Will Khan’s comrades close Keir’s favourite pub?

Ah, the true meaning of Christmas: an excellent chance for some photo opportunities. And while the Tory tech bros of No. 10 have been goofing around for their Home Alone remake, Labour kept it simple. Sir Keir posted a picture of himself and his wife enjoying, in his words, a ‘traditional Christmas drink with neighbours in the local’ – every inch the normal beer-drinking bloke. Get out the sandwiches and he’ll be ready for the unions in No. 10…

Yet Mr S wonders for how much longer Sir Keir’s local is going to survive under the ever-blundering regime of Sadiq Khan’s City Hall? As every Westminster obsessive knows, Starmer’s favourite pub is The Pineapple in Kentish Town – a site ‘woven into the fabric of the community since it was built in 1868.’ Yet now the battle-class boozer is struggling to survive: all thanks to the incompetence of Transport for London, responsibility for which sits with the capital’s Mayor.

For Kentish Town station has been shut since June and is set to remain out of action until at least summer 2024, all to fix two escalators and carry out ‘wider work’ on the station. Sadly, the effect on local business has proved to be catastrophic. The Lady Hamilton pub, located just a two-minute walk from the station, closed down permanently in August, with owner Paul Davies telling the Camden New Journal that:

There was no real warning and it has just wiped out the trade – and it has hit The Pineapple too. The High Street has been killed: we are not the only ones. We were hoping to soldier on, but we just could not with the Tube closing.

As well as the closure of the Lady Hamilton, managers have also seen sales at The Pineapple – which is five minutes away from the station – suffer from a lack of Underground access. Steerpike trusts Sir Keir enjoyed his festive pint but let’s just hope that it’s not a Last Christmas for the pub….

The Conservatives are indulging in fantasy economics

Finally it seems to be dawning on many Conservative MPs that abolishing – or seriously cutting – inheritance tax at the same time as jacking up income tax for millions of low earners is not a great way to tackle a strong Labour lead in the polls. Several backbenchers have written to the Prime Minister in response to reports that he is considering taking the axe to inheritance tax in the Budget on 6 March. They have suggested that the government should be cutting income tax instead, or at least raising the thresholds which have been frozen until 2028. At a time of elevated inflation, that is dragging millions more into income tax, and into the upper rates of income tax, by the year.

If and when we are to have tax cuts, another focus should be on National Insurance – which is really just income tax by another name, albeit one that targets only earned incomes, not income from investments. The Chancellor did cut NI in the autumn statement, but it would be a big vote-winner if he committed to the phasing-out of NI altogether, as and when it can be afforded. Why can’t we simply tax everything the same, whether it be earned income, unearned income, capital gains, inheritance or anything else?

But there is a big danger in the Conservatives having a debate solely over which taxes to cut. Announcing tax cuts without corresponding spending cuts against the current fiscal background feeds the narrative that the Conservatives have become a party which is reckless about public finances. The Office of Budgetary Responsibility (OBR) expects government borrowing to finish this tax year at £124 billion, with the government having to spend over £100 billion just to pay the interest on its debts.

We have a deficit that is still in the same league as the one which Gordon Brown left behind in 2010. The Conservatives, in the election of that year, made a priority of tackling the deficit, as did the Lib Dems – a promise which, initially at least, they seemed to stick to when they formed the coalition. Around four fifths of the readjustment in the public finances made by George Osborne came from spending cuts and a fifth from tax rises. It proved to be a vote-winner: when David Cameron won an unexpected outright majority in 2015, Labour’s own Jon Cruddas concluded that the Conservatives had won not in spite of ‘austerity’ but because of it. Voters actually wanted to government to get on top of public finances, and punished Ed Miliband for attacking its efforts to do so. No, voters were saying, the spending cuts were not ‘ideological’ – they were a necessity given how Brown had lost control of public spending.

Yet the subject of spending cuts seems to have disappeared. All we seem to be talking about instead is tax cuts. I have a feeling that, once more, that the public are going to be left unimpressed by the assertion that Britain can carry on living beyond it means.   They might be more impressed by a determination to balance the public books – something no government of any colour has managed in the past 22 years. 

A Labour government could spell trouble for trans people like me

This has been a year to forget for the transgender lobby. This time last year, Nicola Sturgeon’s SNP government had just forced its Gender Recognition Reform Bill through Holyrood following an acrimonious late night sitting in the run up to Christmas. It seemed likely then that anyone over the age of 16 would be able to change their legal sex much more easily, without the need for a psychiatric diagnosis of gender dysphoria. For some of Sturgeon’s Scottish Green allies, the only regret was that they had not gone far enough. Maggie Chapman MSP suggested that consideration should be given for allowing children as young as eight to be able to take up the offer.

Thankfully, that ludicrous bill was blocked by the UK government before January was out. But the push back did not stop there. Sporting governing bodies have finally remembered why women’s sports were created in the first place. Men and women have different bodies, and feelings in the head do not displace male advantage. During 2023, World Athletics, Swim England and the International Cricket Council updated their policies to protect female sport.

Where administrators were slow to see sense, competitors took action themselves. Four women’s football teams in Sheffield refused to play a team that fielded a transwoman. Meanwhile, on the green baize, Lynne Pinches forfeited a national women’s pool final, rather than play a transgender opponent. Pinches was cheered by the crowd as she walked away. Pool’s governing bodies are now facing a potential sex-discrimination lawsuit from the women they have let down.

At Westminster, after months of dithering, the Tories finally decided against including an LGBT conversion therapy bill in the King’s Speech. It was hardly a priority – abusive and coercive practices are already illegal, and the existing law can deal with them. But it might well have stopped distressed children from getting the help they really need when they had perhaps spent too long on the internet and been convinced that gender transition was the answer to all their problems.

However, the Tory government might not be around much longer. Unless Rishi Sunak subjects the country to a January 2025 election – and a campaign over Christmas – 2024 looks set to herald a Labour government. If the polls are accurate, by this time next year, Keir Starmer will be returned with a thumping majority. If so, we should worry about what a Labour government means for women’s rights – and for trans people. The party’s track record is not good.

Unlike the Scottish Greens, Scottish Labour is supposed to be in opposition in Holyrood. But the party was firmly behind Sturgeons GRR Bill last year; 18 Scottish Labour MSPs backed the bill with only two against. If Starmer takes charge at Westminster, the direction of travel on transgender issues is anyone’s guess. While the party leadership has apparently abandoned support for self-identification, noises are still being made to make it easier to obtain a gender recognition certificate. Why?

According to the Gender Recognition Act – the original one from 2004, which was passed under Labour – ‘where a full gender recognition certificate is issued to a person, the person’s gender becomes for all purposes the acquired gender’. That is a remarkable legal fiction and, what’s more, the change is then veiled in secrecy. Indeed, it is a criminal offence for ‘a person who has acquired protected information in an official capacity to disclose the information to any other person.’ The penalty is an unlimited fine.

So, while Labour might claim to want to protect women’s single-sex spaces, this legislation means that Starmer’s party is likely to find it impossible to practise what it preaches. A party that had properly thought about these issues would hardly pass such a wide-ranging law that has, in the years since, opened up a can of worms. But I fear that Labour policy is being driven by activists and naïve politicians eager to be accommodating to whoever shouts the loudest. Their task is made all the easier by a culture within the party that appears to tolerate no dissent, as Rosie Duffield has found out to her cost.

Duffield has been a beacon of sanity on these matters, but she has suffered appallingly as a result. For three years, she has been hounded, shamed and marginalised after she agreed that only women have cervixes. Earlier this year she dared to ‘like’ a tweet by Graham Linehan that was critical of Eddie Izzard. As a consequence, her name is not currently on the party’s approved list of candidates for the next general election.

If Starmer makes it to Downing Street, the future looks bleak for women. The safeguarding of children also looks to be under threat following Anneliese Dodds’ speech at the recent Labour party conference. The shadow women and equalities secretary pledged to bring in ‘a full, no-loopholes, trans-inclusive ban on conversion therapy.’ What’s more, none of this helps transsexuals like me. Ten years ago, we were quietly getting on with our lives. Not now. Politicians have made a circus out of our rights and protections. If – or when? – Labour get in, that seems likely to get only even worse. We all benefit from governments that make the right decisions, not those that might be politically expedient. If Starmer gets this wrong, then 2024 may be a year we all want to forget.

The decline and fall of banking’s barrow boys

Before the ‘Big Bang’, which led to the deregulation of financial markets in London in the 1980s, the city was dominated by two types of person: the often Oxbridge-educated spreadsheet warriors who ran merchant banks; and the ‘barrow boys’, students of the school of life who worked as traders. While the former are still thriving in London, the latter are now something of a rare breed. It’s a pity.

What the barrow boys lacked in formal education, they made up for in exuberance. Often the children of market traders who put their quick maths to use on the trading floors of the City, the barrow boys came to epitomise the excess of the 1980s. Yet many former barrow boys look back at that decade – a time when the city of London was undergoing radical change – with fondness: they remember rubbing shoulders with public school boys. These were people with radically-different backgrounds brought together with a common purpose to their own: to make loads of money. As a result, while Thatcher’s deregulation has been blamed for all manners of ill, the 80s were, in fact, a period of high upwards social mobility. Crucially, it was an era before degree requirements and professional exams locked out the barrow boys. Nowadays, the advent of increasingly stringent academic requirements means the City has become a place which favours insiders. 

Though diversity has been on the tip of everyone’s tongues for many years, few are prepared to question the need for a degree in the workplace. Even students themselves are convinced that a degree is the answer; the more than 1.4 million British students currently in higher education shows that all too clearly. However, the debt burden and opportunity cost of doing a degree is off-putting to some, meaning that if a job requires a degree, the pool of applicants has already been narrowed down.

With the days of a ‘gentleman’s Third’ now long gone, nearly half of all UK employers require a 2.1 degree. Inside the Square Mile, the vast majority of employers demand one, often from a top university, and sometimes even in specific subjects. Indeed, it is newsworthy when a company drops the requirement, as was the case with both Santander, in January, and PwC, in 2022. Given that graduates, particularly those from the best universities targeted by the top financial firms, are generally better off, all this implies that a lot of hires come from the same backgrounds.

While finance was a high-growth emerging industry back in the 80s, it is now a more mature one, with thousands of students competing to get their foot through the door. By focusing not just on students with a degree, but specifically on students with certain degrees, they give people the opportunity to game the system. This, in turn, benefits those in the know. Given most people make their degree choice at the age of 17, you have to already know enough about finance to choose the right degree, or you risk taking yourself out of the running at the start.

The endless forums on sites such as Wall Street Oasis show this desire to game the system. Posters argue about the precise merits of each university, delicately weighing up whether it would be better to study economics at LSE or Cambridge. On another, a hapless undergraduate questions whether they might stand a chance of breaking into finance if they went to a ‘non-target university’.

LSE is particularly successful at funnelling its progeny into the city, with 21 per cent of all students graduating in 2019/20 heading into finance, and 44 per cent of their economics graduates and 72 per cent of finance graduates finding themselves working in the sector. While the many internships and long studies of the European finance graduate were once the subject of derision, if those online forums are anything to go by, British students are increasingly going the same way.

In many ways, this homogeneity is both the symptom and a cause of Britain’s current economic quagmire. Faced with a dwindling graduate premium, students are, quite logically, trying to secure the best-paid jobs out there. Given that jobs in investment banking can pay £70,000 in the first year, with jobs in trading generally similarly well-paid, it is hardly surprising that students are doing everything they can to get their foot in the door. Goldman Sachs reportedly gets approximately tens of thousands of applicants a year.

But for the students who are actively removing themselves from the race at the age of 17, the gleaming skyscrapers of the city will forever be beyond their reach. The system favours a small group of well-informed teenagers who are set on trying to fit into a mould dictated by monolithic HR departments.

While a lot of barrow boys tell tall tales of long lunches stretching into the evening, they also talk about the energy and sense of community they felt at the time. Though the City had its fair share of public school boys in the 80s, many agree that the focus on degrees has meant some of the vibrancy of the industry has been lost. The question now is: how many of those who made it big in the 80s would be there today if they’d had to be in the know at 17?

Does Putin use body doubles?

It has become something of a fad to try to identify and quantify the body doubles of Vladimir Putin. There are even outlandish claims that the man himself is dead and has been replaced by one. But why the fascination?

It is hardly unusual for autocrats to have doubles – as a shield against assassination or simply as handy proxies to take on the more tedious and less important duties. Stalin had at least a couple; Panamanian strongman Manual Noriega apparently had no fewer than four. North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un was once photographed chatting with two of his identically-dressed doubles.

Certainly there is good reason to suppose Putin has at least one. His security has always been extravagantly paranoid, as demonstrated by the phalanxes of black-suited and ear-pieced presidential security service close protection officers. Having lived on Kutuzovsky Prospect, one of the massive highways leading into central Moscow along which his motorcade would speed to and from his suburban palace at Novo-Ogarevo, I can attest to the comprehensiveness of the precautions: from snipers taking up places on the rooftops to the checks made on manhole covers along the way.

Ever since Covid, Putin has been even more isolated by an additional layer of bio-security precautions, not least the comically long tables at which he would hold meetings. His walkabouts and visits to the provinces, once a central elements of his cosplay as the ‘good tsar’ close to his people, dwindled dramatically. This was a monarch who ruled through the video screen.

Yet after the abortive mutiny by the Wagner mercenary army in June, we suddenly saw a rather different Putin. A week on from Prigozhin’s march on Moscow, he visited the city of Derbent in Dagestan where he waded into the crowd, shaking hands, posing for photos, hugging women and kissing babies like a Western politician on the campaign trail. Then he turned up at Kronstadt near St Petersburg, again working the crowd. ‘What about the quarantine?,’ asked a journalist. ‘The people are more important than quarantine,’ Putin replied.

We had, to be fair, glimpsed this Putin before, driving around the ruined streets of the conquered Ukrainian city of Mariupol in March. He was apparently without his usual army of minders and bullet-catchers and heedless of the risk that Kyiv might see this as an opportunity to rid itself of its sworn enemy. 

The likelihood is that these uncharacteristic public events were, indeed, carried out by a double. Some have even claimed to have identified subtle differences in the ears or the chin or the line of the neck, such as to confirm the presence of at least one stand-in lookalike.

This has, however, taken a bizarre turn with the claim by the anonymous Russian Telegram channel GeneralSVR that Putin is dead and has been replaced by his double. The channel alleges without evidence or plausibility to be penned by a general of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service who somehow has extraordinary insider access, which he shares with impunity on social media. The defrocked academic Valery Solovey, too, has made similar claims. 

There are those who suggest that ‘GeneralSVR’ and Solovey may well be one and the same; certainly the latter has for years been predicting Putin’s imminent demise from one illness or another. Either way, they have excelled themselves with the current claim. They say that Putin died on Thursday 26 October – at 8:42 p.m. Moscow time, to be precise – and his body stuffed into a freezer at his residence in Valdai while security council secretary Nikolai Patrushev took over the reins of power, using Putin’s double as a handy sock-puppet. 

There is no evidence to support these claims, which are becoming increasingly and elaborately fleshed out with tales of behind-the-scenes political shenanigans. We are even told that Putin’s acknowledged daughters will be given cabinet-level posts – one as Minister of Health, the other deputy chair of the Security Council – in return for going along with the grand deception.

These seem little more than entertaining bedtime stories for Kremlinologists, but they do speak to a powerful and recurring theme in Russian history. After the reign of Tsar Ivan IV – better known as ‘the Terrible’ – Russia slid into a period of crisis known as the Time of Troubles. Ivan had killed his oldest son in a fit of rage, his second son Fedor proved too weak for the challenges of his age, and youngest son Dmitry died in 1591 from what, perhaps rather implausibly, was described as an accident in which he slit his own throat in the midst of an epileptic fit. Presumably there were no windows in the Kremlin high enough for him to fall from. 

The Time of Troubles was marked by hunger, civil war and invasion – and at least three pretenders claiming to be the ‘real’ Dmitry, who had miraculously escaped apparent assassination. The first actually became tsar for a year, as a puppet for Polish invaders, the second and third became figureheads for Cossack revolts, and all ended badly.

In the 20th century, at least ten women claimed to be Anastasia, youngest daughter of Tsar Nicholas II, having somehow avoided being killed with the rest of the family in 1918. Even some Russians were willing to believe them, despite all evidence to the contrary. 

So why this fascination with the royal person, whether Putin’s doubles or false Dmitries? Presumably it is because power is still so personal in Russia. In the West, monarchies have withered or become constitutionally emasculated. Power is vested in institutions, law codes and impersonal bureaucracies, the infamous ‘Blob’. 

In Russia, the bureaucratic state remains in thrall to individual leaders. Were Rishi Sunak to be assassinated tomorrow, would that reshape Britain? Hardly, but all those men in black suits, the double or doubles, and the long tables are there precisely because if Putin goes, Russia will once again be redefined.

Why wokeness really is like fascism

If you had to choose a political word of the decade you could do worse than ‘woke’. Because these days ‘woke’ – and its various subsidiary forms: ‘wokeness’, ‘wokery’, ‘wokerati’, ‘the great awokening’, ‘woquemada’ – seems ubiquitous, and very much part of the verbal furniture. And yet woke has a surprisingly short history as a notable term. Though it was birthed in the 19th century, with noble origins surrounding the struggle for civil rights, it achieved its present, greater and much-changed salience as late as the 2010s – the Oxford English Dictionary only included it in 2017.

Since then, the word, initially deployed by people on the left as a badge of pride – epitomising their awareness of social justice – has become more of a boo word, used by people on the right, generally expressing dislike or contempt for perceived leftwing idiocies. In this usage it becomes a kind of swearword and one that can be spat with gratifying, four-letter venom. As the word woke has been ‘weaponised’, so the woke left have fought back (these lexical skirmishes are a fascinatingly fierce corner of the wider culture wars). Generally, the pushback involves two arguments: one, there is no strict definition of what woke is, rendering it useless, and two, it is now used so much it is doubly meaningless.

Both arguments have merit; however, they ultimately fail, because the exact same arguments can be made against the term fascism. As historians of 20th century politics know very well, fascism is fiendishly hard to define. It doesn’t help that the word has such an eccentric etymology: Mussolini coined it from the Roman word for bundled sticks: ‘fasces’. Nor does it help that, unlike other grand creeds and ideologies, fascism lacks a truly foundational text. There is no Little Red Book or manifesto for fascism.

Nevertheless, thinkers have endeavoured over the years to define it and generally they settle on check-lists. If a political force ticks most of these fascist boxes – patriarchy, militarism, misogyny, worship of nation or creed, cults of violence and so on – then we can agree it is fascist. Hardcore islamism, for instance, ticks virtually every box: hence the term islamofascism. Can we do that with woke? I reckon we can, and, intriguingly, we can use one of those checklists, created by Umberto Eco in 1995, which he used to define fascism. In brief, here it is, adapted for woke:

1. ‘The cult of action for action’s sake’: i.e. it’s not enough to be quietly anti-racist, you must be actively and overtly anti-racist: you must show your allyship.
2. ‘Disagreement is treason’: see the way Terfs are treated in the transgender wars, see the way any dissenting voice is treated in woke academe: they are not just people of a different opinion, they are traitors to be cancelled.
3. ‘Fear of difference’: everyone must concur, free speech is passé and sinister, there is only one opinion allowed, there is no more debate to be had.
4. ‘Appeal to social frustration’: all inequality is based on oppression/colonialism/sexism/racism/transphobia (etc.).
5. ‘The obsession with a plot’: wokeism sees white supremacist and imperialist power structures at everywhere, even buried in every white soul.
6. ‘The enemy is both strong and weak’: those who benefit from white Pprivilege – i.e. white people or people who are white-adjacent, such as Jews and East Asians – simultaneously hold all the power, and yet suffer from white fragility.
7. ‘Pacificism is trafficking with the enemy’: doing nothing is not enough, you must ‘do the work’ of self realisation until you accept your white/Jewish/East Asian racism; ‘silence is violence’.
8. ‘Machismo and weaponry’: violence and terror against those coded as oppressors is glorified or excused (see 7 October, punching Terfs).
9. ‘The use of newspeak’: wokeness constantly redefines language to suit its ideology – see the ever-changing terminology applied to non-white people, from the once fashionable Bame (now almost verboten) to ‘people of colour’ to Bipoc, and beyond.

The Umberto Eco list is not perfect. I’m sure most observers could add a few more; I would add that typical wokeness also displays:

1. An obsession with racial and sexual identity and skin colour (even as these are themselves seen as mere social constructs); raising them, in importance, above all other attributes of humanity.
2. A pathological need to order people in complex hierarchies of ‘oppression’.
3. An aversion to demonstrations of logic and reason (a.k.a. ‘factsplaining’); indeed woke exhibits a positive relish for the illogical and emotional as more authentic and real – see ‘lived experience’ versus actual experience; note that ‘my truth’ is superior to the truth.

The argument, therefore, that woke cannot be defined is bogus. It is difficult to define, but that is a different thing. And just because something is tricky to pin down, does not mean we should abandon the attempt. Fascism is a cruel and menacing ideology even if it doesn’t have a handy Fascist Manifesto encoding all its core beliefs, that does not mean we can dismiss it as non-existent.

What then of the other argument against the angry employment of woke: that it is now so overused that it becomes meaningless? There is some truth in this. One rightwing tabloid recently accused British builders of being ‘woke’ for taking an interest in history or discussing their masculine feelings. There are many other farcical examples. But again this mirrors the overuse of the word fascism. From the facile Rik Mayall character in that ancient sitcom the Young Ones to shouty kids marching down Whitehall today, ‘fascist’ is a boo word so overused by the left that it has been applied to any policy to the right of Corbyn’s Labour, anyone who thinks the police might actually do good things, or anyone who even thinks, for a terrible moment of voting Tory. Despite these juvenile exaggerations, true fascism exists and recognising where it exists is important. We only have to look at the mullahs in Tehran beating women to death for not wearing hijabs or take the measure of Putin’s imperialist, nationalist, militarised Russia, to see that fascism – real fascism – has not gone away.

Is it too much to see wokeness as a threat equivalent to fascism? On the face of it, perhaps – until you consider those woke US university presidents in Congress who were unable to condemn calls for the genocide of Jews on campus. How did they reach that insane, dangerous position? Because wokeness subtly instructed them to think this: Jews, in the intersectional woke hierarchy, are inherently colonialist oppressors, therefore they are unworthy of the protection given to more deserving minorities. And this is also where wokeness crucially differs from fascism. Fascism is brutal and overt: it attacks from the front and it glories in its aggression. Wokeness, by contrast, is stealthy, insidious and tentacular. It corrodes from the inside out. And the corrosion is spreading, daily.

How to survive the post-Christmas slump

Elizabeth David was a cookery writer who led the British palate away from the grim days of stodgy, post-war rationing towards the adoption of a fresher, more Mediterranean diet. But she saved the most resonant advice of her six decade writing career for an observation on how to survive a typical British Christmas. Describing the festive period here as The Great Too Much that has also become The Great Too Long, David wrote:

A ten-day shut-down, no less, is now normal at Christmas. On at least one day during The Great Too Long stretch, I stay in bed, making myself lunch on a tray. Smoked salmon, home-made bread, butter, lovely cold white Alsace Wine. A glorious way to celebrate Christmas.

It’s hard to think of a more elegant recipe for a slatternly day in bed. The suggestion is the footnote to the introduction to Elizabeth David’s Christmas, which celebrates its 20th anniversary this year. Published posthumously in 1992, it marks David’s final work proper, in the sense that it’s substantially made up of previously unpublished original material compiled from notes towards a book she had been working on for many years. And it’s a quite delightful book.

There are reminiscences of early family Christmases in a vast country house, with servants manning the kitchens rather than a mother. Then she describes her first Christmas dinner alone, in wartime Cairo, where she worked for the Admiralty and where her Egyptian domestic help keeps setting fire to the NAAFI-issue pudding between each course, such is his excitement at this novel idea. 

As to the food itself, there are things that have fallen from fashion but sound like they are crying out to be revived: a delicate tomato consommé, cream of mushroom soups, prawn paste, spiced beef, brined geese and ducks, a refreshing tangerine ice. Then there’s the wildly impractical, never-to-be-revived or simply gross: vast pressed whole ox tongues, a giblet casserole, a dessert of spiced stewed prunes, a green salad with sprouts, advice on how to decapitate a suckling pig in order to accommodate it in a domestic oven, followed by the suggestion that the meat from the head might appeal to children. 

On this note, my second favourite line is this, which comes amid a passionate denunciation of bread sauce: ‘An Italian friend of mine once told me that in Sardinia a peasant woman had said to her, “Christmas without a roast cat wouldn’t be Christmas.” Each to his own tradition.’ Or perhaps that should be: chacun à son chat. Of course modern tastes suggest that, rather than cooking him, we are more likely to invite the cat to join us in the bed – while being mindful to keep him apart from the smoked salmon sandwich. 

This book is more an esoteric exploration of winter festival food than a practical guide; and David is as much a food historian here as a dispenser of detailed recipes. For example, she devotes many more pages to a dessert that she concedes no one any longer eats – frumenty – than she does to, say,  roasting turkey. This pudding, essentially sweetened stewed whole wheat grains, dates back to pre-Christian Britain, thus predating Christmas itself. 

Yet there is only a single, short recipe for whole roast turkey and in this David abruptly drops the bombshell that she cooks hers on its side – firstly on one side, then the other – without thinking to even explain why. And of course her methods frequently seem old fashioned: that turkey is stuffed with raw pork, cooked for three hours – and there’s barely a mention of resting. Whereas these days food fashion dictates that you don’t put stuffing anywhere near the bird, that it spends half that time cooking – and then rests for hours. 

Her expectations can be quaint too: some of the meat recipes assume one has a professional relationship with a ‘poulterer’. But the cumulative effect is a sensuous and evocative read. David, a longtime Spectator contributor, suffered a birthday during The Great Too Long Stretch, on Boxing Day. The idea of taking to one’s bed recurs a second time in the book, from a 1959 piece in Vogue: ‘If I had my way – and I shan’t – my Christmas Day eating and drinking would consist of an omelette and cold ham and a nice bottle of wine at lunchtime, and a smoked salmon sandwich with a glass of champagne on a tray in bed in the evening.’

But by the time she was writing her Christmas book in the 1970s and 1980s, the idea of a day in bed with wine had apparently evolved from an unrealistic aspiration to an actual annual ritual. And good for her. 

It is without doubt my favourite such observation in all Christmas cookery writing, narrowly edging out Delia Smith’s advice during her chronological run-through of how to do the big Christmas meal, and suggesting, between prepping the chipolatas and the sprouts: ‘Then you are free for a few minutes to go and have a pre-lunch glass of champagne. You deserve it.’ Fine advice, which I followed this and every other year, but not as magnificent as ‘take the whole bottle and go to bed – all day.’

The Tories’ only hope is tax cuts

In the old days, when the Conservatives were chalking up opinion poll ratings in the forties, their strategists knew they needed robust offers on four key subjects in order to secure their electoral base. These were Europe, law and order, immigration and taxation. Brexit has largely removed the need for the first, on the second the Tories are not taken seriously – having just scrapped short jail terms and presided over a collapse in everyday policing – while the least said about their catastrophic record on the third the better.

This just leaves tax cuts. Having presided over record taxation, it will be difficult to sell the idea that the party is zealous about allowing people to keep more of their own money. But the electorate is aware that fighting Covid cost a fortune and also carries a retained suspicion of the Labour party on tax matters.

So here we go then. The morning papers are full of speculation about impending tax cuts in the pre-election Budget of Spring 2024. Top of the list, according to the Telegraph, is the potential scrapping of inheritance tax. A radical proposal on so-called death duties has got the party out of a tight spot once before when it was used with great success to scare Gordon Brown off going for an early ‘honeymoon’ election in 2007. But right now, with only 4 per cent of estates paying inheritance tax, it seems like a measure targeted at homeowners in Home Counties and elsewhere in the south of England – a defensive policy designed to shore-up the Maidenheads and Basingstokes but with an opportunity cost of allowing the Mansfields and Bassetlaws to be lost overboard.

Another measure being considered, at least according to the Times, is reforming stamp duty to help first-time buyers. This is certainly a charge detested by those stretching themselves to get on the housing ladder. The main economic case against it is that it serves as a tax on labour mobility. On the other hand, the impact of getting rid of it would not be to bring owning a home within the reach of millions of disaffected younger adults – only measures that will increase housing supply or reduce population growth can do that. Rather, it would push purchase prices up even further as competing bidders used funds once reserved to cover the stamp duty charge to increase their offers.

Other ideas mentioned in the Telegraph are to U-turn on Rishi Sunak’s freezing of tax thresholds or cut the headline standard rate of tax, currently 20 per cent. The latter measure would help everyone in full-time employment but would surely come across as too easily reversible to reawaken tribal faith in the Tories. The former measure – raising the tax threshold bands – would be awkward personally for Sunak. However a cut on the higher rate threshold, which kicks in just above £50,000, could help to solve a horrendous tax trap that is destroying incentives for ambitious middle earners. Currently the combined impact of a 40 per cent tax rate, the scraping back of child benefit between £50,000 and £60,000, a 9 per cent graduate loan repayment charge and another 2 per cent in national insurance contributions is leading to marginal tax rates above 70 per cent for many in this income range.

Pushing the 40 per cent threshold up to, say, £70,000 would largely solve this and also serve as a radical, ‘cultural’ tax change that could energise the economy. Labour would also need to decide whether to oppose the measure on grounds of it being targeted at the top fifth or so of earners. And setting tax traps for Labour is clearly a large part of what the Tories are up to here. Back in the run up to the 1997 election, Gordon Brown played a canny game by ruling out income tax increases and pledging to stick to Tory spending limits for at least the first two years. In so doing he disarmed a potential re-run of the ‘Labour tax bombshell’ poster campaign that saved the Tory’s bacon in 1992. Rachel Reeves is likely to recommend caution this time round as well.

In tax matters, as in so much else, all the signs are that the traditional Tory audience is no longer willing to indulge in a suspension of disbelief. Still, at least CCHQ’s strategists have taken the public gaze away from migration matters for the next day or two. And from their point of view, that is better than nothing.

SNP ferries farrago gets worse for taxpayers

A new year brings the same old headaches for hapless Humza Yousaf. There’s plenty of problems awaiting the in-tray of Scotland’s flailing First Minister from drug deaths and school standards to Michael Matheson’s iPad data. But perhaps no policy area sums up his party’s failures in office than the ongoing farce over CalMac ferries.

The state-owned ferry network has been plagued by issues in recent years, with extensive delays and costs ballooning in the building of two ships at the Scottish Government-owned Ferguson Marine shipyard. Just this week its chief executive admitted that MV Glen Sannox – the partially-built ferry already almost six years late and £100 million over budget – has now been delayed for at least another two months and might not be deployed for the crucial summer tourism season (again).

And to add insult to injury, new figures confirm the toll that CalMac’s incompetence is taking on Scottish taxpayers. According to a Freedom of Information request by Scottish Labour, ferry compensation payouts to affected passengers have increased almost eightfold in the past six years. CalMac stumped up £454,000 in 2022-23 – almost eight times less than the £57,000 since 2017-18. No rush in fixing the fleet, eh chaps? Pity the poor islanders affected by the farrago.

Still, it’s good to see that the SNP’s best and brightest are taking the issue seriously. After all, the party’s business spokesman Douglas Chapman – Dunfermline’s answer to James Dornan – appears to think that the affected islanders are just ‘banging on about a couple of CalMac ferries ad nauseam.’ His colleague Pete Wishart meanwhile bemoans how ‘Ferries, ferries, ferries, ferries, ferries’ is so frequently a topic at First Minister’s Questions.

Perhaps it wouldn’t have to be if the SNP-run fleet wasn’t quite so useless…

Why can’t the Tories come up with a good nickname for Keir Starmer?

When a nickname really hits its target, there is a satisfying beauty about it: a quippy sobriquet that catches the attention and goes to the heart of some aspect of a person’s character. It is a measure of the Conservative party’s inability to get a convincing hold on Sir Keir Starmer that they have tried tag after tag – Captain Hindsight, Sir Softy, the dismal Captain Crasheroony Snoozefest – but none has yet found its mark.

To real nail Starmer and come up with a nickname that sticks, the Tories should perhaps look across the pond for inspiration. Donald Trump, for all his faults, is in a category of his own when it comes to damning an opponent with a nickname. Crooked Hillary (Clinton), Sloppy Steve (Bannon), Sleepy Joe (Biden), Lyin Ted (Cruz) and Low-Energy Jeb (Bush) were all monikers that were hard to overcome.

Political nicknames didn’t start with Trump, of course. Modern British politics is stuffed with inspiration for those trying to sum up Starmer. But Tories trying to capture something of the Labour leader in a memorable phrase should be careful: nicknames can end up backfiring.

Margaret Thatcher’s epithet of ‘the Iron Lady’ was originally intended as an insult. A year after she became leader of the Conservative Party in 1975, Thatcher gave a typically trenchant anti-Communist speech which accused the Soviet Union of seeking world dominance. A run-of-the-mill Red Army mouthpiece, Krasnaya Zvezda, hit back in unremarkable terms under the headline ‘Zheleznaya Dama Ugrozhayet‘, ‘Iron Lady Wields Threats’. By chance, Reuters’ Moscow chief picked up the phrase, Thatcher saw it and grabbed it with both hands, and repeated it in a speech on 31 January 1976. It stuck, because it was brilliantly apposite – an instant political persona.

A previous Conservative prime minister, Harold Macmillan, had similarly benefited from what began as a slight. He had succeeded Sir Anthony Eden in 1957 as the disastrous Suez Crisis played out, and entered Downing Street without optimism, telling the Queen his government might not last six weeks. But he survived, he steadied his party, and the economy started to boom.

In September 1958, the Evening Standard’s cartoonist ‘Vicky’ (Victor Weisz) sketched the PM as a superhero, caped and soaring into the air above the dismissive caption: ‘How to Try to Continue to be Top Without Actually Having Been There’. He dubbed the character ‘Supermac’. Somehow it worked. The country was emerging from the long shadow of post-war austerity and Macmillan, though an anxiety-ravaged intellectual in his sixties, had a weird streak of Edwardian showmanship. Unexpectedly, the nickname summed him up, and a year later he led his party to a decisive third election victory.

A pithy summation can be damaging too. H.H. Asquith, prime minister from 1908 to 1916 and the last man to lead a Liberal majority government, came to the premiership in his pomp. He was 55, a distinguished KC who had been raised in the glory of Jowett-era Balliol College, Oxford, in the 1870s, and had served first as home secretary then chancellor of the Exchequer. He worked quickly and efficiently but believed in an enviable work/life balance, and was fond of good drink, congenial company and, increasingly passionately but without hope, his daughter’s friend Venetia Stanley.

It is impossible to pinpoint when Asquith picked up the nickname ‘Old Squiffy’, a pun on his name but also a reference to his drinking. It might not have mattered, but his premiership was dogged by challenges and then engulfed by the First World War. In 1912, on a trip to Sicily, Asquith seems to have fallen wholly in love with Stanley, 35 years his junior, and the personal and professional disappointments drove him to drink more heavily. Within Westminster, ‘Squiffy’ became a self-perpetuating reputation: he was occasionally found incapable in the evenings, and some women preferred to keep a table between themselves and the emotional PM.

But by the time the war had come, music hall legend George Robey was singing to guffawing audiences:

Mr Asquith says in a manner sweet and calm:

Another little drink won’t do us any harm.

They laughed because they knew what he was singing about. By the end of 1916, when David Lloyd George sought to displace Asquith as head of government, Squiffy had neither the credibility nor the energy to resist.

Some epithets miss the target in the way Tory efforts with Starmer have done so far. Private Eye dubbed Edward Heath ‘Grocer Heath’ in 1964 after he angered shopkeepers by abolishing resale price maintenance. Characteristically of the Eye, it would not let the identification go; writing in this magazine in 2016, Richard Ingrams, one of the Eye’s founders, was still calling Heath ‘Grocer…as he will always be for me’. But it never really achieved universality, because it said little about the core of the man. Heath was a stiff, awkward man, over-aware of his own dignity, but he was also clever and hard-working, a gifted musician and an Admiral’s Cup-winning yachtsman. ‘The Grocer’ shone a light on none of these characteristics.

Reaching further back in time, you find nicknames which might have resonated at the time but, given the intervening decades or centuries, now mostly perplex or confound. A.J. Balfour, the brilliant but intellectually aloof and detached premier who succeeded his uncle the Marquess of Salisbury in 1902, was known as ‘Pretty Fanny’, supposedly for his delicate manners. The diminutive Whig Lord John Russell, prime minister from 1846 to 1852 and again from 1865 to 1866, supported the Great Reform Act 1832 only as a last measure of liberalisation and thenceforth carried the name ‘Finality Jack’. George III’s favourite, John, 3rd Earl of Bute, was widely disliked but elbowed his way briefly into the premiership in 1762-63 and gave punning rise to a more general term for a stupid person: ‘Jack Boot’.

Some unhappy PMs never achieve nickname status in their time: the records are largely silent on Andrew Bonar Law (1922-23) and the Earl of Rosebery (1894-95). The best must have spontaneity but, more importantly, they should have a shaft of authenticity, striking a chord that eventually brings a nod of recognition. After that, it is the luck of the draw: you can vault upwards through pithy and potent publicity, or you can carry a mark, some sign of a defect, which you will never shake off. Perhaps the reason the Tories haven’t managed to capture Starmer in a single nickname is that he’s plain and forgettable. But, if so, that’s bad news for Labour if it hopes voters will make him prime minister next year.

Did Richard Dawkins’s ‘New Atheists’ spark a Christian revival?

The battle between New Atheism and religion was never likely to have a clear winner. It was never very likely that the arguments of Richard Dawkins and co would topple the towers of theology. Nor was it likely that the atheists would provoke the sleeping giant of faith into rising up and crushing the impertinence for good.

I suppose atheists can claim that their cause is making steady progress, with organised religion continuing its gentle decline in the West, but the more honest among them might admit that the energy of their movement fizzled out long ago. Secular idealism opted for identity politics instead, making the pontifications of white male know-it-alls sound dated and uncool.

Believers, on the other hand, are likely to be more bullish. They might observe that New Atheism was widely disdained by agnostic thinkers, and that one or two prominent atheists have changed their tune, most recently Ayaan Hirsi Ali. But maybe they shouldn’t be too bullish either. Most of the agnostics who have criticised New Atheism have stopped short of advocating religion. A good example is Tom Holland. New Atheism prodded him to write a defence of Christianity’s centrality to the West, but he hasn’t come out as a believer. Much the same is true of Jordan Peterson. Atheism may have fizzled out, but no bold new theology has emerged.

I therefore have my doubts about a new book called Coming to Faith Through Dawkins. It claims a bit too much: that the hubris of New Atheism has backfired comically, and sparked a new mood of Christian confidence. It’s a collection of essays by people who were keen on Dawkins for a time, and then became Christians.

It’s not surprising that there are plenty of such people. Any God-curious youth in the 2000s was bound to engage with Dawkins, and maybe Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens too. For a few of the contributors, Dawkins’ work really did spark an interest in religion, one that turned from hostile to positive. But most of the contributors had a religious upbringing, and Dawkins was just their rebellion phase. 

It’s mostly standard evangelical testimony, but there are a few thoughtful voices. A historian of science called Sarah Irving-Stonebraker includes Peter Singer in the discussion. As a secular humanist, she expected to agree with his utilitarianism, but was alarmed that it dispensed with the principle of human sanctity: ‘The equality of all human beings is not a self-evident truth, as Singer and other world-class secular philosophers are happy to remind us.’

Dawkins, she observes, is less clear on the issue. He presents natural selection as the truth about life, and then says that of course we should defy it by acting humanely, but doesn’t bother exploring the roots of the latter assumption.

This is the real flaw in New Atheism: it inherits a vague rational humanism that it has to pretend is natural, or common-sense. It’s an important task of Christian apologetics to point this out, to insist that the moral assumptions of our culture have Christian roots. But most Christian apologists fail to focus on this and get bogged down in tedious arguments about first causes, and try to make a rational case for God, and even the historical likelihood of the resurrection. Most of these contributors take this approach, some citing the apologetics of William Lane Craig and Alister McGrath (who is this book’s co-editor).

To my mind, this is deeply unhelpful. It sinks to Dawkins’ level. A wise apologetics is minimalist. It calmly exposes the moral muddles of rational humanists, their weak grasp of the history of ideas. But it doesn’t overstate the role of intellectual argument in belief.

People don’t come to faith through arguments. They come to faith because they find that they like religion – the stories, the songs, the art, the speech-forms, the culture. They might also like the intellectual side of religion, but this is mixed in with everything else. For example, I might be intellectually persuaded by something that a theologian says, but this is tied up with my wider appreciation, which is more aesthetic or emotional than rational, of the core Christian themes that he or she develops. Most apologetics overlooks this wider embedding and overstates the role of abstract rationality, and makes theology look brittle and little.

Mad dogs and Putin’s shells: A dispatch from Kherson

Browsing the shelves at Tsum, a supermarket in the centre of Kherson in Ukraine, you could be forgiven for thinking you were in Whole Foods in Kensington. The deli and the grocery are as well stocked and diverse as any in London and, in the patisserie, the smell of freshly baked brioche permeates the air. Every day, people walk the aisles, gathering not only essentials but exotic fruits, kombucha and even Christmas decorations. In many ways, Tsum is emblematic of this city’s resilience in the midst of war. On the upper floors, its windows are either smashed or missing altogether; at street level, its doors are appended with large protective sheets of wood. Yet inside, life goes on much as it did before. Step outside and the booms and crumps of artillery, aerial bombs and grads reverberate constantly across the city. Although its residents can leave at any time, and many already have, Kherson feels very much like a city under siege. 

The Kherson region is cut almost in half by the Dnipro river, with Kherson city on its Western bank. From the other, the shelling is ceaseless. Day and night, artillery pounds the city with a relentlessness that feels both random and indifferent. But the Ukrainians too are unrelenting in their own way, doggedly refusing to give in to fear. Between the explosions, life in Kherson persists. Cafes stay open most of the day and hair salons continue to operate unabated, the low hum of hairdryers and the sound of the radio punctuated by the rumble of artillery and occasional rattling of windows. 

A few blocks from the river, the theatre is staging a production by a local playwright, advertised only by word of mouth. As with much else in Kherson, this is the influence of the fear of being made a target of the Russian artillery. In a basement deep within the building, a hundred or so people gather, huddled together to watch the play in a cellar directly under the boards of the stage above. There is sophisticated lighting and sound design and the show, which would not be out of place on a West End stage, goes on undeterred by the encroaching sound of the war upstairs. There is a sense of stoicism about the whole thing, as actor and audience put themselves at great risk, determined to keep the city’s arts scene going. Life in Kherson is saturated with these instances of intentional normality.

Driving around the city at dusk is a deeply disquieting experience. By 4pm, the streets are empty, the hallmarks of life retreating into dense, squat Soviet era residential blocks that flank wide nineteenth century boulevards. By 5pm, the city is enveloped in darkness, an unsettling silence broken only by the reverberation of nearby explosions and the howling of wild dogs. There are no street lamps here: to light the streets would make targeting infrastructure too easy, and so park and pavement remain dark, illuminated only by moonlight until morning. Entire apartment blocks stand dark and imposing against the night sky, stippled with warm light radiating from the occasional kitchen window. Sporadic silhouettes are the only sign that anyone is still here. The sounds of shelling continue through the night. 

Kherson wasn’t always like this, the wild dogs once had loving owners and a haircut was not always a revolutionary act. Before the full-scale invasion, Kherson was a resort city, frequented, in particular, by Russian tourists. As Ukrainian forces eke out a foothold on the far side of the river, encroaching metres at a time on Russian positions, the city itself is made up only of civilians. There is a punitive nature to these attacks that is hard to describe. When the city finally was liberated following nine months of occupation, Ukraine’s president Zelenskyy stood just metres from the supermarket to address the nation. Within minutes of the end of his address, the shelling began. One year on, it has yet to stop. In recent months, the Russians have redoubled their efforts, unleashing an unprecedented amalgam of weaponry upon the city. It is a grinding, inexorable assault, less shock and awe and more a tireless and punishing wearing down of its inhabitants for no ostensible strategic purpose. People here understand that they are the target, that the army on the other side of the river don’t much care what or who they hit – to hit something, anything, is enough.

In Kherson, fear and resilience go hand in hand, inextricably bound by the resolve of those who live here. The makeshift basement theatre, the supermarket, the hair salons and gyms are sanctuaries, not just literally, but in a more profound sense too. Here, normal life is a deliberate act of defiance. The temerity of old and young alike, navigating daily the war torn streets of Kherson in the face of incessant artillery fire is a kind of resistance. It is here in Kherson, as ordinary people defy the extraordinary circumstances thrust upon them, that the unwavering resolve of the human spirit prevails, finding a way through like a sapling from an old oak through a crack in scorched earth.

Why Ukraine’s attack on the Novocherkassk warship matters

It was not quite in time for Christmas (which Ukraine now celebrates on 25 December, after switching this year from the Russian Orthodox Julian calendar), but Kyiv will still be celebrating today’s apparently successful Storm Shadow missile attack on a landing ship in a Crimean port. There are no seasonal ceasefires on either side in this increasingly bitter conflict.

The Ropucha-class landing ship Novocherkassk (BDK-46) had already had a rather unhappy war. In March 2022, it was damaged by Ukrainian shelling when docked in Berdyansk in occupied southern Ukraine. Later in the year the Novocherkassk, along with its sister ship, the Tsezar Kunikov, were reportedly immobilised by a lack of spare parts thanks to sanctions.

On 26 December, as it was anchored at the Crimean port of Feodosia, the Novocherkassk seems to have been hit by one of a number of British-supplied Storm Shadow air-launched cruise missile fired from two Ukrainian Su-24 bombers (which the Russians claimed they subsequently shot down). Moscow has confirmed that the Novocherkassk was damaged, but Kyiv claims it was destroyed. Footage from Feodosia shows large explosions and fires.

On one level, it is legitimate to ask whether this is a big deal. It is not the first time Feodosia has been hit, nor is the loss of a landing ship militarily crucial ­­– given that the days when Russia could plausibly mount amphibious operations against Ukrainian targets are long gone. These large vessels still have some role as transports – Kyiv claimed the Novocherkassk was carrying Iranian Shahed drones, although it is hard to see why, as it had not recently visited other ports and it would be a pretty illogical place for long-term storage. These ships are also relatively easy targets. Novocherkassk’s sister ship, the Minsk, was hit in a similar attack while at anchor off Sevastopol in September, for example. Still, this attack by Ukraine is noteworthy for several reasons.

First of all, there had been suggestions that Ukraine had originally been supplied shorter-range Storm Shadows compliant with the Missile Technology Control Regime arms control regime, which limits the export of missiles with a range exceeding 190 miles. But this strike seems to confirm that Ukraine has the more capable version with a 340-mile range. Although it is not clear how many of these £2 million missiles Ukraine still has, they will continue to give Kyiv a powerful and long-range capability.

Secondly, the attack demonstrates that Kyiv is committed to a strategy of making occupying Crimea as untenable as possible for Russia. Even were Russian defensive lines to be breached or broken, a direct ground attack on the peninsula would be bloody and hard. Instead, the model is the liberation of Kherson in November 2022. After an assault there failed, the Ukrainians concentrated on isolating the city and hammering its supply lines, until Vladimir Putin’s generals were able to convince him that they had no choice but to withdraw.

Crimea is not Kherson, to be sure, and it would take a truly dire situation to drive Russia from it, not least because Putin likely considers the peninsula politically existential. Nonetheless, for the present at least, Kyiv’s best chance of regaining Crimea seems to be by making it too difficult and expensive to hold. The Feodosiya attack was calculated not only to damage specific military assets, but also to ram home the message that nowhere on the peninsula is safe from Ukrainian action.

After all, wars are political operations. These attacks are not only intended to unnerve the Kremlin, they are also meant to reassure both Ukraine and its western allies that they still have momentum. At a time when Moscow is claiming to have seized the disputed town of Maryinka; when Ukrainian defence minister Rustem Umerov is proposing lowering the combat mobilisation age from 27 to 25; and when there is increasing pressure on Ukrainians abroad to heed the call-up (and Estonia may even be willing to deport draft-dodgers), there clearly is a need for some good news. Along with President Zelensky’s recent claims that three new Russian Su-34 fighter-bombers had been shot down (which has yet to be confirmed) the Novocherkassk also represents something of a bid to encourage Ukrainians, and reassure wobbling allies that the war is still worth waging.

UK becomes first G20 country to halve its carbon emissions

A major milestone has just been passed: Britain has become the first major country to halve its carbon emissions. The rapid pace of UK environmental progress means that our output is now below 320 million tonnes – less than half the 652 million tonnes of our 1970 peak. This is in spite of Britain now having a far larger population than 50 years ago and an economy more than twice the size.

Had things gone the other way – if our carbon emissions had doubled, for example – this would be front page news. But I’m not sure you can expect to read about this good news anywhere other than The Spectator. There are no campaign groups tracking it, no politicians likely to trumpet it. The info is tracked by the Global Carbon Project and is one of many metrics collected in the energy section of The Spectator data hub. Here it is, showing (as you’d expect) a drop during the lockdowns, but by 2022 showing a drop driven by efficiencies that takes our emissions lower in a normal year than they were when the economy was being shut down.

The above is quite a simple graph: a country’s total carbon emissions. You can click on 'per capita' to see it that way too. Yet a quick Google search shows how hard it is to find this historical perspective anywhere online – and how easy it is to find negative metrics. This is a shame because it means a generation of young people are being brought up only ever hearing one side of the story: that there is a climate crisis that shows little chance of being solved. In fact, Britain is leading the G20 in decarbonisation, even when you factor in imports (the so-called ‘consumption’ table).

So how has this been achieved? By the three drivers of green progress: tech, capitalism and consumer choice. Fuel is expensive, hence innovation means every year devices that use energy are improved so they use less and cost less: even petrol cars travel 50 per cent further on the same fuel as when Blair came to power. Home heating efficiencies (and far-better insulation) means the fuel used by the average home has gone down by 41per cent. The pain of high bills would have been a lot greater if it were not the rapid advances of the last five decades.

You can see this across the board. Progress in agriculture mean that fertiliser use peaked in the mid-1980s. Since then, the total amount of nitrogen used in fields has almost halved and the amount of phosphate is down by two-thirds. Air pollution levels have collapsed; London air is purer now than in medieval times. All of which can be seen on the Spectator data hub.

This provides important context for the NetZero debate. The UK itself generates less than 1 per cent of emissions - so very little that we do, now, will move the global dial. We're doing more than anyone else which should raise questions as to how much pain to inflict on the average householder through more green taxes.

The below chart shows how much progress the rest of the G20 has made from their carbon peak.

The first five countries – Argentina, China, India, Indonesia and Mexico – are showing no reduction at all because they are at peak carbon right now and setting new records each year. But this needs to be seen in connection with their likely trajectory: when they peak, they’ll be able to fall a lot faster than Britain did due to far-better technology. And coal-guzzling China? As Cindy Yu says in her recent cover piece, China is on track to have its carbon emissions peak by 2030 and aims to be carbon neutral by 2060. Once countries hit the peak, they’ll be able to fall faster due to better tech. As Cindy writes, ‘It took London 50 years to halve its air pollution; Beijing seems to have done the same in five.’

All told, it’s a striking trend – and a useful balance to the often-hyperbolic negativity that is normally used when covering this important story.

The shameful legacy of Tony Blair’s Hunting Act

Most laws enacted nearly 20 years ago become uncontroversial with the passage of time. The Hunting Act, though, is not one of them. As hunts gather today for their traditional Boxing Day meet, the latest chapter in this ongoing story involves fresh claims about Labour and past ‘cash for commitments’. Central to these is the allegation that the pledge to ban hunting with hounds in the 1997 party manifesto was effectively purchased by a £1 million donation.

Shortly before the election, the Labour party received that figure from Political Animal Lobby, now known as Animal Survival International. It has always been a fair assumption that such a large sum had a significant impact on Labour policy, particularly on hunting. But until recently we could not say that definitively. Now, however, we can. First, Peter Mandelson admitted earlier this month on a Times podcast that the donation was ‘pretty transactional’ and put the party under ‘some sort of pressure’ over the manifesto. Then Brian Basham, the man who physically collected the cheque for the Labour party, wrote a letter to the Guardian declaring that he resigned immediately afterwards because of his concerns that such large donations were ‘deeply corrupting’.

Such a murky story ought not to merely be a matter of titillation to historians and political obsessives. Having spent 30 years in the House of Commons, I know just how reluctant politicians are to reflect on the impact of our law-making. We close the book on one debate and open the next, probably hoping, subconsciously, that if things do not go as planned, we will have moved on before the results become obvious and questions are asked. Yet even so, the complete failure to investigate the consequences of the Hunting Act has been astonishing. 

None of the animal rights groups that gave huge donations, spent millions more on campaigning and made endless grandiose claims have spent a penny considering the actual impact of the legislation they desired. None of the MPs who put hunting at the top of the political agenda for almost a decade are now willing to discuss what their obsession has achieved, let alone dwell on the myriad of important issues that we could have studied during the 700 hours of parliamentary debate.

For the damage inflicted by the Hunting Act continues to be felt to this day. In a new book – Rural Wrongs – the journalist Charlie Pye-Smith forensically details the impact of the law on the countryside and especially the species it was intended to protect. In the uplands of England and Wales, where the use of hounds is often the only practical method of control, fox numbers have increased. As a result, the numbers of threatened ground nesting birds like the curlew are now hurtling towards extinction. In the lowlands, where the use of rifles aided by modern technology is extremely effective, foxes themselves have become an endangered species as they are treated as vermin because they no longer retain their protected status as a quarry species. 

In those areas where the much-misunderstood practice of hare coursing traditionally took place, the brown hare once abounded; now their numbers have dwindled. In some places they are even actively discouraged, as hares attract undesirable bands of poachers who continue to run their dogs with impunity. In the West Country, staghound packs continue to control the population of red deer herds as best they can, within the restrictions imposed by the law. But their use has been seriously hampered, such as in cases where they would have traditionally been used to end the suffering of the increasingly high number of deer injured in road traffic accidents.

Given all this, you might have hoped that Keir Starmer – the man who now leads my former party – would be ready to at least review the impacts of the ban, given his willingness to embrace an admirably fresh approach on many rural issues. Yet sadly, Labour’s mutually destructive relationship with hunting seems set to continue. I had hoped that a future Labour government would not repeat the mistakes of the past in allowing class prejudice and pressure from animal rights groups to dictate the direction the party takes. But the policy adopted by the most Labour conference for the next manifesto aims to strengthen the Hunting Act, rather than replace it.

Apart from all the damage to wildlife and rural communities, this is simply bad politics. Labour needs rural seats to win a majority and needs to persuade rural voters that it has moved on from the divisive politics that saw it beaten so soundly in 2019. A war on the countryside, as past experience has shown, contributes to electoral defeat, not victory.

Has the West forgotten about Ukraine?

When Hamas murdered 1,200 people on October 7, I was in eastern Ukraine, researching a long piece for the Telegraph on how the summer’s counter-offensive had gone. The death toll in Israel’s 9/11 was equivalent to just a week or two’s heavy fighting in the Donbas. Yet immediately it was clear that the massacre 3,000 miles away would mark a new phase in Ukraine’s conflict: no longer would it be the sole international crisis in western leaders’ in-trays.

Until now, one of things that has buoyed morale here is the sense that the world is cheering Ukraine on, and that despite the privations and bloodshed, a glorious Victory Day awaits. Since October 7, the narrative has changed. In Europe and America, funding for the war no longer seems certain, especially if Donald Trump returns to the White House next year. On the streets of London, the protests denouncing evil colonisers are once again talking about Israel, not Vladimir Putin’s murderous land grab. In Kyiv, President Zelensky is arguing with his generals over a 500,000 mobilisation order, while in Moscow, which nearly saw a coup just six months ago, Putin looks back in charge. It’s as if some Kremlin spin-doctor is suddenly writing the script. Most insultingly of all, the counter-offensive is now routinely dismissed as having ‘failed’, as if Ukraine might as well now forget all about winning.

That is not how the war is talked about in Ukraine – although the counter-offensive itself has never been quite the buzzword that it is in the West. Much as it may obsess armchair generals back home, it’s not always the best topic to raise with the real generals in the field. Ask them how the ‘big push’ is going, and you imply they’ve taking it easy for the last 18 months. Ask why the counter-offensive hasn’t scored a major breakthrough yet, as Washington officials did within just a fortnight of it starting, and you sound not just like a backseat driver, but the irritating kid in the child seat going: ‘Are we nearly there yet?’

Privately, Kyiv always knew that if Russian forces put up even a basically competent defence (which they have) then this summer’s campaign was never likely to be a more than a start. It would, essentially, be a blood-drenched exercise in field research, allowing Kyiv to try out its new western armour and figure out what worked best. Those tanks will be back in action, though, once the fighting season resumes next spring – backed, this time, by US-donated F16 jets that should finally be operational.

Daniel Ridley, an ex-British soldier who now runs the Trident Defence Initiative, a private training programme for Ukrainian troops, argues that the counter-offensive was overhyped by western leaders. They thought fancy Nato kit would change the game overnight, and became crestfallen when some of it was chewed up in Russian minefields.

‘To be honest, the counter-offensive only really went on for a few weeks back in the summer,’ he says. ‘It’s partly the West’s fault, they gave the Ukrainians false confidence and western wonder-weapons, but manned by Nato-trained units where 80 per cent of the recruits had no combat experience.’

Many Ukrainian soldiers don’t even see the western-donated Leopards and Challengers as being that crucial. Many of the tank crews I met during my recent trip were still in upgraded Soviet-era T64s – the military equivalent of a Trabant. Yet they were content to stick with what they knew well, rather than risk grappling with fancy new kit in the heat of battle. ‘A tank is just a machine,’ a commander with Ukraine’s 93rd Brigade told me outside Bakhmut. ‘What’s important is your skill in using it, not how modern it is.’

They also dispute that the war is at a stalemate. True, in the southern Zaporizhzhia region, the main focus of the summer thrust, the Ukrainian lines have only gained ten miles or so – way short of the 50 miles they need to reach the Sea of Azov and isolate Russian forces in Crimea. But when every yard of turf is defended to the hilt, even that’s an achievement.

Nor are the gains all about land. Russia’s ability to protect Crimea is being steadily eaten away by sea-drone and air attacks on its Black Sea naval fleet, such as the one on Boxing Day that damaged one of its warships at the port of Feodosiya.

Where Ukraine is weaker than Russia, though, is in the crude metrics of artillery shells and troops. The EU is unlikely to supply more than half of its target of a million shells to Kyiv by next spring, despite pledges to ramp up production. A Ukrainian artillery team operating British howitzers near Bakhmut told me they’d had to stop using them because of a shortage of 105mm shells. And while Russian casualties are horrendous – 120,000 deaths is the rough guess, compared to 70,000 for Ukraine – it hasn’t produced the expected blowback on Putin. The Russian death toll already dwarfs the 15,000 killed during Moscow’s botched occupation of Afghanistan, long cited as the nail in the Soviet Union’s coffin. So far, though, it has sparked no serious social unrest, let alone any challenge to Putin’s rule.

Instead, Putin’s strategy seems to be that Russia should take pride in out-suffering its enemies, just as the Soviet Union did when it lost more than eight million soldiers defeating Hitler. Indeed, the higher the casualties on Moscow’s side, the more Putin may be able to peddle the myth that Russia is re-enacting its second world war glory.

Yet western leaders may be mistaken if they presume that Ukraine can simply be pressured into peace talks. For all that Washington or Brussels tries to bend Mr Zelensky’s ear, any move to the negotiating table needs sign-off from the Ukrainian public. They have already fought, won and lost far too much to be in a mood for compromise, according to Alina Frolova, deputy chair of Kyiv’s Centre for Defence Strategies.

‘There is still no readiness to negotiate, as neither the military nor the population are currently willing to back President Zelensky on that,’ she told me last week. ‘It’s not being discussed in serious political circles here, even if people like Trump are talking about it.’

Last week, the EU voted to open membership talks with Kyiv – regarding the offer, perhaps, as an important sweetener if Ukraine is ever to swallow the bitter pill of negotiations with Moscow. But Brussels may want to think carefully about the consequences of admitting Ukraine to the club if much of its population feels humiliated, angry and robbed of rightful victory by a timid West.

Ukraine, after all, will be no small addition to the EU fold. It has nearly 44 million people – more than Poland (38 million) and the size of Romania, the Czech Republic and Hungary combined. In an EU of nearly 500 million, Ukrainians would wield significant voting power, and a certain moral authority too. Nobody will be able to lecture them about ‘privilege’ or EU values, not when they’ve died in droves to protect those values. But just like Europe after the first world war, there’ll be a generation who bear the scars of conflict, who could well be a volatile addition to Europe’s political constituencies. Better to usher them in gorged on the fruits of victory rather than embittered by the taste of defeat.

While jostling with Israel for the West’s attention, Ukrainian diplomats may also politely argue that their ‘existential threat’ is rather greater. In recent weeks, Israeli embassies have held private screenings for politicians of the ‘Hamas Massacre Tapes’, a horror movie compiled of clips from dead Hamas fighters’ bodycams and victims’ phones. I watched it myself while reporting in Israel last month, and believe me, it’s hideous. But October 7 was essentially a cross-border incursion by a terrorist group. Ukraine’s was very much an invasion.

Finally, lest Ukraine now seem like yesterday’s news, cast your mind back to those scary early weeks of the invasion, when defeat seemed a foregone conclusion. In fact, it was barely 72 hours before it became clear that Kyiv was standing firm, and that Russian forces had bitten off more than they could chew. Had Ukraine’s fate hung in the balance for rather longer, western nations might be less tempted to treat it as another distant war that can quietly be forgotten about. Instead, the talk that the tide is now turning in the conflict seems to elicit not much more than a collective shrug from the western public. Millions of have taken to the streets over Israel-Gaza, on both sides of the debate. Where’s the mass marches for Ukraine, urging governments to stay the course?

In February I may be back in Ukraine again, covering the conflict’s second anniversary, when Zelensky will probably give a press conference. He did one on the anniversary this year, where he was asked how he’d feel if the fighting was still raging a year later. For once, the great orator seemed lost for words. ’That’s a drama that I don’t even want to think about,’ he said.

Back then, that gloomy scenario did indeed seem unthinkable. The war was still going Ukraine’s way. Hopes were high for the counter-offensive. Now it’s all but a certainty.

The trouble with Boxing Day

You are bloated and binged. Your bloodstream is 35 per cent blood, 60 per cent a mix of Nurofen Plus, Gaviscon and acetaldehyde and 5 per cent Quality Street. You will either be making more mess, or clearing up the mess that everybody else is making more of. There are tiny pieces of plastic everywhere, perhaps even in you. If you’re with your family, all of them, including you, will have reverted to their personality and status of 1993 at the latest. Television – merely horrible and chiding throughout the rest of the year – has suddenly dumped on you a ginormous dollop of sickening sugar and thick, choking starch. 

The name Boxing Day comes from the lost Christian tradition of distributing presents in boxes to the poor of one’s parish. This has been replaced by the new tradition of a mass descent on the Westfield Shopping Centre in Shepherd’s Bush to buy presents in boxes for oneself. 

Must everything be a binge? Sadly, yes. We inevitably retain the animal instincts of the Neolithic Era, so our bodies automatically behave as if we are not guaranteed to eat so richly again. This is perhaps the glaringly obvious reason for our rates of obesity. Unless and until an injection of Wegovy becomes a weekly commonplace like doing the bins or the lottery, we are stuck with that. 

But on Boxing Day we could, if we really set our hearts to it, pace ourselves just a bit. Festive overeating, like so many of the self-obsessive banes of modern life, occurs because we are affluent and bored. We want something to do to feel alive, or half-alive. 

There is another big issue with Boxing Day. Looming above it is the dread consideration that we will barely have time to recover before New Year’s Eve, and another bout of binging. The big, nothing-in-moderation, HAVE FUN NOW feast days of our calendar are jammed tight. Why, in the middle of months of grey nothing, do we have three closely adjacent days of state-sanctioned razzmatazz?

We have lost the old stations of the agricultural year, from Hocktide (April/May) to Lammastide (August) to the Harvest Festival (September), which used to spread the jollity and bonding more evenly, and definitely more communally. In their place we have a scattering of drily secular and meaningless Bank Holidays, again all gummed up in the sunshine months. And we’ve totally dropped the essential fasting-before-feasting element that we see in Lent, Ramadan or Yom Kippur. Fasting in those traditions is a penance, a time for reflection on gratitude, a reminder of the tenuousness of the food supply. We have filled that vacuum in our ritual life by reinventing fasting as an apparently super-scientific way to shift our fat. 

We forget, too, that we only started celebrating 1 January as the beginning of the new year in 1752. Before then it took place on the much more sensible 25 March, when you can just begin to feel buds bursting and blossoms blooming. January as the start of the year is a more recent innovation than the Act Of Union, newer than Shakespeare. This explains our cluttered calendar. 

March is when we really need the boost. November and December are made bearable by anticipation for Christmas, the tinsel and glitter in the dark, the little fires of Halloween and Guy Fawkes Night (although those are also ludicrously close together). As it stands, after New Year we are dropped back into the worst weather of the year with no sparkles to adorn the muddy slush, and only the dim prospect of drab, anonymous Easter to cheer us. The horrid smears of dread and flatness that are January and February – ‘Don’t you come around’, Barbara Dickson pleaded in 1980, and so say all of us – would be lifted by looking forward to a late March New Year, with all the rising sap and resurrection shuffle of Spring. Then we could really enjoy Boxing Day again, relax into it fully, and not shudder and clutch our bellies in a gluttonous pit stop between two blow-outs. 

The do’s and don’ts of Christmas thank you letters

My late great-aunt would arrive for Christmas from Edinburgh with a stash of pre-written thank you letters. She’d leave gaps for the specifics of the present and the rest was a scramble of generic, suitably gushing adjectives. The turkey pan would still be soaking and my great-aunt not yet north of the border when you’d be ploughing through her two-sider. My own list of overdue thank you letters – weddings, children’s birthday presents, an impromptu late August BBQ – sit on my to-do list like immovable marker pen, never quite shifted.

Great Aunt Pammie’s clinical efficiency is not something I’ve inherited. But in an age of WhatsApp, there seems to be an absurdity to the paper thank-yous. It’s the impromptu flash of a message the morning after a dinner party glimmering with praise which gives you the smug satisfaction that your slow-cooked ragu was just the ticket, not the dutiful letter which lands through your letterbox after a week of silence. Similarly, the WhatsApped photo of your goddaughter breathless with excitement, fumbling the Polly Pocket you gave her on Christmas morning, is a far greater reward than two lines on a card in January – which has the air of a 1960s school child who’s been made to write lines.

Then there’s the tendency of a letter to relay details to the wedding host which they’re unlikely to have forgotten (‘delicious smoked salmon and rack of lamb, followed by pavlova’). After all, they are the ones who will have shelled out for 150 rounds of it. Or the dangerously dull straying into an inventory of proceedings (‘fantastic brass band, speeches and dancing’).

Writing in the American magazine the Ladies’ Home Journal in February 1894, Mrs Lyman relayed: ‘The “bread and butter” letter as it is sometimes called, because it is supposed to be a letter of thanks for what bread and butter stands for, should be written within 24 hours after arrival at one’s destination, to the hostess whose hospitality one has been enjoying.’

This side of the pond, and 130 years on, time is still of the essence. The longer you leave it the better it needs to be. I recently found my husband desperately googling the history of the Home Counties’ church where his Army friend married in August to bulk out the letter. Had he rattled it off on the Monday after he could have got away with ‘very smart guard of honour on the steps of St Mary’s’ in reference to the church.

And a word of warning: when someone says ‘you mustn’t write’ as they deliver a present or wave you off at the end of an evening, don’t take their word for it. If your host or present giver is a thank you letter proponent, their memory of who has and hasn’t sent one will be terrifyingly encyclopaedic. (And a WhatsApp won’t count.)

There are, of course, exceptions to the tediousness. There are the master letter writers who keep the thank you parts short and use them as a vessel for something much more delicious, a long letter of news and anecdotes which trump any dopamine hit of a flowery WhatsApp message. Or those that are admirably succinct (‘Dear Mr. von Fuehlsdorff: Thank you for your champagne. It arrived, I drank it and I was gayer. Thanks again. My best, Marilyn Monroe’).

It’s here that Debrett’s, which declares ‘thank you notes should always be relentlessly positive and any inconvenience or difficulties associated with the occasion should never be revealed’, is missing a trick. Finding out that you accidentally put your guest next to their disgraced teenage boyfriend at dinner, or that they ripped their dress on the dance floor, is exactly the kind of detail that makes a letter worth reading.

However absurd, there’s a reassuring discipline to the whole charade of the written thank you: the same forces at work that stop you opening 24 advent calendar doors on 1 December or spooning the icing off a birthday cake in one fell swoop. Those hazy days after Christmas when you – and your children, under duress – dutifully tick off thank you letters serve as some sort of calming penance for the preceding days of frothy excess, an excuse to hide with pen and paper.

Keeping track of presents being torn open by three small children simultaneously on Christmas morning, I have found, can feel like a sweat-inducing game of Whac-A-Mole. ‘WHICH CARD CAME OFF THAT ONE,’ you yell as the Lego tumbles, the growing list weighty on your mind. But complete it by the end of the year to start January with an empty thank you inbox – and conscience ­– and you’ll have a feeling akin to the last day of your GCSEs. Utter freedom.

Can Jilly Cooper wreck your life?

What do the names Octavia, Prudence, Harriet, and Imogen all have in common? If you don’t know the answer to that, you’re probably – unlike our current prime minister – not a fan of Jilly Cooper.

Cooper has just published her latest bonkbuster Tackle, one of the doorstep-sized Rutshire Chronicles series that also includes Riders and Rivals. These books are set in a fictionalised Cotswolds and are as reliably comforting as a tin of Quality Streets. But in the good old, bad old days of the seventies and early eighties many of us came to this writer through her ‘name-books’ – six romantic novels (and one collection of short stories) which always had a young woman’s Christian name as the title.   

Were it not for my older sister, it’s doubtful I would have come across them at all. They seemed designed for hormonal schoolgirls and frisky, daydreaming secretaries. Caught with them at boarding school aged ten, I got glowering looks from the teachers – ‘Not suitable reading matter!’ – and quickly learnt to stash them under my mattress and read them at night with a torch.

While my fellow pupils lived in a world of the football game Subbuteo, Wisden and Willard Price stories, I was already dreaming of metropolitan romance, cosy wine bars in Sloane Square and one day owning a Westminster flat in ‘harmonising greys and rusts, with abstract paintings… thousands of books, and the sort of vastly elaborate hi-fi system you need a licence to drive’ – like the barrister Pendle, one of the characters in Prudence.

The format is as predictable as a Bond film. An amiably flawed young woman – we’ll call her Felicity – working in something like advertising, sales or a public library, meets, by chance, an homme fatale. He leads her on a merry dance through Belgravia, Mayfair and the fashionable regions of London’s Zone 1 (Muswell Hill, when mentioned, feels as far away as a Bangladeshi slum). In the books, this initial man is always problematic: he’s too volatile, elusive and not to be trusted. But Felicity, bless her, ‘faint with lust’, is hooked.

Then, a few chapters into the book, this initial man invites Felicity off somewhere and she enters, in true Shakespearean fashion, a ‘magic forest’. This may be a crumbling pile in the Lake District, a Cote d’Azur hotel or even a narrowboat on Britain’s waterways. It’s an enclosed world – a kind of Big Brother petri dish for the upper-middle classes – where for days or weeks Felicity will be trapped with half a dozen witty, sexually unbuttoned malcontents and get some concentrated experience of life. Alcohol and cigarettes (better if they’re French) are never far away (it’s the seventies), and there are riotous parties where the sniping, scintillating comments fly back and forth like lacrosse balls. It’s here that Felicity usually meets man number two – the real deal alpha who smoulders onto the page, showing up initial man as a flimsy imposter.

Jilly Cooper’s ‘real deal alphas’ (RDA) are all of a type. They are tall and broad-shouldered, have long powerful legs, forbidding moods and guarded but tender hearts. Their minds are on higher things like their glittering careers (foreign correspondent/mogul/novelist) and, barring the odd black coffee or triple brandy (a sign of the ubermensch in Cooper), they care as little for their diet as their hairstyle.

Their relationships with Felicity tend to start badly: she has fripperies they disapprove of and she loathes them right back, dismissing them as bullies. They say things like ‘Get in the car!’ or ‘You’ve had quite enough!’ or ‘Cut it out! You’re behaving like a child!’ But soon comes a moment of crisis for Felicity (she shivers, weeps and vomits) and our beetle-browed hero unexpectedly shows chops as a father figure. One RDA, in Octavia, even gives the title figure a spanking for loose morals. But he’s good enough to have broad hairy forearms and tuck in her blankets afterwards, so she delivers him her heart.

Nobody reads Jilly Cooper’s name books just once – Tanya Gold once wrote ‘they are like houses I have lived in’; I know these heroes better than many of my friends. My personal favourite is probably Matt O’Connor in Imogen, a shaggy Irish journalist whose bashed out articles light up the Sunday supplements. Matt’s a mover and shaker in the adult world – we know this because he speaks French, wins at gambling and has, we hear, ‘beaucoup d’allure’. Each day he guts the newspapers over Pernod, even Figaro and Paris Match, and says big-cocked, damn-your-eyes things like ‘this business in Peru’s going to explode at any moment. They want me to fly out tomorrow.’

Nobody in life has ever seemed more adult to me than Matt O’Connor. In many ways at 53 I am still waiting to become him. I have a feeling, though, he didn’t grow up reading books like this.

Though we know Felicity will end up with our man, there are plenty of obstacles, not least his apparent indifference to her (revealed at the 11th hour, rather optimistically, to be mere self-protective bluffing all along). A love rival too pops up to complicate things, usually an actress or supermodel, skilled at the savage put-down and willing to do anything to see off a competitor. Prudence has a peach of a villainess in character Berenice de Courcy: an American feminist, immaculately dressed with gleaming black hair and a wardrobe by Hermès. Berenice talks about herself incessantly, speaks in psychobabble, dislikes shabby English houses, rigidly controls her boyfriend’s diet and dreams of one day assuming power and sacking the housekeeper. Royal family watchers would be forgiven any perceived similarities: the novel was written in 1978, several years before Meghan Markle was born.

These books have left their mark on me, I realise that. Where do my assumptions come from, that red wine is the ultimate comfort drink or French food the snazziest? That tax inspectors and American academics are ghastly, or that a real man doesn’t care what he looks like? Perhaps from experience, but from Jilly Cooper’s books as well.

Do young people still read them in 2023? Should they? Were those teachers right after all? I’ve drawn immoderate pleasure and comfort from Cooper’s name books over the years, though one of the disappointments of growing up is discovering what would be blindingly obvious to any adult: they’re about as true to life as Chicken Run.

That high-ceilinged and autumnal Zone 1 flat never materialises, nor does the womblike little wine bar to shield you from all ills. Most of life, you find, is spent twiddling your thumbs in Zones 3 or 4 (in all senses) and in the field of romance the 11th hour feels too much like the tenth. As for that ‘magic forest’, even if you briefly find it, the denizens keep their secrets and, unless you’re drunk, rarely zing and sparkle as you hope. But that’s what her novels are: fairytales you never quite grow out of.

Maybe Cooper’s beloved Cotswold villages – where Liz Hurley, Kate Moss and Jeremy Clarkson lay their heads – are whooping it up 24-7. But for most of us, the only place we can find Jilly Cooper’s warm, enfolding world is where we always did: between the covers of her books.

Is the West at war in the Red Sea?

Britain and the US are getting ever more drawn in to the conflict in the Red Sea, as Iran-backed Houthis fire missiles at commercial ships. The USS Carney has downed 14 attack drones launched from Houthi-controlled territory and the Royal Navy destroyer HMS Diamond is also there shooting down missiles. 

The Houthis are firing from Yemen, and the Iranian regime is reportedly sending them real-time intelligence and weaponry. The Houthis claim that they are only targeting ships headed to Israel, but evidence suggests otherwise. On Saturday a ship travelling from Saudi Arabia to India was struck. Christmas Eve was one of the busiest days yet: US Central Command said that it had ‘shot down four unmanned aerial drones originating from Houthi-controlled areas in Yemen’. 

This affects all of Europe – any choking of shipping routes could mean shortages across the continent. Many ships are rerouting 3,000 miles around the Cape of Good Hope, rather than going through the Bab-al-Mandeb strait. Energy prices could soar especially if the Houthis decide to attack the Strait of Hormuz, through which most oil from the Arabian peninsula travels.

So is it time for a united response? It seemed so on Thursday when the Pentagon announced 20 countries were joining its Operation Prosperity Guardian. US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin said this was a matter of ‘freedom of navigation for all countries’ and confirmed that Spain had joined Britain and France in this alliance.

But now, Spain has pulled out, saying it would rather participate in Nato-led missions or a EU-coordinated operation than one led by the US. One of the country’s deputy prime ministers accused the White House of being enormously ‘hypocritical’ in its Middle East diplomacy. Why is America more concerned about protecting commerce than it is about calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, Yolanda Díaz asked. 

So much for western unity. What went wrong? Díaz is the leader of the socialist Sumar party, and is one of Pedro Sánchez’s new coalition partners. Sánchez made the call earlier this year to align with parties on his left: he described the Vox party as ‘far-right fascists’ and opted not to go into coalition with the conservative Partido Popular, which would have delivered a coalition more representative of the electorate’s wishes.

The new coalition in Spain will only muddle the EU’s unity, as this week has shown. If Hungary has been winding up Brussels from the right, expect Spain to now do so from the left. Sanchez’s government could seek to pressure Brussels into being more critical of Israel, and attempt to move the bloc towards calling for a ceasefire at the UN. Spain’s latest leftward drift is yet another example of the difficulties, perhaps even impracticalities, of creating a common foreign and defence policy out of 27 wildly diverse member states.