Bright, poor students are being badly failed by Britain’s schools

Britain’s flagging productivity is commonly thought to be the root of the country’s present economic struggles. And as successive governments have painfully discovered – not least Liz Truss’s – there is no quick fix for it. Looking longer-term and investing in the skills of the future workforce satisfies nobody’s desire for instant results. Yet it’s actually the best lever ministers can employ to reverse the slide. 

A strong, internationally competitive economy requires a flourishing pipeline of home-grown talent coming through schools, colleges and universities and into employment or entrepreneurship. Yet many of the future scientists, mathematicians, engineers and start-up gurus that this country needs to produce simply don’t make it through. The reason? Our education system blocks them off. Social mobility has stalled, and the conveyor belt of talent has come to a grinding halt alongside it. 

In the UK we now routinely squander the potential of highly able but disadvantaged pupils. This perpetuates a generational cycle of inequality and compounds the country’s slumping productivity. 

Analysis by the Sutton Trust, which I founded and chair, reveals just how drastic the situation has become. We examined a cohort of 2,500 young people from disadvantaged backgrounds who exhibited high academic potential at the end of primary school, and compared their progress at secondary school with that of their similarly placed but non-disadvantaged peers. The findings entirely disperse any fond notion of a level playing field.

Bright but poor students are now nearly twice as likely as their similarly talented, more affluent peers to drop out of the top third of attainment at GCSE, achieving on average a whole grade lower per subject. In 2021, 62 per cent of privileged high-potential pupils attained five or more grades 7-9 at GCSE, whereas less than 40 per cent of their less well-off peers achieved the same. 

While the inequalities that hinder academic attainment emerge early in life, they intensify in the secondary years. Falling behind early on creates significant challenges for catching up, a problem which has only been worsened by missed classroom time during the pandemic. Between 2017 and 2021, over 28,000 young people from less well-off families who demonstrated the potential at primary school to achieve top grades at GCSE failed to do so. 

This has far-reaching implications for A Levels, apprenticeships, and university placements, where the most competitive courses and positions are allocated based on school grades.

At the same time, recent economic modelling conducted for the Sutton Trust quantifies beyond doubt what boosting social mobility could do for the economy. Raising levels of social mobility to those of other Western European nations that we currently lag behind has the power to generate an astounding £39 billion annually in GDP. 

It’s hard to overstate the magnitude of this opportunity. Minimising the influence of pupil’s backgrounds on their educational futures undeniably benefits everyone. When the mission is economic renewal, that shift of approach becomes imperative. 

To unlock the potential of this generation, ministers must urgently review funding for schools in the most disadvantaged areas and prioritise the integration of the National Tutoring Programme into a comprehensive national strategy to bridge attainment gaps. 

This should not be a hard sell for a government apparently keen to make systemic change in the economy by driving talent and human potential into our start-ups and our corporates. The Prime Minister signalled that he understood this argument as well as anyone earlier this year when he said he would introduce mandatory maths to 18.  

And, after all, it’s the Treasury that stands to gain most by working more closely with the Department for Education to turn the tide on productivity by focusing on talent. Greater productivity results in larger tax receipts, which in turn allow for greater investment in schools. We are in a vicious circle of decline. We could make that circle virtuous.

Opportunities for young people must become the priority as political parties draft their manifestos for the approaching general election. By investing in the most disadvantaged areas and integrating support schemes, we can maximise the potential of the next generation and pull the country upwards. That way, we build a fairer society, of course. But we also build a richer one.

Sir Peter Lampl is founder and chairman of the Sutton Trust and chairman of the Education Endowment Foundation

The disappointing truth about Aperol spritz

I’m in Tuscany, where the piazzas glow orange at dusk, not only from the sunsets but also from the profusion of Aperol spritz. The bright orange drink has exploded in popularity in the past five years. Everyone’s drinking it: young women, middle-aged couples, groups of wrinkly tanned men, all sucking from straws sticking out of vast wine glasses loaded with ice cubes that give the illusion that there’s more liquid than there is in the famous 3-2-1 formula: three parts prosecco (equating to just one-tenth of a bottle), two parts Aperol and one part soda water, plus the obligatory orange slice.

At the trendiest bar in Lucca I scoured the menu for the two drinks I used most to associate with Italy: Martini Rosso and the bellini. They weren’t there. Glitzy Aperol spritz, the parakeet of the drinks world, is eliminating the less brash native alternatives.

It’s happening in Britain, too. Go to any pub or wine bar on a summer Saturday and you’ll see it everywhere, in branded glasses with ‘Aperol spritz’ in diagonal lettering. It’s now so popular that some London pubs can get away with charging £15.50 per glass.

I tend to fall for the drink about once per summer, enticed by its Amalfi coast associations: ‘Italian sunset in a glass’. I like the fact that Aperol liqueur was invented in 1919 by the Barbieri brothers in Padua, and that it’s made of poetic plant ingredients: oranges, rhubarb, cinchona and ‘30 other secret ingredients’ which the Campari Group vowed not to tamper with when they purchased Aperol in 2000.

But after the first three or four thirst-quenching sips, I find it starts to pall, and I start to wonder what those 30 other secret ingredients might be. It tastes a bit chemical (like Campari) but also sickeningly sweet, and I go off its garish Just Stop Oil colour.

I don’t think I’m alone in this. Those glasses of Aperol spritz that cast their glow on Italy’s piazzas are often slow to go down. I notice a great many half-finished ones standing about. They have become a disappointment: weaker, warmer versions of themselves. You see people ploughing on with their Aperol spritzes all the way through supper – and it doesn’t go at all well with food. The soda water and ice cube padding starts to feel like a real rip-off.

Not everyone is in on the craze. When I ordered mine, the old Italian waiter did a wince of disapproval, and was more approving of my husband’s request for a negroni. I felt like a superficial follower of fashion.

Aperol spritz is a photogenic drink for the Instagram world, its popularity spreading almost entirely because of its visual wow factor. With its low alcohol content (just 11 per cent, less than half of Campari’s), I wonder whether it’s in fact a kind of Campari for children, or for adults who don’t want to be challenged by anything too bitter, interesting, unpredictable or demanding.

I can imagine future generations looking back on Aperol spritz as something that typified the looks-obsessed, style-over-substance Second Roaring Twenties. I wonder what they’ll be drinking then, and what it will say about them. 

Frankie gets his last Royal Ascot hurrah – in spades

We all wanted Frankie to have a last Royal Ascot hurrah. In the end he got four, including a ninth Gold Cup to list on the Dettori honours board, a ride in carriage four of the Royal Procession and a cheeky kiss for the Queen. Ascot has always done for him what the Hollies crowd at Edgbaston have done for Stuart Broad, revved up by his flailing arms as he pounds into the wicket. But let us not grieve: a truly thrilling Ascot provided plenty more evidence of quality in the saddle.

‘Riding is about reaction,’ said Ruby Walsh after Shaquille won the Commonwealth Cup for co-trainers Julie Camacho and Steve Brown in the hands of Oisin Murphy. As the stalls opened, Shaquille reared up, losing many lengths, but in a mature display of cool courage Murphy didn’t rush it. He crept quietly and steadily back to the pack, then threaded his way through to win going away. In the Wokingham Stakes the tricksy Khaadem, who had sat in the stalls the previous year in the King’s Stand, dropped jockey Jamie Spencer behind the gates when the blinds went on. But the man they call The Magician settled him in the rear, came through smoothly from two out and picked off Sacred in the last hundred yards. Joy all round.

Charlie Hills had kept faith with the -seven-year-old when Shadwell disposed of him and was determined to ‘train him as a proper horse’, while Dubai-based owner Jim Hay regards Jamie Spencer as part of the family. The only surprise, apart from the 80-1 price, was to learn that this was Jamie’s first Group One victory in Britain since 2011.

Equally warming was the Hardwicke victory for the popular Pyledriver, one of those one-time underdog horses who has been adopted by the racing nation. Hearts worn on sleeves are my favourite Ascot fashion and co-trainer Willie Muir, who reckoned his charge short of work after an injury, does it better than any: ‘I went to bed early last night and after I got up for the tenth time my wife said: “If you do it once more you’ll have to sleep downstairs.”’

Every day was full of sights which will linger: jumps trainer Nicky Henderson’s hurdler Ahorsewithnoname, in foal to Cracksman, winning what was to be her last race, a beaming Ralph Beckett rushing around two sets of exultant owners after performing the remarkable feat of training the first two home in the Royal Hunt Cup with the 22-1 Jimi Hendrix and the 25-1 Sonny Liston. Then there was John Gosden wryly noting of Mostahdaf, who had become visibly excited in the parade ring before trouncing a quality field in the Prince of Wales Stakes: ‘He’s going to enjoy being a stallion.’

Sometimes courage is rewarded: Newmarket trainer Tom Clover secured his first Royal Ascot victory with Rogue Millennium after the Rogues’ Gallery owners agreed to spend £13,000 supplementing the horse to run in the Duke of Cambridge Stakes.

Sometimes it isn’t: it has been brave of Godolphin to campaign Derby winner Adayar as a five-year-old in a quest for a Group One victory over the shorter ten furlongs, which will increase his stud value, but his third behind Mostahdaf will have done the opposite.

Sometimes it is nice to see recompense too: jockey Jack Mitchell was jocked off Rogue Millennium in favour of Ascot specialist Danny Tudhope but he got on the winner’s rostrum anyway, riding Royal Champion for Roger Varian. And one magic moment? For me it was the sight of 66-1 Derby second King of Steel, a magnificently muscled and imposing grey, confirming his powerful quality with jockey Kevin Stott in the King Edward VII Stakes. With him I truly believe we ain’t seen nothing yet.

The string of long-priced winners at Ascot this year, including 150-1 shot Valiant Force, Khaadem and a string of 25- or 20-1 shots had professional punters moaning how hard it was to find winners, but for the first time in my life I made a profit every day. This was partly because after recommending him to readers I took an interest in Neil Callan’s mounts and he obliged with victories on Triple Time at 25-1 and Burdett Road at 20-1 (I got 33s) but also because I share Jim Hay’s approach: ‘Don’t imagine you are going to back a winner in every race because you won’t. Try and bet something that will finish in the first three, four or five and get bookies offering six places. That’s a good bet.’

I raise the subject only because our Twelve to Follow have been a little slow into stride this summer. Some have achieved promising places (which gallingly will trim their prices next time out) but until Saturday the win count was nil. Zilch. Nada. All was gloriously changed though when Hollie Doyle charged home on Saint Lawrence to win the Wokingham at 22-1 for trainer Archie Watson. Thanks too to previous trainer Roger Varian advising owners the Deers that the horse would benefit from changing yards. Off we go…

Is the glucose monitoring craze really so healthy?

At £300 a go, the Zoe is a reassuringly expensive accessory. It has a recognisable logo and even had a 200,000-strong waiting list at one point. That wouldn’t be so unusual if Zoe was a must-have handbag or jewellery, but it is  a continuous glucose monitor that you stick to your arm.

Continuous glucose monitors have been available to diabetics for a few years, but now non-diabetics without any particular reason to worry about their pancreas are also getting in on the act. Like the fear of gluten a few years ago, glucose levels have gone from something only those with a diagnosed medical condition ever think about to a widespread obsession. There are many people who now worry that unless they eat a pear with peanut butter, or drink a cup of vinegar before their lunch, they might end up with elevated glucose levels which could have a range of damaging effects. The vinegar and peanut butter are suggestions, or ‘hacks’, from glucose influencer the Glucose Goddess, Jessie Inchauspé, who promises to help you cut cravings, get your energy back and feel amazing.

Glucose monitors are also part of the latest wave of dietary devices and health wearables. Gone are the days when a Fitbit seemed space age: now you can ‘hack your metabolism’ with a Lumen device (£250), a breathalyser for the health addict which tells you ‘whether you’re in fat burn or carb burn through your breath’. The Whoop (£27 per month) looks like a watch strap but acts as a ‘personalised 24/7 fitness and health coach’, with biometric tracking to tell you when you are recovering well and when you need to get more sleep.

All this monitoring can give interesting results. The Zoe study doesn’t just measure participants’ blood glucose levels, but also the gut microbiome (by asking you to post faecal samples to its team of boffins) to tell you which foods work best for you. It promises to leave you healthier and more alert – and, if you want, to lose weight. Its tech was adapted by co-founder Professor Tim Spector during the Covid pandemic to help the population track their symptoms.

Now, Zoe participants can join a large-scale scientific study into how the human body and food interact. They can also find out how they personally respond to all manner of foods, ‘retrain their biology’ and learn to be healthy for life. In the first few weeks of the programme they test their gut, blood fat and blood sugar responses, before they receive a detailed report. Zoe’s glucose monitor has a limited life span and is only used for a couple of weeks. The Zoe team insist it is only useful when combined with the data and advice that its full programme offers. Similar products, including the Veri Method, run three-month cycles with a 14-day tracking period built into each to see how well its members are adapting their lifestyles.

The theory behind Veri is that our society is in ‘metabolic crisis’, also known as obesity. Zoe wants to encourage people to live healthier lives by eating food that’s good for their gut microbiome and that doesn’t send their glucose levels into orbit. We are only just starting to understand how important the bacteria in our gut can be for so many aspects of our health.

I’m as attracted to shiny new health tech kit as middle-class dads are to pressure washers, so I find the rise of all this health tech very compelling. Every time I check my watch, it tells me the time and how many steps I’ve done that day. Why not stick a few more gadgets on my body? Wouldn’t a wearable monitor that works out which foods I should be eating help me stay more alert and in a better mood? That promise will probably also sound pretty compelling to any family members or colleagues who’ve had to deal with me when I’m tired or hungry.

But the Zoe testing kit promises even more than that: it’s part of a study into what healthy postprandial blood glucose levels actually are. And in this study lies the flaw in all the popular obsession with blood glucose spikes: no one yet knows what ‘healthy’ looks like for non-diabetics. So beyond theorising that consistently elevated blood sugar can, over a long period of time, put you at risk of heart disease and other illnesses, there is a big leap here. It might be interesting to monitor your blood sugar or metabolism and see how that correlates with grumpy or spectacularly productive days, but it’s not necessarily important or useful. Glucose is supposed to increase after eating and, unless you have diabetes, your body is well-equipped to handle this through insulin production.

For diabetics, this new wider obsession with glucose can be pretty irritating. A friend with Type 1 diabetes says she finds the idea that you’d worry about perfectly healthy blood sugar spikes laughable. Glucose monitors aren’t yet available to many people in developing countries, meaning diabetics are still having to use outdated methods of monitoring their health. Some charities even ask non-diabetics to donate their wearables once they’ve finished so they can be reused by people who actually need them.

All this tech helps people feel more in control of their lives and their health, but it also overcomplicates what can be perfectly simple. If you want to lose weight, you need to be in a calorie deficit (and not one so steep that you end up gorging at the end of the diet, which is generally why diets fail, rather than because you are in a ‘metabolic crisis’). You don’t need to shell out hundreds of pounds to know that eating more fruit and vegetables will improve your health. And you definitely don’t need a flashy accessory to tell you that your body is, in fact, boringly healthy.

What’s so super about Super Tuscans?

In Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, the hopes embodied in the title dissolve into grimness and black irony. It was all Mussolini’s fault. Despite the endless opportunities Italy offered for enjoyment, Fellini never trusted his own country, or his countrymen. He could not relax into dolce far niente.

Perhaps he should have spent more time in Tuscany, surely the most civilised region on earth. Venice may claim to be La Serenissima, but among Tuscany’s gentle hills, hill villages and glorious cities, nature and man are in a harmony so serene that one can almost hear the music of the spheres. History has been kind enough to allow civilisation to flourish there, shaped by both bourgeois and aristocratic families.

The Medici started as bankers, and in the late 14th century a Florentine called Antinori featured in the city’s wine-makers’ guild. His descendants prospered. Twenty-six generations later, the Marchese Piero Antinori still makes wine, but there has been a change. In the post-war years, the Italian wine industry was not in a healthy state. It had long since been surpassed by the French.

For decades, many Italian wine-makers seemed to have no ambition beyond churning out a mass-market product that would sell cheaply, and deserved no better fate. It was the sort of plonk which youngsters would glug down with spag bols over the kitchen table. There was decent Chianti. There was also the stuff which came in bottles covered in straw, served by waiters waving 4ft-high pepper pots while singing ‘O Sole Mio’.

Although his family owned around 5,000 acres of vineyards, the Marchese Piero decided that radical improvements were necessary. Why should Tuscany restrict itself to the Sangiovese grape, which can make good wine but could also benefit from blending. So he planted Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Cabernet Franc and Petit Verdot.

But what was he to call these new products? Italian rules were strict. It was even suggested that he might have to sell them as vino da tavola: some table. Then a new name evolved, and stuck: Super Tuscan. The Antinoris brought the first one to market: Tignanello, drawing heavily on Cabernet Sauvignon.

It was an immediate success. Although there were debates as to how high it would rank in a Bordeaux hierarchical classification, it would certainly feature. The Antinoris followed it up with Solaia, while rivals rapidly appeared, principally Sassicaia, usually the most expensive, often priced en primeur at the rate of a first-growth claret, which is slightly undeserved – but a serious drop of stuff.

We had assembled to concentrate on the Antinoris’ wines, guided by Allegra, one of Marchese Piero’s daughters. Wine people are usually fun, and she was no exception. Though the wines could speak for themselves, the experience was enhanced by her vivacity and enthusiasm. Ranald Macdonald of Boisdale, whose food has been celebrated here, supplied a simple dinner: cullen skink pie, haggis, a magnificent Scottish chateaubriand and some admirable cheese.

As for wine, we began with a non-Tuscan interloper, Franciacorta from Lombardy: an Italian fizz at least the equal of any prosecco I have tried. But this was a red evening. The Tignanello ’15 was excellent, yet it was surpassed by a Guado al Tasso, also from 2015. It had depth, length, fruit and power. By no means yet at its peak, it will last for many years.

It is already a good wine. Might it mature into greatness? 2035 will see the 750th anniversary of the House of Antinori. That Guado al Tasso deserves to feature in the celebrations.

Is Thames Water about to sink?

Thames Water appears to be in trouble. The company, which has billions in debt, is in talks with the Treasury about a possible bailout. We may soon be adding the firm, which serves one in four Brits, to the list of victims of rising interest rates.

‘Victim,’ in this case, is perhaps the wrong word. It’s hard to feel sorry for a company that has been relying on ultra-low rates to keep itself afloat, racking up £14 billion worth of debt and now severely struggling to service it.

Financial mismanagement is just one of a series of accusations levelled against the company. Its problems have been in the spotlight for years, especially for its links to leaks and pollution. Its CEO Sarah Bentley stepped down yesterday, forgoing her bonus. Now the question is whether its new boss will temporarily be the government, if Thames Water’s financial situation proves so dire that a new buyer must be found.

Chancellor Jeremy Hunt has been walking a tricky tightrope this week. Hunt has been insisting that the government must hold back and let the economic situation play out. But he’s also been speaking forcefully about intervention, and the government’s willingness to step in over rising costs and failing businesses.

On inflation, the Treasury’s line is clear: inaction is the best course, if we want to get the rate of inflation under control.

Hunt has been rejecting demands, even from within his own party, to offer mortgage holders some kind of relief, insisting that to borrow money to fund such a plan would fuel inflation.

What’s more, to offer financial support to homeowners would work against the impact of interest rate hikes so far, possibly demanding the Bank of England raise rates even further in the future.

It’s politically difficult territory for the Treasury and No.10, not least because so many of their voters are homeowners. But so far, Hunt remains resolute that the government is not going to try to curb the impact of rising rates; indeed, he continues to offer the Bank his full support in their efforts to get inflation under control. 

But this action plan – to stay out of the way – only seems to apply to certain areas. The chancellor has been convening the various regulators this week, including the Competition and Market Authority and the Financial Conduct Authority, to do a deep dive into consumer prices and whether they accurately reflect current inflation rates. Meanwhile, the Treasury might be taking the UK’s biggest water company back into state ownership – temporarily, at least.

In truth, a lot of the talk on consumer prices is just that: talk. The prospect of ‘voluntary’ price caps in supermarkets seem to have been shelved, for now. But it’s going to get increasingly difficult for the government, as it insists it can’t act in one area, yet wades in quickly elsewhere.

Daniel Korski withdraws from London mayoral race

Daniel Korski has pulled out of the race to be the Conservative candidate for London mayor. The former adviser to David Cameron cited the allegation by TV producer Daisy Goodwin that he had groped her during a meeting at 10 Downing Street in 2013 as the reason he is withdrawing.

In his statement announcing the news, Korski said he continued to ‘categorically’ deny the allegation against him. However, he said that the pressure on his family as a result of the claims meant that he felt he had no choice but to drop out of the race:

‘I categorically deny the allegation against me. Nothing was ever put to me formally ten years ago. Nor seven years ago when the allegation was alluded to. No investigation has ever taken place. I have been clear I would welcome and constructively participate in any investigation. However, the pressure on my family because of this false and unproven allegation and the inability to get a hearing for my message of ‘The London Dream’ makes it impossible for my campaign to carry on.’

Korski was certainly struggling to talk about anything else since Goodwin gave her version of events in an article for the Times earlier this week. Goodwin has since said that other women have got in touch with ‘interesting stories’.

The fallout meant that even Korski’s more loyal supporters were questioning the wisdom of him staying in the race, regardless of who is in the right. His Tory MP supporters, too, have felt the heat – facing questions on whether they still backed Korski. It has not helped matters that the complaints process is rather complicated: CCHQ said it was a matter for the Cabinet Office given the alleged incident occurred in Downing Street ten years ago.

So, where does this leave the mayoral race? The Tories already face an uphill path in London, with Labour surging ahead in the polls.

Two approved Tory candidates remain in the race: Susan Hall, the long-serving assembly member, and Mozammel Hossain, a politics newbie in comparison. Expect supporters of some of the candidates who didn’t make the shortlist – such as the minister Paul Scully – to argue that another candidate should be added so there are three to pick from.

Many in the Tory party view next year’s mayoral contest as a chance for the Conservatives to rebuild in London, rather than win, despite the backlash against Ulez. It means there has been an interest in finding a slightly different type of Tory candidate with metropolitan appeal. The events of this week have shown how hard that is proving to be.

PMQs: Rishi whirs like a supercomputer

‘Hold your nerve.’ Rishi’s ill-judged advice to voters last Sunday was perhaps his worst blunder yet. At PMQs it came up half a dozen times. Sir Keir Starmer made the first attempt but he was too verbose to inflict real damage. ‘Rather than lecturing others on holding their nerve why not locate his?’

He exposed Rishi’s confused housing policy and asked if any credible expert believes that the government will reach its house-building target this year. Rishi wriggled deftly and chucked out a few helpful statistics. ‘More homes are meeting our “decent homes” standard, the housing supply is up 10 per cent… and first-time buyers are at a 20-year high.’

Not that any of this helped, as Sir Keir pointed out. ‘He crumbled to his backbenchers and scrapped mandatory targets.’

Both parties are caught in the same dilemma. All MPs want houses built in other MPs’ constituencies. It’s a fight between SW1 and the regions. Central government loves tower-blocks full of taxpayers and local government loves meadows full of butterflies. Rishi said that members of the shadow cabinet had voted for extra housing in Westminster but returned to their constituencies and campaigned for more green fields. Sir Keir barely bothered to take a swing at Rishi today. ‘He’s given up,’ he said with a shrug. But the evidence suggests the contrary.

Rishi is very hard to beat on policy detail (even when his position is plainly contradictory). His eloquence, his memory and his level of preparedness are exceptional and he can deliver an answer as smoothly as a supercomputer. Yet he has warmth and affability too. Sir Keir thinks Rishi is a pushover so his attacks lack force or acuity. He just quacks out soundbites. ‘Tory mortgage bombshell… shattered dreams… millions abandoned… people pushed into economic misery. ’ He added a new one.

‘At least [the PM] isn’t claiming they’re the party of home ownership any more because we are,’ he said. No evidence. Just another title to trumpet to his fan club. Sir Keir looks like an undead leader sleepwalking his way to power. And his backbenchers tried to stir the zombie to life. ‘Weak,’ they shouted as Sir Keir droned through his lines. ‘Weak!’ They were hoping Starmer might rehash Blair’s famous description of John Major as ‘weak, weak, weak.’ Or was their ‘weak’ aimed at their own leader? Rishi evidently considers his opponent a lightweight.

‘As he hasn’t taken the time to understand the detail, I’m happy to explain it again,’ he suggested helpfully. Then he turned to Stephen Flynn, of the SNP, who referred to his ‘hold your nerve’ gaffe.

‘What a nerve,’ said Flynn. He asked Rishi when he ‘last struggled to pay a bill.’ Rishi straight-batted his reply and listened to Flynn’s follow-up which advocated reversing Brexit and increasing public sector wages. Both policies, said Rishi, would lead to higher borrowing and lower growth. He accused the SNP of ‘complete economic illiteracy.’

Labour’s Chris Bryant scolded the PM for ‘lecturing my constituents’ and he pointed out that Rishi has managed Britain’s economy ‘for 1,323 days.’ (A reminder that Rishi isn’t the only one with a head for figures.) Bryant opened fire with deadly effect. ‘The highest inflation in decades. The highest tax-burden since the second world war. And the largest drop in living standards ever!’

Rishi wasn’t troubled. Nearly all his teeth showed as he smiled like a greedy head boy opening a newly confiscated tuck box. He listed the policies supported by Labour that would hurt growth: tens of billions in extra borrowing; unaffordable wage rises; scrapping access to domestic energy supplies.

‘It’ll make things worse for years to come,’ he said. Bryant listened with his jaw set grimly. He obviously fancies himself as leader of his party but the bollard appears unbudgeable.

Lords watchdog refused to back five nominees

It’s been a difficult few years for Paul Bew, chairman of the House of Lords Appointments Commission (HOLAC). Bew picked up his own peerage in 2007, but since being appointed chair of Holac in 2018, he has been busy fighting off the claims of others put forward for a peerage. There was the Lord Lebedev farrago back in 2020 and more recently the row over Boris Johnson’s resignation honours’ list. The names who got on to the latter list caused enough of a scandal: one wonders who didn’t make it that far.

For Mr S has now obtained a Freedom of Information response from Holac which shows that almost one in ten names put forward to the agency between 2019 to 2023 did not make the cut. In that time, a total of 109 nominees were proposed by the Prime Minister to HOLAC; ten were subsequently unsuccessful. The Commission has written to No. 10 to advise that they cannot support a nominee six times (for five distinct nominees), with the vetting unable to be completed for the remaining nominees. Each nominee was vetted by the Security Service; in one case the Serious Fraud Office was alerted.

Talk about the end of the peer show…

Rostov returns to reality after Wagner’s botched coup

Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year, it always seemed likely that the war would come back to Rostov-on-Don, the city which until then had been my home. Rostov isn’t just close to the border but feels it. Most of my university students were from the Donetsk and Lugansk, refugees from the 2014-2022 war. It’s the military hub of southern Russia, the first major city you come to from the Donbass. It felt like a sitting invitation.

It was also somewhere I knew intimately and had been part of my life since my half-Russian daughter’s birth a decade ago. I took to Rostov-on-Don with an outsider’s greed for all four corners of the city, but lived bang in the centre. When images of the Wagner Group’s invasion of Rostov began to appear on Saturday, they were in places I knew as well as you know your own local Tesco or all-night garage. The circus, its entrance blocked by a tank alongside cute cartoon posters of elephants was a five-minute walk from my house and a place I knew inside and out. The takeaway where masked Wagner soldiers slung with loaded automatics were shown pushing their way into the queue for breakfast-burgers was once my local McDonalds. Snipers had been sighted on top of Galeria Astor, the shopping centre where I used to buy my weekly groceries and pick up toys for my child. Watching packs of menacing soldiers and military hardware swarm over these locations was disconcerting, to say the least.

But it was a good chance to reestablish contact with people I’d fallen out of touch with since last year. Most intended to remain indoors – they’d been heavily advised to do so – but there were a few brave souls willing to go out to work. Given the comical end to the day, not a shot fired and Wagner’s troops cheered out of the city like rockstars, it now seems strange to think how imminent crisis seemed. There were already fears Wagner would start pillaging after a few days, and when a report came mid-morning that Kadyrov’s troops were coming from Chechnya to take on Prigozhin’s and drive them from the city, it only meant one thing. Fighting on the streets and almost certain escalation. Things spinning out of control before more of Putin’s ‘decisive measures’ made it all much, much worse.

‘Thank God you no longer live there,’ a British friend said to me. But I felt the queasy guilt of the deserter. This was not something I could get across to anyone at home. When dramas happen in far-off, strangely named places we have no plans to visit, in languages we do not speak, they seem barely real at all. The survivors, when they emerge, wear what Milan Kundera called ‘the halo of tragedy’ and seem strangely predestined for the weird, holy otherness of suffering. Yet knowing people there, I couldn’t see it that way.

Perhaps the constant emphasis of Western books on Russia’s bleakest side – the poverty, the alcoholism, the brutalist politics – has made the people of the country seem other-worldly, mere zombie-citizens of Putinland, but that is not how they were to live among.

There was, to choose from many, my landlord Oleg, who with his leather jacket and shock of spiky hair looked like a strutting white homeboy. But he had a kind of gruff saintliness, coming round to my house during renovation with a newly broken leg in plaster, to shift heavy cement sacks, knowing I hated sharing a living space with them; on my birthday, he left a pair of ludicrously expensive Cuban cigars for me to smoke. Or Masha, an apparently home-loving, buxom girl whose husband had left her after a year of marriage for another woman. At which point she’d lost huge volumes of weight, becoming suddenly, dangerously sexy, a femme fatale, juggling two or three men at a time and with an Instagram page which seemed produced by Conde Nast. She was warm and open-hearted, always gossiping and giggling, and lamented family arguments about the war: ‘I have to keep reminding myself as we quarrel – there is more to people than their politics.’

There was Polina, a young divorcee, with her earthy voice, her bleach-blonde hair, her kindness and terrific sense of humour – but also Russian nationalism. She had multiple sclerosis and I sensed (perhaps wrongly) that in her longing for a strong Russian state she wanted something to atone for the weakness and humiliation life, with her debilitating illness, had forced on her. No one could deny there was profound justice in the idea of war coming home to Russia but still, I wondered how these people, who planned such a different future, would cope with its arrival in their city. One could though say the same of any Ukrainian civilian – and without the conditional tense.

And there was, in the wider context, an undeniable frisson to the day, a sense of things finally on the move in Russian politics. A local journalist sent me a Twitter clip a few months back of a house, without warning, collapsing in seconds, till all that was left was a pile of rubble.

‘That is how,’ he said, ‘the Putin regime will go when the time comes,’ and it seemed he’d got it right. Prigozhin’s march on Moscow surely meant an end to the war as well. Ukrainian friends were more cautious, believing it all too hopeful not be a cosmic trick on them. When the march was aborted and Prigozhin made plans to scurry off to Belarus, I felt a mingled relief and disappointment: nothing seemed to have happened but shady deals, compromise and betrayal, propping up an intolerable situation. It was the cruellest of sick jokes for those Ukrainians who, for a few hours at least, had half-dared to see an end in sight. 

Rostov’s occupation was finally a non-event, the city now famous as the scene of fleeting political farce. The only really meaningful image turned out to be the sight of fanboy-crowds chanting ‘Wagner! Wagner!’ at the departing soldiers that night.

But just as telling were words from a young friend living on the western edge of the city. ‘I had to stay at home all Saturday because of these stupid f***ing Wagner people,’ she muttered. ‘All my weekend plans in ruins…’.

There was little respect in her voice, just disdain and irritation. Or, as a current Rostov meme has it, in memory of that big-top blocking tank: ‘The circus still remains. All the clowns have gone now.’ 

Parents have a right to know what’s in sex education classes

Rishi Sunak tends to shy away from social issues so it has been left to a backbencher, Miriam Cates, to introduce a Bill which would oblige schools to disclose to parents the materials which
are being used in their children’s sex education classes.

The Bill is necessary because the Conservative government has allowed sex education in many schools to be taken over by campaign groups with a radical agenda who wish to persuade children that it is wrong to think in a ‘heteronormative’ way.

The scandals that have recently surrounded schools reveal the scale and severity of the problem. Children have in some cases been taught that there are dozens, even hundreds, of different genders, and that somehow they must discern and choose their own. Some have been told that when talking or writing about historical figures they should always use ‘they’ because we don’t know a past person’s preferred pronouns. Muslim parents in particular have protested against their children being given ‘age–inappropriate’ information about sexual practices. They insist that parents should have a right to know what their children are being told.

The rise in the number of children claiming to be transgender seems to have caught the government by surprise but, given what pupils are now being taught, it should not have done. One popular schoolbook, for instance, tells of a Cinderella-like figure who undergoes a successful gender realignment overnight with no complications and no regrets.

We have a brave London mother, Clare Page, to thank for finally bringing the scandal to light. Page asked to see what her daughters were learning in sex education but to her astonishment she was rebuffed by the school. She then complained to the academy trust which ran the school, and was briefly shown an extract on a laptop which confirmed that children were being taught a concept known as ‘sex positivity’. The trust refused to let her see any of the lesson plans in detail. Even after Page took the matter to the tribunal, she was still denied proper access to the materials. The tribunal ruled that the commercial interests of the School of Sexuality Education, the company which provided teaching materials on relationships and sex education to her daughters’ school, took precedence over parents’ rights to know what their children are being taught. This is an extraordinary development.

The arrival of online teaching materials has allowed a situation in which what children are taught can be kept a secret, with copy-right laws used to enforce that secrecy.

The dangers of this ought to be apparent. Pressure groups on a mission to disrupt societal norms should not be allowed to provide sex education to young children. But the more fraught the whole subject becomes, the more eager schools are to contract out the whole business. Teacher training has anyway become politicised, and young teachers are often themselves indoctrinated with gender ideology. Last year Teach First announced proudly that it had won a gold award in the Stonewall Workplace Equality Index.

Parents, rightly, do not appreciate dogma supplanting education. Any decent Conservative government should at the very least support good parents and promote good education. Yet this government has washed its hands of the matter and seems perfectly content to let Stonewall-approved providers organise sex education in schools. 

Imagine the outrage if, for instance, school-children were being taught, unchallenged, that Brexit will bring great benefits to Britain. It would be seen as unbalanced propaganda. Yet with sex education the ideologues have been put in charge.

It ought to be obvious that pressure groups will want to target children in order to further their own aims. That is why it is so vital to keep political messaging out of schools and why the pupils who recently
recorded their teacher berating them for believing in the reality of just two biological sexes were quite right to release the recordings. The whole process needs to be held up to much-deserved ridicule. 

The only way to tackle this nonsense is to call it out for what it is. As far as education is concerned, it means keeping ideology and dogma out of the classroom. The fact that the government seems to be afraid to stand up for science and for a child’s right to a rational education speaks of a kind of cowardice that will be noticed by voters at the next general election. People are rightly concerned about inflation and the cost of living, but they are also very worried about the kind of society we are becoming, and what we are letting our children believe about the world.

None of this means that children should not be taught to treat each other with respect. They should be encouraged to accept and respect everyone, whatever their race, religion or sexuality. Tolerance is at the heart of our civilisation. But we should not be tolerant of dogma which seeks to undermine reality. The government has let down a generation of children in allowing ideologues to infiltrate lessons. Backing Miriam Cates’s Bill to oblige schools to divulge teaching materials to parents would be a good start.

This leader appears in this week’s Spectator, out tomorrow.

What reshuffle season has in store

Keir Starmer and Rishi Sunak have something in common: both men are under pressure to reshuffle their front benches and pick a final pre-election team. ‘The agitating tends to be done by those who want jobs, rather than those who have them,’ sighs one member of the Labour leader’s team. But with an election due next year – whether it’s in the spring or autumn – Sunak and Starmer know they have one last chance to refresh their front benches before going to the polls.

A pre-election reshuffle isn’t just about managing teams and egos: it means choosing the personalities, tone and message on which to campaign. In 2014, David Cameron used his reshuffle to neutralise Tory weaknesses, even if that meant punishing effective ministers. As one loyal lieutenant recalls, those who Lynton Crosby thought ‘grated with the public’ were sacked or moved to backroom roles. Michael Gove was demoted to chief whip despite his stellar run as education secretary and supplanted by Nicky Morgan, praised for her mild manners. A desire to promote more women meant Owen Paterson was pushed out in favour of Liz Truss. These were difficult decisions, but Cameron believed they were necessary for victory.

Sunak’s mission is to refresh a tired, squabbling party to make it look like a new government, rather than the fag-end of the Tories’ 14 years in power. Plans for an early reshuffle have been complicated by the triple by-election next month, so the autumn of this year looks most likely. Since the departure of Boris Johnson from the Commons and the self-immolation of his allies such as Nadine Dorries, some ministers have argued that Sunak should stamp his authority on the cabinet and lose the idea that he has to balance warring party factions. ‘He should just get on with it, do what he wants on key appointments,’ says one senior minister. ‘He needs people who are 100 per cent behind him, not halfway there.’

Who might fail such a loyalty test? Some cabinet ministers point to Suella Braverman, whom Sunak made Home Secretary as a reward for agreeing not to support a Boris restoration last autumn. Critics accuse her of being on manoeuvres, working with the right of the party to push Sunak around. But others in the Prime Minister’s team take the view that she is better in the tent than out. Her occasional verbal bombs can be helpful. ‘On immigration, we should be to the right,’ says one aide.

Since Sunak’s ‘five pledges’ are proving trickier to meet than first imagined, he will want to make sure he has the right ministers to deliver them. One of his biggest problems is high inflation, but it’s hard to blame Jeremy Hunt, who has only ever done what No. 10 asked. Health Secretary Steve Barclay is a Sunak loyalist but he hasn’t managed to keep doctors from striking, which is blamed for increased waiting lists. There have also been reports of friction between Downing Street and Business Secretary Kemi Badenoch, the bookmakers’ favourite to succeed Sunak.

Ministers planning to stand down at the next election could be moved aside for fresher faces such as Richard Holden, a Red Wall MP, Laura Trott, a former Osborne aide, and Victoria Atkins, financial secretary to the Treasury. All three have been helpful to No. 10 on policy and on the airwaves. Ministers who have regularly turned down media appearances could find their career prospects dimming.

As for Starmer, he must prepare his shadow cabinet for office. Party elders are already giving advice to shadow ministers, most of whom have no experience of being in power. Inside the leader’s office, aides insist Starmer is in no rush to do anything drastic. That’s certainly been the case so far – ambitious MPs complain that he missed an opportunity for a reshuffle after the local elections. The shadow cabinet has not even adjusted to Sunak’s new cabinet briefs: energy and net zero, business and trade and the new science department. Tories say this is proof that Starmer is slow-moving and not ready for the challenges of government.

One figure certain to stay is Rachel Reeves, the shadow chancellor and easily the most influential member of the shadow cabinet. The rest of Starmer’s team is largely made up of three groups: his loyalists (Steve Reed, Nick Thomas-Symonds), Reeves’s allies (Wes Streeting and Peter Kyle) and the soft left (Ed Miliband and Lisa Nandy).

An effective Starmer government would need stability in the two areas which most demand reform: health and welfare. This means that there is an argument for keeping the straight-talking Streeting in health and Jonathan Ashworth as shadow work and pensions secretary. Both men will be asked to perform difficult tasks that their party activists may dislike. Jack Straw spent three years as shadow home secretary ahead of his move to the Home Office. He recently told the Institute for Government that that time meant he had stress-tested his reforms before he entered office.

The Blairites – a resurgent force in post-Corbyn Labour – would like to get rid of Ed Miliband, whom they still blame for the party’s long spell in opposition and see as too close to the Extinction Rebellion faction of the party. Reeves’s recent U-turn on her party’s energy plans – postponing a pledge for £28 billion a year on ‘green jobs’ and technology – has been read as a victory over Miliband. There are rumours that he could have his wings clipped over energy policy in the next reshuffle.

But Miliband is unlikely to lose influence entirely. He remains close to Starmer and enjoys his protection. ‘Every time we move a bit away from him, Keir goes back,’ says a party insider. Others defend Miliband as an important asset in stopping despondent voters on the left from moving to the Greens.

If the polls fail to move, Starmer’s pre-election shadow cabinet will help to decide how successful his first 100 days are. Sunak’s reshuffle could play a role in determining who succeeds him after a defeat (the subject of much Tory conversation). But reshuffles are usually a test of ruthlessness: the next few months will show how determined to win the leaders really are.

Sunak and Starmer clash on housing

Rishi Sunak used today’s Prime Minister’s Questions largely as an opportunity to attack the Labour party, and specifically Keir Starmer’s policy U-turns. This is fertile territory given there have been so many, even if the Labour leader is now adopting better positions than ones he naively took earlier on in his tenure. It does also show that the Prime Minister doesn’t feel he has a great deal to boast about when it comes to his own government achievements.

Starmer invited these attacks by making his first question about Tory frontbench confusion over housebuilding. He said: ‘His party spent thousands of pounds on adverts attacking plans to build 300,000 new homes a year. At the same time, his Housing Minister says it’s Tory party policy to build 300,000 new homes a year. So is he for building 300,000 new homes a year or against it?’ Sunak responded with a list of things the Conservatives had achieved on housing, from 2.2 million additional homes, housing starts at double the level inherited from Labour, and rising housing supply. He didn’t, though, answer the question – something Starmer immediately pointed out, adding a further demand for the PM to ‘point to a single person in housing and construction anywhere who thinks he’ll actually hit his target of 300,000 new homes a year’. Sunak did not, and then started to attack Labour’s policy stances. ‘First the Shadow Communities and Housing Secretary said communities should have control, but then he then said we should get the targets back and disempower local people. I do want to give him some advice. I don’t think it’s local people that are the problem, I think it’s Labour party policy.’

Starmer responded in kind with the claim that Sunak had ‘crumbled to his backbenchers and scrapped mandatory housing targets’ and that housebuilding had collapsed. Sunak shot back that Starmer ‘supports housebuilding, especially on the Green Belt’ but that ‘unfortunately for him, the shadow deputy prime minister, the shadow minister for women, the shadow health, justice, defence, business, Northern Ireland and Scotland ministers are all united against more housebuilding in their areas’. It was only when Sunak mentioned the last two briefs that it became clear he wasn’t just listing Angela Rayner’s many job titles and that these were in fact all different people. But by this point the session had become two men accusing one another of the same thing.

Starmer then claimed Sunak had ‘given up’, and moved onto mortgages. The Prime Minister meanwhile wanted to stick with housebuilding, and continued to talk about who on the Labour frontbench ‘doesn’t actually agree with his new policy on concreting over the green belt’. It was only in a later answer that Sunak addressed the mortgage issue, saying ‘the vast majority of the mortgage market is now covered by the new mortgage charter’. That allowed the Labour leader to get in his out of touch attack line that he uses every week on Sunak, today saying: ‘It’s sort of housing crisis, what crisis with this Prime Minister!’

What did we learn by the end of these exchanges? Nothing, really: both leaders have significant weaknesses on housebuilding and are also prepared to mischaracterise the other. Starmer does not have a policy of ‘concreting over the green belt’, and neither does Sunak have an inability to recognise that there is a crisis in the housing sector. Both had good attack lines: Sunak having given up has a real ring of truth, even if just about the wider Conservative party, while Starmer flip-flopping on policy is a regular occurrence.

What will cause the Prime Minister more trouble is the question from Labour frontbencher Alison McGovern, who asked what would happen if the Prime Minister failed to meet his promise to halve inflation. Would he call an election? The Prime Minister replied that he was sticking to his plan and taking responsible decisions – but that suggests that he too is building up to miss that target.

What really happened between Putin and Prigozhin?

In the absence of facts, it’s hard to understand what got into Yevgeny Prigozhin. I spoke to the former oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky about Prigozhin and Putin and their odd relationship. He says that criminality unites and explains the pair.

Prigozhin went to prison for almost ten years, for robbery. The legend is that he opened the first hotdog stand in Leningrad (now St Petersburg) and then moved on to luxury restaurants. Khodorkovsky says Prigozhin must have remained deeply connected to the underworld to succeed in the restaurant business in the St Petersburg of the 1990s. And he says Putin was the intermediary between the state security agencies and the city’s ‘mafiya’.

‘Putin is a bandit. He’s a gangster. In the early years, he worked in organisations that were above the law or beyond it, like the KGB. Then he became the president… and he really started disregarding law completely. The appearance of Prigozhin in this situation is absolutely logical.’

There is a famous photograph of Prigozhin presenting Putin with a fussy-looking main course. The perfect touch is Putin’s expression, a Mafia-don pout of approval. Prigozhin earning the nickname ‘Putin’s chef’ demonstrated that he occupied a position of absolute trust: Russian leaders have a traditional fear of being poisoned. It allowed him to go on to run the Wagner Group and also the internet ‘troll farm’ that tried to sway a US presidential election, and which still pumps out a slurry of propaganda. Could it be that the two men cooked up an elaborate hoax?

That is one of several theories that, even while probably mistaken, reveal some truths about Putin’s Russia. Rebekah Koffler, a former US intelligence officer who dealt with Russia, told Fox News the mutiny was a ‘classic false flag operation… classic Putin’. The idea was to get western governments to go easy on Putin, because the alternative to him would be worse. This is hard to believe with both men left looking so weak, morale in the army at rock bottom and Ukrainians cheering the sight of Wagner shooting down Russian aircraft. But it might be true that Prigozhin is a kind of licensed critic of the regime, someone to make Putin look good by comparison.

Another theory is that Prigozhin thought others would join his coup. This is the view of someone who was a senior figure in one of Russia’s most feared mafia groups. Let’s call him ‘Lev’. Lev is retired and making up for his past by doing good works in his village (he’s even become rabbi of the local synagogue, where they don’t know his history). He suspects that Nikolai Patrushev, one of the most powerful figures in the Kremlin, told Prigozhin to expect help from the FSB, the new KGB. But Patrushev just wanted to get rid of a rival by provoking Prigozhin into doing something rash. No evidence for this has emerged, though Putin must wonder about some of his most senior lieutenants given how few took sides during the crucial hours.

Prigozhin is not a stupid man and must have known how little chance he had of success. Another theory is that he was pushed into a corner by his rivals in the army and had no choice. The army – backed by Putin – gave Wagner’s contractors just a few weeks to sign contracts with Russia’s MoD, something that might have been the end of Prigozhin. The trouble with this theory is that any deal to preserve Wagner would be worth nothing: Prigozhin and his mercenaries were always sub-contractors for the Kremlin.

We don’t know the terms of the deal between Putin and Prigozhin. Realising he was about to be forced out of the mercenary business, did Prigozhin extort Putin? One more big score before retirement? Prigozhin must know from The Godfather that betrayal normally ends with a garrote, or in this case a dish served with polonium-210. At the weekend, both men seemed to leave themselves no room for anything less than a fight to the finish. But if – as Khodorkovsky says – we understand them primarily as criminals, maybe the boss simply bought off his capo. In Putin’s Russia, anything is possible.

Why I won’t dish any dirt on Vogue

I’ve spent every evening of the past week in the midsummer gloaming, making the most of the longest days of the year. London has been en fête. The National Portrait Gallery’s long-awaited reopening was occasion for an enormous party, but I found it to be a weirdly disorientating experience. As an ex-trustee, for eight years I thought I knew the place pretty well. I could find my favourite portraits on autopilot, using a mental map of the different galleries. I had even worked with the team there on British Vogue’s 100th anniversary exhibition in 2016. But last week it was all change, as the whole place has been reconfigured by architect Jamie Fobert and director Nick Cullinan. They have created more natural light, new spaces and a different perspective on the collection.

As I meandered round the beautifully re-hung galleries, it was like looking at one’s own reflection in a hall of mirrors – recognisable but only just. Instead of the previous, faintly apologetic main entrance, there is now the splendid Ross Place forecourt. As David Ross – donor and chair of the NPG – stood greeting the crowd of guests, I wondered whether having his name etched in stone, forever part of one of London’s most prestigious galleries, would be some compensation for having his nomination rejected on Boris Johnson’s resignation honours list. There are many who would consider the Ross Place plaque a far greater glory.

The next day I visited the London Library (where I am a vice-president) in search of a copy of The Spectator. This was not because I am a cheapskate trying to avoid handing over my own cash but because newspaper vendors are now a rare species in central London. The library, housed in St James’s Square, is part of the ecosystem of gentlemanly clubs, tailors, hedge funds and art galleries in this sector of Mayfair and that afternoon, as ever, the Jermyn Street hunch was on fine display. The hunch is demonstrated by a large number of that area’s population: tall middle-aged men with well-cut suits and neat hair. They stride the pavements, shoulders hunched and slightly bent over, as if they were battling a strong headwind. Which they may be, given the prevailing prejudice against the pale, male and stale.

The annual Victoria and Albert summer party is always a lively, gossipy affair. This year’s coincided with the opening of the Net-a-Porter sponsored exhibition Diva, so there was a higher-than-average fashion quotient among the guests. Unsurprisingly, several people asked me to dish on why my successor Edward Enninful had departed his role as editor-in-chief of British Vogue and whether it was true that he and Anna Wintour were at loggerheads. Sorry to disappoint, but I diplomatically replied that I had no idea. This took some doing as I am not naturally known to hold back, and it was tempting to seed all manner of delicious rumours. But when I announced I was leaving the magazine six years ago, I was given an executive coaching session by two men in suits. What, they asked, would I say when people asked how I felt about leaving the magazine and about my replacement? I imagined, I replied, I would say that I had loved my time there and was excited both to move on and to learn who my successor would be. Anodyne as anything, or so I thought. I was told firmly that I was to say no such thing. I was to say nothing at all, at any time, on the subject. I haven’t always listened to those words of advice. But at the V&A party, I heard those words ringing in my ears just before I opened my mouth.

We’ve had a couple of our own parties recently and it’s always depressing to see all the empty bottles the next morning. Trying to find a place to recycle 100 bottles and cans is no fun. Couldn’t wine merchants such as Majestic offer recycling as part of their service? Accepting the empties would seem a sensible and environmentally helpful solution, just like the village shops of old would do. They could hand us back a penny for our emptied Coronas.

In the recent warm weather, we have had the bedroom windows wide open in our London home and at night the noise is fearsome. Foxes shriek for hours, racing around the street, sparring and rustling in the rubbish bins. Then at about three o’clock, when they retire, the quaintly named birdsong is kicked off by the raucous cawing of crows in the park over the road before they are joined by the pigeons, blackbirds and tits. I’ve just arrived in Oxfordshire for a few days’ retreat from festivities. I’m unused to the countryside and have been surprised by how quiet it is at night, save the odd moo from a cow. At least I think it is a cow.

After Putin: how nervous should we be?

The brief mutiny by Yevgeny Prigozhin and his Wagner mercenaries represented the most serious shock yet to Vladimir Putin’s 23-year reign. No wonder alarmed western governments are considering nightmare scenarios. Yet the outlook may actually be rather more optimistic.

When news of the mutiny broke, there were fears of mass defections to the side of Prigozhin, a man who has sanctioned the murder of prisoners and even suggested that Russia ‘needs to live like North Korea’ to win its war with Ukraine. Rishi Sunak convened a Cobra meeting to consider possibilities apparently including a Russian collapse and nuclear proliferation. The concern is that a serious challenge to Putin risks pushing Russia into anarchy and so poses an even more intractable security challenge to the West.

The irony is that visions of a nuclear arsenal being divided between warlords and rival armies clashing on the European Union’s borders have helped Putin, discouraging some who would otherwise want to see a more assertive approach to the ageing autocrat. Putin himself invoked the smuta, the ‘Time of Troubles’ that followed the death of Ivan the Terrible. Characterised by dynastic crises, foreign invasion, hunger and revolt, this was a clear attempt to push the ‘better the devil you know’ argument. This pernicious sentiment rests on a deterministic sense that imperialism and despotism are somehow encoded into the Russian psyche and ignores the degree to which there are practical and institutional safeguards preventing the end of Putin’s reign.

The septuagenarian Putin has surrounded himself with a clique of individuals with very similar backgrounds. Almost all are also in their seventies, veterans of the KGB, and also arrivistes, the first in their families to break into the nomenklatura, the Communist party chosen. They had finally made it, just in time for that system to collapse around them. A sense of loss has metastasised into one of betrayal, of anger towards a West that supposedly brought down the USSR, then neglected and exploited Russia in the 1990s and has tried to stymie its resurgence since. There is an emotional dimension to Russian policy too often neglected in debates over geostrategic interests.

The next political generation, though, the fifty- and early-sixty-somethings, is rather different. They are not by any means liberal democrats. They are pragmatic opportunists, kleptocrats. They certainly are not afflicted by the Georgian curse ‘may you live on your wages alone’. They are or were Putinists not because of ideological conviction or personal loyalty but because supporting him was the best path to wealth and status.

The 62-year-old Prigozhin is a particularly thuggish case in point. He is a creation of Putin’s, his trajectory from restaurateur to troll-farm manager and mercenary condottiere has been on his patron’s coat-tails. Nonetheless, although his mutiny was likely coercive negotiation, an attempt to prevent the dissolution of Wagner and persuade Putin to stop backing his rival, defence minister Sergei Shoigu, it was still an act of armed rebellion. He himself held back from making any such direct statements, but after Putin condemned Prigozhin’s ‘march of justice’ as treason, a message posted on the Wagner Telegram channel starkly asserted: ‘Putin made the wrong choice. All the worse for him. Soon we will have a new president.’

This political generation is not only growing impatient as Russia becomes a gerontocracy, as Putin cronies reaching the retirement age of 70 are allowed to remain in post. It is also feeling that its practical interests are under pressure. While the oligarchs and minigarchs have the resources to live pampered lives largely as before (organised crime has moved into lucrative new businesses, smuggling everything from Italian handbags to spare parts for Mercedes cars), most bureaucrats and businesspeople are feeling the pinch. Besides, this cosmopolitan class had come to enjoy the opportunities to steal at home but bank abroad, to send their children to foreign universities, to acquire boltholes in Riga, Prague, London. There are still vacation options, from Dubai to Phuket, but it rankles people who consider themselves Europeans to be excluded by the West.

There is no sense that Putin is under imminent threat. However, his system is increasingly sclerotic and dysfunctional, and there is nothing to suggest that he has the plan or the energy for any serious reform. Prigozhin’s mutiny has left it even more brittle. Putin looks weak for having first denounced his mercenary chief as a traitor and then waived all charges against him in the name of a deal. More to the point, it has raised questions about the final backstop of his rule, his control of the security apparatus. The sight of soldiers letting Wagner’s columns roll by can only have heartened those who would see him fall.

It could be a collapse of the lines in Ukraine and the loss of Crimea, or a cascading economic crisis, or a serious illness laying Putin low, or any number of other black swan scenarios, but it means that the system will be even less capable of handling whatever the next challenge may be. Much like Tsar Nicholas II, Putin risks eventually being corralled by his own generals and officials and offered the choice of retiring with honour or being dethroned. If and when that happens, we are likely to see an elite that is even more fearful of anarchy than we are, doing everything it can to ensure a calm transition.

Furthermore, they have every interest in improving relations with the West. There is a quiet consensus growing that the Ukrainian invasion was a mistake, and that the price of victory – escalation, militarising the economy, essentially following Prigozhin’s prescription of ‘North Koreanisation’ – is too high. Extricating Russia from the war would be neither cheap nor easy, but it is possible, especially as many in continental Europe would leap at any opportunity to return to business as usual. And then once again the handbags and Mercedes would flow.

This is unlikely to bring democracy to Russia, but it would roll back the creeping totalitarianism of the past 16 months. More to the point, successful kleptocrats tend, perversely, to favour the rule of law, so as to protect what they have stolen. It is possible to have rule of law without democracy but, as 1990s Russia showed, it is impossible to have real democracy without rule of law. Thus, if the next political generation could be the generation to legalise Russia, it is possible the one after that might democratise it.

Some nevertheless fear that that next generation, whose entire adult lives have been lived under Putin, may instead have been shaped by the distorted histories they have been fed. If Putin holds on long enough, he might try to effect a political transition to them, leapfrogging a generation currently waiting impatiently for their time at the top.

Yet even here there is hope: those raised within the much more tightly sealed Soviet information control environment still proved susceptible to the lure of jazz, jeans, democracy and the dollar. There is no reason that Russian forty-somethings would be any less acquisitive than their elder counterparts.

This is the most positive potential trajectory. The point is that the West cannot allow itself to be paralysed by a fear of what will follow Putin. Actively working to topple Putin may well not be wise – from Iraq onwards, we have proven better at regime change than managing what follows – but at the very least we should welcome whatever hastens the end of his reign. Bring it on.

Parents have a right to know what’s in sex education classes

Rishi Sunak tends to shy away from social issues so it has been left to a backbencher, Miriam Cates, to introduce a Bill which would oblige schools to disclose to parents the materials which are being used in their children’s sex education classes.

The Bill is necessary because the Conservative government has allowed sex education in many schools to be taken over by campaign groups with a radical agenda who wish to persuade children that it is wrong to think in a ‘heteronormative’ way.

The scandals that have recently surrounded schools reveal the scale and severity of the problem. Children have in some cases been taught that there are dozens, even hundreds, of different genders, and that somehow they must discern and choose their own. Some have been told that when talking or writing about historical figures they should always use ‘they’ because we don’t know a past person’s preferred pronouns. Muslim parents in particular have protested against their children being given ‘age–inappropriate’ information about sexual practices. They insist that parents should have a right to know what their children are being told.

The rise in the number of children claiming to be transgender seems to have caught the government by surprise but, given what pupils are now being taught, it should not have done. One popular schoolbook, for instance, tells of a Cinderella-like figure who undergoes a successful gender realignment overnight with no complications and no regrets.

We have a brave London mother, Clare Page, to thank for finally bringing the scandal to light. Page asked to see what her daughters were learning in sex education but to her astonishment she was rebuffed by the school. She then complained to the academy trust which ran the school, and was briefly shown an extract on a laptop which confirmed that children were being taught a concept known as ‘sex positivity’. The trust refused to let her see any of the lesson plans in detail. Even after Page took the matter to the tribunal, she was still denied proper access to the materials. The tribunal ruled that the commercial interests of the School of Sexuality Education, the company which provided teaching materials on relationships and sex education to her daughters’ school, took precedence over parents’ rights to know what their children are being taught. This is an extraordinary development.

The arrival of online teaching materials has allowed a situation in which what children are taught can be kept a secret, with copy-right laws used to enforce that secrecy. The dangers of this ought to be apparent. Pressure groups on a mission to disrupt societal norms should not be allowed to provide sex education to young children. But the more fraught the whole subject becomes, the more eager schools are to contract out the whole business. Teacher training has anyway become politicised, and young teachers are often themselves indoctrinated with gender ideology. Last year Teach First announced proudly that it had won a gold award in the Stonewall Workplace Equality Index.

Parents, rightly, do not appreciate dogma supplanting education. Any decent Conservative government should at the very least support good parents and promote good education. Yet this government has washed its hands of the matter and seems perfectly content to let Stonewall-approved providers organise sex education in schools.

Imagine the outrage if, for instance, school-children were being taught, unchallenged, that Brexit will bring great benefits to Britain. It would be seen as unbalanced propaganda. Yet with sex education the ideologues have been put in charge.

It ought to be obvious that pressure groups will want to target children in order to further their own aims. That is why it is so vital to keep political messaging out of schools and why the pupils who recently recorded their teacher berating them for believing in the reality of just two biological sexes were quite right to release the recordings. The whole process needs to be held up to much-deserved ridicule.

The only way to tackle this nonsense is to call it out for what it is. As far as education is concerned, it means keeping ideology and dogma out of the classroom. The fact that the government seems to be afraid to stand up for science and for a child’s right to a rational education speaks of a kind of cowardice that will be noticed by voters at the next general election. People are rightly concerned about inflation and the cost of living, but they are also very worried about the kind of society we are becoming, and what we are letting our children believe about the world.

None of this means that children should not be taught to treat each other with respect. They should be encouraged to accept and respect everyone, whatever their race, religion or sexuality. Tolerance is at the heart of our civilisation. But we should not be tolerant of dogma which seeks to undermine reality. The government has let down a generation of children in allowing ideologues to infiltrate lessons. Backing Miriam Cates’s Bill to oblige schools to divulge teaching materials to parents would be a good start.

The myth of intersectional politics

A few years ago I mentioned the profusion of moaning women on BBC Radio 4, after a longish car journey during which the station had broadcast pretty much nothing but moaning women over six and a half hours. I am glad to say that the proportion of moaning women has subsequently reduced to about 65 per cent of the station’s output, the rest of it now being taken up with infuriated and horribly subjugated black people.

When I unwisely turned on the radio this afternoon it was to hear a young black lady tell her little brother: ‘They may be beating us, killing us, but that is no reason to give up’, before her father bemoaned ‘this godforsaken country’. The country she was talking about was not the Democratic Republic of Congo, Haiti or Somalia, but the United Kingdom, of course. This had been part of a radio drama in which the young black man had been beaten senseless by the usual racist white English folks and nobody cared.

The previous day, the otherwise excellent Clive Myrie had been busy perpetuating more Windrush myths in a lengthy documentary, where we heard black people he interviewed saying that they’d have been much better off staying in Jamaica than coming here to be exploited and racially abused in this abject dump of a country. You might think, to hear this stuff, that there would be rather less objection, then, to the government’s forlorn attempts to deport Jamaican criminals back to their country of origin – or indeed a plea that the scheme might be extended to those of Jamaican origin who have not committed any crimes. Free airline seats and an in-flight snack, etc – surely they would be snapped up?

The BBC – and Radio 4 in particular – is peculiarly, almost psychotically obsessed with race and particularly the tiny minority of our citizens who are of African-Caribbean heritage. The stories the Radio 4 news programmes got most worked up about last week were the revelations that another piece of sarf Lunnun white trash had been involved in the murder of Stephen Lawrence back in 1993, but that the police had failed to investigate properly, being institutionally racist etc, and the inquiry into English cricket, which decided that the game was riven with racism and basically a disgrace to our country and so on. It is rare to turn on Radio 4 – or BBC1, for that matter – and not find someone hectoring you about whitey’s hideous oppression.

Perhaps this is why the audience for BBC Radio 4 has fallen off a cliff, so to speak. In May it was revealed that the station had lost 11 per cent of its audience share, a total of 1.2 million listeners, over the course of a year. In September last year it was also down by about 10 per cent and my guess is that the Rajar figures for the coming autumn will show a continued rapid decline. Listeners are sick to the back teeth of the relentless, carping, tendentious, one-sided drivel and are switching off in their droves. You might think that plummeting audiences would worry the station’s controller, Mohit Bakaya, but the BBC is not in the commercial sector and Mohit seems not to give a toss.

Meanwhile, BBC News continues to follow the Guardian’s agenda in its selection of stories. I heard no coverage whatsoever of the story about the horrible teacher who was recorded telling her Year 8 pupils that they were ‘despicable’ and should find another school because they disagreed with her absurd views regarding gender, not on Radio 4 nor the rest of the corporation’s output.

Nor was there coverage of what is, I think, my favourite story of the year, which was about the city of Hamtramck in Michigan, where the white liberals are terribly upset. They were not initially upset, you understand: at first they were delighted. Hamtramck became the first US city to elect an all-Muslim council and the white liberals were very pleased at what they saw as a symbolic act against, y’know, oppression.

They were less impressed a little later when the council banned, permanently, the flying of the LGBTQI rainbow flag from any public building in the city, and indeed they became quite annoyed when some Muslims – cheering this decision to the rafters – tweeted their jubilation about living in a ‘fagless’ city.

Then the white liberals noticed that what had previously been a city council noted for its beautiful gender diversity was now one in which every single member was a straight male (called Mohammed, most likely). There are to be many protests. A former mayor of the town, a white liberal herself, summed up the mood: ‘There’s a sense of betrayal, we supported you when you were threatened, and now our rights are threatened, and you’re the one doing the threatening.’ Are they? No kidding! And so it is all getting a little bit edgy. ‘These kids are being groomed’ to hate LGBTQ+ people, the former Hamtramck city councilwoman and mayor pro tem Catrina Stackpoole barked to a crowd of rainbow persons. ‘Are we grooming our children to hate Muslims? No. We could very easily go in that direction given the way that we’re being treated. But we are not grooming our kids to hate Muslims. We are grooming our kids to love everybody, no matter what… We all deserve respect.’

You sad sap. You do not deserve respect at all. You deserve to be laughed at for not understanding that any self-respecting Muslim council would do exactly the same. This is the problem with that thing beloved of the liberals, intersectional politics – it doesn’t actually intersect. The entire ideology is based upon a delusion, a falsehood. And watching the scales fall from the eyes of these idiots is something quite delicious to behold. Frankly, I’m with Allah on this one: that flag has been getting my goat for a long while. Public buildings – and the police and schools – should be politically neutral.

Portrait of the week: More mortgage pain, 999 goes down and a race to kill rats

Home

Jeremy Hunt, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, encouraged banks to enter a voluntary agreement for stretched mortgagors to pay only the interest on their loans for six months, after the Bank of England raised interest rates to a 15-year high of 5 per cent. HSBC, with employees continuing to work from home, is to move its world headquarters from its 45-storey tower in Canary Wharf by 2027. Boots is to close 300 of its 2,200 chemists’ shops in the coming year. To cut its debts, Cineworld, the world’s second-largest cinema chain (also owning Picturehouse cinemas in Britain), is to apply for administration.

The government said it would cost £169,000 to send a migrant to Rwanda, compared with £106,000 to keep one in Britain. The 999 emergency line broke down for a morning; Viscount Camrose told the House of Lords that BT took two hours 50 minutes to inform the government. Junior doctors (those below the rank of consultant) would go on strike again from 13 to 18 July. NHS consultants would strike on 20 and 21 July. The Royal College of Nursing failed to secure votes from the majority of its membership to authorise further strikes. Sarah, Duchess of York, had surgery for breast cancer. The Prince of Wales announced his life’s work to be helping to end homelessness. Winifred Ewing, the Scottish National party politician, died aged 93. Craig Brown, the former football manager of Scotland, died aged 82. Dame Ann Leslie, the journalist, died aged 82. About 7.3 million people watched live on television as Sir Elton John, aged 76, played at Glastonbury on his farewell tour.

Racism, class-based discrimination, elitism and sexism are ‘widespread’ in English and Welsh cricket, according to a report by the Independent Commission for Equity in Cricket, which recommended the removal of the annual match between Eton and Harrow at Lord’s. A BBC correspondent said that Matthew White, who died two years ago, was the sixth suspect in the murder of Stephen Lawrence in 1993. Nadine Dorries congratulated Festus Akinbusoye on his selection as prospective Conservative candidate for Mid Bedfordshire, which she still represents despite announcing on 9 June that she was leaving parliament ‘with immediate effect’.

Abroad

Forces from the Wagner Group of mercenaries advanced from Rostov-on-Don, of which they had taken control, northwards up the M4 towards Moscow. President Vladimir Putin of Russia said on television that the ‘armed mutiny’ by Wagner was treason, and anyone who had taken up arms against the Russian military would be punished. Then the mutineers stopped. President Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus had spoken to both Mr Putin and to Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of Wagner. A video released by Mr Prigozhin on 26 June denounced the decision ‘to close Wagner on 1 July 2023 and to incorporate it into the defence ministry’. He flew in his private jet to Belarus. An Ilyushin 22M (airborne command post) and six helicopters were reported shot down by the mutineers. President Putin made a broadcast from the Kremlin acknowledging that Russian military pilots had died but assuring Wagner troops they could sign a contract with the armed forces, go home or go to Belarus. He also said that ‘the whole of the Wagner Group was funded by the state’. Many questions remained unanswered. Russian missiles killed at least ten at a crowded pizza restaurant at Kramatorsk in Ukraine.

The tourist submersible Titan was found to have broken up after it lost contact an hour and 45 minutes into its dive to inspect the wreck of the Titanic on 18 June. All five aboard died, including the founder of the company that operates the vessel. It had not been certified or classed. Spanish coastguards rescued 227 migrants off Lanzarote and Gran Canaria, a day after the deaths of more than 30 off Gran Canaria. Greek authorities denied that they did not act quickly enough to prevent the loss of more than 500 lives when a migrant boat sank on 14 June. Kyriakos Mitsotakis’s conservative New Democracy party won the second Greek election in a month, trouncing the left-wing Syriza party; 12 of the 300 seats in parliament went to the far-right Spartans party, backed by the jailed founder of the neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn.

Fire engulfed one of the residential Ajman One Towers, in Ajman in the United Arab Emirates; two other towers in the complex caught fire in 2016. The WHO certified Belize, which had 10,000 cases in 1994, free of malaria. New Zealand set about trying to kill every rat in the land. CSH

The Wagner Group isn’t Russia’s only private army

Allowing a psychopath to form a private army of violent criminals may not, on reflection, have been Vladimir Putin’s greatest idea. But Yevgeny Prigozhin’s mutinous Wagner Group is by no means the only private army operating in Russia. Over the past couple of months no fewer than five armies have been fighting on Russian soil. Only one of them, the official Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, is directly subordinate to the Kremlin.

The 12,000-strong semi-irregular forces of Chechen president Ramzan Kadyrov, officially known as the 141st Special Motorised Regiment but more famous as the ‘Kadyrovsty’, are effectively the Praetorian Guard of a regional leader. The 25,000-strong Wagner Group have shown themselves ready and willing to follow their leader into open rebellion. And on the other side, two Ukraine-backed groups of insurgent Russian citizens known as the Freedom of Russia Legion (FRL) and the Russian Volunteer Corps (RVC) have taken and held villages in Russia’s Belgorod Province in a series of cross-border incursions.

But the list does not end there. Gazprom, the state-owned energy corporation, has also formed no fewer than five private armies known as Fakel (Torch), Potok (Torrent), Plamya (Flame), Alexander Nevsky, and Redut (Redoubt). Independent investigative site Gulagu.net and the Molfar open-source intelligence group have alleged that several Kremlin-connected billionaires, including the railway rolling stock magnate Andrei Bokarev, the international oil trader Gennadiy Timchenko and the metals billionaire Oleg Deripaska, have been involved in financing private military companies (PMCs). (Deripaska denies any connection to the Kremlin and says he has never supported or financed any PMCs.) Even Russia’s defence minister Sergei Shoigu founded a smaller PMC named Patriot in 2018 which is currently fighting in Ukraine.

In Crimea, the Russian-installed local leader Sergey Aksyonov runs a military group called Convoy. Orthodox nationalist media oligarch Konstantin Malofeev and his former employee Alexander Borodai (later leader of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic) have been active in building up the Combat Army Reserve of the Country (BARS), a force of salaried irregular fighters based in the Donbas and South Russia. Borodai also heads the Union of Donbas Volunteers which has been fighting in Avdiivka and Vuhledar in the Donetsk region. 

Some of these private armies have existed since before the invasion of Ukraine. Wagner was formed in 2014 by former FSB Special Forces Lieutenant-Colonel Dmitry Utkin in order to provide a deniable fighting force for the Kremlin as it fomented an uprising in Ukraine’s Donetsk region. Others have their roots in corporate security companies protecting oil installations. PMC Redut, for instance, was founded as a security force for infrastructure projects in Syria run by Stroytransgaz, an oil company.

But the majority of Russia’s private armies have sprung up since the beginning of the war. Early this year, for example, the Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin gave permission to Gazpromneft, a subsidiary of Gazprom, to form a private security organisation. Originally known as Gazpromneft Security and based in Omsk, the outfit became the foundation of PMC Potok. Potok soldiers were filmed in April fighting on the Wagner Group’s flanks in Bakhmut.

The structure and leadership of these semi-private forces remains murky, but all are funded and supplied by the Russian military. Indeed, Putin in a speech last week confirmed that between May last year and May this year the Wagner Group had received over 86 billion rubles (£740 million) in state funding. The Kadyrovtsy are also notionally part of Russia’s National Guard and are on the Kremlin’s payroll, not Kadyrov’s.

Why has the Kremlin allowed this proliferation of non-official military forces? To address an acute manpower shortage on the front lines, and the political danger of repeating the forced mobilisation of reservists in September, which prompted hundreds of thousands of military-age men to flee Russia.The Kremlin is ready to take men wherever it can find them, whether recruited from Russian prisons by the Wagner Group or Force-Z (the Russian army’s own special unit for convicts), or from among the populations of company towns run by Gazprom or other major state-affiliated corporations. PMC pay can run to £2,400 a month – an attractive offer in a country where the average wage in the provinces is well under £600.

Forces such as Gazprom’s Plamya, Potok and Fakel are not under the direct command of their parent company; they train at state military bases, use state military equipment and are run by state-linked businessmen. In return for recruiting soldiers, the units’ owners take a cut of the state’s funding. More importantly, they can gain favour from Putin himself for their loyalty. Plus, of course, a group of heavily armed men comes in handy when the time comes to divide up valuable real estate and enterprises in occupied Ukraine. The Wagner Group is reported to have taken partial control of the salt mines of Soledar, while the Kadyrovtsy last year stole thousands of tons of grain and quantities of John Deere agricultural equipment which they sold in southern Russia.

The Kremlin seemed to have understood the dangers of a state losing its grip on its monopoly of armed force even before the Wagner mutiny. Ten days before Prigozhin marched on Moscow, Putin confirmed that Wagner and all other private military forces should sign contracts with the Russian army. When Wagner’s revolt began, it was Putin himself who invoked the spectre of 1917, when military mutiny tipped into civil war. It was the revolt of the popular general Lavr Kornilov in 1917 that fatally weakened the authority of Russia’s provisional government. Prigozhin’s revolt was not, unlike Kornilov’s, an attempt to overthrow the state but rather a fight for the survival of the Wagner Group. Nonetheless, the fact that Wagner troops entered the city of Rostov unopposed demonstrated that Putin cannot take the army and police for granted.

Putin may try to enforce the loyalty of the dozens of private armies that he has allowed to spring up across his country by making them sign on the dotted line. But as the history of Russia’s civil war shows, the loyalty of armed men is very often to their leaders and not to the Tsar.