The complexities of our colonial legacy

It happened by accident. In 1829 the naturalist Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward was trying to hatch a moth pupa. He placed it in a sealed glass container, along with some soil and dried leaves, and set it aside. Sometime later he was surprised to find that a fern and some grass had taken root in the soil, despite having no water. As Sathnam Sanghera writes in Empireworld, the discovery ‘revolutionised the logistics of international plant transportation’. Suddenly there was a means of securely transporting seeds and seedlings across vast distances.

Empireworld is a sequel to Sanghera’s wildly successful Empireland. Where the latter examined the legacies of empire in Britain, this book seeks to apply that template to the world. What, then, do glass containers have to tell us about global imperialism? One result of Ward’s discovery was that Britain was able to transplant the cinchona tree, native to South America, to its colonies worldwide. Cinchona bark contains quinine, an alkaloid which prevents malarial fever; and it was quinine, together with the steamship and the Maxim gun, Sanghera writes, that enabled the late 19th-century conquest of Africa by European powers. Before that, much of the continent was simply too deadly. A European arriving in Mali had a life expectancy of four months.

But the new global live-plant trade also spread pestilence: some 90 per cent of invertebrate pests in Britain today arrived that way. Imported diseases ravaged imperial plantings; one fungus alone destroyed £2 million’s worth of coffee plants in Ceylon in 1869. Ward’s discovery then, was both a triumph and a disaster. As such it is a useful metaphor for Sanghera’s central argument, which is that trying to balance out the impacts of British imperialism by weighing ‘good’ against ‘bad’ is futile. It was both. In Empireworld he attempts a more subtle reckoning, travelling to former imperial territories such as Barbados, Nigeria and Mauritius, as well as examining issues such as humanitarian aid and the rule of law.

In places, Sanghera writes with power and eloquence. One chapter, ‘The Colour Line’, is recommended for anyone who doubts that racism played a part in British imperialism. Also thoughtful are chapters on ‘economic botany’, touched on above, which saw Britain transplant flora, such as rubber trees and tea plants, across the empire to exploit them commercially – with devastating environmental and economic consequences – and on Mauritius, which discusses the issue of indentured labour.

Sanghera’s travels are a mixed bag, however. Exploring ideas of legacy involves an assessment of the present, and it is a shame he didn’t interview more experts on the ground – politicians, historians and academics – for more nuanced local perspectives. In his discussion of Nigeria, reliance on a limited range of sources results in imperialism being held responsible for everything from kidnapping and corruption to distrust of the nation’s law enforcement agencies.

He is also disinclined to engage with arguments that accord agency to peoples post-independence, writing: ‘If even half the things which academics identify as imperial legacies are direct imperial legacies… that’s a startling quantity.’ This is perilously close to the ‘balance-sheet’ history he otherwise deprecates, and it assumes historians’ conclusions to be more definitive than they are. Perhaps the concept of ‘legacy’ itself, which both begs for an evaluative reckoning and demands a precisely measurable chain of cause and effect, is part of the problem.

Sanghera’s discussion of the rule of law, meanwhile, surprisingly sidesteps the large, systemic legacy issues, not least the role of the so-called Anglo-Saxon legal systems in maintaining the structures of global capitalism, in favour of a focus on homophobic legislation and historic injustices during the Raj.

Ultimately, Sanghera concludes that the British Empire ‘resists simplistic explanations’ and should be seen primarily as ‘an incredibly complex mass of contradictions’. If the book’s arc is towards complexity, however, it still sweeps up too many simplistic judgments along the way. It takes just one paragraph, for instance, to make British imperialists the fons et origo of all today’s instability and violence in Kashmir, Iraq and Myanmar.

Reflecting on some of the conflicting legacies he has identified, Sanghera writes that it is ‘better to simply accept slavery/anti-slavery, destruction/preservation of animals/nature as phenomena in their own right and attempt to understand their complicated stories’. This is an important insight which – not least because it seems at odds with the premise of the book – merited further exploration. Empireworld is in part a plea for constructive dialogue about the Empire’s continuing influence on the lives of people both here and abroad. Reframing that as an exploration of historical phenomena in which the empire is merely one participant seems a different conversation entirely.

Overall, the book is too piecemeal to function as a history of Empire. It works best as a lively narrative of Sanghera’s ongoing encounters with imperial history’s messily irreducible complexities. I hope he continues his journey.

Sisterly duty: The Painter’s Daughters, by Emily Howes, reviewed

The painter in the title of Emily Howes’s first novel is Thomas Gainsborough, famous, of course, as a great portraitist – ‘the curs’d face business’, as he once called it – and landscape artist. His daughters by his wife Margaret were Molly and Peggy, immortalised in half a dozen double canvases by their father. These family pictures allow us to intrude upon the sisters’ special intimacy as we follow their development from carefree girls playing in their native Suffolk to their emergence as fashionable young women in Bath and London society.

One of these paintings of the girls, edged about with the anxiety of a father, fearful for their safety, shows them aged six and five against a Suffolk landscape. Molly, cast as protector, is restraining her younger sister from chasing a butterfly that is about to land on a thistle. Much later their roles were reversed. Molly, following a brief and unhappy marriage, subsided into madness, leaving Peggy to care devotedly for her sister as they lived out the rest of their lives as genteel ladies of limited means.

The relationship between the two women offers an ingenious premise for a novel and it’s one that Howes seizes and exploits for all it’s worth. In her fictional retelling, Molly’s mental instability is evident – to Peggy at least – before they reach their teens. Ultimately it’s this secret that keeps the two sisters inseparable. Peggy, known in the family as ‘the Captain’ because of her bossy ways, struggles to hide Molly’s condition from her scolding, socially ambitious mother and loving but distant father, for fear that her elder sister will be sent to an asylum. Towards the end, Peggy feels betrayed when she and Molly fall for the same man, the celebrated German oboist Johann Christian Fischer, and she recognises the personal sacrifices she is making in her attempts to control her sister’s fate.

Told from Peggy’s point of view, the vibrant narrative leaves little to the reader’s imagination as Howes delves beneath the surface of Gainsborough’s portraits to discover stories and incidents that are infinitely less poised and lacking in restraint than their painted representations. Given Gainsborough’s reputation for being dissolute, did he have an affair with one of his sitters, the musician Ann Ford? Howes believes he did, and plausibly portrays him as being in love with more than just Ford’s viol da gamba.

Less successful is a secondary strand probing the paternity of Gainsborough’s wife. Howes’s Margaret talks about ‘the secret of my lineage’. It’s commonly accepted that Margaret Gainsborough was the illegitimate daughter of the Duke of Beaufort. But Howes, in chapters that obtrude upon the main narrative, airs the theory that Margaret was in fact the child of Frederick, Prince of Wales, the father of George III. It’s unlikely that there’s any truth to this, but in any case the story bulks too large and mars what is otherwise a most beguiling debut.

Wishful thinking: Leaving, by Roxana Robinson, reviewed

One evening, a man and a woman who haven’t met for decades bump into each other at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. It’s a familiar tale, but one to which Roxana Robinson brings many twists in her highly enjoyable latest novel, Leaving.

Sarah and Warren were childhood sweethearts in a suburb outside Philadelphia. Sarah was uncertain, made biddable and cautious by cool, judgmental parents. Warren was bold and full of ambition and crazy-sounding dreams. They proved too much, too threatening, for the timid Sarah and she married a man she thought a safer bet. It turned out to be a mistake. Rob, who has electric blue eyes and an intimate manner, skitters from one improbable career to the next. They have two children, a boy, Josh, and a girl named Meg. When they divorce, Sarah retreats to her house in Maine. She joins the board of a museum, for which she arranges exhibitions. She has a dog, her closest companion.

Warren also marries and has a daughter, Katrina, who works in the design world in Boston. But while Meg is loving, if complicated, Katrina is wilful and exacting. The supposedly unreliable Warren turns out to be rather responsible, and sets up a successful architectural practice, his boyhood fantasies folded into an absorbing working life. His marriage, however, is bleak.

Sarah and Warren are now in their sixties, and this is a novel about affection between older people; but that is just one aspect of it. Their new relationship is not about age but about love in all its ageless forms – the happiness and delight it brings, the anguish and trouble it causes. Katrina is a young woman focused on her own desires, casually intent on the selfish destruction she is able to cause. 

Leaving deals with the intricate play between expectation and achievement, the trade-off between adventure and security, the pacts people make to get through life. It paints a painful, touching picture of the endlessly complicated, endlessly fascinating relationship between mothers and daughters, fathers and daughters, and the terrifying ruthlessness of human beings. No one has ever written better about infidelity and the break up of marriage than John Updike in his short story collection Your Lover Just Called. But in Leaving, Robinson has captured all the sadness, poignancy and resignation of loss. Anyone who has ever been left, has ever left someone, who has a daughter or perhaps even just a dog, will find in it an echo of their experience.

The English were never an overtly religious lot

Generalisations about national characteristics are open to question. Nevertheless, the overwhelming impression one gets from reading the major works of English literature, or from studying the famous English men and women of politics, the military or the academic world, is that the English have not been an especially religious lot. Or, if you think that a strange judgment of a nation that produced the finest Gothic cathedrals in Europe and the hymns of Charles Wesley, then you could rephrase it and say that they have not generally worn their religious feelings on their sleeve. Jane Austen’s hilarious novels do not quite prepare us for her letters in which she confesses her sympathy for evangelicalism. The novels are not only wonderful; they seem the quintessence of what we would like to think of as English.

Shakespeare describes almost all the emotions except the religious. Isabella in Measure for Measure is almost the only overtly religious character in the entire oeuvre. Dickens was in favour of Christmas and being kind, but his Life of Christ is really a bit of secular sentimentalism.

Undeterred, Peter Ackroyd has undertaken to tell the story of the English soul. Inevitably, therefore, it omits Shakespeare and John Locke and Dickens and William Cobbett. It is not a continuous narrative but a series of thumbnail sketches of some of the figures in English religious history, starting with the Venerable Bede, taking us on a breezy tour of the medieval mystics Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe, and whizzing through the cast list of Archbishop Laud, George Fox, John Bunyan and Cardinal Newman before we reach the 20th century.

Ackroyd wrote a brilliant book about T.S. Eliot, whose Four Quartets were written when that austere American had become not merely a British citizen but a self-confessed monarchist and Anglo-Catholic. Surprisingly, neither Eliot nor his Christian witness get a mention. There is a chapter on C.S. Lewis and G.K. Chesterton, preceded, in an odd chronological twist, by Richard Dawkins. And then we round off the story with three theologians: Bishop John Robinson, of Honest to God fame, John Hick and Don Cupitt. None of them, surely, is of sufficient merit or weight to be placed in a book with Richard Rolle or William Blake. And where is that great English churchman Dr Johnson?

Ackroyd’s novels – especially English Music, The House of Doctor Dee (perhaps his masterpiece) and his bizarre fantasy Milton in America, in which he transports the author of Paradise Lost to the colonies – are true evocations of the English soul. They also retain what is, or was, a huge part of Ackroyd’s personality when he was out and about in London, before retreating into his anchorite’s cell near Harvey Nicks – namely, humour. His biography of Thomas More is the best. His book on William Blake is completely wonderful.

It is in the context of contemplating Ackroyd’s near genius in these earlier books that I dare to express a bit of disappointment in this one. In the acknowledgements, he thanks research assistants, and, although I am sure they have done their best, there isn’t much in The English Soul that you could not get from clicking in and out of the relevant Wikipedia entries on Wesley or the Diggers. In fact, because the book jerks hastily from one subject to another, it feels more like the experience of looking up names in Wikipedia than like reading a book.

Before Ackroyd wrote his novels, he was also a poet, and it was with a poet’s skill that he evoked, in his fiction, the spiritually bizarre. How glorious it would be if he regarded the sketches which make up this book as work in progress towards his own Four Quartets.

Will Keir Starmer ever learn to loosen up?

Tom Baldwin declares at the outset: ‘It’s only fair to warn those hoping to find these pages spattered with blood that they will be disappointed.’ Fair enough. This is not an authorised biography, but it is a friendly one, written with Keir Starmer’s co-operation. Baldwin briefly worked as Labour’s communications director, and then was asked to help Starmer with his autobiography. They did several interviews, but Starmer always had reservations and finally pulled the plug last spring. Instead, he agreed that Baldwin could write this book, using some of the material he had already gathered, and that he would assist him with contacts.

Starmer is always reluctant to talk about his childhood but Baldwin has winkled out a lot. Both his parents sound remarkable. Jo, his mother, was a cheerful soul even though she had been diagnosed with Still’s disease – a particularly severe form of rheumatoid arthritis – when she was ten and told that she would not be able to walk or have children. She not only walked; she climbed the Lake District fells and had four children (Anna, Keir and the twins Katy and Nick) within four years of marriage. While Keir was growing up she was often hospitalised, and he remembers when he was 13 his father ringing from the hospital and saying Jo was not expected to pull through. But she did, and died only nine years ago, just before Starmer became an MP.

Rod, his father, was devoted to Jo but not particularly affectionate to his children. He never praised Keir, who was surprised to learn after Rod’s death that he had kept a secret album of press cuttings about him. A dour, taciturn man who worked all day as a toolmaker, came home for tea and then worked some more, he demanded silence at mealtimes so that he could read his paper. Starmer rushed to his bedside when he was dying in 2018 but still never had the heart-to-heart conversation he longed for.

They lived in Hurst Green, Sussex, in a modest pebble-dash semi (it sold for £455,000 in 2021) with a field at the back which they later turned into a donkey sanctuary. It was quite a squash. Keir shared a bedroom with his brother Nick, who had learning difficulties. They also had four dogs, because the children were each given a dog for their tenth birthday, and they all packed into the family Cortina when they drove to the Lake District for their annual holiday. Jo loved going there, even when she had to be pushed up the fells in her wheelchair, and became friends with Alfred Wainwright, the author of the fellwalker guides, who sent her postcards when she was in hospital.

Keir was the only one of the children to go to grammar school – Reigate – and then to university – first Leeds, then Oxford, to read law. He specialised in international law and human rights and was one of a group of 30 progressive barristers, led by Geoffrey Robertson, who moved out of Temple to set up their own chambers in Doughty Street. One of them, Helena Kennedy, said: ‘We’d all fight to have Keir as our junior counsel. He was brilliant, crystal clear, very meticulous.’ And he fought for two and a half years, pro bono, to defend the McLibel Two against the great weight of McDonald’s legal team. His 30 years’ work as a civil rights lawyer and then DPP earned him a knighthood, and he remembers his father asking one of the Buckingham Palace flunkeys to hold their dog while he attended Keir’s investiture.

He had at least three long-term relationships but never showed any inclination to marry until he met Victoria Alexander, who was then a solicitor but now works for the NHS. He found her ‘grounded, sassy, funny, streetwise and utterly gorgeous too’. Most of their early courtship was conducted in north London pubs, but then they went on holiday to Greece and he proposed. They married in May 2007 and had their first child, a boy, the following year and their daughter in 2010.

Starmer was already in his fifties when he decided to become an MP, hoping to be appointed a minister under his friend Ed Miliband. But then David Cameron won and he found being in opposition frustrating. He told Baldwin: ‘I have achieved less in opposition than at any other period in my life. It is noise but not change.’ He was increasingly upset by the growing anti-Semitism in the party under Jeremy Corbyn (not least because his wife, though not practising, is Jewish and they occasionally take the children to synagogue). When he won the Labour leadership in April 2020 he said that one of his first tasks would be to stamp out anti-Semitism, and he showed he meant it when he withdrew the whip from Corbyn. They have not spoken since. Now that he seems in sight of No. 10, his main worry is the effect on his family. Vic is reluctant to leave Kentish Town and his daughter says she won’t go.

Baldwin achieves his purpose of making Starmer seem more likable and less boring than expected. Decent, dogged, compassionate, incredibly hard-working, his worst fault according to his friends is that he is so buttoned-up. He can be warm and spontaneous with people he knows, but he seems to freeze in front of the cameras. Andrew Sullivan, who was at school with him, says: ‘I almost don’t recognise him when I see him on TV.’ Angela Rayner admitted: ‘Keir wouldn’t be the first on my list for a karaoke night.’

The only thing I find off-putting about him is his passion for football. He goes to see Arsenal whenever he can and still, aged 61, plays eight-a-side matches at weekends and sometimes five-a-side during the week. When he was laid up with a knee injury last year, he still insisted on organising his team’s fixtures (just as Jimmy Carter was still managing the White House tennis court rota when he was president). I fear he suffers from the dangerous delusion that football keeps him in touch with real people. He should be reminded that there are quite a few real people – often women, gays and ethnic minorities – who don’t share this great bonding experience. I was glad to learn that Rachel Reeves thinks football ‘very boring’.

There was nothing remotely pleasant about a peasant’s existence

If we are to remember peasants, we need a definition. Here is an imperfect but workable one. A peasant is a person working on the land in return for a bare subsistence. Patrick Joyce’s peasants are smallholders making just enough to feed their families and pay the rent in a normal year. They are people without status, tied to the land even if they are legally free. They occupy the lowest place in society, people with no ambitions and no future, who come into the light of history only when they revolt against their condition, as they frequently do. Historically, there have been peasants who did not fit this mould. There were rich peasants, like the well-fed revellers in a Brueghel painting. But Joyce’s image is a harsher one: the exhausted, calloused men and prematurely aged women painted two centuries later by Jean-François Millet.

From the earliest agricultural settlements, some 8,000 years ago, most of mankind have been peasants. Yet in barely a century they have all but vanished. As recently as 1950, only a fifth of the world’s population lived in cities. Today 60 per cent do. The figures for Europe are even starker. France was once the greatest peasant country on the continent, but today only 3 per cent of the population is employed in agriculture. In the former communist countries of eastern Europe the same transformative changes have been compressed into just three decades. Where have the peasants gone? To the cities, to industry and services.

Curiosity about this dying world is not new. In Ireland, the government-funded Folklore Commission, founded in 1935, spent 35 years collecting information and recording the spoken recollections of the last generations to follow the old way of life. In Poland, museums of peasant life have sprung up like mushrooms after rain since the collapse of communism. In southern Italy, a sanitised, theatrical version of peasant life is played out at festivals.

Joyce’s Remembering Peasants is not a history, although there is history in it. Nor is it an ethnographic treatise, although the author has made extensive use of academic literature on peasant societies. It is certainly not a compilation of folklore or a cabinet of picturesque curiosities. It is really an ode, an elegiac lament for the passing of a distinctive way of life. But it is also something more personal, as the subtitle suggests: an act of veneration for the author’s own family, who were peasants in western Ireland, most of them eventually driven by poverty from the land to earn a living in the docks, shipyards and factories of Britain and America. ‘The dead belong to us and we to them,’ he writes, ‘and a moral bond is established.’

Joyce’s focus is on Ireland, and in particular the corner of Ireland from which his family comes. He draws heavily on his own autobiographical work Going to My Father’s House, published in 2021. If he glances over his shoulder at other countries, mainly Poland and Italy, it is usually to point out analogies and to demonstrate the basic sameness of peasant life everywhere.

Yet the problems of Ireland’s peasantry were in many ways unique. Ireland was John Bull’s other island, geographically and politically dependent on England and yet separated from it by a gulf of mutual incomprehension. Peasants constituted the great majority of Ireland’s 19th-century population at a time when they were fast disappearing from urbanised and industrialised England. They were Catholics at a time when Protestantism was very much part of the identity of the rest of the British Isles.

The attitude of the Irish peasantry to land was alien to English ways of thinking and to English common law. In law, land was owned by freeholders and occupied by tenants under leases in return for rent. But in popular sentiment it was a tribal inheritance of the clans who worked it. The fact that a large proportion of land in Ireland belonged to Protestant absentees who treated it as a mere source of income underlined the difference. That shrewd French observer Alexis de Tocqueville, who had travelled in Ireland, observed that the tradition of liberal aristocratic government which in his view had made England strong and rich, also accounted for the irredeemable failure of everything that they did in Ireland.

Conflicts over the occupation of land explain why Irish nationalism was strong among a basically conservative peasantry, in contrast to, say, Poland and Italy, where nationalism was a middle-class movement to which peasants were indifferent or hostile. The Victorians woke up too late to the scale of the problem, and the issue ultimately destroyed the union with England. Successive Land Acts from 1870 onward broke up the great estates and enabled freeholds to be bought out for the benefit of tenants. As a result, in the space of 60 years the proportion of Irish land owned by those who farmed it rose from 3 per cent to 97 per cent. It was a dramatic change, driven by political necessity. Yet, ironically, although peasants were among the intended beneficiaries of these schemes, they sounded the death-knell of peasant farming. The emotional tie between families and the land that they worked was broken as land became a marketable commodity.

Inevitably, there is a political undercurrent beneath much of what Joyce writes. He bitterly criticises the agents of the peasants’ destruction. What he calls the ‘Third Agricultural Revolution’ has generated a huge agribusiness sector in which most of the world’s food is grown in a handful of countries and brought to consumers by a few vast corporations, crushing small farmers and dislocating local markets. Joyce hates the picturesque images of peasant life confected for tourists, and the museums of ethnography offering an ‘experience’ of the past instead of the means of understanding it. He laments our rootlessness and inability to connect intelligently with our past. He resents the capitalist model in which everything is monetised, a model which has displaced the conventions of peasants’ life.

These are the reflections of a political radical, but their implications are profoundly conservative. It is hard to believe that Joyce really regrets the way of life of his forebears. He was born in England and became a professor of history, a destiny unimaginable in their eyes. The truth is that the world his parents left behind was a horrible place: a world of grinding poverty, of ignorance, oppressive religiosity and enforced conformity, cramped horizons, casual violence, drunkenness, bullying and exploitation by fellow peasants and neighbours as well as landlords and employers. Capitalism may be soulless. The money economy is anything but picturesque. But the Third Agricultural Revolution, however impersonal, feeds a world in which many millions were once condemned to routine starvation. England is surely better off for having had no peasants since the 18th century, and modern Ireland is immeasurably happier for having confined its peasants to museums.

The making of Good Queen Bess

In the course of British history there have been few royals with a childhood as traumatic as that of Elizabeth I. She endured the torment of her mother Anne Boleyn’s execution, her father’s death, the comings and goings of four stepmothers, sexual abuse from a stepfather (who was executed soon after), the death of a half-brother, imprisonment and the death of a half-sister before finally acceding to the throne. All this by the age of 25.

Not many could cope with such a relentless identity crisis. Throughout her young life, Elizabeth veered from sole inheritrix to the crown to hated bastard child. One moment she was championed as a shining example of piety, the next scorned as the bad seed of a notorious concubine. ‘How haps it yesterday Lady Princess and today but Lady Elizabeth?’ she would enquire, perplexed at the constant change of status.

She had barely known her parents, but their shadows defined every aspect of her life. Her half-siblings, Mary and Edward, were her closest family, yet in different ways they were a threat to everything she stood for. Her upbringing was a blur of governesses, stepmothers and tutors. By the end of it, Elizabeth trusted no one. What would a modern therapist make of all this? What kind of woman – what kind of queen – would this tumultuous youth produce?

That is the question Nicola Tallis addresses in her latest book. Through a rigorous dissection of primary sources, she investigates the princess’s life up to her coronation in 1559. It is familiar territory for the author, who has published biographies of Lady Jane Grey, Lettice Knollys and Margaret Beaufort. ‘I have written about extraordinary women before,’ she writes, ‘but Elizabeth goes beyond the extraordinary.’ Of course, finding a new take is the challenge. Elizabeth’s is an oft-repeated tale, rewritten and reworked in books and on the screen, but Tallis’s eye for the captivating detail keeps the appraisal fresh.

Young Elizabeth is also an exhausting read, as we lurch wildly from triumph to heartache, betrayal or ruin. Take a single month in 1536, when the princess was two years old. On 7 January, Henry VIII’s first wife, the 51-year-old Katherine of Aragon, died. The king was ecstatic. Instead of mourning attire, he dressed ‘all over in yellow, from top to toe’, and Elizabeth was ‘triumphantly taken to church to the sound of trumpets and with great display’. But such crass celebrations ended abruptly on 24 January when Henry suffered a jousting accident. He ‘fell so heavily that everyone thought it a miracle he was not killed’. Five days later, on the day of Katherine’s funeral, Anne Boleyn miscarried. Devastatingly, the unborn baby ‘seemed to be a male child’.

We learn of a condemned man plotting his final revenge and concealing conspiratorial letters between ‘the soles of a velvet shoe’. We are dragged through the hysteria of those facing execution, as they reel between ‘weeping a good pace’ and succumbing to ‘great laughing’. We are haunted by the morbid dreams of Alexander Ales, the Scottish theologian and Lutheran supporter. In London at the time of Anne Boleyn’s downfall, he had visions of ‘the queen’s neck, after her head had been cut off”, with ‘the nerves, the veins and the arteries’ in clear view. And we learn of the abusive behaviour of Elizabeth’s stepfather, Thomas Seymour, who made unorthodox visits to the teenage princess’s chamber. Here he would ‘strike her upon the back or on the buttocks familiarly’, forcing her to ‘go further in the bed, so that he could not come at her’.

In the course of four years of research, one area of inquiry gave Tallis a ‘completely different perspective’ on Elizabeth’s life. After consulting a neuroscientist, she considered the long-term health impact of trauma and grief, perhaps passed on from Anne Boleyn. Did this cause Elizabeth’s shallow breathing in adulthood (she was ‘half breathless’). What of the migraines (‘an affliction of my head and eyes’) or the swelling of her body? Was this nephritis, an inflammation of the kidneys, triggered by stress? It is fascinating to speculate, and some readers will be disappointed that the subject is relegated to a two-page appendix. 

Nevertheless, Tallis undeniably proves that examination of Elizabeth’s troubled youth is fundamental to making sense of her later years. It is no easy task to pin down such an elusive character, but this is a compelling study of a woman who ‘endured emotions on a scale few of us in the 21st century will ever be able to fully comprehend’. Diamonds are created under pressure, and – as Tallis so compellingly argues – the brutal pressure endured by the young Elizabeth produced something magnificent: a dazzling diamond in the ruff.

Is it wise for Prince William to wade in on the Israel-Gaza war?

The Prince of Wales’s statement on the Israel-Gaza conflict raises more questions than answers. William has announced that he is ‘deeply concerned about the terrible human cost of conflict in the Middle East since the Hamas terrorist attack on 7 October’, before saying explicitly: ‘Too many have been killed.’ He then declares that ‘I, like so many others, want to see an end to the fighting as soon as possible’, before calling for increased humanitarian support to Gaza, the influx of aid and the release of hostages. The statement then concludes with him stressing ‘the importance of permanent peace’ and by saying ‘Even in the darkest hour, we must not succumb to the counsel of despair. I continue to cling to the hope that a brighter future can be found and I refuse to give up on that.’

They are fine, noble sentiments (even if the ‘counsel of despair’ phrase is rather odd) but is it wise for William to wade in on this subject? The last time that William made any kind of public statement about the Middle Eastern conflict was on 11 October, when both the king and the Princess and Princess of Wales unequivocally condemned ‘the barbaric acts of terrorism’. A Kensington Palace spokesman said that both the Prince and Princess were ‘profoundly distressed by the devastating events that have unfolded in the past few days’. Then, they – along with the government and opposition – were clear about Israel’s right to defend itself in the face of such horrors. Now, four months later, matters have shifted.

It is increasingly clear that, given what is taking place in Gaza, simply holding the line that Israel is defending itself against the evils of Hamas is no longer tenable. As Keir Starmer and Labour demand an ‘immediate humanitarian ceasefire’ in the region, anyone who is still holding out against the inevitability that the conflict has to be resolved with the laying down of arms is either a warmonger or simply deluded as to what can, or must, happen. William then has placed himself firmly on the side of those who wish to see the fighting ended and conflict resolved immediately, even as he stresses the impetus for the actions as lying with the initial terror attack of 7 October. The explicit desire (some would call it demand) for humanitarian aid to Gaza is also going considerably further than the government have done recently, indicating that the heir to the throne is doing that most dangerous of things: playing politics.

The penultimate series of The Crown implicitly suggested that Prince Charles and Tony Blair shared the same political outlook and were comfortable in one another’s company. This may have been exaggerated for dramatic effect. But given the King’s (hopefully temporary) indisposition through illness and consequent withdrawal from public life, it is not too fanciful to begin to wonder what William’s relationship with Starmer will develop into, given the likelihood of the Labour leader becoming prime minister this year.

The way that both Starmer and William have placed themselves on the side of immediate resolution of the conflict – and doing so at almost exactly the same time – might simply be coincidence, or just an awareness that something must be done before matters worsen. Yet, while his younger brother distracts himself with self-indulgent interviews with Good Morning America, William is clearly keen to be seen as statesmanlike in these matters. Time will tell whether this intervention is heeded by the government, or anyone else, but the very fact that he has made this statement at all indicates that he is unwilling to sit back and remain neutral on geopolitical matters. The next reign, whenever it occurs, could be very consequential indeed.

Starmer moves to quell ceasefire rebellion

Keir Starmer has moved his party’s position on a ceasefire as he seeks to quell what could the biggest rebellion of his leadership. Tomorrow MPs will vote on an SNP motion calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. When MPs voted on a similar motion in a similar vote three months ago, 56 Labour MPs rebelled, including eight frontbenchers. This time around, Starmer has been warned the rebellion could be even larger.

In a bid to thwart the potential revolt, Starmer met with his shadow cabinet this lunchtime. Following that meeting, the party has announced plans to add its own amendment to the SNP motion tomorrow. For the first time, Labour is calling for an ‘immediate humanitarian ceasefire’. The lengthy amendment makes clear that the mooted Israeli ground offensive in Rafah ‘risks catastrophic humanitarian consequences and therefore must not take place’.

However, scratch the surface and it’s not clear that this is such a big change in the Labour position – even if it is being dressed up to be. The Labour amendment defines an ‘immediate humanitarian ceasefire’ as meaning ‘an immediate stop to the fighting and a ceasefire that lasts and is observed by all sides’. It also includes a demand for Hamas to release all hostages. It notes that ‘Israel cannot be expected to cease fighting if Hamas continues with violence’. It is therefore a much more heavily caveated call for a ceasefire than what the SNP is calling for.

The hope in the Leader’s office is that Labour MPs will be content backing this amendment. There are some early signs of encouragement for Starmer with the Labour MP Clive Betts, who voted for the SNP amendment in November, telling Radio 4 he is now comfortable with the Labour position.

However, if it fails, it is currently unclear whether Labour MPs would then be allowed to back the unamended SNP motion. Starmer’s team have tried to come up with a form of words that will satisfy those MPs calling for the Labour leader to take a stronger stance in support of Palestine. For some in the Labour party, they fear a backlash among Muslim voters if they look as though they are not standing up for the people of Gaza.

This feeling is particularly acute after Starmer disowned the Labour candidate in the Rochdale by-election for an offensive Israel remark – with George Galloway now the bookies’ favourite to win next week. If he does, it will increase fears that Labour is vulnerable electorally as a result of its position. It means Starmer still faces a bumpy 24 hours convincing his MPs to hold the line.

Why the US is suddenly calling for a ceasefire in Gaza

In a surprising move, the United States has put forward a draft for a UN Security Council resolution calling for a temporary ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. The draft also opposes Israel’s planned operation in the southern Gaza city of Rafah.

US president Joe Biden has stood firmly by his support for Israel’s right to defend itself in the wake of Hamas’s brutal attack on 7 October. America has provided Israel with considerable munitions, as well as sent forces to deter attacks by Iran and the Iranian-backed military organisation Hezbollah. They have also thwarted attacks against Israeli targets and and others by the Houthis in Yemen. The US senate also recently approved $14.3 billion (£11.5 billion) in aid to Israel. The president has been clear that he fully supports the destruction of Hamas and restoring safety to Israelis.

Why, then, are the Americans putting forward a resolution that seems to contradict Israeli interests? The proposal was triggered by another UN resolution put forward by Algeria, which the US had planned to veto today. Algeria has proposed an immediate ceasefire which the US believed would benefit Hamas. The American proposal is meant to be a more balanced alternative, although it contains several issues that Israel is unhappy with.

Biden’s priorities still include putting an end to Hamas’s rule over Gaza and for the Israeli hostages abducted on 7 October to be released. However, he is also increasingly concerned by the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, which is likely to be exacerbated by an offensive on Rafah, where 1.4 million Palestinians have found refuge from the war.

Rafah is where many Hamas terrorists are hiding, and where many of the Israeli hostages are believed to be held. This makes it an important strategic target in Israel’s war against Hamas. Therefore, although America’s proposal voices an opposition to a major assault on the city, it is unlikely that they will oppose limited Israeli military actions targeting terrorists there, as long as civilian casualty numbers are kept low. Israel’s ability to make sure humanitarian aid reaches civilians in the area, and across Gaza, undisrupted by fighting in Rafah will also be key.

The US has been involved in negotiations between Israel and Hamas for the release of Israeli hostages. So far, Hamas has firmly opposed any temporary ceasefire. Its leaders are demanding a full withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza and continued Hamas governance over the region. Negotiators from the US, Egypt and Qatar have gathered in Cairo to attempt to soften Hamas’s demands and bring a successful temporary ceasefire that will partially relieve the humanitarian crisis.

It’s a sensitive and crucial time in the negotiations. The terror group’s chief Ismail Haniyeh is reportedly due to arrive in the Egyptian capital with a Hamas delegation today. Israel worries that if a ceasefire is imposed, it will lose any leverage for placing pressure on the group, and the hostages’ fate will be doomed. Meanwhile, the US is worried that if the Algerian proposal is successful, negotiations could collapse.

The American proposal also expresses concern with Israel’s plan to create a temporary or permanent buffer zone between Gaza and Israel where IDF forces could remain after a ceasefire were reached. Biden has been advancing the notion of a reformed Palestinian Authority (PA) taking control over Gaza, uniting the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank under one moderate leadership. He believes that self-governance and autonomy are crucial for building a lasting truce and enhancing Israel’s security – not to mention Palestinian prosperity. A buffer zone under Israeli control would undermine that.

Israel’s perspective on this is markedly different. Israel suffered a large-scale invasion during which thousands of civilians were killed, raped or abducted from their homes. It is determined to restore the security and safety of its people. The PA is not only deeply unpopular among Palestinians, meaning it may not have a legitimate mandate to govern, but it has also resisted a peace settlement with Israel since its foundation in 1994 and in its earlier form as the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO).

The PA suffers from corruption and holds radical views that would undermine peace efforts and Israel’s security. If it is successfully ‘reformed’, Israel would require assurances from the organisation for its safety if it’s to give up on holding a buffer zone.

The American proposal – which is currently in draft form and subject to change – concerns Israel. Although the US is an ally, and continues to support Israel’s goals, there are disagreements between the two sides. Biden also has little confidence in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and is convinced, rightly so, that Netanyahu allows personal and political interests to affect his decision-making. This proposal is has escalated the tension that exists between the two.

Biden’s support for Israel cannot be doubted – it’s his support for Netanyahu that is wavering. The American proposal is at once a way for the US to protect Israel from one-sided harmful UN resolutions, but also a warning that Netanyahu has to adopt policies that will promote a future long-lasting settlement rather than undermine its chances.

Andrew Bailey: Britain’s recession may already be over

We’re not cutting interest rates because we think the recession may already be over and we’re not even sure we are in recession anyway. That was the gist of Governor of the Bank of England’s evidence to the House of Commons Treasury Select Committee this morning.

Andrew Bailey reminded the committee of what happened ten years ago when Britain seemed to be on the verge of a triple dip recession. In the end, revisions of the GDP figures revealed that we had never even entered a double dip, yet a triple one.

There are signs of economic recovery, added Bailey. Services inflation and wage rises are still too strong. Real incomes rose by 1.8 per cent last year. While the Consumer Prices Index (CPI) might well fall to 2 per cent in the spring, it is then likely to rebound – although not to anything like the level it has reached over the past two years. No one should be fooled by a drop in the CPI in the short term, he said, because a lot of it will be to do with the energy component – which could soon be falling by 25 per cent. 

Bailey’s words will not impress the Bank’s former chief economist Andy Haldane, who yesterday accused the Monetary Policy Committee of ignoring the recession and warned that they could ‘crush’ the economy. Haldane was expressing a growing view that while the Bank of England failed miserably to foresee the inflation surge two years ago, now it is failing in the other direction: to see the weakness of the economy.

Therese Coffey, a member of the select committee, expressed this very view, suggesting that the MPC may now be ‘over-compensating’ for its failure to raise interest rates quickly enough (although cynics may remind Coffey that she was deputy prime minister at a time when Kwasi Kwarteng’s mini-budget did its own bit to send interest rates surging).

Yet a year ago the Bank of England very much was predicting recession – indeed, in late 2022 it believed that GDP growth would remain negative throughout 2023. How come Britain avoided that fate? Bailey fell back on the traditional excuse of CEOs who get it wrong and send their businesses into a downwards spiral: the weather. Europe, he said, has enjoyed two mild winters, which helped to moderate energy price rises and keep us out of recession.

The alternative explanation is that the Bank of England just isn’t very good at economic forecasting, and the current membership of the MPC isn’t very good at fulfilling its only role: deciding the appropriate rate for the Bank of England’s base rate.

But whatever the past record of the Bank, the message being transmitted by Bailey seems to be: don’t expect the interest rate horizon to change as a result of last week’s GDP figures. The situation remains as it was before: interest rates are unlikely to fall before May, and don’t expect much of drop after that. The days of near-zero interest rates are not going to return in the near future, even if we are in recession.

Why does the Met prioritise Palestine marchers over Londoners?

If you want an illustration of one of the things that is wrong with the Metropolitan Police, you need only look at how some of the best known streets in central London were yet again handed over to protestors this past weekend – including allies and apologists of Hamas. This is the price which the Met’s leadership seems to be willing to pay to keep things quiet in the capital.  

Over recent months, these supposedly peaceful demonstrations have included a range of individuals throwing flares, shouting antisemitic chants ‘from the river to the sea’ and calling for there to be a ‘Jihad’. Despite these incidents, there’s a lot of satisfaction with this outcome in the senior command levels at New Scotland Yard. But is their self-confidence justified?

In Northern Ireland, thanks to the Parades Commission, there are extensive limits to the ‘marching season’. In London, meanwhile, the ordinary Londoner is apparently now expected to tolerate mass protest marches all year round.

Up to 250,000 people are believed to have attended this weekend’s protests. Even if this number is right, it would still mean many of the over eight million Londoners were again prevented from going about their normal daily lives. To police this weekend’s protest, officers from 29 different forces were drafted in from as far afield as South Yorkshire and Wales. What is the impact on crime and policing in those towns and cities far from London? What price the ‘right to protest’?

One incident last Saturday appears to encapsulate the Met’s flawed approach. On the fringes of the march, a sole counter-protestor, Niyak Ghorbani, held a lawful sign protesting against Hamas. This led to a confrontation with several marchers attempting to grab Ghorbani and his sign; threats were made and items were thrown at him. But it was not those threatening violence who were physically removed: it was, rather, Ghorbani who was led away by the police.

While following the police's advice to collect placards and move away from the area, this individual violently grabbed my hand and threatened that if I returned there, they would arrest me!

Is arrest a justifiable threat for speaking the truth?! #HamasTerrorist https://t.co/UrcAZTFAeV pic.twitter.com/sYtoWA7GbB

— Niyak Ghorbani (نیاک) (@GhorbaniiNiyak) February 18, 2024

On this occasion the fault is not so much with the two police constables involved in dealing with Ghorbani. Every police officer is, after all, operating within a context set by the Met Commissioner and his senior commanders: and it appears that the Met’s leadership have decided that the ‘right to protest’ is the preeminent value that must be upheld on London’s streets.

This is despite the protestors’ rights to freedom of expression and freedom of assembly under Articles 10 and 11 of the Human Rights Act being subject to limitations ‘as necessary in a democratic society in the interests of national security and public safety’. Indeed, despite the frequent invocations made by the Met’s leadership, the Human Rights Act itself provides no explicit ‘right to protest’.

A response from a Met Police spokesperson to the incident is revealing:

‘We’ve reviewed all the bodyworn video of this 11 minute incident. While the wording on the man’s sign was an accurate reflection of the law in relation to Hamas, it was also apparent he was there to provoke a reaction from the passing crowd. The priority for officers was to de-escalate the situation to keep everyone safe and the most proportionate way to do that was to ask the man to move away from the protest.’ 

Where are the rights of ordinary Londoners in this exercise? Why are the rights of a lone individual who posed no physical risk to anyone else so readily ignored by the police? Has the Met’s approach now created a de facto right of larger, better organised, groups to overwhelm the rights of everyone else? Above all, what are the precise terms of the Met’s accommodation with the Palestine solidarity march organisers? What can be done to make its decision-making processes more transparent to Londoners?

Equality before the law is a fundamental principle of the rule of law. Everyone is subject to the same laws and entitled to be treated the same by the institutions responsible for law and order – be that the courts, prosecutors or the police.

When it comes to protestors marching across our capital city, the Met appear to be using a different benchmark. Having apparently struck a bargain with the protest organisers, it appears that the pro-Palestinian cause is frequently to be given a wide berth while the Met affords a much less tolerant hearing to anyone else. 

This is the very definition of ‘Differential Policing’. In apparently adopting such an approach, have the Met’s leaders miscalculated the balance of forces at work in our capital city? That is why I am writing to the Commissioner and to the London Policing Ethics Panel – to ask them to examine the impact of the Met’s current approach on crime and policing in the rest of London and beyond.

What, then, must the Met now do to rebalance this inequity? The Met must start to prioritise the ability of ordinary citizens wishing to go about their daily lives without impediment, over the rights of the agitators who are regularly dominating many central London streets. And senior officers must be transparent about where they are receiving their advice from: too often, the Met allows itself to be captured by small groups of noisy activists, lobby-groups and ‘experts’ representing their own sectional interests.

The Met’s approach to the relentless protesting on our streets is now one of the bellwethers which tells us whether the force’s senior leadership have got heir priorities right. At the moment, many Londoners reckon they are falling well short of the gold standard.

Another by-election loss looms for Rishi

It never rains but it pours for our beleaguered Prime Minister. Less than a week after the Tories were defeated in both the Wellingborough and Kingswood by-elections, Rishi Sunak is now facing the loss of yet another Tory-held seat. Scott Benton this morning lost his appeal against his 35-day suspension from parliament, following a Times investigation in which he offered to lobby for gambling industry investors. Talk about a bad bet…

Benton offered to table parliamentary questions, provide ‘behind the scenes’ information and ‘call in favours’ from colleagues to help the commercial interests of a fake company despite rules prohibiting MPs from acting as paid lobbyists. The standards committee ruled in December that he should be suspended from the Commons without pay for 35 days – enough to take him above the 10-day threshold which can trigger the recall process. Benton appealed on the grounds that the report had been leaked to the media and contained factual inaccuracies.

But today the Independent Expert Panel threw out his appeal, judging there to be ‘no substance to the allegation of a leak from the committee and therefore no procedural flaw in the process’. It paves the way for MPs to vote on his suspension which, if passed, will trigger a recall petition. This will in turn lead to a by-election if more than 10 per cent of voters in Benton’s Blackpool South seat sign it. And if history is anything to go by, his opponents will hit this threshold comfortably.

With a majority of just 3,690, Labour look set to take clean up in the North West. Talk about an illuminating result, eh Rishi…

How the West can truly avenge Navalny’s death

With the Kremlin now claiming that it needs to hold on to the body of opposition leader Alexei Navalny for another fortnight for ‘tests’, there is little doubt in the West that Vladimir Putin’s regime was either directly or indirectly to blame. Inevitably, the talk is now of punishing it.

Junior Foreign Office minister Leo Docherty told the Commons yesterday that the government was considering further measures beyond the immediate diplomatic prospects, and that ‘it would be premature…to comment on the prospect of future sanctions,’ but that he could confirm ‘that we are working at pace and looking at all options in that regard.’

It is quite right that there should be consequences. After all, the reason we do not know the details of Navalny’s end is because the Russian government is being characteristically untransparent and unreliable. It has been announced that the Investigative Committee (very roughly analogous to the FBI) is investigating, but as this was the same agency that built the trumped-up case used to send Navalny to prison, this is hardly a comfort.

However, already some are simply using Navalny’s death to push measures that have little real connection to his cause. He was a patriot and although he initially welcomed the annexation of Crimea in 2014 (in fairness, pretty near every Russian did think the peninsula rightfully theirs), he rejected the invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Yet it’s unlikely he relished the deaths of ordinary Russian soldiers, and arguing that a suitable legacy is more military aid is questionable. To be sure, it may well make sense in its own terms, to repel Russian imperialism, but not necessarily in Navalny’s name.

Instead, the obvious go-to measure is sanctions. Certainly Navalny’s own Anti-Corruption Foundation has a lengthy list of Russian officials, politicians and businesspeople it would still like to see sanctioned. However, we must also be realistic. At this stage in the undeclared political-economic war the West is waging with Moscow, more individual sanctions may satisfy the urge to ‘do something’ but are unlikely to influence the Kremlin. Instead, this is an opportunity to be as imaginative and subversive as Navalny himself could be.

First of all, there is much more we could do to undermine the Kremlin’s leaden propaganda at home. Just as during the Cold War, the BBC’s Russian language service – increasingly accessed online – is a vital information source for many who know they are being lied to by their own state. At a time when many of the BBC’s foreign-language services are seeing their audiences shrink, the past year saw BBC Russian’s grow by 19 per cent. 

This needs to be protected and developed, but there are other cheap and easy ways to help challenge Putin’s toxic propagandists. In particular, there are news services and platforms run by Russians opposed to the regime, now in the West, which can speak directly to their compatriots. The Meduza news service provides both news and analysis from inside Russia, for example, while Riddle Russia, based in Glasgow, provides a platform for some of the most innovative research on the country. These services tend to operate on a shoestring, and for a fraction of, say, the £4 million a Challenger 2 tanks costs, can take the information war to Putin. 

That the Kremlin considers these online sources a threat is evident from the way it tries to cut off access to to them. Many Russians bypass these online barriers using VPNs (virtual private networks), which in effect allow them to pretend to be in another country for access purposes. As the Kremlin tries to crack down on VPNs as well, maybe it is time to address how to help Russians get and use them?

Of course, it takes courage for people to challenge this murderous banana republic of a regime. To this end, we ought to be making it a great deal easier and quicker for those with a demonstrable record of anti-government agitation and consequent retaliation by the state to gain asylum. Back in the (first?) Cold War, we tended to welcome defectors with open arms. It is a strange irony of the new one that, in effect, it is the West which has erected its own iron curtain to keep disaffected Russians at home.

Navalny’s widow Yulia is a powerhouse in her own right who has long been recognised as having dimmed her own light so as not to outshine her husband’s. As her passionate speeches after his death have shown, she is both formidable and determined to continue Alexei’s cause. While it is not appropriate to treat her as a president-in-exile the way Belarus’s Svetlana Tsikhanovskaya is, nonetheless she needs to be supported in practical as well as political ways as force of moral clarity.

In the Cold War, the West in general – and the UK in particular – became very good at political warfare, undermining the Kremlin at home and abroad, not so much with dirty tricks as truth and soft power. It’s time to recover some of those dark arts which can be used for good.

Say no to Labour’s citizens’ assembly

A spectre is haunting Westminster – the spectre of the citizens’ assembly. This unkillable bad idea is making the headlines again because of the suggestion that, when Labour comes to power, citizens’ assemblies could be used to develop new policy proposals to put before Parliament. Fittingly, given its essentially anti-political and anti-democratic nature, this idea has been mooted by Sue Gray, Keir Starmer’s ‘chief of staff’, a woman who has wielded enormous power but who holds no elected office and has never offered herself for any public vote, rather than by Starmer or any of his frontbenchers.

Creating such assemblies may not be official Labour policy. It appears that Gray was either freelancing, or had agreed to float a trial balloon on behalf of the Labour leadership, when she put forward the ‘transformational’ plan; by the end of Monday, citizens’ assemblies were already being briefed against by Labour’s National Executive Committee. Luke Akehurst, a member of the NEC, said that ‘citizens’ assemblies are a stupid idea’.

He’s right, of course, but this won’t be the last time we hear about citizens’ assemblies. It is a perennial favourite among the Sensible classes, involving as it does core Sensible values such as Consulting The Stakeholders, and bypassing the allegedly archaic and unacceptably adversarial House of Commons. It is worth reflecting, therefore, on why exactly we must say no.

An obvious question is: who will assemble which citizens, and to what end? Advocates, including Gray, have referred specifically to Ireland, where citizens’ assemblies have been established since 2016 to consider a number of hot topics, notably the repeal of the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution, prohibiting abortion, which was eventually abolished via referendum in 2018. This is an enlightening comparison, because the Irish experience demonstrates a number of dangers.

Under Ireland’s system, the secretariat is provided by the civil service and the chairs are government appointees, meaning that the establishment is well able to guide deliberations. Reports are drafted by the secretariat, and no doubt the chair and other ‘facilitators’ can do their best to ensure that any non-compliant members who somehow slip through the selection net do not have too much influence on proceedings. Moreover, while the members are selected at random and intended to be broadly representative of the demographics of Ireland, people who agree to take part are by definition those who already have an interest in politics, as well as the willingness and the ability to spend long days discussing the subject.

‘Nonsense can and does go by default,’ said the social critic Anthony Daniels. ‘It wins the argument by sheer persistence, by inexhaustible re-iteration, by staying at the meeting when everyone else has gone home, by monomania, by boring people into submission and indifference’. Was he talking about citizens’ assemblies? Probably not, but he might well have been. There is, after all, a certain kind of person who is quite content to get obsessively involved in decision-making processes. More often than not that person has very strongly defined and rather unrepresentative views.

Perhaps the work of citizens’ assemblies would be better described as ‘consensus laundering’; these assemblies are used to create the appearance that there is a widely held view on some matter of public importance. Typically this will support the action that the establishment – the political parties, the civil service, the quangocracy, and ‘civil society’ – want to take anyway, but now their policy preference has an extra patina of legitimacy because the citizenry has given it two thumbs up.

The problem is that if the authority of Parliament is watered down in this way, it undermines the simple mechanisms of accountability which are meant to be at the heart of the British constitution. At the risk of over-simplification, Parliament – in practice the House of Commons – is supreme within our system, and the Commons, in its turn, must answer to the electorate. Of course, this approach has already come under serious threat in recent years. Prominent dangers to parliamentary sovereignty include constant judicial review of government decision-making, and the limits placed on legislation by vast and often arbitrary human rights requirements and equality impact assessments. There is also the growing powers of parliamentary standards bodies, which combine quasi-judicial powers of investigation and censure with very weak protections for due process. But citizens’ assemblies would further reduce the powers and prerogatives of MPs. They would blur lines of responsibility and enable cowardly and weak politicians to kick difficult issues into the long grass, by passing the buck to extra-parliamentary bodies with extremely limited mandates.

The aim of modern left-wing politics is to make right-wing politics impossible. This means that governments are hemmed in by human rights and equality law, civil service guidelines and consultation requirements, such that any decisive action against the Blairite consensus becomes inconceivable. Citizens’ assemblies must be seen as part of this conscious and ongoing attempt to gum up the works, to ensure that the ratchet only ever turns one way – note that in Ireland it has consistently been the political class that determines what issues may be considered by the assemblies.  

The great struggle for conservatives is to reverse the neutering of Parliament, and more broadly to restore the domain of politics itself; to re-establish the norm that the proper place for hammering out the great questions of the day is not the courts, or the offices of a standards watchdog, or a meeting of political obsessives and their NGO handlers in a provincial conference room, but the chamber of the House of Commons.

The truth about John Lewis’s trans takeover

John Lewis is, to most people, a department store that exists to sell toasters, cushions and lamps. But it turns out we have been labouring under a massive misapprehension all these years. John Lewis’s internal magazine Identity reveals that the shop’s purpose is rather different: it exists to affirm the bespoke identities of its staff.

The publication, created by John Lewis’s LGBT network, contains advice to parents on how to allow their child to express their gender identity. Identity includes testimony from the mum of a trans-identifying girl in a story titled ‘Raising Trans and Non-Binary Children’. She writes that ‘a (chest) binder is always safer than the alternatives. Among the magazine’s other delights is a gender wordsearch – sample clue: ‘Calling someone, often a trans person, by a name or gender identity they no longer use’; answer: deadnaming. A reminder: this is John Lewis, where your mum gets her curtains.

One is reminded of some of the more outré episodes of Are You Being Served?, but at least young Mr Grace’s bizarre executive brainwaves on that sitcom, such as pushing particular lines of imported stock – Mrs Slocombe in lederhosen, Captain Peacock with an Afro in a kaftan – had a kind of commercial logic to them.

Identity does have a clear purpose though, even if its creators might not realise it: magazines like this exist to goad people. John Lewis isn’t alone here in doing something that winds people up: such goading is particularly common in institutions with a somewhat conservative brand: the National Trust or English Heritage, for instance. It’s the fatal result of a smash up between well-meaning but clueless executives and the shameless chancers at the exhibitionist end of what we used to call the gay scene.

But what spurs this goading in the first place? I think you can divide it into two types, like diabetes. Type 1 goading is mostly harmless, a game of being safely outrageous in a liberal society because there are no consequences. Type 2 goading is more sinister – part dominance display, part wounded cry for attention. Type 2 is acceptable, and often quite funny, in children. ‘I will kill myself if I’m not allowed to watch the Eurovision Song Contest!’ I shouted to my mother when I was seven. But this way of thinking is no longer isolated to kids.

Let’s take two famous examples of the same vintage: Mick Jagger and John Lennon. Jagger was pure Type 1. He was playful, blatantly inauthentic; a middle-class Kent schoolboy who pretended to be a poor boy from the ghetto and said and did slightly outrageous things. It was all a healthy game of a wind-up, and tremendous fun. Lennon was extreme Type 2 – given to grievance and pointless statements and hurt gestures. We tolerated this because we were getting fantastic tunes. Without the music, Jagger would still have been fun. Lennon would’ve been unbearable. (For confirmation on this point, see what has happened to Yoko Ono.)

In its purest and most sociable form, the impulse to be noticed is the spur for art and achievement of all kinds. The deal is that we pay attention because we get something good in return. But the goading of Type 2 – of the Identity magazine sort, of dyeing your hair pink and pretending to be oppressed – offers only a continuous toddler screech.

My theory is that so much of Type 2 is, like a toddler’s tantrums, designed to get a reaction. Why? Because the hoped-for backlash to it at least shows that someone notices, that they care what you do. It proves that you are there. Unfortunately for those seeking attention in today’s world chastisement no longer comes. Take Sam Smith, the gender fluid singer prone to wearing increasingly bizarre outfits. The truth is that Smith is never put on the naughty step. Instead, he gets just enough attention to reward his antics and confirm him on his regrettable tasseled-moob path.

The trouble is not that these people are being exhibitionist and irritating – because attention seekers will, after all, always be with us – but that the institutions take them seriously. ‘We have an ambition to become the UK’s most inclusive employer, because celebrating diversity will make us a better business,’ says James Bailey, Executive Director of John Lewis. ‘That means creating an environment where everyone feels welcomed irrespective of their backgrounds or beliefs.’ That all sounds very sensible and level-headed, doesn’t it? Until you wonder whether he’s talking about bondage gear in the haberdashery department.

So John Lewis’s Identity might seem like a throwaway publication that doesn’t merit a reaction. But it is far more revealing than it realises: its goading exposes one of the many interesting ways that society is gradually breaking down. In short, publications like this are all about grabbing attention. Once, a suitable response would be to say ‘that’s nice, dear’ and to change the subject, as my mum did to my Eurovision threat of 1976. But now, these attention seekers are indulged: they get their own magazine – and woe betide any John Lewis employee who calls this nonsense out for what it is.

It’s stalemate in Ukraine but Putin is defeating the West in Africa

In the early hours of Saturday morning, police in Paris shot dead a Sudanese man who had threatened them with a meat cleaver. The motive for his actions has yet to be revealed but the incident happened a day after Italy’s prime minister Giorgia Meloni warned her government that Europe faces a new migrant crisis because of the brutal war in Sudan that has displaced millions of people. Among the 157,00 migrants who arrived in Italy in 2023, 6,000 came from Sudan but Meloni believes that number will increase significantly this year.

The repercussions of last summer’s coup d’etat in Niger are also starting to be felt in Europe. One consequence of that regime change, in which the Europhile president Mohamed Bazoum was toppled by the military, was the decriminalisation in December of people trafficking. This was a booming trade a decade ago. It was estimated that three-quarters of the 181,459 migrants who crossed the Mediterranean to Europe in 2016 passed through Niger. The traffickers based themselves in the central city of Agadez, and at the height of the 2015/16 migrant crisis more than half of the city’s 140,000 residents were said to be involved in the smuggling trade in some shape or form.

Bazoum put an end to that by signing a treaty with the EU, but he is now gone and so has any will on the part of Niger to stem the flow of migrants north.

So far this year, 4,022 migrants have landed in Italy, a decrease of more than 2,000 in the same period in 2023. Most come from Syrian, Tunisia or Egypt with only a small percentage coming from Sudan.

There’s a reason for this drop. The people traffickers have moved their main smuggling route west, into Spanish territory, where the Socialist prime minister Pedro Sánchez is more relaxed about mass immigration than his Italian counterpart. In the first six weeks of 2024, nearly 12,000 migrants arrived in the Canary Islands from West Africa, a seven-fold increase on 2023, when 1,602 made the crossing. Most of the small boats bound for the islands depart from Mauritania, and so earlier this month the EU agreed to pay their government €210 million (£180 million) ‘to help it to curb irregular migration to Europe’. It is a similar deal to the one it signed with the Tunisian government last year – and the EU is also reportedly in talks with the Egyptian government.

The European right are sceptical that these deals are anything other than window dressing. Brussels will certainly be embarrassed by the announcement at the weekend that the man they employed for seven years to police Europe’s borders will represent Marine Le Pen’s National Rally party in June’s European elections. Fabrice Leggeri, who left Frontex, Europe’s border agency, in 2022, said Le Pen’s party is ‘determined to combat the migratory submersion, which the European Commission and the Eurocrats do not consider a problem, but rather a project: I can testify to this’.

Europe’s left-wing parties and human rights organisations make no secret of their opposition to pacts that might restrict freedom of movement. The European Council on Refugees and Exiles condemned the EU’s deal with Tunisia as ‘creating more barriers’ between Europe and Africa and infringing the ‘migrants’ dignity’.

These are the foolish remarks of Vladimir Putin’s useful idiots. Russia’s growing influence in Africa has been well chronicled over the years, but more recently it has become evident that Russia is creating chaos in the continent as part of a calculated strategy to destabilise Europe.

Putin’s malign interference stretches from Niger and Mali in the west to Sudan, Somalia and in the east, and to Zimbabwe in the south. Last July, Zimbabwe’s president Emmerson Mnangagwa met Putin in Saint Petersburg and told him that his country ‘is in solidarity with the Russian Federation in your country’s special military operation in Ukraine’.

In an in-depth report into Russia’s expanding presence in Africa in January 2022, the French newspaper Le Monde pondered whether it signified ‘the beginning of a strategic shift that would see a new “Russafrique” supporting “Chinafrique” in an anti-Western conspiracy’.

The answer is undoubtedly ‘Yes’. While Nato is focused on the fighting in Ukraine, Russia has opened a second front against the West in Africa; to put it crudely, it involves migrants rather than Russian troops. Sudan is a case in point. Russia covets the country’s gold mines (Sudan is now Africa’s third largest producer of gold) and in return for the mineral it offers humanitarian aid, scholarships and trade deals. It has also, according to a report last year by the Human Rights Foundation, ‘fuelled the [civil] war, a bloody and destructive power struggle’ that began last April and has resulted in the displacement of ten million Sudanese and pushed 18 million into food insecurity. The war started with a coup, one of seven that have occurred in Africa since 2020: Niger, Burkina Faso (two), Guinea and Mali (two).

Last year, 18,000 Guineans arrived in Italy in search of peace and security; many then headed north towards France. Among them was a young man called Aboubacar, who was interviewed by a French TV crew at the border. ‘We’re going to invade you,’ he boasted, referring to the thousands of his compatriots waiting to cross the Mediterranean. Asked why he wanted to settle in France, Aboubacar replied that ‘it was France that colonised Guinea’.

Similar sentiments were made regularly on social media by a 32-year-old Malian migrant. He expressed his ‘hate’ for France and its people because they enslaved his grandparents. He also raged against French leader Emmanuel Macron, blaming him for ‘pushing Russia’ to invade Ukraine, and he declared that ‘Europe will not have gas from the Russians’.

Why would he rant like that, unless, as the French government suspects, he was the victim of ‘foreign propaganda’? The Malian is now in police custody, accused of randomly stabbing three people at a Paris railway station at the start of this month.

Since Macron came to power, France’s influence in West Africa has evaporated. It is now Russia to whom Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger look for support and guidance. During last year’s coup in Niger, mobs waving Russian flags attacked the French embassy. Across the continent, Africans are being encouraged to hate Europe, to blame Europe and, in some cases, to come to Europe. The conflict in Ukraine might be locked in stalemate but, on his second front, Putin appears to be winning the hearts and minds of Africans.

Welcome to the age of uncancelling

In September 2019 my fear was that comedian Shane Gillis might throw himself off a bridge. Just hours after being hired by Saturday Night Live, one of the world’s biggest TV shows, he was fired. The reason: journalist Seth Simons had posted clips of Gillis disparaging Chinese people. The clips, from 2018, showed Gillis on his podcast mimicking the accent of an old-fashioned racist as he said, ‘Let the fucking Chinks live there.’ Then he used his natural voice to have an ugly conversation about Chinatown. Another clip showed Gillis saying ‘faggot’ and using ‘gay’ as an insult.

His Saturday Night Live dream was over. The show, produced by NBC, said ‘the language he used is offensive, hurtful and unacceptable’. Gillis tweeted that he ‘pushes boundaries’, a tweet he later regretted. Simons predicted Gillis would ‘spin his oust[ing] into a lucrative career as a (gag) #CancelCulture martyr. He will probably make tons of money from stand-up gigs and a much larger podcast audience’.

The reason I feared Gillis might throw himself off a bridge was that in comedy terms he had won the lottery, only for it to be taken away hours later. He was 31 when it happened, he had recently moved to New York from his native Pennsylvania, and had been able to tell his parents and peers he had made it, only to have to tell them he hadn’t. It felt horrifically cruel. Gillis, however, is not a fragile human being.

He later revealed that Saturday Night Live paid him $50,000, which must have taken the edge off. More importantly he stayed in touch with Lorne Michaels, the show’s executive producer, sending him sketches he was making for the internet. Gillis continued his podcast. He worked on his stand-up, gig by gig. He put a special on YouTube. But was there a route to the mainstream success he had once seemed destined for?

The first indication that his rehabilitation was working came in September 2022 with a favourable profile in the New Yorker. A year later, his second stand-up special was released on Netflix. Then came the announcement earlier this month that he was going to host Saturday Night Live on 24 February, a role reserved for stars, a U-turn which prompted questions about the future of cancel culture.

I heard the news via the X account of Vittorio Angelone, a Northern Irish comedian who retweeted the announcement with a comment, ‘This has made me so bizarrely happy’. He told me, ‘Shane Gillis played cancellation perfectly because he didn’t play it. He didn’t try to profit off it, he didn’t use it as some kind of angle to get clicks. He continued to create brilliant work in sketches and stand-up while refusing to take fewer risks and more importantly refusing to become a boring free speech campaigner.’ Angelone pointed me to an episode of the HoneyDew podcast on which Gillis said, ‘If I let being cancelled define who I was and talked about it constantly… I mean, I talk about it on every fucking podcast, but if you let it consume who you are and what you’re creating, that’s how you lose, that’s like actually getting cancelled.’

As Gillis said, he didn’t avoid the issue, addressing it whenever asked. In 2022, on American economist Glenn Loury’s show, Gillis said ‘On a podcast sometimes it doesn’t look like you’re trying to be funny. When I got in trouble, it’s tough to tell whether or not you’re joking, I assure you I was trying to. I don’t have a racist podcast. It’s a comedy podcast.’ However, on the stage he focused on being funny, resisting becoming a reaction against wokeness, a direction some comedians went in. He pushed back on assumptions about his politics.

Was it this careful rehabilitation that convinced Saturday Night Live to forgive him? Was it just because he’s a star now? Or did something else change? Simons, whose reporting got Gillis fired, told me:

I think over the last four years comedy has noticeably taken a right-ward turn. That was already in progress but I think was accelerated a bit by the pandemic. I think Shane’s sort of sensibilities is kind of the dominant strain now. He’s one of a large crew of podcasters that traffic in racial caricatures and sometimes outright slurs and transphobia and saying gay as a pejorative.

Noam Dworman, owner of the Comedy Cellar, where Gillis performs when he in New York, is a vocal defender of free expression. When I asked what the reaction has been to Gillis hosting Saturday Night Live, he said:

A lot of people in charge are realising that they were panicking for nothing. I don’t know if the culture has actually changed. I don’t think anybody cared about Shane Gillis then, but in the bubble of NBC executives, they were petrified. They were scared of Twitter. They were scared of whatever wrong indications they were getting about how people actually felt.

Speaking to the New Yorker in 2022, producer Michaels said of firing Gillis: ‘NBC was in something of a panic. It was, like, “They’re going to boycott these sponsors!”’ Yet Gillis’s words were hurtful, NBC were right about that. Rewatching the 2018 clips reminded me of watching The Simpsons with a Chinese housemate I once had. We loved the show, it made us laugh, but when the Chinese character came on it became uncomfortable; the joke was soured, for me, when the subject of the joke was in the audience.

On BBC Radio 4 in 2020, comedian Ken Cheng described to the audience how Gillis called Chinese people ‘effing Chinks’. He said that although Gillis claimed it was a joke, he saw no joke. Cheng then said: ‘This is why we no longer deserve freedom of speech, because people have been abusing it for decades to say racist, sexist and homophobic things and then claim it was just a joke.’ I understood Cheng’s hurt, but what he said about free speech startled me. I couldn’t tell if that was a joke, but he declined to speak to me. 

This is what I think: Gillis being fired from Saturday Night Live isn’t a free speech issue and I don’t think he suggested it was. The threat to free speech in the UK comes from police officers telling people what they can and can’t say, courts locking people up for what they say, and people encouraging that. The Gillis issue is to do with comedy’s gatekeepers overreacting to those who demand purity – likely the same people who want custodial sentences for words they don’t like – while also underestimating the wider audience’s instinct to forgive. While gatekeepers have focused on that first group, comedians like Gillis focused on the latter. Saturday Night Live, at least in this case, realised their error.

‘The proof is in the pudding,’ says Dworman. ‘He’s a huge star now and he did it 100 per cent on his own, and now they’re coming back to him. He actually fought and won an important cultural battle.’

Hollywood, please stop the biopics

Having just watched the overwhelmingly underwhelming Bob Marley: One Love, I have decided that Hollywood’s obsession with biopics must be stopped. Biopics have become so ubiquitous, so pervasive, so unoriginal, that Kingsley Ben-Adir, who plays Marley in the film, has already starred in two other biopics: The Comey Rule as Barack Obama and One Night in Miami as Malcolm X. 

Real-life stories have become so popular that this year we will be treated to not one, but two dramatisations of Prince Andrew’s disastrous BBC Newsnight interview. Will they offer anything more than a competition between who has the better hair and make up teams, or who can make sure the actor playing Andrew does not sweat under the lights?

Biopics are mostly boring and predictable because they tend to fall into one of three categories. The first is a voyeuristic spectacle of suffering, usually on a female subject: think Renee Zellwegger as a slurring Judy Garland, Naomi Ackie as an overdosing Whitney Houston, or Ana de Armas as a self-harming Marilyn Monroe, in a film that is really little more than ‘thinly-veiled trauma porn’. Hollywood loves to fetishise famous women who destroyed themselves: Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Christine Chubbuck, and now, Amy Winehouse. Given how much Winehouse’s life (and death) has already been picked over for profit, I am not sure what more can possibly be gained by replaying her addictions on the silver screen, other than a morbid enjoyment of watching talented young women fail.

The second category of biopic is the imitation game: an exercise in embodiment and impersonation, to the point that the film becomes little more than an extended Saturday Night Live impression. We love to hear about the lengths actors go to transform themselves for a role, whether that’s Austin Butler permanently changing his voice after playing Elvis, Gary Oldman giving himself nicotine poisoning playing Winston Churchill in The Darkest Hour, or Cillian Murphy eating only an almond a day to lose weight for Oppenheimer. Yet there is a fine line between authenticity and gross parody: think Remi Malek’s teeth as Freddie Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody (surely the largest in cinematic history), or Leonardo di Caprio’s overcooked old-man latex prosthetics in J. Edgar.

Nonetheless, the second category continues to be the perfect awards-bait. Since 2000, 12 of the Oscars for Best Actor have gone to famous men playing famous men, and 11 of the Oscars for Best Actress have gone to famous women playing famous women. In 2022, three out of the five Best Actress and Best Actor nominees were based on real people, even though it is arguably more of an acting challenge to create a new, fully-believable character from scratch than it is to mimic someone else’s mannerisms. Regardless, Hollywood continues to overlook and over-reward: for example, Daniel Kaluuya didn’t win his Academy Award for his game-changing performance in Get Out (there are few shots as iconic in recent cinematic history as his wide-eyed, teary stare) but for his role as real-life activist Fred Hampton in Judas and the Black Messiah.

The third and final category is the biopic that is more fiction than fact: more interested in the sensational or sentimental than the historically accurate. Sometimes it is to santise, as in the case of Bohemian Rhapsody, which pointedly skims over Freddie Mercury’s HIV diagnosis. Sometimes it is to simplify, as in the case of The Theory of Everything, where important details were removed in order to minimise the running time. Sometimes though, as in the case of Green Book, a biopic becomes a ‘symphony of lies’ (to quote the sister of Don Shirley, the biopic’s protagonist) which becomes so fictionalised you wonder why they didn’t just write, well, fiction.

The truth is that, as formulaic, conventional and safe as biopics may be, they are often box office hits, even if not necessarily beloved ones. Bohemian Rhapsody made $910 million on a $55 million budget, not because people love the film, but because people love Queen. A biopic can feel like little more than a Wikipedia page, a cinematic CV of cradle-to-grave greatest hits, and still make a decent amount of money, because audiences crave familiarity. Studios know all too well that one of the only reliable ways to lure viewers out of their living rooms and away from their Netflix accounts is to tap into intellectual property that the public already has a vested interest in. This is why we have so many remakes, so many franchises, so many adaptations of books and video games, so many prequels and sequels, and now, so many biopics. It’s high time that audiences, and the film industry as a whole, moved on.

Rewild the churchyards

In the village where we used to live, the churchyard was just over the road from our cul-de-sac. I often used to potter around on my lunchbreaks, or pass through on walks. The oldest gravestone I managed to find, if I remember correctly, was for a local chap who had died in his seventies around the year 1750, which meant that he had been born towards the end of the reign of Charles II, some three hundred years before my own birth.

There was a strange comfort in thinking that the man whose mortal remains lay – or had once lain – beneath my feet had walked the same hills and fields as me, had known the same church and the same valley. No doubt he had wondered, each November, whether the intermittent stream would flow that winter, as we did in our years there. If he had been resurrected in the 2020s, the shape of the village would still have been familiar, even if the buildings were not. I felt a kind of fleeting communion with him. Our lives had been separated temporally by an enormous span of years, but we were members of the same place.

Part of the value of churchyards is reminding us that we have a fellowship with those who have gone before. Edmund Burke, of course, had the classic formulation of the idea, describing society as ‘a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.’ Many people find them good places to contemplate, perhaps because there is a quiet consolation in the long continuity of communities and families, and the knowledge that, in the words of the King James Bible, all flesh is as grass.   

I was intrigued, therefore, to see that the Church of England is proposing the rewilding of some churchyards – to deliberately reduce mowing, for example, with a view to increasing biodiversity and growing rare plants and flowers in the areas with older graves. Possibly there is an element of making a virtue of necessity, given the difficulties of finding people to manage churchyards on either a voluntary or a paid basis. That said, I think we should be encouraging people to spend time in churchyards and reflect on their unique importance.

The fading of churches as centres of their community is often, and rightly, lamented. Turning some churchyards into mini-nature reserves is not going to reverse this trend. All the same, it is a good idea to encourage people to find some of the loveliness and life among the tombstones, to think about the frailty of human endeavour, and even to confront the reality of death. We are increasingly shy about the subject. I have relatives in Ireland, where funeral traditions such as open caskets and the coffin being kept at home the night before the funeral remain widely observed. My own family has followed them. But in the United Kingdom, these things are often met with incomprehension and amazement, as if they very idea of being in close proximity to a corpse, or letting one in your home, is self-evidently awful.

One might note too the unstoppable rise of the light-hearted funeral, with growing trends for bright colours, upbeat songs and relaxed dress codes. Jokes and indulgent eulogies are the order of the day. The awful looming mystery is pushed to one side.

In a churchyard, with the birdsong in the trees and the wind rustling the wildflowers, such diversions seem to lose their power and their necessity. Our ultimate lack of mastery over the fact of our own demise – symbolised by the grass and mosses overtaking ancient monuments – becomes inescapable without being terrifying, because it is softened by beauty and our awareness of the rhythms of nature. No wonder Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written In A Country Churchyard is one of the most famous poems in the English language, with its poignant yet consoling meditation on the unknown and unknowable lives that might have been lived by those who now lie forever silent. Even that self-consciously grumpy atheist Philip Larkin had some intimation of the importance of churchyards, with his realisation that churches were ‘proper to grow wise in / If only that so many dead lie round.’