Is Labour right to remain positive about this week’s Scottish by-election?

Nigel Farage will make his first political visit north of the border in six years this week, causing intense excitement in the Scottish media. The Reform UK leader’s trips here rarely pass without incident, including the time he sought refuge from protesters in an Edinburgh pub or when a nearby branch of McDonald’s was asked by police not to sell milkshakes. Activists are already targeting the visit to Hamilton. Which is, of course, precisely what the media-hungry Farage wants.

To date, media coverage of the Scottish parliamentary by-election campaign in Hamilton, Larkhall and Stonehouse in the heart of the central belt has breathlessly predicted a Reform breakthrough, which could push Scottish Labour into third place according to several commentators. First Minister John Swinney has railed against Farage, holding a cross-party summit that inevitably provided even more free publicity for the Clacton MP.

And yet, as diametrically opposed as the SNP and Reform are, the latter’s rise has come at precisely the right moment for Swinney. Even with his party way down in the polls compared to 2021, and clear voter dissatisfaction after nearly two decades in power, the polls suggest he is still on course for victory as the anti-SNP coalition splinters. If Labour fails to win a by-election that it would have walked this time last year, it will be as much to do with Farage bailing out Swinney as it is with Keir Starmer’s teething problems in government.

But in Hamilton, Larkhall and Stonehouse, campaign teams insist the contest remains close. With much of the media gaze seen through a national prism, Scottish Labour is running a traditional local ground operation away from the spotlight. Seasoned activists armed with extensive data are going door-to-door, trying to squeeze every voter they can before polling day on 5 June and rebuild the anti-SNP coalition that returned 37 Labour MPs last year.

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In the 2023 Westminster by-election in neighbouring Rutherglen, these conversations were quick. Today, they are far longer. There is anger towards Keir Starmer’s Labour government; that promise of ‘change’ hasn’t materialised, they argue. But dissatisfaction, too, with the SNP’s long record in office and the state of public services. Persuading people not to resort to a protest vote against both parties is Labour’s primary mission.

The result may hinge on how many of these conversations can take place before polling day. Reform campaigners will have far fewer meaningful chats with voters. The insurgent party simply doesn’t have the voter ID to know where the undecideds live, or which houses are a waste of time, so it largely relies on creating a media narrative and deploying gutter online tactics. This includes an advert which targets Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar, questioning his belonging to Scotland, which Farage has doubled down on.

Away from this air war, however, Labour strategists remain positive. Their decision to focus so much on the ground campaign has partially led to a contentious decision to reject STV’s plans for a national TV debate – with candidate Davy Russell insisting he would ‘rather be chapping doors and talking and listening to ordinary voters’. Critical commentators pointed out that the debate won’t take place until after 10.30 p.m. although this fails to acknowledge the huge amount of preparation these shows require. (Who on earth is clamouring for a national TV debate between the candidates anyway?)

That doesn’t tell the full story though. Russell is not a polished media performer and is unlikely to relish a TV debate. He has avoided any one-to-one interviews with journalists, and his awkward social media clips appear to have been edited. But he is well-known and liked locally – not least in the pubs where he sings Frank Sinatra classics or the bowling clubs where he competes on the lawns.

The unwaveringly loyal pro-SNP newspaper the National ran a sneering story with the headline ‘Scottish Labour MSP candidate “can’t string a sentence together”‘ – with the quote attributed to an SNP councillor. There is a whiff of snobbery in some of the commentary. As one MP who came from England to campaign pointed out: ‘Davy speaks like everyone else round here.’

The SNP’s candidate, Katy Loudon, is the more traditional by-election candidate. Comfortable in front of the media, articulate, doesn’t live in the constituency, and desperate to be elected (this is her third time as a parliamentary candidate in less than two years). The media narrative is that she will win on 5 June, prompting some within the SNP to worry about complacency.

Feedback from the SNP campaign acknowledges there is an angry electorate, and Reform – which straddles the yes/no constitutional divide in Scotland more than is often acknowledged – is peeling off voters from all sides. But sources claim that voters are, for now anyway, angrier with Keir Starmer than they are with John Swinney. Coupled with the increasing popularity of Nigel Farage, Swinney probably can’t quite believe his good fortune.

Ireland has been consumed by hatred of Israel

A new religion blights the Republic of Ireland. Catholicism has been supplanted by a far more cultish creed. Its doctrines are declared with great fervour, its icons scar every town and village. You will struggle to find one person who has not converted to this strange and all-consuming faith. Its name? Israelophobia.

I knew Ireland was hostile to Israel but I had no idea how bad things had got. It’s suffocating. Wherever you go, whether city or bog, you’ll see it and hear it – that swirling animus for the Jewish State. The political class speaks of little else. The media are feverishly obsessed. From every political party, every TV set, every soapbox, the cry goes out: Israel is evil!

It’s inescapable. It’s all over Dublin, of course, long a hotbed of leftish activism. You won’t walk five metres there without seeing a youth wearing a keffiyeh and a look of smug self-satisfaction. The Palestine flag flutters at Trinity College. Even the Hamas flag has been waved at protests in the capital: leftists for fascism.

In the country too, where Dublin fads once held no sway, Israelophobia has put down roots. I find no relief from its dogmas out in Connemara, where my parents are from. Palestine flags fly in random fields. ‘STOP’ road signs have had the word ‘GENOCIDE’ attached to them, meaning everywhere you turn you’re reminded of that most unholy nation. There were once statues of the Virgin Mother on Ireland’s roadsides, imploring you to resist evil; now there are dire reminders of the evil Israel commits. It feels like the Jewish State has become a Satan substitute in post-Catholic Ireland. You prove your virtue through renouncing it. 

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On a drive from Connemara to Clare I switch on the radio. The first thing I hear is an interview with a folk singer from Galway who’s become a national treasure by going on a ‘hunger strike for Gaza’. The presenter fawns over her with holy reverence: Ireland’s new saints. She called off her strike after seven days – less Bobby Sands than a body detox. The interview bleeds into a breathless report on famine in Gaza. I turn it off; only silence brings respite from the religious fury. 

Even pubs bow and scrape to the new faith. A bar in Bundoran in Donegal has banned ‘all Zionists’. Zionists are the devil here. One was spat on in Dublin and told to get out of the country. So much for Ireland’s old cry of ‘Céad Míle Fáilte’: a hundred thousand welcomes. 

I take a pint in a quiet bar in Clifden. A TV in the corner is whispering about genocide. It’s a panel discussion about Israel’s crimes against humanity. They all agree. It’s interrupted by news of Gerry Adams’s libel victory over the BBC. Gloating Gerry is in a keffiyeh. They say it’s the one gifted to him by Ismail Haniyeh, the former leader of the neo-fascists of Hamas. You can’t so much as finish a drink without hearing the cult’s claims and seeing its paraphernalia. The old priests would have killed for such reach. 

Politicians of all persuasions genuflect at the altar of Israelophobia. The Dáil is a sea of keffiyehs some days. A proposed new law, the Occupied Territories Bill, would make it a criminal offence to trade with any person or business in Israeli settlements in the West Bank. The moral deviant who does so risks five years in jail. One envisions pilgrims returning from the Holy Land and being grilled by gardai over whether their holy trinkets were bought from a Jew in a settlement. ‘You traded with the Zionists? Off to Mountjoy.’

This week both the Taoiseach, Micheál Martin, and the Tánaiste, Simon Harris, said Israel is committing genocide. Martin, frustrated by his failure to convince other nations to sign up to this vile calumny against the Jewish State, called for a ‘broadening’ of the definition of genocide. They’re shameless. They want to alter the very meaning of words in order that they might frame Israel for the gravest crime. Like all witchfinder cults, they twist truth to ensnare the demons they irrationally fear. 

Some say the reason Ireland feels so strongly about this is because we too experienced ‘colonial repression’. What an insult to the men and women who fought for Ireland’s freedom to speak of them in the same breath as the murderous obscurantists of Hamas. Israel is not waging a colonial war on Gaza, as Britain once did in Ireland: it is pursuing the army of anti-Semites that raped and murdered hundreds of Jews in the 7 October pogrom. 

If Ireland’s fury is just ‘solidarity with Palestine’, then why does it feel so hateful? So stifling? Why does it involve the expulsion from public houses of Jews who believe in a Jewish homeland? And the spitting on such Jews? And the criminalisation of trade with such Jews? And the waving of the flag of the army that butchered a thousand Jews 18 months ago? Ireland is in the grip of a new hysteria. The country I love has fallen. Who will save it?

Ukraine has dealt a stunning blow to Russia

During their spat in the Oval Office in February, Donald Trump infamously told his counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky, ‘You don’t have the cards’ to play against Russia. It now appears that Trump could not have been more wrong if he tried. Yesterday, Ukraine inflicted a stunningly unexpected act of sabotage on Russia, directing a flotilla of explosive-laden drones at a number of airbases right across the country.

Dubbed ‘Operation Spider’s Web’, Ukraine worked across three time zones to launch 117 drones, successfully blowing up 41 aircraft, including nuclear-capable bombers, at four air bases across Russia. The attacks spanned the breadth of the country: two military bases in the Ivanovo and Ryazan regions, respectively – less than 200 miles from Moscow – were targeted, as was one base in the Arctic region of Murmansk, over 1,900 miles from Ukraine, and one in Siberia, over 3,400 miles from the conflict’s front line. A fifth military base was also targeted in the far eastern region of Amur, which borders China, but the truck carrying the drones caught fire before they could be deployed. 

According to Ukrainian officials, the operation took over 18 months to plan and was personally overseen by Zelensky. It was a complicated operation with many moving parts: the drones and crates to store them had to be smuggled onto Russian soil and loaded into trucks. These were driven close to the military bases and parked up outside, before the trucks’ roofs were supposedly remotely removed and the drones flown up and out towards the bases. Trump was reportedly not warned by Kyiv ahead of the attacks taking place.

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Acknowledging the attacks in his nightly address yesterday, Zelensky declared it would be an operation that would ‘definitely appear in history books’. The operatives responsible for carrying out the attack were all safely back on Ukrainian soil, he said, although Russia has since claimed to have arrested one of the men they say was driving one of the trucks. In words guaranteed to send the Kremlin into even more of a frenzy over the attacks, Zelensky said one detail he could reveal was that ‘the “office” of our operation on Russian territory was located right next to the Russian FSB headquarters in one of their regions’.

Ukraine, naturally, is talking up the attack as having devastating consequences for Russia’s ability to bombard them. There does appear to be merit in this: the drone attacks mainly targeted Tu-95 and Tu-22 bombers, which Russia has been using to fire long-range missiles into Ukraine. Following a weekend over which Ukraine once again faced heavy bombardment by Russian forces – Moscow directed 472 drones and seven ballistic missiles at the country on Saturday night – this will also provide a welcome boost of morale. 

Zelensky claimed that the strikes have eliminated a very specific 34 per cent of Moscow’s strategic cruise missile carrier stock. While Kyiv has claimed to have done about $7 billion (£5.2 billion) worth of damage, a more likely estimate is around $2 billion (£1.5 billion). Nevertheless, these aircraft were old Soviet-era stock – replacing them won’t be easy for the Russian army, particularly with the supply chain issues caused by the war.

This has not been lost on Russia’s military bloggers, the vast majority of whom appear to be acknowledging the enormity of the damage. One prominent pro-war milblogger who goes by the handle ‘Rybar’ wrote on Telegram criticising the special services for failing to anticipate the attack and the army for failing to adequately protect the jets: ‘These losses cannot be restored. This is, without understatement, a very serious damage to the war’s strategic component.’ 

The blame game that has now begun in Russian milblogging circles will almost certainly be reflected in the Kremlin, undoubtedly made all the more intense by the historic rivalry that has long existed between the country’s army and special intelligence service FSB. They will have to answer to Putin at the very least on the question of how so many drones were able to fly straight into a number of military bases. What, if any, electronic warfare countermeasures were in place?

The timing and success of yesterday’s attack will bolster Zelensky ahead of today’s latest round of peace talks set to take place between Russian and Ukrainian delegations in Istanbul. Questions remain over whether the negotiation will go ahead, not least because Russia has refused to publish its position paper of what it will be asking for ahead of the meeting. 

These drone attacks certainly place Moscow in a sticky position ahead of today’s negotiation. With Trump continuing to exert pressure on both sides to come to an agreed peace deal, the Kremlin faces a choice: raise the subject of the strikes, retaliate and risk escalating the conflict in a way that pushes Trump away, or play them down and pretend they didn’t happen, leaving them to accusations of weakness from Russia’s frothing ultranationalists and influential milbloggers. 

After a dismal five months of being cajoled and coerced into meeting Russia at the negotiating table, Zelensky can allow himself this moment to feel a momentary burst of smug pride: Ukraine’s president does, despite everything, still hold some cards against Putin.

The shoplifters are winning

It was when I saw an entire crate of orange juice exit my local supermarket that I knew something had died. The Artful Dodger school of shoplifting has officially been boarded up, its artisan poachers and pilferers as redundant to the modern world of thieving as swag bags, eye masks and soft sole shoes. 

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There’s no longer any attempt at discretion or skill when it comes to shoplifting in my nearest Co-op in south London. The thieves don’t enter in trench coats and furtively peruse the aisles. They stroll in, take as much as they can carry and walk out again, knowing that the worst punishment they face is being given some scatological invective from the five-foot-nothing woman of venerable age who is usually locked inside her till cubicle.

I’ve seen the new breed of urban kleptomaniac in action four times in the past two weeks. And it’s making me wonder if perhaps the reason why Co-op were so slow in restocking their shelves after the recent cyber-attack on their network is that, quite frankly, anything they put back on the shelves, around my way at least, will just disappear into the grasping hands of looters. 

As for us SW9 shoppers who still have the quaint notion that we really should pay for milk, bread and loo roll, a successful trip to my local Co-op means possessing the ability to juggle as well as W.C. Fields did in The Old Fashioned Way while also displaying patience that would test the fortitude of Gandhi. In their wisdom, my Co-op has decided to remove all the baskets from the shop, rightly seeing them as a receptacle designed to make shoplifting even easier. For us men and women of honest toil, however, this means that what you buy is restricted to your balancing skills with cat food, courgettes and chocolate.   

The Co-op has also opted to lock the doors of the fridges containing any product with meat or dairy in it. I have composed limericks, re-tied my boot laces and sung three verses of Don McLean’s ‘American Pie’ while waiting for an assistant to find the right key so I can access some medium cheddar.

Yet none of it stops the crooks. And of late, I’ve started to become suspicious that perhaps there’s a Faustian pact going on between supermarkets and shoplifters. My local Co-op has just small door for customers to enter and exit through. The one security guard who does an occasional shift is a man who looks old enough to be David Attenborough’s dad and is clearly not getting paid enough to put up entirely futile physical resistance to a man a third of his age who is intent on leaving without paying for his bottle of chenin blanc and packet of Quavers. Two security guards of fighting weight and age could eliminate the shoplifting overnight by simply standing in front of the door and refusing to let any suspected thieves leave. But the shop hasn’t done this, despite the tsunami of stealing.

Call me cynical, but could it be perhaps that some supermarkets have calculated that it’s actually cheaper to let shoplifters go about their warm work with freedom than it would be to employ an extra security guard who, quite reasonably, would demand more than minimum wage for what is a potentially dangerous occupation?

I’m not picking on Co-op exclusively. The Sainsbury’s, Iceland and Superdrug near me all have similar problems. But is it ludicrous to ponder whether the bean-counters in various head offices have done some quick maths and found that the agency fees, potential insurance claims, DBS checks and even the cost of the hi-vis jackets that the creation of more security jobs would entail simply cost far more than seeing a fair-sized litany of wine, doughnuts and chocolate disappear from their shelves each day?

It’s not especially difficult to prevent the vast majority of the general public from walking through a shop door if you don’t want them to. And that’s all that is required to stop the shoplifting epidemic in my part of south London reaching the point where I suspect the shop doors themselves might be the next item bandits walk away with. Yet if it’s a choice between job creation and low-cost pilfering of goods that seldom add up to more than £15 in value each time, I wouldn’t be surprised if supermarkets in high-steal areas have decided to just let the bad guys win.

Shoplifting isn’t redistribution of wealth. It’s cocky, damn-the-consequences-because-there-aren’t-any gluttony. I have never seen anyone steal the kind of goods which could feed a young family a hot meal. It’s chocolate and wine, not bread and pasta that gets a shelf-rustler excited. This boiling rash of picayune robberies are inevitable if shops aren’t prepared to invest in the kind of ultra-basic security detail that would struggle with an armed raid but are capable of stopping a large man with a purloined pint of milk in his tracks.

As for me, I’ll just carry on with my obsolescent habit of using my wallet and the self-checkout. The only thing I’m taking away from shops without payment is a sense of righteous anger. And that, I imagine, doesn’t taste anywhere near as good as a nicked Kit Kat Chunky.

Are you tough enough for the school run?

Nothing in life prepares you for the school run. In theory, on paper, it ought to be idyllic. What could be better than feeding a nutritious breakfast to your nine- and five-year-old, before scrubbing their cherubic upturned faces and combing down their buoyant hair, and then helping them get dressed and out to the car for the short drive to school, whereupon they can skip through the gates happily to education-land?

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Instead, it’s a Thursday morning – by which point the week has taken its toll – and you find yourself shouting ‘GET YOUR SHOES ON’ for the 30th time at the sort of level that would be a serious breach of health and safety regulations were the noise emanating from a hairdryer or lawnmower. 

But your children aren’t wearing ear protection. And all you really want to do is to repeat the exhortation, even more loudly – until their little angelic ears bleed and the neighbour’s windows shake. Because you’ve been trying to get them dressed for half an hour already. And you have to be out of the door in five minutes, otherwise they’ll be late for school and go on the list. And then you’ll suffer the indignity of having to state – typed on the computer – the reason for their lateness, which is in fact your lateness, not theirs at all, as you are the parent and meant to be capable of arriving somewhere on time.

But it is not only the pending shame that weighs on your mind and makes this – perhaps of all routine tasks associated with parenthood – the one most likely to shred the sanity of even the most level-headed individual. It runs deeper. Because this moment of frustration is underscored by long-buried, subconscious pains and angsts of your own which rise up from the recesses of the mind and get to the brain’s top floor just in time for you to be assailed by the shame and guilt that comes with the realisation of your own rank failure, once again, to have your children dressed at 8.25 in the morning. You also realise that despite years of trying, you have so far failed to teach them anything except for how to be late, of course.

So your only recourse is to seize them and forcefully push their protesting limbs into sleeves, trouser legs, socks and shoes while repeating the mantra: ‘GET DRESSED!’ But before you get there, as they leap on the parental bed with joyful abandon, you still hope that a stern instruction or some other encouragements might do the trick. You try bribing them with the promise of their own body weight in sugar at the end of the day or another £7 magazine that will be disregarded the moment they have assembled the small plastic toy torn from its cover. All to no avail.

Of course, you remind yourself, being late doesn’t matter. It’s just school. But it does matter. Because if you teach your children to be late for school, you are teaching them to be late for life – for every meeting or working day henceforth. And that won’t do. So getting them into school before the shutters come down at 8.50 really matters.

But by 8.29, with no progress in sight – and the school gates opening in 11 minutes – the pain in your temples becomes acute. You visualise the headmistress shaking her head as she surveys the list of late children, and then perhaps nodding because she knew it all along. They are late people, she will be thinking; that father, especially.

Then the bouncing youngest rockets towards the ceiling and gleefully swats at the light fitting, while the eldest roars ‘I’m not going to school today!’ and kicks his tie high across the bedroom. The sight of the tie is enough to give me an aneurysm. And I see the clock, It’s 8.32! There isn’t time for an aneurysm. ‘GET DRESSED!’

This time I shout loudly enough to pop my youngest’s grommets. Which is when the tie-kicker starts crying.  ‘I don’t want to go to school,’ he wails, tears erupting from eyes. Oh God… not now. Surely not real emotions, ones that require steadying and love and understanding – not when we have 17 minutes to get dressed, teeth brushed, faces cleaned, shoes found, water bottles filled (schools no longer having cups and running water, seemingly) and actually there on time.

So I take a deep breath and cuddle him. It won’t be as bad as all that, chum. I kiss his tears, pick up his tie and do it up for him… it’s then that the youngest slips off the bed and lands headfirst on the dog which is currently on heat again and madly bonking a heap of washing.

Never let a disaster go to waste. In the 85 seconds that follow – with the youngest dazed from pain and shock and the dog beside herself – the final pyjamas are removed and school clothes affixed. A minute later their teeth have seen the brush, breakfast and toothpaste remnants have been smeared across their faces with a flannel and hair has been patted with a comb. They are downstairs and now the search for the shoes begins. Followed by the car keys.

Eventually, as the clock ticks down, the last shoe is unearthed – usually knotted so ferociously only Alexander’s solution will do. With relish you slash the knot free with a kitchen knife – hah! – then shove the shoe on the child’s foot and gaffer tape it so tightly it won’t come off for a week. Then you lift, carry and drag the whole caboodle of children, bags and coats to the car.

It’s at this point, finally seated and panting at the wheel, that the youngest chirps: ‘Daddy, I need a poo…’

The Volvo races from the drive at precisely 8.44. We have fewer than 360 seconds to get to the school gate and somehow, out of breath, running, faces like Sally Gunnell at Barcelona in 1992, we make it. Just.

Be under no illusion, the school run will break even the strongest spirit. Ant and Dec don’t need to fly micro celebrities around world to ingest elaborately plumaged wildlife to entertain the masses. They should instead just follow their Z-listers for a week on the school run. Whichever parent breaks last wins. Ant and Dec’s Celebrity School Run would be a television sensation. It would be quite a leveller, too, because as another father said to me the other day: ‘I’m always rather suspicious of those parents who look too together at drop off.’ One day, I dare say, I’ll look back and laugh. But not yet.

Inside London’s transport time warp

The illustration shows a smiling couple on a yacht, the wind ruffling their hair and the coastline receding into the distance behind them. Above it are the words: ‘Work out of London – get more out of life.’ Something from the post-Covid work-from-home era, perhaps, or Boris Johnson’s 2019 ‘levelling up’ election campaign? No – this is the work of ‘The Location of Offices Bureau’, set up by the Tory government in 1963 and abolished by Margaret Thatcher.

The advert appears on the wall of a decommissioned Tube carriage that’s one of many frozen in time in a warehouse in west London. In the latest issue of The Spectator, Richard Morris writes that museums often have a ‘wealth of treasures… hidden away in storage’ and argues that more should open their vaults. The London Transport Museum Depot in Acton is an object lesson in how to do this. The 65,000 sq metre unit exists primarily to store, catalogue and preserve objects from the London Transport Museum’s collection – and three times a year, it opens its doors to the public. 

With live music, food stands and a programme of talks and activities, these ‘open days’ have a vibe more like a festival than a museum. But the main draw is the 320,000 items kept here, which include road and rail vehicles, engineering equipment and drawings, signs and maps, tiles and ticket machines, signalling systems, original artworks and posters, and all kinds of transport ephemera – as well as anything that doesn’t fit into the London Transport Museum in Covent Garden. Exhibits range from a cavernous tunnel lining ring that was used in the 1880s to build London’s first Tube railway to the electrical equipment that was installed under the floor of the first automatic passenger trains in the world, placed on stilts so visitors can see it in operation.

But it’s stepping inside the vehicles themselves that most vividly evokes the Britain of days gone by. Each bus and Tube carriage is like a time capsule, with everything from the upholstery and flooring to adverts and signage offering a snapshot of life on the day it left service.  

Inside a surprisingly luxurious 1938 Tube stock car, varnished floors and deep-cushioned seating give a teasing glimpse of a much more comfortable commute – beneath adverts promoting ‘Embassy Number 1. Every time’ and ‘Don’t wait… Dial 168… for Racing Results’. (Though some things haven’t changed – another poster reminds passengers: ‘When waiting for your train, please let people off first.’)

A 1967 Tube stock train that went out of service in 2011 offers adverts for an Aer Lingus flight from Gatwick to Dublin for £29.99 and ‘The All-New Kindle’ for £109. There’s also a ‘Smart phone, smart plan’ for an HTC Wildfire Red with 3.2in touch screen and ‘packed with Facebook, Flickr and Twitter’ – yours for £30 a month.

On a fleet of buses from the past century and beyond, adverts for Wills’s Capstan cigarettes, Brymay safety matches and Watneys beer abound. A gleaming 1880s horse bus (top speed 8mph, capacity 28) and 1910s B-type motor bus (top speed 16mph, capacity 34 – though 18 of these had to brave the uncovered top deck) sit alongside a double-decker ‘Blitz bus’ with anti-splinter netting on the windows to protect passengers from shattering glass in a bomb blast. Nearby is a 1920s ‘pirate’ bus, a reference to the days when multiple bus companies operated in London and smaller firms would run services a minute ahead of rivals to try to steal passengers. (Imagine that next time you’re stranded at the bus stop at rush hour.)

A 1966 issue bus has an on-board turnstile that demands 20p in 5p and 10p coins for entry – fortunately deactivated in these cashless days. The route map on the wall inside comes from the days when retail stores constituted landmarks and is littered with London’s ghosts: ‘HIGH HOLBORN (Pearl Assurance)’, ‘PICCADILLY CIRCUS (Swan & Edgar)’, ‘MARBLE ARCH (C&A), FLEET STREET (Daily Telegraph).’ Beside it is an advert showing a smiling woman at the wheel of a bus. The caption? ‘Who needs women drivers and pays them really good money? London Transport do. A Double-Decker responds just as well to a woman’s touch – we already have a band of lady drivers to prove it.’ 

Today, Londoners’ commutes are wallpapered with images warning against ‘intrusive staring’ and promoting assisted dying. The late American comedian Bill Hicks once said ‘If you want to understand a society, take a good look at the drugs it uses’. I’d suggest you also could also take a good look at the adverts on its public transport network.

The next London Transport Museum Depot Open Days are 6-8 June.

Ash Regan’s prostitution blunder

To Scotland, where once Britain’s greatest schools were found. These days, sadly, that can no longer be said, thanks to the SNP’s mismanagement over the past 18 years in office. One of those who served as a minister in its wretched regime was Ash Regan, who held the Scottish Government’s Community Safety brief from 2018 to 2022. Having failed to win the party leadership in 2023, she now sits as an MSP in the Alex Salmond fan club that is the Alba party. 

Her latest Holyrood initiative is to restart the debate on prostitution north of the border. Regan is championing a new ‘Prostitution (Offences and Support) (Scotland) Bill’ which aims to criminalise the buying of sex in Scotland while decriminalising those selling sexual services. The 51-year-old is in the midst of a big publicity push for her Bill. But it seems she has now come unstuck in her latest interview with the Herald. 

For its Sunday edition today contains the following glorious exchange:

Asked about concerns her bill could drive prostitution to an unregulated and underground system, Ms Regan said: “There is no basis for any of those assertions. If you even think for one second, you cannot possibly drive prostitution underground. If you had a lot of women in underground cellars with a locked door, how would the punters get to them?”

The Herald clarified that the point being made was that if someone wants to buy sex, they would simply do so illegally. Asked if that made sense, Regan replied: ‘No. It does not really make sense whatsoever.’ 

You can say that again Ash. Perhaps an Oxford English dictionary is required for this diehard Scottish nationalist…

John Healey: ‘Russia is attacking the UK daily’

John Healey: ‘Russia is attacking the UK daily’

Defence Secretary John Healey was interviewed today ahead of the government’s publication of the Strategic Defence Review, which will warn that new technology is significantly changing the nature of war. On the BBC, Laura Kuenssberg asked Healey if there is a risk that Russia would attack the UK. Healey said the UK defence system already deals with thousands of cyberattacks, many of which come from Russia, which is why the government is putting in ‘an extra £1bn to create a new cyber command’. Healey warned we are in ‘a world of growing threats’, and that the Strategic Defence Review will set out how UK forces must respond.

Healey admits army size target will not be reached until the next parliament

Healey was also asked about the size of the British Army, which has been in decline. The current target is 73,000 troops, but Healey admitted to Laura Kuenssberg that he did not expect to meet that target until the next parliament. He said there had been ‘15 years of a recruitment and retention crisis in our armed forces’, and that he had to reverse the trend of ‘more people leaving than joining’. Healey said he had given an above inflation pay rise to the armed forces, and had committed £1.5bn to upgrade armed forces housing, saying the families of army personnel and their families are currently living in conditions that ‘you or I would not tolerate’.

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Healey: ‘Britain lost control of its borders five or six years ago’

On GB News, Camilla Tominey asked John Healey about boat crossings, after Saturday saw a near-record number of migrants cross the channel. Healey said that the Tories had left the asylum system ‘in chaos’, and that the UK’s new agreement with France was part of the government’s strategy for dealing with the smuggling gangs. Tominey pointed out that although the UK is paying the France £480m, interceptions by the French have gone down this year. Healey said that once the new operation with French police is in place, ‘it will start to help’, and argued that the Rwanda scheme had cost £700m with no results. Tominey suggested that if the scheme hadn’t been scrapped it might have worked as a deterrent, but Healey said it had ‘failed’, and that the government had been able to reinvest that money to deport more people who have ‘no right to be in this country’.

Robert Jenrick’s plan to ‘crack down on Islamist terrorists in jail’

On Sky News, Trevor Phillips interviewed Shadow Justice Secretary Robert Jenrick about his proposals to arm prison officers and deport foreign criminals. Phillips asked what would happen if the criminals’ home countries didn’t ‘want them back’. Jenrick said he would ‘use every lever of the British state’, to get prisoner transfer agreements, such as withholding foreign aid, and would ‘disapply the human rights act’ to allow for deportations. Jenrick claimed we are ‘losing control’ of our maximum security prisons, in which dangerous criminals are ‘running riot’. Phillips asked why Jenrick’s press release mentions ‘Islamist terrorists in jail’ and not just maximum security prisons in general. Jenrick said the proposals did apply to all maximum security prisons, and argued that prison officers should have ‘access to lethal weapons in extreme situations’. 

Reform Chairman Zia Yusuf: All of Reform’s cuts would ‘improve the lives of British people’

Speaking to Reform Chairman Zia Yusuf, Trevor Phillips asked him to elucidate on his party’s claim that they could cut £350bn from public spending, saying that getting rid of DEI initiatives would only save ‘£10m’. Yusuf disagreed, describing the cost of DEI as ‘pernicious’. He told Phillips that £5bn was being spent on asylum seekers a year, net zero costs £45bn, and Reform would also cut 5% from the £265bn spent on quangos. Phillips pointed out that the Chancellor is only putting £7bn into the Green Prosperity Plan, and asked where Yusuf was finding the other £38bn. Yusuf said Reform would get rid of the state subsidies that go towards the ‘electrification’ of the car industry, which is a ‘very significant amount’. 

Thom Yorke has exposed the intolerance of the ‘pro-Palestine’ set

Thom Yorke has done us all a great service by exposing how unhinged, intolerant and, frankly, bigoted much of the supposedly ‘pro-Palestine’ set is. 

The Radiohead frontman and bandmate Jonny Greenwood have for years now been locked in a bitter beef with Israelophobic fans and fellow musicians, due to their dogged refusal to treat Israelis like moral lepers and insistence on still playing to – and with – them.

In 2017, Radiohead ploughed ahead with a big tour show in Tel Aviv, despite outrage from all the usual suspects. Roger Waters even called Yorke a ‘prick’, which I suppose would only really sting if you subscribed to the old adage ‘it takes one to know one’.

Yorke’s perfectly rational, liberal argument – ‘we don’t endorse Netanyahu any more than Trump, but we still play in America’ – fell on deaf ears among those who see Israelis as uniquely, collectively, responsible for the actions of their political leaders.

He walked off stage in Melbourne last October, after being heckled by an activist, demanding he ‘condemn the Israeli genocide of Gaza’. Now, Yorke has published a thoughtful statement on Instagram, responding to the incident and laying out his thinking on this issue. 

His ‘silence’ isn’t complicity with anything, Yorke says. He’d just rather ‘not trivialise’ the suffering of those on both sides of the conflict by uttering ‘a few words’. He condemns ‘social-media witch-hunts’ and activists who are ‘pressurising artists and whoever they feel like that week to make statements’ about Israel and Palestine, because it can only lead to ‘fear and over-simplification of what are complex problems’. (If only more musicians – or ageing football pundits – felt the same way.) 

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Still, he also slams ‘Netanyahu and his crew of extremists’, insisting ‘the international community should put all the pressure it can on them to cease’. And he slams Hamas, for choosing to ‘hide behind the suffering of its people’, adding: ‘[T]he unquestioning Free Palestine refrain that surrounds us all does not answer the simple question of why the hostages have still not all been returned.’

If the pro-Palestine movement were actually the peaceniks they pose as, this statement would have been met with a collective shrug. But for daring to say the Middle East’s most intractable conflict is actually quite complicated, and gently reminding people of Hamas’s murder of Jews, hostage-taking and use of human shields, he’s been slammed across social media. 

One suspect his critics aren’t opposed to this war – or even really in favour of Palestine. They’re just opposed to the existence of Israel and are remarkably, tetchily, sensitive to any admission of Israeli Jewish suffering.

Indeed, it’s not an exaggeration to say that the anti-Israel movement struggles even to see Israelis as actual human beings. What else could explain their insistence on singling Israelis out and treating them differently to the citizens of any other nation? 

When Erdogan bombs the Kurds, Turkish artists aren’t picketed and bands aren’t hounded out of playing in Istanbul. And yet Greenwood recently had two UK shows with collaborator Dudu Tassa cancelled, after the venues were threatened by activists. Tassa’s only crime, you’ll have guessed, is being an Israeli Jew. Remind me who the progressives are here again?

So let’s give it up for Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood – two islands of reason and genuine anti-racism in a sea of music-industry Israelophobia. Telling Roger Waters and Co to do one is their greatest gift to culture since OK Computer. Here’s to more kicking against the pricks.

What is Robert Jenrick up to?

It has been another good week for Robert Jenrick. At a time when many of the shadow cabinet are struggling to make an impact, his video on fare-dodging in London has certainly caused a stir. The 58-second clip – in which Jenrick, like some Tory Batman, accosts Tube passengers walking through barriers – has now been viewed nearly 15 million times. It prompted a Newsnight discussion, acres of coverage and begrudging private praise from opposition politicians too.

Such videos are not some mere fluke but rather, the product of much time and effort by Jenrick and his aides. He has learned from masters of the craft like Pierre Poilievre, the leader of the Canadian Conservatives. Polievre believed in trial-and-error, going from homespun YouTube clips in 2020 to producing slick mini-documentaries by 2023. Similarly, Jenrick has built a team sophisticated in identifying zeitgeist issues, crafting snappy narratives and packaging them online in a way designed to go viral on X, TikTok and Facebook.

Good communications come from good policy. The Shadow Justice Secretary is developing both a compelling diagnosis of Britain’s fraying social contract and a political economy to fix it. His Tube clip highlights a potent political issue: the degradation of the public realm. Many voters can see the visible decline of the high street and their local transport network. The Spectator’s recent ‘Scuzz Nation’ cover prompted much comment by Tory MPs, who think that a manifesto to tackle lawlessness at a local level would be both popular and a useful campaign tool.

Jenrick is aided in his mission by elements of what one might call the ‘Angry Young Men’ of the right. Clever, passionate and ever-online, they are often found in the world of think tanks and policy institutes, toiling away on subjects such as immigration and the rule of law that will likely form the bedrock of Britain’s next right-wing government. The Newark MP has worked hard to develop links over the past 18 months, including writing a major CPS paper and fronting the Prosperity Institute’s ‘Free Market Road Show’ last summer.

A symbiotic relationship with such places helps with Jenrick’s campaigns and policies. Amid talk of ‘JudgeWatch’ – a potential project to focus on activist members of the judiciary – the Shadow Justice Secretary has started posting such threads on X, to call out such figures and highlight what he calls ‘mounting evidence of a highly politicised legal system’. It is the modern equivalent of what Business for Sterling did 25 years ago: an online, low-cost version of a campaign group that aims to shift public opinion.

Helping Jenrick in all this is a loyal team of dedicated aides. His communications chief is Tom Milford, one of the diminishing number of Tory political advisors who served in government. Dov Forman, his social media strategist, a 21-year-old student who racked up millions of views on TikTok as a teenager. Their ranks have been bolstered by the arrival of Sam Bidwell from the Adam Smith Institute. He is credited by some with influencing Tory thinking on Kemi Badenoch’s policy of reforming Indefinite Leave to Remain.

Having a compelling vision helps attract staff; money is another. Jenrick registered more than £800,000 in donations between May 2024 and May 2025. At a time when Tory finances are tight, and shadow cabinet members complain of a lack of staff, the optimism of those around Jenrick is a striking contrast with others. A good team helps the Shadow Justice Secretary identify ostensibly dry policy issues with potentially explosive political appeal. The row over ‘two-tier’ Sentencing Council guidelines is one of the few issues on which the Tories, not Reform, has made the running.

Stunts like the fare-dodging clip are useful in ‘cutting through’ too. At a time when much of the government and opposition seem almost paralysed by paranoia, Jenrick has demonstrated a refreshing willingness to embrace guerilla tactics. The decision to project a two-tier ‘countdown clock’ onto the Ministry of Justice in March was an eye-catching and successful effort to grab some precious media airtime.

All of this is what a good shadow cabinet member should be doing: scrutinising government, developing policy, thinking clearly and winning publicity. But as other frontbenchers struggle to do exactly that, talk of a second leadership Jenrick bid will only increase in Westminster, as his hard work continues to impress both his party and his colleagues.

The Limitless Pendant is an uncool trip into the tech nerd future

The problem with the future is it is very obviously no longer being created by cool people. Instead, it belongs to autistic nerds who want nothing more than to be a computer.

Cool people invent things like surfboards, Ray-Bans and Triumph Spitfires. Nerds make profoundly uncool things like cars that drive themselves and the absurd Limitless Pendant device that I have been attempting to wear.

Let me start this review by stating I hope the Pendant – yours for $199 – fails very hard. It is an awful and life-negating device that subjugates any human stupid enough to place one around their neck to an AI processing unit. It’s all too easy to imagine a not too distant future in which each of us is compelled by authoritarian governments to put one on in order that social credit scores can be apportioned based on activity behind closed doors. It’s a terrible thought.

The Pendant records everything you say, and everything anyone near you says. That’s it. It then feeds the captured data into AI and sends you a summary of your daily performance. I first put mine on last Friday ahead of an evening during which my nine year old daughter would go to a school disco and my football-obsessed seven year old son would be allowed to stay up past his bedtime to watch a match.

While I had it on, I also confessed to my wife that in the afternoon I had lost control of myself after eating half a chocolate brownie and consumed three Twix, one after the other. I told her the effect was to make me feel both catatonic and deranged. 

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This is what the Pendant had to say: ‘Your day was a wonderful mix of family time, sports, school events and meaningful conversations. There was a lot of laughter, some bedtime wrangling, and a sense of pride in your children’s activities and confidence. The evening ended with a bit of reflection and planning for the days ahead.’

I asked it how I could ‘be better’.

‘You mentioned feeling ‘hit by such a wave of tiredness’ – the three Twix – and ‘being so done with this’. Don’t forget to take care of yourself!’ it replied. Other bromides included the suggestion to incorporate a ‘gratitude moment’ into the kids’ bedtime routine and to try ‘a new family activity, a creative project or a shared learning experience (like cooking a new recipe or exploring a new park).’

So far, so anodyne.

The following day I wore it to our neighbours’ house during a mid-afternoon family visit and then to the shops while I searched for a fancy dress outfit for a Rivals-themed party in the evening. The Pendant gave a bland ‘friendly summary’ of these events. When I asked it for an ‘unfriendly summary’, this is what it said:

‘You spent the morning arguing with a child about socks, then hustled everyone out the door for yet another round of football. The sock drama was only matched by the chaos of trying to find water bottles and footballs. Football was played, but mostly it was a lot of talk about who’s better, who scores first and who cheats. You had a random chat with a dog walker about how many dogs they walk and how many steps they do a day. Riveting stuff. The rest of the morning was spent obsessing over football fixtures, arguing about which games were on, and making a big deal about going to the shop for milk because the kids drank it all. Lunch was a noisy affair with more bickering. The afternoon was dominated by a frantic search for 80s party costumes. You bought wigs and a fake moustache in a panic, then spent way too long in a vintage shop trying on hats that cost more than a small car. Back home, you fussed over which wig to wear, debated the merits of various party themes and generally overthought the whole thing. You herded the family to your neighbours, which was as chaotic as ever – lots of yelling about shoes, doors and who’s knocking. Once there, you all talked about how tired you were. The kids ran wild, you talked about TV shows you don’t really watch. Hide-and-seek was played, but mostly it was just an excuse for the adults to sit around and complain. The FA Cup final was the main event. You tried to watch the game while also lighting a barbecue and fixing a tap. The evening ended with more football, more family squabbles and vague plans for tomorrow that will probably change anyway.’

Who needs this? Not me. I took it off and am yet to put it back on. Clearly, this is not the response those behind the product expect. Limitless co-founder and CEO Dan Siroker has spoken recently about how he expects very soon that ‘millions, if not billions,’ of people will wear listening devices like the Pendant and make their lives into searchable documents. The company, launched last year, recently raised $33 million, and the sinister-seeming tech overlord Sam Altman sits on its board.

Tech nerds have taken recently to talking in public – without discernible embarrassment – about the idea that what we think of as life is actually a simulation, by which they mean we are all living in some kind of computer game. Elon Musk, for example, has said ‘we are most likely in a simulation’ and it has become increasingly common to hear these people denounce anyone of whom they disapprove as trivial ‘non-player characters’. This is very much the reality into which the Pendant fits – a device that makes you feel as if you are living within a mainframe and not in the kingdom of nature.

‘Our vision is to free the human mind from its biological limitations’ reads the blurb that comes with the device, without specifying what those limitations – emotions? forgetfulness? individuality? – actually are. Perhaps the answer to the complexity of the human condition is go through life recording every encounter we have, the better to analyse it later, but it’s hard to see how this approach could facilitate the things that matter most, and that ultimately make life worth living – things like friendship and romance and trust.

Don’t wear the Limitless Pendant. It’s deeply uncool.

Reeves could leave farmers with Diddly Squat

The powers that be at Amazon seem to have an uncanny talent for releasing each new series of Clarkson’s Farm just as British politics descends into fresh farming chaos. The new series is no different. At the exact moment that I am watching Jeremy Clarkson and the cast of Diddly Squat farm get their government-funded agri-environment schemes in order for the year, over in Whitehall, Rachel Reeves is plotting how to cut the budget that pays for them. 

A recurring theme so far in the show’s fourth series has been the jibes directed at the government for paying farmers for seemingly non-food things, like establishing wildflower meadows. Initially, this does seem strange. That is, until you realise that farming is not just about the end product. It is about ensuring that the land that grows this food is stewarded well. Other options he discusses, like planting herbal leys, benefit food production directly, by providing forage for livestock, alongside improvements to soil health. 

Government schemes now pay farmers public money to farm in a more environmentally-friendly way. This approach not only delivers a public good for the taxpayer footing the bill, in the form of cleaner water and healthier soil, but it is also good for the farmer. As the devastating clips of the deluged Cotswolds can attest, British farmland is no longer resilient to the impacts of flooding and drought. By prioritising the health of the soil – a farmer’s most important asset – these schemes are helping to build resilience back into the land. 

You may be wondering where our resilience went. The answer lies in the perverse incentives set by the European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy, by which farmers received subsidies based on the amount of agricultural land they managed. This resulted in 50 per cent of the budget going to just 10 per cent of farmers. 

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It also meant that farmers were incentivised to remove nature from their land to maximise the area in production. By removing hedgerows, ploughing right up to the margins of a field, and making fields into more perfect rectangles to accommodate modern machinery, farmers were responding to incentives that would deplete the land. 

In the wake of Brexit, English farmers are now paid to deliver a service, not subsidised merely on the basis of the amount of land they farm. This subtle distinction is lost on some, but it is an important one. Our new environmental land management schemes (ELMs) will deliver far better outcomes for the countryside, for taxpayers and for farmers, who want to continue farming the land for generations to come.

As has become abundantly clear in recent months, Labour – and especially Rachel Reeves – are less fussed about these things than the Tories were. Labour’s changes to agricultural property relief (APR) demonstrate a lack of care for the vital intergenerational mindset of family farming that had allowed farmers to keep the long-term picture front and centre. With no APR u-turn on the horizon, Reeves has now set her sights on the farming budget. 

This budget has remained essentially unchanged since before Brexit. After years of high inflation, it means that this £2.4 billion budget has actually decreased in value. This has led to an unlikely alliance of the NFU and environmental NGOs calling for it to be increased. But instead of listening to them, Reeves is rumoured to be cutting the budget in her upcoming Spending Review. 

Jeremy Clarkson’s engagement with the new schemes fits with the experience of farmers across England. Farmers were gaining confidence in them and over 55,000 ELMs agreements were in place. With a £100m reduction in funding meaning 239,000 fewer hectares of nature-friendly farmland supported by ELMs, this move be disastrous for the environment and for farmers.

In defending ELMs, I am not saying that the schemes are perfect. Largely because they are new, teething problems are inevitable. Minutes into the first episode of the latest series, Clarkson is inspecting some big bags of wild bird seed mix wondering what on earth is going on. The likely answer is that one of his team was responding to a perverse incentive within ELMs which saw the government making the payment to plant wild bird seed too generous. This saw some farmers planting whole farms with wild bird seed mixes. Prior to the general election, the Conservatives spotted this abuse of the system and stopped it.

The initial rollout of ELMs was imperfect, but ultimately it was carried out, by successive Conservative ministers who were passionate about delivering this fundamental shift in how the government distributes public money to farmers. ELMs are a genuine example of politicians saying they would do something positive and then actually getting on with it. 

If this farming budget cut goes ahead, Reeves won’t merely be trimming some fat – she will be betraying a genuine Brexit dividend, and further undermining her government’s supposed commitments to both farmers and the natural environment. 

As I watch Clarkson wrestle with new tractors and attempt to plough his sodden fields, the parallel with Whitehall feels inescapable. He is trying to make a complex new system work, just as Reeves is on the cusp of tearing it down. The greatest tragedy of this cut would not be that something went wrong, but that it was finally going right. Somehow Labour still chose to break it.

Paris Saint-Germain’s win was a triumph for sportswashing

Paris Saint-Germain (PSG) are champions of Europe for the first time in their history. They demolished Inter Milan 5-0 in the Champions League Final in Munich.

Forget the Premier League and the sporting abomination that is the revamped Fifa Club World Cup. The Champions League is the pinnacle of club football -the competition that every top team wants to win.

The final was billed as a mouth-watering clash of opposites: youth and free-flowing football (PSG) versus experience and the nous to always find a way to win (Inter). But the final was a huge anticlimax: PSG dominated the match from start to finish.

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The French quickly took the lead in the 12th minute with a goal from Achraf Hakimi – likely the best right back in world football right now. The second goal came in the 20th minute, a deflected strike from Desire Doue, the 19-year-old wonder kid. Doue scored the third in the 64th minute. It became 4-0 in minute 73, courtesy of Khvicha Kvaratskhelia. The fifth and final goal came from Senny Mayulu, a youngster fresh out of the PSG academy. The final was as one-sided as it gets, an utter humiliation for Inter who looked lost and bereft of belief. The French were simply too good.

PSG’s manager Luis Enrique deserves special mention. He has already won the Treble with Barcelona, and has now repeated this extraordinary feat with PSG. Only the great Pep Guardiola has previously achieved the Treble with two different teams. The new all-conquering PSG is entirely Enrique’s creation, built to press high and dominate possession. The prima donna superstars of old (the likes of Neymar) have been jettisoned and replaced by a team of young strivers. They are the ones who delivered on the biggest stage of all.

This wasn’t just a game of football though. The match took place against a backdrop of big money. In the case of PSG, it’s not just any money but nation-state money courtesy of Qatar. PSG have spent an estimated €1.9 billion (£1.6 billion) since Qatari Sports Investments group (a subsidiary of Qatar’s state-run sovereign wealth fund) bought the club in 2011.

The purchase price for PSG back then was €70m (£60m). The club is now valued at somewhere around €4.25 bn (£3.7 bn). Winning the Champions League has always been the ultimate goal for PSG’s super-wealthy Gulf owners. Nasser al-Khelaifi, the club president and a former professional tennis player, also happens to be a minister in the Qatari government.

The Qataris have been ridiculed in recent years for spending huge sums but still failing to win the Champions League with PSG, a club that only came into being in 1970. Rival fans like to mock it as a ‘plastic’ club with no real history or soul.  Who’s laughing now?

Even so, PSG’s triumph casts a darker shadow.  It is an uncomfortable victory for  ‘sportswashing’, the term used for authoritarian regimes investing  in football and other sports to enhance their global image. Winning European football’s most prestigious club competition — together with the praise and global profile this brings— amounts to the ultimate sportswashing triumph.

Football clubs have become the playthings of autocratic nation states with bottomless pockets. Manchester City is owned by Abu Dhabi; Newcastle have Saudi owners. Few fans seen to care much that their clubs are being taken over by profoundly undemocratic states. They might be too busy counting the trophies. 

No footballing neutral will begrudge PSG their moment in the sun. Less welcome is that the victory amounts to an undeniable triumph for Qatar, a country with an authoritarian political system and a dismal human rights record. Is it any wonder that the Qataris would rather everyone focused on the time and money they’ve spent helping PSG win the biggest prize in European club football? That’s what sportswashing is all about, after all.

Welcome to the golden age of conspiracy theories

There’s never been a better time to be a conspiracy theorist: government funded plans to dim the sun; a pop star embarking on a questionable space flight; supermarkets stripped bare after Spain and Portugal were plunged into a catastrophic blackout; Robot policemen on the streets of China; the US admitting to the existence of UFOs. 

Like a lot of people my age, my gateway drug to the murky world of cover-ups was The X Files. For an hour each week, my young mind was exposed to alien abductions, secret societies, cannibal cults and paranormal phenomena. And my interest in the other worldly – and the people who wholeheartedly believe that humanity is being misled en masse – has never abated. 

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Since the 9/11 terror attacks in 2001, I have been an avid reader of conspiracy theories about all sorts of topics, from the ludicrous to the mundane. I’ve attended hush-hush meetings in pubs to watch engineers and architects discuss the temperature at which airplane fuel burns, had a numb bum as I sat through an eight-hour talk by David Icke about the ‘Reptilian agenda’, counted down to Doomsday (twice), and loitered on Alex Jones-backed forums where I learnt about Americans who were digging out bunkers and filling them with weapons, ammo, water purifiers and canned food for when SHTF. 

And when I’m not doing that, I’ve been watching Ancient Aliens on The History Channel, chatting to flat earthers, and scouring eBay for out of print magazines and books about cryptozoology. These days, mind-bending conspiracies are just a few taps away, with Telegram groups, TikTok and YouTube turning your phone into a pulsating mass of unbridled paranoia. Despite the low level hum of doom that propels my daily life, my geekery of choice has long been reading about worst case scenarios, built on dubious facts with little credible evidence. Tolkien fans can keep their Middle Earth, the Hollow Earth theory is much more my vibe. 

It’s important to draw a clear line between the things we’ve been exposed to in dystopian science fiction and a true conspiracy theory. By definition, the latter involves a plot carried out by a secret organisation – and crucially, the theories sometimes turn out to be true. Most recently, geoengineering conspiracists were punching the air when the Advanced Research and Innovation Agency (Aria) announced that they wanted to use solar radiation modification to try and ‘dim the Sun’ in a bid to tackle global warming and thicken arctic ice. 

Weather modification has long been a conspiracists’ favoured topic. You’ve probably heard of chem trails, the thick, straight, lines of cloud-like vapour we often see criss-crossing the sky, and you’re likely to have heard people sharing their (unsubstantiated) beliefs that they are evidence that toxic cocktails are being fired into the atmosphere. Why is this supposedly done? Well, to placate society and make us unwell of course. The attempt to lessen the sun’s impact on our planet confirms that geoengineering is real – or at least being considered – and leaves one wondering weather chem trail spotters really are just loons.

I’ve read countless theories about the shady meteorological going-ons at the US military’s mysterious HAARP base in Alaska. Are their experiments on the Earth’s ionosphere behind freak weather events? Is weaponised weather being used by countries to target hostile states or distract enemies? So far, this kind of thing is still obviously a conspiracy theory. But it’s starting to seem like the technology, at least, is getting there.

Some of the most vivacious conspiracy theories focus on Ancient Egypt and the Pyramids. Beyond the puzzle of who (or what) built them, many conspiracists have argued that there are mind blowing secrets hidden beneath the sands. And it looks like they were right. In March, researchers published a paper that used radar imaging to show some kind of structure lying 4,000 feet below the pyramids, including eight vertical cylinders standing 2,100 feet tall.

But a wad of fresh ‘evidence’ is not enough for a long-running conspiracy to get a big fat FACT rubber stamped on it. Earlier this year, pop star Katy Perry was at the epicentre of a tornado of conspiracies after joining the crew of Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin mission, which took the singer and five women 66 miles above sea level to the Kármán line, the internationally recognised boundary of space, where they teetered in zero gravity for a few moments.

For many years, Katy Perry has been caught up in numerous unfounded theories about being somehow connected to the Illuminati (a clandestine organisation who really pull the strings of world governments, and who may or may not be Satan-worshipping reptiles). The evidence? Symbolism in her music videos and costumes which are allegedly favoured by the group and used in the drugs-based mind-control programme MK Ultra, which was developed by the CIA in the early 1960s. 

Did Katy even go to space at all? Or was it all faked, like the 1969 Moon landing (allegedly)? Why did she cover one eye with a butterfly-shaped setlist for her forthcoming tour? Why does the New Shephard mission badge look like Baphomet from a distance? Did Katy kissing the goat-like emblem pre-flight symbolise her allegiance to the Dark Lord himself?

Britain urgently needs an Antarctica strategy

Now that a deal has been struck with Mauritius over the Chagos Islands, the government’s focus should be on the UK’s southernmost overseas territories. There are three of them: the Falkland Islands, South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands (SGSSI) and the British Antarctic Territory (BAT). As increasingly tense geopolitics make the world more hostile, these territories are becoming ever more vulnerable. If Britain wants to secure its presence here in the face of the looming shadows of Argentina, Russia, China and the US – to name a few – Labour urgently needs to start thinking about how it does so.

The Strategic Defence Review (SDR) for 2025 is expected to be published this coming week. It will reveal where the Labour government believes the future direction of the UK armed forces lies. In any strategic audit, crises and conflicts such as Ukraine will loom large, as will the Middle East. But the UK’s overseas territories will also continue to demand policy- and resource-related attention.

In the final days of the last Conservative government, a commitment was made to publish for the first time the UK’s Antarctic strategy. Labour didn’t carry forward the pledge, almost certainly because it is focusing on the SDR. They would, however, be wise to consider publishing an Antarctic strategy this year.

For the last seventy years, the UK has enthusiastically supported the internationally agreed 1959 Antarctic Treaty prohibiting any military activity on the continent. This is because it provides a cost-effective mechanism for ensuring that the polar continent is kept demilitarised and largely informed by scientific decision-making and policy development. For many years, this worked well alongside a robust commitment to maintain a military presence in the Falkland Islands to ensure that Argentina was deterred. And yet while the Falklands and the other British overseas territories are separate, with their own distinct local governments, Argentina claims they belong to them. Chile’s Antarctic claim also overlaps with the BAT.

The challenge posed by Argentina in and around the Falklands has waxed and waned over time depending on the presidential leadership in Buenos Aires. What will be a source of concern, however, is the Chagos Islands deal. From the 1960s onwards, local communities in Gibraltar and the Falkland Islands were keenly aware that any apparent concessions on sovereign authority to either Spain or Argentina, respectively, could trigger consequences for other then-colonies.

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Creditable deterrence remains a priority for those communities as well. As many Falkland Islanders recall, the decision to withdraw HMS Endurance in 1981 as part of that year’s defence review was perceived as a ‘signal’ that the UK was not serious about its presence in the South Atlantic. A year later, the Argentinian junta launched their full-scale invasion of the Falkland Islands and sought to take over South Georgia as well. Now, post-Chagos, the Falklands will be nervous that Argentina could try its luck once again.

Over in the BAT, if the UK is committed to maintaining its sovereign presence there, it needs to recognise explicitly that this region is changing rapidly. The Antarctic peninsula is warming and becoming increasingly ice-free. This means that third parties, including China and Russia, can operate for longer and more extensively.

In recent months, the UK and other allies have had to confront some uncomfortable realities. China and Russia are increasingly not inclined to support ocean conservation initiatives and China is pushing hard for further exploitation of fish and krill in and around the northern tip of the peninsula. Russia has flagged an interest in the mineral resource potential of Antarctica. All of this is going to place further stress and strain on the consensus-based model that is the Antarctic Treaty system. Argentina and Chile are digging in and remain committed to the southern edges of their national territories. Most unsettlingly, from the UK perspective, the US under President Trump is proving to be an unreliable partner, seemingly hell-bent on slashing its polar science and logistics budgets.

Any UK Antarctic strategy will need to grapple with some uncomfortable truths. Thanks to the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), based in Cambridge, the UK is one of the world’s most preeminent polar science powers with three research bases and two logistical facilities in the BAT. But this requires ship- and air-based support to maintain and support, with the most notable being RRS Sir David Attenborough. The Royal Navy’s HMS Protector, which is prone to breaking down, also supplements this effective presence.

In the next decade, however, this operating environment is going to be more challenging. The Antarctic peninsula will be busier. With that comes the risk of accidents, alongside the danger that rival parties miscalculate each other’s intentions and accidentally trigger escalation.

Deterring China and Russia was never going to be straightforward. China considers the Antarctic to be a strategic frontier, which contributes to its food security and economic advantage. It wants to recast the Antarctic Treaty system from one shaped by American diplomatic power in the 1950s and 1960s to one with a more distinct Chinese look and feel. Russia is a bad-faith actor which is currently trying to dismantle the ability of the South Georgia government to run its fishing licensing operation. Moscow has made baseless accusations about ‘illegal fishing’ and will try to discredit the UK’s claim to running a responsible living resource management.

Maintaining an effective presence in the southernmost UK overseas territories will require a clear-eyed assessment of risk and deterrence. There will need to be a long-term investment programme in science, logistics and manned and unmanned platforms. The BAS will need to work closely with the UK armed forces to ensure that air- and ship-based capabilities are used strategically. Ensuring a safe and effective scientific presence requires investment and vigilance. HMS Protector cannot be expected to travel back and forth between the Arctic and Antarctic. And we already ask a great deal of BAS personnel stationed in UK facilities with long deployments on physically remote Antarctic stations.

China, Russia and the United States have not made a formal claim to any part of the polar continent yet. But that could change in the Putin-Trump-Xi era when the great powers are calculating and negotiating their respective spheres of influence. So far, Donald Trump’s gaze has been northwards rather than southwards. One of those parties might decide to walk away from the Antarctic Treaty in the next three to five years and pursue their own agenda. Britain and allies including the EU, Norway and Australia will need to work hard to ensure that the treaty prevails.

If we want to make sure the UK stays both a polar science superpower and guardian of the BAT, ministers will need to recognise that operational capacity and scientific reach are under pressure in the region. Chile and Argentina are increasing investment in their Antarctic footprint, China is a major polar power, Russia will continue to be disruptive, and no one knows what will happen to America’s Antarctic operations. The government must publish a UK Antarctic strategy without delay.

Is the ‘woke’ movement really over?

‘I was with some doctors last week who said there is no such thing as biological sex.’ It sounds like the rambling of a madman or a drunk, but these words were uttered last week at the Charleston literary festival in East Sussex by Lady Brenda Hale, former president of the Supreme Court. Personally, I would avoid doctors who lack this rudimentary knowledge of the human body. They might start asking me about the regularity of my menstrual cycle.

The ubiquity of wokeness has meant that we have grown accustomed to hearing these kinds of deranging remarks from figures of authority. This ideology was always imposed from the top down against the wishes of a subdued population. A recent study by More in Common found that progressive activists of the ‘woke’ kind comprise as little as between eight and ten per cent of the population, and yet their power is such that medical professionals will spout their hogwash.

It all sounds frivolous, until we consider the full extent of the havoc that this movement has wreaked over the past decade. Wokeness has destroyed lives. Children who are gender nonconforming have been persuaded that they are ‘born in the wrong body’ and put on a pathway to irreversible harm. Women’s rights to single-sex services have been eroded in order to accommodate men who identify as female. Racial division has been heightened in the name of ‘anti-racism’. The principle of free speech has been all but jettisoned by the ruling class, with the UK police arresting over 12,000 people per year for offensive speech. Society has regressed in the name of ‘progress’.

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For all that, woke appears to be dying. Of course, commentators have often made the mistake of declaring the ideology to be on its last legs, only to discover that it is a centipede with an indefinite surplus of limbs. Yet there have been too many seismic events that suggest the jig is very nearly up.

The Supreme Court has ruled that ‘sex’ in the Equality Act means a biological reality that cannot be changed with a certificate. The findings of the Cass Review has led to the banning of puberty blockers for children. Major corporations are stripping away their Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives. LGB rights groups are rejecting the parasitical TQ+ that has hijacked and undermined their cause. The death rattles of woke are loud and sustained.

Woke activists will doubtless cling to their precious beliefs like barnacles to the keel of sinking ship. Already, we are seeing various companies and charities openly pledging to ignore the Supreme Court ruling on the Equality Act, groups so captured by ideology that they are willing to break the law.

The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust has pledged to ‘decolonise’ its collections to warn visitors that some aspects might contain ‘language or depictions that are racist, sexist, homophobic, or otherwise harmful’. The NHS is still insisting that toddlers can be transgender.

The title of my new book – The End of Woke – is therefore more aspirational than prophetic. It is possible, of course, that woke will return in a different guise. After all, its practitioners accrued their power largely through shapeshifting and word games. When they called for ‘diversity’, they meant ideological homogeneity. When they called for ‘inclusion’, they meant exclusion of their opponents. When they created their cruel system of retribution known as ‘cancel culture’, they called it ‘accountability’.

Many liberal-minded people were gulled into endorsing these illiberal ideas, but the tricks have mostly been exposed. Debates that would have seemed impossible five years ago are now being held with some frequency. While the BBC has studiously referred to male rapists as ‘she’, and applied a rainbow gloss to the damage being wrought by gender ideology, at last we are hearing the likes of Helen Joyce – Director of Advocacy of campaign group Sex Matters – being platformed on Radio 4. The cries of ‘No Debate!’ from trans activist groups such as Stonewall are now fading.

With the woke in retreat, there is also the possibility that the vacuum may be filled by unsavoury elements on the right. In The End of Woke, I have made the case that the culture war has persisted for so long because it has been widely misapprehended as a conflict between left and right. In truth, there are identity-obsessed authoritarians on both sides of the political spectrum. If my definition of ‘woke’ is accurate – a cultural revolution that seeks equity according to group identity by authoritarian means – there is no reason why this would not apply to white nationalists as much as it does to DEI zealots.

The woke movement was a catastrophe in every respect. We are now staggering through the debris of a culture war that most of us never sought. As we near the end of woke, we need to be vigilant against successive ideologies that will likewise attempt to curb our freedoms. We might not be able to anticipate how exactly the authoritarian instinct will next manifest, but that it will do so is an inevitability.

The End of Woke: How the Culture War Went Too Far and What to Expect from the Counter-Revolution by Andrew Doyle is available now (£25, Constable). You can buy it here

Why is your pension fund so obsessed with net zero?

Legal & General is Britain’s largest asset manager, with over £1 trillion on its books. Every pound it manages should be dedicated to achieving the highest possible returns. This matters a lot: L&G manages over five million pensions in the UK.

But in recent years, the asset manager has been particularly concerned with fashionable causes, instead of being entirely focused on making sure your retirement is secure.

That is why I recently attended their AGM. I wanted to learn why the board is wedded to net zero, despite their fiduciary duty to clients, and whether they would consider reprioritising saver returns instead.

At the Q&A I highlighted that US competitors have dropped their net zero ambitions. Most have pulled out of the ‘Net Zero Asset Managers Initiative’ – a consortium of asset managers committed to achieving net zero within their investment portfolios by 2050 or sooner.

L&G – along with most other British pension fund managers – is still committed to this. But their promise to decarbonise their portfolios and to advocate for ‘a supportive policy environment that aligns with the goal of achieving global net zero’ are premised on a net zero consensus that no longer exists.

At the moment, roughly half of the public support either Reform or the Conservatives. Both parties oppose net zero by 2050. It is therefore reasonable to assume, as I told the board, that many with L&G pensions, do not want their retirement outcomes subordinated to the green agenda.

In response, the board told me that its clients want to align with net zero by 2050. Whilst the board acknowledged that complex trade-offs exist, they did not explain what these were. Instead they doubled down, reaffirming their net zero commitment, before asserting that decarbonisation offers stellar investment opportunities.

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The problem is that these opportunities rely on government subsidy.  Let’s set aside the moral argument regarding investments in rent seeking schemes reliant on a taxpaying base. The reality is that green investments are hugely exposed to policy changes, and so  don’t reflect sound financial management.

This was evident in the USA last week as Trump’s tax bill slashed renewable subsidies. The consequence was the immediate crash of renewable energy shares. Enphase Energy, a NASDAQ renewable energy posterchild, had over $1 billion, or 20 per cent, instantly wiped from its valuation.

Compare this to the hydrocarbon industry. Far from receiving subsidies, oil companies in Britain been subject to a windfall tax since 2022. They currently pay a 78 per cent tax. Despite this, they have fared well. Shell for example has outperformed the market, delivering returns of 30 per cent since 2022.

The market mechanism should reward these companies for their success. Instead, the focus by investors on Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG)  either excludes them entirely, or pressures them into decarbonising. L&G has used savers’ money to vote against both BP and Shell for failing to be sufficiently green.

L&Gs recent Climate Pledge laments that, ‘The pace of transition is neither fast enough nor smooth enough,’ and that ‘inaction is not an option.’

But inaction is and should be an option for the firms managing your pension. Hayek was right: business managers do not manage for their own sake, but on behalf of ‘those who have entrusted [them] with their resources.’ In this case, pension savers.

At the moment, individual pension savers already fund net zero schemes via their taxes. They should not be forced to pay an effective additional tax, via lower returns on their assets, to fund net zero with their retirement savings.

It is for government to pursue manifesto commitments, and for private companies to pursue profit.

Following the L&G AGM, there was a light lunch, during which several individual investors thanked me for raising this issue.

Multiple members of the board also approached me. They asked why I had asked my question and what I would have them do. Again, I urged them to stop blackmailing private companies into decarbonising. I said their net zero goals are out of step with public opinion and that they are violating their fiduciary duty. Some back and forth ensued. The conversation was civil, but the disagreement was clear. They appear to have accepted the orthodox thinking around climate change, that catastrophe looms and all else is secondary.

The irony is, that many of the green investments being made are only possible due to the dirtiest forms of energy. Asset managers praise and invest in China’s booming electric car industry. They rarely acknowledge that it is only booming due to China’s reliance on coal, which results in lower energy prices.

The public increasingly rejects climate alarmism, yet the managerial class embraces it. They are convinced they are saving the world, and the ends will always justify the means. The means, in this case, is imperilling the retirement of millions.

Since attending the AGM, many have told me that they will be selling their L&G shares. They shouldn’t. Instead, they should exercise their rights as owners of the company to demand change. As should anyone else who has a pension with a company obsessed with net zero.

Can you beat The Spectator’s quizzers?

This week, the Spectator Club hosted a quiz night for subscribers – with the ‘Charles Moore’s red corduroys’ team the eventual winners.* The night was such a success we thought other readers would enjoy doing the quiz as well.

There are four rounds of questions below. We’d like to think the questions are fun to work out, and pass the ‘even if you don’t get them, you’ll kick yourself when you hear the answer’ test. If you can beat the winning team’s score we’ll enter you into a draw for a bottle of Pol Roger champagne. Enter your answers here by Friday 6 June.

Round one

1. Which type of pasta was banned from menus for those attending the 2025 papal conclave, because of ancient fears that it could be used to smuggle in notes from the outside world? 

2. Which British rock star said in a 1999 interview with Jeremy Paxman that even he didn’t know how to pronounce his own surname?  

3. In 1995, a British journalist published a biography of a leading British politician. At the 2005 general election the politican stood down as an MP, while the journalist was elected as an MP. They share the same Christian name. Who are those two men? 

4. May 30th was Harry Enfield’s birthday – how old is he now?

5. A report in March 2025 found that recent years have seen a significant drop in children needing surgery after swallowing which item? The item in question historically accounted for 75 per cent of objects swallowed by children, but has undergone a dramatic reduction in everyday use. 

6. Between 2002 and 2015, about whom were the following statements made? ‘He appears on high-value stamps in Sweden… he can catch fish with his tongue… he never blinks… he’s confused by stairs… and his left nipple is the shape of the Nürburgring.’

7. Muggsy Bogues, who played for several NBA teams between 1987 and 2001, is the shortest player ever to play in the league. How tall is he?  

8. At around midnight on the 14^th/15^th April 1912, about 425 miles south-southeast of Newfoundland in Canada, some people put some ice in their drinks. Where had that ice come from? 

9. James Finlayson was an actor who appeared in 33 Laurel and Hardy films, often uttering a three-letter expression of dismay. In 1988 that expression was adopted, in tribute to Finlayson, by the creators of which fictional character?

10. This musical instrument is played on ‘It’s a Long Way to the Top (If You Wanna Rock and Roll)’ by AC/DC. A quote often attributed to Oscar Wilde states that the definition of a gentleman is someone who can play this instrument, but doesn’t. Which instrument? 

Round two

1. This website and app, launched in 2003, had a five-letter name beginning with S. It was closed in May 2025 due to competition from rivals offering the same service. Which site?   

2. Which footballer, who played for England between 1996 and 2007, has the first name Sulzeer? 

3. June 1 is Jason Donovan’s birthday – how old is he now?  

4. A Donald Trump quote, February 2025 – which word is x? It’s a verb. ‘I try and walk off sometimes without x-ing and I can’t. I have to x.’  

5. In 2024 the American author Johannes Lichtman commented on his visit to the headquarters of which organisation, saying that its branch of Starbucks is the only branch in the world where staff aren’t allowed to ask your name?

6. Noel Coward was born in 1899 – in which month? 

7. Tony Blair wore the same what for every PMQs of his premiership?  

8. Which position in the British cabinet derives its name from the pattern on a cloth used to cover a table in medieval England? 

9. Until 1981 the band The Alarm were named Alarm Alarm. They decided on the change after John Peel, grouping them with two other bands, said he was wondering if he should start calling himself John John Peel. Which two other bands? 

10. In May 2025 it was announced that, in a bid to tackle a shortage of train drivers, the minimum age for the job would be lowered to what?

Round three

1. In February 2025 Andy Murray revealed that after retiring from tennis he tried a sport he’d always wanted to try, but had never been allowed to because of the risk of injury. At the end of his first day he had to be rescued. Which sport? 

 2. The Princess of Wales was given one of these items as a Christmas present last year, to help her with her gardening. Its name is the third word of four in the title of a controversial 1974 film. Which item?  

3. June 3 will be Jill Biden’s birthday – how old will she be? 

4. A very few entertainers can claim the title ‘Egot’, having won at least one award at each of which four ceremonies? 

5. How did the 20-year-old American Thomas Matthew Crooks make the news in 2024?  

6. In January 2025, Rocky Flintoff, the son of Andrew Flintoff, became the youngest player ever to score a century for the England Lions cricket team. He was 16 years, 291 days old when he achieved the feat against a Cricket Australia XI. Whose record, set in 1998, did he beat? 

7. Why, in September 2022, did Morrisons turn down the volume of the beeps on their tills … a West London school postpone its Guinea Pig Awareness Week … and Norwich City Council close a bicycle rack? 

8. Which song did George Harrison write while sitting in Eric Clapton’s garden on a bright spring morning in 1969?

9. Which country achieved independence from Spain in 1822, and took its modern name from the fact that it lies on the equator?   

10. The Serbian version of which British TV show is called ‘No One Thought of That’?

Round four

1. Which three Presidents of the United States were born in 1946? 

2. In 2021, who became the first artist ever to achieve UK top 10 singles in six different decades? 

3. Which is the only English county whose name contains five consecutive consonants? 

4. Winston Churchill’s first speech to the House of Commons as Prime Minister, on May 13th 1940, didn’t actually contain the phrase ‘blood, sweat and tears’. Instead Churchill said: ‘I have nothing to offer but blood, x, tears and sweat.’ Which was word is x?

5. Which 1975 hit single had the word ‘Mongolian’ in its working title, but replaced it with another four-syllable word?  

6. June 4 is Angelina Jolie’s birthday – how old will she be?

7. He was a Conservative MP between 1992 and 1997. In 2000, when he was created a life peer, he chose, as the place to go with his title, Ranmore in Surrey. Although this wasn’t a deliberate joke, many people commented that Ranmore was very appropriate. Who are we talking about? 

8. The last ever case in Britain of a woman suing a man for breach of promise to marry was in 1969. The woman bringing the case was 19 year-old Eva Haraldsted, described by one magazine as ‘an au pair with the emphasis on pair’. The man she sued was 23 and very probably the most famous man in the country. Who was he? 

9. Colonel Gaddafi named his yacht after which 20^th century revolutionary leader? Diego Maradona had a tattoo of him, as does Mike Tyson.

10. Which British man, born in 1967, once said of his younger brother that he is ‘a man with a fork in a world of soup’? 

*Charles Moore has clarified that he does not own, and has never owned, red corduroy trousers.

Disposable vapes are fantastic. Naturally, they’re demonised

Forty a day for forty years – that’s a hell of a lot of cigarettes – but je ne regret rien. I loved smoking. But note the past tense because, eventually, for all the clichéd health reasons you can imagine, I had to give up. Despite always knowing it was a matter of life or death, I dreaded packing it in. Smoking has been so much part of my persona for decades; I just couldn’t imagine life without puffing away. All the usual smoking cessation options didn’t work, from gum to patches, Alan Carr to NHS counselling. Until eventually, on the recommendation of no less than two NHS doctors, I tried disposable vapes. Miracle upon miracle, they worked. And I am now a happy chain vaper.

At last, I thought, I would stop being demonised for my bad habit. I have endured years of sanctimonious lectures from public health policy-wonks about how the dangers of tobacco meant smokers could be treated as pariahs, which – by the way – made giving up even less attractive. Who wants to succumb to bullying nanny state interference? Smoking was and is a personal choice, and in a free society we should be allowed to indulge in a legal bad habit, however risky or unhealthy. However now, newly virtuous as an ex-smoker, I imagined that at last I might get a pat on the back for being responsible.

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How naïve. The modern state can’t help itself. It simply has to regulate and interfere in people’s personal choices. Never mind the public health benefits of vapes that have helped millions of people to stop smoking, DEFRA now finds them ‘extremely wasteful’. Disposable vapes are apparently a potential litter hazard and ‘blight our towns and cities’. Forget the real blight of derelict high streets, homelessness, boarded-up shops, widespread crime – the government’s focus is on disposable vapes.

Last October, when the government announced a forthcoming ban on 1 June, Mary Creagh, DEFRA’S Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Nature and ‘the circular economy minister’ (eh?), justified the prohibition as helping to ‘accelerate the path to net zero and create thousands of jobs across the country’. Which is a stretch when we are all waiting with bated breath for a growth strategy that will actually accelerate meaningful employment. 

Meanwhile, when it becomes illegal to sell or supply disposable vapes, Trading Standards enforcement officers will have powers to seize non-compliant products, give out compliance notices and fines of £200, with serial offenders facing criminal charges, including unlimited fines or a prison sentence of up to two years. But as convicted criminals are being released early from prison, and enforcement of laws already in place to deal with black market cigarettes, are to say the least, patchy. This surely means scarce resources are being spread far too thinly. And for what?

The main aim of the ban seems to be to deal with environmental waste i.e. to reduce litter. An estimated five million disposable vapes were thrown away every week last year. So yes, I know many people do get very annoyed about unsightly discarded colourful plastic tubes on pavements. But for goodness sake, a whole range of less punitive solutions could have been explored; from special vape disposal bins to deposit schemes (each empty vape could mean £1 off next purchase or whatever) rather than deploying the whole paraphernalia of the state to deal with a minor waste issue, on a par with empty coke cans, crisp packets or – dare I say it – Waitrose sandwich wrappers. And if the Government are really worried about unseemly detritus on our streets, maybe it might tackle councils that have halved their bin collection service, creating domestic mounds of overflowing garbage, (please don’t blame Birmingham’s litter mountains on vapers).

What’s more, the whole scheme seems to be a waste of time because if policymakers had done any kind of cost / benefit analysis (or just used common sense) they’d know that vapers will buy the technically compliant new refillable, rechargeable vapes and won’t bother fiddling around with replacement pods and recharging. Who wants to have yet another device to remember to charge? They’ll be thrown away, effectively becoming disposable, and that’s because one of disposable vapes’ big attractions is they are easy to use and there’s no faff.

The truth is that the creator of disposable vapes should have been awarded a public health innovation award. Finally, a smoking cessation device that works for smokers. Instead, his invention is vilified, and we seek to ban it in order to tick some environmental box. At what cost? In one poll of UK vapers, almost a fifth said if they couldn’t get hold of disposable vapes, they’d go back to smoking.

So, it’s shocking that anti-smoking lobbyists like Action on Smoking and Health (Ash), not only support a legislative move that threatens to hinder smokers giving up the evil weed, but they say that the ban doesn’t go far enough. Indeed, ASH’s CEO Hazel Cheeseman urges the government to make use of powers within the Tobacco and Vapes Bill to clamp down further. The numpties in parliament are happy to oblige, promising an especially egregious ban on flavoured vapes. 

In the House of Lords Second Reading debate, it was argued that these are especially wicked because they are designed to appeal to the young, as if only children like brightly coloured, sweet things. Have ministers not noticed the exponential rise in the flavoured gin market for adults? As I argued at the time, research shows that 65 per cent of adult vapers find fruit and sweet liquids preferable, often because they don’t want to be reminded of the taste of tobacco that they are quitting.

So, as we speak, like other vapers, I am stockpiling strawberry and banana disposables and predict the growth of a massive black market, or an uptick in smoking. And all because governments of all shades seem to be addicted to interfering with legal behaviours, carelessly indifferent to whether civil liberties – or indeed our health – go up in smoke.

No, Zoomers: life wasn’t better before the internet

Almost half of 16 to 21-year-olds wish they had grown up without the internet. A similar portion are even calling for a social media curfew, with a quarter wanting phones banned in schools, according to research from the British Standards Institution. Really? The truth is that Zoomers – those born between 1997 and 2012 – don’t know how lucky they are to have come of age during an era in which they had access to the web.

While my own generation of Millennials were early guinea pigs for Facebook, Twitter and – for the connoisseurs out there – MSN Messenger, much of our teenage lives remained firmly analogue. Having first snuck online to the sounds of a dial-up connection, my recollection is that life before the internet was often quite dull. Many teenagers today blame their woes on social media and smartphones. But teenagers have always been quite capable of being listless, alienated and angsty, even before Silicon Valley started designing algorithms to monetise it.

Yes, modern technology has its problems. Too many young people waste time scrolling through social media. But there is no doubt in my mind that life with the internet is better than it was before. It has given us more experiences, more opportunities and even more life – literally so, in the case of Tinder babies.

Consider the luckless fan of vintage Korean dramas in the nineties, struggling to watch the shows and unable to find likeminded enthusiasts in his town. The internet has solved both these problems, making what was once esoteric commonplace, opening more and more to the masses.

The privations suffered before the internet are almost shocking to recall. Only five TV channels? Book selections controlled by Waterstones and the local library? New music flitting briefly across the airwaves, later lost in an obscure corner of HMV? It was no way to live.

Nor is the internet merely a glorified bazaar for clueless tourists. Much as people love to mock the creator economy, it is an incredible achievement to have equipped a majority of the world’s population with a printing press, recording studio and video camera, and the ability to distribute the results globally. The means of production are already being liberated.

So why do we continue to malign the online world as a Wild West, a swamp of AI slop stalked by Russian cyber gangsters and flooded with fake news, pornography and scenes of ultraviolence? The conventional reading, championed by the likes of psychologist Jonathan Haidt, is that we can’t look away because the technologists have become too adept at stealing our attention.

It’s true that the techies are experts at distraction. But fundamentally the problem is not technology. It’s our inability to manage its downsides. When half of BSI’s Gen Z survey respondents call for a social media curfew, we should be asking them why they cannot impose one on themselves.

No doubt there is social pressure to engage, and no cohort in life is more conformist and biddable than the young. Every teenager wants to fit in, and a lot of that fitting in now happens on Instagram, Minecraft or whatever else the kids are into these days. We can and probably should blame the parents, the schools and even society that so many struggle not to open the app, start scrolling and hit the post button.

But these groups didn’t fail because they allowed the internet to exist; they failed because they have not taught the younger generation that they must deal with the downsides. You can delete your account, hit the gym and lawyer up, to quote an old internet phrase. You can take responsibility for your own life.

The alternative is a world nobody wants. Whether it was checking the weather through Ceefax, flicking through a recipe book to remind ourselves how to make an omelette, or going to a travel agent to book a trip to Poland, people switched to the newer technology because it is better.

As Wikipedia will tell you, the Wild West era did not conclude with the Americans falling back to the East Coast to protect themselves. Instead the pioneers tamed and domesticated the new territory, which stretched out all the way to Santa Clara in California. Had they sounded the retreat, Silicon Valley would not have been invented. And you would not be reading this.