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Why have Canada’s conservatives backed euthanasia?
There’s two weeks left before Canada’s federal election, and we’re dying over here. Former Bank of England governor Mark Carney seems more and more likely to walk away with the top job, while Poilievre is busy bowing and scraping before the sacred cows of the left.
This week, Poilievre decided, for some reason, to pledge to keep euthanasia legal. He said his government would not expand the eligibility for assisted suicide, but that people would ‘continue to have that right.’
This makes no sense. Canada’s euthanasia regime is the brainchild of the Liberal party, forced upon Canada by an activist Supreme Court with a majority of Liberal appointees, and it developed into the horrific regime that it is today thanks to a decade of Trudeau’s Liberals.
Why on earth would Poilievre decide that’s a legacy he wants to preserve?
Disabled people and the elderly are being bullied into assisted suicide. The poor and terminally ill are told their suffering is meaningless and their lives aren’t worth living. Veterans with PTSD are advised to consider ending it all. Whether the state should help children do themselves in, is a matter of open debate.
So far, the Conservatives can hold themselves innocent of these horrors. Their hands are clean. But if they get into power, Poilievre is telling us, they intend to legitimise some part of this horrible travesty? Are they completely heartless? Can’t they offer Canadians a vision of human life that is valued, protected, worth living?
This past week also saw Poilievre double down on his pro-choice position. He told Quebecois podcaster Olivier Primeau that a Conservative government would never pass pro-life legislation—and reaffirmed this position at a rally later on.
But why? Even if Poilievre doesn’t believe his government could successfully push through pro-life legislation, he’s offering incense to a Liberal idol. And Liberal idols don’t reward conservatives for good behaviour; they eat them for breakfast.
The anti-religious Trudeau – who famously said anger against the Catholic Church was ‘understandable’ when churches were being burned down – banned pro-life Liberals from the party.
He also denied some funding to charities that wouldn’t swear allegiance to so-called ‘reproductive rights’ (such an obfuscatory term; it means, of course, preventing reproduction, not encouraging it).
So why is Poilievre anxiously promising the Liberal team that they don’t need to worry, he won’t take a stand on such matters? Is he afraid someone will paint him as… well… er… you know… a conservative?
How disappointing to see an intelligent man like Poilievre cowering before the left. He’s probably just following the advice of the Conservative party machine, whose members really need to get out more. Their strengths are talking points, party discipline, and sticking to the strategy. But times have changed since they were last in power, and they haven’t quite realised it yet.
Tragically, Poilievre could easily act so differently. Instead of letting the Liberals and their media friends control the narrative, with just a little courage, he could flip the script. To the question ‘Will your government end access to euthanasia?’ he could try this: ‘The life of every Canadian is important, firstly to their family and friends, and secondly to our whole nation. A Conservative government will do everything in its power to protect the lives of its citizens, especially in their most vulnerable moments.’
Or on pro-life matters: ‘Will your government introduce pro-life legislation?’ ‘It seems unlikely to me that our government will be in a position to do so, but I can tell you that a Conservative government supports Canadian families and would like to see more, not fewer, Canadian children.’
‘So you don’t support a woman’s right to choose?’
‘That’s a radical leftist slogan. A Conservative government would encourage parents to love their children and take care of them, even the unexpected ones.’
A real leader doesn’t let himself be defined by the enemy’s terms. A real leader has a positive vision, in which he profoundly believes, which he can articulate in a way that’s appealing, but also genuine and heartfelt.
They say Poilievre has difficulty connecting with female voters. The leftist media pretends this is because Canadian women are all radical social progressives, which is, of course, complete nonsense. More likely, it’s because Poilievre is skirting the issues they care most about.
Instead of trying to impress the ladies on his own team, Poilievre is going out of his way – just as his ill-fated predecessors did – to show the Liberals that as far as social issues are concerned, they’ve got him wrapped around their little fingers. And now he expects conservative women to come out and vote for him?
That won’t impress them much. In fact, it may well lose Poilievre the election. Should he win it, he’ll forever be at the mercy of the leftist stranglehold on Canadian affairs, forever dancing to the media’s tune. It takes both vision and guts to change the course of history. Last week was a chance for Poilievre to display both – and he flubbed it.
Is Donald Trump ready to weather a US recession?
A recession now looks even more certain for the United States than it does for the UK. Output has flattened. The chaotic implementation of Donald Trump’s tariff regime has left businesses bewildered. And consumers will soon be facing huge price rises. Of course, the States might well emerge in better shape at the end of it. The trouble is, President Trump has done nothing to prepare the voters for the pain ahead – and he will find a downturn very tough politically.
It is probably one of the less controversial calls Goldman Sachs has ever made. The bank’s chief executive David Solomon argued yesterday that the ‘prospect of a recession has increased’, with plenty of signs that output was slowing down both in the US, and around the world. Likewise, JP Morgan now estimates there is a 60 per cent chance of a US recession this year, while HSBC puts it at 40 per cent.
It is not hard to understand why. The overnight imposition of huge tariffs on imports into the US has thrown supply chains into chaos, and will lead to big price rises in the shops, while at the same time slowing demand in some of America’s main export markets. It will be difficult for the economy to expand amidst disruption on that scale.
Of course, there may be some mitigating factors. The vice president J.D. Vance has suggested that a trade deal between the US and the UK may be signed very soon. ‘We’re certainly working very hard with Keir Starmer’s government’ on an agreement, he said in an interview with UnHerd today. If that reduces some of the tariffs, that will help at the margins. Against the size of the US economy, however, nothing that happens with the UK will make a great deal of difference. A recession still looks the most likely outcome for America.
True, you can argue that it is well worth it. Trump’s tariffs are designed to re-order the global economy. They are meant to reindustrialise the American heartland, restore blue-collar jobs, bludgeon other countries into opening up their markets, and, perhaps most of all, end the dependency on Chinese manufacturing, so that the US no longer relies on its main geo-political adversary for survival. Against a prize of that magnitude, a couple of quarters of falling output should not necessarily prove a very big deal.
Here’s the problem, however. President Trump has not made that argument. He hasn’t delivered any stirring speeches on how the country will endure some short-term pain to secure its future, or how a year of weakness will prepare the ground for a revival in the years ahead. Instead, he has just told everyone he will do ‘some great deals’, and that everything will be better immediately. Even worse, Trump is a feel-good politician, who likes to boast about how ‘everything is going great’.
Trump has four years left in the White House, and (probably!) can’t run for reelection. Even so, a recession is going to be very tough for him politically, especially as he is its main author – and it remains to be seen whether he can ride it out.
Does Taiwan have a free speech problem?
These are jittery times in Zhongzheng, Taiwan’s Westminster. The island’s most important supporter, the United States, is now led by a man who resents, rather than is grateful for, the island’s enormous high-tech exports to the US. A few commentators wonder out loud whether Taiwan has become too economically dependent on America. There’s another large economy nearby that would happily boost ties.
Then there’s the military drills. The two Chinese characters for ‘Liberation’ have dominated the front pages here recently: some in reference to Trump’s tariffs bonanza, others referring to two days of surprise live-fire exercises by the People’s Liberation Army around the island. The median line in the Taiwan Strait, which both sides once tacitly agreed not to cross, has been confined to history in the last three years by repeated Chinese naval incursions. In the most recent drills, apparently a belated response to President Lai’s designation of Beijing as a ‘foreign hostile force’ in a speech last month, the Shandong aircraft carrier was at one point just 24 nautical miles off Taiwan’s coast.
But policymakers’ worries are not limited to these kinds of external threats. The government frets that trust in Taiwan’s institutions – as well as the population’s willingness to fight, and other factors that add up to population resilience – are slowly eroding. The administration is pushing back, trying to enhance society’s resilience and cohesion. But in doing so, it is testing the limits of how liberal a democracy can reasonably remain in the face of deliberate attempts to divide and undermine it.
Perhaps the gravest threat is spying. According to Taiwan’s intelligence agency, 64 people were prosecuted last year in espionage cases related to China, triple the figure three years ago. It is a particular problem in the military: almost a quarter of those indicted were active military personal. In response, the government is working on legal amendments to allow military judges to handle cases in which active armed forces personnel are accused of offences such as rebellion and aiding the enemy. Military judges are highly controversial in Taiwan, which was ruled under martial law by the Kuomintang (KMT) dictatorship from 1949 to 1987. The opposition-controlled legislature is likely to block the move, decrying it as authoritarian. Ironically, the largest of the two opposition parties is the KMT.
Less serious than espionage but perhaps more impactful is the state of public discussion in Taiwan. In recent weeks, three Chinese residents in Taiwan have been ordered to leave for supposedly advocating unification with China by force. The three are women married to Taiwanese men, which grants them residency rights in Taiwan. Cross-Strait marriages are not uncommon: there are around 260,000 mainland Chinese spouse, as the official terminology refers to them, in Taiwan, out of a population of 23 million. Ninety-five per cent are women. In China’s boom years, many Taiwanese went to work in places like Shanghai, where there were plenty of jobs for Mandarin-speakers. Some met a significant other there that they then married, and brought to live with them back in Taiwan.
The three women had children in Taiwan, and talked on social media about living in Taiwan. They then strayed into politics. One of them, whose channel is called ‘Yaya in Taiwan’, has a video with the caption: ‘Think you can resist the mainland? You overestimate yourselves’. In another video, she says ‘if you don’t want peaceful unification, then we must have non-peaceful unification’. To be clear, there does not seem to be any evidence of the three women actually working for Beijing. Regardless, the Ministry of the Interior determined that they had posted content that threatened national stability and social stability, and revoked their residence permits.
Some Taiwanese, though appalled by this kind of content, think the government has gone too far. One criticism of the decision pointed out that there was no evidence that her statements actually sponsored or mobilised violence. On this line of thinking, if influencers actually helped the Chinese military infiltrate Taiwan, that would be a security threat. But talking about it is just speech, which should be protected. International conventions do allow for restrictions on speech that is ‘propaganda for war’. But the National Human Rights Commission has pointed out that Taiwan lacks clear legal norms to define what this means in practice.
The government defended its decision. Chiu Chui-cheng, head of the Mainland Affairs Council, says that Chinese residents of Taiwan are free to advocate the benefits of unification or mention ‘one country, two systems’. ‘We respect all that because it falls under the scope of freedom of speech. Advocating for unification by force and for war has nothing to do with freedom of speech’. But clearly some in government are listening to the criticisms. The MoJ announced that it would listen to public input on whether ‘advocating war’ should be made a crime before it proposes legislation.
In the face of external threats and efforts to undermine cohesion from within, liberal democracies are in a bind. Any restrictions on speech must be clearly justified; laws around speech must be as precise as possible. Efforts to build a ‘unified national will’ to defend democracy are, in principle, all well and good. In practice, if implemented clumsily, they risk being perceived as illiberal. In the end, that could be just as damaging to Taiwain’s institutions than any external force.
Exhilarating – but also exhausting: ENB’s The Forsythe Programme reviewed
The first time I saw the work of Trajal Harrell I stomped out in a huff muttering about the waste of public money and is this what the art of dance has come to. But perversely I was drawn back for more of its weirdness, and after The Köln Concert I am relenting. The guy might be on to something.
A middle-aged, Yale-educated African-American with a melancholy air on stage, Harrell should probably be classified as post-post-postmodernist. In any case, don’t expect meaning to emerge clearly or logic to govern the movement he creates. His territory is queer in every sense of the term, dippy-hippie in spirit, and aesthetically far to the left in its rejection of order or hierarchy. Yet it is also open-hearted, innocently comical and slyly beguiling.
The Köln Concert uses music improvised by the great jazz pianist Keith Jarrett on a legendary occasion in 1975, with a first section given over to four Joni Mitchell songs – three from the album Blue, plus her jazzed-up version of ‘Both Sides Now’. Describing what ensues may sound Pseuds Corner daft, but perhaps that is part of the game.
During the first three Joni songs, seven figures (including Harrell himself) outlandishly dressed in non-binary clothes, half-rags half-fanciful John Galliano couture, sit on small benches and wave their arms around repeatedly, responding to the music in the casual manner we all adopt in the privacy of our own fantasies. For ‘Both Sides Now’, a man sashays on tiptoe round the stage in a fur coat. Others follow suit. There are no emotional overtones: it all seems completely pointless, and almost apologetically humble – nobody is claiming to be a technically expert dancer.
Then the recording of Jarrett starts. The seven performers – of all shapes and sizes, none of them classically groomed beauties – don elegant short black togas of various cut. They sit on the benches in attitudes of mute self-absorption – no touching, no interaction, not even any eye contact. Without any evident prompting each in turn stands up and executes a little dance, some of them totteringly inept, some of them flamboyantly manic, to the entire indifference of his or her fellows. Finally, they all assemble in a wide semi-circle and strike statuesque poses.
Silly, yes. Baffling too, but without pretension. And somehow, I don’t quite know why, it not only held my attention over 45 minutes but also seduced me with some nameless subliminal sadness.
Harrell’s pathos stands in stark contrast to the energy coursing through the work of another American choreographer, William Forsythe, honoured by English National Ballet with an exhilarating but also exhausting triple bill. Harrell can’t relate to ballet; Forsythe is madly in love with it, driving its vocabulary to its extremities, speeding it up and sharpening its edges, making what was courtly in its graces into something uninhibitedly athletic. Balanchine is in his stylistic hinterland, but Forsythe is unencumbered by a tsarist past and adopts something of a college football coach instead, determined that his team will come out on top. He makes his dancers sweat, and they love it.
Of the three pieces being presented by ENB, Rearray is the winner: a trio for a ruthless female, attended and supported by two more hesitant male swains – a series of relationships worked out in brief scenes separated by blackouts and enhanced by David Morrow’s spare atonal score. It has all the clean fierce immediate impact of an icy vodka shot, and it is brilliantly executed by the imperious Emily Suzuki, flanked by Jose María Lorca Menchon and Miguel
Angel Maidana.
I’m not sure, however, that it was a good idea to follow it up with both Herman Schmerman (Quintet) and Playlist (EP). The two pieces are very similar – jolly, competitive workouts – and by the end I was feeling bamboozled by the sheer relentlessness of the exuberance on display. Perhaps Forsythe would like to return to ENB with one of his darker, more subtle creations: there are facets to his genius that London audiences haven’t yet encountered.
Event
Spectator Writers’ Dinner with Richard Bratby
Good lawyers make for bad TV
Given that TV cameras aren’t allowed to film British criminal trials, Channel 4’s new documentary series Barristers: Fighting for Justice is a courtroom drama without the courtroom. As for the drama bit, the programme does its excitable and occasionally successful best – but isn’t always backed up by its own participants, who on the whole are a serious and disappointingly discreet bunch. All of them, you imagine, would have plenty of cracking tales to tell after a few drinks. As things stand, however, they stick firmly to no-shit-Sherlock generalisations. ‘What I do is present the defence case on behalf of my client,’ said one in Tuesday’s episode. ‘It’s very important that innocent people aren’t convicted,’ argued another.
Leading the way was Leon-Nathan Lynch, whose client here had been charged with carjacking a Mercedes at knifepoint, having got into the back seat when it stopped in traffic. The client’s own story, delivered in a voiceover, didn’t sound terribly promising to me. He was, he told us, brought up in a church family and had gone to private school. Unfortunately, he’d ‘ended up going the wrong way’ – more specifically by spending most of his life in prison after committing loads of crimes. But not, he insisted, in this case – because the carjacking had been carried out at the request of the owner, who wanted the insurance. ‘I’ve gone from doing someone a favour to being the bad guy,’ the client lamented.
Faced with this, Leon was surprisingly bullish about his chances of courtroom victory. His spirts rose further when he discovered that this particular model of Merc automatically locks when stationary – and even if it hadn’t, why wouldn’t his client have used the passenger or driver’s door like any normal carjacker?
And from there, we had to rely on the narrator reporting what was happening in court – which she did rather patchily. Oddly, for example, there was no further mention of the automatic-locking evidence. Instead, to the sound of dramatic music and the sight of Leon looking pensive on a train, we heard that ‘The jury are considering their verdict!’, that ‘After four hours of deliberation the jury have made up their minds!’ and that ‘The jury has found Leon’s client guilty!’. We then watched Leon looking genuinely distressed as the man was driven off to spend five years and four months in prison.
All of which was fine as far it went – the problem being that it didn’t go any further. Of course Barristers couldn’t do anything about the restrictions on courtroom cameras. It might, though, have told us not just that Leon had gone from a childhood on an east-London estate to a prestigious job in the Temple, but how he did it. The same lack of backstories for the other lawyers going about their sober, largely unfilmable business also added to the general underwhelming effect.
All in all, by the end of the episode you felt that these were the type of people who you’d certainly want to have defending you in court – but not necessarily entertaining you on television.
Rebuilding Notre-Dame has been a suitably slow-motion series about a painstaking process, with episode one in 2020, episode two in 2022 and episode three, ‘The Last Chapter’, on Monday. Sadly, seeing as this was set in the present day, there wasn’t much chance for presenter Lucy Worsley to indulge in her beloved cosplay – although she did manage an Emily in Paris-style beret for the exterior scenes and a full boiler suit to go with the hard hat for the interior ones. When not saying the word ‘iconic’ a lot, she also kept the blizzard of stats coming: 1,000 cubic metres of stonework to be replaced, 2,400 oak trees brought in from across France, etc.
The barristers are, on the whole, a serious and disappointingly discreet bunch
But as you might expect, most of the programme was like The Repair Shop on a massive scale. Craftspeople of all kinds duly dazzled us with their recherché skills – although how these experts at medieval masonry, carvers of gargoyles and constructors of huge wooden church spires earn a living when, say, Notre-Dame hasn’t just burned down wasn’t entirely clear.
Meanwhile, the more we marvelled at them in action, the more tantalisingly mysterious Monday’s documentary left it as to how on earth people had done all this 900 years ago without the benefit of 21st-century cranes, lorries, cutting equipment and electronic measuring devices.
Equally mysterious was the BBC’s decision to broadcast the programme now. Like the old pro she is, Worsley presented the whole Notre-Dame restoration as that classic TV staple: the race against time. Could the work possibly be finished before the scheduled reopening in December 2024? And yet, not only did we know the answer, but the final credits rolled with her still thinking that it probably would be, rather than showing us that it had.
Event
Spectator Writers’ Dinner with Richard Bratby
Was Sir John Soane one of the first modernists?
Sir John Soane’s story is a good one. Born in 1753 to a bricklayer, at 15 he was apprenticed to George Dance the Younger and at 18 had moved on to Henry Holland. Later came major commissions, a professorship, a knighthood and gold medals. Fame followed. Along the way he added an ‘e’ to his surname and married Eliza Smith, an heiress whose fortune helped him to buy three houses in Lincoln’s Inn Fields as well as the collection that still fills one of them, which he left to posterity as a museum when he died in 1837.
Soane’s son compared the image of his father in a library to ‘a eunuch in a seraglo’
Success attracts critics, though, and one of the keenest was Soane’s estranged son George. In two anonymous pieces published in the Champion in 1815 he compared the image of his father in a library to ‘a eunuch in a seraglio’ and mocked his buildings for betraying ‘a perversion of taste that is truly admirable’. This was great copy, but bad diplomacy. Eliza said his words had given her a ‘death blow’ and died two months later; Soane disinherited him.
Both of them would feel vindicated by this exhibition, which makes the case that Soane was ‘one of the first modernist architects’ and, in the process, establishes that modern architects have looked more favourably on his work than his son did. The argument that Soane is a proto-modernist is not new, but this is the first time it’s been made in an exhibition. The gist of it is as follows. Soane’s style, at its most severe, was so stripped back and abstract that it almost ceased to be recognisable as what it was: a form of classicism. (What George called ‘perverse’ others describe as ‘eccentric’, ‘idiosyncratic’, ‘individual’.) And because modernists wanted to do away with style, the two are natural bedfellows.
The evidence the exhibition gives for this is drawings by Soane or his assistants, which have been paired with plans, sections and sketches by some of modernism’s best-known names (Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, Adolf Loos) and elegantly displayed in cases that have headings which correspond to modernism’s ‘key themes’ and ‘core ideals’, such as ‘Materiality’, ‘Modularity’ and ‘Ornament’.
These are big topics for a small space, but the curators have done an impressive job of working within the constraints imposed by the context – rather as Soane did at the Bank of England. ‘Space and Light’, for example, is pulled off well. There is a clear correspondence between Soane’s solution to lighting Dulwich Picture Gallery and Le Corbusier’s approach to the same problem at the Chandigarh Museum. A section on ‘Engineering’ brings one of Soane’s painstakingly detailed studies of a Swiss bridge together with a drawing by Ove Arup of his Kingsgate Bridge in Durham. Jorn Utzon’s model for the Sydney Opera House, which Arup’s firm helped execute, is displayed above. They make a compelling trio, neatly pointing to the dependence of design on engineering and to Soane’s interest in that relationship, as well as to his knowledge of contemporary structural engineering – which probably exceeded that of many modernists.
Other sections are less successful. In ‘Urban Space’ a view of Lincoln’s Inn Fields and its gardens by George Basevi, one of Soane’s pupils, is juxtaposed with Alison and Peter Smithson’s proposal for the Golden Lane Estate. Beyond a vague thematic link, the two have nothing in common. Soane, the label tells us, approached building with ‘a clear understanding of the neighbourhood’ and ‘intended his houses to contribute to the city’s beauty’. The same cannot be said for the much-lauded Smithsons, whose collage is an excellent reminder of how grateful we should be that Geoffrey Powell won the competition and went on to design the estate with his friends Peter Chamberlin and Christof Bon.
Soane’s style was so stripped back and abstract that you could argue he was a proto-modernist
In the second room two projects by contemporary architects are presented alongside two by Soane. Tony Fretton’s sketchbooks of designs for the Lisson Gallery are shown next to Soane’s sketches for Downhill House. A number of sheets have their respective architect’s notes on them: Soane plainly lists a few ideas; Fretton seems to have transcribed a session with a therapist (‘I don’t want to upset myself’; ‘I draw the same things again and again’). The stronger pairing is between Soane’s Tivoli Corner and Alvaro Siza’s scheme for SAAL Bouca, a public housing block in Porto. The scale and complexity of the buildings is similar and both architects were looking for solutions to a tricky corner, albeit for different reasons. Soane’s was forced on him by a tightly confined site; Siza’s was of his own making.
Soane was an inventive, obsessive and attentive architect. The idea that he was a modernist one, too, is intriguing. In his Royal Academy lectures he spoke about ‘nice distinctions’ and ‘nice discriminations’ in architecture. Where this show succeeds is in encouraging both rather than arguing an anachronism.
Event
Spectator Writers’ Dinner with Richard Bratby
Trouble is brewing for the Tories in Wales
Next year, the people of Wales will elect their seventh national parliament. For the first time in a quarter of a century of devolved governance, its implications will be felt way beyond Offa’s Dyke. Westminster should be taking notice of the potentially seismic political developments at play, which look set to smash the established political order and could be a harbinger for the future of politics at a UK level.
To give context for those unfamiliar with Welsh politics, the Senedd (Welsh parliament) resembles the Westminster orthodoxy in many ways, in that the main two parties are Labour and the Conservatives. Plaid Cymru, the Welsh nationalist party, has on occasion shaken matters up, but the best it has ever managed to accomplish is to partner Labour in government. Labour hasn’t lost an election in Wales in over a century (barring the 2019 European election), and since 1999 and the birth of devolution it has always been the dominant party.
The new political system plays into the hands of a one-man operation like Reform
The current 60-member Senedd, for instance, has Labour on 30; the Conservatives form the official opposition with 16 seats; Plaid Cymru holds 12 and the Liberal Democrats and Independents have 1 each. However, successive opinion polls since the general election indicate that there will be what can only be described as a Nigel Farage-induced revolutionary event come the next election in May 2026. Potential developments are likely to be aided by the introduction of what some see as an anti-democratic closed list, multi-member constituency system to elect an enlarged 96-seat Senedd.
With the Labour honeymoon in Westminster long evaporated, the party is heading for its worst ever result in a Welsh national context. Opinion polls indicate that three parties are vying for the top spot in Wales, with each party within the margin of error. The latest opinion poll published earlier this month by Survation puts Labour on 27 per cent, Reform and Plaid Cymru on 24 per cent. The Tories find themselves worryingly trailing on only 15 per cent. The Greens and Liberal Democrats are on 5 per cent. Other opinion polls support the trend, with some indicating that Labour has lost its position as the dominant political party in Wales.
If the polls are replicated, Wales is heading for political stalemate, far removed from the stitch-up Labour and Plaid Cymru envisaged when they devised the new electoral system during their recently-struck partnership agreement.
Strategic challenges are faced by all involved. For Labour, the loss of Wales would be an incendiary device through the wider Labour movement in the run-up to the next general election. A contagion of panic could easily ignite within Labour ranks as they focus on the next general election. If I were the Prime Minister, I would be agreeing to every single request from the Welsh First Minister, Eluned Morgan. Saving blast furnaces in Scunthorpe whilst Port Talbot is allowed to close probably isn’t the cleverest optics from a Labour perspective in Wales, where both Plaid Cymru and Reform will seek to take advantage.
Plaid Cymru will never have a better chance of winning a Welsh national election. As the party celebrates its centenary, if it fails to capitalise on a deeply unpopular Labour UK government, it may as well give up and allow the emergence of a pro-Welsh independence political party that can succeed where it has miserably failed over the years.
Rhun ap Iorwerth, the party’s leader, has skilfully ended the partnership agreement with Labour, allowing him to lead full-frontal attacks on the Welsh government. The problem he faces is that the change option narrative he is desperate to claim for Plaid Cymru in the lead-up to the election will be difficult to convert unless he confirms he would be willing to work with Reform and/or the Tories. The reality, however, is that he won’t be able to carry his party. This is an enormous chink in Plaid’s armour that surely their opponents will seek to expose over the next twelve months.
The biggest strategic headache, however, falls on the Conservative party. If Labour faces potential internal strife because of losing Wales, by comparison the leadership of Kemi Badenoch could hit stormy waters capable of capsizing her leadership. As things stand, the Tories will fall to fourth place, way behind Reform. Nigel Farage understands Trumpian rust belt politics better than anyone in British politics, and many of the post-industrial communities of the South Wales valleys face the same sort of economic challenges as those encoutered by the US Midwest. There is a reason the party’s general election campaign last year was launched in Merthyr Tydfil.
Furthermore, the new political system plays into the hands of a one-man operation like Reform. Voters will place their cross in a box next to a political party, not a candidate. Expect Farage to be the only face of the campaign for the party even though he won’t be standing. If the polls are replicated next May, Reform will portray the result as a changing of the guard for the political right, with the focus very much on the next general election.
The Tories’ strategy of trying to out-Reform Reform by the previous Welsh leader, Andrew RT Davies, was going nowhere and new leader Darren Millar seems incapable of pivoting the party to a sensible pro-Wales, right wing offering. Unless the Conservatives manage to turn things around, there is a risk that those of a right-wing persuasion coalesce around Reform. We are at tipping point territory for the Conservatives.
One group of the electorate which the Conservative party could try to attract to get itself back in the game are those Welsh-identifying, right-of-centre voters who are desperate to see a change of government in Cardiff Bay, especially if they can make the case that Plaid Cymru’s ambition is limited to propping up the Labour party. Reform has cornered the anti-establishment vote; the Conservatives must put forward a programme of economic hope based on enhanced fiscal powers to incentivise growth and increase Welsh government accountability – all good Conservative values.
If the result itself poses major problems for Badenoch, the Senedd aftermath could be equally troublesome. From where they currently stand, on a very good day, the Tories could find themselves holding the balance of power. What would they do then? Prop up some sort of arrangement with Labour and Plaid Cymru, or serve as a junior partner to Reform? The Tory leadership should be thinking about how they get ahead of events in Wales before they are consumed by them.
Tender and gripping portrait of Edna O’Brien
You could say it’s impossible to make a poor documentary about the writer Edna O’Brien as she’s never said or done anything uninteresting in her life. Point a camera and we’re away. But Sinead O’Shea’s Blue Road: The Edna O’Brien Story is especially rewarding as it is not only beautifully constructed but also includes diary entries that have never been made public before, plus an interview conducted with O’Brien in July last year just before her death. She was 93 and frail but as extraordinarily vivid as ever. She was born, she says, ‘ravenous for life’ and, blimey, what a life it was.
O’Brien was born, she says, ‘ravenous for life’ and, blimey, what a life it was
When I was growing up, there was no teenage fiction to speak of so we went straight from Ballet Shoes to whatever was on the bedside table of our mother. Luckily, my mother had O’Brien, and The Country Girls. I still have that paperback, which I’ve returned to many times, and I’ve read all her other novels (there are 20). She fearlessly and thrillingly told the truth about the female experience, which is not something I ever took away from the books at my father’s bedside (cricket, military, Wilbur Smith). She also carved her own path despite many attempts to bring her into line. The Country Girls (1960) was banned in her native Ireland, while her father said she deserved to be ‘kicked naked down the street’. When she ran off with the writer Ernest Gebler, they bolted to the Isle of Man, thinking they’d be safe there, but woke up to find her father, her brother, a neighbour, her sister’s boss and an abbot at the gate. The abbot ‘held up the gold crucifix and made the sign of the cross over me’. Her brother dragged her out – ‘He asked if I’d had intercourse. I said I had’ – and then Ernest was beaten up. She is incapable of recounting a duff anecdote.
Like the women in her novels she was endlessly punished for desiring more than domestic and sexual servitude
Jessie Buckley reads out her diary entries while we’re offered a selection of talking heads (including those of her two sons). There’s plenty of archive footage. She was a chat-show favourite. There is footage of her father performing his jovial-Irishman shtick and singing ‘Danny Boy’, while she watches on. ‘I look terrified,’ she says. Her father was a violent drunk. Her mother, she says, endured ‘bullying, kicking, drinking, beating’. Gebler became insanely jealous of her success and made her hand her royalty cheques over to him. When she once refused, he grabbed her by the throat until she submitted. Like the women in her novels she was endlessly punished for desiring more than domestic and sexual servitude. O’Shea discovers that Gebler had written sneering taunts over her diary entries. It’s chilling, although when he calls her mother ‘a suspicious, slit-eyed peasant’ I did laugh.
After their divorce, she set up house in Chelsea, where she hosted legendary parties, slept with Robert Mitchum – ‘more handsome than in his films’ – and tried to sleep with Marlon Brando (his body was ‘taut like an animal ready to spring’). You see? Never a dull moment. And I’ve barely scratched the surface. This is a tender, gripping portrait that is rightly admiring without ever being hagiographic. If she had the one fear it was that, in living life so ravenously, it obscured the writing. She asserts: ‘A lot have thought I’m a flibbertigibbet. That is not who I am. I am someone else.’ What she was, always, was ferociously herself.
Divorce are the best young British band I’ve seen in an age
Can we talk business for a moment? When reviewers like me go to big arenas, we get the best seats in the house, with fantastic sightlines and excellent sound (a PR who used to work for U2 told me she would routinely reassign press into even better seats than the already splendid ones they had originally been given; you do anything you can to get an extra 1 per cent more enthusiasm into the review). When we go to standing venues, though, we are as prone to the vagaries of geography as anyone else.
And because we go to a lot of shows, we tend to arrive only five minutes before the turn we want to see goes on stage, which means we rarely find great positions. When Divorce played at Koko last week, I ended up at the very top of the old Victorian theatre, looking almost directly down on the stage, the sound muffled by the roof low above me. From the most distant spot in the gods, Divorce were absolutely breathtaking. So from down on the floor, they must have been something else.
They’re a four-piece, but let’s be brutal: only two of them matter. Drummer and second guitarist were tucked away on little platforms at the back of the stage, while singing bassist Tiger Cohen-Towell and singing guitarist Felix Mackenzie-Barrow occupied the front. The other two were exemplary players, but the front pair write the songs and sing the songs. It’s their band.
There was nothing wildly unconventional about them: often they took very familiar forms, but bent them out of shape just enough for them to sound fresh. The opening ‘Fever Pitch’ was old-fashioned slow blues fed through shoegaze. As with the brilliant Big Thief, there was a sense of their music being frayed; of it pulling itself apart at the seams. It rattled and creaked appealingly, like an old wooden chest.
There is a tension in their music, between their desire to be fuzzy and out of focus, and brutally upfront, which I think is what makes it exciting. Though no single element of what they do was unfamiliar, nothing was ever exactly as expected. They already have future arena anthems, too: gussy up ‘Karen’ or ‘Scratch Your Metal’ a bit, and the lighters will be in the air.
But – and it is a big but – there is one huge imbalance in this group. Cohen-Towell possesses at least 90 per cent of the charisma. They have an extraordinary voice, a willingness to throw shapes, and on the one song for which they shed their bass, a stage presence far beyond what indie bands normally offer up. They are so absurdly talented that you do not have to be Nostradamus to predict that the words ‘solo career’ will be raised sooner or later.
But right now? Divorce are the best young British band I’ve seen in an age. They’ve got an album out now, but they’re even better live.
From the most distant spot in the gods, Divorce were absolutely breathtaking
Usher has just completed ten nights at the O2. That’s 200,000 tickets. I have yet to encounter one person – everyone I know in the music industry included – who had any idea he was capable, after 30 years, of selling 200,000 tickets. And fair play to him, he spent a good 15 minutes of his set singing while roller-skating. Nick Cave could take some tips.
Usher does something extremely old-fashioned. He unapologetically sells sex, but without getting pornographic. There’s a kind of critical writing these days that tries to expunge sex as a primary motivator of pop preferring to frame it as intellectual rather than physical – god, all those essays about how ‘WAP’ (‘Wet Ass Pussy’) was a single about female empowerment, vagina as goddess, reclaiming autonomy.
Not Usher, whose largely female crowd melted before him, dazzled by his unblemished voice, fabulous physique, lovely moves, and – yes – sex appeal. They liked the songs, too, which was more than I did – R&B slow jamz, I suspect, will always leave me cold. But the show – a faux AI survey of Usher’s life up to 30 years from now – was a hoot. And it makes one realise, sometimes a cigar really is just a penis.
Cartier used to be a Timpson’s for the rich
In the fall of, I suppose, 1962, my friend Jimmy Davison and I, window shopping on Fifth Avenue, bumped into the glamorous Venezuelan playboy-grandee Reinaldo Herrera. Jimmy asked where he was going. ‘I’m just nipping into Cartier. They’re fixing my skis,’ Reinaldo replied. Autres temps, autre moeurs. I doubt anyone today uses the world’s most famous jewellers as their local Timpson’s, though I suspect Cartier’s unrivalled in-house craftsmen could still run up a supple sapphire USB cable if requested.
I doubt anyone today uses the world’s most famous jewellers as their local Timpson’s
Because that was partly the firm’s point. Apart from the staggering banque-busting biggies, they, almost uniquely, made the most exquisite smaller things. Bejewelled necessaires de dames, exactly sculpted to a gloved palm, fitted with a matching, mirrored poudreuse, a slim baton for Chanel red lipstick, a crystal phial for Guerlain’s L’Heure Bleue, and perhaps, if Jean Cocteau is to be believed, a ribbed platinum straw for the discreet hit.
Like Elsie Mendl in decoration, Cartier brought modernity to bijouterie. Fabergé had made objets d’art: but in the Rue de la Paix, New Bond Street, Fifth and 52nd, Cartier’s muted rooms displayed practical pieces in their showcases. Miniature notecases with a pencil to match, a slim gold cigarette lighter or enamelled holder, simple evening links, and more. Such were the baubles that fortunate guests of the society-barging American hostess Laura Corrigan found folded in their napkins at her lavish dinners, not to mention a flexible-gold-strapped watch for any HRH she’d nabbed.
With the arrival of aviation, and two-seater planes the new toy for high-flying heroes, Cartier supplied society’s pilots with the Panthère and later, the Tank, watches. Lean and leather-strapped, both became, and remain, the ne plus ultra for men’s wrists, as did those interlocking triple ‘Russian’ rings, still the only gleam of gold that should be seen on the male hand.
Chic trinkets like these advertised that it wasn’t only the fuck-off rocks, the matched parures, the tremblant tiaras that made the name Cartier peerless around the world.
Feminine temps have autred, and women no longer want such enchanting knick-knacks, no longer powder their faces in public, nor apply lipstick at table (so sexy) and now light their Vogues with a Bic.
I remember once driving Lady Bruntisfield to Cartier. I pulled up smartly at the New Bond Street store. Tania was aghast. ‘Surely you know,’ she said in her delicious Mittel-European voice, ‘Vun never uses zee front door. Take me round to Albemarle Street at vunce.’ This discreet entrance meant business, clients with taste and knowledge, people with accounts, designers bringing the newest ideas, a hushed haven away from the glitter and gloss up front. From here, dear Arnaud Bamberger, who ran ‘London’ for many years, would arrange starry lunches in the first-floor Louis-the-Something panelled dining-room, gave gala dinners in floral fantasias, provided sumptuous teas for Queen Elizabeth in the room behind his box at Cartier-sponsored polo. Whatever its merch, Cartier remained grandly unflashy.
Now the V&A has thrown open its doors, its many rooms, to show us all how the magic began, grew, and lives. From the early, intricate, towering tiaras for Edwardian duchesses, to the newest, sleekest, must-have bangles and ‘Juste un Clou’ – Aldo Capullo’s witty twisted-nail earrings – the whole gamut of Cartier’s knack with these rarest minerals is on dazzling display. The alacrity with which they incorporated historical moments is fascinating. End of China’s imperial dynasty? Boom! Cartier are mounting ‘spinach’ jade plaques with diamonds. King Tut’s tomb found? Kerpow! Cartier carve vast stones into scarabs set with azure enamel. India was ever an inspiration: Alice Astor had uncut rubies as buttons on her tracht jackets. Hollywood’s technicolour influenced their tutti-frutti multi-hued pieces, what Daisy Fellowes called ‘beach jewellery’.
If Jean Cocteau is to be believed, Cartier made a ribbed platinum straw for the discreet hit
All the showstoppers are here: Queen Elizabeth’s sublime, soothing, pink diamond ‘Coronation’ necklace; the articulated pavé panthers; the Duchess of Windsor’s strutting flamingo brooch – hideous, I feel, on anyone but her. There is Barbara Hutton’s rope of 27 marble-sized jade balls which surely weighed more than the heiress herself, Grace Kelly’s engagement ring, touchingly visible in High Society, a Baroda Maharani’s black pearl ‘wristlet’, and Princess Andrée Aga Khan’s all-singing, all-dancing ‘Halo’ diamond tiara, though it was always rumoured that the old Aga liked to have the Princess lick the stones out of his… well, you get my drift.
No, Elon, you cannot buy any of this beautiful bling. A few are still privately (royally) owned, but most of the whole shebang belongs to Cartier itself. One feels a certain pang that such individuality in jewellery is a thing of the past, and that the most we can hope for is sunnies from the Cartier shop at Heathrow. Maybe there are hedge-funders hoarding priceless pieces against the inevitable rainy day, but is anybody commissioning frivolous fancies these days… like Elsie Mendl, who ordered blue diamond curls to supplement her famously blue hair? That’s thinking ahead.
Event
Spectator Writers’ Dinner with Richard Bratby
Those behind this fabulous new comedy are destined for big things
Rhinoceros by Eugene Ionesco is a period piece from 1959. It opens with the invasion of a French village by a herd of rhinoceroses. This paranormal event is never explained. In Act Two, the villagers start to imagine that they’ve become rhinoceroses and changed species. But one plucky sceptic, who defies conformity, refuses to swap his human character for an animal alternative. That’s it. Ionesco is offering the same arguments about peer-group pressure that Arthur Miller made with far more grace, artistry and psychological penetration in The Crucible.
The show can’t decide what register to aim for and the cast are dressed in a mishmash of cheap costumes. Some wear white coats like asylum orderlies and some are in Primark expendables. Many of them scream or honk out their lines in grating voices. Ionesco’s script adds to the noise and confusion.
The show begins with a compère who warms up the crowd by doing arm-stretching exercises, as if the Almeida were a care-home for dribbling old crocks. Then the play begins and the main characters, Bérenger and Jean, meet in the village café. Ionesco has no interest in human beings and his characters are as absorbing as teddy bears or plastic flowers. And the surreal storyline moves at the pace of smog.
These faults are concealed by arrival of several prattling commentators, who discuss Jean and Bérenger using a pastiche of the pretentious chitchat favoured by academics. The play keeps switching focus from the events on stage to a literary analysis of those events, and back again. Audacious in 1959, perhaps. Not any more.
A third layer of narrative complication is added. Beside the playing area stand two tables equipped with microphones and pieces of kitchen clutter which the actors use to produce sound effects, as if the play were being recorded for the radio. Lots of directors employ this gimmick and it usually reveals the same problems: a lack of confidence in the script and deep misgivings about the show’s viability as a spectacle. Theatre means seeing, not listening, and a director who moves from the visual to the acoustic realm is having an artistic crisis on stage.
The result is a futile, dated and mirthless pastiche. It’s like watching a two-hour radio sketch discarded by Spike Milligan because it wasn’t funny enough. A note of caution. The crowd adored this show, and at the curtain call they screamed and whooped like maniacs. Could it be a hit? Let’s not rule it out.
Thanks For Having Me is a new comedy about hook-up culture. If you’re single, affluent and living in London, here’s how it works. Sex is your friend. Love is your enemy. A fling is physical but never emotional.
It’s like watching a two-hour radio sketch discarded by Spike Milligan because it wasn’t funny enough
You can assemble a large harem of partners but you have to keep your distance. Never share breakfast with a lover and don’t even kiss them goodbye at the front door. On no account visit a farmers’ market together and buy organic yoghurt and fruit juice. That’s how you end up in a relationship. And hook-up culture is a revolt against long-term commitment. Both women and men can enjoy transactional sex on equal terms and this play follows the lives of three busy bed-hoppers.
But Cashel is different. He’s a sensitive, vulnerable fool who secretly longs for a steady girlfriend and a wife. Schooled by his wiser and more experienced flatmate, he tries to play the field and to conduct an arm’s-length affair with Eloise, a slinky blonde bombshell. On their first date, Cashel falls instantly in love. ‘When she took off her top, I wanted to blind myself so it was the last thing I ever saw.’ Eloise discovers that Cashel is struggling to suppress his real feelings and she finds his confused adoration profoundly attractive.
So both of them are now breaking the rules. Meanwhile Cashel’s flatmate finds himself falling in love with his regular no-strings partner, too.
The development of the story is a bit predictable, and a cynic may argue that the show lacks dramatic weight. Perhaps it’s just a 90-minute sitcom. Well, so what? The pacy script has vast reserves of wit, swagger and style. So does the chic, fleet-footed production.
The supporting cast led by Nell Tiger Free are fabulously funny. The show is written by the lead actor, Keelan Kember (Cashel), who happens to look like a movie star. Comparisons between him and Hugh Grant may be exaggerated but not by much. As a writer of light comedy he bears comparison with Simon Gray and the young Christopher Hampton.
His collaborators are the director, Monica Cox, and the producer, Kit Bromovsky. Their names will become significant in our theatre. What a joy this show is. A sophisticated and intelligent feelgood comedy that speaks the truth about love, sex and romance.
Event
Spectator Writers’ Dinner with Richard Bratby
An astonishingly good new album from Black Country, New Road
Grade: A
Is that a kind of nod to Oasis in the album title? I can’t think of a band less like that grunting Manc convocation, except in the fact that BCNR are just about the biggest band in the country right now, as the Gallagher bros were all those years ago.
Vocalist (of a sort) Isaac Wood has left and with him has gone the occasional temptations to stray into stadium bombast, à la Arcade Fire. Instead, with three females sharing vocals, we have evanescent chamber pop, occasionally buttressed by a certain glam swagger, almost always underpinned by plucked acoustic guitar and May Kershaw’s superb and imaginative piano. It is a beautiful album, from the sweet harmonies of ‘Besties’, to the Revolver-era McCartney of ‘Mary’.
As you might have hoped – if you know the band – some of these off-kilter melodies take a while to resolve themselves and on one or two occasions lose their way entirely, such as on the Nick Drakeish ‘Nancy Tries To Take The Night’. Then, just momentarily, they begin to sound like fey, well-bred, proggish folk-jazz refugees from the late 1960s Canterbury scene, a kind of a dislocated Kevin Ayers. But for the most part these are cleverly constructed and astonishingly well executed baroque-pop songs, the best of the crop being the dream-pop of ‘Goodbye (Don’t Tell Me)’, the aforementioned ‘Besties’ and ‘Happy Birthday’ with its cute Mick Ronson guitar. Some of the songs stretch to nigh on seven minutes, but even so, rarely outstay their welcome. There is not much in the way of, uh, rocking out, it has to be said. So I would pay good money to hear them cover Quo’s ‘Paper Plane’.
Why is the British Museum hiding its great Orthodox icons?
The long neglected art of Byzantium and early Christianity is returning to the world’s museums. Last November, the Louvre confirmed plans for a 3,000 square metre department dedicated to the Byzantine legacy and more than 20,000 works from Ethiopia to Russia that are currently scattered across the museum’s cabinets. Having been initially shelved a decade ago, this monumental undertaking is scheduled to open in 2027, signifying a pivotal moment for the Christian arts of the Eastern Roman Empire to become a serious curatorial subject in European museums once again. (A precursor to the new department established in 1954 lasted but 15 years.)
Byzantine art has been the subject of serious study in universities only since the 1940s. But there’s been a recent resurgence in interest: from the Met’s seminal Africa & Byzantium that showcased more than 200 works last year to the show at the Church of Sant’Agnese in Agone, Rome, of icons from the Vatican Museum’s Byzantine collection that has just concluded. Late last year it was also announced that Treasures of Byzantium: the birth of New Rome will be one of the British Museum’s international touring exhibition in 2028.
Within these collections and exhibitions are the icons of Eastern Orthodoxy – those haunting faces of Christ, the Virgin and saints, anonymously executed in the monasteries of the ancient Christian East – and precious refractions of a vast inheritance that we will never comprehensively know. In the academy, these images have long been treated as the primitive products of superstitious, religious folklore. ‘The Greek [icon] painter is the slave of the theologian… bound by tradition as the animal is to instinct,’ wrote the 19th-century French art historian Adolphe Didron.
They are an eccentric entry to the narrative proposed by the Enlightenment science of art history. How does one make sense of these products, which rely not on painterly experimentation but on methods of prayer, on a contemplative, introspective mode of vision and an inversion of the optical wizardry ushered in by the Italian Renaissance? Only in the 20th century did the startlingly flat language of colour and abstraction – finally revealed beneath layers of blackened varnish – suddenly start to make sense to artists. Matisse was smitten when he saw them on his trip to Moscow in 1911. ‘You should have seen his delight at the icons,’ reported his Russian handler. Meanwhile, Malevich and the Russian constructivists leapt on these formalist forerunners.
Beyond those in Greece and the Slavic East, one can find exceptional and extensive collections at the Petit Palais in Paris, Ikonen-Museum Recklinghausen, the Jaharis Galleries at the Met and the renowned Menil Foundation in Houston, Texas. The Menil icons were, however, initially destined for the British Museum.
The first British exhibition of ancient Russian icons – dating from the 12th to the 19th centuries and lent by the government of the USSR – occured at the V&A in 1929. It was then another 63 years before the same icons appeared again under the name, Gates of Mystery: The Art of Holy Russia, only a year after the fall of the Soviet Union. London’s galleries catered accordingly to the renewed interest with a flurry of exhibitions at the Royal Academy (1998 and 2009) and at the Courtauld Gallery (2001). But early, far-sighted British collectors bought out of passion rather than commercial opportunism: Sir Frank Roberts, Guy Dixon and Dyne Steele all bequeathed extensive collections to the British Museum and by the 1990s, the National Collection of Icons, worthy of the name by which it came to be known, was solidified.
Then in 1985 the Museum was offered the collection of the late Eric Bradley – 60 icons spanning 1,200 years that would have turned a national collection into one of world renown. Bradley had excavated an extensive subterranean ‘crypt’ under his Hampstead townhouse to host the collection formed over several decades. But after the British Museum declined, it was sold to the widowed Dominique de Menil who was then anticipating the completion of her namesake museum in Texas two years later, where it is now held. At the time it was considered a travesty and treated accordingly by the British press. A trustees report of that year confirmed the failure as ‘a matter of regret’. Deprived of the world’s finest private collection outside the Orthodox world, the great bequests already held by the museum sunk into obscurity.
The icons would have turned a national collection into one of world renown
One man has campaigned for decades for the icons the British Museum does own to be put on public display: Sir Richard Temple, a renowned specialist and dealer in Orthodox icons for more than 65 years. (Eager punters searching in vain for the faces of the Orthodox East in London’s major galleries must head to his gallery in Holland Park.) For years, however, there appeared to be no enthusiasm from the British Museum to bring these items out of storage. But in 2002, fate took a turn.
While on a private spiritual retreat at Vatopedi Monastery on Mount Athos, Temple had a fortuitous encounter with the then Prince of Wales whose patrilineal affection for Greek Orthodoxy and the Holy Mountain is well known. ‘Write to me,’ came the response. On return to London, a private correspondence between Temple and Clarence House ensued through which an informal campaign group with the Prince’s endorsement was assembled: Rowan Williams, then Archbishop of Canterbury, Sister Wendy Beckett, the Bishop of London, Bishop Kallistos Ware, former luminaries of the Art Fund, Royal Academy and so on.
A petition was put to the British Museum (then under the directorship of Neil MacGregor) with, as was later controversially revealed, the Prince’s written endorsement. Silence. Alternative venues for the collection were mooted, conditionally under the Government Indemnity Scheme – the crypt of St George’s Holborn, the Galleries and Cellarium at Westminster Abbey, the Library at Lambeth Palace – to little response. But around that time, Temple mentioned the problem over lunch to a longstanding Russian client: finance for a purpose-built venue to house the collection permanently was offered without question, to which the British Museum responded by memorandum that ‘it was not a priority’. After a fit of hyperactivity, the campaign petered out.
A succession of directors followed, and a concerted effort made in the summer of 2023 was thwarted by Hartwig Fischer’s resignation after an approximated 2,000 artefacts were found to be missing. An admirable online catalogue of the museum’s icons – numbered at ‘around 150’ – appeared earlier that year, but still with only a handful of the artworks themselves stuffed in poorly lit corners of the overcrowded medieval section. It is an embarrassment when compared with the dedicated spaces of museums with which the British Museum claims comparison.
Event
Spectator Writers’ Dinner with Richard Bratby
There are only 13 icons currently on view – five magnificent Cretan icons reappeared without fanfare in November. According to the museum’s own records, the great treasures from the National Collection languish in what was once aptly described by Sister Wendy as ‘a stopped-up fountain’. These include several Novgorod and Old Believer icons of exceptional quality and size, icons from 13th- to early 15th-century Constantinople, Athonite triptych panels and later Balkan icons produced by Orthodox Christians under Ottoman rule.
The last exhibition of icons held by the British Museum was in 1994 – the Prince of Wales was its patron – and it is anticipated that its 2028 one will receive a comparable endorsement. But a strong case could be made to the secretary of state for the collection to be loaned to a permanent space outside the museum: it has never been seen as a whole by the public, nor has it retained its proper nominal status as the ‘National Collection of Icons’.
For the sake of its late donors and the extraordinary images, languishing and inaccessible in a storage facility, one hopes the renewed public demand is compelling enough for the museum to think again.
Nigel Farage turns his guns on the Red Wall
Much of the commentary on the local elections has focused thus far on the Tories’ southern discontent. But today, Nigel Farage will turn his guns on the north of England, as he seeks to position his party as the real challenger to Labour across swathes of the so-called Red Wall. Key voters in these northern constituencies broke with Keir Starmer’s party over Brexit, elected Boris Johnson in 2019 but then switched back to Labour in protest at the Tories last July.
Given the government’s subsequent woes, Farage clearly now senses an opening. This afternoon’s speech has been heavily trailed, with a column in the Sunday Express and the splash of today’s Sun. ‘Britain is broken’, screams the headline, citing a poll showing that two thirds of voters in the Red Wall think the country is ‘heading in the wrong direction’. Aides talk excitedly of ‘something you have never seen before’ and how ‘we are going after Labour now.’
The setting for Farage’s speech could not be more appropriate: a working men’s club in Durham, whose council was run by Starmer’s party from 1925 until 2021. The timing works perfectly too, coming a week after the Reform leader declared that British Steel would shortly be nationalised. The Scunthorpe crisis is perhaps the perfect crisis for Reform UK: both the Tories and Labour are culpable in British Steel’s woes, while the role of the Chinese company Jingye neatly fits Farage’s own political economy.
‘Reindustrialisation’ is the new favoured phrase on the leader’s lips: a pitch that chimes well with key demographics. Durham, Doncaster and Nottinghamshire are some of the places where Farage has visited in recent weeks, ahead of 2 May. For Reform, there are encouraging portents that voters in such areas are less-than-enamoured with Starmer’s government so far. On Friday, the party triumphed in the Longdendale council by-election: Labour’s safest ward in Greater Manchester.
Reform’s efforts in the north have been helped by the limited Conservative recovery since 4 July. A number of Tory candidates in that general election have since remarked on how little infrastructure there was at a local level. ‘Much of the grassroots has simply shrivelled and died’, says one Tory PPC who stood in Manchester last time. Others spent no time in their constituencies, but instead were sent to fire-fight in safe seats in the south. ‘Levelling up’ as a Tory project seems to be dead in all but name too: the autumn leadership race featured little reference to the flagship policy in Boris Johnson’s landslide win.
Reform is devoid of the baggage of both the historic Tory brand and the failures of 2019 to 2024. In parliamentary seats like Blyth and Bolton South, the party came second last year. Next time, they hope to go one better. Today’s speech is all about making that a reality, one ward at a time.
The Bank of England’s mission to tame inflation just got harder
Much to the concern of the Bank of England, British workers are continuing to bank inflation-busting pay rises. Figures just released by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) show that over the three months to February, the average worker received a pay increase of 5.6 per cent. Remove inflation and that works out as a 2.8 per cent real-terms rise.
The persistence of strong pay growth is likely to alarm the nine members of the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee. They have repeatedly warned that they consider sustained wage increases to be a key sign of entrenched inflation. The committee has previously said it wants to see pay growth slow before resuming interest rate cuts. But this will now need to be weighed against fears of a recession, brought about by Donald Trump’s tariff turmoil, which have led markets to anticipate a faster pace of rate cuts for the rest of the year.
Of course, wages rising faster than inflation is a positive thing for household finances and casts doubt on claims of a continued cost-of-living crisis. It’s no bad thing for the average worker with more cash in their pocket. However, as Professor Joe Nellis of MHA warns, without accompanying productivity growth, higher disposable incomes risk fuelling consumer demand and driving up prices. The Bank wouldn’t mind persistent wage growth so much if productivity rose with it – but that just isn’t happening.
Meanwhile, the unemployment rate held steady at 4.4 per cent over this period, offering some relief to Chancellor Rachel Reeves. It suggests her £25 billion tax hike on employer National Insurance contributions and the rise in the minimum wage haven’t yet dented the jobs market. But it’s worth noting that given the period of the latest data, these figures only reflect employer sentiment ahead of those changes, not their actual impact – though there are early signs of anxiety.
For the first time since early 2021, the number of job vacancies in Britain has fallen below pre-pandemic levels. Vacancies dropped by 26,000 to 781,000 – marking the 33rd consecutive quarterly decline. There are now two unemployed people for every advertised job. What’s more, youth unemployment remains stubbornly high at around 13 per cent, with little evidence that firms are creating opportunities for younger workers.
Serious questions remain about the reliability of this data. The government has recently launched a review into persistent failings at the ONS, particularly around the frequency and scale of data revisions. Today saw more such changes, including ‘exceptional’ updates to wage figures dating back to October 2020. These revisions – prompted by data from a single employer – have significantly altered the historical record.
When I wrote about this upcoming revision last month, it seemed plausible that the employer in question was the government. Not so, according to the ONS. They still refuse to name the source, but the most substantial changes was in the 'wholesaling, retailing, hotels and restaurants’ sector. For instance, the regular pay growth in April 2022 for that sector was revised from 6.2 per cent to 7.9 per cent. Such a shift could have meaningfully influenced employer and employee behaviour had the true figure been known at the time.
Britain’s economic picture remains as murky as ever. Strong wage growth and a flat unemployment rate suggests resilience after months of cooling, but it also complicates the Bank of England’s job of taming inflation. Meanwhile, the reliability of the data used to assess these trends is increasingly under scrutiny. Those in charge of pulling our economic levers are flying blind more often than they should be – and that’s perhaps the most worrying trend of all.
Europe’s annual migrant crisis is just getting started
Irregular border crossings into the European Union dropped by 31 per cent in the first quarter of 2025 to 33,600. The figures, released by Frontex, the European Border and Coast Guard Agency, appear to show that the EU is getting a grip on illegal immigration.
The gangs in charge of the people-smuggling trade are becoming ever more sophisticated and cunning
But figures can be misleading. The biggest fall in irregular entries was the Western Balkan route, down 64 per cent on the same period in 2024. This is largely attributable to the accession of Bulgaria and Romania to the Schengen Zone on 1 January this year. As a result, more border police have been deployed and evidently they’ve been successful in controlling the frontiers. Frontex also said that there was a ‘significant’ drop in migrants crossing the Central Mediterranean in March. That was because of the storms that swept Italy in the second half of the month.
On 13 March, Frontex released figures stating that in the first two months of 2025 the Central Mediterranean route had experienced a 48 per cent rise on a similar period in 2024, with nearly 7,000 migrants crossing. The majority of that number came from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Syria.
The Western African route into Spanish territory dropped by 18 per cent in the first quarter of this year, although it remains the busiest passage into Europe. In January and February, 7,200 migrants arrived in the Canary Islands, most coming from Mali, Senegal, and Guinea. Hundreds more made the journey in the first week of April, attracted by Spain’s pro-migrant Socialist government.
This is not to decry the hard work performed by police and border force personnel in Spain, France and elsewhere in Europe. Last month a two-year investigation involving Spanish and French police resulted in the dismantling of what was described as a ‘well-oiled international organisation’ with hubs in both countries. Nineteen people smugglers were arrested and it is believed they had facilitated the arrival in Europe of a vast number of migrants from the Middle East, North and sub-Saharan Africa.
This is the challenge facing the authorities: the gangs in charge of the booming people-smuggling trade are becoming ever more sophisticated and cunning. InfoMigrants, a European information service about migrants, stated last month that the gangs ‘increasingly use high-speed boats to evade authorities, with crossings costing between €5,000 (£4,300) and €8,000 (£6,900) per person’.
It’s likely, therefore, that the true number of irregular entries into Europe this year is higher than Frontex’s figures as they refer only to the detected entries. How many migrants have been landed undetected by the authorities?
The determination of the gangs is matched by that of the migrants desperate to come to Europe and, more often than not, Britain. So far this year, more than 8,000 have succeeded in crossing the Channel – despite the fact that the police have broken up ten smuggling networks in the first three months of 2025; they dismantled 22 networks in 2024.
French police have noticed the emergence of a new phenomenon in recent months: gangs that are ‘100 per cent African’, but who operate with the blessing of the Albanian and Iraq-Kurdish smugglers, who for years have dominated the trade in illegal immigration.
As I wrote in 2023, the political upheaval in Sub-Saharan Africa, particularly Niger, would likely have repercussions for Europe’s migrant crisis. The overthrow that year of president Mohamed Bazoum in a military coup deprived the EU of a partner, and consequently Niger has once more become a thriving migrant hub.
A report last week in Le Figaro described how the police and gendarmes on the French coast are now struggling to contain the migrants. One senior officer said: ‘Coming from war-torn countries such as Afghanistan and Iraq, some of them have military experience…we are faced with professionalised, structured networks which, since the end of 2023, have been encouraging migrants to engage in violence that we have never seen before.’Sometimes, added the officer, the violence is accompanied by shouts of ‘Allahu akbar’.
Frontex are doing the best job they can, but those they face are well-organised, battle-hardened and determined. And as the summer approaches, they’ll soon have the weather on their side.
Is the NHS losing its appeal for Britain’s youth?
The NHS has survived many Conservative governments which, according to their opponents, were out to privatise it. But can it survive a growing disenchantment on the part of young professionals who are turned off by the idea of having to queue for healthcare?
According to the Independent Healthcare Provider Network (IHPN) – admittedly not an entirely disinterested party – the largest growth in the private health sector is among young professionals in their 20s, 30s and 40s, who want rapid scans and other diagnostic tests without the wait. As the organisation’s chief executive, David Hare, puts it, these are people ‘who are accustomed to high quality, convenient and personalised services in many other aspects of their lives’, and who don’t see why healthcare should be any different. When you have grown up being able to order taxis, book airline flights, have lunch delivered to your desk, all with a few swipes on a smartphone, the idea of waiting several weeks for an appointment – and then having little choice as to when that appointment is held – holds little appeal.
The political power of spreading the fear of a ‘privatised NHS’ may be losing its bite
This might all seem at odds with the assertion that the young are becoming more left-wing – with the tendency to vote Labour increasing steadily as you go down the age scale. But the claim by the IHPN fits in with the latest edition of the National Centre for Social Research’s Social Attitudes Survey, published a fortnight ago, which found that faith in the NHS is falling most rapidly among young people. The survey showed an alarming drop in people who say they are satisfied with the NHS – down to just 20 per cent, compared with 60 per cent in 2012, the year when the opening ceremony of the London Olympics incorporated real-life nurses bouncing on NHS beds. Most of the fall has occurred since the pandemic. Yet among the over-65s, satisfaction with the NHS actually rose a little last year – it was only among young people where it is cratering.
It is a sign that the health service can no longer count on being carried along on a sense of national pride or communitarian spirit. Ironically, that is something which seems to be alive more among Tory-voting septuagenarians than among Labour-voting twenty-somethings. If you are old enough to remember relatives who succumbed to polio or tuberculosis, no doubt you are more inclined to appreciate the step-change in accessibility to healthcare which came with the founding of the NHS, and therefore to forgive the health service for its current failings. It is another matter if you are of a generation which is more remote from the pre-NHS era.
None of this is to say that the principle of public healthcare which is mostly free on the point of delivery does not continue to enjoy wide public support. But the idea of how that healthcare should be provided is shifting. Opinion is hardening against the idea, popular with the unions, that the NHS should be a state monolith which never uses private providers.
One YouGov poll which has been conducted regularly since 2019 is instructive on this. It gives people three options: should the NHS never use private providers, should it use a mixture of its own facilities together with private ones, or should all hospitals and clinics be privatised, with the NHS reduced to a mere buyer of services. In the most recent survey, 63 per cent went for the middle option, 23 per cent for the first and 3 per cent for the third. The gap has widened significantly since 2019, when 30 per cent wanted the NHS to be a state monolith and 56 per cent wanted a mixture of public and private provision. Most of that change has occurred in the past couple of years, since the NHS strikes.
It suggests that the political power of spreading the fear of a ‘privatised NHS’ may be losing its bite, and young people may be leading the way on this. Wes Streeting, who has spoken of more private provision, just as Tony Blair did with his independent sector treatment centres, may well have his finger on the public pulse.
Iran is playing for time in the US nuclear talks
Over the weekend, the US and Iran held opening talks in Oman on Teheran’s nuclear programme. With the first round concluded, the Iranian regime’s position on the negotiations is becoming clearer. The Islamic regime, which prides itself on its strategic patience, intends to buy time, while avoiding any major and irreversible concessions. Whether Donald Trump’s administration will prove willing to accommodate Iran’s demands is another matter entirely.
Iranian foreign ministry spokesman Ismail Baqaei said on Sunday that Iran would refuse to discuss anything other than the nuclear programme in the talks. Teheran, Baqaei said, ‘will not have any talks with the American side on any other issue.’
To rebuild, replenish, re-arm, and recruit, Iran needs only time
One of the major criticisms of the 2015 nuclear deal (known as the JCPOA) negotiated by Barack Obama’s administration was that it failed to address other aspects of Iran’s drive for regional hegemony. Specifically, the Iranian ballistic missile program and Teheran’s support for an array of proxy political-military organisations across the Middle East were left out of the discussion. The result was that the JCPOA removed sanctions on Iran, enabling it to ratchet up its campaign of subversion across the region, and to test-fire more than 30 nuclear-capable ballistic missiles over the past decade.
Trump pulled the US out of the agreement in 2018, declaring he could negotiate a ‘better’ deal. Iran, meanwhile, is determined to ensure that the current negotiations maintain a similar narrow focus to those a decade ago.
With this narrow focus ensured, the Iranian regime will then seek one of two outcomes. It wants either a renewed nuclear agreement which, in its essentials, resembles the JCPOA, or a drawn-out negotiating process which leads nowhere but enables Iran to avoid further sanctions and the possibility of US or Israeli military action against its nuclear programme.
Time is what the Iranian regime needs above all now, and what it hopes the US’s desire for a renewed nuclear deal will provide. The last couple of years have not been auspicious for the Islamic Republic. It needs a period of quiet to recover and replenish its capacities.
Iran’s strategy of proxy warfare, which had brought it unprecedented power and influence across the region, has suffered a number of very telling blows since October 2023. Its Palestinian client organisations, Hamas and Islamic Jihad, though not destroyed, have suffered enormous casualties and damage in Gaza. Lebanese Hezbollah, Iran’s most powerful proxy, is similarly beleaguered. Its historic leader, Hassan Nasrallah, is dead. A significant part of its senior and mid-level leadership echelon has been removed. It has also suffered the destruction of 80 per cent of its long-range missile capacity.
Meanwhile, the Assad regime, a key Teheran ally and link in Iran’s route to the Mediterranean, is gone. The Houthis in Yemen have succeeded in effectively shutting down the Gulf of Aden/Red Sea route to international shipping, but are now the subject of an ongoing US bombing campaign. Even in Iraq, the Iran-aligned Shia militias of the Popular Mobilization Units (PMU) elected to unilaterally cease attacks on Israel. There are now rumours that they may disarm as a result of American pressure.
All this adds up to a profoundly changed regional balance of power, in which the steady gains made by Iran over the last two decades across the Middle East have been reversed.
It is important to note, though, that contrary to some of the more overheated commentary of recent months, the Iranian regional project has not been destroyed, or even conclusively defeated. Rather, it has been weakened, significantly. But all of the setbacks, with the exception of the loss of the Assad regime, are reversible. To reverse them – to rebuild, replenish, re-arm, and recruit – Iran needs only time. This, as we have already noted, is precisely the commodity that the renewed nuclear negotiations with America grant it.
This raises an obvious question. If the Iranian regime constitutes the most powerful anti-Western and Islamist force in the Middle East, and if it has been damaged and now needs time to recover, why are its enemies granting it what it needs? Why – when the regime is vulnerable, its economy in tatters, its regional proxies on the ropes, its standing among its own people at an all time low – are its enemies giving it the time it needs to emerge from its current low point?
There is no obvious answer, except that it may turn out that the efforts at negotiation will be brief. The US administration may rapidly become aware of the Iranian regime’s needs and tactics, and decide not to accommodate them.
Iranians themselves are watching carefully, and with concern. As one Iran-based supporter of the opposition who I spoke to for this article said:
The American delegation considers negotiations with our enemy – the Iranian regime – to be optimistic and constructive? This is a regime that, during anti-American protests in Tehran and other cities, painted donkeys in the colours of the American flag, kicked them from behind, and said “This is Trump, this is America.” They staged street performances of capturing and chaining Trump.
The recent rise in the value of the toman against the US dollar is being seen by the Iranian regime as a sign of success and progress in the negotiations since yesterday. Reformists have been happily spreading news about the dollar-toman rate on their social media accounts.
If America does not want to support the people of Iran in their gradual efforts to dismantle the ruling regime – a regime that has no legitimacy in the eyes of Iranians – then at the very least, it should stop feeding the regime.
It is too soon to tell, of course, if such sentiments will prove justified, or if the current phase will turn out to be a transient moment preceding renewed American pressure on Teheran. If the former, then the Iranian regime has a good chance of recouping much of the ground it has lost over the last eighteen months of war in the region. The basic structures of the Iranian power arrangement in the region remain intact, if enfeebled. Whether or not the regime manages to build them up again to their former capacity will be decided in Washington, and in Oman, in the coming months.
The sad death of ITV
The slow death of ITV makes for painful viewing. In its glory days of the 1980s and 1990s, the channel had a salty naughtiness, a thrilling random quality. Its kids’ shows were raucous or even scary, its crime dramas were raunchy, its quizzes and games were sparkly and crass and its highbrow offerings were spicy. The channel had an edge to it; watching ITV was aspirational and fun. It was cool.
ITV has swapped any distinctive offering for constant retreads of the same generic thrillers
But ITV has swapped any distinctive offering for constant retreads of the same kind of generic gloomy thriller; at the moment it’s tempting us with Red Eye, Protection and Grace. Swipe through ITVX and you will see endless title cards – serious-looking constipated faces, frowning – for similar shows: Malpractice, Out There, Until I Kill You, Angela Black, After The Flood, The Suspect, No Return, Redemption…and a heck of a lot of ‘Live Laugh Love’ reality shows of the Real Housewives/Ferne McCann variety.
Things could soon get even worse. All3Media – a subsidiary of our old friends in Abu Dhabi, Red Bird IMI – is reportedly in advanced talks to buy ITV Studios, the division of ITV that actually makes programmes. This would, we are told, create a new £3 billion production ‘powerhouse’, with ITV Studios spun out into a new company. But the possible break up of ITV is nothing to celebrate.
If this deal goes ahead, it is likely to mean that the speed of ITV’s decline is accelerated dramatically. The channel risks being cast adrift without a sustainable income stream. ITV would become just another channel, competing with every other Tom, Dick and Sky Max for an ever-dwindling pot of linear TV advertising revenue. As John Whittingdale, the former media minister, points out: ‘It is very difficult to sustain a purely advertising-funded channel with public service broadcasting obligations as the world changes. ITV have been very successful at developing their production arm, which has generated a large chunk of their revenues. But if they get rid of it, then they’re sort of back to square one.’ He’s right. ITV’s days would surely be numbered.
Perhaps even if the deal doesn’t go ahead, ITV is still doomed. The age of linear TV is undoubtedly coming to an end. ITV renewed its licence last year, meaning that, until 2034, it is committed to public service obligations, including offering national and local news output. In return, the channel gets a state-mandated priority on listings guides as the UK’s third channel. But in nine years’ time, as streaming continues to become more important, will that third channel status still matter? It seems unlikely. Come 2034, ITV may well decide that local news, in particular, is not worth the hassle.
If so, this will be a great pity. When it was originally conceived in the 1950s, locality was baked in to ITV. The fiefdoms of the ITV regional franchises – a network of independently owned regional companies – were established to encourage competition and innovation. The relaxation of the ownership rules in 1994 led to Carlton in London and Granada in Manchester gulping up most of the minnows, until, in 2002, the last vestiges of the regions’ identities disappeared.
The sense of something important being lost, as this process of centralisation happened, was hard to articulate. What did it really matter if Border or Grampian went up the swanny? But, along the way, we lost something important: the sense that ITV was catering for British – or, indeed, regional – audiences. ITV’s streaming service ITVX makes the results of this plain to see; there’s little on there to mark the channel out as any more British than Netflix or Amazon Prime.
TV’s history in recent years has been a slow, sad process of gulping globalisation. We’ve gone from the individuality – and often the eccentricity – of regional British studios, spread across the land, (‘and now, from Norwich, it’s the quiz of the week!’) to corporate monoliths that struggle to produce much programming that’s tailored only for a British audience. Television as we knew it coming to an end. The break-up of ITV will speed up this sad decline.
I’ve had it with neurotic dog owners
‘She’s overweight! You should weigh her every week and if she puts on so much as 50g, immediately reduce her diet,’ one commenter said. Another castigated me for not using organic shampoo, and someone else told me off for my poor choice of outdoor coat. Under every post were furious debates, judgements and accusations.
I adore Dixie. She is coming up for four years old and I want the best for her. But she is, after all, a standard short-haired dachshund, not a human toddler – and frankly it all seems a bit much. The number dogs being given fluoxetine, the same drug used in Prozac, has increased tenfold over the past decade. Perhaps that’s because more than half of dog owners are now members of some kind of Facebook groups related to pet health and wellbeing. Like Mumsnet, they can be hugely useful as well as a minefield of canine dos and don’ts – and of petty criticism and bitch fighting. That’s around eight million people ready to jump in the minute you set a foot wrong.
Food is a particular topic of discussion. Dixie came to us three months ago and I joined a dachshund owners’ Facebook group to ask about a good brand of dog food. So began the onslaught. These groups are not about potential Crufts winners – the racehorses or supermodels of the canine world. They’re for your average dog. Yet a mild recommendation from one poster about a widely available biscuit brand was met with a sniffy: ‘I think you can do better than THAT.’ One suggestion was for a weekly organic fresh-delivery box that, when I looked it up, would have cost more than the one my husband and I once used for our human suppers. ‘We only feed ours raw and organic,’ chirruped someone else, in a kind of smug, Meghan Markle, I-actually-bake-my-own-dog-treats yummy mummy way – which, to be clear, she really does. It was the kind of detail that made me want to chuck a stale Bonio at my laptop.
I grew up on a farm and feeding our dogs was essentially ‘chuck a load of biscuits and some leftovers in a bowl and get out of their way’.
Twelve years ago, my husband and I acquired a puppy – Betty, the Jack Russell/Poodle cross – and like an over-anxious first-time parent, I adopted a bonkers food regime that involved baking a meatloaf for her. From scratch. Until we asked my parents to look after Betty while we went on holiday, and the look on my mother’s face when I explained the feeding schedule ended that one. The home-cooked feeding trend isn’t particularly new. In his teenage years, my husband once staggered home from the pub after closing time and, upon finding a large casserole dish of stew in the larder, proceeded to heat some up and scoff it. Cue much amusement the next morning when he came downstairs and his animal-loving stepmother informed him he’d eaten the dog’s dinner.
More recently, some waggish friends convinced him that the posh doggy treats sold at our local pub were actually parmesan breadsticks. He fell for it and is now the butt of endless jokes about his glossy coat.
She is, after all, a standard short-haired dachshund, not a human toddler
A pregnant friend was telling me about how utterly confused she was about what kind of pram to buy after asking for advice online. I told her that was nothing compared with the harness v. lead debate currently waging on my group. To crate or not to crate? Is co-sleeping acceptable? Are dog shows demeaning or confidence-building? Should you put nappies on your dog when she’s in season? A post on the Horse & Hound forum about whether other dog owners are too judgemental about each other provoked even more – yes – judgemental comment.
In their defence, I have found some of these groups very useful, particularly when it comes to settling a rehomed dog. And many first-time owners are obviously thankful for the advice of more experienced members. When a trip to the vet’s costs £40 before you’ve even managed to get a recalcitrant dog through the door – only to be told there’s nothing wrong but let’s give the little darling a £100 vitamin pill anyway – the online world of free opinion can be a godsend.
Owners with real-life experience of vets’ practices and pet insurance are also a lifeline amid occasionally misleading advertising. But some people on these groups are concerned that they might be taking advice from armchair experts who are offering opinions based on little or no evidence.
Dogs Today magazine recently ran an article warning that online groups are leading to a rise in owners self-diagnosing their pets with conditions and disorders – and as a result abandoning or rehoming them. Still, for all the madness, some of it sticks. Those Meghan Markle home-baked dog treats that raised such eyebrows? My friend Julia tried a similar recipe, suggested by the Battersea Dogs & Cats Home charity. Dixie gave them five stars.