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What is Robert Jenrick up to?
It has been another good week for Robert Jenrick. At a time when many of the shadow cabinet are struggling to make an impact, his video on fare-dodging in London has certainly caused a stir. The 58-second clip – in which Jenrick, like some Tory Batman, accosts Tube passengers walking through barriers – has now been viewed nearly 15 million times. It prompted a Newsnight discussion, acres of coverage and begrudging private praise from opposition politicians too.
Such videos are not some mere fluke but rather, the product of much time and effort by Jenrick and his aides. He has learned from masters of the craft like Pierre Poilievre, the leader of the Canadian Conservatives. Polievre believed in trial-and-error, going from homespun YouTube clips in 2020 to producing slick mini-documentaries by 2023. Similarly, Jenrick has built a team sophisticated in identifying zeitgeist issues, crafting snappy narratives and packaging them online in a way designed to go viral on X, TikTok and Facebook.
Good communications come from good policy. The Shadow Justice Secretary is developing both a compelling diagnosis of Britain’s fraying social contract and a political economy to fix it. His Tube clip highlights a potent political issue: the degradation of the public realm. Many voters can see the visible decline of the high street and their local transport network. The Spectator’s recent ‘Scuzz Nation’ cover prompted much comment by Tory MPs, who think that a manifesto to tackle lawlessness at a local level would be both popular and a useful campaign tool.
Jenrick is aided in his mission by elements of what one might call the ‘Angry Young Men’ of the right. Clever, passionate and ever-online, they are often found in the world of think tanks and policy institutes, toiling away on subjects such as immigration and the rule of law that will likely form the bedrock of Britain’s next right-wing government. The Newark MP has worked hard to develop links over the past 18 months, including writing a major CPS paper and fronting the Prosperity Institute’s ‘Free Market Road Show’ last summer.
A symbiotic relationship with such places helps with Jenrick’s campaigns and policies. Amid talk of ‘JudgeWatch’ – a potential project to focus on activist members of the judiciary – the Shadow Justice Secretary has started posting such threads on X, to call out such figures and highlight what he calls ‘mounting evidence of a highly politicised legal system’. It is the modern equivalent of what Business for Sterling did 25 years ago: an online, low-cost version of a campaign group that aims to shift public opinion.
Helping Jenrick in all this is a loyal team of dedicated aides. His communications chief is Tom Milford, one of the diminishing number of Tory political advisors who served in government. Dov Forman, his social media strategist, a 21-year-old student who racked up millions of views on TikTok as a teenager. Their ranks have been bolstered by the arrival of Sam Bidwell from the Adam Smith Institute. He is credited by some with influencing Tory thinking on Kemi Badenoch’s policy of reforming Indefinite Leave to Remain.
Having a compelling vision helps attract staff; money is another. Jenrick registered more than £800,000 in donations between May 2024 and May 2025. At a time when Tory finances are tight, and shadow cabinet members complain of a lack of staff, the optimism of those around Jenrick is a striking contrast with others. A good team helps the Shadow Justice Secretary identify ostensibly dry policy issues with potentially explosive political appeal. The row over ‘two-tier’ Sentencing Council guidelines is one of the few issues on which the Tories, not Reform, has made the running.
Stunts like the fare-dodging clip are useful in ‘cutting through’ too. At a time when much of the government and opposition seem almost paralysed by paranoia, Jenrick has demonstrated a refreshing willingness to embrace guerilla tactics. The decision to project a two-tier ‘countdown clock’ onto the Ministry of Justice in March was an eye-catching and successful effort to grab some precious media airtime.
All of this is what a good shadow cabinet member should be doing: scrutinising government, developing policy, thinking clearly and winning publicity. But as other frontbenchers struggle to do exactly that, talk of a second leadership Jenrick bid will only increase in Westminster, as his hard work continues to impress both his party and his colleagues.
The Limitless Pendant is an uncool trip into the tech nerd future
The problem with the future is it is very obviously no longer being created by cool people. Instead, it belongs to autistic nerds who want nothing more than to be a computer.
Cool people invent things like surfboards, Ray-Bans and Triumph Spitfires. Nerds make profoundly uncool things like cars that drive themselves and the absurd Limitless Pendant device that I have been attempting to wear.
The Pendant records everything you say, and everything anyone near you says
Let me start this review by stating I hope the Pendant – yours for $199 – fails very hard. It is an awful and life-negating device that subjugates any human stupid enough to place one around their neck to an AI processing unit. It’s all too easy to imagine a not too distant future in which each of us is compelled by authoritarian governments to put one on in order that social credit scores can be apportioned based on activity behind closed doors. It’s a terrible thought.
The Pendant records everything you say, and everything anyone near you says. That’s it. It then feeds the captured data into AI and sends you a summary of your daily performance. I first put mine on last Friday ahead of an evening during which my nine year old daughter would go to a school disco and my football-obsessed seven year old son would be allowed to stay up past his bedtime to watch a match.
While I had it on, I also confessed to my wife that in the afternoon I had lost control of myself after eating half a chocolate brownie and consumed three Twix, one after the other. I told her the effect was to make me feel both catatonic and deranged.
This is what the Pendant had to say: ‘Your day was a wonderful mix of family time, sports, school events and meaningful conversations. There was a lot of laughter, some bedtime wrangling, and a sense of pride in your children’s activities and confidence. The evening ended with a bit of reflection and planning for the days ahead.’
I asked it how I could ‘be better’.
‘You mentioned feeling ‘hit by such a wave of tiredness’ – the three Twix – and ‘being so done with this’. Don’t forget to take care of yourself!’ it replied. Other bromides included the suggestion to incorporate a ‘gratitude moment’ into the kids’ bedtime routine and to try ‘a new family activity, a creative project or a shared learning experience (like cooking a new recipe or exploring a new park).’
So far, so anodyne.
The following day I wore it to our neighbours’ house during a mid-afternoon family visit and then to the shops while I searched for a fancy dress outfit for a Rivals-themed party in the evening. The Pendant gave a bland ‘friendly summary’ of these events. When I asked it for an ‘unfriendly summary’, this is what it said:
‘You spent the morning arguing with a child about socks, then hustled everyone out the door for yet another round of football. The sock drama was only matched by the chaos of trying to find water bottles and footballs. Football was played, but mostly it was a lot of talk about who’s better, who scores first and who cheats. You had a random chat with a dog walker about how many dogs they walk and how many steps they do a day. Riveting stuff. The rest of the morning was spent obsessing over football fixtures, arguing about which games were on, and making a big deal about going to the shop for milk because the kids drank it all. Lunch was a noisy affair with more bickering. The afternoon was dominated by a frantic search for 80s party costumes. You bought wigs and a fake moustache in a panic, then spent way too long in a vintage shop trying on hats that cost more than a small car. Back home, you fussed over which wig to wear, debated the merits of various party themes and generally overthought the whole thing. You herded the family to your neighbours, which was as chaotic as ever – lots of yelling about shoes, doors and who’s knocking. Once there, you all talked about how tired you were. The kids ran wild, you talked about TV shows you don’t really watch. Hide-and-seek was played, but mostly it was just an excuse for the adults to sit around and complain. The FA Cup final was the main event. You tried to watch the game while also lighting a barbecue and fixing a tap. The evening ended with more football, more family squabbles and vague plans for tomorrow that will probably change anyway.’
Who needs this? Not me. I took it off and am yet to put it back on. Clearly, this is not the response those behind the product expect. Limitless co-founder and CEO Dan Siroker has spoken recently about how he expects very soon that ‘millions, if not billions,’ of people will wear listening devices like the Pendant and make their lives into searchable documents. The company, launched last year, recently raised $33 million, and the sinister-seeming tech overlord Sam Altman sits on its board.
Tech nerds have taken recently to talking in public – without discernible embarrassment – about the idea that what we think of as life is actually a simulation, by which they mean we are all living in some kind of computer game. Elon Musk, for example, has said ‘we are most likely in a simulation’ and it has become increasingly common to hear these people denounce anyone of whom they disapprove as trivial ‘non-player characters’. This is very much the reality into which the Pendant fits – a device that makes you feel as if you are living within a mainframe and not in the kingdom of nature.
‘Our vision is to free the human mind from its biological limitations’ reads the blurb that comes with the device, without specifying what those limitations – emotions? forgetfulness? individuality? – actually are. Perhaps the answer to the complexity of the human condition is go through life recording every encounter we have, the better to analyse it later, but it’s hard to see how this approach could facilitate the things that matter most, and that ultimately make life worth living – things like friendship and romance and trust.
Don’t wear the Limitless Pendant. It’s deeply uncool.
Reeves could leave farmers with Diddly Squat
The powers that be at Amazon seem to have an uncanny talent for releasing each new series of Clarkson’s Farm just as British politics descends into fresh farming chaos. The new series is no different. At the exact moment that I am watching Jeremy Clarkson and the cast of Diddly Squat farm get their government-funded agri-environment schemes in order for the year, over in Whitehall, Rachel Reeves is plotting how to cut the budget that pays for them.
A recurring theme so far in the show’s fourth series has been the jibes directed at the government for paying farmers for seemingly non-food things, like establishing wildflower meadows. Initially, this does seem strange. That is, until you realise that farming is not just about the end product. It is about ensuring that the land that grows this food is stewarded well. Other options he discusses, like planting herbal leys, benefit food production directly, by providing forage for livestock, alongside improvements to soil health.
The greatest tragedy of this cut would not be that something went wrong, but that it was finally going right
Government schemes now pay farmers public money to farm in a more environmentally-friendly way. This approach not only delivers a public good for the taxpayer footing the bill, in the form of cleaner water and healthier soil, but it is also good for the farmer. As the devastating clips of the deluged Cotswolds can attest, British farmland is no longer resilient to the impacts of flooding and drought. By prioritising the health of the soil – a farmer’s most important asset – these schemes are helping to build resilience back into the land.
You may be wondering where our resilience went. The answer lies in the perverse incentives set by the European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy, by which farmers received subsidies based on the amount of agricultural land they managed. This resulted in 50 per cent of the budget going to just 10 per cent of farmers.
It also meant that farmers were incentivised to remove nature from their land to maximise the area in production. By removing hedgerows, ploughing right up to the margins of a field, and making fields into more perfect rectangles to accommodate modern machinery, farmers were responding to incentives that would deplete the land.
In the wake of Brexit, English farmers are now paid to deliver a service, not subsidised merely on the basis of the amount of land they farm. This subtle distinction is lost on some, but it is an important one. Our new environmental land management schemes (ELMs) will deliver far better outcomes for the countryside, for taxpayers and for farmers, who want to continue farming the land for generations to come.
As has become abundantly clear in recent months, Labour – and especially Rachel Reeves – are less fussed about these things than the Tories were. Labour’s changes to agricultural property relief (APR) demonstrate a lack of care for the vital intergenerational mindset of family farming that had allowed farmers to keep the long-term picture front and centre. With no APR u-turn on the horizon, Reeves has now set her sights on the farming budget.
This budget has remained essentially unchanged since before Brexit. After years of high inflation, it means that this £2.4 billion budget has actually decreased in value. This has led to an unlikely alliance of the NFU and environmental NGOs calling for it to be increased. But instead of listening to them, Reeves is rumoured to be cutting the budget in her upcoming Spending Review.
Jeremy Clarkson’s engagement with the new schemes fits with the experience of farmers across England. Farmers were gaining confidence in them and over 55,000 ELMs agreements were in place. With a £100m reduction in funding meaning 239,000 fewer hectares of nature-friendly farmland supported by ELMs, this move be disastrous for the environment and for farmers.
In defending ELMs, I am not saying that the schemes are perfect. Largely because they are new, teething problems are inevitable. Minutes into the first episode of the latest series, Clarkson is inspecting some big bags of wild bird seed mix wondering what on earth is going on. The likely answer is that one of his team was responding to a perverse incentive within ELMs which saw the government making the payment to plant wild bird seed too generous. This saw some farmers planting whole farms with wild bird seed mixes. Prior to the general election, the Conservatives spotted this abuse of the system and stopped it.
The initial rollout of ELMs was imperfect, but ultimately it was carried out, by successive Conservative ministers who were passionate about delivering this fundamental shift in how the government distributes public money to farmers. ELMs are a genuine example of politicians saying they would do something positive and then actually getting on with it.
If this farming budget cut goes ahead, Reeves won’t merely be trimming some fat – she will be betraying a genuine Brexit dividend, and further undermining her government’s supposed commitments to both farmers and the natural environment.
As I watch Clarkson wrestle with new tractors and attempt to plough his sodden fields, the parallel with Whitehall feels inescapable. He is trying to make a complex new system work, just as Reeves is on the cusp of tearing it down. The greatest tragedy of this cut would not be that something went wrong, but that it was finally going right. Somehow Labour still chose to break it.
Paris Saint-Germain’s win was a triumph for sportswashing
Paris Saint-Germain (PSG) are champions of Europe for the first time in their history. They demolished Inter Milan 5-0 in the Champions League Final in Munich.
Football clubs have become the playthings of autocratic nation states with bottomless pockets
Forget the Premier League and the sporting abomination that is the revamped Fifa Club World Cup. The Champions League is the pinnacle of club football -the competition that every top team wants to win.
The final was billed as a mouth-watering clash of opposites: youth and free-flowing football (PSG) versus experience and the nous to always find a way to win (Inter). But the final was a huge anticlimax: PSG dominated the match from start to finish.
The French quickly took the lead in the 12th minute with a goal from Achraf Hakimi – likely the best right back in world football right now. The second goal came in the 20th minute, a deflected strike from Desire Doue, the 19-year-old wonder kid. Doue scored the third in the 64th minute. It became 4-0 in minute 73, courtesy of Khvicha Kvaratskhelia. The fifth and final goal came from Senny Mayulu, a youngster fresh out of the PSG academy. The final was as one-sided as it gets, an utter humiliation for Inter who looked lost and bereft of belief. The French were simply too good.
PSG’s manager Luis Enrique deserves special mention. He has already won the Treble with Barcelona, and has now repeated this extraordinary feat with PSG. Only the great Pep Guardiola has previously achieved the Treble with two different teams. The new all-conquering PSG is entirely Enrique’s creation, built to press high and dominate possession. The prima donna superstars of old (the likes of Neymar) have been jettisoned and replaced by a team of young strivers. They are the ones who delivered on the biggest stage of all.
This wasn’t just a game of football though. The match took place against a backdrop of big money. In the case of PSG, it’s not just any money but nation-state money courtesy of Qatar. PSG have spent an estimated €1.9 billion (£1.6 billion) since Qatari Sports Investments group (a subsidiary of Qatar’s state-run sovereign wealth fund) bought the club in 2011.
The purchase price for PSG back then was €70m (£60m). The club is now valued at somewhere around €4.25 bn (£3.7 bn). Winning the Champions League has always been the ultimate goal for PSG’s super-wealthy Gulf owners. Nasser al-Khelaifi, the club president and a former professional tennis player, also happens to be a minister in the Qatari government.
The Qataris have been ridiculed in recent years for spending huge sums but still failing to win the Champions League with PSG, a club that only came into being in 1970. Rival fans like to mock it as a ‘plastic’ club with no real history or soul. Who’s laughing now?
Even so, PSG’s triumph casts a darker shadow. It is an uncomfortable victory for ‘sportswashing’, the term used for authoritarian regimes investing in football and other sports to enhance their global image. Winning European football’s most prestigious club competition — together with the praise and global profile this brings— amounts to the ultimate sportswashing triumph.
Football clubs have become the playthings of autocratic nation states with bottomless pockets. Manchester City is owned by Abu Dhabi; Newcastle have Saudi owners. Few fans seen to care much that their clubs are being taken over by profoundly undemocratic states. They might be too busy counting the trophies.
No footballing neutral will begrudge PSG their moment in the sun. Less welcome is that the victory amounts to an undeniable triumph for Qatar, a country with an authoritarian political system and a dismal human rights record. Is it any wonder that the Qataris would rather everyone focused on the time and money they’ve spent helping PSG win the biggest prize in European club football? That’s what sportswashing is all about, after all.
Welcome to the golden age of conspiracy theories
There’s never been a better time to be a conspiracy theorist: government funded plans to dim the sun; a pop star embarking on a questionable space flight; supermarkets stripped bare after Spain and Portugal were plunged into a catastrophic blackout; Robot policemen on the streets of China; the US admitting to the existence of UFOs.
Like a lot of people my age, my gateway drug to the murky world of cover-ups was The X Files. For an hour each week, my young mind was exposed to alien abductions, secret societies, cannibal cults and paranormal phenomena. And my interest in the other worldly – and the people who wholeheartedly believe that humanity is being misled en masse – has never abated.
Since the 9/11 terror attacks in 2001, I have been an avid reader of conspiracy theories about all sorts of topics, from the ludicrous to the mundane. I’ve attended hush-hush meetings in pubs to watch engineers and architects discuss the temperature at which airplane fuel burns, had a numb bum as I sat through an eight-hour talk by David Icke about the ‘Reptilian agenda’, counted down to Doomsday (twice), and loitered on Alex Jones-backed forums where I learnt about Americans who were digging out bunkers and filling them with weapons, ammo, water purifiers and canned food for when SHTF.
And when I’m not doing that, I’ve been watching Ancient Aliens on The History Channel, chatting to flat earthers, and scouring eBay for out of print magazines and books about cryptozoology. These days, mind-bending conspiracies are just a few taps away, with Telegram groups, TikTok and YouTube turning your phone into a pulsating mass of unbridled paranoia. Despite the low level hum of doom that propels my daily life, my geekery of choice has long been reading about worst case scenarios, built on dubious facts with little credible evidence. Tolkien fans can keep their Middle Earth, the Hollow Earth theory is much more my vibe.
It’s important to draw a clear line between the things we’ve been exposed to in dystopian science fiction and a true conspiracy theory. By definition, the latter involves a plot carried out by a secret organisation – and crucially, the theories sometimes turn out to be true. Most recently, geoengineering conspiracists were punching the air when the Advanced Research and Innovation Agency (Aria) announced that they wanted to use solar radiation modification to try and ‘dim the Sun’ in a bid to tackle global warming and thicken arctic ice.
Weather modification has long been a conspiracists’ favoured topic. You’ve probably heard of chem trails, the thick, straight, lines of cloud-like vapour we often see criss-crossing the sky, and you’re likely to have heard people sharing their (unsubstantiated) beliefs that they are evidence that toxic cocktails are being fired into the atmosphere. Why is this supposedly done? Well, to placate society and make us unwell of course. The attempt to lessen the sun’s impact on our planet confirms that geoengineering is real – or at least being considered – and leaves one wondering weather chem trail spotters really are just loons.
I’ve read countless theories about the shady meteorological going-ons at the US military’s mysterious HAARP base in Alaska. Are their experiments on the Earth’s ionosphere behind freak weather events? Is weaponised weather being used by countries to target hostile states or distract enemies? So far, this kind of thing is still obviously a conspiracy theory. But it’s starting to seem like the technology, at least, is getting there.
For many years, Katy Perry has been caught up in numerous unfounded theories about being somehow connected to the Illuminati
Some of the most vivacious conspiracy theories focus on Ancient Egypt and the Pyramids. Beyond the puzzle of who (or what) built them, many conspiracists have argued that there are mind blowing secrets hidden beneath the sands. And it looks like they were right. In March, researchers published a paper that used radar imaging to show some kind of structure lying 4,000 feet below the pyramids, including eight vertical cylinders standing 2,100 feet tall.
But a wad of fresh ‘evidence’ is not enough for a long-running conspiracy to get a big fat FACT rubber stamped on it. Earlier this year, pop star Katy Perry was at the epicentre of a tornado of conspiracies after joining the crew of Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin mission, which took the singer and five women 66 miles above sea level to the Kármán line, the internationally recognised boundary of space, where they teetered in zero gravity for a few moments.
For many years, Katy Perry has been caught up in numerous unfounded theories about being somehow connected to the Illuminati (a clandestine organisation who really pull the strings of world governments, and who may or may not be Satan-worshipping reptiles). The evidence? Symbolism in her music videos and costumes which are allegedly favoured by the group and used in the drugs-based mind-control programme MK Ultra, which was developed by the CIA in the early 1960s.
Did Katy even go to space at all? Or was it all faked, like the 1969 Moon landing (allegedly)? Why did she cover one eye with a butterfly-shaped setlist for her forthcoming tour? Why does the New Shephard mission badge look like Baphomet from a distance? Did Katy kissing the goat-like emblem pre-flight symbolise her allegiance to the Dark Lord himself?
Britain urgently needs an Antarctica strategy
Now that a deal has been struck with Mauritius over the Chagos Islands, the government’s focus should be on the UK’s southernmost overseas territories. There are three of them: the Falkland Islands, South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands (SGSSI) and the British Antarctic Territory (BAT). As increasingly tense geopolitics make the world more hostile, these territories are becoming ever more vulnerable. If Britain wants to secure its presence here in the face of the looming shadows of Argentina, Russia, China and the US – to name a few – Labour urgently needs to start thinking about how it does so.
The Strategic Defence Review (SDR) for 2025 is expected to be published this coming week. It will reveal where the Labour government believes the future direction of the UK armed forces lies. In any strategic audit, crises and conflicts such as Ukraine will loom large, as will the Middle East. But the UK’s overseas territories will also continue to demand policy- and resource-related attention.
Any UK Antarctic strategy will need to grapple with some uncomfortable truths
In the final days of the last Conservative government, a commitment was made to publish for the first time the UK’s Antarctic strategy. Labour didn’t carry forward the pledge, almost certainly because it is focusing on the SDR. They would, however, be wise to consider publishing an Antarctic strategy this year.
For the last seventy years, the UK has enthusiastically supported the internationally agreed 1959 Antarctic Treaty prohibiting any military activity on the continent. This is because it provides a cost-effective mechanism for ensuring that the polar continent is kept demilitarised and largely informed by scientific decision-making and policy development. For many years, this worked well alongside a robust commitment to maintain a military presence in the Falkland Islands to ensure that Argentina was deterred. And yet while the Falklands and the other British overseas territories are separate, with their own distinct local governments, Argentina claims they belong to them. Chile’s Antarctic claim also overlaps with the BAT.
The challenge posed by Argentina in and around the Falklands has waxed and waned over time depending on the presidential leadership in Buenos Aires. What will be a source of concern, however, is the Chagos Islands deal. From the 1960s onwards, local communities in Gibraltar and the Falkland Islands were keenly aware that any apparent concessions on sovereign authority to either Spain or Argentina, respectively, could trigger consequences for other then-colonies.
Creditable deterrence remains a priority for those communities as well. As many Falkland Islanders recall, the decision to withdraw HMS Endurance in 1981 as part of that year’s defence review was perceived as a ‘signal’ that the UK was not serious about its presence in the South Atlantic. A year later, the Argentinian junta launched their full-scale invasion of the Falkland Islands and sought to take over South Georgia as well. Now, post-Chagos, the Falklands will be nervous that Argentina could try its luck once again.
Over in the BAT, if the UK is committed to maintaining its sovereign presence there, it needs to recognise explicitly that this region is changing rapidly. The Antarctic peninsula is warming and becoming increasingly ice-free. This means that third parties, including China and Russia, can operate for longer and more extensively.
In recent months, the UK and other allies have had to confront some uncomfortable realities. China and Russia are increasingly not inclined to support ocean conservation initiatives and China is pushing hard for further exploitation of fish and krill in and around the northern tip of the peninsula. Russia has flagged an interest in the mineral resource potential of Antarctica. All of this is going to place further stress and strain on the consensus-based model that is the Antarctic Treaty system. Argentina and Chile are digging in and remain committed to the southern edges of their national territories. Most unsettlingly, from the UK perspective, the US under President Trump is proving to be an unreliable partner, seemingly hell-bent on slashing its polar science and logistics budgets.
Any UK Antarctic strategy will need to grapple with some uncomfortable truths. Thanks to the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), based in Cambridge, the UK is one of the world’s most preeminent polar science powers with three research bases and two logistical facilities in the BAT. But this requires ship- and air-based support to maintain and support, with the most notable being RRS Sir David Attenborough. The Royal Navy’s HMS Protector, which is prone to breaking down, also supplements this effective presence.
In the next decade, however, this operating environment is going to be more challenging. The Antarctic peninsula will be busier. With that comes the risk of accidents, alongside the danger that rival parties miscalculate each other’s intentions and accidentally trigger escalation.
Deterring China and Russia was never going to be straightforward. China considers the Antarctic to be a strategic frontier, which contributes to its food security and economic advantage. It wants to recast the Antarctic Treaty system from one shaped by American diplomatic power in the 1950s and 1960s to one with a more distinct Chinese look and feel. Russia is a bad-faith actor which is currently trying to dismantle the ability of the South Georgia government to run its fishing licensing operation. Moscow has made baseless accusations about ‘illegal fishing’ and will try to discredit the UK’s claim to running a responsible living resource management.
Maintaining an effective presence in the southernmost UK overseas territories will require a clear-eyed assessment of risk and deterrence. There will need to be a long-term investment programme in science, logistics and manned and unmanned platforms. The BAS will need to work closely with the UK armed forces to ensure that air- and ship-based capabilities are used strategically. Ensuring a safe and effective scientific presence requires investment and vigilance. HMS Protector cannot be expected to travel back and forth between the Arctic and Antarctic. And we already ask a great deal of BAS personnel stationed in UK facilities with long deployments on physically remote Antarctic stations.
China, Russia and the United States have not made a formal claim to any part of the polar continent yet. But that could change in the Putin-Trump-Xi era when the great powers are calculating and negotiating their respective spheres of influence. So far, Donald Trump’s gaze has been northwards rather than southwards. One of those parties might decide to walk away from the Antarctic Treaty in the next three to five years and pursue their own agenda. Britain and allies including the EU, Norway and Australia will need to work hard to ensure that the treaty prevails.
If we want to make sure the UK stays both a polar science superpower and guardian of the BAT, ministers will need to recognise that operational capacity and scientific reach are under pressure in the region. Chile and Argentina are increasing investment in their Antarctic footprint, China is a major polar power, Russia will continue to be disruptive, and no one knows what will happen to America’s Antarctic operations. The government must publish a UK Antarctic strategy without delay.
Is the ‘woke’ movement really over?
‘I was with some doctors last week who said there is no such thing as biological sex.’ It sounds like the rambling of a madman or a drunk, but these words were uttered last week at the Charleston literary festival in East Sussex by Lady Brenda Hale, former president of the Supreme Court. Personally, I would avoid doctors who lack this rudimentary knowledge of the human body. They might start asking me about the regularity of my menstrual cycle.
Wokeness has destroyed lives. Children who are gender nonconforming have been persuaded that they are ‘born in the wrong body’
The ubiquity of wokeness has meant that we have grown accustomed to hearing these kinds of deranging remarks from figures of authority. This ideology was always imposed from the top down against the wishes of a subdued population. A recent study by More in Common found that progressive activists of the ‘woke’ kind comprise as little as between eight and ten per cent of the population, and yet their power is such that medical professionals will spout their hogwash.
It all sounds frivolous, until we consider the full extent of the havoc that this movement has wreaked over the past decade. Wokeness has destroyed lives. Children who are gender nonconforming have been persuaded that they are ‘born in the wrong body’ and put on a pathway to irreversible harm. Women’s rights to single-sex services have been eroded in order to accommodate men who identify as female. Racial division has been heightened in the name of ‘anti-racism’. The principle of free speech has been all but jettisoned by the ruling class, with the UK police arresting over 12,000 people per year for offensive speech. Society has regressed in the name of ‘progress’.
For all that, woke appears to be dying. Of course, commentators have often made the mistake of declaring the ideology to be on its last legs, only to discover that it is a centipede with an indefinite surplus of limbs. Yet there have been too many seismic events that suggest the jig is very nearly up.
The Supreme Court has ruled that ‘sex’ in the Equality Act means a biological reality that cannot be changed with a certificate. The findings of the Cass Review has led to the banning of puberty blockers for children. Major corporations are stripping away their Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives. LGB rights groups are rejecting the parasitical TQ+ that has hijacked and undermined their cause. The death rattles of woke are loud and sustained.
Woke activists will doubtless cling to their precious beliefs like barnacles to the keel of sinking ship. Already, we are seeing various companies and charities openly pledging to ignore the Supreme Court ruling on the Equality Act, groups so captured by ideology that they are willing to break the law.
The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust has pledged to ‘decolonise’ its collections to warn visitors that some aspects might contain ‘language or depictions that are racist, sexist, homophobic, or otherwise harmful’. The NHS is still insisting that toddlers can be transgender.
The title of my new book – The End of Woke – is therefore more aspirational than prophetic. It is possible, of course, that woke will return in a different guise. After all, its practitioners accrued their power largely through shapeshifting and word games. When they called for ‘diversity’, they meant ideological homogeneity. When they called for ‘inclusion’, they meant exclusion of their opponents. When they created their cruel system of retribution known as ‘cancel culture’, they called it ‘accountability’.
Many liberal-minded people were gulled into endorsing these illiberal ideas, but the tricks have mostly been exposed. Debates that would have seemed impossible five years ago are now being held with some frequency. While the BBC has studiously referred to male rapists as ‘she’, and applied a rainbow gloss to the damage being wrought by gender ideology, at last we are hearing the likes of Helen Joyce – Director of Advocacy of campaign group Sex Matters – being platformed on Radio 4. The cries of ‘No Debate!’ from trans activist groups such as Stonewall are now fading.
With the woke in retreat, there is also the possibility that the vacuum may be filled by unsavoury elements on the right. In The End of Woke, I have made the case that the culture war has persisted for so long because it has been widely misapprehended as a conflict between left and right. In truth, there are identity-obsessed authoritarians on both sides of the political spectrum. If my definition of ‘woke’ is accurate – a cultural revolution that seeks equity according to group identity by authoritarian means – there is no reason why this would not apply to white nationalists as much as it does to DEI zealots.
The woke movement was a catastrophe in every respect. We are now staggering through the debris of a culture war that most of us never sought. As we near the end of woke, we need to be vigilant against successive ideologies that will likewise attempt to curb our freedoms. We might not be able to anticipate how exactly the authoritarian instinct will next manifest, but that it will do so is an inevitability.
The End of Woke: How the Culture War Went Too Far and What to Expect from the Counter-Revolution by Andrew Doyle is available now (£25, Constable). You can buy it here
Why is your pension fund so obsessed with net zero?
Legal & General is Britain’s largest asset manager, with over £1 trillion on its books. Every pound it manages should be dedicated to achieving the highest possible returns. This matters a lot: L&G manages over five million pensions in the UK.
But in recent years, the asset manager has been particularly concerned with fashionable causes, instead of being entirely focused on making sure your retirement is secure.
Individuals already fund net zero schemes via their taxes. They should not be forced to pay an effective additional tax, via lower returns, to fund net zero with their retirement savings
That is why I recently attended their AGM. I wanted to learn why the board is wedded to net zero, despite their fiduciary duty to clients, and whether they would consider reprioritising saver returns instead.
At the Q&A I highlighted that US competitors have dropped their net zero ambitions. Most have pulled out of the ‘Net Zero Asset Managers Initiative’ – a consortium of asset managers committed to achieving net zero within their investment portfolios by 2050 or sooner.
L&G – along with most other British pension fund managers – is still committed to this. But their promise to decarbonise their portfolios and to advocate for ‘a supportive policy environment that aligns with the goal of achieving global net zero’ are premised on a net zero consensus that no longer exists.
At the moment, roughly half of the public support either Reform or the Conservatives. Both parties oppose net zero by 2050. It is therefore reasonable to assume, as I told the board, that many with L&G pensions, do not want their retirement outcomes subordinated to the green agenda.
In response, the board told me that its clients want to align with net zero by 2050. Whilst the board acknowledged that complex trade-offs exist, they did not explain what these were. Instead they doubled down, reaffirming their net zero commitment, before asserting that decarbonisation offers stellar investment opportunities.
The problem is that these opportunities rely on government subsidy. Let’s set aside the moral argument regarding investments in rent seeking schemes reliant on a taxpaying base. The reality is that green investments are hugely exposed to policy changes, and so don’t reflect sound financial management.
This was evident in the USA last week as Trump’s tax bill slashed renewable subsidies. The consequence was the immediate crash of renewable energy shares. Enphase Energy, a NASDAQ renewable energy posterchild, had over $1 billion, or 20 per cent, instantly wiped from its valuation.
Compare this to the hydrocarbon industry. Far from receiving subsidies, oil companies in Britain been subject to a windfall tax since 2022. They currently pay a 78 per cent tax. Despite this, they have fared well. Shell for example has outperformed the market, delivering returns of 30 per cent since 2022.
The market mechanism should reward these companies for their success. Instead, the focus by investors on Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) either excludes them entirely, or pressures them into decarbonising. L&G has used savers’ money to vote against both BP and Shell for failing to be sufficiently green.
L&Gs recent Climate Pledge laments that, ‘The pace of transition is neither fast enough nor smooth enough,’ and that ‘inaction is not an option.’
But inaction is and should be an option for the firms managing your pension. Hayek was right: business managers do not manage for their own sake, but on behalf of ‘those who have entrusted [them] with their resources.’ In this case, pension savers.
At the moment, individual pension savers already fund net zero schemes via their taxes. They should not be forced to pay an effective additional tax, via lower returns on their assets, to fund net zero with their retirement savings.
It is for government to pursue manifesto commitments, and for private companies to pursue profit.
Following the L&G AGM, there was a light lunch, during which several individual investors thanked me for raising this issue.
Multiple members of the board also approached me. They asked why I had asked my question and what I would have them do. Again, I urged them to stop blackmailing private companies into decarbonising. I said their net zero goals are out of step with public opinion and that they are violating their fiduciary duty. Some back and forth ensued. The conversation was civil, but the disagreement was clear. They appear to have accepted the orthodox thinking around climate change, that catastrophe looms and all else is secondary.
The irony is, that many of the green investments being made are only possible due to the dirtiest forms of energy. Asset managers praise and invest in China’s booming electric car industry. They rarely acknowledge that it is only booming due to China’s reliance on coal, which results in lower energy prices.
The public increasingly rejects climate alarmism, yet the managerial class embraces it. They are convinced they are saving the world, and the ends will always justify the means. The means, in this case, is imperilling the retirement of millions.
Since attending the AGM, many have told me that they will be selling their L&G shares. They shouldn’t. Instead, they should exercise their rights as owners of the company to demand change. As should anyone else who has a pension with a company obsessed with net zero.
Can you beat The Spectator’s quizzers?
This week, the Spectator Club hosted a quiz night for subscribers – with the ‘Charles Moore’s red corduroys’ team the eventual winners.* The night was such a success we thought other readers would enjoy doing the quiz as well.
There are four rounds of questions below. We’d like to think the questions are fun to work out, and pass the ‘even if you don’t get them, you’ll kick yourself when you hear the answer’ test. If you can beat the winning team’s score we’ll enter you into a draw for a bottle of Pol Roger champagne. Enter your answers here by Friday 6 June.
Round one
1. Which type of pasta was banned from menus for those attending the 2025 papal conclave, because of ancient fears that it could be used to smuggle in notes from the outside world?
2. Which British rock star said in a 1999 interview with Jeremy Paxman that even he didn’t know how to pronounce his own surname?
3. In 1995, a British journalist published a biography of a leading British politician. At the 2005 general election the politican stood down as an MP, while the journalist was elected as an MP. They share the same Christian name. Who are those two men?
4. May 30th was Harry Enfield’s birthday – how old is he now?
5. A report in March 2025 found that recent years have seen a significant drop in children needing surgery after swallowing which item? The item in question historically accounted for 75 per cent of objects swallowed by children, but has undergone a dramatic reduction in everyday use.
6. Between 2002 and 2015, about whom were the following statements made? ‘He appears on high-value stamps in Sweden… he can catch fish with his tongue… he never blinks… he’s confused by stairs… and his left nipple is the shape of the Nürburgring.’
7. Muggsy Bogues, who played for several NBA teams between 1987 and 2001, is the shortest player ever to play in the league. How tall is he?
8. At around midnight on the 14th/15th April 1912, about 425 miles south-southeast of Newfoundland in Canada, some people put some ice in their drinks. Where had that ice come from?
9. James Finlayson was an actor who appeared in 33 Laurel and Hardy films, often uttering a three-letter expression of dismay. In 1988 that expression was adopted, in tribute to Finlayson, by the creators of which fictional character?
10. This musical instrument is played on ‘It’s a Long Way to the Top (If You Wanna Rock and Roll)’ by AC/DC. A quote often attributed to Oscar Wilde states that the definition of a gentleman is someone who can play this instrument, but doesn’t. Which instrument?
Round two
1. This website and app, launched in 2003, had a five-letter name beginning with S. It was closed in May 2025 due to competition from rivals offering the same service. Which site?
2. Which footballer, who played for England between 1996 and 2007, has the first name Sulzeer?
3. June 1 is Jason Donovan’s birthday – how old is he now?
4. A Donald Trump quote, February 2025 – which word is x? It’s a verb. ‘I try and walk off sometimes without x-ing and I can’t. I have to x.’
5. In 2024 the American author Johannes Lichtman commented on his visit to the headquarters of which organisation, saying that its branch of Starbucks is the only branch in the world where staff aren’t allowed to ask your name?
6. Noel Coward was born in 1899 – in which month?
7. Tony Blair wore the same what for every PMQs of his premiership?
8. Which position in the British cabinet derives its name from the pattern on a cloth used to cover a table in medieval England?
9. Until 1981 the band The Alarm were named Alarm Alarm. They decided on the change after John Peel, grouping them with two other bands, said he was wondering if he should start calling himself John John Peel. Which two other bands?
10. In May 2025 it was announced that, in a bid to tackle a shortage of train drivers, the minimum age for the job would be lowered to what?
Round three
1. In February 2025 Andy Murray revealed that after retiring from tennis he tried a sport he’d always wanted to try, but had never been allowed to because of the risk of injury. At the end of his first day he had to be rescued. Which sport?
2. The Princess of Wales was given one of these items as a Christmas present last year, to help her with her gardening. Its name is the third word of four in the title of a controversial 1974 film. Which item?
3. June 3 will be Jill Biden’s birthday – how old will she be?
4. A very few entertainers can claim the title ‘Egot’, having won at least one award at each of which four ceremonies?
5. How did the 20-year-old American Thomas Matthew Crooks make the news in 2024?
6. In January 2025, Rocky Flintoff, the son of Andrew Flintoff, became the youngest player ever to score a century for the England Lions cricket team. He was 16 years, 291 days old when he achieved the feat against a Cricket Australia XI. Whose record, set in 1998, did he beat?
7. Why, in September 2022, did Morrisons turn down the volume of the beeps on their tills … a West London school postpone its Guinea Pig Awareness Week … and Norwich City Council close a bicycle rack?
8. Which song did George Harrison write while sitting in Eric Clapton’s garden on a bright spring morning in 1969?
9. Which country achieved independence from Spain in 1822, and took its modern name from the fact that it lies on the equator?
10. The Serbian version of which British TV show is called ‘No One Thought of That’?
Round four
1. Which three Presidents of the United States were born in 1946?
2. In 2021, who became the first artist ever to achieve UK top 10 singles in six different decades?
3. Which is the only English county whose name contains five consecutive consonants?
4. Winston Churchill’s first speech to the House of Commons as Prime Minister, on May 13th 1940, didn’t actually contain the phrase ‘blood, sweat and tears’. Instead Churchill said: ‘I have nothing to offer but blood, x, tears and sweat.’ Which was word is x?
5. Which 1975 hit single had the word ‘Mongolian’ in its working title, but replaced it with another four-syllable word?
6. June 4 is Angelina Jolie’s birthday – how old will she be?
7. He was a Conservative MP between 1992 and 1997. In 2000, when he was created a life peer, he chose, as the place to go with his title, Ranmore in Surrey. Although this wasn’t a deliberate joke, many people commented that Ranmore was very appropriate. Who are we talking about?
8. The last ever case in Britain of a woman suing a man for breach of promise to marry was in 1969. The woman bringing the case was 19 year-old Eva Haraldsted, described by one magazine as ‘an au pair with the emphasis on pair’. The man she sued was 23 and very probably the most famous man in the country. Who was he?
9. Colonel Gaddafi named his yacht after which 20th century revolutionary leader? Diego Maradona had a tattoo of him, as does Mike Tyson.
10. Which British man, born in 1967, once said of his younger brother that he is ‘a man with a fork in a world of soup’?
*Charles Moore has clarified that he does not own, and has never owned, red corduroy trousers.
Disposable vapes are fantastic. Naturally, they’re demonised
Forty a day for forty years – that’s a hell of a lot of cigarettes – but je ne regret rien. I loved smoking. But note the past tense because, eventually, for all the clichéd health reasons you can imagine, I had to give up. Despite always knowing it was a matter of life or death, I dreaded packing it in. Smoking has been so much part of my persona for decades; I just couldn’t imagine life without puffing away. All the usual smoking cessation options didn’t work, from gum to patches, Alan Carr to NHS counselling. Until eventually, on the recommendation of no less than two NHS doctors, I tried disposable vapes. Miracle upon miracle, they worked. And I am now a happy chain vaper.
At last, I thought, I would stop being demonised for my bad habit. I have endured years of sanctimonious lectures from public health policy-wonks about how the dangers of tobacco meant smokers could be treated as pariahs, which – by the way – made giving up even less attractive. Who wants to succumb to bullying nanny state interference? Smoking was and is a personal choice, and in a free society we should be allowed to indulge in a legal bad habit, however risky or unhealthy. However now, newly virtuous as an ex-smoker, I imagined that at last I might get a pat on the back for being responsible.
How naïve. The modern state can’t help itself. It simply has to regulate and interfere in people’s personal choices. Never mind the public health benefits of vapes that have helped millions of people to stop smoking, DEFRA now finds them ‘extremely wasteful’. Disposable vapes are apparently a potential litter hazard and ‘blight our towns and cities’. Forget the real blight of derelict high streets, homelessness, boarded-up shops, widespread crime – the government’s focus is on disposable vapes.
Last October, when the government announced a forthcoming ban on 1 June, Mary Creagh, DEFRA’S Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Nature and ‘the circular economy minister’ (eh?), justified the prohibition as helping to ‘accelerate the path to net zero and create thousands of jobs across the country’. Which is a stretch when we are all waiting with bated breath for a growth strategy that will actually accelerate meaningful employment.
Meanwhile, when it becomes illegal to sell or supply disposable vapes, Trading Standards enforcement officers will have powers to seize non-compliant products, give out compliance notices and fines of £200, with serial offenders facing criminal charges, including unlimited fines or a prison sentence of up to two years. But as convicted criminals are being released early from prison, and enforcement of laws already in place to deal with black market cigarettes, are to say the least, patchy. This surely means scarce resources are being spread far too thinly. And for what?
The main aim of the ban seems to be to deal with environmental waste i.e. to reduce litter. An estimated five million disposable vapes were thrown away every week last year. So yes, I know many people do get very annoyed about unsightly discarded colourful plastic tubes on pavements. But for goodness sake, a whole range of less punitive solutions could have been explored; from special vape disposal bins to deposit schemes (each empty vape could mean £1 off next purchase or whatever) rather than deploying the whole paraphernalia of the state to deal with a minor waste issue, on a par with empty coke cans, crisp packets or – dare I say it – Waitrose sandwich wrappers. And if the Government are really worried about unseemly detritus on our streets, maybe it might tackle councils that have halved their bin collection service, creating domestic mounds of overflowing garbage, (please don’t blame Birmingham’s litter mountains on vapers).
What’s more, the whole scheme seems to be a waste of time because if policymakers had done any kind of cost / benefit analysis (or just used common sense) they’d know that vapers will buy the technically compliant new refillable, rechargeable vapes and won’t bother fiddling around with replacement pods and recharging. Who wants to have yet another device to remember to charge? They’ll be thrown away, effectively becoming disposable, and that’s because one of disposable vapes’ big attractions is they are easy to use and there’s no faff.
The truth is that the creator of disposable vapes should have been awarded a public health innovation award. Finally, a smoking cessation device that works for smokers. Instead, his invention is vilified, and we seek to ban it in order to tick some environmental box. At what cost? In one poll of UK vapers, almost a fifth said if they couldn’t get hold of disposable vapes, they’d go back to smoking.
So, it’s shocking that anti-smoking lobbyists like Action on Smoking and Health (Ash), not only support a legislative move that threatens to hinder smokers giving up the evil weed, but they say that the ban doesn’t go far enough. Indeed, ASH’s CEO Hazel Cheeseman urges the government to make use of powers within the Tobacco and Vapes Bill to clamp down further. The numpties in parliament are happy to oblige, promising an especially egregious ban on flavoured vapes.
In the House of Lords Second Reading debate, it was argued that these are especially wicked because they are designed to appeal to the young, as if only children like brightly coloured, sweet things. Have ministers not noticed the exponential rise in the flavoured gin market for adults? As I argued at the time, research shows that 65 per cent of adult vapers find fruit and sweet liquids preferable, often because they don’t want to be reminded of the taste of tobacco that they are quitting.
So, as we speak, like other vapers, I am stockpiling strawberry and banana disposables and predict the growth of a massive black market, or an uptick in smoking. And all because governments of all shades seem to be addicted to interfering with legal behaviours, carelessly indifferent to whether civil liberties – or indeed our health – go up in smoke.
No, Zoomers: life wasn’t better before the internet
Almost half of 16 to 21-year-olds wish they had grown up without the internet. A similar portion are even calling for a social media curfew, with a quarter wanting phones banned in schools, according to research from the British Standards Institution. Really? The truth is that Zoomers – those born between 1997 and 2012 – don’t know how lucky they are to have come of age during an era in which they had access to the web.
The truth is that Zoomers don’t know how lucky they are
While my own generation of Millennials were early guinea pigs for Facebook, Twitter and – for the connoisseurs out there – MSN Messenger, much of our teenage lives remained firmly analogue. Having first snuck online to the sounds of a dial-up connection, my recollection is that life before the internet was often quite dull. Many teenagers today blame their woes on social media and smartphones. But teenagers have always been quite capable of being listless, alienated and angsty, even before Silicon Valley started designing algorithms to monetise it.
Yes, modern technology has its problems. Too many young people waste time scrolling through social media. But there is no doubt in my mind that life with the internet is better than it was before. It has given us more experiences, more opportunities and even more life – literally so, in the case of Tinder babies.
Consider the luckless fan of vintage Korean dramas in the nineties, struggling to watch the shows and unable to find likeminded enthusiasts in his town. The internet has solved both these problems, making what was once esoteric commonplace, opening more and more to the masses.
The privations suffered before the internet are almost shocking to recall. Only five TV channels? Book selections controlled by Waterstones and the local library? New music flitting briefly across the airwaves, later lost in an obscure corner of HMV? It was no way to live.
Nor is the internet merely a glorified bazaar for clueless tourists. Much as people love to mock the creator economy, it is an incredible achievement to have equipped a majority of the world’s population with a printing press, recording studio and video camera, and the ability to distribute the results globally. The means of production are already being liberated.
So why do we continue to malign the online world as a Wild West, a swamp of AI slop stalked by Russian cyber gangsters and flooded with fake news, pornography and scenes of ultraviolence? The conventional reading, championed by the likes of psychologist Jonathan Haidt, is that we can’t look away because the technologists have become too adept at stealing our attention.
It’s true that the techies are experts at distraction. But fundamentally the problem is not technology. It’s our inability to manage its downsides. When half of BSI’s Gen Z survey respondents call for a social media curfew, we should be asking them why they cannot impose one on themselves.
No doubt there is social pressure to engage, and no cohort in life is more conformist and biddable than the young. Every teenager wants to fit in, and a lot of that fitting in now happens on Instagram, Minecraft or whatever else the kids are into these days. We can and probably should blame the parents, the schools and even society that so many struggle not to open the app, start scrolling and hit the post button.
But these groups didn’t fail because they allowed the internet to exist; they failed because they have not taught the younger generation that they must deal with the downsides. You can delete your account, hit the gym and lawyer up, to quote an old internet phrase. You can take responsibility for your own life.
The alternative is a world nobody wants. Whether it was checking the weather through Ceefax, flicking through a recipe book to remind ourselves how to make an omelette, or going to a travel agent to book a trip to Poland, people switched to the newer technology because it is better.
As Wikipedia will tell you, the Wild West era did not conclude with the Americans falling back to the East Coast to protect themselves. Instead the pioneers tamed and domesticated the new territory, which stretched out all the way to Santa Clara in California. Had they sounded the retreat, Silicon Valley would not have been invented. And you would not be reading this.
Israel faces a brutal choice
For months, Israel has faced a relentless barrage of criticism over its conduct in Gaza – from western governments, UN agencies, and media outlets that once claimed to be her allies. Central to the condemnation are the humanitarian circumstances: civilian suffering, limited aid access, and Israel’s temporary obstruction of some relief efforts. What has gone largely unreported, however, is that the bold new strategy in place may now be altering that equation entirely – a direct aid delivery mechanism, led by American contractors, that is not only reaching civilians more effectively but also weakening Hamas from within. You would never have guessed from the way some world leaders have condemned it.
For years, aid to Gaza flowed through Hamas-linked channels. The results were predictable. Supplies were diverted, skimmed, taxed, or hoarded by Hamas and resold at inflated prices. The very system intended to alleviate suffering ended up financing the terror group’s entrenchment and violence. According to Israeli journalist Amit Segal, Hamas made roughly one billion shekels – approximately $274 million or £215 million – from humanitarian aid in the first few months of the war, when international pressure forced Israel to allow supplies through Hamas-controlled networks. This sustained its ability to wage war even as its fighters were being decimated in the field.
This paradox had far-reaching consequences. While Israel was eliminating Hamas battalions, it was also being pressured – particularly by the Biden administration – to allow humanitarian supplies into Gaza through Hamas-controlled networks. The White House throttled arms transfers unless Israel complied, and humanitarianism became a lever of coercion that prolonged the war by helping Hamas maintain its grip.
This was always clear for all to see: during ceasefires, up to 600 aid trucks entered Gaza daily, yet the prices of basic goods continued to climb. Far from easing scarcity, the influx allowed Hamas to manipulate the economy and further exploit its population. Under normal conditions, abundance reduces prices. In Gaza, abundance was turned into a racket.
That is what makes the new model so significant. Under this system, designed and implemented with American oversight, aid is distributed independently of Hamas. In the first 48 hours alone, six million meals were reportedly provided through just three of eight planned distribution centres. Prices dropped by an estimated 35 per cent. Food aid is being distribute properly, for free, for the first time since the conflict began. Hamas meanwhile has not paid its fighters for months, and its grip on the streets appears to be slipping.
Within days, some Gazans began storming Hamas storage sites, with several being shot and killed by the terrorists in response. Public anger spilled into view. In one widely shared video, a Gazan man offers a searing indictment:
All of Gaza took food. Hamas tells us not to go to the Americans. May the Americans be blessed – they give us flour and food. Osama Hamdan is in Qatar – he’s full and goes to sleep with air conditioning… and he tells us to stand firm. Hamas, surrender and get out of here! Look at what Hamas has brought us to. Bless Trump. Trump is feeding us while Hamas is starving us. Thank you, Trump. Osama Hamdan, come here, sit with us, starve with us, die with us. Osama Hamdan, we want the war to stop. Those who are negotiating on our behalf have no idea what we’re going through. They’re eating kebab and lamb and have no sense of what’s happening to the starving people of Gaza.
These rare glimpses into how Hamas is losing the confidence of the population it claims to represent should not be ignored. If the new aid model continues to prove successful, it will do more than feed civilians. It could finally fracture Hamas’s hold on power and accelerate the end of the war on terms that at least don’t guarantee future violence.
And yet, the very agencies tasked with helping Gazans – most notably elements of the United Nations – have opposed this shift. They claim it undermines established procedures. But what those procedures preserved was a Hamas-managed economy in which aid was bartered for loyalty. Their resistance appears less about humanitarian outcomes than about defending institutional turf and relationships with a regime that enabled their access. They are acting like a mafia, displaying a brazen disregard both for Israel’s security and the welfare of people in Gaza.
The international community must ask itself: should humanitarian aid serve civilians or entrench terrorists? The old model left that question unanswered. The new one makes its priorities clear.
Still, none of this guarantees a swift or clean end to the conflict. There are many variables and possible outcomes. Hamas still holds dozens of Israeli hostages and has little incentive to release them all. Israel must resist ever more shrill demands for a so-called ceasefire if its terms would leave the jihadist Islamic terror group Hamas in place to rearm, regroup, and repeat the cycle. Hamas has rejected the offer anyway, even when some consider it a de facto surrender to the Palestinian terrorists. And the hostages are Hamas’s last line of leverage. They will not relinquish them all willingly. Any pause that halts Israeli momentum without dismantling Hamas risks freezing the conflict in place, as has happened repeatedly for decades, condemning the region to endless future wars.
Israel now faces a brutal choice. It can yield to a manufactured global outcry – or it can stay the course. That will mean withstanding a torrent of diplomatic pressure, media hostility, and moral posturing from capitals far removed from the battlefield. But if this strategy continues to work – if it truly fractures Hamas’s power – then Israel must endure the opprobrium, however bitter. The hysteria may eventually pass, giving way to a more sober acceptance of a new, pragmatic balance of power, security, and dignity. The alternative is not peace. It is paralysis.
The long-term beneficiaries of Hamas’s defeat will not only be Israelis, but potentially Palestinians as well. A Gaza no longer held hostage by jihadist rule could finally begin the long journey toward recovery, accountability, and perhaps one day, a different future.
That outcome is not assured. But for the first time in years, it appears possible.
Zelensky is in an impossible position
The Ukrainian president said this week he hopes the war will end by next June. Not this summer. Not this year. But in 12 months’ time. Sanctions, he believes, and four years of gruesome war will finally hit the Russian economy, pushing it into a deep budget deficit. The IMF’s latest forecast sort of backs this up. Russia’s GDP growth is set to slow to 0.9 per cent next year, down from over 4 per cent in 2024. Most of Russia’s workforce is already employed and its central bank’s key interest rate is at 21 per cent. Still, for many Ukrainians, Russia’s downfall feels like yet another fairy tale.
They’ve heard it all before. In the first days of the full-scale invasion, Ukrainians were told it would be over in ‘two to three weeks’. And when those weeks passed – again, ‘two to three weeks’. Russia’s stockpiles had almost run out of missiles, Ukrainians were told. It was comforting to believe, to cling to the hope that the nightmare would end soon. But when a year passed, trust in these soothing predictions began to wane. The President’s office stopped spinning fantasies. Until now. Volodymyr Zelensky is once again promising Ukrainians something he cannot deliver.
Yet few blame him. In fact, Zelensky has made clear just how much humiliation he’s willing to endure to bring peace closer. He’s agreed to everything Donald Trump demanded, including the minerals deal and an unconditional ceasefire. He’s shown up to peace talks in Istanbul while Vladimir Putin stayed home. He’s handed over Ukraine’s peace memorandum to Moscow and will send a delegation to Turkey on Monday to resume Kremlin-scripted negotiations. Zelensky knows Putin is playing with him, sending a low-level delegation for peace talks while launching a major summer offensive on the front line. Putin believes he can still win and is doing everything to ensure the peace meetings are meaningless.
Zelensky has no choice but to play along. Trump is watching. It might be naive to believe Trump can still be swayed on Ukraine’s side, but Zelensky must keep trying. With Trump back in charge, Ukrainians find themselves in something out of Orwell’s world where they must prove they didn’t invade Russia and that they aren’t the obstacle to peace. This is the absurd reality Zelensky must operate in, but the American President remains the best and probably the only chance to end the war on anything resembling fair terms for Ukraine. No one but him can pressure Putin to stop the killing, implementing crushing sanctions if Russia refuses to play the ball, even though the chances of that happening are dimming after each ‘beautiful’ phone call Trump has with Putin.
What else can Zelensky do? Accept Russia’s terms and surrender Ukraine’s sovereignty? Order a withdrawal from Zaporizhzhia and Kherson – cities Putin claims, but didn’t manage to capture? Zelensky knows doing so would be to betray the sacrifice of tens of thousands of Ukrainians who fell for their country and possibly ignite civil unrest. It would have been an easy choice if public opinion favoured such a deal with Russia, but 79% of Ukrainians, according to the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology, consider Putin’s demands for a ceasefire as categorically unacceptable.
So here he is, six years into the job, trapped by the sham talks with Russia, allies’ indecisiveness and the war that has no end in sight. Whatever deal eventually emerges, it will carry his signature, his name, become his legacy. That’s the weight Zelensky is bearing: to find a way out as soon as possible, without betraying everything his people have bled for.
Tommy Robinson and the truth about jail beards
When Tommy Robinson walked out of prison this week, he was unrecognisable. The far-right activist, who was jailed for contempt of court, was sporting a huge bushy beard as he emerged from HMP Woodhill. Robinson looked more like a man who had been marooned on a desert island, or lost in the mountains, than someone who had spent a few months in a Category B prison in Milton Keynes.
Robinson’s prison beard made me think of my own. When I was locked up at HMP Wandsworth, I grew a beard even wilder than Robinson’s. For the first six months in prison, I didn’t touch my facial hair, letting it grow and grow as the fat fell off me, until I looked nothing like my prison ID photo. Eventually I looked so different that I had to ask the prison officers for a new ID card.
For all his faults, Robinson is a master self-publicist
For all that my beard made me look dishevelled, I was comforted by my facial hair. It set me apart from the younger men in prison. In Wandsworth, aged 37, I was one of the oldest on my wing. Prison is a young man’s game, with most criminals growing out of crime before they reach middle age. The beard emphasised my age, I suppose, and helped me wear the role I took on of a cheerful, helpful, and fatherly figure.
Was Robinson hoping that his beard might send a similar message to his social media followers? It sounds trivial, but when men decide to let their facial hair grow, they are often intending to send a message or mark a change in their lives.
When Robinson was released, his beard didn’t last long. ‘From hobo to hero. The man is back!!!!,’ tweeted Robinson following a trip to the barbers on the day he was released.
My beard lasted rather longer. I decided that I wanted my facial hair to serve as a symbol that I was a new man. I had lied and committed a fraud. I had been sent to prison, and deservedly so. If I had any chance of redemption, I knew that I needed to change. My beard would show that I was a new man.
Eventually, after six months in prison, I asked a man named Charlie, who lived on the same corridor as I did, to use just a pair of clippers to tidy me up. He did so with incredible precision. I tried not to think about the life he’d taken with a blade. The pandemic put an end to these haircuts. But as lockdown abated and things once again ‘opened up’, I was able once again to get my hair and beard tidied up.
I relished those trips to the prisoner-staffed barber shop. It felt like normality after being cooped up in my cell. When I walked from where I slept to the barber, and when having my hair and beard cut while looking in a mirror, I thought about how much I’d hated haircuts as a child, and how grateful I felt for one now.
By that point, I was a few months away from release. Soon I’d be allowed ‘town leave’, then ‘home leave’. I planned to see a woman I thought I loved. Now I wanted a beard which she’d like, not one to convey age and wisdom to other men. That’s why, unlike Robinson, I left prison with my beard groomed and neat. I suppose I also wasn’t planning to give a press conference. I didn’t need to play the prophet for the cameras.
Beards have long been associated with wisdom. Perhaps Robinson wanted to show the world, and his supporters in particular, a visible sign of all he had endured, in what his supporters claimed was ‘solitary confinement’ but was, in fact, nothing of the sort. Maybe Robinson thought his beard would make him look wise? Was it an attempt to be seen as a prophet, returning to his people?
For all his faults, Robinson is a master self-publicist. When he appears in front of the camera, he knows what he is doing. His beard made him look dishevelled, but it was no accident: he was trying to send a message to his followers that he had been cast away by polite society. His followers lapped it up.
Where have all the Japanese tourists gone?
Is the Japanese tourist, for so long in good numbers a welcome and reliable fixture at our most famous tourist spots, now in serious decline? The number of Japanese travelling abroad is still well down on pre-Covid times and with government data just released revealing that fewer and fewer Japanese even hold a passport, the slump could be prolonged, which would be disastrous for the UK tourism and hospitality industry.
According to the Japanese government, only around 17 per cent of Japanese adults currently hold a passport, a significantly lower rate than the US and UK (50 and 85 per cent respectively). It seems the Japanese are less and less inclined to travel. The reasons are not difficult to identify but quite hard to address. They fall into two categories:medical (or perhaps psychological) and financial.
According to the Japanese government, only around 17 per cent of Japanese adults currently hold a passport, a significantly lower rate than the US and UK
The first is the legacy of the Covid restrictions that for a while returned Japan to its exclusionary Sakoku period of splendid isolation. The physical barriers are gone but the mental ones remain. A walk around central Tokyo will reveal a considerable percentage of people still wearing masks, a habit taken up around five years ago and now, it seems, hard to kick (‘What’s with all the masks?’ was the first observation of a colleague who visited me recently). It doesn’t take much to spook the almost pathologically risk averse Japanese and the belief, especially prevalent amongst some of the old (who have most of the money) that foreign travel means the risk of exposure to deadly pathogens, seems unshakeable. In a 2023 survey, a third of Japanese cited Covid as a reason for never travelling again.
It’s not just the old, though. Younger people have been put off too. According to the Japanese Association of Travel Agents, three years of border restrictions significantly dampened the wanderlust of the young. The millions who should have been catching the travel bug at an impressionable age have been led to believe that travel is a risky, expensive and selfish endeavour. That last refers to the societal disapproval Covid wrought: bring back some infection along with your souvenirs and you face the risk of the ultimate Japanese nightmare, ostracism.
Then there is the ‘weak’ Yen. This has been touted as a reason for the boom in inbound foreigners and the decline in outbound Japanese. But it is perhaps somewhat overstated, a bit of a lazy cliche. In my 25 years in Japan I’ve known the currency to be significantly weaker than it is now, so perhaps it is more the depressing economic sclerosis of Japan and higher prices than the actual exchange rate that is the real problem. The spectre of unemployment (Nissan laid off 20,000 employees recently) looms large.
Whatever the causes, the consequences of this gradual withdrawal are serious. Numbers are now down so much in the Cotswolds (80 per cent) that the region’s tourist board are said to be in ‘panic mode’. Japanese tourists are spending an estimated £12 million less than a just a few years ago according to the ONS. Guided tours tailored for Japanese tour companies and etiquette lessons have been organised in an attempt to arrest the decline. It had better work, as it’s not clear what else will. No one in Japan has heard of Jeremy Clarkson (Clarkson’s Farm doesn’t really translate).
The Japanese government is concerned by the increasingly stay at home proclivities of its citizens, as it has long promoted efforts to better internationalise the workforce. And airlines are worried about what is becoming an increasingly lopsided destination (full planes into Japan, half full out).
There has been talk of government action and incentives such as free passports for the young and an uncapping of the limits placed on expenses for class trips, though if previous attempts by the Japanese government to influence lifestyle choices are anything to go by (boosting the birth rate, cutting long working hours) it is unlikely to have a great effect. The Japanese can be stubbornly un-nudgeable.
The real answer may lay elsewhere, with the service providers. Arguably the international hospitality industry has taken Japan tourists for granted for years. A recent example of this took place at the Osaka Expo where at the British pavilion visitors were asked to hand over 5000 yen (£25) for ‘Afternoon tea’ which consisted of two small rather miserable looking scones and a paper cup with a tea bag. After criticism went viral, the British hosts apologised and upgraded the service.
A little more care and attention then, a little courting, might be in order. There are signs this is understood by some in the sector. The Japanese themed Prince Akatoki hotel in London with its focus on hospitality, atmosphere and well-ness is one example; the proliferation of Japanese street food (onigiri) outlets another. And if Rachel Reeves could be induced to drop the utterly self-defeating tourist tax (a big issue here in Japan), we might be getting somewhere.
But I definitely won’t be holding my breath on that one.
What’s wrong with using Xenon to climb Everest?
Reaching the top of the world and returning to London within a week without so much as stopping for a coffee in Kathmandu sounds like the stuff dreams are made of. But on 21 May 2025, four former members of the British special forces turned this dream into reality when they stood on the summit of Mount Everest four days and 11 hours after leaving the UK. Their secret was to inhale Xenon two weeks prior to the climb, a gas well known to anaesthetists, but so far unheard of in mountaineering.
When I climbed Everest in 2009, I remember thinking that the World Anti-Doping Agency would have a field day at base camp
‘Although Xenon has worked well in clinical studies, it is very rarely used for patients in the UK. It is expensive and complex to administer with no significant benefits over established agents,’ says Dr Mike Grocott, a professor of anaesthesia and critical care medicine at the University of Southampton. This gas has now rocked the mountaineering world – leaving government officials, climbers and doctors scrambling to make sense of it.
In January, when the Financial Times broke the story of using Xenon for Everest, a bold bizarre-sounding innovation from Austrian expedition operator Lukas Furtenbach and German anaesthetist Dr Michael Fries, it sparked instant controversy. Even the International Climbing and Mountaineering Federation released a statement solemnly reminding the world that ‘the ethics and style with which we climb and the environmental and social considerations’ still matter. It was an earnest sentiment and frankly, a surprising one. Having followed Himalayan mountaineering for over two decades through my work for the Himalayan Database, I have seen those ethics being gradually thrown out of the window. Purists may cringe at the mention of Xenon, but the truth is that we have always had aids to perform better at altitude. Even the legendary 1953 expedition, which crowned Tenzing Norgay Sherpa and Edmund Hillary as the first people to stand atop the world, relied on what might be considered a rather significant performance enhancer called ‘bottled oxygen’ which effectively lowers Everest’s altitude from 8,848m to around 6,500m. It wasn’t until 1978 that Austrian Peter Habeler and South Tyrolean Reinhold Messner proved that Everest could be climbed without supplemental oxygen. Since then, a mere 195 people have followed suit, which is a sliver of the roughly 7,400 who have reached the summit wearing a mask.
So why the outrage over Xenon? ‘People seem to struggle with innovation and change,’ says Furtenbach whose Everest clients have pre-acclimatised in hypoxic tents since 2016. He argues that a faster ascent is actually safer. Less time spent at high altitude means lower risk of frostbite, hypothermia, acute mountain sickness or a serac collapse in the treacherous Khumbu Icefall. Not to mention the environmental benefit of fewer people milling around base camp for weeks – meaning less human waste is left behind.
Perhaps the real issue is the transparency. Unlike others, Furtenbach and his team have been open about Xenon. When I climbed Everest in 2009, I remember thinking that the World Anti-Doping Agency would have a field day at base camp. The sheer volume of substances being popped or injected behind thin tent walls was already mind-boggling, and yet, nobody batted an eyelid.
Now, suddenly, the climbing world seems to be up in arms. Xenon has sparked not only outrage but an official investigation by the Nepal government into the ethics and legality of the method. What seems to have escaped their attention is that the gas wasn’t administered in Nepal, but in a specialised clinic in Germany. Still, officials have gone so far as to consider withholding summit certificates from the four Brits.
But if that’s the new standard, should we also deny certificates to the hundreds who reach the top each year using bottled oxygen? As South Tyrolean mountaineering legend Hans Kammerlander once put it, ‘Climbing Everest with supplemental oxygen is like riding the Tour de France on a motorbike.’
One of the government’s other objections is that Xenon might harm Nepal’s tourism industry by cutting short climbers’ time in the country. But that could be a miscalculation. If anything, Xenon could entice more people to attempt Everest – whether or not that’s a good thing is another debate entirely. After all, those willing to drop €150,000 on the full Xenon package, once it’s fully off the ground, rarely have the luxury of time. And if a handful of high-speedsters are added to the mix, it’s hardly a loss for tourism – more likely a modest gain.
As Professor Grocott points out, Xenon is unlikely to revolutionise mountaineering and will, at most, remain a fascinating side story. In the end, how one climbs the mountain is a personal choice. What matters is doing it with respect – for the peak, for its dangers, and for the people who call it home.
Why shouldn’t vegans be catered for in an apocalypse?
You know you’ve arrived when professors start thinking about how to look after you during a major emergency. As a vegan, I was thrilled to read in the Times this week that Professor Tim Lang, a professor of food policy, has told the government that us meat-dodgers must be catered for in any ‘food apocalypse’.
Speaking at the Hay Festival, Lang said that if a cyber attack or military strike from Russia destroyed Britain’s ‘vulnerable’ food chain, the contents of ration packs would need to bring comfort to a shaken public. We’d all be ‘in psychological shock’, he explained, so we’d need to have food that we’re ‘familiar and comfortable with’. In the face of ‘explosions’ and ‘energy outages’ he wouldn’t want vegans to ‘have to eat meat’. Well, if mushroom burgers are on the menu as the mushroom cloud goes up, then I’m feeling better about Armageddon already.
Once you’ve decided to stop supporting all that brutality, there can be no turning back
Lang’s remarks are just the latest step in veganism’s move to the mainstream. Over the past seven years a plant-based revolution has put what was once a fringe lifestyle much more centre stage. Supermarket shelves and restaurant menus offer plenty of vegan options, and awareness is growing about the horrors of factory farming, the negative effect that the meat industry has on the climate and how eating processed meat is bad for our health.
The numbers reflect all this: in 2014, vegans made up just 0.25 per cent of the UK population, but a study found that 6.4 per cent of UK adults plan to follow a vegan diet this year – that’s an estimated 3.4 million people, including the 2.1 per cent who were already vegan.
Obviously, this has rather unnerved meat and milk bosses. The industry body Dairy UK has spent many years and lots of money trying to ban plant milk companies from using the word ‘milk’ in their marketing, and meat companies desperately want to ban the use of ‘sausage’ or ‘burger’ terms on plant-based products. Goodness, someone’s feeling threatened!
But it’s not just companies that turn into snowflakes when they hear the word ‘vegan’. As the media has covered the topic more, Piers Morgan has repeatedly goaded vegans, partly because he knows that they can be easily riled but more because he understands that lots of meat eaters feel so guilty about eating animals that they’ll cackle with relief when he mocks those bloody vegans who unsettle them.
Let’s be real: aside from the factory farm and slaughterhouse bosses who make money from the meat racket, the only reason to be even remotely threatened by vegans is that secretly you know we’re right. If you ask anyone whether they’re opposed to cruelty to animals they’ll say yes, but the fact is that every time you buy meat or dairy, you’re supporting horrific cruelty to animals.
The facts are simple: more than 92 billion land animals are killed each year for their meat, usually at a tiny fraction of their natural lifespan. Around 85 per cent of the UK’s farmed animals endure their truncated lives in horrific factory farms. Most pigs are killed in gas chambers. Many male chicks are tossed into grinders by the egg industry and dairy cows have their babies torn from them after birth.
Once you’ve decided to stop supporting all that brutality, there can be no turning back, even during a major disaster. So thank you, Professor Lang, for including vegans in your plans for when it all inevitably goes tits up. I’d still basically prefer it if the world didn’t end, but if I can toast a catastrophe with a glass of oat milk, maybe it won’t all be as bad as I thought.
Israel is going too far
I have kept my silence on the Middle East for ten years. I left Israel in 2015, after five years as British ambassador, as the first Jew in the role. Since then, I have turned down every request to be a talking head. Neither the world nor my successors needed another ex-ambassador pundit.
But I now feel obliged to break my silence, just once, to say that the Israeli government’s treatment of the Gazan population is both wrong and self-defeating. And that it is not anti-Israel or pro-Hamas to say that withholding humanitarian aid is not the answer.
The situation is the opposite of straightforward. It is not just that there are no easy answers; there may be no answers of any sort. The Israeli position is impossible. Israel has been provoked by her enemies and patronised by her friends in equal measure.
And yet. The right answer is never to withhold humanitarian aid from two million people. The right answer is never to let children become malnourished as a matter of state policy, if not by intent, then by inevitable consequence of intended actions. It is simply wrong to traumatise and retraumatise the people of Gaza by making them flee repeatedly at short notice as part of a military campaign. These are clear, simple truths.
Many of my friends will find this hard to hear. They will have a set of powerful objections.
The first is that the blame for this sits with Hamas, not Israel. It is true that the attack Hamas launched on 7 October was a hideous atrocity, and an affront to humanity. Hamas remains a grievous threat to Israel. There must be no equivalence between Israel and Hamas. Hamas is a brutal, authoritarian terrorist organisation. Israel is a democracy, subject to the rule of law. Israel is our ally.
But however culpable Hamas may be, Israel has agency and choice in how it responds. The UK has given Israel strong support as it mounted its response to 7 October, understanding that it had no choice but to respond with overwhelming force, and knowing that this would come with painful consequences for the people of Gaza. But there must be a point beyond which our support cannot continue. Even for our allies. Even after 7 October.
The second objection is that Israel must get its remaining hostages home. By taking hundreds of hostages, Hamas created for Israel an impossible choice – sue for a deal with Hamas to get the hostages back alive, or fight to destroy Hamas. Netanyahu has tried to find a third option – fighting Hamas to get the hostages back. But the tragic evidence of the past year and a half is that this does not work. Eight hostages have been rescued by the IDF; 135 have been released in ceasefires. Israel has not escaped the appalling options created by Hamas. The current military campaign is not the best way to bring the hostages home alive.
The third objection is that there is no other way to tackle Hamas. And it is surely true that Hamas is the most pernicious of enemies – hiding itself among the civilian population of Gaza, using hospitals and ambulances for cover, shamelessly diverting aid to its own pockets and projects. All of its actions show a cynical determination to sacrifice Palestinian lives for the greater cause. Hamas knew exactly what Israel’s response would be to 7 October. They welcomed it.
I have long been wary of explaining to Israelis how to fight their battles. Israelis have learnt to disregard the well-meant but naive advice of self-described ‘critical friends’ who cannot possibly understand Israel’s state of permanent existential threat. Us lecturing Israel about the need for peace goes down as well with them as Americans lecturing Britain about Northern Ireland used go down with us.
I’m a proud Brit and Jew who hates what’s happening to the people of Gaza
But I struggle to see how the Israeli government’s current approach can lead to a lasting solution to its Gaza problem. I cannot see a viable exit strategy, the vanquishing of Hamas, and a route to a viable post-conflict stability. And I cannot see how peace is brought closer by withholding humanitarian aid, destroying all of Gaza’s infrastructure, and keeping the entire Gazan population in a cycle of fear, grief and flight.
So what can Israel do? It knows that withdrawal will lead to Hamas rebuilding. It knows that Hamas will exploit anything coming into Gaza, from food to concrete. Israel has tried withdrawing from Gaza. The outcome was Hamas takeover, and years of rocket attacks followed by 7 October. Israelis know from experience that they cannot rely on international peacekeepers to protect them, who collapse like an umbrella at the first sign of trouble. It is fantasy to think that a moderate Palestinian Authority can be inserted back into Gaza to take control. It is even more of a fantasy to think that the residents of Gaza can be moved to neighbouring countries, leaving Gaza empty.
So what is left? There are no good choices here. The least awful for Israel may be a combination of withdrawal, working with moderate Arab states to rebuild Gaza and restrain Hamas, and continued targeted strikes against Hamas personnel and facilities.
But the absence of good choices still does not make it right or sensible to let children in Gaza become malnourished. The destruction of hope and the accumulation of grievance in Gaza will not serve Israel’s security any more than it will lead to peace.
This is not siding with Hamas, as Netanyahu has claimed. It is possible both to despise Hamas and its indifference to the suffering of the Palestinians of Gaza, and to say to Israel, our ally, that withholding humanitarian aid from those same people is not something we can tolerate.
None of this is to pander to those who hate Israel, who are now comfortable in their own occupation, that of the self-declared moral high ground. One of the saddest outcomes of all this has been the growing conviction among the bien pensants that this is a simple morality tale, with our democratic ally playing the part of the villain. Things have got muddled when crowds in London cheer for the Houthi rebels, whose slogans include ‘death to America, death to Israel, curse be upon the Jews’; when feminist groups exclude the victims of 7 October from their principle of believing women who say they have been raped.
It is not anti-Israel or pro-Hamas to say that, despite the impossible situation, withholding humanitarian aid is not the answer.
And one final point. Gary Lineker said recently that ‘the real heroes are the Jews who have spoken out against [Israeli action]’. Thanks, but no thanks. I don’t need anyone to tell me I’m being a good Jew or a bad Jew. I’m a proud Brit and a proud Jew who loves Israel, and hates what’s happening to the people of Gaza. I don’t need anyone’s approval or permission for that.
Can Scotland learn to love Farage?
There’s not much that’s green in Larkhall, Scotland. So staunchly Protestant unionist is the ex-mining town in South Lanarkshire that it has scrubbed itself of anything associated with Irish Catholicism. The local Subway franchise has grey panelling on its front, and local pharmacies have opted for blue signage. The 15,000-strong area has one football team: Rangers FC. Go deeper into Larkhall’s suburbia and you’ll find Union Jacks on flagpoles interspersed with those bearing the Red Hand of Ulster. Kerbstones have been painted in the colours of the British flag while rumours abound of youths trying to set fire to the grass. ‘In our schools, the wains aren’t taught that traffic lights are red, amber and green,’ one resident chuckled proudly. ‘It’s red, white and blue.’ He was not joking. Some unsuspecting emerald lights were subjected to £17,000 worth of damage many years ago, and they remain boxed off by wire mesh to this day.
It is in this town, as well as in neighbouring Stonehouse and Hamilton, that voters will head to the polls on Thursday 5 June to choose their representative in the Scottish Parliament, following the passing of SNP incumbent Christina McKelvie in March. The first Scottish by-election in six years is just 11 months out from the 2026 Holyrood poll and the result will set the tone for the next year of campaigning.
Each party faces significantly different challenges from the last time voters went to the ballot box. The SNP is on its third leader in as many years, after Nicola Sturgeon – who commanded an impressive personality cult for over a decade – was briefly implicated in an embezzlement scandal. Scottish Labour experienced a brief spell of euphoria after its UK counterparts won a thin supermajority last summer, before remembering that mid-terms never tend to benefit the incumbents. And Nigel Farage’s Reform party has seen a surge in Scotland that has surprised even its own leadership.
In any other year, the constituency would have been Labour’s to lose. The last election result saw McKelvie take 46 per cent of the vote, while her opponent, Labour’s Monica Lennon, was a distant second on 33 per cent. Since then, however, the party of government has dropped about 14 points in the polls, while Scottish Labour has only wobbled by one or two. This would put the two parties neck-and-neck, and after 18 years of SNP rule – never mind the havoc that both Operation Branchform and Humza Yousaf’s leadership wreaked – the reds would have been on course to overturn McKelvie’s 4,500 majority. But with the addition of the unknown quantity that is Reform, there is a widespread but broadly unspoken nervousness in Scottish Labour that their worst fears may soon be realised: that the polls suggesting Farage’s party could become the official opposition in Scotland are accurate.
Reform’s ambitions have grown after a recent run of good news. Pollsters have suggested that Reform could elect around 15 MSPs to Holyrood, making Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar’s dreams of becoming first minister less and less likely. But Reform has more to celebrate than projections: a series of recent by-election successes show that the party is gaining traction north of the border. In the Clydebank Waterfront council by-election earlier this month, Farage’s candidate came second to the SNP on 26 per cent of the vote – taking support from both the nationalists and Labour – while the group made gains in council polls across Glasgow at the start of the year. Deputy leader Richard Tice jetted up to Hamilton last week to tell reporters: ‘This is now a two-horse race between the SNP and Reform.’
In Larkhall, he is right to be confident. Here, I find former SNP, Labour and Conservative voters who are all – bar one who won’t vote – backing Farage’s party this time around after feeling let down by the SNP’s lack of delivery and Labour cuts. I meet the Reform-curious George and Cliff in the Village Tavern by the station. (It is frequented, coincidentally, by Sarwar’s cousin – not that this makes the two men any more amenable to Labour.) George, who is a 62-year-old landscaper, tells me of his struggles to find younger employees now. ‘They want to work the system, not come to work,’ he notes cynically, pointing to the generous payouts given to the unemployed and long-term sick. The conversation segues into immigration. Scotland may be facing a population crisis across many of its rural and island towns, but the degree to which Britain’s borders matter in the country’s central belt should not be underestimated. ‘I’m not racist,’ Cliff caveats quickly, ‘but I feel like a minority nowadays when I go into Glasgow.’ George is a little more restrained. He nods to the growing numbers of Turkish barbershops in the area and makes comments about Poles. ‘I’m not fussed as long as they contribute,’ he shrugs.
While Reform is gaining momentum, Labour insists that talk of Farage’s party leapfrogging into second place are overblown
The sense of injustice runs deep. The town has a rich mining history and was once a Labour heartland, but the area has its fair share of deprivation and its hard-working residents feel they’ve been let down by successive governments both north and south of the border. As ever, Keir Starmer’s winter fuel payment cuts provoke a strong response – and despite the Prime Minister’s announcement of a partial U-turn last week, news of the reversal hasn’t permeated much. Now, with both the SNP and Reform promising to ditch the two-child benefit cap and universally reinstate the winter fuel hand-out, Labour finds itself on the back foot. And it’s not just the party’s UK leader that is facing the wrath of Larkhall’s voters: Scottish leader Anas Sarwar inadvertently burnt bridges with the country’s voters after he claimed during a televised general election debate last summer: ‘Read my lips: no austerity under Labour.’ ‘I mean, who is he kidding?’ 59-year-old Cathy snorts incredulously. ‘We’ve had nothing but cuts and tax rises since Starmer came in.’
The working class, unionist elements of Larkhall make it the perfect territory for Farage’s party. In their Hamilton headquarters, Reform organisers show me their ‘war room’: a draughty office tucked away just off the high street kitted out with turquoise merch, colourful flyers and a huge whiteboard across which a blown-up map of the constituency is stretched. Reform’s canvassing material attacks both the SNP’s record in Scotland and Labour’s in Westminster – suggesting, despite Tice’s previous assertion, that the party still sees Sarwar’s crowd as competition. Its candidate Ross Lambie is a former Tory councillor who defected in March – an experience that was dampened slightly when Tice, during interviews with Scottish journalists, forgot both Lambie’s name and the council ward he represented. Voters don’t care about these kinds of oversights though, Lambie assures me when we meet in Hamilton: ‘I’ve had a really positive response on the doors.’ It’s not all been plain sailing, however: Farage and Sarwar remain in a spat over ‘racist’ Reform campaign material that suggested the Scottish Labour leader’s party will prioritise Pakistani constituents.
While Reform is gaining momentum, Labour politicians insist the projections that Farage’s group could leapfrog them into second place are overblown. Deputy leader Jackie Baillie has talked up her candidate’s credentials, pointing out that Davy Russell is well-known in the area and a local success story for Hamilton. This doesn’t explain why the party has rather curiously kept him away from media appearances: Russell announced last week he would not appear in a televised election debate ahead of polling day and he was the only frontrunner not to be interviewed on BBC Radio Scotland. ‘He’s not good on broadcast,’ one insider confided. ‘We’d rather take the hit for not putting him up.’ Scottish Labour’s reluctance to showcase Davy has got some activists privately complaining about why he was picked in the first place. And while Starmer hasn’t been seen in the area, the suggestion that the UK party isn’t fussed about this by-election is immediately shut down. ‘Morgan McSweeney literally lives in the constituency,’ an activist retorts, in a nod to the Labour strategist’s wife being the MP for Hamilton and Clyde Valley.
While the area is of historical significance to the nationalists – it was the 1967 Hamilton by-election that delivered the party its first Westminster MP in the form of Winnie Ewing – and McKelvie was popular among parliamentarians and constituents alike, the SNP’s current candidate is hardly a lucky charm. This will be councillor Katy Loudon’s third shot at contesting an election in two years after she lost the 2023 Hamilton by-election to now-energy minister Michael Shanks and then lost again in 2024. That most pollsters reckon the SNP will clinch victory here is testament to the stickiness of the nationalist vote among pro-independence supporters and the unpopularity of Starmer’s policies, rather than any real political gains made by the party of government.
Ultimately the most interesting feature of this election will be where Reform places – and by how much it will cut into both the SNP and Labour vote. While Reform’s surge north of the border has so far proven beneficial to the SNP, it isn’t in the nationalists’ interest to see the right-wing party gain much more support. For now, it’s the unionists who have most to fear from Farage – but as his group begins to eat into Scotland’s Yessers, the SNP will soon be forced to concede that not even it can hold off the Reform threat for long.
Who will stand up for swingers?
Is there any intrinsic problem with sex parties? Of course not. At least, not for those of us who believe in the liberal tenet of living and letting live. This tenet has been put to the test by recent events at Belair House, a Georgian pile in subdued Dulwich. Hired last month by the company Heaven Circle, which puts on ‘naughty events’, including ‘online parties’ (you can join with face blurred or wearing a mask), the event at Belair was very much offline, with 2,000 condoms provided, a naked fire show, plus ‘500 candles, 500 roses, two DJs, THE BIG BED, three playrooms, five performers, one shibari artist, one Domme, 2,000 condoms and 60 toys,’ according to the company’s Instagram post. Shibari is the Japanese art of knot-tying.
Many neighbours, unsurprisingly, were appalled. Belair House, a pleasing six-minute stroll from Nigel Farage’s alma mater, Dulwich College, is more usually used for children’s parties and weddings. The East Dulwich Forum, an online message board, rippled with rage, and Dulwich council was bombarded with complaints.
‘I’ve noticed these sex events happening in the last few months at a place that’s supposed to be a restaurant and venue,’ snapped a resident called Michelle. ‘I was planning my wedding there and was appalled by the set-up for those events. When I discovered what was going on, I was disgusted by how they were using the same rooms as “playrooms” where families are supposed to eat. The hygiene and safety concerns are just unacceptable. They’re destroying a sacred, Grade II-listed building, and it’s just not right. The owners need to be held accountable for their actions. It’s time for us to stand up and protect our heritage and ensure that these spaces are used appropriately, especially when they should be serving families and the community.’
With reactions like these, it is no surprise that Sage Waterhouse, the beautiful young minx who runs the parties, finds London less progressive than it thinks it is. ‘There are certain presumptions about the swinger lifestyle that are very misunderstood and negative, and so often when we approach a venue we’ll just get a flat no,’ she said. Belair House, she says, was different: ‘lovely [and] the owners of the property have nothing against us.’
Indeed, the angry of Dulwich are behind the times. Kink is no longer something you shamefacedly reveal to a long-term partner in the hope that they don’t leave you, screaming in horror. If anything, it’s more likely to be the reverse – those who are too vanilla may be ditched for spicier types. Sites like Feeld, ‘the dating app for open-minded individuals’, used to be a niche offering for those with insatiable sexual fetishes; now it’s how you find your future husband.
‘For many people, sex parties have shaken off their seedy image,’ says Chris Haywood, a Newcastle University reader in masculinity studies who studies sex clubs. The number of known physical swingers’ clubs in the UK has increased dramatically since the turn of the millennium. A recent Cosmo guide to ‘sex clubs for IRL and URL fun’ in Britain is an exhausting read. But there does seem to be demand for clubs like the franchise Killing Kittens (where only women can make the first move), Klub Verboten, which is about ‘self-expression and alternative forms of human interaction’, and the even more didactic-sounding Joyride, founded by ‘sex educator’ M.J. Fox and described as a ‘queer, sex-positive, south London-based party that strives to be a non-intimidating entry into the world of kink’.
Killing Kittens claims to have 180,000 online members and Heaven Circle insists it has 114,000 members. The woman-led trend is building. ‘My best party was a “sorority party”, just for women, where I arranged a nude ballerina and a human fruit table,’ says Waterhouse.
If Dulwich didn’t like it, how will the Home Counties feel? ‘We’re looking at venues in Surrey and Hertfordshire,’ Waterhouse warns. To repeat: however furious some of the responses, there is nothing wrong with any of this, given that it is consensual and doesn’t, for instance, incite violence or terror. People are meant to leave smiling. Nobody is meant to be hurt in any way they don’t fantasise about.
And yet I can’t imagine anything more tiresome than a modern, out ’n’ proud sex party. As an outlet for the exceedingly dreary rise of lefty kink, one can anticipate all the cringe-making exposition that must precede any action – the permissions, the announcements, the pronouncements, the foreshadowing. Far from unbridled eros, the whole thing is really an airless anatomical lesson in how to be ‘open-minded’ for, one suspects, people incapable of enjoying sex on its own steam – for the reasons it’s always been enjoyable. This contemporary confusion of ideological eroticism with real sex is mournful and, as the more traditional sex-enjoyers surfing the queasy waves of dating apps will know, very depleting to contemplate.
And a sex party in Dulwich? I don’t care how game and open-minded you are. Topping off the arduous ordeal of embarrassment that such a gathering would be for me, the trek back to north London would be the nail in the coffin of enjoyment. I am pleased for those of my fellow Londoners who can enjoy being tied up while having wax poured on them in a posh Georgian pile. It’s quite the feat – and more power to them. The truth is that I like sex as much as the next Hampstead-adjacent Milf. But I would not in a million years abandon Netflix for such a marathon, even if it means a lifetime of wondering what it’s like watching a fire show naked six minutes from Nigel Farage’s old school.