Germany’s Reichsbürger movement is anything but a joke

They don’t believe the German state exists, they make their own passports and they want the German monarchy restored. It’s tempting to dismiss the so-called Reichsbürger movement as a bunch of deranged conspiracy theorists. But the movement is growing, increasingly well-connected and willing to use violence to overthrow the state.

In their latest crackdown on extremist Reichsbürger circles, the German authorities on Thursday conducted a coordinated raid involving around 280 police officers in eight of the country’s 16 states. They targeted 20 residences, involving people aged between 25 and 74 who are suspected of having formed a group around a 58-year-old Bavarian man. He had been arrested before, in November 2021, and is accused of running a Telegram channel through which he incited his 22,000 subscribers to commit crimes. Police officers, for instance, may be ‘summarily executed,’ according to the man. He also pronounced ‘death sentences’ against German ministers of government.

The Reichsbürger group targeted by the raid stands accused of organising an attempt to cause a breakdown of governmental communication systems and destabilise administrative structures. They encouraged mass communication of their members with German authorities via emails and telephone calls to cause overload. The recipients reported to have been confronted with conspiracy theories, accusations of war crimes, insults and even death threats. Police confiscated phones, computers and a replica gun.

As this latest example of a failed attempt to bring down the government shows, the threat the Reichsbürger scene poses to the stability of the German state is by no means existential. The domestic security service estimates that 23,000 people belonged to the movement last year. But collectively they committed 1,358 crimes, some of them violent. Collectively, the Reichsbürgers also have significant access to firearms, even though the authorities have retracted 1,100 licences from members since 2016. Dozens still legally keep guns and rifles in the state of Baden-Württemberg alone.

There is also a worrying amount of illegal weapons in the hands of the conspiracy theorists. Earlier this month, a 55-year-old Reichsbürger named as Ingo K was sentenced to 14 years and six months in prison for fourteen acts of attempted murder, grievous bodily harm and attacking enforcement officers. Police suspected that K had possession of an illegal weapon. But when they attempted to raid his house last year, he fired over forty shots at them with a Kalashnikov rifle, injuring three officers. Eventually K surrendered, and police found a walk-in armoury with rifles, machine guns and ammunition. The judge said he was shocked by the suspect’s ‘sheer, boundless hatred for all things to do with the state.’

The Reichsbürgers are a fairly disjointed movement that encompasses people who range from those merely sceptical towards state authority in general to individuals willing to kill to bring it down. It’s unlikely that they will be able to mobilise and organise forces large and efficient enough to pose a systemic danger to the German government, but they are capable of causing significant damage regardless.

What unites its members is what makes them so dangerous: an unwillingness to accept the legal authority of the German state. In their view, the German reich was not abolished in 1918 when its last emperor, Kaiser Wilhelm II, abdicated. So they claim the imperial constitution of 1871 still applies, including the former reich’s (much bigger) borders, its currency and its laws. Others set the cut-off point in 1937, the year the Allies used in their war conferences as the time before Nazi Germany’s acquisition of territory through aggression and war. Yet others feel that the German state has never had any authority over anyone who hasn’t explicitly agreed to this. But despite these differences, the conclusion of such considerations is always the same: the German state has no legitimacy and those seeking to uphold and maintain it are fair game for acts of sabotage, aggression and even murder.

Naturally, the police are an obvious target of such rejection of state power. Earlier this year, another policeman was shot and injured during a raid on a group suspected of plotting a coup. But other people and state institutions are also in danger. In 2022, a retired teacher was arrested on suspicion of planning the abduction of health minister Karl Lauterbach with her terrorist Reichsbürger cell called United Patriots. They would then have gone on to cause chaos with attacks on the national grid in order to overthrow the system and reinstate the reich constitution of 1871. 

In December 2022 another raid on the Reichsbürgers made headlines, one of the biggest in modern German history. At the centre of it was a 69-year-old man, who was suspected of being the leader of the military branch of a Reichsbürger group. A former paratrooper in Germany’s armed forces, he had managed to recruit other ex-service personnel for a planned coup, prosecutors said. The plan was allegedly to use allies in the police force, in the military and in politics to overthrow the government and install the 71-year-old aristocrat Prince Heinrich XIII of the House of Reuß as Head of State.

As ludicrous as their conspiracy theories and botched putsch attempts may seem, their irrationality doesn’t make the Reichsbürger any less dangerous. They may not be a fundamental threat to political stability in Germany but the networks, access to firearms and blind hatred of some of their sub groups are classic ingredients for terrorism. The police have to win every time to render them harmless, the Reichsbürger only once to show that they are anything but.

Why Russell Norman was a restaurant genius

Polpo, Russell Norman’s celebrated and original Italian restaurant in Soho, was in full flow when I visited for the first time: busy, loud, glasses full and meatballs rolling. I had returned to London after some years away in my early twenties, and had little money. Polpo welcomed diners with its buoyancy and affordability. It was a good restaurant for everyone. Importantly, it was one that we could afford.

There is much to say about Norman, a pioneering and visionary restaurateur who died suddenly at the age of 57 on Thursday. I’ll leave the more personal and intimate conversation to those who knew him well. What I want to say is that it is a rare and fine cause to open restaurants that are quite so approachable. Before Polpo they hardly existed in London and today they are expected.

The first Polpo opened in 2009 and immediately changed things. Small plates were not yet everywhere; waiting staff in fashionable restaurants were supposed to appear well turned out, not almost effortless; tables were booked, not chanced upon. Diners who were used to white linen questioned the use of brown paper on tables. You can bristle against small plates being everywhere, at no-reservation policies being everywhere, but at their heart they are democratic ideas. Norman once conceded that his food wasn’t complex, it was comforting and simple. The Instagram bio for one of his restaurants reads ‘Noisy. Not too fancy. Don’t expect too much.’

More than a decade on, and Norman’s restaurants have been and gone. There is still a Polpo in Soho. Who knows how many £5 negronis have been sipped (he’s to thank for their comeback). Brutto, his latest, launched to much fanfare in 2021 and the Brutto cookbook was only released a few weeks ago.

Brutto, by all accounts, is a considered fixture. As with Norman’s concepts before it, it is a highly fashionable place. Tables are not always forthcoming, but persistence pays off. A lunch last year brought tortellini in brodo with a generous broth, anchovies, and a pork tonnato to the tune of someone who really did know hospitality and what it should be about: openness, care, generosity, good food. Even on a Tuesday lunchtime, the dining room was rammed. Only the other day I enjoyed one of his negronis with a food critic who admired him and whose recognition is not easily bestowed. Naturally, Norman would always make time for his guests, whomever they were.

He leaves behind a grand legacy. And Brutto will, I hope, endure in the hands of his son; an unfussy place for people in search of something, but also somewhere for those less romantic and for those who just want to have a bowl of pasta or a Florentine steak that isn’t bank-breaking.

When restaurants can be stuffy and exclusive, Norman’s Brutto was a beacon. Rabbit pappardelle? Around £15. Sausages and lentils? Just a pound or two more. Negroni? Always a fiver. Diners have much to thank him for.

Will Farage return to haunt the Tories?

The rise of Ukip and the highway to Brexit was greatly smoothed by the widespread perception that British governments had lost control of immigration. For many years, we purists in matters of nation-state independence struggled to articulate a stand-alone ‘sovereigntist’ argument that would catch fire with the wider public. But then Tony Blair threw open the UK labour market to millions of workers from the A8 EU accession countries, without even taking advantage of the transitional controls offered to existing member states by Brussels. As enormous numbers of Poles, Slovakians and others came to Britain to compete for working class jobs, suddenly we were in business.

It is often forgotten how long it took Nigel Farage to break-out of the fringe right-wing zone in which the British media kept him corralled. But it was well into the 2010s before right-of-centre newspapers became willing to quote him extensively. Without all the main parliamentary parties being seen to fail on immigration control – first Labour and then the Conservative-Lib Dem coalition – I doubt it would have happened.

As we know, genies cannot easily be put back into bottles and so it has proven with Farage. And yet he has not been a fixture in frontline politics, instead diversifying into broadcasting first with LBC and lately with GB News. His direct political activity has waxed and waned for 15 years or more.

In 2009, he led Ukip to second place at the European elections but stood down as leader before the 2010 general election having correctly discerned that it would be a tough gig. A return followed, which encompassed outright victory at the 2014 European elections and a spectacular 13 per cent vote share at the 2015 general election. But within weeks of the Brexit referendum success of 2016, he quit the party leadership again. And so it was that Paul Nuttall found himself in the hot seat for a 2017 election at which Ukip’s clothes had been stolen by the bigger parties rendering its prospects very poor.

Once Theresa May had been exposed as a betrayer of Brexit, Farage brilliantly put together the insurgent Brexit party to finish off her premiership by squeezing the Tories down to a 9 per cent vote share at the 2019 European elections. After a bruising experience at the general election a few months later, he handed on the party – now rebranded as ‘Reform UK’ – to Richard Tice. It is fair to say that, until a few weeks ago, it had struggled to make much impact.

What should be discerned from this gallop through the Farage years is not that he is an arch-opportunist so much as a canny campaigner who understands when conditions are conducive and when they are not. When he embarked for Australia and the I’m A Celebrity jungle, there were already signs that political space was opening up for him again. Tory-leaning voters were becoming increasingly scratchy about their party’s record on everything from taxation to public services, net zero to that old staple of immigration.

Since he has been away, new evidence of political climate change has come in at an accelerating pace. Suella Braverman got sacked for telling the truth about multiculturalism, ‘hate marches’ and Rishi Sunak’s failings. The Prime Minister made the Remainer-in-chief David Cameron Foreign Secretary – in charge of UK relations with the EU once more. The Supreme Court torpedoed the Rwanda policy and Braverman exposed Sunak’s hesitancy in pursuing it. This week, Sunak’s enormous breach of faith with the Conservative voting tribe on legal immigration has been exposed as well. Even in the absence of Farage, Reform UK has surged at Tory expense and is now averaging nine per cent in polls. Important Tory commentators have pulled the plug on Sunak, with the Daily Telegraph’s Allison Pearson telling readers: ‘The Conservative party is dead to me.’

Across Europe, right-wing populists are making big electoral gains amid growing angst about Islamist militancy. Geert Wilders in the Netherlands is just the latest example.

With a British general election coming up next year, this is surely the sweet spot to end all sweet spots for a new right-wing insurgency. If the jungle sojourn goes well for Farage – and, so far, it seems to be – then he will return even more famous and potentially on the brink of national treasure status. Under his leadership it is not hard to envisage the Reform poll rating doubling and the Tory one falling from the low 20s down into the teens.

The prospect of dishing out a second punishment beating to a Cameroon Conservative party and being seen once more as a political gamechanger is going to be very tempting indeed for Nigel Farage. The preening brigade of liberal Conservatives could hardly have set things up better for him.

The notion of Farage one day joining the Tories has recently been widely floated by MPs on the party’s right, by Rishi Sunak and even by himself. Some on the party’s liberal flank shudder at the prospect. Were they properly alert something much more threatening would be causing them to gulp: their old tormentor may soon be coming home with a view to a kill.

Why are the Spanish so loyal to the EU?

An upright Englishman, some years after marrying into a Spanish family, finally breaks his cardinal rule. In a moment of sudden daring at an extended family lunch, he challenges the totem of the Spanish renaissance: the Euro. The stunned silence that follows this blasphemy is filled by one of his in-laws: ‘Aha! Just what I expected… I know exactly what you are… You’re an euroescéptico!’ ‘Eh-oo-ro-es-THEP-ti-co’, she repeats slowly, each of the seven syllables a hammer blow to the poor Englishman’s standing.

As this scene from the novel Spanish Practices suggests, the Spanish people’s faith in the European Union is often as blind as it is widespread – not a breath of criticism is permitted. In the referendum held in 2005, a massive 76 per cent of voters approved the treaty establishing a European constitution – although it then had to be replaced by the Treaty of Lisbon when voters in France and the Netherlands rejected it. Meanwhile school textbooks in Spain portray the EU as an unquestionably good thing.  

Unsurprisingly, many Spaniards regard Brexit as a sort of national suicide. Its inevitable aftermath, the mainstream media likes to suggest, is an ever deeper economic and social crisis. When the topic comes up, my Spanish friends nod sadly to show their sympathy with my suffering and then tactfully change the subject. 

In many ways this devotion to the EU is understandable. Auden described Spain as ‘crudely soldered on to Europe’ and that sense of not really belonging grew during the long decades of General Franco’s military dictatorship. When the longed-for membership of the European Economic Community arrived in 1986, Spaniards felt as if their country had, at long last, been accepted as a modern European democracy. Now no one would be able to say that ‘Africa begins at the Pyrenees.’

Decades later Spaniards continue not only to accept but to actively rejoice in the ongoing loss of sovereignty that membership of the EU brings. And there’s a good reason why they want to hand over power to Brussels: over the last 200 years good governance in Spain has been conspicuous by its absence. That’s why Spaniards nod enthusiastically when someone quotes philosopher Ortega y Gasset’s famous dictum: ‘Spain is the problem and Europe the solution.’ Their well-founded mistrust of home-grown politicians goes a long way towards explaining their touching faith in foreign leaders.  

And in many ways that faith has been rewarded: cash for roads, airports and other infrastructure projects has poured in – and now there’s 140 billion euros from the post-pandemic European recovery funds. And if Spain has usually been a rule taker rather than a rule maker, well, as a relative newcomer to this exalted company that’s only to be expected. Anyway, the Germans and French surely know best.

There have been disappointments for some of course. In 2017 after Catalonia held an illegal referendum on independence and then made its unilateral declaration of independence from Spain, the separatists naively expected the European Union to welcome them with open arms. After all, they were committed to the EU project and, given its prosperity, Catalonia would be a net contributor to the budget. Brussels, the separatists reasoned, would doubtless save them from the Spanish state’s cruel oppression. It was some time before the realisation dawned that, as one ‘independentista’ succinctly put it, the EU didn’t give a damn.     

If the cold shoulder the EU gave the separatists in 2017 shocked Catalans and gratified the rest of Spain, the boot is now very firmly on the other foot. Spaniards, outraged by the amnesty Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez is granting Catalan separatists in return for their parliamentary votes, have asked the EU to intervene. However, in a sparsely attended debate in the EU parliament on Wednesday, Didier Reynders, the EU justice commissioner, declared that, at least for now, this is ‘an internal matter for Spain’.

If the EU is reluctant to get involved, then millions of Spaniards for whom the amnesty undermines the rule of law will be bitterly disappointed. And it will compound an earlier disappointment: the refusal of EU countries to extradite Catalan separatists wanted by Spain after the illegal referendum and unilateral declaration of independence in 2017. Perhaps Spain, traditionally the most pro-EU nation of all, is about to become a bit more euroescéptico itself.

Sanctions against Russia haven’t failed

One of Russia’s toxic TV presenters recently cackled that Western sanctions ‘have only helped Russia wean itself off dependence on foreign imports and given a boost to our own producers’. At a time when Russia’s third quarter growth has actually exceeded expectations, hitting 5.5 per cent, it is worth noting what sanctions can and cannot do. The bottom line is that sanctions have not failed – but were never going to be the silver bullet solution to Kremlin aggression some claimed at the start.

As in so many aspects of the West’s response to the 2022 Ukraine invasion, unrealistic early boosterism has led to subsequent, and arguably equally unrealistic, despondency. Daleep Singh, US deputy national security adviser for international economics, had claimed that the Russian economy would quickly be in ‘freefall’. Certainly there was a serious initial impact: Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov recently admitted that ‘there was a threat of a collapse, we really had to mobilise all resources and internal forces in order to prevent this collapse’. But Russia’s technocrats have proven themselves rather more competent than its generals, and although no one had anticipated the scale of the Western response, they had been wargaming such a situation for years.

As things stand, the Russian economy seems to be doing inordinately well. Even though this year’s massively-increased defence spending may account for a third of the federal budget, the economy could grow by 3 per cent this year, even above of the 2.2 per cent the International Monetary Fund anticipates.

Much of this growth, however, is down to ‘military Keynesianism’ – the massively increased spending on the war. There have also been all sorts of indirect effects, with salaries inflated by the need to lure more workers into the factories, to the way the substantial bonuses paid to the families of fallen soldiers have tended to boost consumer spending in the impoverished regions from which so many of them came.

Capital flight from Russia, though, is undiminished and the value of the ruble on international markets has plunged. The interest rate, meanwhile, has reached 15 per cent as the Central Bank tries to get a handle on inflation. More to the point, while sectors connected with the war may be booming, others are near collapse, and the scope for further expansion is limited, not least by a dearth of investment capital.

It is clear that personal sanctions on various Russians have had no real impact on policy. But it is foolish to try and make some simplistic judgement as to whether or not the wider sectoral sanctions on the economy have ‘failed’.

Have they destroyed Russia’s capacity to wage war or forced Putin to withdraw from Ukraine? Patently not, but the experiences of Iran and North Korea should have demonstrated to everyone that authoritarian regimes can withstand sanctions for a long time, not least by transferring the pain to their cowed and controlled citizens.

That does not mean they have not had an effect, though. Russia is, for example, able to bypass the G7+’s attempts to impose a $60 (£48) per barrel price cap on its oil exports by selling outside the bloc and using gambits such as its ‘ghost fleet’ of unregistered tankers. However, this has entailed all kinds of additional costs and risks, from paying hefty fees to rogue traders to using uninsured vessels. Likewise, Russia is still managing to source microchips for its drones and cruise missiles, but through a complex network of third-party re-exporters or by buying modern fridges and the like through ‘grey market’ channels and removing and repurposing the hardware. This works, but is an expensive, time-consuming and inefficient way of acquiring essential components that Russia itself cannot make.

This is the point: what sanctions are doing is adding costs and bottlenecks to the Russian war economy. Of course, the Russians have a track record for ingenuity in responding to tough circumstance, from Central Bank chair Elvira Nabiullina’s firm fiscal policy, through the smugglers and facilitators bringing in sanctioned goods, to the entrepreneurs exploiting new markets, from pseudo-McDonalds to domestic clothing lines.

Systemically, though, this cannot go on at this pace for ever. There is no real spare capacity for the further expansion of the defence-industrial economy, for example, with unemployment down to a record 3 per cent low. Although the National Welfare Fund is officially worth $145 billion (£155 billion), there are questions as to its real value. In September, Finance Minister Anton Siluanov set out plans to borrow $42 billion (£33 billion) from it, and said that only $69 billion (£55 billion) would then be left. Perhaps most strikingly, the 2024 budget is built on the assumption that defence spending can be cut back in 2025. If, as most now assume, the war rolls on, the Kremlin will be scrabbling for funds to pay for it.

There are new measures being proposed, such as the EU’s efforts to prevent Russian diamond exports. But there are no further substantive sanctions the West could probably place on Russia that would not have a seriously negative impact on our own economies. However, there is much that can be done to tighten up the existing ones, closing the loopholes that ingenious sanctions-busters have found. Above all, though, the sanctions need us to be patient. In and of themselves, they were never going to win the war – but over time, bit by bit, they will help Russia lose it.

The EU has only itself to blame for Geert Wilders

On the same day that the Dutch went to the polls my teenage daughter went to Strasbourg on a school trip. Once in the EU parliament she and her classmates were given a guided tour by a French MEP; she was charming, by all account, a member of the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats.

My daughter’s class had their photo taken as a memento of the visit and underneath it was captioned: ‘Europe is important because, together, we can protect our way of life’.  

Her class outing was part of an initiative organised by Together.eu, whose slogan is ‘For democracy’. Their mission statement explains that they are ‘dedicated to getting as many people as possible involved in the democratic life of Europe.’

Surely then they would have been satisfied with the turnout in the Dutch elections, where 78 per cent of the electorate cast a vote. Then again, perhaps not, given that the winner in a sensational result was Geert Wilders of the Party for Freedom (PVV). 

Suddenly democracy has lost some of its appeal. Iratxe Garcia, the president of the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats commiserated with the beaten left-wing candidate, Frans Timmermans, and vowed that ‘we will stand firm and united to defend our values against the far right and its normalisation.’ 

Timmermans is the incarnation of the grey Brussels bureaucrat. For nine years the 62-year-old served as vice-president of the European Commission, the man who more than any other has championed the Europe’s Green Deal. Two years ago Timmermans described Greta Thunberg, the Swedish environmental radical, as a ‘hero’ for her environmental activism.  

On the other great issue of our times, mass immigration, he’s on record stating that Europe is the ‘continent of solidarity, and our doors will remain open for those in need of protection… migration is and will be a permanent feature of our life.’

In a speech in Brussels almost exactly seven years ago Timmermans rubbished the idea that Europe could do anything about protecting its borders: ‘No matter what people may want you to believe: there is no sea wide enough, no fence high enough, to prevent people from coming if desperation takes a hold.’

Since Timmermans uttered those words, Europe has begun what the Guardian described in an editorial September as a ‘drift rightwards’.  

Not surprisingly the Guardian has not digested Wilders’ victory well. In a profile of the man it described as ‘the Dutch far-right figurehead’, it referenced some of his more objectionable comments, such as calling Moroccans ‘scum’ and his description of Islam as ‘an ideology of a retarded culture’. However, the paper also alluded to why Wilders made this remark, prompted by the brutal murder in 2004 of Theo van Gogh. The documentary maker was slain by an Islamist because he made a film that criticised the treatment of women in Islam. In the immediate aftermath of the killing the Guardian reported from Holland that ‘even politicians on the left spoke last week of ‘harsh truths’ on immigration.’

They may have spoken ‘harsh truths’ but that was as far as it went. Nothing was done to check uncontrolled immigration to either Holland or Europe. On the contrary, from 2011 onwards the number of migrants accelerated, from 4,450 illegal border crossings on the Central Mediterranean route in 2010 to 181,459 six years later. 

Instead of addressing this phenomenon, the political and cultural left embraced mass immigration and became increasingly intolerant of those who raised objections, branding them ‘far-right’, ‘fascist’ and ‘Islamophobic’. 

In Thursday’s profile of Wilders, the Guardian said that while he had recently toned down some of his opinions about Islam he had still campaigned on ‘extreme’ issues, among which were ‘restoring Dutch border control, detaining and deporting illegal immigrants’. Is border control ‘extreme’?

One of the first European politicians to congratulate Wilders was Marine Le Pen in France. She told a radio interviewer that the Dutch people had spoken, and their message was that they ‘want us to master immigration, which is seen…as massive and totally anarchic today.’  

The EU boasts to visiting schoolchildren that it ‘protects our way of life’ but the reality is it does no such thing. Protecting a way of life, such as Europe’s, means controlling the borders to ensure that terrorists and extremists don’t enter with evil intentions. This has not happened.  

As I wrote in January ‘Europe’s leaders are failing in their duty to keep people safe’. Since those words, there have been appalling atrocities in Annecy, Brussels and Arras, all perpetrated by non-Europeans.  

That is why Geert Wilders won the Dutch election; it explains why Giorgia Meloni is Prime Minister of Italy, and Marine Le Pen has 88 MPs in the French Assembly. Their voters aren’t fascists; they’re fearful about what the future holds.

Ed Sheeran’s time is up

Who’s the worst pop star of modern times? Some might say that Adele sounds like a moose with PMT – and Sam Smith certainly has his knockers. But I’d be tempted to plump for Ed Sheeran.

The 32-year-old is the most successful pop star of our time, with a voice best described as pasteurised ‘urban’ delivered with an insistent, hollow enthusiasm. Sheeran makes background music which has been inexplicably pushed to the foreground, elevator music elevated to a ludicrous degree. He has sold more than 150 million records; two of his albums are in the list of best-selling albums of all time. In 2019, he was named Artist of the Decade, with the most combined success in the UK album and singles charts in the 2010s. His 2017–2019 world tour became the highest-grossing of all time; this year, for the sixth time in eight years, he was named the UK’s most-played artist. He has a net worth of around £300 million; unsurprisingly, for a man who makes such cautious, bourgeoise music, a lot of it is tied up in ‘property.’ It’s hard to imagine him blowing the lot on wine, women and schlong as caution could be his middle name, were it not Christopher. But has this garden-gnome-shaped bubble finally burst?

Although Sheeran’s new album Autumn Variations went to number one, it didn’t stop there long compared to the exhaustive presence of the previous six. It wasn’t long before it crashed out of the top 40. Even the Guardian and the i paper have had enough, the latter’s reviewer described the first half of his show – showcasing this latest venture – as ‘near irredeemable’ and ‘robotic, like ChatGPT doing an impression of human feeling without quite understanding how emotions work’. The new record’s lyrics really do sound shockingly bad:

‘I can’t help but be destructive right now. It’s been weeks since I saw your outline.’ (Outline!)

‘I can’t help it but I love you so. I can’t take this letting go. I still feel like we could work it out or something.’ (Or something!)

‘This is not the end of our lives, this is just a bump in the ride. I know that it’ll be alright.’ (Alright!)

The weirdly inappropriate ‘England’ seems to illustrate how out of touch being really rich makes you:

‘There’s a peace and a quiet in this island of ours / That can’t be mirrored by anywhere else.’ Sing that by the Cenotaph on a Saturday afternoon.

Mind you, the old stuff – which the i‘s critic said was the good bit, in the second half – was awful too. In my recent play Awful People, co-written with Daniel Raven, a middle-aged and middle-class songwriter tries to move with the times and ends up being inspired by Sheeran to write:

‘Took her to a Nando’s, mates like Han and Lando

But something in her eyes just tells me I’m her man, though

The waiter Piri-Piris us and things start getting serious

I’m layin’ on the charm in a way that’s not mysterious

We flirt till it hurts, eat some frozen yogurts

And have a good laugh when I spill some on my sweatshirt

Then it’s time to split the cheque – her equal rights and status are things I respeck…’

This is actually a good deal too skilful for the mewling muppet, whose mania for being seen as a Normal Bloke gave rise to the grim ghastliness of songs such as Galway Girl. Authenticity is surely at the root of Sheeran’s mediocrity: the erroneous belief that it’s better to be honestly dull than to deceive and inspire.

I once wrote that pop stars should either be sexy or profound – ideally both, as with Debbie Harry, but such wonders are rare – and if Sheeran is shallow intellectually, sexually he’s like a bucket of cold bromide. He’s what a rock-and-roll-hating parent would have done to Elvis, given half a chance; taken away all the bumping and grinding and wiggling and leering until what was left was as unlikely to have teenage girls screaming with desire as a Tellytubby. (Which he reminds me of, come to think of it – and his fans would be around the right age to have come under the influence of the cuddly quartet and their crooning inanities.) Yes, I get that something magical happens when a young man, however unsightly, picks up a guitar, allowing him access to a quantity and quality of women undreamt of when he was just walking and talking like a normie; two words – ‘Mick’ and ‘Hucknall.’ But hearing Sheeran sing about sex is like having a supply teacher instruct one on the finer points of fellatio: it’s just wrong.

Politically, Sheeran is a predictable product of his class. The child of an arts curator and a jewellery designer, privately educated, he was opposed to Brexit and – along with Sting – signed a letter drafted by bitter multi-millionaire Bob Geldof warning of the damage done by leaving the EU. This loss to the Brains Trust also described himself as a ‘fan’ of Jeremy Corbyn, opining in 2017 ‘I love Corbyn. I love everything Corbyn is about…he cares about all classes, races and generations’ – shortly before receiving an MBE from Prince Charles. He is, of course, a believer in ‘rewilding’, announcing awhile back that he planned to purchase farmland to plant ‘as many trees as possible’ to offset his carbon footprint after years of flying.

I get that it’s somewhat comedic when we sexagenarians try to understand what gets Modern Youth going. And I admit I’ve been spoilt; I was lucky enough to be young when pop titans – Bolan, Bowie, Bryan Ferry – ruled the airwaves and bedroom walls alike. But modern music is rubbish; this isn’t a pensioner peeve, it’s a fact, unless you’re a Magical Thinker who believes that women can have penises. In the decade of my teens, the 1970s, I was lucky enough to experience the glory days of – deep breath – glam rock, Philly, Motown, disco and punk. The biggest male and female acts of the 1970s – if you combined sales, cred and sheer star quality – were David Bowie and Diana Ross. Now? Sheeran and Adele. You’d have to be certifiable to say that the latter compare.

Of course music goes through the doldrums, like anything else. But the crucial element of Woke-scolding is what makes this slump different and probably permanent. For the first time, young people are having less sex and consuming fewer stimulants than their elders. Instead they are spending long periods of time crouched over their keyboards, glumly interfering with themselves. Wokeness and Covid between them have created Generation Killjoy; punk, disco and glam would all be *problematic* in some way now – too white, not the ‘right’ kind of black, too light-hearted about gender-bending. Gareth Roberts sums up Sheeran well, if over-generously; ‘He’s *all right* which nowadays makes him a megastar. If he’d been about in 1973, he’d have four minor hits and disappeared.’

But most of all, Sheeran exemplifies everything that’s gone wrong with popular music since the middle-classes got their plump pink hands on it; the colonising of rock – previously the best escape route for ambitious and gifted proletarian youth – by privileged poltroons.

What does Geert Wilders’s win mean for Dutch Muslims?

Muslims in the Netherlands have reacted with an understandable mixture of trepidation and anger to the electoral triumph of the far-right, anti-Islam politician Geert Wilders. Should they be afraid?

‘I don’t know if Muslims are still safe in the Netherlands,’ Habib El Kaddouri, a spokesman for Dutch Moroccans, dramatically informed the news agency ANP. On the face of it, who can blame Muslims for worrying about what Wilders’ unexpected — and frankly stunning — victory might mean for their future prospects. After all, Wilders is no friend of Muslims or Islam. No mosques, Korans or headscarves is the political clarion call of his Freedom Party (PVV). It is unashamedly anti-Islam: ‘We want less Islam in the Netherlands,’ it proclaims. In all, the PVV won 37 seats in Wednesday’s vote — more than any other party, and double its total at the last election in 2021. It is no longer some extremist fringe of no great political consequence.

For Dutch Muslims, Wilders has long been an enemy hiding in plain sight. In 2017, he described the biggest problem facing the Netherlands as ‘Islamisation’. This process, Wilders claimed, constitutes an ‘existential threat’ to ‘our identity, our freedom. Who we are. Everything.’

He has dismissed Islam as a fascist ideology of ‘a retarded culture’ and a ‘backward religion’. He even compared the Koran to Hitler’s Mein Kampf. In 2016, he was convicted of discrimination after calling Moroccans ‘scum’ at a campaign rally, remarks that he has not withdrawn.

Wilders knows what he is doing. Even though there are other migrant groups in the Netherlands, public debate around immigration and multiculturalism has focused on non-Western migrants, mostly those of Moroccan and Turkish origin. This is, in part, because these groups likely account for the growth of Islam within a largely secularised Dutch society: about five per cent of the population in the Netherlands is now estimated to be Muslim, compared to less than one per cent in the 1970s. 

Wilders has been successful in tying his twin obsessions of Islam and Muslims to wider voter worries about asylum and immigration, more so at a time of economic hardship, growing social problems and widespread public disenchantment with mainstream politics. This is the context behind the fears of Muslims and others who are dismayed by the steady encroachment of Wilders into the Dutch political mainstream.

What’s harder to calibrate is whether these fears will turn out to be right. On the campaign trial, for example, Wilders softened (by his standards, at least) some of his wilder rhetoric, vowing to push policies ‘within the law and constitution’. He has gone on to stress that he wants to be ‘prime minister for all Dutch regardless of their religion, colour, sexuality, gender or whatever.’

In saying different things to different audiences at different times, Wilders merely reveals himself as a rather traditional politician rather than an anti-establishment firebrand. Indeed some of the reaction to his election triumph may turn out to be mere hyperbole. Rather than signalling the end of the world, it is simply more of the same in the world of Dutch coalition politics.

There is no guarantee that Wilders will be able to form a government with a viable working majority in the Netherlands’ 150-seat parliament. He simply did not win enough seats, so his chances of becoming prime minister remain small. What’s more, Wilders will need to convince at least  two more mainstream parties to join him. The centre-right conservative People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD), which won 24 seats, has ruled out formally joining any new cabinet under Wilders. Its leader Dilan Yesilgoz-Zegerius said her party would consider offering outside support. If Wilders is to lead the country he will have to do so under some form of coalition government, which will require him to jettison most of his radical ideas. A ban on the Koran is not likely to be official government policy any time soon, nor is a referendum on exit (Nexit) from the European Union much of a starter. In reality, Wilders may soon find himself prisoner to a lengthy process of coalition wrangling, the favourite pastime of Dutch politics (it took a record-breaking 299 days to form a government after the March 2021 election). The end result could well be a new coalition of centrist parties or even fresh elections. Hardly a triumph for Wilders, who described his election victory as the ‘most beautiful day of his life’. It might be all downhill from here. Dutch Muslims should take note.

The Museum of London’s dubious ‘race research’

I don’t know about you, but I love a bit of topical reading when I go abroad. That’s why, in my last week of travelling between lush, green, untouched Cambodian islands, I’ve been immersed in apposite books like Julia Lovell’s Maoism: a Global History, and Frank Dikotter’s The Cultural Revolution.

So far, I’ve been pleased with my choices. First, they are properly appropriate: one of the reasons Cambodia’s islands are so untainted by tourism, or even inhabitants, is because the ultra-Maoist, Chinese-funded Khmer Rouge evacuated all the occupants and forced them into deadly labour on the mainland. Also, the books are truly astonishing, perhaps in a consoling way. By which I mean this: our own Cultural Revolution – that of Wokeness – might be bad, but at least Anglo-American students aren’t forcing their professors to eat excrement, then beating them to death with planks. Yet.

But then I caught a news story from London which did give me a faint but distinct hint of communist madness.

The story, reported from the BBC to the Daily Telegraph to the Guardian, was this: ‘Black women most likely to die in medieval London plague’. The subheading of one was: ‘Museum of London study also claims “misogynoir” – prejudice against women of African descent – increased deaths during 14th-century disease.’

One of my first reactions was: were there really that many black people/women in London in the 14th century, enough to make a study like this remotely credible?

But then I remembered one of my favourite examples of Chaucer’s work in the original Canterbury Tales, The Tale of Ye Personne of Colouyre, and how they mette the Transgenderye Genderyequir and Spake of Misogynoirye, and I thought OK, let’s be fair, let’s check the actual data. Maybe it does add up. So I did. As much as I could anyway, given that the actual study is yet to be published; all we have is surrounding research. And this is where it gets weird.   

To reach their conclusion that medieval bacteria, rats and people were horrible racist misogynoiristes, the archaeologists – a mix of Americans and Brits – apparently checked, in their underlying research, about 150 bodies (approximately 35,000 Londoners died in the Black Death).

Or these 150, only a few were ‘nonwhite’, and even fewer were ‘African’. So the scientists’ conclusion that higher death rates among people of colour and women of black African descent was a result of the ‘devastating effects’ of ‘premodern structural racism’ in the medieval world seems to be based on a sample of nine.

I was particularly intrigued by scientists Rebecca Redfern (Museum of London) and Joseph Hefner (Michigan State University), who authored that prior research. One of their scholarly endeavours ends with this superb conclusion:

In archaeology, social inequalities can be identified in many different ways, and one way is how people are buried. When we looked at how the skeletons were buried at East Smithfield, we found that none of the plague victims with Black African or mixed heritage had been maltreated as you might expect to see in a population group that might have suffered from discrimination. We could see that their bodies were placed in the graves with care and respect, as can be seen in the image. What exactly this might have meant requires further research.

It does rather feel that the boffins went looking for evidence of racism, and found, to their chagrin, that actually there was no racism. Picture them hurling ‘non-maltreated skulls’ to the ground with disgust.

And here we reach the next obvious question: how can these academics tell these skeletons are black Africans anyway? Isn’t it a shibboleth of the Left that race is a social construct, and has no genetic, anatomical reality? My suspicions on this point were heightened by this paragraph in the Guardian: ‘[To discover the race] the team looked at five features of the skulls, such as the shape of the eye area… The approach, the researchers say, is an established forensic tool, and is not based on controversial methods involving cranial measurements.’

To me that reads very much like, ‘No, we don’t do creepy skull-size measurements to determine race, like Joseph Goebbels, instead we measure different parts of the skull to determine race, which are totally fine.’

And, as it happens, this is the case. We know this because the Skull Guy here is Joseph Hefner, a forensic anthropologist who uses a ‘refined’ version of racial skull-measuring techniques which were pioneered by one Earnest Hooton (Hefner has written multiple papers referencing Hooton and his skull measuring, now handily renamed ‘macromorphoscopics’).

For those that don’t know (including me, until about an hour ago) Harvard’s Earnest Hooton was really one of the skull caliper guys. This is from his Wikipedia page to give you a flavour: Hooton was a member of the ‘Committee on the Negro, a group that “focused on the anatomy of blacks”’. In 1927, ‘the committee endorsed a comparison of African babies with young apes’. In 1932, Hooton personally published an article ‘Is The Negro Inferior?’, and so on.

So there we have it. This BBC headline ‘Black women most likely to die in medieval London plague’ actually derives from a dubious study, based on tiny samples, authored by academics with a prior agenda, who only seek to confirm their own biases, as long as they can prove that such-and-such is racist. And the BBC made it a headline.

Does it matter? I believe it does, and this is where I come back to Maoism and Chinese communism. There are, as I’ve implied, a number of parallels between the Cultural Revolution and Wokeness: the Red Guards used to put labels on suspect art the same way we now put warnings on unwoke movies and TV (or hide them altogether). The Red Guards were also quite keen on statue toppling. But more importantly, what the Cultural Revolution tried to do was erase the past, and reframe it in a bogus way that suited their politics.

And that is what is happening here. Because this piece of dreadful ‘race research’ from the Museum of London is, it seems, going to ‘inform exhibitions at the Museum of London’s new home in Smithfield, opening in 2026’. In other words the new Museum of London may yet become another museum determined to force a false, race-obsessed narrative down our throats: a narrative which tells us that medieval Britons were racists and that, anyway, Britain was never really white. As Xi Jinping once put it, so pithily: ‘To destroy a country, you must first destroy its history’.

Who is Sandi Toksvig to lecture ‘radical feminists’ like me?

Another day, another virtue signaller standing by their ‘trans siblings’ and taking a pop at feminists. Sandi Toksvig, she of the unfunny Radio 4 shows more recently known for her involvement in the Women’s Equality Party (WEP) – has denounced feminists who are ‘anti trans’.

‘I am so distressed by people who call themselves “radical feminist” that are anti-trans. I could weep. I don’t get it. It’s beyond me,’ she told a journalist this week. Toksvig went on to insist that she has been an activist all of her life. But is that really the case? While Toksvig has recently made a name for herself by going to war with the Church of England over the presence of bishops in the House of Lords, what her life of activism has achieved is beyond me.

When I came out aged 15 on a working-class housing estate in the northeast of England, it was pretty rough. But eventually, after years of fighting, we won the rights we have today. This includes the right for single sex spaces that, thanks to trans activists, is currently under threat. Toksvig, who came out in 1994 at the age of 36, would be wise to remember this.

In her interview with the i paper, Toksvig goes on to say:

‘When the feminist movement started in the 60s and 70s, lesbians were often excluded, because we were told that we would make the movement less palatable’

I’m intrigued as to how Toksvig knows. When feminists were battling to set up single sex services to support women that had experienced rape and domestic violence, was she there? Was Tokvsig on the feminist frontline in the 1960s and 1970s? If so, what did she achieve? If not, perhaps she should pipe down about those feminists who were present, instead of berating us for being trans exclusionary.

Rather than aiming her fire at women, Toksvig needs to realise there are important battles still to be won. Even today, lesbians are lectured by some for excluding men who identify as women from our dating pool. Such attitudes are a rerun of old misogynistic times, but with a progressive spin. Toksvig should surely understand how distressing it is for lesbians to be told we are not valid unless we include a penis in our relationship.

Perhaps Toksvig felt the need to speak out because she has seen what has happened to lesbians such as myself, Kathleen Stock, and numerous others when we pushed back against gender ideology? Whatever her reason for adding fuel to the misogynistic fire currently raging, it is cowardly, craven, and deeply disrespectful of those women that have fought for the rights that she enjoys. ‘Radical feminists’ like me will not be rebuked by someone who spends time attacking us – instead of concentrating on fighting for the rights of women.

New Zealand’s smoking ban u-turn is bad news for Rishi Sunak

New Zealand’s new coalition government has announced that it will scrap Jacinda Ardern’s plan to usher in a generational smoking ban. The scheme would have steadily lifted the legal age for buying cigarettes from 2027, effectively stopping anyone born after 2008 from purchasing them. 

The right-leaning parties now in power – the National party, the libertarian ACT party, and centrist New Zealand First – aren’t even going to give such a strange experiment a chance. No doubt they want to avoid the myriad problems the policy will conjure up in future, including burdens on businesses one day having to ID people in their 50s and 60s. But what the U-turn really prevents is a creation of a two-tier society of adults, where some have more rights than others (the reason a similar policy has been put on the backburner in Malaysia). 

It’s a good day for liberty – and a bad day for Rishi Sunak. The Prime Minister used his political capital at Conservative party conference last month to announce a generational smoking ban in the UK. It was an odd policy choice for such an important moment, not least because it felt like an extremely heavy-handed approach to a problem that’s already on the path to solving itself. Kids are increasingly rejecting cigarettes: the percentage of children who try smoking has plummeted, from over 50 per cent in the early 1980s to 12 per cent (those who report smoking regularly is down to 1 per cent).

As Fraser Nelson wrote at the time of Sunak’s announcement in October, the models used to usher in this policy in the UK were rather dubious. They assumed that this trend of anti-smoking would stop and that the generational ban was needed to keep things on track. But the real cover for the policy was that the UK wasn’t the only country in the world set to green-light such a huge state overreach. New Zealand was leading the way on this infringement, and the UK was going to be an early adopter.

No longer. Britain has lost its partner in crime, which came to its senses just in time. Now Sunak’s government is set to pursue this crackdown all on its own. It’s never the position government wants to find itself in: acting as the illiberal outlier.

Alex Salmond’s revenge against the SNP is far from over 

The former First Minister, Alex Salmond, is to sue Nicola Sturgeon and her former civil servants for ‘misfeasance’. In court documents today he accuses her and her officials of having ‘conducted themselves improperly, in bad faith and beyond their powers with the intention of injuring Mr Salmond’. The surprise is that it has taken him so long.  

It is nearly four years since Salmond won his judicial review against the Scottish government over its mishandling of claims of sexual misconduct. Judges in the Court of Session, Scotland’s highest civil court, ruled in January 2019 that the Scottish government’s investigation into the allegations, overseen by the then-permanent secretary, Leslie Evans, had been ‘unlawful’ and ‘tainted with apparent bias’. Salmond was awarded £512,000 in costs. But he was never going to stop there – and he is now seeking £3 million in damages, according to the Herald (Salmond says ‘it will be for the Court to determine damages once the case on misfeasance has been won. They will be significant’).

The former SNP First Minister believes he suffered ruinous reputational and financial damage from leaks to the Daily Record in August 2018 that led to the headline: ‘Alex Salmond accused of “touching woman’s breasts and bum” in boozy Bute House bedroom encounter.’  He insists that only the Scottish government could have leaked these salacious details of the complaints to the press. 

Few politicians survive headlines like that, but Salmond isn’t an ordinary politician. He was determined to clear his name and make the Scottish government pay. However, his search for compensation was rudely interrupted on 24 January 2019 when he was arrested and charged with two counts of attempted rape, nine of sexual assault, two of indecent assault, and one of breach of the peace. Bombshell was too small a word for it. This development rocked the Scottish National party to its foundations and shocked the hundreds of thousands of Scots who had voted for Salmond in successive elections. 

The subsequent court case led to even more lurid headlines as Salmond’s accusers gave evidence alleging sexual misbehaviour. However, in March 2020 Salmond was acquitted of all charges by a jury of eight women and five men. To the astonishment of his many critics in the media and politics, Salmond walked free. It was then that he promised to sue the Scottish government for damages.  

But his trial in the court of public opinion was not over. The next year, Holyrood launched an inquiry into the Scottish government’s handling of the original harassment allegation. Sordid details of Salmond’s alleged misconduct were aired once again. Nicola Sturgeon, in her evidence to the special committee of MSPs declared that she’d felt ‘physically sick’ when she had heard the original allegations against her former mentor and leader back in 2018. Salmond’s detractors in the press said they could not believe that all those women were lying. 

Then, in high drama, Salmond accused Nicola Sturgeon’s husband, the then-party chief executive Peter Murrell, and others of having led a ‘deliberate, prolonged, malicious and concerted effort’ to damage his reputation and remove him from public life. He also directly accused Nicola Sturgeon’s closest aide, her chief of staff Liz Lloyd, of being an accessory to this conspiracy to have him jailed.  These allegations, vigorously denied by those accused, form the substance of his claims for ‘misfeasance’ and for £3 million in damages for loss of earnings and reputational damage.  

The cross-party Holyrood harassment inquiry reported in March 2021 that the Scottish government’s handling of the investigation was ‘seriously flawed’, though a parallel inquiry by the senior Irish lawyer, James Hamilton, concluded that Nicola Sturgeon had not broken the ministerial code.  

Some legal experts, like Dr Nick McKerrell of Glasgow Caledonian University, are sceptical about Salmond’s chances of establishing misfeasance. He must prove that civil servants and members of the Scottish government knowingly abused their power to cause harm in their investigation of sexual harassment allegations made against him in 2018. The bar is set high and all those involved have moved on.   

Nicola Sturgeon resigned in February, claiming that she no longer had the stomach for politics. Peter Murrell resigned in March after taking responsibility for the release of false SNP membership figures during the leadership campaign to replace her. Both were later arrested and questioned by Police Scotland as part of Operation Branchform into alleged misuse of party funds. No charges have been brought and both deny any wrongdoing. Liz Lloyd and Leslie Evans have left the Scottish civil service for the world of consultancy. Salmond never re-joined his old party and now leads the breakaway nationalist Alba party.   

But the former leader of the Scottish National party clearly hasn’t moved on. In a statement today Salmond’s lawyer accuses Nicola Sturgeon and public officials of ‘criminal leaking of confidential documents, the concealment of documents in defiance of court orders and a criminal warrant, the misleading of the court during judicial review proceedings, the soliciting of false criminal complaints, and ultimately the commission of perjury at a parliamentary inquiry’. Only the kitchen sink is missing from the Salmond charge sheet.  

Needless to say, Sturgeon has consistently denied taking part in any conspiracy to damage her former leader and mentor. 

But Alex Salmond, the last man standing, clearly feels he has yet to have his own day in court. 

New Zealand’s coalition goes to war with Jacinda Ardern’s legacy

New Zealand finally has a government again. It’s been 40 days since Labour was defeated in the country’s election, but the centre-right National party, which won the vote, has struggled to form a coalition. At last, it has thrashed out a deal with the libertarian ACT party, and centrist populist New Zealand First.

The coalition is good news, at least, for foreigners seeking to live in New Zealand. Earlier this year, the National Party announced a plan to whack foreign buyers with a 15 per cent tax on houses worth over $2 million (£1.6 million). Now that idea has been ditched – a casualty of the coalition agreement. But New Zealand’s prime minister Christopher Luxon is cagey on how his government is going to make up for the shortfall.

Asked how he intends to pay for tax cuts without the foreign buyers tax, Luxon said: ‘I want to be really clear, we are going to deliver tax relief as we promised and in the amounts we promised to working and lower to middle income earners in New Zealand.’

Also out the window is legislation banning tobacco sales to people born after 2008 and the ban on offshore oil and gas exploration is set to be repealed. The mooted Covid inquiry looks set to have its terms watered down.

Most controversially, the new government has vowed to review the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi, New Zealand’s founding document which balances the relationship between the government and the Maori. In the election, ACT leader David Seymour – who will rotate in the role as deputy PM along with New Zealand First leader, Winston Peters – said that his party would end co-governance and ‘division by race’. New Zealand First also outlined plans to remove Māori names from government departments and to introduce a bill making English an ‘official’ language of New Zealand. These policies, if enacted, mark a sea change from previous ‘progressive’ governments.

Of course, there’s no guarantee the coalition will hold together and be able to enact its plans. Luxon begins his tenure as New Zealand PM with a pair of ideologically disparate coalition partners in Seymour and Peters, but the protracted negotiations seem to have, for now, culminated in a robust and comprehensive agenda. If the government can stick it out though, it’s clear who the big victim of the new coalition will be: the legacy of Jacinda Ardern.

Tips for the Coral Gold Cup and Becher Chase

There are two high-class chases taking place tomorrow – one at Haydock and the other at Ascot. They will have a bearing on the betting markets for the Ladbrokes King George VI at Kempton on Boxing Day and the Cheltenham Festival. However, neither race this weekend is now an attractive betting proposition because each has attracted just four runners.

I suggested a bet a week ago in the Grade 1 Betfair Chase (Haydock 3 p.m.) at a time when most bookmakers were still offering three places. So I am pleased to see that Corach Rambler, put up each way at 14-1, now only has three rivals tomorrow. However, I am fully aware that he is the lowest rated horse in the race and it is perfectly possible that he could still finish fourth (or indeed not finish at all).

Bravemansgame is the most likely winner, with 6 lbs in hand of the second favourite Protektorat on official figures, but he is now odds on and cannot be backed at current prices.

At Ascot, Shishkin looks likely to be an even shorter priced odds-on favourite in the Grade 2 Nirvana Spa 1965 Chase (1.30 p.m.). If he is at his best, he will be too good for his three rivals of which Pic D’Orhy is likely to prove his toughest opponent. However, once again there is no horse in the race worth backing at the current odds.

Also at Ascot, I was tempted to put up Saint Segal in the Jim Barry Hurst Park Handicap Chase (3.15 p.m.) as he is perfectly capable of reversing the form with Boothill, on better terms, following their run at the track early this month. 5-1 initially seemed attractive each way because Jane Williams’s stable star looked like a Grade 1 Arkle Trophy contender early last season and he can race off a rating of just 136 here in a contest worth more than £65,000 to the winner.

However, I am pretty certain Saint Segal would prefer softer ground and he is also prone to race far too keenly, particularly in small-runner fields. So I will refrain from tipping him for these two reasons and not get too frustrated if he does win.

Instead, I am going to look forward to early December and put up a horse in each of two big handicap chases, one at Aintree and the other at Newbury.

PERCUSSION loves tackling the Grand National fences and has put up three fine performances over them in just over a year. His most recent run was earlier this month when he was a fine second to Geskille in BoyleSports Grand Sefton Handicap Chase.

Percussion has been raised 2 lbs in the official ratings for that run, but I am pretty sure he will be better over the longer trip of the BoyleSports Becher Handicap Chase on December 9. I am also convinced he is a better horse on faster ground and he is unlikely to have to run on heavy ground again at Aintree, as he did just two weeks ago.

Back Percussion each way at 10-1 with bet365, paying four places because his talented trainer, Laura Morgan, has already made it clear that he is an intended runner in the race.

The big handicap chase in just eight days’ time is the Coral Gold Cup, formerly the Hennessy Gold Cup, at Newbury. Three horses are currently vying for favouritism: Complete Unknown, Monbeg Genius and Mahler Mission.

Both Complete Unknown, trained by Paul Nicholls, and Monbeg Genius, trained by Jonjo O’Neill, are much better on soft or heavy ground and different weather forecasts vary on whether they are going to get these conditions. 

In any case, I prefer the chances of Mahler Mission who can take another big pot back to Ireland for his connections. Trained by John McConnell, Mahler Mission was putting up a superb performance in the WellChild National Hunt Challenge Cup at the Cheltenham Festival in March, only to come down at the second last when holding a four-length lead. We will never know if he would have won if he had stood up but connections clearly felt that he was ridden too aggressively that day in the three mile six furlong chase for amateur riders.

His regular pilot, Ben Harvey, will be back in the saddle at Newbury and I think he has a huge winning chance if, as expected, he is ridden with more restraint. He will have a lovely weight of 10 stone 10 lbs if the top weight Ahoy Senor takes his chance in the contest.

Back Mahler Mission 2 points win at 8-1 with bet365, SkyBet, Paddy Power or Betfair fixed odds. I will probably go in double-handed in this race next weekend once I have a better idea of what ground conditions to expect.

Once thing is certain, the jumps season is now in full swing with plenty of top-class racing to look forward to before and beyond Christmas Day.

2023-4 jumps season

Pending:

1 point each way Corach Rambler at 14-1 for the Betfair Chase, paying 1/5^th odds, three places.

2 points win Mahler Mission at 8-1 for the Coral Gold Cup.

1 point each way Percussion at 10-1 for the Becher Chase, paying ¼ odds, four places.

1 point each way Iron Bridge at 16-1 for the Welsh Grand National, paying ¼ odds, four places.

1 point each way Giovinco at 20-1 for the Brown Advisory Novices’ Chase, paying 1/5^th odds, three places.

Settled bets from last week:

1 point each way Fugitif at 11-1 for the Paddy Power Gold Cup, paying ¼ odds, 4 places. 4^th. + 1.75 points.

1 point each way Notlongtillmay at 14-1 for the Paddy Power Gold Cup, paying ¼ odds, 4 places. 2nd. +2.5 points. 

2 points win L’Eau Du Sud at 10-1 for the Greatwood Hurdle. Unplaced. – 2 points.

2023-4 jump seasons to date: + 2.25 points.

2023 flat season: – 48.22 points on all tips.

2022-3 jumps season: + 54.3 points on all tips.

My gambling record for the past eight years: I have made a profit in 14 of the past 16 seasons to recommended bets. To a 1 point level stake over this period, the overall profit of has been 475 points. All bets are either 1 point each way or 2 points win (a “point” is your chosen regular stake).

Russia’s plan to freeze Ukraine

Winter hasn’t officially started, but Ukraine is already covered in snow. As temperatures dip a few degrees below zero, the nation is grappling with an electricity deficit. Ukrainians have been urged by the national power company to use electricity sparingly during the day and take measures such as switching on the washing machine at night. It’s just a taste of what’s about to come: for Russia, the cold is a weapon – and missile strikes aimed at power stations seek to freeze the nation into surrender.

Last winter, even though Ukraine’s air defence systems downed hundreds of Russian missiles and drones, Russian forces managed to successfully strike Ukrainian energy facilities 271 times. The average Ukrainian household endured five cumulative weeks without electricity. Thousands were deprived of heat and water supply. My family, like many others in rural homes, use wood burners, so they weren’t as badly affected as those in the cities. But across the country the cascade of blackouts caused damage costing more than $11 billion, with half of the entire energy system lost.  

Ukraine’s power grid has mostly recovered since last year’s attacks. Our defences are stronger. The main networks have been surrounded by protective barriers made using mesh wire, stones, sandbags and nets the size of tennis courts. Ukraine has received more air defences and stocked up on coal, while backup gas and electricity generators have been set up to protect critical infrastructure like hospitals, boiler houses and water canals.

But that won’t be enough. Some of the power units are still being repaired, and the restored ones can’t match the pre-damage capacity. This week, a cold spell has placed power plants under additional pressure – and it’s not even December, when temperatures can reach -15°C.

Russia has reportedly saved up some 800 missiles to use this winter and trebled the size of its drone fleet. When Moscow strikes, Ukrainians may be plunged into cold and darkness again. But while the thermometer is creeping down (in the depths of winter, temperatures can sink to -25°C), Ukrainians are ready. The last winter hardened them; they know what to expect. Many have already bought reserve generators, batteries, power banks, lights, candles and camping stoves. My friends who work in IT have bought mobile Starlink kits, to access the internet and keep working when under bombardment.

Moscow hopes that strikes will lead to a complete blackout, a humanitarian disaster and the beginning of peace negotiations on unfavourable terms for Ukraine. This strategy failed last year and is likely to fail again – unless Russia has planned something Kyiv doesn’t expect.

Starmer says the EU anthem best sums up Labour

Join die Labour jubilation! Keir Starmer, the man who is very likely to be our next prime minister, has just been asked on Classic FM to choose a piece of music that sums up Labour and picked ‘Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, the choral Ode to Joy’. Which just happens to be the European Union’s anthem.

‘It has got a sense of destiny and is hugely optimistic,’ Starmer told his radio audience. ‘It’s that sense of moving forward to a better place, [which] is incredibly powerful.’

So a sort of high-brow version of the Blairite D:Ream belter: Things can only get better. Or perhaps a not-so-subtle nod to those Starmer-supporting Remainers who hope that, with him in No. 10, Britain might somehow find its way back to its joyful membership of the EU.  

Or Maybe Starmer just really likes Beethoven. In his Desert Island Discs appearance on Radio 4 in 2020, he chose Ludwig’s Pastoral Symphony and his Piano Concerto No. 5, the latter because it reminds him of his wedding day and therefore his wife. He also chose the Northern Soul classic Out on the Floor by Dobie Gray, Three Lions (natch), and Stormzy’s tribute to Grenfell. He’s man of the people, after all, and, unlike poor Beethoven, who was deaf by the time he used Ode to Joy, Keir wants us all to know that he’s a very sensitive listener.     

What good would forcing cyclists to have number plates do?

There was little competition for the oddest and most obscure bill to be announced in the King’s Speech: the proposal to licence London’s pedicabs. On the list of the most pressing issues facing the nation, it doesn’t tend to feature very highly. There must be many people in Britain who have never seen a pedicab, let alone ridden in one or come into conflict with these vehicles, which tend to ply a tiny zone of tourist London around Piccadilly Circus. But could the move to regulate pedicabs evolve into something a little more substantial?

During a debate on the pedicab bill in the Lords this week, Lord Hogan-Howe, formerly chief commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, made the suggestion that the legislation be expanded to cover cyclists in general.

‘If we learn any lessons about holding pedicab drivers and owners to account, could we consider whether we take those lessons and apply them to cyclists?’ he said. In particular, he pitched the idea that bicycles should have registration plates to allow irresponsible cyclists to be identified (whether he meant small markings on the mudguard, or large number plates which would be read by traffic cameras, he didn’t say).

Hogan-Howe, who is a crossbench peer, does not speak for the government in any capacity, but the very fact that we have a pedicab bill at all does rather reveal a certain schizophrenic attitude of the Prime Minister: while he has decided to get heavy with a rather small subset of cyclists, he is simultaneously promising to roll back regulation of motorists. Also contained within the King’s Speech was a proposal to allow driverless cars on the streets – in spite of the many problems which the technology has revealed during trials in San Francisco and elsewhere. Rishi Sunak has also launched a review into 20 mph zones and low traffic neighbourhoods, and promised to be the motorist’s friend (although not to the extent that he felt able to use central government powers to try and block Sadiq Khan’s expansion of the Ultra Low Emissions Zone (Ulez)).

If you are worried about pedestrians being mowed down by pedicabs, or passengers being thrown off overturned vehicles, surely you should be even more concerned by the continuing toll caused by motor vehicles. The uncomfortable reality is that the annual number of road deaths, which fell steadily by two-thirds between 1980 and 2010, has stalled at around 1,700 a year since the present government came to power. While it is true, as Lord Hogan-Howe says, cyclists can and do kill, the vast majority of these casualties are connected with motor cars. Pedicabs do not feature in the statistics. What’s more, those cyclists who have killed pedestrians are invariably brought to justice.

More regulations on cyclists, especially electric bicycles, as well as e-scooters would certainly be popular with some voters – and so I wouldn’t be surprised if the government adopts some of Lord Hogan-Howe’s suggestions. E-bikes, in particular, seem to be being used freely on cycle paths when some should in fact be classed as motorbikes. Yet the voters who would be impressed by such measures are also like to be dismayed that the government is in any way considering watering down low traffic neighbourhoods and 20 mph zones – initiatives which have made life a lot more pleasant in many Conservative-voting suburban areas.

At present, government policy seems to be taking its direction from what might be called the militant motorists’ lobby – a body of car-drivers who demand absolute freedom for themselves, but who come over all authoritarian when demanding laws to deal with the cyclists and pedestrians who get in their way. I fear that throwing in the government’s lot with them will prove an electoral – as well as moral – dead end.  

The tension simmering beneath the Dublin riots

The situation in Dublin yesterday – in which five people were injured in a knife attack in the heart of the city, resulting in a riot and violent clashes with the police – was to the untrained eye reminiscent of Belfast from days gone by.

Speculation about the nationality of the attacker fuelled the scenes of violence which took place last night and that has led to condemnatory tutting. After all, Ireland’s national myth is tied into tales of immigration and welcoming. A riot over immigration in its capital city contradicts the stories Ireland tells the world about itself.

The instinct, almost reflex reaction of the establishment, was to deploy the term ‘far right’. The commissioner of the Garda, Drew Harris, said that a ‘hooligan faction driven by a far-right ideology’ were to blame.

There’s no doubt that far-right elements were involved in the violence. But it is too easy for a society and a governing class, frantically obsessed with positioning itself as a good global citizen, to blame this unseemliness on a fringe. This is not the Dublin of Guinness and glass palaces housing tech companies which it wishes to present to the world.

To immediately sound the far-right klaxon betrays an institutional glibness which explains many of the inherent, simmering tensions currently characterising Irish political debate. 

This, after all, was not the first act of random street violence in Ireland in recent times. There was a stabbing at Dublin Airport in September, while a woman was stabbed in the centre of Dublin on Chatham Street on Thursday night last week.

Concerns about the impact of immigration and Ireland’s readiness to cope with it is starting to ratchet up. These tensions are undoubtedly intertwined with the Republic’s unprecedented housing crisis. There has been a record amount of homeless in recent years. People’s anecdotes about rental prices in Dublin would make even a hardened Londoner blanche. No wonder Ireland has seen protests when migrants are moved into accommodation ahead of Irish people who have been waiting for a home for some time.

What is Ireland’s escape route from this quagmire? A great many – based on current polling – want to chuck their lot in with Sinn Fein, such is the contempt for the Fine Gael and Fianna Fail cabal which has taken turns at running the country. That such a party is being viewed as a solution says a great deal about the mire the Republic finds itself in. 

A poll by the Business Post found that 75 per cent of people believed that Ireland is taking in too many refugees. Interestingly, 83 per cent of Sinn Fein supporters endorsed this view, with between 70 to 74 per cent of the supporters of the two other main parties also agreeing with that statement. 

To therefore immediately blame unrest on the far right, as the Irish government and police have done, shows yet another European establishment out of kilter with its people on immigration.

Undoubtedly there was clear desire for opportunistic violence amongst some of the crowd who rioted last night. However, the crux of the matter will be the stabbing which led to those riots, and the circumstances which allowed such an attack to take place. 

In the court of public opinion, particularly in Brussels, the Republic and its leaders have for many years wanted to be patted on the head for ‘doing the right thing’. They have wanted to be the friendly country – and certainly friendlier than the English across the water. However, as the old political elites in Sweden and the Netherlands are now finding, there is a price to pay for such a lax approach to the questions of immigration and integration. Will the Irish political establishment cotton on before it is too late for them? Based on their response in the past 24 hours, I wouldn’t bet on it.

The families of Israel’s hostages are living in hell

Yair Mozes, whose mother and father are among the 240 hostages kidnapped by Hamas, is trying to describe what it feels like. ‘It is hell,’ he says. ’You don’t go to sleep properly, then the minute you wake up, you’re bolt upright. I’m just about managing at present… then every now and then I fall apart and sleep for ten hours straight, as my body can’t handle it anymore.’

I suspect even those words don’t really do it justice. But they sound familiar. My own relatives suffered that same ghost-like half-life when I was kidnapped for six weeks by Somali pirates while working for the Telegraph back in 2008. Sleepless nights, visits to the GP for tranquillisers, and terrible paranoia. My brother wondered if perhaps I hadn’t been kidnapped, but bumped off by the CIA after discovering that they were sponsoring the pirates. Fat chance that I would ever unearth a story as good as that. But I had vanished into thin air, and overnight he felt like he was in a lurid airport thriller. In that situation, conspiracy theories seem normal.

Grim as it was, though, my family had far less to worry about than Mr Mozes. I was being held by pirates, whose only interest was getting money, and who didn’t generally kill folk if things didn’t go their way. Mr Mozes’ parents are being held by Hamas, who, judging by last month’s massacres, seem to relish it. The pair are also in their late 70s and somewhat frail: his mum Margalit is a diabetic.

I met Mr Mozes last week, when he and other hostages’ families were on a five-day march from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Well-wishers lined the route, and there were stop-offs for speeches and snacks. The march ended up outside Prime Benjamin Netanyahu’s house last Saturday, trying to persuade him that freeing the hostages should be as big a priority as destroying Hamas.

Historically, Israel has always gone to extraordinary lengths to get hostages back. The 1976 Entebbe raid in Uganda, in which Israeli commandos snatched 102 passengers from Palestinian hijackers, is up there with the SAS’s storming of the Iranian Embassy. When Ron Arad, an Israeli airman, fell into the hands of Hezbollah in Lebanon in 1986, Israel offered a $10 billion aid package to Tehran, and kidnapped an Iranian general in Syria. Following Hezbollah’s abduction of Corporal Gilad Shalit in 2006, Israel freed more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners to get him back.

Indeed, given that one of the freed prisoners was Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader behind last month’s massacre, some Israelis feel that hostages have become their country’s weak spot, and that Mr Netanyahu should just tough it out. Last month, his finance minister, the hard-right settler leader Bezalel Smotrich, demanded that the army ‘hit Hamas brutally and not take the matter of the captives into significant consideration.’

The prime minister has his intimate experience of hostage showdowns. His brother, Jonathan, commanded the Entebbe raid, and was the sole Israeli fatality. But with the Hamas hostages like dispersed in tunnels all over Gaza, a repeat of Entebbe would stretch even the modern IDF’s capability.
Instead, the strategy is to keep the military pressure on Gaza. An agreement has now been reached whereby 50 captives, all women and children, should be exchanged from today, in return for a four-day pause in fighting and the release of 150 Palestinians in Israeli jails.

The swap was part-brokered by Sheikh Mohammed Bin Abdulrahman al-Thani, the prime minister of Qatar, who has acted as a go-between. Don’t expect many Israelis, though, to be singing His Highness’s praises. Many are livid about Qatar hosting Hamas’s leadership in exile, and have not forgotten how they cheered last month’s attacks from their offices in Doha.

The polite term for what the Qataris are doing is ‘diplomacy’. The less polite term is that they are acting as ‘chewers’, as they’re known in kidnapping circles. These are people who pose as neutral, disinterested intermediaries, but in fact have connections to the kidnapping gang. I had one in my own case, a shadowy man called Ali. He claimed to be acting in ‘a humanitarian capacity’ but was on suspiciously good terms with my pirate captors.

The Qataris aren’t the only intermediaries that Israelis are less than happy with. They are disgruntled with the International Committee of the Red Cross, which has failed to get welfare access to the hostages. Its officials have visited detainees of terror groups in the past, such as the Afghan Taliban, and has extensive contacts in Gaza, where it operates humanitarian programmes. So far, though, it says Hamas has refused its requests.

This has angered many Israelis, who point out that the welfare needs in this particular hostage crisis are almost unique: there are babies, children, pensioners with dementia, people with injuries. It has also prompted acid comments from Israel’ foreign minister, Eli Cohen, who suspects that like many foreign aid organisations, the Red Cross harbours an institutional sympathy towards the Palestinians. (The ICRC says: ‘From day one, we have called for the immediate release of all the hostages, and for access to them… But we are not the ones making the decision and creating the conditions for access to materialise. We wish we had that power, but we don´t.’)

Last month, Cohen told Mirjana Spoljaric, the ICRC’s president, that ‘The Red Cross has no right to exist if it does not succeed in visiting the hostages.’ He criticised it for focusing on Israel, ‘which is bound by international law and acts in accordance with it,’ instead of the humanitarian crisis created by Hamas.

The ICRC insists it is speaking direct to Hamas at the highest levels, and says that ‘while it may feel like we are silent’, it makes more progress if works discreetly behind the scenes. Israelis wonder, then, why it continues to issue a running commentary of Tweets and press releases, which focus as much, if not more, on the humanitarian impact of the Gaza invasion.

The ICRC’s ‘Facts and Figures’ webpage on the crisis, for example, refers to ‘renewed hostilities’ between both sides – a somewhat anodyne term for a war sparked by one of the worst terror attacks in modern history.

This kind of studied, BBC neutrality might be suitable for the ICRC’s wider international audience, and yes, it may avoid upsetting Hamas. But if you want to win the confidence of hostages’ families – who, as per my own experience, often feel the world is conspiring against them anyway – then it may not help. The 240 abductees, after all, aren’t PoWs in a war between two nation states, they are civilian victims of criminal kidnappings.

Israelis have not forgotten, either, the Red Cross’s notorious failure to speak out on behalf of Holocaust victims during the second world war. Red Cross representatives visited Hitler’s death camps, but chose not to publicly condemn what was going on for fear of upsetting the Nazis and losing welfare access to allied prisoners of war. They also feared compromising the neutrality of Switzerland, where the Red Cross is based. In 1997, the organisation admitted to ‘moral failure’ for keeping silent.

If the exchange of 50 hostages begins later today, it will of course be a welcome start. But it goes against the best-practice rule for hostage negotiations, which is to get everyone out at the same time. The more they’re released in dribs and drabs, the more those still in custody assume a greater value to Hamas, who may keep them back as an insurance policy.

Those left behind will probably be the adult males, most likely the younger, fitter ones. Their families, however, may not be as robust as they are. And as I know from my own spell as a hostage, families are the victims of a kidnapping as much as the captives are. Israel has already had its share of Ron Arads and Gilad Shalits. It doesn’t deserve any more.

Introducing my manic Christmas tradition

It is a truth universally acknowledged – at least by anyone with a developed frontal lobe – that seasonal enjoyment and growing up are inversely proportional. As the stranglehold of middle age tightens, I am incapable of conjuring the Christmas excitement I felt as a child. And it seems to have been replaced with intense festive angst. 

Samuel Johnson was talking about second marriages when hatching his aphorism about hope over experience, rather than what Americans refer to as ‘readying the home’, yet every year I still try to summon those seasonal spirits of childhood. My efforts border on the authoritarian, kicking off in a prescriptive fashion as Advent starts. I blame my mother – and not just because it’ll save in therapy fees later. She was wilfully resistant to my young self’s seasonal yearnings, postponing buying a tree until about a week before the big day, and then returning with something that was only my height. I’d been to the Royal Opera House; I’d seen The Nutcracker. The tree was meant to instil awe not elicit a shrug. She once even made me re-use the previous year’s Advent calendar. The deprivation was real. 

Now my own festive routine is enshrined, at no small cost to the mental wellbeing of myself, my husband and our daughters. On 1 December, breakfast is eaten off our Christmas plates, accompanied by Carols from King’s at plaster-cracking volume. I stand over the girls as they open the first door of their vastly overpriced, overwhelmingly tasteful and disappointingly chocolate-free German Advent calendars. Before I go to work, I buy the tree. The biggest, fattest tree our London terrace can accommodate. (The man I’ve bought it from for the last 15 years knows my house well enough to be able to rein in any delusions I have about property proportions; last year he was right that 14ft was too tall.) I then decorate it in an obsessive fashion with my carefully curated decorations (German and paper mâché since you ask).  

But before 1 December, a mince pie won’t pass my lips (requiring Herculean restraint on my part). The only seasonal preparation I’ll countenance comes on the last Sunday before Advent which is Stir-Up Sunday; so named because the opening line to the Collect for that day in the Anglican 1549 Book of Common Prayer reads, ‘Stir up, we beseech thee, O Lord, the wills of thy faithful people.’ Round ours the mood is less holy and more fisticuffs, as it presents an excellent opportunity to ratchet up the festive stress before the first bars of Bublé hit the airways. 

Stir Up Tension and Marital Disunity Sunday is undoubtedly born of my intransigence. For in the face of my husband’s steadfast opposition, I’ve been making a batch of at least half a dozen Christmas puddings for friends and family for the best part of 20 years. My husband protests that it’d be cheaper to courier Fortnum & Mason’s finest across the country. I reason that part of his resistance comes from the fact he doesn’t like Christmas pudding, so it’s reasonable to ignore him because he’s got a seasonal screw loose. (My girls don’t like it either, but that genetic anomaly is their father’s fault, so I forgive them.) 

I think I feel compelled to rustle up my fruity mounds as part of my festive rebellion against my mother’s restrained approach. I’d like to pretend that I use a recipe that has been carefully preserved in the pages of some trusted culinary bible, and passed down through the generations, but that would be a gross deception. My mother would simply head to Fortnum’s for ours, reasoning that if one spent four times what it cost at Waitrose, all manner of things would be well. So I’m pre-disposed to overspend when it comes to my puddings, but I splurge on the ingredients instead. I use quince instead of cooking apples, rum instead of brandy, the quotidian dried fruit is bolstered by dried figs, dried apricots and dried prunes, and the perversion which is candied peel is very definitely out.  

So the angst in our household is already running high by 1 December. All that’s left to do is argue about which grandparents’ turn it is, the merits of Christmas lunch versus Christmas dinner, and why, despite knowing I always make one, my mother-in-law insists on buying a Tesco’s Finest Christmas pudding. By which time, any seasonal spirit has shrivelled like a supermarket sprout left languishing in the furthest reaches of a fridge drawer until mid-January.