Will Jeremy Hunt play it safe today?

This Budget is probably Jeremy Hunt’s last fiscal event before the election, and the Chancellor will want to at least set a fair wind for the Conservatives to head into polling day. That means giving voters a sense that sticking with the Tories is the safer option, offering them giveaways on tax and the sense that more tax cuts might be to come – as well as avoiding the sort of post-Budget rows that can define a government in all the wrong ways.

Hunt is expected to cut National Insurance by a further two percentage points, on top of the 2 point cut he made in the autumn. This is cheaper than cutting income tax, but has the disadvantage of being a tax that voters don’t fully understand or acknowledge in the same way. Tory MPs have already complained that repeating a cut the party didn’t get any thanks for in the autumn is a ‘definition of insanity’ approach. Others wonder whether polls showing voters are more concerned about the state of public services suggest the electorate isn’t as interested as the party is in lowering the tax burden. Given the national insurance cut has already emerged, it is unlikely to be the headline announcement today, though, with some in the party wondering if Hunt will also cut income tax after all – or if he’s keeping that for the party’s campaign manifesto.

Hunt could also abolish inheritance tax, which would mean he would have to find £7 billion from elsewhere and face accusations of favouring the wealthy – even from his own party. He has also been rumoured to be considering scrapping non-dom tax status. There are political arguments in favour of this approach, in that it makes it harder for Labour to attack Rishi Sunak’s wealth (his wife Akshata is a non-dom but has opted to pay UK tax on her overseas income following revelations about her tax status). But the Institute for Fiscal Studies has warned that scrapping the status could backfire, as these highly mobile, wealthy individuals could easily take their wealth and businesses elsewhere. 

There’s also the question of how to pay for these tax cuts. The overnight briefing has suggested that local authorities will be told to cut back spending on consultants and diversity plans, but neither will fund the tax cut – nor plug the black hole in many local authorities. Some councils are already effectively bankrupt, with Birmingham last night approving the biggest cuts to its services in history. Some councils, like Woking, have made manifestly daft decisions which have contributed to their financial failure. But the Local Government Association has long been warning of a £3 billion funding gap for all local authorities in England. 

Mind you, the warnings about council funding have been going on for almost as long as successive chancellors have been freezing or cutting fuel duty in response to backbench campaigns. Hunt is expected to extend the 5p cut in fuel duty, which is for now due to go up at the end of March. The current onus for this policy is that the Tories are keen to be the party of the motorist in the coming election.

They also want to be the party of homeowners, a rapidly ageing group given the housing crisis. This is one reason Hunt has been reportedly considering a 99 per cent mortgage scheme. That policy doesn’t solve the supply problem, which is very much in the category of things the party could have fixed during their 14 years in government but didn’t. In reality, there’s not much a party can do in its final Budget before an election to change the weather it has spent more than a decade making.

The race for the White House is about to get much dirtier

Super Tuesday is over and so is the primary season. Although some states have not voted yet and a few others have not finished counting, the parties’ nominees are now locked in. They were really locked in several weeks ago. Biden had no serious competition and Trump vanquished his two main rivals in the early voting. 

Trump’s chief competitors were Florida governor Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley, former governor of South Carolina and Trump’s UN ambassador. The former president effectively clinched the nomination when he beat both decisively on their most favourable terrain: DeSantis in Iowa and Haley in New Hampshire and her home state. Haley stayed in the race but, despite winning DC and Vermont, had no path to victory. 

Why did Trump win the nomination? Because he transformed his party’s base during his first run for president and then reassured that base he was able to run aggressively one more time. DeSantis found there was no room to Trump’s right on social issues, or at least not enough to persuade primary voters. Haley found the centrist, internationalist wing was too small. She still presents a challenge to Trump, even if, as she says, she won’t run as an independent in the November election. The challenge is that her voters form a significant portion of the Republican electorate, roughly a third, and many of them are hesitant to vote for Trump in the general election. He needs to bring most of them back into the fold to win the White House. One open question is whether Haley herself will help him.  

President Biden had a much easier time in the primaries, winning without serious competition. He even won New Hampshire as a write-in – no easy feat. His name wasn’t on the state’s ballot to avoid offending South Carolina, which Democrats had made their first primary. New Hampshire, they decided, was too white and too rural. South Carolina, by contrast, has a racially mixed population and is more representative of the Democratic party. But New Hampshire refused to give way, so Biden was forced to run as a write-in. He secured a big win there, as well as in South Carolina.

So, the Fat Lady (she/her/hers) has sung. Trump and Biden now begin the long slog to November. What challenges does each nominee face? 

Biden’s are easy to specify but hard to solve: the economy, immigration and his own physical frailty and cognitive decline. He must convince voters he is still sharp enough to hold the most demanding office on earth, or at least hide his deficiencies. He will try to mask the problems by relying almost entirely on advertisements, while avoiding long speeches, questions from reporters, and impromptu comments. Biden will do everything possible to avoid debates, or at least to limit the number. A friendly media should help on all counts. 

The economic issue is good for Trump and bad for Biden. Voters have decided they fared much better during the Trump years, at least before Covid. Their income went up about 7 per cent in real terms. It has gone down about 4.7 per cent under Biden. 

People notice the difference in prices, too, especially at the grocery store and gas pump. They also see them in much higher interest rates if they want to buy a house or car. They are grumpy about Biden trying to squeeze them into electric vehicles, even with huge government incentives, and prohibit gas stoves. 

Trump’s cry of ‘drill, baby, drill’ is not just a jab at that gas prices, EVs and environmental regulations (made by unelected bureaucrats). It is really a promise to unleash the American economy as a whole and a reminder that he did so last time. 

Republicans are punching home Biden’s responsibility for inflation and higher interest rates: they’re right. He flooded the economy with public money during his first three years. The president can rightly point to superb employment numbers, but the economy is still a major problem for him and a major plus for Trump. Voters simply don’t feel they are doing better economically under Biden. 

Important as the economy always is, illegal immigration now vies with it as citizens’ top concern. During Biden’s tenure, well over 7 million people have entered the US illegally. And they keep coming. 

That’s not a natural disaster. It’s a man-made one. During Biden’s first months in office, he overturned almost all Trump’s successful policies, which had limited the flow of illegal immigrants. Biden stopped building the border wall, ended the policy that required asylum seekers to ‘remain in Mexico’ while their claims were processed, and ended the valuable cooperative arrangement with the country to station their troops on the border to prevent illegal transit. Recently, when Texas tried to close its open southern border by erecting razor-wire fences, the Biden administration successfully sued to cut the wire. 

The immediate result has been a huge influx of illegal aliens, not just from Mexico, Central America and Venezuela, but from all around the world. The results of this unprecedented migrant wave are: 

• Unsupportable financial burdens on cities and states where the migrants arrive, 
• A surge of deadly narcotics from China through Mexico and into the US via cartels, 
• Human trafficking, including sex slaves, and  
• The solidification of transnational Mexican cartels, much like the Mafia was solidified under Prohibition 

Putting Vice President Kamala Harris in charge of the border and sending her to Central America to find the ‘root causes’ of immigration quickly became a joke. Indeed, Harris herself became a laughing stock, not only because of her ineffectiveness but because of her ‘word salad’ speeches and inauthenticity. Her favourability rating is now even lower than Biden’s. That’s a serious problem for Democrats since voters doubt whether Biden can make it through a full second term. They really don’t want a President Harris – and Trump will hammer that theme. 

The migrant problem has also strained the Democratic coalition. Progressives were the force behind open borders, and they still resist any efforts to close it. Not so with African Americans, a crucial component of any Democratic victory. They are angry with policies that put them in direct competition with illegal aliens for jobs and public resources. 

Donald Trump will run on these negatives and try to downplay his own, just as the Democrats will try to depict the former president as a ‘threat to democracy’. Democrats will emphasise ‘the insurrection of 6 January’ and Trump’s steadfast refusal to acknowledge his loss in 2020.  

Democrats will also emphasise abortion, a huge issue with women voters and a major reason why the party holds such a sizeable lead among them. Trump takes credit for appointing three conservative Supreme Court Justices who helped overturn Roe v. Wade – it’s a pillar of his support on the right – but he will try to tamp down the issue by emphasising his support for in vitro fertilization and his centrist position on abortion limits. That may help, but the issue is still a big winner for Democrats. 

So is the basic fear that Trump doesn’t respect the constitutional limits of his office, particularly the vital importance of publicly acknowledging defeat and transferring power peacefully. Democrats will highlight that issue by constantly pressing Trump on whether he still thinks he won the 2020 election. 

Voters mostly look to the future, not the past. What will you do for us? They do occasionally look back and Trump wants them to remember better times when he was president. Biden and his party want them to remember the tumult surrounding a ‘rogue president’ who tried to stay in power after losing an election and encouraged violence to do it.  

Trump’s best ‘positive’ argument is the one Reagan used so effectively against Jimmy Carter, ‘Are you better off now than you were four years ago?’ His best negative argument is that Biden has made Americans worse off economically, flooded the country with illegal immigrants, and will give way to President Kamala Harris sometime during his second term. 

Biden’s best positive argument is that he will preserve Americans’ traditional rights, especially reproductive rights. (He long ago dropped his 2020 argument that he will bring the country together.) His best negative argument is that Trump is a wannabe dictator, bent on revenge. 

Now that Super Tuesday is over, expect the negative arguments to dominate the race. 

A version of this article first appeared on The Spectator’s world edition.

Will Macron sell out to the Saudis?

Britain and its government has a well deserved reputation for kow-towing to foreign investors. But even they (one hopes) would draw a line at allowing a Middle East state to set up shop in the Royal Hospital Chelsea. In France, however, Emmanuel Macron’s government is studying a request from Saudi Arabia to erect its Olympic village in the Invalides during the Paris Olympics this summer.  

The site is sacred for the French military. As well as housing the country’s national army museum, it is the site of the Institution Nationale des Invalides, the equivalent of the Royal Hospital in Chelsea, and is also home to a necropolis containing the tomb of Napoleon.

When he was asked about the likelihood of the Saudis installing themselves in the Invalides for the duration of the Olympics, Armed Forces Minister Sébastien Lecornu replied that a decision had not yet been taken. He declared however that, in initial talks, ‘Saudi Arabia has agreed to respect the security and funding measures of Les Invalides’.

That’s nice of them, the cynic might mutter, but Lecornu hinted that their request will get the go-ahead. Riyadh was an ‘important defence partner’, he said, asking the media ‘for a sympathetic approach to the Saudi request, which could lead to benefactors’.

Macron is not a president averse to doing business with whoever opens their cheque book. He was the first Western leader to welcome Mohammed bin Salman back into the fold, after his brief spell on the naughty step for allegedly ordering the murder and dismemberment of a dissident journalist. Just last week he proudly announced a €10 billion (£8.6 billion) trade deal with the Hamas-friendly state of Qatar, mere months after the terrorist organisation had murdered 42 French citizens in Israel. So why should selling the country’s military soul be a problem?

The news has enraged the centre-right Republican party, which likes to think of itself as the party of the military top brass. They’ve pointed out that were the Saudis permitted to turn the Invalides into a base camp, the hullabaloo would likely have a deleterious effect on its residents, some of whom are undergoing rehabilitation for injuries sustained in the service of their country.

Patricia Mirallès, the Secretary of State for Veterans, was asked about the story in parliament last week and her vague response suggested this was a matter being decided at the very top. ‘I’m going to try to answer on the basis of what I know…information that we have been able to obtain,’ she said. ‘Today, nothing is concrete, nothing has been done.’

In response, Republican MP Nathalie Serre accused the government of putting the ‘values of the Republic’ up for sale. The fact it was the Saudis made it even more repugnant. ‘Saudi Arabia poses a specific problem in terms of respect for human rights,’ said Serre. ‘But if it had been a Danish or Canadian village, the problem would have been the same.’

‘Values’ have been a recurring theme of Macron’s presidency, a word he often bandies about in his speeches. In one address in 2020 he declared that ‘the Republic begins long before the Republic itself, because its values are rooted in our history’. Evidently those roots aren’t too deep to rip up if the price is right.

Geri Halliwell can never be wrong

Watching the current scandal around Christian Horner play out, I didn’t feel any of the glee I usually do when tabloids dissect the private lives of well-known people. (To be fair, I had zero sympathy for myself when the Daily Mail did it to me, twice – if you dish it out, you’d better be able to take it.) Rather, I felt an emotion that I rarely feel: protectiveness for my adored Ginger Spice – a.k.a Geri Hallwell Horner, wife of the Red Bull boss.

It’s a weird one. We’re used to feeling various emotions towards pop stars – lust, love, loathing – but it’s not often that we feel protective of them. I’m not being ‘O, poor you!’ pass-agg patronising here, either; I felt protective of Geri at the height of her fame, when she was young and gorgeous and fantastically successful. She just wanted it so, and she didn’t have any visible talent. More than Victoria, yes – but that’s not saying a lot; Brooklyn Beckham’s got more talent than Victoria. Lusted after and laughed at in equal measures, Geri was even mocked by her confidante Robbie Williams, her boyband equivalent: ‘She turned into a demonic little girl playing with dolls and a tea set, speaking like a psychotic child….it was genuinely scaring me.’ Throw in an eating disorder and a love-life that made Bridget Jones look like Zsa Zsa Gabor and things seem set to end badly for Ginger Spice.

But the Spice Girls all grew up to defy their stereotypes; Baby turned out to be sensible, Posh the earth mother, Sporty the sensitive one, Scary the alleged domestic violence survivor while Geri – previously defined by ambition and bad love choices – found herself at 50 married to a handsome and wealthy man, transformed into a gracious and graceful society matron and philanthropist. Seeing her receive an honorary degree from Sheffield Hallam university for a quarter of a century of campaigning for the rights of women and children, I felt like a proud parent.

Halliwell was always the one who drew the eye, and not just because of her outrageous clothes and pin-up body. The daughter of a Spanish cleaner, she grew up on a council estate and was a nude model while still a teenager, going on to boldly declare Mrs Thatcher ‘the first Spice Girl’. David Sinclair said that ‘Ginger, Posh, Baby, Sporty and Scary were the most widely recognised group of individuals since John, Paul, George and Ringo’; their first single, ‘Wannabe’, was Number One in 37 countries, Spice, the album it came from, the best-selling album by a female band ever, followed by merchandising deals worth more than $500 million by 1998. They took five Brit Awards, four Billboard Awards, three American Music Awards and were the youngest ever recipients of the Brit Award for Outstanding Contribution to Music. Fame is a wonderful thing, especially for working-class women, allowing them to live a luxe life which otherwise could never be theirs – but knowing when to step away is the icing on the ginger cake. And Geri seemed very happy having done so –  until the present kerfuffle.

I can imagine the glee of Halliwell’s detractors; there’s a certain sort of no-mark male who on hearing the words Spice Girls will sneer ‘Friendship never ends, eh?’ Certainly Geri made a sharp exit two years after their first hit, but since then, they have reunited for two tours, both of which were the highest grossing of each year. So, in a way, friendship didn’t end – it just evolved, as friendships must if they want to avoid being boring. The fact that five ordinary girls made all that money from only 130 minutes of recorded material remains a remarkable commercial feat; they were the ultimate Lottery winners of fame. Geri, ever the opinionated one, had a pleasant shock in store for Spectator readers when the girls were interviewed in 1996: ‘We Spice Girls are true Thatcherites. Thatcher was the first Spice Girl, the pioneer of our ideology – Girl Power. We don’t have to agree on politics – it’s bigger than that. Support a woman doing the best she can and that’s it… everyone’s politically different and that’s OK.’ 

Everyone’s politically different and that’s OK – such a throwaway remark in 1996, but it sounds so daring now. Remember when Kate Bush said of Theresa May in 2016 ‘We have a female prime minister here in the UK. I actually really like her and think she’s wonderful. I think it’s the best thing that’s happened to us in a long time. She’s a very intelligent woman… it is great to have a woman in charge of the country’? This was too much for many sensitive flowers, who had suffered previously when Bush refused to wet herself with indignation over Brexit like any good snowflake should, saying instead ‘Change is such an important part of life. It’s such a different world from even five years ago.’

After a certain age – probably 15 – there’s something pathetic about being so invested in a pop star that they can cause you actual grief; the hysteria that greeted Morrissey’s and John Lydon’s Brexiteerism was another example, especially considering that it was entirely predictable they’d both be Leavers, being rebels and contrarians. (Like me.) Setting oneself up as judge and jury of the politics of one’s nearest and dearest is unreasonable enough but when the grudge is between fan and idol, it becomes tragic. I’ve noticed, too, that women are expected to ‘behave’ politically far more than men; like Bush, Taylor Swift has also been harassed into denying she is conservative, while no fan ever turned their back on David Bowie because he once spoke well of the Nazis.

Could Geri wear her Union Jack dress today without getting monstered by Bed-Wetters Inc? Probably not. Both this and their early anti-EU cheek – ‘All those countries look the same – only England looks different’ said Ginger with magnificent insouciance–- reflected the fact that the Spice ethos was was rooted in working-class girl-chancer culture, from vaudeville to glamour modelling. They were the last gasp of chav triumphalism, which now seems such a glorious thing surveying the current political scene in which the Left openly hate the working-class for no longer being easy to corral, control and count by head like cattle as they pour into the voting sheds and the Tories have totally betrayed those Red Wall constituents who favoured them so open-mindedly.

Popular music itself – always the creation and escape of the British working-class – has been utterly colonised by the liberal bourgeoisie. Will we ever again have a pop star who can remember, as Halliwell did, ‘when it was time to leave junior school, I demanded to go to Watford Girls’ Grammar School and threatened to run away if Mum didn’t send me there. It was full of middle-class kids whose parents couldn’t afford private schools. I was the token poor kid – a fact I was never allowed to forget. One teacher enjoyed using me as an example of the school’s noble policy towards the underprivileged, saying ‘Geri, you’re very, very lucky to be here.’ No wonder I had little confidence.’? Yet from this sad little girl emerged the glorious red, white and blue striped butterfly that was Ginger Spice.

The private school-kids have taken over now: the Last Dinner Party (Bedales); Arlo Parks (Latymer Upper); Jessie Ware (Alleyn’s). Is it a coincidence that music is also more boring than it’s ever been? Comparing Ed Sheehan in his prime to Geri Halliwell in her pomp, I think of Clough Williams-Ellis great line: ‘I would rather be vulgar than boring – especially to myself.’

There is precious little vulgar about the mature Mrs Horner, who has proved the very model of dignity and decorum during this scandal. Whatever decision she makes about her future, I’m sure she’ll carry it through with verve and nerve. If she stays with her husband, she’ll do so with her customary flair, and if she doesn’t – well, so long as she remembers that there can be no half measures. Because – as with another bold project of which she was once the most vampish and vivacious supporter – Leave Means Leave.

Could the BBC sink Desert Island Discs?

Desert Island Discs is 80 years old and to celebrate this milestone the BBC has planned an event unprecedented in the show’s long history. It is also one that will surely have its creator and original presenter, Roy Plomley, spinning in his grave. Desert Island Discs Live will take place at London’s Palladium over three nights later this month with host Lauren Lavern in conversation with celebrity guests Russell T. Davies, Katherine Ryan, Lemn Sissay, Ellie Simmonds, Dara Ó Briain, Sue Perkins ‘and more to be announced’.

If this sounds like your sort of thing then it’s not too late to book – there is, at the time of writing, a whole raft of tickets still available from between £44 and £92. It is perhaps surprising that a show which gets an audience in the millions has so far failed to sell out a venue with a capacity of just 2,000. Perhaps its because regular DID listeners know it is an extraordinarily bad idea. 

The whole charm of the show, and the reason for its longevity, is its intimacy. The programme captures the sense of solitude and reflection that being cast away, alone, might bring. The host then gently encourages to share those feelings – with the music selections both articulating and puncturing the intimacy. Desert Island Discs whispers rather than shouts. The studio becomes a confessional.

We listeners don’t necessarily want guests to break down but it’s certainly memorable when they do. One thinks of Ian Wright on his inspirational school teacher, Ade Edmondson on the death of his comedy partner Rik Mayall, Richard E. Grant on how broken he was by the death of his wife, Stephen Graham on having been suicidal, Lemn Sissay on being cruelly taken from his mother. Will Sissay, who is on the DID Live bill, be asked to recreate this emoting on stage? 

Lauren Laverne, whose previous broadcasting career had been more in the ‘Hello Glastonbury!’ vein, initially seemed to lack the lightness-of-touch that had characterised her masterful predecessors in the DID chair, Sue Lawley and then Kirsty Young. But she has got better over the last six years and now consistently strikes the right tone – a quiet one.

By putting DID in front of a live audience, it will surely lose this. DID Live will, inevitably, be more akin to a chat show where hoary anecdotes are wheeled out for laughs and cheers rather than a thoughtful, unscripted conversation, one-on-one. 

This seems to have been reflected in the choice of guests: there is no unheralded Scottish judge or volcanologist here, it’s pure showbiz, all TV entertainers and performative celebs. Furthermore, all of the guests announced so far have already been on the show. While it’s not unprecedented for guests to appear more than once, they never record another show within a couple of years. All six of these DID Live guests have been interviewed recently, making this, in a sense, another BBC repeat. 

It’s not like the producers needed to do this. DID couldn’t be any more loved. It’s regularly the most searched item on the catch-up service BBC Sounds. An expert panel five years ago voted it the best radio show ever. And it’s not even the 80th anniversary at all, not really.  Perhaps fittingly for a show about being marooned on a desert island, they have missed that boat. It’s not even in the year of the 80th anniversary. The first DID was in January 1942. The live show is over two years late. So why this? Why now?

Well, the announcement of the Palladium shows came just months after DID became one of several radio crown jewels shows – along with the consistently brilliant Melvyn Bragg-fronted In Our Time – which were moved under the control of BBC Studios, the commercial wing of the corporation. In other words, they wanted to monetise the show’s popularity. 

There you have it: its new controllers are using the feeble excuse of the 82nd-and-a-bit anniversary of DID to test the water for turning it into a proper live event earner in the vein of Gardeners’ World with no doubt merch and all the rest. If all this is judged a success – assessed on financial terms, of course, rather than on whether it truly enhances the brand – they’ll surely take DID to Latitude in the summer, perhaps even to Glastonbury, which would be full circle for Laverne. 

Please don’t let that happen. This is a precious national institution. Just as you wouldn’t get planning permission to significantly alter a listed building, you should have some respect for heritage radio shows. Leave Desert Island Discs alone.

Sydney Sweeney and the return of real body positivity

Yay! Boobs are back! Sydney Sweeney made engagement farming easy with her cleavage-revealing curtain call this past weekend as the host of Saturday Night Live. If you spend any time online at all, I’m sure you’ve seen the video. Wrapped in a revealing little black dress, Sydney thanks the cast, the crew, Lorne Michaels and giggles and bounces in familiar ways I haven’t seen in decades. For anyone under the age of 25, they’ve likely never seen it in their lifetime – as the giggling blonde with an amazing rack has been stamped out of existence, a creature shamed to the brink of extinction.

sydney sweeney’s end speech at SNL pic.twitter.com/tNtMr4YTcJ

— best of sydney sweeney (@sydneyfiles) March 3, 2024

I’m honestly shocked at the response to Sydney Sweeney, although I probably shouldn’t be. She reminds me of Jenny McCarthy in the white bikini circa 1996 and there were hundreds of her type for me growing up. In fact, when she dressed up in the Hooters uniform for one of the sketches, I could have sworn she was Pamela Anderson or Denise Richards. If you went to any mall in the American Midwest in 1999, you would have seen dozens of Sydneys wandering around, traveling in packs, twirling their hair and doing that same hot girl thing with their hands when they got excited.

See, back in my day, kids, boobs were everywhere. It was the 1990s and early 2000s. We had Pamela Anderson and Baywatch. Jennifer Love Hewitt graced the cover of Maxim with her boobs. My girlfriends always used to complain about not understanding men – I told them, ‘stop reading Cosmo and start reading Maxim’. Our supermodels – like Tyra Banks and Cindy Crawford – had curves. Carmen Electra did one of the hottest photoshoots in the history of Playboy magazine in her 2003 cover spread. McCarthy was Playmate of the Year in 1993 and from there became a host of Singled Out on MTV. The Man Show with Adam Carolla and Jimmy Kimmel, had a segment that was just girls jumping on trampolines. We were a culture awash in tits – and it was glorious.

We could look at boobs and not feel bad about it – and that’s a good thing. In fact, I’d argue it’s a healthy thing. Boobs are fantastic. There’s a biological component that makes it totally normal to be fascinated by boobs.

Then came the advent of the highly-strung women’s site and, understandably, stuff got weird. It’s been weird ever since. There was a newfound mainstream media fixation on the ‘male gaze’ – people were told to fixate on whether the female forms they viewed were ‘realistic’ or ‘body-positive’, rather than simply nice to look at. The first column I ever wrote for Playboy online was on April Fool’s Day 2015. That October, Playboy announced they were getting rid of their nudes, right around the time I was hired to write a weekly sex and relationship column. It was the sharp intake of breath that preceded the onslaught of the #MeToo movement and in the fervour of that long overdue reckoning, things started to feel like a witch hunt. Needless to say, it was a very strange time to be writing for a men’s magazine. I was constantly crossing ever-shifting lines.

Writing for the red-blooded American male was hard enough, so I can only imagine what it was like to be one. Normie Americans everywhere, men and women, got used to walking on eggshells. Things that we took for granted as being true – comedians are allowed to be hyperbolic and offensive, the First Amendment is good, men and women are different – were suddenly up for debate. 

The old school objectification was out and a new kind of objectification took over. Two weeks ago when comedian Shane Gillis had a triumphant return to host Saturday Night Live after being fired for ‘racist jokes that resurfaced’ – the right wing saw it as a win and the left wing saw it as a loss. Millions of Americans didn’t care either way. Shane Gillis doesn’t belong to the right wing any more than Sydney Sweeney does.

If the reaction to Sydney Sweeney is any indication, this trend is not getting better. The horny conservative crowd immediately jumped in to capture the moment and label it ‘right wing’. But the online right is an inconsistent disaster; they’ll go from calling Taylor Swift a psyop for dating a football player and chugging a beer, to saying a bunch of sorority girls dancing is a sign of Satan and degeneracy. These lunatics, who are clearly suffering internet poisoning, do not speak for the masses. 

Representation matters and if the past two weeks of Saturday Night Live hosts are evidence – a blonde with nice boobies and a dude who says ‘gay’ and ‘retard’ – at last the culture is representing me, an Instagram reels-addicted basic bitch in the suburbs. People with broad appeal are back. Humour and boobs have returned. It’s refreshing, in a completely banal kind of way.

This article first appeared on The Spectator World edition website.

Why Cambodia is the best country in the world

Yeah, I know, ridiculous. Cambodia? How can that be the best country in the entire world? For a start, most people can’t place it on a map. This includes close relatives of mine who are studying geography at A Level. They know all about the Marxist topography of urbanism, but Cambodia, err, um, is that near Africa?

Also, Cambodia?? Isn’t that the country that suffered a fearsome Maoist genocide within living memory, with a quarter of its population dying by execution, torture, famine and disease, and the rest left so hungry they resorted to eating giant spiders roasted in tomato powder?

Well yes, it is. But I have spent the last year – and indeed several decades – travelling the world, and the last three months travelling all over Indochina, especially Cambodia, and I can report that, quite remarkably, it has a claim to be the best country on earth, right now.

First let’s start with those tarantulas. Or, rather, all the many alternatives to roast tarantulas (which you can still buy on street stalls at fairs, like toffee apples in the UK). Cambodian food is phenomenal. Right up there. Why this is, I am not sure, the geography certainly helps: it benefits from yummy Thai influences to the west, scrumptious Vietnamese influences to the east, and a lot of delicious Chinese culinary ideas; plus some succulent Indian, Malay and colonial French tinges. An impressive lineage.

The result is mmm, sensational. And it’s not just the Khmer food (like the river prawn pancakes dipped in peanut sauce, or the succulent fish amok curries, or the beef in kampot pepper) the Khmers seem to have a mastery of any food. If you order a pizza, it will be properly cooked and probably fabulous. Ditto a tarka dhal, prawn tempura, fish and chips, confit de canard, or tortilla, tacos, and toasted cheese sarnies. Even the crisp, cold, cucumber-laced gin-and-tonics come with brilliant bar snacks – freshly deep-fried banana slices dipped in nut and chilli powder.

One reason for the great food might be Cambodia’s relative poverty and its lack of ‘sophistication’ in food prep. There is not much processed food here – let alone ultra-processed. If you eat greens they probably came from a field a day ago, likewise fish from the sea, meat from the butcher. The result, despite the deliciousness (and now plentifulness) of the local food is that Cambodia has an obesity rate of about 4 per cent, one of the lowest on the planet. And you can see it: everyone is slender and fit.

The Cambodians look, in fact, like westerners in photos from the early 1960s, before the Americans adopted the Standard American Diet (poignantly know as SAD), with all its UPFs, its fried wings, and its fructose corn syrups, making them obese. In my years of travelling I have watched this Standard American Diet inexorably waddle its way around the world, with an early landing in Britain and Oz, followed by Latin America, the Middle East, mainland Europe, north Africa. I have likewise seen the whole world get fat and arguably less healthy, notwithstanding increasing wealth. Yet not in Cambodia, so far.

The lack of rubbish western food ingredients is one reason Cambodian health – despite relatively meagre medical care – has vastly improved in recent decades. Forty years ago life expectancy here was around 50. Now it is 71. During the depths of the Khmer Rouge atrocities, Cambodian life expectancy actually went down to 12. This is a majorly positive change in a comparatively short time: on present trajectories Cambodian life expectancy will overtake the USA in a few years, as American life-span falls, thanks to all those guns, drugs and deep pan pizzas.

What else? The landscape is agreeably green, the jungles are often untouched, the islands can be Edenic (but primitive), Angkor Wat is utterly astonishing. Also, the climate is benign, with a long warm dry season tempered by sweet river breezes in its buzzing, hedonistic capital of Phnom Penh, now regaining its title of the Pearl of the Orient. The French coveted Cambodia for a reason. But with the French long gone, and their language largely forgotten (replaced by English) the Chinese now desire the place, and pump money in, briskly improving the infrastructure (mobile coverage is probably better than in Britain).

Politically, Cambodia has also had that fortunate thing: a terrible recent encounter with socialism. This means they loathe leftist ideas, a blessing for any nation, yet they cherish Buddhism, once again, which provides a nurturing spiritual framework for their lives, without oppressing anyone (Khmer women are sassy and forthright: it’s difficult to put them in shrouds). At the same time, hard work is respected, as is free enterprise, and low-level crime – as in most of East Asia – is bewilderingly absent, compared to the cities of the West.

If this makes Cambodia sound paradisiacal, it probably shouldn’t. There are plenty of serpents in the garden. Political corruption is dire. Evil developments abound (Sihanoukville is like a kind of ruined Chinese Detroit). Democracy is fragile; gangsters trade in arms and people; lots of Cambodians work in exploitative jobs for very little money. Pollution and deforestation are major problems.

And yet, no country on Earth avoids all these issues, there is no true paradise anywhere. And I have yet to touch on the most important aspect of all, which makes Cambodia such a pleasant place to be: the optimism.

This is an unplaceable thing, not measured in any of those stupid surveys which claim, say, Toronto is the world’s best city despite being uninhabitable for seven months of the year. But it is real. Cambodia just feels happy, despite having a low GDP per capita. And this is surely because that GDP per capita is rising, and fast, alongside longevity – which is the key to national happiness. France, America and the UK are all fortunate and rich in their own ways, yet they are not happy, and their political divisions show this. The French, Americans and Brits rightly sense stagnation, which makes for sadness, disquiet, then anger.

In young, go-getting Cambodia, by contrast, GDP per capita rose by 7 per cent per year for a decade, pre-pandemic, and it now seems to be returning to that path. That is what makes people truly smile: if you think that life, however hard this year, will be better next year, and the year after that, and much better for your kids, then you look at the world with hope. You get up in the morning with a sense of purpose. Life improves.

Are there lessons for the west in Cambodia? Perhaps, perhaps not. We really don’t want a few years of a western Khmer Rouge to teach us that woke-ish neo-Marxism is catastrophic, so we can return to good sense, but maybe some version of this is inevitable. In the meantime, if you want to avoid all this nonsense: go South East, young man.

MPs demand veto on foreign state press ownership

More than 100 MPs have tonight backed an amendment in the House of Lords which would give parliament a veto on foreign states owning UK media outlets. Robert Jenrick, the former Housing Secretary, has organised an open letter among colleagues, following the attempt by the UAE-owned RedBird IMI to take over the Telegraph and Spectator titles. Signatories include  a string of former Cabinet ministers including Sir John Redwood, Therese Coffey, Sir Simon Clarke, Robert Buckland, Stephen Crabb, Sir Iain Duncan Smith, Theresa Villiers and Sir Geoffrey Cox.

Jenrick’s letter to Lucy Frazer, the Culture Secretary, says that: ‘If major newspaper and media organisations can be purchased by foreign governments, the freedom of the press has the potential to be seriously undermined.’ It notes that ‘No other democracy in the world has allowed a media outlet to be controlled by a foreign government. This is a dangerous Rubicon we should not cross.’ Their letter signals support for an amendment to the Digital Markets Bill by Tory peer Baroness Stowell that would create the new powers for parliament. It is due to be debated in the Lords next week, on either Monday 11 or Wednesday 13 March.

Two things are immediately striking about Jenrick’s letter tonight. The first is the degree to which it commands support across the Conservative party. Those concerned about foreign ownership of UK titles range from diehard Thatcherites to One Nation liberals. Representation of different strands in Tory thinking is represented in the form of Eurosceptics like Sir Bill Cash to internationalists like Alicia Kearns and Johnsonites like Sir Conor Burns.

The second is that Jenrick’s letter is simply the latest expression of parliamentary concern about the prospect of state-run vehicles owning British titles. In the Commons, Kearns tabled an Urgent Question in January; Michael Forsyth did similar in the Lords last week. Both occasions made clear the extent to which parliament was opposed to the nation of titles like the Telegraph and the Spectator being owned by a foreign state-backed company.

Judging the ‘mood of the House’ is an imprecise and inelegant way of assessing parliamentary opinion. But the demonstration of feelings on both occasions, combined with tonight’s development that around half the Conservative non-payroll rate have opted to sign Jenrick’s letter, show the strength of concern about these issues within parliament. Will the government accept that when it comes to responding to Stowell’s amendment next week?

Science minister forced to pay damages

Another day, another government figure in a spot of bother. Michelle Donelan, Science and Technology Secretary, has today had to retract false accusations she made about an academic and agreed to pay the damages and costs. It’s a rather embarrassing case of the science minister unable to get her facts right: sub-optimal to say the least.

Last October, Donelan accused Professor Kate Sang, an academic working at Heriot Watt University, of expressing sympathy for Hamas in the aftermath of the 7 October attack. She also accused another academic, Dr Kamna Patel, of sharing extremist material. Both woman, Donelan claimed, had breached the Seven Principles of Public Life and should be removed from their positions.

In fact, Dr Patel had shared no such material, while Professor Sang’s only crime was to tweet a link to a Guardian article that described the fallout from the Hamas attack, labelling it ‘disturbing’. Donelan’s mistake seems to be based on a press release from the Policy Exchange which has now left the unfortunate minister rather humiliated by the whole thing. Not only did she fire off a letter of complaint to UK Research and Innovation about its new equality, diversity and inclusion board members, Donelan decided to then publicly post the offending letter on Twitter/X — raising more interest in the whole palaver. Talk about being hoist by your own petard…

Would another cut to National Insurance be enough to move the polls?

We’ll know tomorrow afternoon what exactly Jeremy Hunt has included in his Budget, but reports this evening suggest we’re looking at another 2p cut to employee National Insurance: a move that is estimated to put £450 back in the pocket of the average worker, which Hunt will try to sell as a £900 tax cut, if you combine it with the additional 2p taken off NI in his Autumn Statement last year. 

The decision to opt for NI will be driven by fiscal restraints rather than political desire. Tory MPs, and workers, have been expecting something bigger than what was already delivered last autumn, and an income tax would have fit the bill. Furthermore, Rishi Sunak made clear when he ran for the leadership back in summer 2022 that he wanted to focus on income tax cuts, pleading to reduce the basic rate from 20p to 16p over the next parliament. 

But Hunt has been working with far less fiscal headroom than he thought he’d have at the start of the year, and income tax cuts are expensive: £7 billion for every 1p off income tax, compared to roughly £5 billion for every 1p off NI. 

The Chancellor can try to justify the downgrade to his tax cutting plans by insisting it fits his narrative, started last year, that tax cuts are part of creating a better incentive to work. Moreover, the government has insisted for over a year that income tax cuts can be inflationary. It’s a point that has always been disputed – a relatively minor income tax cut is unlikely to lead to a spending boom when inflation outpaced wages for so long – but it’s a talking point we can expect the government will double down on if ministers opt for NI tax cuts instead.

But will the country buy it? Hunt’s first round of cuts to National Insurance didn’t see any movement in the polls. The government may be banking on more time for the benefits of these tax cuts to be fully felt by workers, who have only just started to see the benefits in their take-home pay. The problem remains that these tax cuts are being offset by tax rises elsewhere, as freezes to tax thresholds pull millions of workers into paying tax, and millions more into paying the higher rate.

This is why the big question tomorrow remains: what happens to the overall tax burden? Whether Hunt opts for an income tax cut or a NI tax cut, he runs the risk (as he did in the Autumn Statement) of being accused of raising taxes. Despite the 2p off NI last November, the tax burden didn’t budge, remaining on track for tax receipts as a percentage of GDP to hit a post-war high in 2028-29. This makes it very difficult for the Chancellor – or indeed the Prime Minister – to claim they are cutting taxes as they head towards an election. If they want to claim they are the party of tax cuts, the tax burden has to be falling. Income tax cut or NI tax cut: the government can’t be giving with one hand and taking with another. 

Listen to today’s episode of Coffee House Shots, where Kate Andrews, James Heale and Isabel Hardman look ahead to tomorrow’s budget:

The flaw in the SNP’s plan to ‘build a new Scotland’

The SNP seems determined not to stick to the day job of actually running the country. Scotland’s government this week launched a publication called ‘Building a New Scotland: an independent Scotland’s Place in the World’. It set out policies for something that doesn’t exist – an independent Scotland – in areas in which the devolved administration has no responsibility.

Angus Robertson, the party’s constitution and external affairs secretary who launched the report, hardly seemed fazed by those facts: he spoke fluently and familiarly about ‘defence, peace and security’ and Scotland’s role as ‘a good global citizen’, even if his party’s plan is unlikely to ever see the light of day.

Robertson set out a series of propositions which cannot logically be reconciled, while blithely refusing to acknowledge any obstacles. The individual building blocks of his policy were that Scotland would seek Nato membership, that it would build ‘strong relationships’ with its immediate neighbours, and that it would require the removal of nuclear weapons from its territory in ‘​​the safest and most expeditious manner possible’.

This is all, essentially, about missiles and submarines, but there’s a big problem. The United Kingdom’s nuclear capability is provided by four Vanguard-class submarines armed with Trident II ballistic missiles, one of which is always on station somewhere in the world, providing continuous at-sea deterrence. Their home is HM Naval Base Clyde at Faslane, 40 miles from Glasgow, and the nuclear warheads are stored and loaded a few miles away at Royal Naval Armaments Depot Coulport on Loch Long. These facilities cost billions of pounds to build and maintain from the 1960s onwards, and another £1.7 billion in improvements at HNMB Clyde was announced in 2017. Most importantly, they are unique in the United Kingdom.

An independent Scotland would, therefore, demand that the United Kingdom effectively take its nuclear submarines out of service and suspend its deterrent capability. The Vanguard-class submarines have nowhere else to go. The Royal Navy’s other operating bases, HMNB Portsmouth and HMNB Devonport in Plymouth, do not have the appropriate combination of facilities to maintain and repair the submarines and handle and store the Trident warheads. Building a ‘new Faslane’ would cost many billions of pounds and would take, at a reasonable estimate, between 15 and 20 years, assuming a suitable site could be found. So the ability to use the deterrent, which had been available every minute of every day since April 1969, would end.

Expelling the Royal Navy from Faslane would cause an almighty stooshie, however fervently the SNP might desire ‘strong relationships’ with its neighbours. But accession to Nato requires the unanimous consent of existing members, so while Scotland effectively demanded the UK disarm unilaterally on one hand it would be asking it to approve its alliance membership on the other. That, surely, is simply a non-starter.

The Royal Navy’s ballistic missile submarines are also a critical part of Nato’s nuclear capability. The Strategic Concept, the alliance’s fundamental plan and statement of values, says that nuclear weapons are ‘the supreme guarantee of the security of the Alliance…Nato will take all necessary steps to ensure the credibility, effectiveness, safety and security of the nuclear deterrent mission’. These forces are provided by the United States, France and the UK. With the possibility of a second Donald Trump presidency placing doubts over America’s commitment to Nato, the loss of the United Kingdom’s contribution would surely be unacceptable.

Robertson glided smoothly over these objections at yesterday’s press conference. He conceded that the UK would ‘clearly rather not’ relocate its nuclear submarines – a masterpiece of understatement – but put aside concerns by stating that ‘in these circumstances, it will’. The idea put about before the 2014 referendum that the UK might in the end lease Faslane and Coulport as sovereign bases was some years ago dismissed by the Nationalists. Voters are entitled to ask how, when and at what cost the relocation will happen.

Something would have to give. Some were troubled that Robertson would not commit a future SNP government to signing the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, an international agreement with 93 signatories to eliminate such weapons, but any softening of the party’s opposition would create huge internal strife. But the speedy departure of the nuclear submarines from Faslane and the UK approving Scottish membership of Nato are incompatible.

If the SNP wants to spend time and public money imagining how it would conduct itself running an independent country, then it has to answer serious questions. How would it get rid of nuclear weapons and get into Nato? Pretending there is no problem is dishonest; providing an answer is hard.

Vulnerable children don’t belong in jail

Britain’s prisons brim with vulnerable people but perhaps the most vulnerable are children. At 30 September 2023, there were 301 children in prison in England and Wales alone. Wetherby Young Offender Institution in Yorkshire is home to 165 of them and a new report from His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Prisons makes for troubling reading about the conditions inside. There are the usual observations, familiar to regular readers of these write-ups, about broken heating systems and smashed windows, faulty electrics and insufficient time out of cells. But then there is this:

‘We had considerable concerns about the use of all-male teams to cut the clothes of vulnerable girls under restraint and place them in anti-ligature clothing.’

This appears to have been done to prevent self-harm but the Inspectorate says it is ‘simply not acceptable’ to have groups of male prison officers stripping female children. Inspectors identified two occasions on which this happened. They also found 24 occasions on which children had been strip-searched in the previous year, half of them while the child was under restraint. Inspectors considered this frequency to be ‘high’. The report notes that while management had kept records of the strip-searches, none had recorded the authority to conduct them under restraint.

A review of prison records showed that force had been used against the children on 1,126 occasions, with 155 of these cases involving girls. That might seem a pretty small proportion but at time of inspection, from November to December 2023, there were exactly three girls being held at Wetherby. Two-thirds of children reported having been restrained. One in three use-of-force events cited the need to prevent self-harm, a significant problem in the institution, with 892 self-harm incidents and 205 reports of children being at-risk of self-harm or suicide.

One third (98) of the prison’s safeguarding referrals last year involved allegations of a child being harmed during restraint. ‘Pain-inducing techniques’ had been deployed nine times in the previous 12 months and in every case their deployment was found to be ‘inappropriate’ by the Independent Review of Restraint Panel. Prison management ‘did not routinely attend incidents to provide support to staff nor did they attend planned intervention briefings which resulted in poor management of incidents’. The prison leadership is criticised for failing to review body-worn camera footage. When inspectors studied the videos, they uncovered ‘the restraint of a child which resulted in an injury that had not been referred to senior leaders’.

The Inspectorate’s report for Wetherby paints a picture of a prison which, while getting some things right (mostly on care and purposeful activity), is struggling to manage behaviour. One in four of the children fail their drug tests. There were 443 assaults reported in 2023, with 67 involving a blade, blunt implement or harmful liquid. While not the worst example of the English prison estate, HMYOI Wetherby does not come across as a safe place for detaining vulnerable children. The stripping of girls by male prison officers in particular is beyond alarming.

Some of the issues identified could be remedied by tightening of rules and regulations. Prohibiting anyone other than female staff from removing girls’ clothing would be one such measure. Limiting the use of restraint to the preservation of human life or prevention of serious harm to other children would be another. Yet none of these measures would address the more basic question of whether we need or ought to be holding 300 children in prison. There will be some for whom incarceration in a place such as Wetherby is unavoidable on public safety grounds, but there is scope to consider alternative arrangements for children who pose a lesser risk but still require restriction and supervision.

Unfortunately, there’s no votes in this and in an election year everyone’s attention will be focused elsewhere. Children who end up behind bars are just wrong’uns and toerags and getting what they deserve. Except, we know that the kind of people who enter the carceral system are disproportionately likely to come from broken homes, to have witnessed or experienced alcohol and drug dependency or violence and abuse. They are typically children who have been failed from the earliest years of their lives and written off not long thereafter. They don’t need our cynicism, they need our empathy and compassion and support.

There are no votes in this issue but there damn well ought to be. The treatment vulnerable children receive at the hands of the state is far less than adequate. It is sometimes scandalous. That should be everyone’s concern. We cannot lock up our conscience along with these children and throw away the key.

Who cares that Rishi Sunak makes his own bed?

Mr and Mrs Sunak of Downing Street have given a joint interview to Grazia magazine in which they give answers to the most pressing questions facing the country. They don’t bother sweating the small stuff like the state of the economy, the upcoming Budget, or the election prospects of the beleaguered Tories, but instead share their carefully considered thoughts on dividing up the household chores.

Akshata Murty gushes that Rishi’s ‘special skill’ is tidying the bedroom. Rishi is not to be outdone when it comes to spilling the secrets of their home life. He confesses to breaking away from his day job (just the small matter of running the country, lest we forget) to go upstairs to the Downing Street flat and make the bed because of his wife’s habit of leaving it in a mess. Indeed (and make of this what you will) the most urgent question on Sunak’s mind most days appears to be whether his wife has made the bed properly. ‘You also just don’t like making the bed. I mean it bugs me. So I actually sometimes come up back into the flat from the office after we’ve all left to make the bed. I’ll be irritated if it’s not been made’, he said. Akshata, duly reprimanded, confessed to not being a ‘morning person’, confiding that making sure the bedroom was ‘neat and tidy’ was one of her husband’s specialties. 

Is it any wonder the country is in such a mess if this is where Sunak’s core skills really lie? Perhaps when he is kicked out of Downing Street at the next election (and barring a miracle this is the most likely outcome if the polls are to be believed) he should consider becoming a chambermaid at the local Premier Inn? 

There is much more of this vacuous nonsense. We learn that Rishi takes the lead when it comes to loading the couple’s dishwasher, with Murty conceding: ‘I’m not the most organised person compared to Rishi’. As for cooking for their two daughters, Murty coos that her husband has ‘more talent in that department’. Apparently Rishi also has to remind his wife that the children need carbohydrate and protein at mealtimes. Oh please. Enough. The takeout from this interview, if there is one, is meant to be that these two super-privileged multimillionaires are just ordinary homebodies like everyone else in Britain, struggling to make ends meet, reduced to squabbling over boring domestic chores, and making sure the kids eat their greens.

The ostensible reason for the joint interview with the ‘country’s most high-profile couple’ about how they share out domestic chores is to mark International Women’s Day. But why agree to it? Why would Sunak and his advisers think that droning on about his home life, making him out to be a cross between a househusband and superman, would play well with voters? It reeks of political desperation. Nor is it politically wise to follow in the path of Theresa May (another doomed PM) when it comes to daft publicity stunts. Who can forget the toe-curling interview May and her husband Philip did on the BBC’s The One Show, where he revealed that the couple split household duties into ‘girls’ jobs’ and ‘boys’ jobs’. His assigned role was to take out the household bins. The best that can be said is that at least with the Mays it was half-believable, in that they bore a passing resemblance to an ordinary suburban couple. In the case of Sunak and Murty, it is too absurd. It is to treat the average voter as a gullible idiot.

Sunak has form when it comes to daft PR stunts that spectacularly backfire. After all, he is the man who didn’t know how to use a bank card to pay for filling up his car at a petrol station (a borrowed car rather than his own at that). These are supposedly serious times in which the country faces multiple crises. Sunak is trailing by huge margins in the polls. His tenure in Downing Street has lasted barely 18 months but it already feels like an age. His problem is that he is not a natural performer in an age dominated by performative politics. He can come across, at times, as a little robotic, and interviews like this are meant to help humanise him. But not all publicity is good publicity and this poorly-judged PR stunt is proof of exactly that. It merely encourages mockery and disbelief.

GB News suffers big losses as TalkTV goes online

What a week for TV broadcasters: it’s been non-stop breaking news about, um, themselves. After BBC Verify’s debacle yesterday, it’s TalkTV that is making headlines today. The television channel, launched to much fanfare in 2022, is moving entirely online from this summer. Staff were informed by email on Tuesday, just a month after the channel’s most famous presenter Piers Morgan announced that his shows would be broadcast solely on YouTube.

The station has struggled with fluctuating viewing figures for some time, and it racked up 2 million viewers in December 2023 – significantly less than BBC News’s 11.4 million and falling just behind its main competitor, GB News, which reached 2.87 million. The channel will continue to have a schedule based on news and opinion but go out via streaming services and on YouTube rather than on traditional TV. It will also continue to air in the TalkRadio slot on DAB. Some comfort at least…

Not that GB News has much to celebrate at the moment either. The channel has seen cumulative losses of £76 million in two and a half years, according to reports published today. The right-wing channel, which is home to a host of presenters including Nigel Farage, Lee Anderson and Jacob Rees-Mogg, has encountered financial difficulties from the off, with PressGazette reporting that there were losses of £31 million in its first year on-air. That grew by 38 per cent to £42.4 million this year, with staff numbers swelling from 175 in May 2022 to 295 in May 2023.

A bad day for broadcasters all round…

Dinosaurs, dogma and the Victorian mind

In March 1860, shortly after The Origin of Species was published, Charles Darwin wrote to Leonard Horner thanking him for some surprising information. ‘How curious about the Bible!’ he exclaimed. Horner had taken aim at the marginal notes that were printed in the standard (and ubiquitous) Authorised, or King James, Version. These began with the date of creation, 4004 BC, as calculated by Archbishop James Ussher in the 17th century. Darwin was astonished. ‘I had fancied that the date was somehow in the Bible,’ he wrote.

The fact that Darwin, who had trained to be clergyman, did not know that Ussher’s dating system was an early modern imposition on the text gives some indication of the hold it had on the British mind in the early 19th century. That hold was first broken by dinosaurs or, more precisely, by the fossils that Mary Anning and her family dug from the soft cliffs around Lyme Regis in the 1810s, which is where Michael Taylor’s eminently readable and well-researched book begins.

Larger than and unlike any known living creatures, these disturbing ‘monsters’ did not sit well with a literal reading of Genesis. They could not have drowned in the Flood because God had preserved all living creatures on the Ark (plus many looked rather like fish). They were also buried very deep. The idea of an ancient world had long been discussed in fashionable European salons. Fossils now seemed to add weight to these speculations.

Taylor traces the story from Anning’s first discoveries, through William Buckland’s establishment of geology as a discipline respectable enough even for stuffy Oxford, and Darwin’s epochal voyage, to the globalisation of palaeontology and the widespread acceptance of evolution within a generation of The Origin’s first publication. He writes well, knows his subject and has a fine eye for detail. He is especially good on the ‘gorilla war’ between Richard Owen – pre-eminent anatomist, coiner of the word ‘dinosaur’ and opponent of evolution – and Thomas Huxley, self-made scientist, intellectual pugilist and Darwinian crusader. Taylor nails the deep tension between the two men, with Huxley determined to ‘segregate scientific enquiry from issues of religion or belief’ while Owen ‘spewed venom at the radical researchers who would carry off his science into secular terrain’.

All of which makes it frustrating that he (or perhaps his publisher) has chosen to frame the entire story around the hackneyed ‘war between science and religion’. You suspect Taylor knows this doesn’t quite add up. ‘Historians have long sought to present a more nuanced assessment of the subject,’ he writes in his preface, approvingly referencing a recent volume with contributions from 17 scholars discrediting the idea. ‘The first generation of British geologists had been devout Christians, all of them,’ he acknowledges later in the text.

True, clergymen in the 1820s had to accommodate geology to theology, whereas those in the 1880s did the opposite. But reading the book, one struggles to find anyone who actually lost their faith on account of geology or evolution. George Cuvier, Mary Anning, William Buckland, William Conybeare, Charles Lyell and William Thomson all modified their beliefs but remained devout while pioneering their relevant fields. Those who did reject Christianity (Darwin), or take up arms against it (Huxley), tended to do so for personal rather than scientific reasons. Ussher’s dating system was clung to at first but soon renegotiated and then easily jettisoned (the systemic fundamentalist rejection of an old Earth was a 20th-century phenomenon). Many of the arguments were actually internal to the science itself, geology, palaeontology and biology all being nascent and highly contestable disciplines. Ultimately, biblical criticism, anti-clericalism and increased moral sensitivity to the idea of hell were far more responsible for the famed Victorian crisis of faith than dinosaurs or even science ever were.

In as far as there was a war here it was, as Taylor himself says, a ‘culture war’, concerning intellectual and public authority, once accorded by right to old-school clerical naturalists, and now sought by new-fangled ‘scientists’. In this, the latter were decisively victorious. The country that buried Darwin in 1882 was hardly less religious than the one that first dug out fossils 70 years earlier, but its science was. In the 30 or so years before the famous Oxford debate between Huxley and Bishop Wilberforce in 1860, nearly 40 Anglican clergy had presided over the various sections of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. In the 30 or so years after, three did. Dinosaurs weren’t exclusively responsible for the secularisation of science in Britain, but they were certainly powerful allies in this worthy cause.

The skull beneath the skin: Ghost Pains, by Jessi Jezewska Stevens, reviewed

Hell, according to Jean-Paul Sartre, is other people. Jessi Jezewska Stevens would nominate parties. Social catastrophe can stem from the invitation: ‘Email!’ she laments. ‘The way all modern tragedies begin.’ She homes in on the space between what a woman thinks and says and does. Her anti-heroines can be relied on to make wrong decisions – men, marriage, nipple-piercing and, of course, parties. The choice invariably ends in failure.

Ghost Pains is a collection of 11 stories, sardonic and elegant, imbued with a sense of isolation and self-awareness. Stevens’s women throw spectacularly disastrous parties. And attend them. The result can be amusing for the reader while being grievous for the protagonists

The stories are world-hoppers, set in Italy, America, Siberia, Krakow and Berlin. Events are seen askance, from an outsider’s point of view. In ‘Honeymoon’, a newly-wed overdoses on culture in Tuscany: ‘I got distracted by our collective struggle to Renaissance ourselves. One cannot gawk one’s way into personal transformation.’ Stevens’s characters are strangers to spontaneity: ‘There are certain people for whose arrival one would like to be prepared – Hitler; your mother-in-law; yourself when you’re high and suddenly confronted by a mirror.’ Or, on one occasion, an ex-lover.

In ‘Gettysburg’ there’s a rare instance of a happy marriage – tenderly observed and lovingly detailed. But its final paragraph questions the future. Another story is a knife-edge account of two people in a war-zone city rediscovering each other on their phones while outside lethal drones and searchlights watch and wait. Stevens illustrates the fragility of their connection with compassionate precision.

She returns often to Berlin, where gatherings veer from calamity to nightmare. A Futurist dinner party offers ‘deconstructed spaghetti that spilled over tables and on to brown paper on the floor; here a pile of limpid noodles, there a red lake of sauce’. On another night, ‘the party swelled around the new arrivals, feeding on them like fish’. Elsewhere, abandoning reality for a parallel universe, Stevens has fun with fantasy, looking at the elusive nature of crypto and the consequences of an unwitting Faustian pact. All our paranoid techno-dread is here: be careful what you wish for.

Big questions break the flippant surface. Stevens can see the skull beneath the skin: ‘We carry death within us like a stone within a fruit’ the narrator of one story observes, adapting Rilke. Reality is mutable, happiness fleeting; pain lurks.

The lonely passions of Carson McCullers

It may be true that The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940) – but in the case of Carson McCullers it could also be an indefatigable and exhausting one. Born Lula Carson Smith into a struggling middle-class family in Columbus, Georgia in 1917, she grew up hungering for great passions – and, like Hunter’s teenage protagonist Mick (her characters often carry gender-neutral names), she fell in love with classical piano at a young age. (Then Carson – not Mick – fell in love with her female piano teacher.) She married young a 20-year-old ex-serviceman named Reeves McCullers who, by all reports, was far more beautiful than her. Then together, almost whimsically, they launched themselves off to New York with little money and few contacts, where they competed to find out who would write the first successful stories and novels. Carson quickly left Reeves behind in everything except drinking.

Giving up an opportunity to study at Juilliard, she sold two stories to the significant editor-of-first-sales Whit Burnett, the founder of the literary magazine Story; and then sold Hunter as a chapter and outline to Harper, after applying for, and losing, the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship Award. Appearing in 1940 when McCullers was only 23, Hunter extended Faulknerian rhapsodic rage into the lives of an angry, overweight Greek neurasthenic homosexual, an angry, boozy former labour-organiser, and an even angrier black doctor, prone to issuing justifiably enraged lectures about the Jim Crow south.

These loners find solace in one another through their mutual friendship with a mute Jewish homosexual, ironically named Singer, and Mick, a local girl exploring the ranges of love and passion available to her. Mick was the sort of character, filled with youthful poetry and desire, who would reverberate in many small-town American novels over the next decades, from Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine to Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird.

At night, Mick goes looking for all the things McCullers longed for – music, friendship and sexual passion:

These nights were secret, and of the whole summer they were the most important time. In the dark she walked by herself and it was like she was the only person in the town. Almost every street came to be as plain to her in the night-time as her own home block. Some kids were afraid to walk through strange places in the dark, but she wasn’t. Girls were scared a man would come out from somewhere and put his teapot in them like they was married. Most girls were nuts. If a person the size of Joe Louis or Mountain Man Dean would jump out at her and want to fight she would run. But if it was somebody within 20 pounds her weight she would give him a good sock and go right on.

    The nights were wonderful, and she didn’t have time to think about such things as being scared…

For McCullers, the rages of lonely men and women emerged mostly when they weren’t allowed to satisfy their deepest desires. In her second, shorter and even more adventurous novel, Reflections in a Golden Eye (1941), the protagonist, Captain Penderton, releases his frustrations (when he can’t make love to the men who make love to his unfaithful wife) by torturing kittens and horses. At times, he thinks, ‘the irritations, disappointments and fears of life, restless as spermatozoids, must be released in hate’.

McCullers’s early books made her famous, sold well, and allowed her to meet lots of older writers and artists (usually women) whom she assaulted with an inexhaustible artillery of passionate letters, gifts and pleading. Then, after scaring off one unattainable lover after another (she often referred to them as her ‘imaginary friends’), she issued alternate barrages of tears and objurgations. Kay Boyle, Katherine Anne Porter and Jane Bowles were just a few of the authors who began to worry about her showing up at Yaddo – an upscale writer’s refuge that McCullers treated like a combination of an AA summer camp and/or love hospital. Late in her brief life she called her relationship with a young Swiss journalist, Annemarie Schwarzenbach, the ‘love of her life’, even though it physically amounted to little more than a kiss (and a lot of fruitless pleading).

Carson was never happy for very long unless she was unhappily in love. But when most of these women went off to their husbands, she went back to hers – where the two accomplished more drinking than love making. She and the equally troubled Reeves divorced in 1941 and remarried in 1945, and the intensity of their partnership seemed to survive everything but each other. It was easily the longest and most enduring unhappy relationship of her life, until Reeves committed suicide in 1953 after failing to convince Carson to join him. (At one point he showed her a tree where he proposed they hang themselves side by side.)

After publishing three now well-regarded novels in five years, McCullers’s passions burned too hot for her gangly body, and she spent the next decade or so adapting old stories to stage rather than producing new ones. By the time Clock Without Hands appeared in 1961, her various illnesses prevented her from venturing far from her bedroom. Whether it was her childhood bout of rheumatic fever or her drinking, she continued suffering strokes and fevers throughout the rest of her life until she died, mostly bedridden and partly paralysed, at the age of 50.

By all accounts, McCullers was a difficult person to handle – even for those who loved her. Gore Vidal, a long-time friend and admirer of her work, once said: ‘Fifteen minutes in the same room listening to one of her self-loving arias and I was gone.’ Late in life, she forced friends and nurses to accompany her through a nightly bedtime ritual that dragged on so long that participants couldn’t bring themselves to divulge the details even years after her death. All they did reveal was that it began in the early evening with one incredibly huge serving of alcohol (her doctor restricted her to a glass per night but didn’t specify the size) and concluded much later with a beer before lights out.

Mary Dearborn’s biography is well-written, hefty, responsible and absorbing, treating its subject with respect and compassion without dismissing her obviously thorny and difficult personality. It’s a true pleasure to read – or, at the very least, a lot more enjoyable to take to bed than Carson McCullers.

The many Jesus-like figures of the ancient world

What people tend to forget about Jesus Christ is that he killed children. As a five-year-old, Jesus was toddling through a village when a small boy ran past, knocking his shoulder. Taking it like any five-year-old would, Jesus shouted after him ‘you shall not go further on your way’, at which point the boy fell down dead. Later, when the boy’s parents admonished Joseph and Mary for failing to raise their son properly, Jesus blinded them. Something to bear in mind next time you ask yourself: ‘What would Jesus do?’

If this story is unfamiliar, that is because it doesn’t appear in any of the Bible’s traditional Gospels. It is recounted in the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, a text composed around the mid-2nd century AD (and so around the same time as the four traditional Gospels, which are dated between 70-110 AD). This is just one text among many now labelled apocrypha, but which, as Catherine Nixey outlines in her wonderfully readable, informative book Heresy, ‘were believed and read by Christians for centuries’.

In bewitchingly titled chapters such as ‘The Falsehoods of the Magicians’, ‘The Breeds of Heretical Monsters’ and ‘Fruit from a Dunghill’, Nixey takes us on a tour across the early centuries of Christianity, when who Jesus Christ was, what he did, and whether he mattered at all were issues highly contested by followers and critics alike.

For in the beginning were the words. Alongside his animosity towards fellow children, Jesus smites teachers, sells a ‘twin’ into slavery, has someone crucified in his stead and, in what Nixey describes as a ‘somewhat surprising’ turn, impregnates his own mother. That’s not the only time Mary’s vagina is invoked – in the Infancy Gospel of James, a woman arrives at the nativity scene sceptical of Mary’s virginity. Deciding to take things into her own hands, she thrusts a fist into Mary’s vagina to check. Divine justice is swift: the woman’s hand is instantly burned off inside Mary.

As Christianity spread quickly, so did its myriad competing stories. Traces of these texts remain today. The image of Mary on a donkey comes from that Infancy Gospel of James, while the Thomist Christians of India still read The Acts of Thomas, in which Jesus preaches celibacy, since children end up ‘lunatics or half-withered or crippled or deaf or dumb or paralytic or idiots’. Quite how the Thomists sustain their numbers is unclear.

One of Heresy’s central arguments is that, as the Church’s power grew, ‘it would start to reject the idea that Christianity was similar’ to anything that had come before, ‘but in the early days… it did not merely admit the similarities but even traded on them’. Those similarities included Jesus-like figures: the ancient Greek Asclepius (who made the blind see), Socrates, Emperor Vespasian and, most strikingly, Apollonius of Tyana. With his divine birth, raising of the dead, trial before the Romans, disappearance and apparent resurrection, Apollonius appeared so alarmingly similar to Jesus that for centuries he was labelled ‘Antichrist’ by Christian authors, and biographies of him were systematically destroyed (so it is now unclear whether Apollonius’s story draws on the gospels or vice versa or neither). Rather than bringing religion to the pagan wilderness, Jesus enters a wild marketplace for the soul, competing with long-haired sorcerers and babbling fools all crying out the name of God. Christianity, Nixey argues, was ‘uniquely successful; it was not, despite its later claims, unique’.

Nixey studied Classics at Cambridge, works at the Economist and has a magpie-like eye for the gold in any story. As such, Heresy is a joy to read. Page after page is studded with fascinating gems and well-crafted phrases, laced with Nixey’s dry humour. The strangeness of the ancient world is on full display. Here is a man having breast reduction surgery to remove ‘the reproach of femininity’; here are books of ancient magic buried in a desert, to be found 2,000 years later; here is a man being sewn into a leather sack full of serpents and hurled into the sea – the punishment for patricide. Nixey also has a healthy scepticism of her own sources, admitting where the material is thin (although a few ancients – Celsus and Porphyry – are relied upon too often to hold up an argument about a whole culture).

Returning to the theme of her first book, The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World, Heresy is also a lament for what Nixey sees as the shackling of the classical mind by the repressive Catholic Church. In Nixey’s telling, Rome and Athens were broadly tolerant environments, more interested in the truth than how it was reached, whereas for Christianity there was only ‘the way’. This shift is felt in the word ‘heresy’ itself. From the Greek haeresis meaning ‘choice’ (open-ended, positive), under the Church’s reign it morphed into ‘error’. If there is one way, then choice is a distraction. Nixey does recognise the brutality of Rome and notes that the idea of the Dark Ages – with religion extinguishing the flame of classical reason – has been repeatedly undermined; but reading Heresy you sense she thinks it is closer to the truth than not. We might also quibble that it remains unclear in Nixey’s telling quite how the Church came to settle on the version of Christ that it did – but perhaps that’s for another book.

The bigger question lurking beneath Nixey’s story, however, is whether all this contingency, overlap and contradiction fatally undermines the Christian story as we have it today. Nixey – an atheist from a religious family – seems to think so (religious stories are often described as ‘nonsense, obviously’).

A different thought occurred to me while reading her book. Perhaps the fact that there is overlap across centuries and continents between, for example, the New Testament, the Epic of Gilgamesh and the 18th-century BC Atrahasis, speaks of a deeper truth: that there is a rich stock of stories, symbols and metaphors by which humans experience the divine. As Nixey’s book suggests, ‘the word’ is misleading. Perhaps God is to be found in the spaces between them.

The fresh, forceful voice of Frantz Fanon

‘If I’d died in my thirties, what would be left behind?’ is the question that keeps coming to mind reading this timely new biography of Frantz Fanon, the psychiatrist and philosopher who became an icon to leftist revolutionaries across the globe. ‘Would I want history to judge me by what I wrote at 36?’ For that was the absurdly young age at which Fanon died of leukaemia in 1961, leaving two key works to his name: Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth. Not a huge legacy, then, in sheer numbers of words.

But it was enough to seal his reputation as both a chronicler of one of the 20th century’s most important independence movements and a thinker whose examination of the damage done by colonial racism influenced decades of activists, from Che Guevara in Cuba to Steve Biko in South Africa and the Black Panthers in the US. His star did not burn long, but it burned bright.

The Black Lives Matter movement makes his ideas more topical than ever, so it is strangely jarring to be reminded that Fanon’s own reference points were Freud and Hegel, and that Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir were the contemporaries he met and sought to impress. Theirs feel like voices from another era; he seems a man of our time.

Fanon made up for his short lifespan by trying out new roles at breakneck speed. Within a few years of leaving his native Martinique to fight Nazi Germany – a loyal young Frenchman inspired by Republican values – he was registering the impact of systemic racism at medical school in Lyon and psychiatric clinics in southern France and French-occupied Algeria. That understanding fed his decision to embrace the FLN liberation movement as his own.

Fanon shared neither the FLN members’ skin colour, language nor religious faith, but that didn’t stop him becoming the movement’s healer and trusted spokesman. Before he died, he was already moving on to a bigger stage, becoming a rallying voice for anti-colonial movements across the developing world. 

Fittingly captured in this vividly written, though unabashedly erudite account, it’s an extraordinary itinerary. Yet one finds oneself wondering: had Fanon lived another 20 years, would he have come to regard the opinions expressed in his books as those of an impetuous youngster embarrassingly short of grassroots experience?

While Sartre’s preface to The Wretched of the Earth caricatured Fanon’s views – it comes across today as the posturing of an ageing armchair warrior – the younger man certainly saw violence as a prerequisite for freedom, a ‘detoxifying’ experience which not only released the slave from his inferiority complex but possessed a cohesive effect, allowing the group to rise above regionalism and tribalism.

That claim rings a little hollow to an audience numbed by reports from the ruins of Ukraine and Gaza, the killing fields of Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Current brutality surely teaches us that however invigorating violence may feel to the individual, it creates grievances which can fester for centuries, laying the groundwork for revenge-taking and a whole new set of grudges. Old men and women – the people who sign peace deals with hardened killers in conference rooms – know this. Fanon did not have time to learn.

For a man praised for the audacity of his thought, Fanon could be surprisingly cowardly, too. Whatever he confessed to friends, in public he discreetly skipped over the FLN’s assassination of his friend Abane Ramdane, a hardline leader strangled in 1957. When the FLN slaughtered 300 villagers thought to support a rival faction, Fanon blamed it on the French, despite knowing better.

While clearly charmed by his protagonist, Adam Shatz nonetheless scrupulously acknowledges the faults of a man who was a little too fond of the sound of his own voice and – more understandably – probably too worried about his own survival to be entirely honest.

Algeria’s post-independence years swiftly exposed how thoroughly Fanon had underestimated the strength of cultural conservatism, ethnic solidarity and religious belief in his adopted nation. ‘It is unlikely that Fanon, if he had been cured of his leukaemia, would have found a home there for long,’ writes Shatz. In 1963, observing Ramadan was made obligatory and Algerian nationality was restricted to citizens of Muslim origin. Most of Fanon’s friends decided it was time to leave.

Today, that disappointment extends far beyond the Maghreb. In his last and most thought-provoking chapter, Shatz wonders what Fanon would have made of today’s world. Whether it’s the increasingly sectarian, misogynistic nature of Narendra Modi’s India, China’s treatment of its Uighur and Tibetan minorities or the use to which Russia puts its atrocity-prone mercenary Wagner Group, ‘Fanon’s project for the post-colonial world lies in ruins’. Shatz writes:

We live in an era in which the neoliberal economic model and democracy governance have fallen into crisis, but in which alternative horizons have also receded from view. Today’s radical movements and insurgencies are religious, identitarian, or both, and many of them are on the hard right.

A born iconoclast, Fanon, one suspects, would have thoroughly revised – rather than nuanced – his early opinions and recommendations as he aged. As it was, he died in a hospital in Bethesda, Maryland, after a medical evacuation – organised, ironically, by the CIA. The world is the poorer for the loss of that fresh, forceful voice.

An unenviable mission: Clear, by Carys Davies, reviewed

Carys Davies grew up in Newport, south Wales but her novels have been set in 19th- century Pennsylvania (West, 2018), contemporary Ooty in India (The Mission House, 2020) and now a small island off the north coast of Scotland in 1843. Her short stories have been set variously in the Australian outback and Siberia. She has said that when creating a fictional world, ‘I seem to require a certain kind of distance from my own life’.

On an island ‘between Shetland and Norway’, a man called Ivar lives in isolation, talking only to Pegi the horse, whom he calls ‘old cabbage and a silly, odd-looking person’. One day he finds a man naked and unconscious on the beach below the cliffs. Even after the man regains consciousness, he and Ivar do not share a common language, so communication between them is halting. The newcomer is John Ferguson, a church minister who has been sent to evict Ivar so that the land can be used solely by grazing sheep.

It is the year of the Great Disruption in the Scottish Church, when roughly one third of its ministers broke away to form the Free Church. Ferguson is one of these ministers who has had to leave his church and start again from scratch; his straitened circumstances made him vulnerable when it was proposed that he would be paid to get rid of Ivar. As Ivar nurses Ferguson, he is unaware of the visitor’s mission.

Meanwhile Ferguson’s wife, Mary, awaits his return with increasing anxiety. When he left, she behaved ‘like a mother who was sending her only son off into the navy and was determined not to disgrace herself by crying’. Ivar discovers John’s picture of Mary and becomes entranced by it. What he doesn’t realise is that this shy-looking woman is nothing of the sort, only hiding her rubber dentures by not smiling broadly.

As befits the landscape, this is sometimes an austere novel, but it is not without passion – from the pleasure Mary didn’t realise was contained within her own body to later echoes of Brokeback Mountain. It lacks some of the vivid colour of The Mission House but this is another epic in miniature. Davies manages to pack in more drama and nuance into 160 pages than other authors manage in novels twice that length.