Is one badly filed flight plan really to blame for the airport chaos?

A faulty flight plan filed by a French airline is unofficially being blamed for the meltdown in our national air traffic control system on Monday. While Nats (National Air Traffic Services) has declined to comment, it should come as no comfort if it turns out to have been a cock-up rather than – as many initially feared – a cyber attack. If one badly-filed flight plan can cause delays for days on end – as the airlines are warning us – it is an alarming reminder of how vulnerable our transport infrastructure has become. It wouldn’t take much input from a hostile state to bring the country to a halt.

You can see the vulnerability everywhere – it is the price we pay for running transport so close to the bone. It is there to be seen on the roads, where one accident almost instantly leads to miles of tailbacks. Our national practice of running utilities beneath the road rather than in channels alongside compounds the problem. A burst water main or broken electricity cable – all the more likely when we allow 44 tonne lorries on roads which are not even nearly fit for the job – and we lose vital road capacity as well as the utility. Around my way in East Anglia all three roads linking us to our nearest town, Newmarket, were recently closed at once. 

The problem is made worse by a planning system which continues to allow many thousands of new homes to be built in places which make their occupants utterly reliant on cars. By the way, I am all in favour of 15 minute cities – so long as they don’t involve wretched number plate cameras and fines – and I don’t understand the opposition to the principle of bringing public services closer to where people live.

You can see our vulnerability, too, on the railways, where we are trying to squeeze every last inch out of a shrunken rail system. The opportunities for diversion when something goes wrong are non-existent in many parts of the network, partly as a result of the Beeching closures and partly because peripheral routes are no longer maintained to the standard required to take an inter city train. HS2 was supposed to be part of the solution in providing extra capacity, but initial plans involved putting nearly every express train from London to the North of England on one line, at three minute intervals. It doesn’t take much to imagine the havoc when even one train was delayed – there would be no time to recover the timetable without cancellations.

And then, of course, is air travel. While other countries build new airports and runways, we are largely stuck with much of the infrastructure we had in the 1970s, when air traffic was a third of what it is now. The only new runway at a major international airport built in the years since was at Manchester over two decades ago. We have been talking about a third runway for Heathrow since 1946 – yes, 77 years ago.

Our water and electricity infrastructure is affected too. Our essential problem is that around 40 years ago we lost pride in building infrastructure. Instead, we moved to a system where private owners were incentivised to sweat their assets to the last, rather than invest in new stuff. The result has been to turn Britain into a creaking hull of a country – and a saboteur’s dream. Monday’s events may not turn out to have been caused by a cyber attack – although it hasn’t been ruled out – but they will certainly be studied with great interest by hostile nations.  

Sadiq Khan dodges the question over Ulez

Could Sadiq Khan’s controversial Ulez scheme cost Labour the general election? Even before Ulez came into effect this morning, the policy has already proved costly for Khan’s party, having led to Labour failing to win the Uxbridge by-election in July. This morning, just hours after the scheme went live, Khan was asked whether more votes might be lost. Khan’s response on the BBC Radio 4’s Today programme suggests he isn’t too concerned:

Mishal Husain: Have you thought about it costing Labour the general election?

Sadiq Khan: Look I’m quite clear in relation to the policies to reduce air pollution in London: Londoners want to see cleaner air in our city…I accept Ulez was a factor in relation to Uxbridge..a lot of misinformation in relation to that seat. Obviously I’m disappointed. I’ll carry on listening to Londoners.

Mr S can think of one Londoner Khan isn’t listening to over Ulez: Camden resident Keir Starmer. The Labour leader has clashed with Khan over the plan, but for now, it seems, Khan is doubling down – even if the scheme carries on losing Labour votes.

Biddy Baxter and the perils of remembering the past

I’ve been reading the cracking, crackling new biography Biddy Baxter: The Woman Who Made Blue Peter by Richard Marson (he’s a friend, but I wouldn’t sell you a pup). There is always fun to be had in the gap between the transmitted, necessarily anodyne, product of children’s TV and the real-life shenanigans backstage, and the story of the often forbidding Biddy serves this up in satisfyingly salty dollops. In the collegiate, committee-ridden atmosphere of TV production, Baxter was a rare tyrant but one who always put the viewer ahead of any other consideration. Making TV is a battle; the reason so much of it is so bad is that the people involved don’t have the stomach to fight. Baxter did, and the accounts of her clashes with beloved nationally treasured presenters are a delight.  

But as I read, I was taken by another thought. They used to say, back in the analogue age, that it was always the other side of a press clipping that, when you looked at it years later, was more interesting. And a book like this ends up telling you more about its era than an actual social history.  

Because the world of The Woman Who Made Blue Peter, compiled from primary and often contemporary sources, is definitely not the world of Britain in the 60s, 70s, and 80s that our folk memory has settled on. I was young in the 80s, very young in the 70s, and I kept receiving memory flashes as I read – splashes of cold water in the face of ‘of course, that’s how it was’.  

Most obviously, the book captures a certain type of terrifying woman that seems to have both disappeared and been written out of history. But the other women in the story, and there are lots, are hardly mousy victims either. Yes, this is a narrow slice of middle-class life in a brand new industry, but the male resistance to this supposed invasion of professional territory is so weak as to be almost non-existent.

There is a general air of people of both sexes speaking their minds and treating each other like adults – nobody goes crying to HR, nobody would even contemplate it. It does not occur to anyone to be ‘oppressed’. If they’re badly treated they don’t wail, they get angry and they have it out. And for all the frequent strikes and strife at the BBC, there is little sense of a clapped-out nation in decline; in fact, there is a vitality and an acceptance of difference that sometimes, and in some areas, seems more harmonious than our pernickety, angsty age. Blue Peter, like all children’s TV, is keen to innovate and is positively awash with reggae and steel bands (at a time when the non-white population of the UK stood at 1.5 per cent). People discuss politics frankly at work and nobody gets cancelled. They just get on with their jobs. Is this really a terrible dark era before the coming of progressive enlightenment? 

Coincidentally I recently reread Iris Murdoch’s 1956 novel The Flight from the Enchanter, which is also partly about women entering the professions – and also illegal immigration, institutional complexity, capture by ideology, and what we would now call date rape. This is not what comes to mind when the popular imagination thinks of the mid-50s, all gingham tablecloths, housewives and husbands smoking pipes. Similarly, many who read Christopher Lasch today are staggered by how similar his concerns are to ours.  

Why do we have such a misleading idea of the fairly recent past, even within living memory? Obviously for those of us who were kids there is what we might call the Shallow and Slender factor – the world then seems less complicated because we were less complicated then. The idea of the 70s as a prelapsarian age of pre-Thatcherite simplicity and political innocence would have been hilarious to the people of that time. ‘The overheated, one-way streeted, saturated 70s’ as a Dairy Milk ad of the time described it, over fast-cut images of the futuristic technopolis of 1973. As my grandfather said to me around then, ‘the trouble is that things never settled down again after the war’.  

But on a bigger societal level I think the disconnect is because of the disconcerting rapidity of novelty from technological changes. Technology changes so fast that every age before the current one, no matter how recent, gets smoothed out as a nostalgic idyll or retrofitted as a dystopia to reflect contemporary concerns – and sometimes both at the same time. Tellingly, the Wikipedia page for Biddy Baxter makes a major feature of the few, fairly minor sexist put-downs she received at the BBC. 

I’ve already begun to see people getting wistful and nostalgic about lockdown, which was fractious, fraught and hotly contested. It won’t be long before 2023 is somebody’s golden age, and somebody else’s bad old days. It takes immersion in a book like this one to jolt you back to reality.  

How the West made a mess of Syria

It was the last week of August 2013. I was Her Majesty’s Ambassador to Saudi Arabia. The course of the Arab uprisings of 2011, which had been greeted with such naïve optimism at the time, had become bloody, not least in Syria. Only the previous week there had been a chemical weapons attack on opposition-controlled areas of Damascus in the ancient oasis – the Ghouta – that lies to the south-east of the city.  UN inspectors were begrudgingly and belatedly allowed access by the Syrian government. They concluded that the chemical in question was Sarin. Hundreds of people had been killed, many others severely injured. Some may have been insurgents. The overwhelming majority were civilians, men, women and children, all trapped in a war between a brutal regime and increasingly radicalised and violent militias.  

The Assad regime –with Russian support – claimed its opponents were responsible. No one seriously believed them. The missiles had probably been fired from Mount Qasioun, the great mountain overlooking Damascus, where the Presidential palace and other regime installations were situated. Everyone knew the regime had a sophisticated chemical weapons programme and significant stockpiles of missiles. Assad’s armed forces had begun to use them in 2012 and had already probably used Sarin at least once before in 2013 – in Khan al ‘Asal, to the South-West of Aleppo. 

It was a no-brainer. At the time Syria was not a signatory to the 1997 Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC). But the attack was indiscriminate, disproportionate to any threat and entirely unrelated to any recognisable military objective, there was no attempt to limit harm and the aim was pretty clearly to terrorise and punish civilians simply for getting in the way – and to show what awaited others who happened to find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. So it was probably a war crime, whatever Syria’s CWC status. The problem for western capitals, faced with a civil war between a variety of repellent actors, was what to do about it.

The outcome was shaped by two significant factors. First, the US, scarred by its experiences of attempted regime change in Iraq and Afghanistan and, faced with the disintegration of Libya, had become increasingly sceptical of any military intervention at all and wanted to wash its hands of intractable Middle Eastern conflicts. President Obama had been clear that he wanted instead to pivot to Asia, where the US was facing the most substantial challenge – from China – to its global hegemony in decades. On the other hand, he had also called for the replacement of Bashar al Assad and backed a political process in Geneva involving the Syrian opposition which explicitly aimed at regime change. In 2012 he had also said in public that ‘…a red line for the US’ would be if ‘we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons being moved about or being utilized. That would change my calculus. That would change my equation.”    

Obama was encouraged to take a stand by David Cameron, who – for honourable reasons – had lost little of his appetite for intervention in the Middle East in spite of the problems we and others were facing and the clear evidence of authoritarian resurgence across the wider region. In Riyadh we prepared ourselves for military strikes on Syria. More importantly, so did the Saudis and their GCC partners in Doha and Abu Dhabi. Even if their desired end-states in Syria were different – with the Qataris in particular favouring the Muslim Brotherhood (as they had done damagingly in Libya) – they had all been partners in the early days of the Syrian uprising in seeking to remove Assad and install a non-Alawite government which would reduce or cut Damascus’s problematic ties with Tehran. And they saw direct western military intervention in the Syrian conflict as a way to short-circuit the process. 

The problem, of course, was that Cameron, who insisted on a House of Commons vote before action, had miscalculated the parliamentary arithmetic and seems to have been misled into believing that he would have enough Labour party backing to overcome doubts among his own back-benchers. Once it became clear that he had no majority for military action, he was forced to pull out. That gave Obama, whose heart was never really in it, the perfect excuse to stand US forces down too.

Some people – most notably foreign policy realists who think the only thing that matters is a narrow definition of the national interest – claim that all this amounts to a nothingburger. The war in Syria, which continues at lower intensity, didn’t matter then and doesn’t matter now. They say that if you read his remarks carefully, Obama never actually committed the US to doing anything at all about chemical weapons in Syria. They also suggest that the subsequent deal John Kerry struck with Sergei Lavrov to sequestrate what turned out to be 95 per cent of Assad’s CBW stocks (and brought Damascus into the CWC) was a brilliant success. In any case,the internal armed opposition were fragmented, the opposition in exile useless and no one seriously thought failure to act in Syria meant the US would not defend vital US interests elsewhere. In Britain some think Cameron lucky to have been saved from the consequences of his own folly – and Britain’s reduced capabilities – by the collective caution of his parliamentary colleagues.

But we don’t live in a world where what matters is the scholastic parsing of words and hidden escape clauses. Parliamentary debate is parochial: what other people believe you mean matters too. They interpret caution as a lack of will. And all decisions have consequences beyond parliamentary majorities or some short-term domestic political calculus.

The fact is that Obama led people in the region and in his own administration to believe that US-led military action would be the logical conclusion of any proven use of chemical weapons by Assad’s forces. Standing down was not an irrational decision. But neither he nor David Cameron had prepared the ground for it. So it came as a shock. And the consequences were serious and enduring. I had been in Jeddah earlier that week in August, with an old friend who was with the UN. We both thought action was imminent. So did UN HQ in New York, who wanted to get their inspectors out of Damascus urgently.  So did the Saudis, who had been walked at least half-way to agreeing to support air strikes. Until the last moment they were expecting a call from Cameron to the King to confirm the details. The call never came.

When instead the news arrived that nothing would happen after all, I vividly remember Saudi dismay. After all, the strikes envisaged were designed not to overthrow Assad but, by disabling airfields and enough of his airforce’s planes and helicopters, to stop him killing his own people from the air, an increasingly common regime tactic. In the following months, the use of crude and untargeted barrel bombs filled with high explosive became increasingly frequent. And in spite of the bogus deal between the US and Russia, Assad retained both the capacity and a willingness to use chlorine and, in the 2017 attack on Khan Shaykhun, sarin too.

Gulf leaders had already started to doubt the willingness of the US to protect them or even treat them with respect. They thought Obama in particular had made clear his distaste both for them and for US involvement in arbitrating regionalconflicts, some of which they blamed the US for igniting. Now he had simply walked away from what they thought was a joint enterprise. More than any other, it was probably the moment when they decided they needed to start seriously hedging their bets.  

There have been other moments since then, all of which have confirmed them in their views: for example, the Iranian-sponsored attacks on Saudi oil facilities in 2019 and Abu Dhabi airport in 2022 (when it reportedly took President Biden over two weeks even to speak to Sheikh Muhammad bin Zaid).  Iran has also been allowed to continue hijacking tankers with apparent impunity. In return, Tehran gets a sustained diplomatic effort to resurrect the JCPOA. Meanwhile, Gulf leaders continue to feel exposed and taken for granted. Is it any wonder they seek strategic balancing with China and Russia and see no reason to take western interests into account when managing the oil market or deciding to do deals with Iran – and now also Assad?

There is also to many observers a direct line from what Arabs, Iranians, Israelis, Russians and others all interpreted at the time as American weakness to the increased Iranian support for Assad from 2014 onwards and then the direct Russian military intervention in Syria – at the request of Tehran – in 2015. You could even argue (I have done so) that Russia would have been less belligerent in Africa and thought twice about invading Ukraine. My former US colleague in Baghdad and Damascus, Robert Ford, and at least one other widely respected chronicler of the war, Sam Dagher, think the West’s inaction fuelled violent Islamism. Lots of other people think the same. 

There are, of course, structural reasons for the US’s reluctance to play global policeman any more. Other states have become more powerful. New technologies of war have equalised the battlefield. The US military itself has suffered from two decades of conflict in the Middle East and South Asia. Europe has failed to step up to the plate. Globalisation is in reverseand the economies of the West have taken a serious hit. Above all, the rise of China poses a unique challenge that deserves the undivided attention of the Washington policy elite. But the costs of the sort of intervention in Syria that we envisaged in 2013 would not have been high. There would have been a need to ensure that Assad didn’t recoup his losses. And there would have needed to be a more serious push for a political settlement on the back of it.  That would have required a willingness to consult properly with people who thought we were their friends.  Above all, it would have required political energy. In its absence, the enemies of the West in Moscow, Tehran, Beijing and elsewhere saw an opportunity. And, boy, did they they take it. The result has been more entropy in the Middle East, bragging rights for Putin and Khamenei andwidespread distrust of American leadership at a moment when we need it more than ever. Western solidarity over Ukraine has helped restore some balance. But support for Kyiv remains fragile. Nato is fractious. And there are US elections next year. I hope we behave more resolutely, if it comes to that, over Taiwan.

Admit it, the French are better than us

The French, according to the enshrined belief system that I grew up with, are work-shy layabouts. They never turn up for a job on time as they’re too busy drinking wine for breakfast. And once they do finally start, they break off almost immediately for a two-hour lunch with more wine before dithering about a bit and then finishing early. If anyone threatens these unproductive practices, they blockade ports or set fire to lorries full of lambs. 

We British, by contrast, have work ethic running through our veins. We fill every unforgiving minute with sixty seconds’ worth of distance run, as Kipling put it. They ridicule us as a nation of shopkeepers, but this is mere jealousy – we are strivers while they are hopelessly lazy shirkers.  

Although this inherited mindset didn’t prevent me from becoming a great francophile – I think I’ve visited France at least once annually for more than 40 years – it clung on. And it’s only very recently that it’s changed. My epiphany came a couple of weeks ago, during a stay in the Languedoc, after an episode with a toilet. I noticed that the pipe which joined the cistern to the water supply was leaking. I texted a suggested workman in Franglais: ‘J’ai une petite problème avec nos toilettes’ etc. He said he’d come the following morning at 8.

He actually turned up ten minutes early. I offered him coffee, expecting him to want to sit around aimlessly for a bit, probably smoking, but he preferred to crack on. By 8.35 a.m. he had found the stopcock – this alone would have taken me hours – disengaged it, replaced the rusty old part with a gleaming new one, reengaged the water supply, tested his repair, and even mopped up. It was impressive stuff. But surely the sting was still to come. And so it was with cringing fear that I asked ‘…et c’est combien?’ 

‘Vingt Euro,’ he said.

I was so shocked I could barely process what he was saying: there was no call-out fee – even though we were miles from anywhere – no charge for that gleaming replacement part, just £17 for the whole job. I tried to force a tip on him. He refused it. 

I can’t recall a plumbing job in the UK costing anything less than £200. On one memorable occasion a London plumber charged me this for pointing out within moments of arriving that the reason our hot water wasn’t running was that someone had unplugged the boiler. Could it be that the French workforce was not only not lazy – but that the protectionism around their work culture we’d so long mocked might also serve to protect consumers against rip-off pricing?  

I began to reflect on other points of difference between British expectation and French reality. And few of the examples that came to mind favoured the UK. A couple of days later we visited Orleans. Its centre historique is a model for how these things should be done: medieval buildings sensitively repointed but not remodelled, no plastic window frames, no garish signage, no chain stores; even the bins were visually harmonious. Whereas on a recent trip to York, an English city of perhaps comparable historic interest, I found things very different: clustered close by the Minster were a Tesco Extra, a Five Guys, a McDonald’s, and a multi-story car park. 

Bath, I read, has been ruined by drug addicts, Brighton by the Greens’ inability to collect rubbish. We seem to have abandoned the notion of civic pride. On a recent visit to Hampton Court, I found that all along the palace’s extensive Thames waterfront were plastic barriers to prevent people from leaning on the older and more picturesque wooden railings which, presumably, might give way and cause them to in. Plastic barriers directly outside Hampton Court! The temporary had become permanent. The French simply don’t do things like this. 

John Lewis-Stempel, in his La Vie: A year in rural France, addresses the French psyche: ‘Free trade in France is a chimaera; effectively the country operates a cultural tariff system.’ This extends from the terroir of the food and wine through entrenched consumer support of a still functional national car manufacturing industry to the way the country’s towns are run – by Maires who are imbued with local pride and respond to things like older wooden fences accordingly.  

Every municipality advertises itself to passing visitors with those brown cultural heritage signs and each diversion these signs suggest tends to be a good idea. You can go from Calais to the Mediterranean and back at 85mph with no traffic jams and no sighting of litter for 1,200 miles – and even enjoy a decent meal at a motorway service station.

There’s graffiti, yes, and the larger cities can be moody in places. And the gilets jaunes may have set fire to the bins to protest against something – but it now occurs to me that the motivation behind some such actions may be to protect the very things that I’m describing.

So as your two weeks of French bliss come to an end, you, the weary British holidaymaker, find yourself forced to leave this charming world to return to the UK, where within minutes you’ll find yourself trapped by barriers put up to accommodate queuing lorries on the M20, which means being plunged into a lengthy ‘50mph average speed check zone’; a zone so jammed, that actually reaching an average speed as high as 50mph will be practically impossible.

And then it’s back to work, where you’ll have a sandwich from Pret, a pallid impression of the boulanger’s baguette you’ve become used to during your vacances, which will cost you £5 and which you will be expected to eat at your desk – because we no longer have a lunch hour, let alone two; accompanying wine now unthinkable. 

Here we allowed our retirement age to be raised and raised – with barely a raised voice: it’s now 68. In France, a million people took to the streets and there were riots at attempts to push it above 62. I remember laughing at the residents of Hampstead for opposing a McDonald’s as anachronistic snobs. But perhaps they were simply being a bit French. And perhaps I should have set fire to the plastic stanchions outside Hampton Court in protest at their ugliness.

Why weren’t police forces investigating every theft?

Police must investigate every theft. This is the message from the Home Secretary as the government heralds an agreement from all 43 police forces in England and Wales to follow up on any evidence where there is a ‘reasonable line of enquiry’. In practice, that means the police should investigate low-level crimes such as stolen bikes, phones and shoplifting when there is reasonable lead such as a GPS tracker, CCTV footage or a doorbell video.

As I noted earlier this month in a cover piece for the magazine, ‘investigate every crime’ doesn’t sound like a particularly novel concept. It raises the question: Why weren’t police investigating every theft? Over the past few years, forces – including the Metropolitan Police – have largely given up on low-level crime. Austerity was seen as a reason to ignore burglaries, thefts and minor assaults if officers believed there was little chance of identifying a suspect. Already there are voices of alarm at the policy, with the Police Federation of England and Wales saying forces are already ‘stretched beyond human limits’.

However, the policy is not the product of a Westminster think tank imposing ideas on the police. Instead, it came from the police force in Greater Manchester – a model put in place by Steve Watson when he took over as chief constable there two years ago. At the time, the force was in special measures. But after just 18 months it was removed from enhanced monitoring after it halved the number of open investigations, shortened response times and improved support for staff. Watson’s tactics were to make more arrests, follow up every burglary and get his officers off Twitter.

Watson is one of a handful of standout chief constables to whom Suella Braverman is paying close attention to as the Tories prepare to fight on the issue of crime at the next election. Boris Johnson focused on police numbers – with a New Labour-style pledge to find 20,000 new officers. Under Sunak and Braverman, there is a push for a ‘back to basics’ policing model.

The current statistics suggest there could be a positive story to be told on crime. According to the Office for National Statistics, surveyed crime has halved since 2010. Earlier this year, HM Chief Inspector of Constabulary Andy Cooke declared in his annual report that ‘England and Wales are arguably safer than they have ever been’. However, the surveyed crime figure does not include fraud – and there’s evidence to suggest that a lot of people are now unlikely to report some crimes to the police due to a sense that some theft has effectively been decriminalised in much of the country. A YouGov poll has found that most people don’t think the police will bother with crimes such as phone snatching or bicycle theft. This new policy is aimed at addressing that.

What Jeremy Vine gets wrong about cyclists

I can’t believe we need to say this, but here goes: Motorists should not pull over to allow cyclists to overtake. I know it’s obvious, but the cycling elites have been agitating for this ridiculous rule-change, led by Jeremy Vine.

In an interview yesterday, he upped the ante in his general campaign to turn the country’s drivers into a second-class citizens. ‘I’m starting to think I want cars to pull over if they see me behind them because they know I’m faster,’ he told the Sunday Times.

Thus the shark was jumped. I’m a cyclist myself and I’d wager I’m quite a lot faster than Vine. I’m younger, for a start, and in addition to commuting daily on my Brompton, on weekends I am a fully paid-up member of the Lycra brigade. True, my training has been suffering recently, as I’ve been busy with my new book but still, if Vine wants to race me, I’m confident I’d leave him for dust.

But motorists shouldn’t pull over to allow me to pass. On the whole they go faster than me. The average speed of traffic in Britain’s biggest cities is 22.6mph, which is a lot faster than Vine ever cycles, and me too if I’m on my Brompton. And even if cars are stuck in slow-moving traffic, it’s the cyclist’s job to weave his way safely through the gaps, not theirs to pull over meekly to the side of the road as if Judge Dredd was looming in their mirrors.

All this is part of an effort to pound drivers into submission. Battered by taxes, leg-swept by Ulez, tangled in red tape and shamed by the militant green lobby, these perfectly law-abiding citizens, using a perfectly law-abiding method of transport to engage in their perfectly law-abiding jobs, are being turned into public enemy number one. Anyone for a stoning? Packet of gravel?

I suspect the real problem isn’t motorists but Jeremy Vine himself. He swans around London like a member of the morality police wearing a large camera rig on his head used to film motorists’ indiscretions, which seem to occur more often in his life than anybody else I know, and edit them into Matrix-style whizzy videos. He’s a cyclist powered (rather slowly) by the fuel of self-righteousness. I’m a cyclist myself and even I can see this.

So let’s make an amendment to the Highway Code, stipulating the following: no motorist is permitted to pull over to let Jeremy Vine pass. After all, the zealots don’t represent the moderates.

Who’s more useless – the Tories or the England rugby team?

In a curious way the decline of English rugby mirrors that of the Conservative party. Four years ago there was a spring in the step of both. England had trounced the All Blacks in the semi-final of the World Cup in Japan, and although they lost to South Africa in the final a week later there was a belief that the future was bright. As the Daily Telegraph summed it up in a headline, ‘England’s squad unity demonstrates cause for optimism’.  

Four years on and England are anything but optimistic ahead of next month’s World Cup. Under new coach Steve Borthwick they have won just three of their nine matches this year, and on Saturday they were humiliated by Fiji at Twickenham in one of the greatest upsets in rugby union history. The Pacific Islanders (population 937,417) beat England (population 56.3m) 30-22 and a deserved victory it was, the visitors playing with an enterprise and verve that was beyond the capabilities of their hapless hosts. 

According to the Mail on Sunday, England’s humbling ‘turned a once proud union into a laughing stock’ and consequently ‘they will travel to the World Cup as the butt of the jokes’.  

Britain went to the polls six weeks after the 2019 Rugby World Cup, and the result was a landslide victory for the Conservatives. Boris Johnson’s party did to Labour what England had done to New Zealand in that never-to-be-forgotten semi-final. Their 80-seat majority was, boomed Boris, a ‘new dawn’ for the country and he promised Red Wall voters who had abandoned Labour for the Tories for the first time that he would ‘never take [their] support for granted’. 

Johnson wasn’t able to keep his promise, and support for the Tories among Red Wall voters – as well as their traditional base – has drained away in the last four years. England rugby players know the feeling; they, too, have seen the faithful drift away and nearly 30,000 seats went unsold for the visit of the Fijians on Saturday. Nobody likes to align themselves with a laughing stock, which is also an apt description of the Conservative party.

The reasons for the decline are similar: bad management, poor strategy and mediocre people. Eddie Jones, the Australian coach who guided England to the 2019 World Cup should have been sacked in 2020 when it emerged he was moonlighting for a Japanese club instead of running the rule over young talent in the English domestic league. The RFU lacked the courage to fire Jones, even when the national team suffered an embarrassing 2022 Six Nations campaign, losing 3 of their 5 matches, including a record 32-15 thrashing at home to Ireland. Jones was eventually given the heave in December last year, after England were booed off the Twickenham pitch following a limp defeat to South Africa. 

Unfortunately the RFU replaced Jones with Steve Borthwick, the rugby equivalent of selecting Liz Truss to succeed Johnson. Borthwick may have outlasted a lettuce, which Truss was famously unable to do during her short-lived tenure in No. 10, but the England head coach is likely to be gone by November if, as expected, they endure a wretched World Cup campaign; despite the fact England are in the easiest pool of the four, they will struggle to beat Argentina, Samoa and Japan on current form, though they should – fingers crossed – just about have the wherewithal to edge out Chile.  

Borthwick lacks boldness and imagination, and he has no clear vision of where he is taking his team. 

That will sound familiar to Tory voters. Like Borthwick, Rishi Sunak is a decent man but one who has been promoted above his station. The other trait they share is a habit of over-promising. In January Sunak made five pledges to the country and boasted that he would deliver on them and restore ‘optimism, hope, and pride’.  

Borthwick, meanwhile, was also confidently stating his ambition for the year ahead, in his case ‘to produce a team that delivers. I think that’s what supporters want. I promise you I’ll lead in a real, authentic way. I love winning.’ 

To compound England’s misery, the favourites for the World Cup are France, who hammered Australia on Sunday and are playing with a flair and a ferocity that suggests they will win the trophy in front of their home fans in Paris on October 28.  

Expect Emmanuel Macron to be in the stadium, smugger than ever. Can it get any worse for England rugby and the Tories? 

Watch: Nish Kumar meets his match on women’s rights

Who says Britain no longer produces quality telly? Mr S this weekend thoroughly enjoyed the sight of Nish Kumar – a man who identifies as a comedian – being put firmly in his place by TV presenter Lowri Turner on women’s rights. Invited on to Jeremy Vine’s Channel 5 show, Kumar waxed lyrical on the subject, declaring that:

I believe that the transgender community deserves our love and support. But there is a bizarre fixation with it in the British press. I don’t know what’s going on. It feels like everyone in the British media has like caught some sort of brainwaves about the subject. It is a community that people have a pathological obsession with. I just think: live and let live.

To which Turner responded by saying that:

Speaking as a woman obviously, when I see some of my rights under threat, I haven’t got a “brainworm,” I’m not “pathological,” I’m simply defending my rights. And I think that feminists – whether you want to call them TERFs or not – have a right to defend their rights. We’re not having a kind of brain explosion here, this is quite a serious issue about women’s rights that need to be defended.

Nish Kumar talking about brainworms? Wonders will never cease…

Trussites inspire their peers in parliament

So. Farewell Then. Nadine Dorries. The departure of the bestselling author from parliament got Mr S wondering just which books her colleagues have been reading this past year. Fortunately, the Commons Library publishes a list of all works purchased and borrowed, allowing us to discover just what is on our honourable members’ minds…

The latest list, covering the period up from October 2022 to March this year, tells us that £638 worth of new books purchased include scholarly insights on US-China relations, treatises on diplomacy and leadership, practical paths to Korean reunification, memoirs on American policing, genetic studies on inequality and a history of the debate on climate change. The diaries of Chips Channon now adorn the library walls, as does the distinctly less stimulating ‘Secret Diary of a Tory MP’.

Which of these tempted MPs in the same period? None it seems. Instead, bookish members fattened their eyes on David Cameron’s biography, For the Record (borrowed twice), Hannah White’s book on What is Wrong with the Commons, Jeremy Hunt’s post-pandemic NHS screed, and Sebastian Payne’s Fall of Boris Johnson. The top two titles though were Kwasi Kwarteng’s study of Thatcher’s leadership, and, most borrowed of all, Harry Cole and James Heale’s Out of the Blue: The Unexpected Rise and Rapid Fall of Liz Truss. Perhaps MPs are looking for lessons on what not to do in power?

Steerpike looks forward to Nadine taking her rightful place among such literary giants when she publishes her eagerly awaited work on the ‘Political Assassination of Boris Johnson’ in due course…

Net Zero is condemning more Brits to energy poverty

Here’s another great idea from the net zero establishment: only heat your home when it is warm and sunny outdoors. In its Sixth Carbon Budget paper, the government’s Climate Change Committee advises homeowners to turn their heating on in the afternoon, so that they can turn it off again during the evening when demand for electricity is higher. ‘Where homes are sufficiently well-insulated,’ it says, ‘it is possible to pre-heat ahead of peak times, enabling access to cheaper tariffs which reflect the reduced costs associated with running networks and producing power during off-peak times.’ In other words, boil yourself when the outdoor temperature is relatively warm, and with any luck you might still be tolerably warm when it is freezing outdoors at eight in the evening.

The advice is an admission of where we are headed. At the moment, for most of us, there is no difference between the price of electricity during the afternoon and the evening – it is only at night that we can buy off-peak electricity. That is not how it looks like being in the future. A big part of the plan for decarbonising the electricity system is to manage demand by varying tariffs throughout the day. That is the whole point of smart meters. We had a foretaste of this last winter when customers with smart meters were offered small discounts if they agreed to turn off appliances during the early evening on days when demand was high but, thanks to a lack of sun and wind, renewable energy was in short supply.

That, however, is only the beginning. At the moment, with the help of back-up from gas plants, we don’t have a huge problem in balancing demand and with supply. But by 2035 (2030 in the case of the Labour party) the government wants to remove all fossil fuels from the electricity grid. What do we do then? No-one seems able to explain. Investment in – very expensive – energy storage isn’t coming along at anything like the pace it would need to if we are going to be able to enjoy an uninterrupted supply of power throughout the day. Given that the supply of wind energy can fall away to virtually nothing during calm periods, and solar energy falls to zero every evening, we have a very serious problem. The tendency for still periods to concur with the coldest winter nights exacerbates the problem – especially if the country does as the government wants and switches to heat pumps.

As you can see, from the report of the Commons Business Select Committee ‘demand-side response’ is a big part of the energy industry’s plans. But it isn’t going to be nice little incentives like those offered to householders last winter in the form of £10 vouchers and the like. In future there will be a lot less carrot and a lot more stick – with surge pricing structures akin to those used by companies like Uber. Just think of the price of electricity is going to have to be jacked up to match supply and demand on a cold, still winter’s evening when – in normal times – demand would be at its highest.

In Britain’s net zero future it won’t just be a case of turning your heating on a few hours early to pre-heat your home. Many customers face being priced out of the electricity market altogether when supply of renewables is weak. On a sunny, windy afternoon you may be able to turn on your heating with abandon, even if you don’t need it on. But freezing, still evenings? Maybe there will be a special deal on woolly jumpers.

How Georgia Meloni plans to stop the boats

Few can deny that the arrival of 100,000 illegal migrants to Britain from France by small boat since 2018 is nothing short of a catastrophe. 

 So what word would best describe the arrival in Italy by sea from North Africa of 100,000 illegal migrants already this year? 

That is well over double the number of migrant sea arrivals in Italy during the same period in 2022. It means this year’s total will almost certainly break the record set in 2016 of 181,436. This weekend alone more than 4,000 migrants arrived by boat on the tiny Italian island of Lampedusa half way between Tunisia and Italy.

The record number of illegal migrant sea arrivals in Italy this year would seem to prove that the country’s new conservative Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, like her British counterpart Rishi Sunak, has totally and utterly failed to honour her 2022 election campaign pledge to stop the boats. 

But, in fact, the situation in Italy – thus Europe – would be far worse if she were not in charge. 

She knows, as everyone knows, that once migrants set foot in your country it is virtually impossible to deport them anywhere, let alone to Rwanda. 

So Meloni’s main focus is not on dealing with the migrants once they are in Italy but on stopping them getting to Italy. 

Since coming to power last October she has devoted much of her energy to cajoling reluctant European Union leaders into agreeing that the migrant crisis is not just Italy’s but Europe’s problem and that the EU should pay – i.e. bribe – North Africa to stop migrants at the source. 

Traditionally, Libya has been the preferred people smuggler departure point in the central Mediterranean, even though it is over 300 miles away from Sicily. However, this year for the first time there are more migrant departures from Tunisia which is far closer. 

Tunisia verges on bankruptcy and collapse. The dreams that inspired its Arab Spring have disappeared into the Sahara. Its president, Kais Saied, who was elected in 2019 suspended democracy in 2021, and rules by decree. 

It is to Tunisia in particular that Meloni has turned her attention. 

In March, she warned EU leaders at a European Council summit that ‘if Tunisia collapses’ Italy – and thus Europe – risks the arrival by sea of ‘900,000 migrants from Tunisia.’ 

Italy’s secret services meanwhile warned of a further 685,000 migrants ready to cross to Italy from Libya which has been the traditional migrant departure point since ‘we’ deposed Colonel Gaddafi’s in 2011. 

The Italians, though founder members of the EU, are traditionally mocked and derided by the smarmy French and Germans, despite Italy’s history as the beating heart of Europe. 

But Meloni is steadily emerging as the most important leader in Europe. 

This is above all due to the general move to the right across the Continent. But it is also because of the failure of either Emmanuel Macron or the German Chancellor Olaf Scholz to fill the vacuum left by Angela Merkel as de facto EU leader. 

As a result, in July, the European Union signed a deal in Tunis with President Saied, orchestrated by Meloni after months of intense diplomatic activity. The EU promised to give €105 million to Tunisia to stop the boats. It also gave Tunisia €150 million in aid as the first tranche of a promised €1 billion aid and investment package. Both Meloni and EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen were present. 

This is similar to the deal the EU struck in 2016, after Merkel’s disastrous decision to open the floodgates to all and sundry in 2015, when it agreed to give Recep Erdogan €6 billion to stop boats crossing to Greece. 

In the case of Turkey, many of those seeking to cross to Greece were genuine refugees from Syria and Afghanistan. In the case of Tunisia and Libya, many come from countries that are not war zones.

There are thought to be at least half a million illegal migrants in Italy at any one time. Many move on to countries in the north, such as Britain, where work and welfare are easier to get.

Last year, there were 105,129 migrant sea arrivals in Italy. The top three countries of origin were Egypt, Tunisia, and Bangladesh, where there are no wars, though Syria and Afghanistan came in at fourth and fifth. There were 77,195  asylum requests. Of requests decided in 2022 (which does not correspond to requests made), only 12 per cent were granted refugee status, though many more were granted leave to remain. But Italy only ever actually deports about 5,000 migrants a year. So it makes little difference.

This year’s migrant sea arrivals have already exceeded last year’s total and the top three countries of origin are not war zones: Guinea, Ivory Coast, and Tunisia.

But at least the deal with Tunisia is reducing the flow.  

Thanks to the EU deal that Meloni masterminded, the Tunisian coastguard has stopped and returned to Tunisia this summer boats headed for Italy containing 40,000 migrants – compared with only 15,000 in the whole of 2022. On the night of 14-15 August alone they stopped 18 boats with 630 migrants on board. 

If only the French coastguard did the same in the English Channel. 

In Libya, meanwhile, since 2017 successive left-wing Italian governments paid for and equipped the Libyan coastguard to stop and return migrant boats to Libya, at a rate of around 30,000 migrants a year. 

The Italian left and its global allies try to keep quiet about this initiative. But even the left, when push came to shove, realised that there was no alternative. 

In February, Meloni renewed Italy’s payments to the Libyan coastguard for a further three years and supplied five more patrol vessels. 

Meloni’s next move will be to convince her EU partners to establish hot spots in North Africa to process asylum applications. But she will not get very far until after next May’s Euro elections at which the right is expected to make massive gains and win majority control of the European Parliament for the first time in its history. 

One thing is sure though: Meloni and Italy cannot defend Europe alone. 

Is the game up for Justin Trudeau?

In the dog days of summer, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his Liberal government are skating on thin ice once more. 

An August 18-23 national survey by Abacus Data of 2,189 adults revealed that 56 per cent of respondents believed he ‘should step down’ rather than run again for re-election. Only 27 per cent felt he should stay, and 17 per cent were unsure. 

This number is in line with recent polling data in Canada. Pierre Poilievre and the opposition Conservatives have led in almost every opinion poll conducted since he became party leader on September 10, 2022. Moreover, the federal government has largely slipped into the 26-29 per cent range in national popularity – and, in several cases, is behind by either close to or above double digits. In the most recent example, the Conservatives lead the Liberals by 38-26 per cent in an August 23 poll by Abacus Data. 

For Trudeau, who has led the Liberals since 2013 and been PM since 2015, this is a real kick in the political backside. The Canadian public is clearly tired of his ineffective, mediocre leadership and want him to return to private life.

In fairness, this isn’t the first time that Trudeau has teetered on the brink of political disaster. He’s survived a multitude of political pitfalls, hurdles, mistakes, mishaps and scandals the past eight years. This includes three older instances of blackface, two ethics violations, public spats with some female MPs and ministers and spending taxpayer dollars like a drunken sailor.

Was it skill, or the luck of fools, that enabled him to survive this long? His political spin doctors obviously helped him to some degree. That’s what they’re paid to do, after all. At the same time, significant stumbles by the two previous Conservative leaders, Andrew Scheer and Erin O’Toole, helped save the PM’s bacon in the 2019 and 2021 elections, respectively.

Poilievre is a different political animal than his two direct predecessors. I’ve known him for over two decades, and endorsed him a couple of days before he entered the Conservative leadership race. He’s intelligent, strategic, an excellent orator, media savvy, and enjoys the give and take of discussion and debate. 

Most importantly, Poilievre is as politically astute as one of his more successful predecessors, former Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper. An admirer of the late British Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill, he knows full well ‘those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.’ To Poilievre’s credit, he hasn’t deviated from this credo one iota since becoming party leader.

The Conservative leader has also taken several pages out of Trudeau’s political playbook – and other parties on the left. He’s targeted young voters, political independents and the apolitical with videos and speeches about housing, cryptocurrency, and reducing the influence of ‘gatekeepers’ in society. He’s also crafted messaging to directly appeal to middle class voters, talking about escalating costs of staples like milk, bread and butter, mortgage rates and real estate prices, gas prices at the pumps, and the ‘affordability crisis’ that various provinces are struggling with.

Most Conservative leaders in Canada – and, truth be told, around the world – would traditionally shy away from this type of messaging. Even though similar themes were ultimately successful for right-leaning world leaders like former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, former US President Donald Trump and former Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison. As it turns out, Poilievre’s strategy has worked exceedingly well and appealed to many Conservatives and non-Conservatives in my country. The proof is in the pudding – and polling, as the case may be.

As Daniel Johnson nicely put it in the Daily Telegraph, Poilievre ‘offers a modernising, moderately libertarian agenda, a change from the Liberals’ big state profligacy and fiscal incontinence. For the first time in eight years, Trudeau is up against a dangerous opponent.’

Will Poilievre’s masterful strategy ultimately succeed against Trudeau’s lousy leadership? Time will tell. The Liberals currently have a three year confidence and supply agreement with the New Democrats, Canada’s Socialist party, in place until June 2025. It could potentially save Trudeau’s political hide yet again. Based on current Canadian attitudes about the Prime Minister, it’s also possible that his best-before date (if there really ever was one) has expired.   

What went wrong at the Open University?

The Open University is a cherished British institution. The sociologist Michael Young, who went on to become a Labour peer, conceived this ‘university of the air’ as a force which would democratise university education, bringing learning to the masses via lectures broadcast by the BBC at the crack of dawn.   

One can only imagine how horrified Young would have been to learn that the beloved OU, which has given second chances to so many students, is currently facing three legal challenges from staff and students who say they have been discriminated against because they dared to express the ‘gender critical’ view that sex matters.  

Professor Jo Phoenix’s case will go to the Employment Tribunal in October. As a criminologist, she has spoken critically on issues such as male offenders being housed in the female prison estate. Her claim centres on the harassment that she says she faced from OU colleagues as a result. (An OU spokesperson says, ‘The Open University is an environment where an academic can express a view freely, and others can choose to disagree. That is the nature of academic debate and holds true, even for the most polarising of topics.’) Pilgrim Tucker is a PhD student who also says that she has been bullied and harassed at the OU because of her gender critical views. 

The most recent and perhaps the most shocking case is that of Almut Gadow, who was sacked from her role teaching criminal law at the OU after she challenged new requirements to teach gender identity theory as an uncontested truth. Gadow is being supported by the Free Speech Union, whose founder and director is Michael Young’s son Toby.   

If Gadow is successful, her case will exemplify the way in which university curricula are being ‘liberated’ from academic control by EDI (Equality, Diversity and Inclusion) departments. Gadow says that the OU EDI department demanded that all curricula should be revised in line with the tenets of a set of theories which are often termed ‘Critical Social Justice’, which includes intersectionality, Critical Race Theory, decoloniality, Education for Sustainable Development, Queer Theory, and gender identity theory. Crucially, Gadow claims EDI wanted these ideas to be taught not as theories, but as uncontested facts. The law course that Gadow taught on, she says, was redesigned around a ‘core theme’ of ‘liberating the curriculum’.  

According to Gadow’s statement, tutors were told to teach about gender identity, insisting that gender identity should trump sex in criminal contexts, for example leading to the demand that pronouns should be identity-based, implying that a female rape victim should be obliged to call her rapist ‘she’ if the perpetrator claimed to identify as a woman. 

Gadow’s claim also touches on the potential intellectualisation of paedophilia. Gadow says in her Crowdfunder statement: ‘It had become apparent to me that some [curriculum liberators] treated ‘minor attraction’ (i.e. paedophilia) as part of the “diverse sexualities and gender identities” Open University law teaching now seeks to “centre”.’ 

This may seem astonishing, but Queer Theory is identified with the intellectualisation of paedophilia. A search of the OU library catalogue for ‘minor attraction’ returns 273 hits. The first of these is ‘Minor Attraction: A Queer Criminological Issue’, published in 2017. This paper uses a ‘queer criminology’ framework to question the stigmatisation of paedophiles:   

‘There exists evidence that minor attraction is a sexual orientation, and the parallels between the treatment of MAPs [Minor-Attracted Persons] and LGBT populations are striking. Employing queer criminology’s use of deconstructionist techniques, we address the current state of criminology and criminal justice, which sees MAPs as a suspect population warranting formal control’.  

In an ideologically monolithic climate, Gadow’s crime was essentially asking awkward questions in an online forum for law tutors after being told it was not the correct forum for that type of discussion. She says she was accused of insubordination and of violating the OU’s transgender inclusion policy. She was told that her persistent critical comments amounted to bullying and harassment, and was sacked for gross misconduct. 

The OU contest Gadow’s account, saying: ‘Given these ongoing legal proceedings, we do not intend to comment further at this time, save to say that we strongly dispute the account which we understand Almut Gadow to have given to the media about the circumstances of, and reasons for, her dismissal; the university’s criminal law curriculum and modules; and its equality, diversity and inclusion policies.’  

Academic freedom does not only apply to research, it is also central to what makes university teaching different from school teaching. Scholars have traditionally designed their own courses. Some of these courses may have been bad or even nonsensical, but their content was not mandated by management. When EDI departments take control, it means that nonsense is imposed from on high, and it is the same nonsense for everyone.   

Gadow’s case shines a light on current restrictions on academic freedom regarding the curriculum and teaching. The academic freedom to teach, and even to ask questions about the curriculum, is increasingly being restricted by EDI encroachment into what would once have been seen as academic, scientific and scholarly prerogatives. Gadow’s case may be extreme, but it reflects a wider trend, reflected for example in QAA curriculum benchmarks adopting ‘Critical Social Justice’ theories across curricula, even in mathematics.  

University managers often say that EDI must be ‘at the heart of everything we do’. This is reflected for example in recent proposals to centre EDI in the next Research Excellence Framework (REF). At first glance, ‘Equality, Diversity and Inclusion’ may seem as unobjectionable as motherhood and apple pie. But Almut Gadow’s case shows that we need to look again. The Open University once championed real equality, diversity and inclusion by encouraging people from all walks of life to pursue education. These values could not be more different from the narrowly ideological agenda that Almut Gadow has so bravely challenged.  

Why is the RSPCA defending the American Bully dog?

Britain is caught in the jaws of a dangerous dog.   

In the past two years, fatal dog attacks in the UK have increased dramatically. It used to be that around three people a year were killed by dogs. In 2022, that rose to ten people – including four children. Another five people have already been killed by dogs in 2023.  

This rise is disproportionately explained by one breed: the American Bully, a close relative of the already banned American Pit Bull Terrier, which was cruelly bred to fight other dogs to the death. The American Bully now accounts for over 70 per cent of deaths from dogs in the UK since 2021. It is also behind nearly half of all dog attacks, the majority of these being against other dogs or pets. In one week of July this year, one dog a day was killed by an American Bully in the UK.  

Despite these astounding figures, the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) are aggressively lobbying the government to prevent not only a ban on the American Bully, but to bring the American Pit Bull Terrier (responsible for around 60 per cent of all deaths to dogs in the US) and other dangerous dog breeds back to the UK.   

The RSPCA calls their view on dangerous dogs ‘anti BSL’, meaning anti-Breed Specific Legislation. As this suggests, the argument is that there are no differences in aggression between different dog breeds. In other words, whilst the RSPCA presumably agrees that Pointers point and Retrievers retrieve, they say ‘there’s no robust scientific evidence to suggest that prohibited types are more likely to be involved in dog bite incidents or fatalities than any other breed’, and ‘although it might seem that some dogs are born to be aggressive, it is more accurate to say that they are born with inherited tendencies that might, if not controlled, make aggressive behaviour more likely.’ That dog fighting rings created breeds specifically for the purpose of killing is seemingly irrelevant to the RSPCA’s belief that breed barely matters.  

Their view is clearly false. To hold this position you have to ignore mounds of scientific data, publicly available figures on attacks and deaths, and cherry-pick research. Indeed, it seems even the RSPCA itself doesn’t really believe that all breeds are created equal. Their own dog insurance, for example, will not cover multiple fighting breeds, such as the American Pitbull Terrier, and even other fighting breeds that are not forbidden by the Dangerous Dogs Act. The American Bully is not even listed by the RSPCA’s insurance arm as a separate breed. Anyone wanting to insure their Bully has to register it as an Pitbull-cross, meaning it would be denied any cover. Such dogs, it seems, are too risky to insure.  

This hypocrisy is only the tip of the absurd iceberg. The RSPCA states that from 1991 (the year of the Dangerous Dogs Act and the banning of breeds such as the American Pit Bull Terrier) to 2016 there were 30 deaths caused by dogs. Of these deaths, the RSPCA confidently declares ‘only nine were carried out by dogs identified as Pit Bull terrier types’. This conveniently ignores the fact that despite a ban on Pit Bulls, they nevertheless still managed to account for almost one-third of all UK deaths by dog. That is quite some achievement for a breed supposedly not any more prone to violence than your average Cockapoo.  

The rot of these bad arguments goes deeper. A central thrust of the RSPCA’s anti-BSL lobbying concerns ‘bites’. The charity says that, despite a ban of dangerous breeds, dog-bites have increased by 154 per cent since 1999 to 2019. This shows, they say, that breed bans do not work. Whilst this completely ignores the obvious counterfactual (would these numbers be worse without breed bans?) it is also deeply misleading. In these figures, a bite from a chihuahua is treated the same as an arm torn off by an American Bully. As the RSPCA likely well knows, it is not ‘bites’ that the public cares about – it is bites that maim, and dogs that kill.  

Fighting breeds, like the American Bully, were bred from stock that could survive intense battles that sometimes lasted hours, while they were locked in a pit and forced to fight to the death. Fight winners were selectively bred for their ability to obliterate their opponent – which was another dog that had been similarly selected for those same violent traits. It is not surprising that the American Bully, founded on intensive inbreeding from fighting dogs in the late 1980s and early 90s, is responsible for deaths and maulings so severe that one victim had to be identified by his shoe. 

It is difficult to know why the RSPCA is choosing to pick this fight. Why are they spending their limited donations defending dog breeds they won’t even insure themselves? Strangely, it is not even that the RSPCA is against animal bans. They have supported calls for bans on the importing and breeding of domestic wild cat hybrids – so-called dangerous cats – on the grounds that they suffer too much in domestic settings.   

Whatever the reason, the RSPCA should re-examine its purpose. It is bizarre that the animal welfare charity Peta – not known for its moderation – somehow has a more sensible American Bully position than the RSPCA. In response to the repeated attacks and killings of other dogs by the American Bully, Peta has openly called for a breeding ban, saying that ‘no one can pretend that owners are solely to blame’. Instead, Peta say, it is ‘an undeniable fact that the most serious and fatal dog attacks are by bully breeds’. An undeniable fact that the RSPCA is choosing to consistently ignore.  

Unfortunately the RSPCA have the ear of government on this issue. A recent freedom of information request found that an RSPCA representative sits on Defra’s dangerous dog taskforce. Until the charity re-examines its position, it is likely that more people and dogs will be attacked, maimed and killed by this breed.   

Just last week, two women were mauled trying to save their dogs from an unprovoked assault by two American Bullies. They were lucky in the end, and were only severely injured, not killed. The RSPCA and government need to wake up to the horrifying reality that is the American Bully in Britain.  

I’ve had it with awful dinner parties

I’m always a bit wary when invited for the first time to a dinner party at a friend’s home; some of the least enjoyable social occasions I’ve ever attended have been misleadingly advertised as such. The inevitable email about ‘dietary requirements’ has been duly responded to. You’ve muttered to yourself about the time (8 o’clock? Why so late?) and worked out that because your hosts (and I use that word advisedly) live on the other side of London, you won’t be in bed before midnight. And the route is terrible – but never mind, it’s lovely to be invited to someone’s home for dinner, isn’t it?

Welcome to a bad dinner party.

On arrival, as your host opens the door, you can already hear the toddlers whining about not wanting to go to bed. There is no smell of cooking. As you walk in, you note that the table is not set, and neither is there any sign of pre-dinner snacks such as olives or canapés. There is a suspiciously warm-looking open bottle of white wine. No ice is available.

My friend Jess is a notoriously bad timekeeper, to the point that when I invite her to mine to eat, I tell her to come an hour before I actually want her there, to be in with a chance of her arriving by 7.30. Even so, when she invited me to her house for Friday night dinner, I turned up bang on time.

I’d been dreading being greeted with the news that dinner would be a little late, but it was worse than that. Jess was struggling up the steps to her front door laden with the bags containing our meal, including a whole uncooked chicken. The house was a tip, the table unlaid and the fridge devoid of wine. As I set about helping her prepare, I did let her know how cross I was – although I stopped short of directing the large kitchen knife towards her throat instead of the chicken. I ended up cooking the whole damn lot while Jess sat around chatting to everyone, clearly unable to multitask, or even task. It was 9.30 by the time we sat down to eat, and the evening finished at 1 in the morning. I stopped at the garage for Gaviscon on the way home.

So (just in case you’re thinking of inviting me over) let me begin by saying that for me, the food is not the most important thing. If my opinion matters to you, here’s a list of absolute atrocities to avoid:

• A complete absence of cooking smells because nothing has been pre-prepared. No table laid. And no napkins when it is. Taking the very good chocolate and wine your guests bring and putting them away, but later serving Ferrero Rocher and Blossom Hill.
• Children still up and having to be put to bed (often repeatedly) while the host(s) run around looking frazzled – leaving their guest sitting there feeling about as welcome as a pork chop in a synagogue.
• The very worst dinner party crime is seeing the host dip a spoon in whatever they are cooking, tasting it, then putting the spoon back in. I once witnessed this happening several times and felt so queasy I pretended I had developed a migraine and went home.

Now, my faults are legion – but my own dinner parties are as near perfect as it is possible to be. I regularly have people round to my home to eat and, unless it is a special occasion, it will be a fairly casual affair, with no standing on ceremony. But I always ensure that my guests have something to eat and drink on arrival. The wine will be chilled, with at least one cocktail on offer too – and there will always be a few snacks for immediate reassurance. I will have pre-prepared as much as possible so that I can actually chat with my friends while making the salads and adding finishing touches.

The table will be set, with napkins, fresh bread, and good-quality salt and pepper – an element very often missing from the dinner table. How do you ask for seasoning without insulting your host? Put the bloody salt and pepper on the table.

There are so many things I don’t get about how other people do it. Why would anyone cook you a meal they’ve never attempted before? And how come some people are incapable of understanding cooking times? I was once invited to dinner at Alice’s, who, having poured a lukewarm glass of wine for her guests, proceeded to sit with us all in the living room for over an hour before suddenly announcing that she had better go and put the (baked) potatoes in. Some time later, she shouted to her partner (who had failed to refresh our drinks): ‘I didn’t realise the oven wasn’t working, it will take a little longer’. An hour later we sat down to pastry that was burnt on one side and raw on the other, and rock-hard potatoes.

Here’s an idea: if you can’t cook or don’t enjoy it, order in, and take the time and trouble not to cook but to actually host the evening. Make some snacks, chill some wine, have a cocktail ready mixed. Be relaxed and actually talk to your guests instead of running around looking stressed and resentful. And if you can’t reliably get your kids out of the way, get a babysitter and let’s go to a restaurant. It’s why they were invented, after all.

What you get for a £25 million custom Rolls-Royce

Back in the early days of the motor car, Rolls-Royce would sell you a ladder chassis and drivetrain, but for the bodywork you’d have to consult a coachbuilder and write a separate cheque. It wasn’t until 1946 that Rolls-Royce provided its own. Henry Royce dealt with the oily bits, but when it came to the styling, his patrons had to visit the likes of Park Ward, Mulliner, James Young and Hooper.

There were dozens of firms to choose from and the outcome would be a collaboration between designer and client, not unlike tailoring. There was an upside to all of this: Rolls-Royce customers often ended up with something unique, or at the very least rare. While Henry Ford was mass-producing identical Model Ts in Detroit, London’s mews (and elsewhere) rocked to the percussive banging of sheet metal, with rakish saloon, touring, coupé and roadster shapes fitted to chassis brought down from Rolls’s works in Derby. These creations would bring the streets to a standstill; despite stiff competition from Bentley and Bugatti, nothing made a statement like a prewar Roller.

The owner of the car you see here hopes to stop traffic in a similar fashion. Rolls-Royce still offer coachbuilding, but now it does so in-house. And while a hundred years ago it was possible to spend up to £3,000 on a four-wheeled spectacular (£150,000 in today’s wonga), things have escalated. At £25 million, the 2023 Rolls-Royce Droptail is, by a considerable margin, the most expensive new car ever built.

The reason coachbuilding is now so rare and pricey is because cars are all built as monocoques, with the chassis and body as a structural whole. This makes manufacturing unique or very limited-edition models rather complex and time-consuming. The Droptail’s gestation took four years. Ford and Toyota would expect to shift 300,000 units off the back of an investment like that. Here, we’re talking rather less.

This is the third model to leave the Coachbuild department, where design is headed by Alex Innes. The first was the Sweptail in 2018, a one-off commissioned five years earlier by the son of a Hong Kong property tycoon. The second was a trio of Boat Tail cars starting in 2021, one of which has never been seen in public (there are persistent rumours it belongs to Jay-Z and Beyoncé). Droptail will be a quartet. Last weekend, at Pebble Beach where the world’s wealthiest car enthusiasts congregate each August, La Rose Noir Droptail was unveiled. Now comes the second in this series: Amethyst Droptail.

Last month, I got to see it in the metal in a top-secret studio within Rolls-Royce’s Goodwood plant and before doing so I had to sign an NDA the size of a phone book. The V12-powered Droptail is the first two-seat Rolls-Royce since the interwar era, when American customers in particular had their coachbuilders come up with something sportier than those requested by backseat Brits with their chauffeur. F. Scott Fitzgerald imagined Jay Gatsby owning such a machine for flitting between West Egg and Manhattan after dark.

As such, the proportions are rather different than we’ve come to expect from BMW-owned Rolls. Innes went way back for inspiration, reinterpreting some of the spirit of the 1930 Brewster Roadster, which was one of the original US-only specials, and the monolithic 1912 Silver Ghost ‘The Sluggard’, which was coachbuilt to portray strength as well as its 100mph top speed.

On the Droptail, there’s less of a rear overhang, while the cabin is high-collared and reduced flanks. An upsweep line on the door panels, unheard of on a Rolls, pushes its form forward. The exterior details are minimal and clean, and for the first time the pantheon grille – less ostentatious than usual – has been chamfered and the vane pieces kinked. These things come together to make, not a sports car, but certainly the most athletic Rolls-Royce shape we’ve seen since the 1930s.

The fact that the Droptail is 5.3 metres in length – much the same as other modern Rolls – is a testament to the clever proportions, which include a high waistrail and snug glasshouse, that make it appear lower and more compact. This is surely the most lux-o-barge two-seater ever sketched. The nautical metaphors continue to the rear, which is referred to by designer Innes as the ‘aft deck’ (and which is the first open-pore wood surface to produce downforce on a car). Innes refers to the ‘transom area’, a term taken from yacht design where the deck slopes down to meet the waterline. Meanwhile, the aero void at the back of the deck should probably be considered the only time Rolls-Royce has ever put its badge on a car with a spoiler.

Inside, the occupants feel cocooned and protected by a huge swathe of calamander open-pore wood – the most extensive wooden surface ever crafted by Rolls-Royce – which wraps around the cabin. Shaped almost like a scarf or shawl, it looks to be a single piece of uninterrupted veneer but is, in fact, made from 32 pieces. The sand-coloured secondary leather was chosen to match with the caramel strands in the wood. It took six months and 99 false starts just to find the perfect log.

There is no convertible roof. Instead, there is an electrochromic glass and carbon-fibre canopy that is set aside and fitted (you’ll need your gentleman’s gentleman to help with this bit) over the cabin, transforming the open speedster into a closed coupé with a hint of 1930s West Coast hot rod.

Who bought this thing? The identity of the Amethyst’s owner has not been revealed but Innes did say the car’s specification embodies certain connections. ‘We explored their sensibilities, pursuits and values through curated details, each imbued with symbolic significance.’ These include ‘a passion for modern design, haut horology, and a family connection to gemstones.’ Gemstones are a longstanding source of the owner’s riches and amethyst is the son’s birthstone. A polished ring of amethyst sits under the Spirit of Ecstasy and illuminates the winged figurine. I’m told the patron’s precious jewel collection, like their car collection, is significant, and they have so much contemporary art they’ve built a private museum. The main body colour – a soft purple with delicate silver undertone – is inspired by the Globe Amaranth wildflower, which blooms in the desert near one of the client’s homes and, putting my Sherlock Holmes hat on, probably makes that Mexico, though I’ve been given hints the owner may originally hail from Morocco.

The owner’s son is the watch obsessive. There’s a nod to that in the brushed stainless steel grille, which took 50 hours to buff, and more directly with a one-off dash-mounted Vacheron Constantin, which can be removed and worn on the wrist.

The designer speaks of projecting modernity while acknowledging the past. It’s about ‘creating something artful that has real meaning,’ says Innes. ‘[This car is] glamour distilled, imbuing the personal passions and distinctly bold visions of the commissioning family. It is an elevated statement of true connoisseurship.’

If you’d handed over £25 million, you’d expect some floral flattery too. But given the rising values of the world’s rarest classic cars, you never know; perhaps at the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance in the year 2123, the car’s auction estimate will exceed that sum adjusted for inflation. But I’d be more surprised if that Vacheron Constantin timepiece hasn’t gone walkies by then.

Nadine Dorries blasts Sunak in first interview since resigning

It’s only been a day since Nadine Dorries announced her resignation as an MP – in a scathing letter released to the Mail on Sunday blasting Rishi Sunak’s premiership. But it seems that the former culture secretary still has plenty of ammunition left over.

Dorries appeared on TalkTV this afternoon to explain why she felt she had to resign now, and to take another pop at the Prime Minister for good measure.

In the interview, she claimed that she had actually told Cabinet Secretary Simon Case last summer that she planned to resign, but that ‘there was a huge amount of pressure not to go’ from her colleagues. She held out this long, she said, because she didn’t want to force the Tories to fight a by-election on her patch that they would likely lose. 

In the end, Dorries said she felt like she had to step down because ‘the entire summer Rishi Sunak has been asking me to go’. Accusing Sunak of indulging the growing calls for her to give up her seat, Dorries blasted the prime minister for ‘[whipping] up a public frenzy which has endangered my safety’.

‘I don’t know what Rishi Sunak is doing because it didn’t have to be this way. He has now put the party in the position of having to fight yet another by-election,’ she said. Dorries says she doesn’t have high hopes for the Tories in the upcoming contest, predicting ‘if my seat is lost, it will be the biggest defeat in a by-election in living history’.

Sticking the knife in further, Dorries said colleagues should blame No. 10 and not her for any defeat in Mid Bedfordshire. She said she couldn’t understand why Sunak would choose to force a by-election on the party just as his first anniversary as PM was coming up – rather conveniently side-stepping her own role in forcing the election.

Elsewhere in her interview, Dorries repeated her claim that Rishi Sunak has been presiding over a ‘zombie parliament’. She also criticised Sunak for abandoning many of the policies that had been in motion when he took over, including house building targets and reforms for leaseholders.

Ominously, Dorries declared that there would be ‘more to come’ on the subject of why she didn’t get a peerage. 

Rounding up the chat, TalkTV presenter Nick de Bois asked Dorries if she thought the Tories had a chance of winning the next election with Rishi Sunak as leader? ‘No. I don’t think so. I think it’s very, very unlikely.’ Nor would she say if she would vote Tory at the election.  

It certainly seems like Dorries isn’t planning to go quietly…

The real origins of Putin’s war

In 1992, Richard Nixon assessed the future of Russia in a remarkably prophetic interview. ‘Russia is at a crossroads’, said the former US President:

It is often said the cold war is over and the West has won. But that is only half of the truth. Communism has been defeated but the ideas of freedom are now on trial. If they don’t work, there will be a reversion not to communism but to a new despotism which would pose a mortal danger to the rest of the world. It will be affected by a virus of Russian imperialism which has been a characteristic of Russian foreign policy for centuries.  

Therefore, the West and the US has a great stake in freedom succeeding in Russia. If it succeeds, then China and other communist states will follow. If it fails, the hardliners in China and Russia will get a new life. They will say it (freedom) failed so there is no reason for us to turn to democracy’.

Nixon was not the only soothsayer. The British ambassador to Moscow, Sir Rodric Braithwaite, wrote in his dispatch to London six months earlier: ‘We must now gear ourselves for what may well be a decade of instability with the rebirth of Russian nationalism, frightening in its power and there will be trials of strength between Russia and Ukraine’. He concluded the Russians now fear the ‘Time of Troubles’, prophesised by the fool at the end of the 19^th century opera ‘Boris Godunov’ – with hungers, tears and impenetrable darkness.  

This rebirth of authoritarian Russian nationalism was helped by the catastrophe of wholesale privatisation, with valuable state assets given to a tiny group of oligarchs who moved their wealth to London via offshore entities instead of investing in Russia. As this policy was based on the advice of US economists, Putin could blame western free-market capitalism for the chaos and corruption of the 1990s.   

But the real origins of the new despotism and ultra-nationalism that resulted in the invasion of Ukraine lie in a long-running conspiracy theory inside the Kremlin that Russia has been in a perpetual full-scale non-military war with the West. ‘This is underpinned by a belief, widely held by Russia’s leaders, that their country is under threat from the Euro-Atlantic alliance and is existential’, said Andrew Foxall, a former academic who now advises the Defence Secretary Ben Wallace. ‘This view did not originate with Putin but has become canonical under his leadership. Russia’s leaders perceive that Euro-Atlantic values – universal human rights and the rule of law – threaten Russia’s stability as much as its conventional capabilities.’

This siege mentality can be traced back to 2005 when the Defence Secretary Sergei Ivanov declared: ‘There is a war against Russia underway and it has been going on for quite a few years. No one declared war on us. There is not one country that is in a state of war with Russia. But there are people and organisations in various countries who take part in hostilities against Russia.’ These ‘organisations’, according to the Kremlin, included Netflix, the videogame Pokémon Go and the funding of NGOs as part of a CIA plot to harm Russia’s interests. All of this constituted an act of war. For Putin, any protesters in Russia were ‘paid agents of the West’. And the promotion of democracy was an attempt to ‘dismember Russia’, declared National Security Chief Nikolai Patrushev.  

By 2014, faced by what they regarded as a hybrid war by the West, the role of the security service, the FSB, was paramount. A new generation of Russian intelligence officers had taken over and were conscious of the humiliations of the past like their president. In Russians Among Us by Gordon Corera, there is a revealing account of a conversation between a former KGB operative and a serving FSB officer:

One American recalls witnessing the tension at the end of a long vodka-drinking session after a liaison meeting. An older Russian officer reminisced wistfully about the good old days of the Cold War, when the two spy services went head-to-head. But a young FSB officer reacted angrily. The older officer’s generation was the one that lost the Cold War, he said bitterly. His generation was determined to restore Russian pride and would take the fight to the enemy.

This hard-line mindset manifested itself in the invasion of the Crimea and Donbas region in 2014. The FSB recruited senior members of the Ukrainian Security Service, the SBU. Over the next seven years about 50 per cent of the security forces were recruited by FSB operatives, some using Kompromat techniques. The FSB spent an estimated $200 million per year in bribing and persuading Ukrainians to become Russian agents of influence, according to the Ukrainian lawyer Yuri Shulipa. He said these funds are derived from the state and Russian oligarchs but ultimately controlled by the Kremlin.  

The FSB’s agenda was to divide and weaken Ukraine and its security service, according to Valentyn Nalyvaichenko, head of the SBU between 2006 and 2010, and between 2014 and 2015. His investigation resulted in five FSB officers being arrested for espionage. The SBU discovered digital voice recorders, a video camera inside a fountain pen, a tiny container for storing digital data inside a keychain and a memo with instructions for undercover FSB operations.   

After Nalyvaichenko left the SBU, the FSB flourished in Ukraine before the invasion of the Crimea in 2014. ‘The FSB inserted their own agents into the Crimea government, its parliament and its law enforcement offices’, Nalyvaichenko told me. ‘Unfortunately, there was no SBU which had become a branch of the FSB’.   

In November 2013, the President of Ukraine, Victor Yanukovych had been ousted as president but refused to leave office. Ukraine was on the brink of civil war. Meanwhile, a group of 43 FSB and GRU (military intelligence) generals and officers and Vladislav Surkov, deputy chief of staff to Putin, twice secretly visited Yanukovich in Kyiv. ‘According to our investigation, Surkov and FSB officers were actively engaged in activities against the Ukrainian people’, said Nalyvaichenko.

It was during this period that the SBU allowed 20 high-ranking FSB officers to stay at a secret counter-terrorist facility near Kyiv where they were given access to the internal data and computer software of the Ministry of Interior. The FSB officers – heavily armed – copied everything and flew back to Moscow. 

On returning to the Kremlin, the FSB was in possession of a treasure trove of top-secret documents and discs. Using this stolen data, the FSB hacked MPs in the Ukrainian parliament, civil servants and military officers. ‘This unit operates as a special institution inside the FSB where 1,500 people work around the clock’, Nalyvaichenko told me. ‘They operate through the social media networks, robotic messaging systems, send out texts to make people panic over several days. When your mobile phone is under attack by this robotic calling system, you cannot make a call to anyone or text a message for several hours.’   

For the Ukrainian citizens of Crimea, it was much worse. From the day of the invasion in 2014, the FSB used the stolen database for disrupting their lives. The data was used to place all people at train and bus stations under surveillance. This enabled the FSB to arrest all military and police officers and their families. Hundreds of people were detained by the FSB.   

Nalyvaichenko told me the FSB have been using every cyber-attack at their disposal both before and after the invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Based on partly the data stolen in 2014, the FSB cyber-attacked Ukraine government websites, television channels, banks and corporations. ‘The FSB is very active on social media, telegram channels and public online forums and using these platforms to send out disinformation, fake news and trying to create panic among our people’, he said.  

Today the Ukrainian people are suffering from the unrelenting and ruthless firepower of Putin’s war machine. But the warning signs of brutal Russian nationalism was visible in the resurgence of the FSB, the Kremlin’s focus on influence operations, cyber hacking and the complacency of the 1990s. Perhaps if western leaders had listened to President Nixon in 1992 history would be different.  

A woke witch hunt has taken over the arts

Remove the preconceptions that stop you seeing clearly, and it is hard to tell the difference between how the arts are treated in the UK versus a dictatorship. In Russia and China, the authoritarian state is the oppressive force. In the West, the state won’t arrest you for breaking taboos, and for that we must be grateful. But perhaps we should refrain from being too pleased with ourselves.

Woke – or if you don’t like the word, identitarian – movements rather than authoritarian governments can still force degrading confessions to ideological thought crimes. Friends can still denounce each other, as if we were in America during the McCarthyite witch-hunts of the 1950s or China during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. Fear can still run through the arts, publishing and the liberal press. And, as in true autocracies, the price of speaking out can still mean losing your job and any chance of alternative work in your chosen field.

So commonplace are the symptoms of fear we barely register them now. A few days ago, to quote an example that got next to no publicity, an ‘interdisciplinary artist’ called Rosie Aspinall Priest took it upon herself to go through the social media of David Greig, a Scottish playwright and theatre director, as if this were an entirely normal way to behave – in the arts today I am afraid to say it is.

Her snooping paid off. She announced that Greig was guilty of ‘openly liking transphobic tweets’: a career-destroying offence, as she must have known. But how transphobic did they need to be to finish Greig off?

One tweet Greig liked referred to ‘gender madness’, a sackable offence, apparently. A second contrasted the police’s cruel arrest of an autistic girl, who had said that one of their officers looked like her ‘lesbian nana’, with the cops’ light handling of a transgender activist who allegedly punched a gender-critical feminist in the face.  

So you can be sure I am not misreading this, here is the tweet Greig liked in full. He was damned for endorsing the sentiment that ‘if you are a 16-year-old autistic girl who says someone looks like a lesbian you will be arrested and held in custody, but if you are a 26-year-old man who punches a woman twice at a women’s rights rally, you will just be cautioned’. And that was it. 

Understanding of people with disabilities in general, and with autism in particular, is in short supply. Far from being praised, Greig was forced to issue a grovelling apology for his ‘careless and harmful Twitter actions’. He promised that he would speak to HR – the modern equivalent of taking instructions from the parish priest – and ‘discuss making organisation-wide training available to ensure we approach these matters sensitively’.

Like so many other cases, the cancel campaign at the Edinburgh Festival has illustrated how bizarre our culture is becoming. Let me count the ways.

Spying and informing have become normalised. No one ever criticises an ‘interdisciplinary artist’ or anyone else for acting like a nark or a stool pigeon. They are public benefactors rather than sadists or busybodies.

Evidence of real harm is not required. To the best of my knowledge, no one suggested that Greig had discriminated against trans actors or against anyone else for that matter. The accusation that he had endorsed an unorthodox opinion was enough to send him into frantic efforts to save his career.

Meanwhile, apologies in the progressive world are now entirely divorced from repentance. No one cares if they are insincere. Everyone accepts that fear rather than true contrition inspires them. PRs, lawyers and friends tell anyone under fire to just say whatever they need to say to direct the Eye of Sauron elsewhere.

If artists do not apologise, they get the JK Rowling treatment: people who ought to be their friends turn on them for fear of being denounced themselves. After Rowling took up the gender critical cause, every star in the Harry Potter movies came under pressure to disassociate themselves from her. I have no doubt that many were genuine in their condemnations. But no one should pretend the spectacle did not have a McCarthyite element. Like authoritarian governments, authoritarian movements want to isolate their targets by tearing the natural bonds of affection and provoking friends into denouncing each other.

The most compelling parallel with dictatorship, however, is in the tentative nature of protests against such censorship. Artists do it obliquely in a code that only the initiated understand. The National Theatre, for example, dare not take on woke culture directly. But it has revived The Crucible, Arthur Miller’s 1953 reaction to McCarthyism, just when we need it the most.

There’s a contemporary feel to the passages in Miller’s autobiography Timebends describing how he decided to set a play in the witch mania that seized the small town of Salem, Massachusetts, in the 1790s. By the early 1950s, Miller was a successful playwright – he had made his name with Death of a Salesman. Like many on the US left, he had been associated with the Communist party in the 1930s. The association was brief and long ago, but much like endorsing a JK Rowling tweet today, the tenuous link was more than enough to destroy him.

‘McCarthyism’, whether practised by Joe McCarthy in the Senate or the House Un-American Activities Committee, was not a genuine effort to uncover Soviet influence in the US, which had been widespread in the 1930s and 1940s. Rather it became a purge of anyone with left-wing sympathies. To save themselves, targets had to name names, and damn people who may once have been their friends as Communists.

‘In effect,’ Miller wrote, ‘it came down to a government decree of moral guilt that could easily be made to disappear by ritual speech: intoning the names of fellow sinners and recanting former beliefs.’ How like the 1950s the 2020s appear.

Elia Kazan, who was to go on to be one of the great Hollywood directors, asked Miller to visit his home in New England. The two had worked together. They were friends and an artistic team, and now they had to decide whether to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee. Miller, a man of principle, was never going to name names. But as we can see today, principles come at a price.

Miller describes how he and Kazan left the house to walk in the woods:

He was trying, I thought, to appear relieved in his mind, to present the issue as settled, even happily so. The story, simple and by now routine, took but a moment to tell. He had been subpoenaed and had refused to cooperate but had changed his mind and returned to testify fully in executive session, confirming some dozen names of people he had known in his months in the party so long ago. He felt better now, clearer.

Kazan told Miller that Hollywood executives had spelt out to him that he would never work again if he did not satisfy the anti-Communist politicians in Washington. Miller sympathised with Kazan, just as we should sympathise with today’s artists who parrot party lines to save their careers. It is always a very big deal to expect someone to throw away everything they have worked for.

Miller thought Kazan a genius, and saw that ‘to be barred from his métier, kicked into the street, would be for him like a nightmarish overturning of the earth itself.’

And yet, and yet, Miller understood that he could be ‘up for sacrifice if Kazan knew I had attended meetings of [Communist] party writers years ago and had made a speech at one of them. I felt a silence rising around me, an impending and invisible wash of dulled vibrations between us.

Miller asked: ‘Who or what was now safer because this man in his human weakness had been forced to humiliate himself.’ A question we should also ask today.

As Miller was leaving, Kazan’s distraught wife Molly told him that most Americans agreed with the witch-hunt. Miller nodded and said that, yes, he supposed that they did. Trying to make conversation, Molly Kazan asked where Miller was heading to, ‘and I said that I was on my way to Salem. She instantly understood what my destination meant, and her eyes opened in sudden apprehension and possibly anger. “You’re not going to equate witches with this!”’

But he was and did. The genius of The Crucible lies in its depiction of the bureaucratisation of coercion. In the final act, the frenzy that led teenagers to condemn innocents to death for witchcraft has passed. The authorities sense the public mood is turning against them, and are now desperate to justify the judicial crimes they have presided over. 

They want John Proctor, Arthur Miller’s compromised hero, to confess to convince others that the Devil has indeed been abroad in Salem, and the panic and the executions of innocent people were not an enormous crime. In a scene straight out of the contemporary progressivism the witch-hunter Darnforth insists on the need for public humiliation:

Danforth: Proctor, you mistake me. I am not empowered to trade your life for a lie. You have most certainly seen some person with the Devil. Mr. Proctor, a score of people have already testified they saw this woman with the Devil.

Proctor: Then it is proved. Why must I say it?

Danforth: Why ‘must’ you say it! Why, you should rejoice to say it if your soul is truly purged of any love for Hell!

Proctor won’t confess to imaginary crimes. He condemns himself to death by saying he will not put his name to lies. Asked why, he cries, ‘Because it is my name! Because I cannot have another in my life! Because I lie and sign myself to lies! Because I am not worth the dust on the feet of them that hang! How may I live without my name? I have given you my soul; leave me my name!’

Like the witch crazes of the 1690s and the anti-communism of the 1950s, woke radicalism is burning itself out. Conservative readers probably need to accept that it did some good, but that good is passing as the movement confirms the truth of Franz Kafka’s observation that ‘every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy’. 

We have a culture of spying and guilt by association backed up by HR departments and forced apologies. No one believes the apologies it extracts from artists are anything other than a bending of the knee before power. 

As Miller said of McCarthyism, all that is left now is ritual speech, intoning the names of fellow sinners, and recanting former beliefs. One day, British culture will find the John Proctors who will refuse to lend their names to the witch hunt and revolt. I hope and believe it will be soon.