Revolution, coming from cultures which are still clannish, making integration very difficult. Marriages were often forced, and resulted in a number of honour killings, which were annually in double figures by the time Labour left power.

This form of chain migration is extremely damaging to social cohesion, and becomes harder to control once a minority population becomes large enough. The only way you stop it is by clamping down on marriages. But because of taboos about openly saying who we wish to let in, we instead employ very crude measurements, and apply these rules far more widely.

Immigration taboos also lead to proxy arguments, the classic example being the EU and Brexit. The rising salience of immigration in Britain, and the rise of anti-immigration parties, first the BNP and then Ukip, came about with the rapid growth of segregated, largely south Asian communities from 1999 – before EU immigration ramped up in 2004. Indeed, both Leave and Remain voters preferred EU to non-EU migration, but because of taboos about discussing the issue, the EU became a proxy for immigration concerns. Immigration drove the Brexit vote, but even the argument about ‘control’ enabled senior Tories to convince themselves that it was wise to increase global migration afterwards.

Avoiding the real issue results in bad policy decisions, and the marriage rule is another example. It is in part designed to stop sham marriages and chain migration – unions that increase the separation of a minority group – but because it is so crudely applied the net drags in people who wouldn’t be a problem, and ends up needlessly making our lives worse.

Immigration policy should be directed towards serving the interests of British citizens and making their lives as convenient and happy as possible. Any restrictions will lead to hard cases having their hearts broken, but more selective rules can still minimise this human cost.

It should be a formality to bring in a spouse from another rich country, while having rules to make it difficult to do so from states which enable chain migration. A British professional overseas who wants to return with a Singaporean, Italian or Canadian spouse shouldn’t have to jump through hoops or spend a fortune in legal fees – they’re paying a high premium on an insurance policy which doesn’t usefully discriminate.

Numbers matter, but they are not the only story. The most beneficial sort of immigration comes from countries of relatively equal wealth, and the social cost of free movement between rich countries is minimal.

But because immigration concerns are so wrapped in taboo, the authorities are only able to use extremely crude and arbitrary rules. And so Romeo and Juliet must live apart.

Could killing Yahya Sinwar end the Gaza war?

Somewhere beneath the rambling town of Khan Yunis, Yahya Sinwar, the murderous leader of Hamas in Gaza, is awaiting his fate. The terrorist leader, who orchestrated the October 7th atrocity and the deaths of 1,200 innocent Israelis, knows that his days are numbered.

Either the 61-year-old Palestinian will die from the impact of a 500 lb satellite guided Joint Direct Attack Munition bomb exploding above the fetid hole in which he is hiding or his life will end in a hail of bullets fired by Israeli commandos, with orders to kill and not capture the Hamas leader.

While his death, when it comes, should be rightly celebrated, his demise will also provide the Israeli government with a useful ‘offramp’ out of the conflict.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promised the Israeli people in the wake of the terrorist attacks that he would destroy Hamas. That was always going to be a tall order. After all, how do you destroy an idea, apart from annihilating everyone who believes in it? Even then such a plan probably wouldn’t succeed.

Sinwar’s death should be seen as a useful substitute and could be used to lay the foundations for a longer ceasefire, where one of the central conditions should be the freeing of all of the remaining 130 hostages, along with how Gaza will be administered in the future.

Clearly Israel will have to negotiate with the Palestinians over Gaza’s future and who will control the territory at some stage, unless Mr Netanyahu intends to occupy the region indefinitely.

Back in 2001, after the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon Building in Washington, Britain joined the US in sending special forces into Afghanistan with the aim of killing Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda’s Saudi-born leader.

While there was great support for that military operation amongst the western democracies, the late Admiral Sir Michael Boyce, then British Chief of the Defence Staff, warned that it was far easier to start a war than to end one.  His comments were treated somewhat sniffily by Tony Blair’s Labour government at the time. But the UK remained in Afghanistan for the next 20 years. The two conflicts, Afghanistan and Gaza, are obviously different but Admiral Boyce’s warning remains relevant.

Israel has every right to carry on its war against Hamas but Mr Netanyahu’s war cabinet must also realise that time is running out if it wants to keep the US onside.

At a recent meeting in Israel last week, Anthony Blinken, the American secretary of state, made it clear that Israel would have until early January to complete its ground operation against Hamas.

According to sources who were present, Blinken stressed to Israeli officials that the US continued to support their campaign to destroy the terrorist group’s military capabilities in Gaza. However, because of the heavy death toll President Biden expected the war to end three months after it began.

During a press conference with Britain’s new Foreign Secretary Lord Cameron in Washington last Thursday night, Blinken was asked how much longer the war could go on. ‘We strongly support Israel’s efforts to ensure that it can effectively defend itself,’ he said.

‘In conversations with the Israelis we talk about how long this campaign will take and also how it will be prosecuted. These are decisions for Israel.’

But senior Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) officials are said to privately admit that the latest stage of the conflict, the attack on the city of Khan Yunis, the largest in southern Gaza, will probably be the war’s final wide-scale ground offensive.

Of course, this does not mean Israel will afterwards agree to a ceasefire, but it may allow for a scaling-down of operations. The Israeli army could then transition to a strategy of smaller raids on Hamas strongholds using targeted mobile forces, rather than the current use of entire armoured divisions occupying parts of the Gaza Strip for weeks.

The IDF estimates that they have killed somewhere between 5,000 to 6,000 terrorists – or a fifth of the number that Hamas claimed it had under arms. That means 25,000 terrorists remain signed up to Israel’s destruction.

But the damage wrought on Hamas’s capability to wage future terrorist attacks should not be underestimated. Many lower-level commanders will have been killed or injured, the group’s command and control structure will be in tatters and much of its weaponry will have been destroyed. Many of the terrorist foot soldiers may also now be more worried about the security of their own families than waging a war which will only end with their own messy death. It is also easy to imagine that while many Palestinians will blame Israel for their suffering now and in the future, others will rightly blame Hamas.

So, Sinwar, when it inevitably comes, will represent a notable win and will offer Israel a way out of the conflict with an achievable end game.

The Turner prize doesn’t make sense anymore

In 1950 the American critic Lionel Trilling suggested, in his book The Liberal Imagination, that there was no meaningful right-wing philosophy in the US. ‘The conservative impulse and the reactionary impulse do not… express themselves in ideas but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.’ He was giving voice to a venerable, and continuing, strain in left-liberal thought which regards conservatism as little more than incoherent grumbling about inevitable and irresistible change. In this view, such change is, naturally, best managed by those clever, mature left-liberals.

There is a grain of truth in Trilling’s claim, insofar as a good deal of conservative politics involves pragmatic, practical people trying to limit or repair the damage done by the crackpot schemes of intellectuals. But the problem of intellectual or artistic traditions degenerating into reaction, repetition and pastiche is hardly limited to political conservatism.

Which brings us to the Turner prize, and conceptual art more broadly. It was announced a few days ago that this year’s prize winner was Jesse Darling, whose winning piece was the usual mish-mash of found objects loosely tied together with some political waffle about Brexit and racism. All very predictable, all very safe – to be honest, I can feel my attention wandering as I type. It seems like a waste of mental energy even to think about it for more than a couple of minutes. I know that I am the sort of person modern artists want to annoy and upset with their work, and am therefore reluctant to give them the satisfaction of having shocked uptight provincial squares.

The thing is, I’m not shocked. I’m bored, because conceptual art has, like so many previous artistic movements, run out of steam. It has become unmoored from its original impetus, bogged down in the same old clichés and glib political posturing – irritable mental gestures, if you will. The argument put forward by the pioneers of conceptualism in the mid-twentieth century was that the traditional forms and idioms of visual art were exhausted and inadequate for the modern age, and that political comment and theoretical interrogation of the very concept of art needed to become integral to their work. An out-of-touch establishment was throttling new ideas, therefore that establishment needed to be rejected and replaced. Nowadays, though, conceptualism is the establishment. Duchamp’s ‘Fountain’, which was the most high-profile if not the first piece of conceptual art in the modern sense, appeared more than a century ago. We are now six or seven decades on from the first self-consciously conceptual artists, and the extent of the political and cultural insight generated seems to be ‘being left-wing is good’. There is little apparent interest in creating beauty or illuminating enduring truths about the world – partly, of course, because art has become entangled with ideologies that regard beauty and truth as little more than social constructs used to shore up the power of the dominant classes.

Artistic movements that spring from opposition or antagonism to something else, or have a political edge, are always going to struggle to maintain enduring interest or worth in the longer term, because they are engaged in an essentially negative endeavour. Conceptual art, like a lot of modern art, has this difficulty.

The early generations of conceptualists (and modernists) had mostly been educated in the old tradition, or were at least familiar with it. When they lamented the restrictions of figurative or representational art, they had a clear idea of what they were talking about. But contemporary practitioners are at least two or three generations removed from the classic tradition. They weren’t raised in the old world; they don’t know much about it. They certainly don’t understand it. The alleged straitjackets once imposed on the free artistic spirit by that tradition are a kind of folk devil, a mythologised enemy which no longer really exists. The same is true of those other frequently invoked antagonists for modern artists, the conservative establishment, or the conventional middle-class who need to be shocked out of their prim complacency. There is no coterie of arch-conservative bishops, minor gentry, and retired colonels secretly running everything. There are no easily shocked bourgeoisie having fits of the vapours because a play features nudity. It is no longer 1952. Art which takes anti-conservatism as its foundation or core principle is merely bombing the rubble of a long-defeated city.  

This problem is not confined to the visual arts. In poetry, early modernists like Walt Whitman or TS Eliot used free verse, and crafted complex webs of reference and allusion, to reimagine what could be done with the medium. For the American Whitman that meant rejecting the strict ideas about structure and subject matter that still dominated the poetic culture of Europe – the Old World – and creating a vigorous new democratic idiom for the young, energetic United States, which during his lifetime (1819-92) transformed from a relatively marginal agrarian nation into a proto-superpower.   

Eliot (1888-1965) was also an American by birth but a naturalised Briton. He saw that the transformation of western culture in his time, especially the cataclysm of the first world war, required a wholly new poetry to address the fragmentation, dislocation and alienation experienced in the modern world. Eliot and Whitman’s poems are undoubtedly difficult, but rarely are they obscure for obscurity’s sake. And – particularly in Eliot’s case – they are in conversation with the great tradition. They take for granted that beauty and meaning really do exist. They have a positive vision.

Many of their successors, however, seem to regard deeply obscure imagery, and the rejection of structure and rhyme, as ends in themselves. Or that these things are sufficient to be ‘authentic’ (and therefore, supposedly, good). Like conceptual artists, they are reacting against a largely vanquished and forgotten enemy – the old poetic requirements concerning metre, rhyme and form, which have been out of fashion since long before most people reading this were born.

The near-inevitable rebuttal to these kind of arguments is that the person making them is a mere reactionary. This is not the case. I suppose I am an artistic conservative, in that I believe art should aim for truth and beauty, but there are different ways to show truth and beauty, and many of those ways do not require traditional forms. I am fond of the new Coventry cathedral, and Bridget Riley paintings and Henry Moore sculptures and the buildings of Frank Lloyd Wright. My objection is not to certain forms of art but to glib, uninspired and tired approaches. The current conceptual scene offers unparalleled opportunities for the untalented and lazy.

Net zero has doomed Europe’s car industry

The decision of the European Commission to delay, for three years, tariffs on car exports between Britain and the EU is the harbinger of a more constructive relationship between the two. But is it going to save the European car industry? Probably not. It is net zero targets, not Brexit, which are condemning mass-market car production in Europe to possible extinction.

Until this week’s decision, car manufacturers faced a cliff edge. Unless they could show that at least 45 per cent of a vehicle, by value, had been made in Europe, that vehicle would face a 10 per cent tariff if exported from Britain to the EU or vice versa. What might have seemed a good protectionist wheeze when the post-Brexit trade deal was being negotiated became a millstone when European manufacturers realised it was going to be extremely difficult to reach the 45 per cent threshold – especially in the case of electric cars. 

In spite of predictions that the weight of electric car batteries meant that their manufacturing would need to be undertaken as close to the final market as possible, China has rather cornered the market in batteries for electric cars. They now have a global share of over 90 per cent – a share which has been won thanks to a lower cost base. Given that the batteries account for nearly half the cost of manufacturing a new car, it becomes virtually impossible to meet the 45 per cent European-made content rule while using Chinese batteries.   

But here is the irony. One of the main reasons it costs around a third less to manufacture batteries in China than in Europe is cheap energy. But China’s energy is not just cheap, it is very dirty, too. In 2022, 61 per cent of Chinese electricity was coal-powered. We call electric cars ‘zero emissions’, but their manufacture is anything but.

From 1 January, manufacturers must ensure that at least 22 per cent of cars they sell in Britain are pure electric. As such, with Britain and the EU introducing mandates for electric car sales, net zero rules are actually helping to transfer car manufacturing to China. 

And it is not just the batteries. From virtually nothing three years ago, China exported half a million cars to European markets in 2022.

While still a low proportion of overall sales, Chinese brands are quickly beginning to dominate the budget end of the electric car market. The future of the European car market is beginning to take shape: Chinese-made cars will proliferate at the bottom of the market, while European manufacturers are increasingly confined to the premium market.

Chinese-made cars may help European motorists to go electric. But so long as China continues to rely heavily on coal power, it is hard to see how the planet benefits all that much (the manufacturing process accounts for a hefty slice of a vehicle’s lifetime emissions). Europe faces losing much of its car industry for a disappointingly small environmental gain.

Will Tory plotters sink Sunak?

After months of tedium, Sunday newsrooms everywhere rejoiced at Robert Jenrick’s resignation on Wednesday night. Finally, a return to the greatest hits: Tory splits and fevered speculation of a leadership contest. Leading the way is the Mail on Sunday which brings news of yet another food-themed conspiracy. Boris Johnson saw off the ‘pork pie plot’ but Rishi Sunak is reportedly facing the ‘pasta plotters’ who are ‘cooking up a scheme’ to oust him at a Covent Garden Italian eaterie. Penne Mordaunt for leader, anyone?

The paper declares tonight that a ‘determined cabal of MPs and political strategists’ have been meeting at the legendary Giovanni’s restaurant, a stone’s throw away from Westminster. There they have been busy turning a torrent of headlines damaging to the Prime Minister, previously described as a ‘grid of shit’, into ‘an advent calendar of shit’. Talk about a festive twist on regicide. One of the Giovanni’s plotters is apparently ‘open about wanting to “crash” Sunak’s administration in order to install a new leader’ before the election – but ‘admits to having no idea how it will happen or who should take over’. Jolly good.

Elsewhere, the Sunday Telegraph reports that the European Research Group’s (ERG) so-called ‘Star chamber’ of Conservative lawyers has concluded that Sunak’s Rwanda deportation plans are not fit for purpose. In the words of Sir Bill Cash, who chairs the panel, the legislation is insufficiently ‘watertight’ to avoid protracted legal challenges by illegal migrants seeking to remain in the UK. The ERG was able to lead 22 MPs to vote against Sunak’s Brexit plan back in March; an ominous portent for the Rwanda Bill on Tuesday. The last time a government Bill was defeated at a similar stage – the second reading – was in 1986; however, only 29 Tory MPs would need to vote against the legislation to wipe out Sunak’s majority.

Forget pasta, sounds like popcorn is going to be needed come Tuesday night in the voting lobbies…