Where was the original kangaroo court?

‘Their purpose from the beginning has been to find me guilty, regardless of the facts. This is the very definition of a kangaroo court.’ So said Boris Johnson, in announcing his departure from parliament, with reference to the Commons Privileges Committee. What have kangaroos got to do with it?

Perhaps a kangaroo court’s essence is not in fact that of finding the accused guilty. That is the work of a show trial: ‘A judicial trial held in public with the intention of influencing or satisfying public opinion, and typically having a predetermined verdict,’ as the Oxford English Dictionary defines it.

A kangaroo court is more like lynch law, named after Charles Lynch, a justice of the peace active in 1780 during a threatened Loyalist uprising in Virginia, when suspects were given summary trials. Lynching developed its own horrible connotations for black Americans in the century after the Civil War.

A kangaroo court held by strikers, mutineers or prisoners essentially lacks legal standing. Since the phrase was coined in the 1840s, it has mostly applied to prisoners ruling on the distribution of the property of a new convict.

But why kangaroo? It clearly originated in America, not Australia. An early source is A Stray Yankee in Texas (1853) by Philip Paxton. What he describes is actually an off-duty lawyers’ game of a mock trial, in a log cabin with whiskey consumed. ‘I do not ever remember to have laughed so long or so heartily before or since,’ declares the narrator. He also calls it a Mestang court, a version of mustang, itself conflating two Spanish words for ‘a stray’.

For the invocation of kangaroos, plenty of explanations have been made up. It is unrelated to Australian diggers in the California gold rush. The admirable Michael Quinion on his World Wide Words website points to an example of the phrase from 1849 in Mississippi, far from the goldfields. So on kangaroo court, the jury’s still out.

Dear Mary: how do I stop my husband stripping off in the sun?

Q. I own a small boutique in north London selling secondhand clothes which are exclusively couture. An acquaintance is a frequent shopper but has a tendency to return items a few days after buying them with reasons like ‘My husband didn’t like the colour’ or ‘I think it’s too young for me.’ I have been tipped off by a mutual friend that she is wearing these clothes to parties before bringing them back for a refund. I would feel awkward confronting her but I would like to get the better of her. What is the best way to do this, Mary?

– B.B., London NW8

A. Online retailers have noticed a surge in ‘wardrobing’ – ordering clothing to wear just once, usually without removing any tags, and then returning the item for a refund after use. Next time she walks into your boutique – and before she has time to open her bag – invoke the name of the person who sold you the item of clothing and gush: ‘XXXXX saw you in that pink Chanel skirt the other day and said you looked fantastic in it – much better than it ever looked on her.’ This should stymie her intention to ask for a refund as she won’t have time to wonder which client might have been at any of the events where she wore it before her face has given her away.

Q. My husband, who is much loved and wonderful in every way, likes to strip off and wear just a pair of shorts and wellies while gardening in the summer. This is partly to avoid muddy splashes as he digs and clears the weed in the stream at the bottom of the garden, but also because he wants, as he always has, to get a gorgeous tan and a ‘phwoar’ from me from the kitchen window. The trouble is that he is unaware that, as he is now in his mid-sixties, others do not view him as the Poldark hero I obviously do. Mary, how do I get him to put that shirt back on when he is visible to passers-by without denting his self-confidence?

– Name and address withheld

A. Say nothing yourself. By this age you must have male friends who are currently having bits cut out because of historic exposure to sun. Invite one of these around to tell his own tale and warn your husband of the – verifiable – fact that nine out of ten cases of melanoma could be prevented by staying safe in the sun.

Q. I have been at my firm for more than a year and there is a colleague who sits near me who I get on well with. Somehow I have never caught his name and I am now too embarrassed to ask him or anyone else for that matter. How can I resolve this?

– P.H., London SW1

A. Ask him to join you for coffee at a Starbucks where customer names are felt-tipped on to the cups. Listen carefully while he gives his order.

Property prices represent the real cost-of-living crisis

I sometimes feel my entire life in advertising has been wasted, and not for the reason you may assume. No, my problem is that I am increasingly becoming a bit of a Georgist. It makes no sense to me that we are taxing people more for working than for living off rent or unearned capital gains. But, additionally, I increasingly wonder what the point is of making goods cheaper and better for consumers if any savings are mopped up by rises in property prices.

It’s rather like that half-joking observation that any economic gains in India will simply be spent on ever more expensive weddings. In Britain it’s worse. At least in India the guests get to enjoy a wedding. In Britain, expenditure on property is entirely rivalrous – a negative-sum game.

Over the 34 years of my working life, I have seen human ingenuity, technology and globalisation combine to develop products and services which offer much greater value for money. Televisions, cars, food, cafés, restaurants, clothing, air travel, telephony and domestic appliances have all become better and more affordable. There are lots of good reasons why you may wish to go back in time, but shopping, like dentistry, isn’t one of them.

Many modern goods are also bizarrely egalitarian. Someone on well below medium income can own a phone which, only four years previously, was the best in the world. And it comes with a free camera which not long ago would have cost £1,000.

It occurs to me that my children are blind to these improvements, since they lack any longer-term comparisons. This helps explain why young people are considerably less enthusiastic about free-market capitalism than their elders – they haven’t been around long enough to see it work.

A few years ago I was on the tarmac at Sydney airport awaiting take-off and I briefly giggled. ‘For a minute back there I turned on our central heating at home.’ ‘Dad, you are such an idiot!’ I then realised my children had never experienced a world where controlling your boiler from the other side of the planet was remotely novel. They hadn’t sat through endless episodes of Tomorrow’s World explaining that – maybe – in 20 years’ time, you could buy a bus ticket through your 22-inch television.

If you wanted to run a campaign promoting consumer capitalism, it would be easy. Just as in a sale, when price tags carry a ‘Was’ and ‘Now’ price, you would simply mandate that every product bear the current price and the price in real terms in 1980. Kitting out your child for school? ‘Was £700’ – ‘Now £200!’

So why don’t we feel better off?

And here’s where I explain my Georgism. We don’t feel richer because the rising cost of property has absorbed most of the gains created elsewhere, shifting productive spending away from goods and services towards rentier capitalism. Imagine if all goods carried a label stating what they would have cost if the price had increased in line with property prices since 1980. Ideal Home recently performed this calculation, and found that a double duvet would be £1,500.

It is long-term property prices, not a temporary spike in the cost of food or energy, that represent the real cost- of-living crisis. Until we do something to curb this, working consumers will not benefit from lower prices – they will merely fuel the property Ponzi scheme: ‘Dear consumer capitalism, thank you for all your work promoting ever better, cheaper goods and services. We couldn’t have done it without you. (Signed) Britain’s banks and buy-to-let landlords.’

And for people who have made an untaxed £300,000 gain on their house, but are now complaining that vine tomatoes are a bit expensive, I have two words of advice. The second one is ‘off’.

The Battle for Britain | 17 June 2023

Did the BBC silence lockdown sceptics?

Did the BBC breach its own impartiality rules by keeping critics of the government’s pandemic response off the air during the first lockdown? I first made that accusation in 2020 in a witness statement I submitted to the High Court in an effort to challenge Ofcom’s ‘coronavirus guidance’, which I argued was a factor in the BBC’s one-sided coverage. The attempt failed, with Ofcom able to convince the court that its guidance only cautioned against broadcasting ‘harmful’ content.

Part of my evidence, which I remember being slightly embarrassed to submit, was that my invitations to appear on the BBC had dwindled to almost nothing since I’d become a critic of lockdown policy. I’ve spoken to other lockdown sceptics and they say the same thing, but it’s impossible to prove we were kept off the airwaves because of our heretical views. In my case, it might just be because the Beeb had decided I’d become a bit of a bore.

But a recent investigation by the Telegraph into the Counter Disinformation Unit (CDU), a secret ‘cell’ in Whitehall that worked with the government during the pandemic to monitor ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation’, suggests that the BBC’s editorial independence may have been compromised. The head of the CDU, Sarah Connolly, says that one of its functions was ‘passing information’ to social media companies to ‘encourage… the swift takedown’ of posts it regarded as suspect. That’s worrying because we know that the CDU ignored an instruction from the Cabinet Office not to include ‘opinions’ in its definition of mis- and disinformation. Among the content flagged by the censors were criticisms of the government’s decision to close schools by Molly Kingsley, the co-founder of a children’s campaign group.

Did the CDU’s attempts to suppress dissent extend to the BBC? Connolly also chaired the Counter Disinformation Policy Forum, a group that included academics, lobbyists, tech companies and – crucially – a representative from the BBC. This was Jessica Cecil, founder of the Trusted News Initiative, a consortium that includes Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Twitter, and which was recently accused in a Texas court of getting those companies to remove dissident views about lockdowns and vaccines.

The BBC has played down the significance of Cecil’s attendance, claiming she was there in an ‘observer-only capacity’. But in the context of other things we know about the Beeb’s lockdown coverage, it looks a bit suspicious. ‘People were suggesting eminently qualified experts as alternative voices, but in my experience not one of them was put on air,’ an ex-BBC employee told the Telegraph. Other BBC journalists describe a ‘climate of fear’ in which anyone questioning the wisdom of the lockdown policy was ‘openly mocked’.

When dissenting experts did slip through the net, they weren’t always given a fair hearing. In October 2020, Sunetra Gupta, one of the signatories of the anti-lockdown Great Barrington Declaration, was invited on to BBC News to talk about new lockdown measures. Yet just before she was due to go on air a producer told her not to mention the declaration. Where did that instruction come from?

In September 2020, Susan Michie, then a member of Sage and a zealous supporter of Covid restrictions, complained on Twitter that she’d been booked on to the Today programme to discuss the Great Barrington Declaration with Professor Gupta on the understanding that the scientists behind it would be portrayed as cranks. But to her irritation, Gupta was, for once, allowed to set out her stall. ‘I was assured that this would not be held as an even-handed debate,’ wrote Michie. Who gave her that assurance? And why were the normal impartiality rules being waived?

David Davis MP, whose social media posts were monitored by the CDU, has called for a parliamentary inquiry into the government’s efforts to suppress dissent during the pandemic under the guise of protecting the public from mis- and disinformation. But wouldn’t it be better if this was dealt with by the official Covid inquiry? During the public consultation on the terms of reference last year, I responded by saying the inquiry should broaden its remit to investigate state interference with freedom of expression. I was told this would be covered under the existing terms, although to judge from the people who have been invited to testify that seems unlikely. No sceptical journalists have been called up, but 17 members of Independent Sage, a pro-lockdown lobby group, have.

Nadine Dorries causes Rishi Sunak even more misery

She’s done it again. Having re-ignited the Tory wars with her shock plans to quit parliament last Friday, now Nadine Dorries is delaying her resignation plans – prolonging the by-election misery for Rishi Sunak. The former Culture Secretary may not leave the Commons until the summer recess, pushing a by-election in her Mid-Bedfordshire constituency into the run-up to the Tories’ annual conference in the autumn. Just when Rishi wants to sell himself to the nation…

Friends of hers have told the Daily Mail – where Dorries writes a weekly column – that former Labour MP Rosie Cooper took two months to go after she formally resigned. ‘It’s her prerogative when she decides to go,’ said one. ‘She’s not going to give Sunak the convenience of three by-elections on the same day.’ Tory operators had hoped that the trio of contests caused by the resignations of Dorries, Nigel Adams and Boris Johnson would be held concurrently to limit the likelihood of opposition parties winning all three. Now though, Labour can focus their efforts on replacing Adams in Selby and Johnson in Uxbridge. The Liberal Democrats meanwhile have enough time to find a decent candidate to take on the Tories in Mid-Bedfordshire, the one which the Conservatives looked most likely to retain.

Maybe Sunak should have given her that peerage after all…

How should King Charles handle Prince Harry?

What does a king do when his privileged but dysfunctional son turns against him, flees to America and spends his time there attacking the monarch and his family? King Charles’s reaction has been to let him get on with it. But given what he might have done, the Stoic philosopher Seneca (d. ad 65), and adviser to Nero would have seen this as an admirable act of mercy.

In his essay on that subject (De Clementia), Seneca discussed the case of Tarius, who discovered that his son was plotting to murder him. In such circumstances, it was customary for the father, who had the right of life and death over his whole household, to summon a private council of family and friends, which in this case included the emperor Augustus, to decide what action to take. If the death penalty was agreed, the traditional punishment for a parricide was to be flogged, sewn up in a sack together with a cockerel, a snake, a monkey and a dog – good luck with that – and thrown into the sea.

The case was heard, and the evidence of the son and the contents of the accusation examined and discussed. Augustus then ordered each man to write down his own judgment in a secret vote, to prevent them all from simply agreeing with the emperor. They concluded that the son should be banished to whatever place seemed best to his father. After all, the son had been too timid to commit the deed, effectively making him innocent and justifying a mild punishment. So the son was exiled to Marseilles (a wealthy, cultured place, very popular with Roman exiles) with the same allowance that he was already receiving.

Seneca applauded this decision, with which Augustus was in full accord. As the philosopher wrote, the wise man will look not to the past but to the future, to improve the wrongdoer, like the good farmer who tends trees that stand tall, but applies props to those that have grown crooked, trims the overgrown, fertilises those in poor soil, and so on. Perhaps His Majesty is putting his faith in his son to grow up, in the hope that all can be forgiven?

Men don’t belong in women’s sport

Olympic leaders say there’s no such thing as male advantage in sport. Here’s a simple question for them: if that were true, why not just scrap sex-based categories of men and women altogether?

We all know why. Men run faster, jump higher and are stronger than women. In my sport of swimming, men are on average 11 per cent quicker than women. In boxing, their punches are 160 per cent more powerful. Such advantages mean that, on gender transition, mediocre male athletes are rocketing up the rankings, winning prizes and taking women’s places for one simple reason: whatever their feelings and life choices, they are biologically male.

So, faster, higher, stronger – but not better. Different. Human biology dictates it. In sport, sex matters. It’s binary and it governs safety and fair play. Inclusion makes a mockery of sport but it harms just one group: female athletes.

At the heart of a furious debate in which female rights, science and the nature of sport have been shoved aside, trans activists have had the ear of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), whose members insist that there is no evidence to suggest males identifying as trans women have an unfair advantage. That’s simply untrue. The IOC is also ignoring the 18 peer-reviewed studies which contain plenty of evidence to show that the vast majority of male advantages cannot be reversed through transition, or even mitigated to anything remotely close to fair play.

These irreversible male advantages include height, muscle by weight, larger heart and lung capacity, higher metabolic rates, stronger ligaments and less risk of injury. Longer arms give a greater reach and can generate more speed on a cricket ball. Bigger hand spans can more easily palm a basketball. Longer legs and narrower pelvises lead to better running gaits. Males need fewer strides to cross a distance and the strides they take are more efficient. Females have a significantly higher Q-angle of the knee and hip joint internal rotation angle, as well as a significantly lower arch height index in their feet than males. This means that women are much more susceptible to lower limb and foot/ankle injuries.

The results of all that are stark. If you take the top 15-year-old boys in just the United States in a wide range of swimming and track and field events and overlay the best eight results over the top eight outstanding women in Olympic finals in 2016, only a handful of women make a final and none gets a medal of any colour. Because they’re boys, they have male hormones and developmental pathways that girls never have unless cheating is at play.

Which takes us to another huge chunk of evidence the IOC has been ignoring. I swam at a time of East German doping and in my sport the GDR women were systematically doped with testosterone from around the time of puberty. Scientists worked out in the 1960s that if they gave girls a touch of what boys got, they were guaranteed gold and most of the other prizes too.

Olympic, World and European sports results of the 1970s and 1980s were awash with injustice and the crime was confessed to as early as 1990. Yet the IOC has done nothing to address the biggest heist in sport. East German athletes have received compensation in Germany for the harm caused to them, but there has been no justice for all the women from other countries denied their rightful rewards.

At the Moscow Olympics, I finished second to Petra Schneider, who later admitted to having been doped. I have teammates and friends like Ann Osgerby, who came fourth behind three doped East Germans. No one has heard her name or the names of generations of others who excelled in Olympic, World and European championships but were rolled over by GDR cheating. In Europe, more than 90 per cent of all women’s medals in the pool between 1974 and 1989 went to swimmers who were given male steroids around the time of puberty.

But they were, of course, female. Imagine having to face and race opponents who have had the full male-steroid boost from the womb to their twenties before they self-identify their way into women’s competition.

I knew what it would mean from the moment I realised what the IOC had done all those years ago. This was the same organisation that had placed the heads of GDR doping on their advisory panels and had failed to act when it discovered that this doping had been run from an IOC-accredited laboratory. It was the same organisation that had ignored our pleas for justice for more than 30 years.

Rugby, swimming and athletics have led the way back to safety and fair play with rules that ring-fence the women’s category for females only. Sports like cycling are lagging woefully and harming female riders by forcing them to face male advantage in almost every event.

Like the suffragettes, today’s female athletes have been forced to conclude that the only way to halt a march on their rights is to openly object. They are starting to realise that there is immense power in working together to say, ‘Male advantage is real – we are entitled to a female-only category in sport.’ Some cyclists have staged protest rides wearing T-shirts with ‘WOMAN’ on them and posting results under an event category of ‘Woman Means Adult Human Female’. Similar things have been seen in Park Runs up and down Britain. This week half of England’s angler squad quit after a biological male was allowed on the team.

It is a response that sports authorities and event organisers can expect to keep growing until we get back to fair play. Ten British rowing women’s masters records are now in the hands of male athletes identifying as women. That’s not merely unfair – it’s cheating by another name. Women’s sport is not a colony for mediocre males.

The weather isn’t ‘climate change’

I was in New York while the smoke from Canadian wildfires filtered over the city for three days last week, and I took a guilty pleasure in the aesthetic thrill. Midday, the light assumed the roseate hue of sunset. A cloudless sky appeared overcast, and the ghostly sun was so occluded one could look straight at it. Honestly, the atmosphere of anomaly was electrifying. New Yorkers advertised their sense of snow-day exceptionalism by driving even more atrociously than usual. Despite hysterical health warnings to batten ourselves in our homes with closed windows, I played three daily hours of tennis throughout the respiratory emergency – though it was nice to have a ready excuse when I botched another cross-court forehand.

Justin Trudeau must have felt similarly grateful for a ready excuse for those raging wildfires, although we couldn’t call his get-out-of-responsibility-free card creative: climate change, the same all-purpose culprit New York Times columnist Gail Collins lazily blamed for our doomy skies. Anyone care about the truth? The fires and Gotham’s eerie haze were due to wind-fanned lightning strikes in Quebec and a rare high/low pressure system across North America called an ‘omega block’ (don’t ask).

Ironically, the real problem may be that Canada hasn’t been lighting enough fires. Government regulations regarding controlled burns have gnarled into a thicket. By the time the paperwork is completed, the narrow window of cool, windless weather ideal for safely incinerating highly flammable dead branches and dry brush has often passed. Fewer controlled burns mean more uncontrolled burns. Add to that: the country has no national firefighting service; provincial wildfire prevention budgets have been cut, and tend to be spent on protecting villages and towns; over the past 25 years, Canadian Forest Service staffing levels have plunged from 2,200 to 700.

But never mind those pesky details. Call it ‘climate change’, and all is forgiven. For politicians, climate has become the catch-all homework-eating dog. If President Erdogan neglected to blame this spring’s earthquake fatalities in Turkey on fossil fuel emissions – rather than the shoddy construction and corruption his administration has fostered – he was missing a trick.

Given the ceaselessness of this mantra, perhaps we’ve finally discovered that scientific holy grail, a ‘theory of everything’ – a single formula that explains why anything happens anywhere (‘Because climate change!’). Yet for my entire life I have heard tell of hurricanes, typhoons, cyclones, earthquakes, floods, mudslides, tornadoes, volcanoes, tsunamis, hailstorms, droughts and, yes, wildfires ruining other people’s lives somewhere. We used to call these humbling outbreaks of arbitrary havoc ‘natural disasters’, but the expression is out of fashion now that every fit the planet throws is all our fault.

So long as the wrath of God has not rained down on me personally or on anyone I care about and the cataclysm has occurred safely far away, I confess that as a news consumer I’ve always been a tiny bit bored by these stories. Oh, sometimes the pics are riveting (especially of the mud slides). I’m abstractly sympathetic, and if given a button to press to make these calamities unhappen, I would press it. Still, there used to be no implicit moral or political content to these impersonal meteorological or geological convulsions, which were simply a terrible shame. After weeks of coverage, I might sheepishly fast-forward through the suffering of strangers, because it didn’t mean anything other than that life was unfair, and I knew that already.

Well, now we’ve loaded the erstwhile ‘natural disaster’ with moral and political content galore. Without fail, news presenters explain every unfortunate weather occurrence as due to anthropogenic ‘climate change’. A while back, the media were obliged to dredge up some well-funded activist ‘expert’ to justify this claim, but not any more. The attribution of every rained-off picnic to human-induced ‘climate change’ is mindlessly appended to mainstream broadcasts as if the whole industry has the hiccoughs. Newscasters are safe in their surety that no one will ever demand evidence of a causal link between a drought in the western US and petrol-fuelled Land Rovers in Sussex. They’re safe in their surety that no one will ever object that, sorry, Bangladesh has suffered huge floods throughout its history, from which fewer people are dying than ever before. As we do not have an Earth control group – a second identical planet on which all humanity still gets around in donkey carts – they’re safe in their surety that blaming every cataclysm under the sun on fossil-fuel-driven ‘climate change’ is unfalsifiable.

A proposal: let’s bring back the distinction between climate and weather. Climate regards patterns across hundreds if not thousands of years. Check out the graph of global mean temperatures for the last 500,000 years, which resembles an ECG. With a periodicity of approximately 100,000 years, the planet’s mean temperature has steadily dropped to about 5˚C, then swooped up to between 10˚C and 12˚C, rising on virtually identical gradients each time (without the help of a single coal-fired power plant). We’re now atop another 20,000-year upward swoop – thankfully, since my forehand would be really crap if I had to chase the ball on a glacier. Industrialised modernity since 1880 takes up so little space on this graph that it’s indiscernible. That is ‘climate’. Accordingly, I even dismiss climate sceptics’ observation that, according to satellite readings, warming has nearly flatlined for the past 20 years, because in climate terms 20 years is meaningless.

The media’s knee-jerk ‘Because climate change!’ is numbing in its repetition and suspicious in its constancy. As it smacks of propaganda, on a popular level the incantation backfires. I’d have more faith in the reliability of these incessant attributions if newscasters occasionally tacked on to, say, a report on a deluge, ‘This event had no connection with climate change. It happened to rain a shedload in one place, but that’s occurred for ever. While locals might take councils to task for allowing rampant house-building on a flood plain, otherwise this story has no moral or political content and mostly amounts to bad luck.’ But I’m not holding my breath.

Where’s Putin? The Russian leader is losing control

‘Does Putin even still exist? Where is he anyway?’ asked Igor Strelkov, former minister of defence of the self-declared Donetsk People’s Republic last month in one of the regular video rants he publishes on his Telegram channel. It’s a good question. Since 3 May, the Kremlin has been struck by two Ukrainian drones while up to 30 more have fallen among the billionaire dachas of Russia’s elite along the exclusive Rublevo-Uspenskoe highway. Anti-Putin Russians attacking from Ukraine have seized at least eight villages in Belgorod province, capturing Russian soldiers and sending drones to hit the regional capitals of Belgorod, Voronezh and Kursk. Russia’s Wagner mercenary group captured and beat up a Russian regular army battalion commander and forced him to make a hostage-style video admitting to drunkenly ordering his men to shell Wagner positions. Meanwhile, Wagner’s founder and chief, Yevgeny Prigozhin, has been touring Russia drumming up recruits and giving a series of highly inflammatory interviews in which, among other things, he has called for defence minister Sergei Shoigu to be tried and shot for facilitating ‘the genocide of the Russian population’.

And Putin? As Strelkov put it, Russia’s ‘commander-in-chief has withdrawn from hostilities’. Over recent weeks Putin has appeared to tell an audience of children that he sleeps ‘very well at night’; to briefly claim that the Ukrainian counter-offensive has ‘failed to achieve any of its goals’ despite then admitting Russia had lost 54 tanks last week; and to have breakfast with his ally Alexander Lukashenko and agree that Russian tactical nuclear missiles would be deployed in neighbouring Belarus. In all these appearances Putin looked stiff, puffy and stilted. ‘You can make reports to a mummy, but it does not mean that the reports are heard,’ continued Strelkov in an open attack on Putin. ‘Either we must hand over power to someone more competent, or take it upon ourselves to carry this burden. If a horse has drowned crossing a river, you can’t conceal it for ever. The wagon is sinking.’

As Russia flounders under Ukrainian attack, Putin is conspicuous by his absence. The most realistic and articulate public voice on the unfolding jeopardies facing Russia is Wagner’s founder Prigozhin – who is also one of Russia’s most bloodthirsty and aggressive ultra-patriots. ‘Conscripts are being thrown against an enemy who is well-prepared and well-armed,’ said Prigozhin, who served nine years in jail for theft and later became a billionaire caterer and close Putin ally.

Addressing his bête noire Shoigu, Prigozhin demanded: ‘Did you prepare for this war at all? Did you check that the army was ready? Why haven’t you gone to the Duma, admitted that we are completely screwed and asked for martial law to be declared?’ Prigozhin rubbished Russian ministry of defence claims that an incursion by the Ukraine-backed Russian volunteer corps in Belgorod had been repelled and claimed that official photos of dead invaders had been faked. He contrasted Ukraine’s evacuation of the civilian population of Bakhmut followed by a ‘brave and honourable defence’, to the Russian authorities ‘totally contemptuous abandonment’ of civilians in frontline Belgorod towns like Shebekino. ‘They don’t care what happens to people anywhere they are not – except on Rublevka,’ he railed, referring to the luxury suburb of Moscow where Putin and the Russian elite reside. ‘It’s good that the Ukrainians hit that.’

Even more pointedly, Prigozhin claimed that the two places in Russia that Nato would never attack were the headquarters of the general staff in Moscow and the army’s command post in Rostov-on-Don because if the enemy did succeed in eliminating Russia’s current army command, ‘we might have a chance of winning this war’. Supposedly quoting letters from residents of Belgorod appealing to Wagner for help, Prigozhin floated the idea that Russia should be like the military dictator General Augusto Pinochet’s Chile, with ‘the Russian elite in a stadium surrounded by armed men with machine-guns’. He also warned that Russia risked a revolution similar to the one in 1917 because of the divide between ‘the Kremlin elite’ and ordinary Russians whose children ‘come back in zinc coffins’ from Ukraine.

This is more than just fighting talk; it’s an open call for insurrection. And to be clear, Prigozhin is no marginal eccentric. He is – or at least was – a personal ally of Putin, and his Wagner mercenaries have been a key part of the Kremlin’s war effort in Ukraine. He commands a heavily armed force at least 50,000-strong who are fiercely loyal to him. And such is Prigozhin’s contempt for the regular Russian army that earlier this month his men arrested and tortured Lieutenant Colonel Roman Venevitin, commander of Russia’s 72nd Motorised Rifle Brigade. On his release, Venevitin claimed that Wagner regularly ‘issued death threats, stole military hardware… kidnapped [Russian soldiers] and tried to trade them for ammunition, forced them to work as warehousemen for the killed and wounded, used simply as labourers, like slaves’. In his latest video interview Prigozhin made an open threat that he and Wagner would come and liberate Belgorod if the regular Russian army could not. ‘My commanders are angry – when they hear defence ministry briefings they grab their pistols,’ he growled. ‘We won’t allow Shoigu’s daughters and sons-in-law to sit and lubricate their asses with Vaseline while grandmothers and children die like dogs in Belgorod… And it’s not far from Belgorod to Rublevka.’

How Prigozhin still walks the earth – let alone remains at liberty to openly trash the Russian war effort and literally threaten Putin’s top ministers with death – is a mystery. Some Machiavellian minds have argued that Prigozhin is useful to the Kremlin as a kind of extremist bogeyman who makes Putin appear sane and reasonable, much like the ultra-nationalist firebrand Vladimir Zhirinovsky did in his time. But the more likely explanation is that Prigozhin has risen into a power and charisma vacuum left by Putin’s apparent paralysis.

There are other signs that the Kremlin is losing control of the overall war narrative. Last week one of Russia’s most aggressive propagandists, Margarita Simonyan, suddenly suggested that the war could no longer be won. ‘Wouldn’t it be wonderful to stop this bloodshed right now?’ Simonyan said on Vladimir Solovyov’s long-running show on state-owned television. ‘Leave the front lines where they are, freeze the conflict and hold referendums? People can stay with whichever side they choose to stay with.’ Konstantin Zatulin, a senior lawmaker and member of the ruling United Russia party, told a televised forum that the invasion had achieved none of its declared aims. ‘Let’s get out of this somehow,’ Zatulin said – prompting an investigation by his party apparatus.

A poll last month by the Moscow-based FOM agency found that 53 per cent of Russians considered their family and friends ‘in an anxious mood’, a jump of 11 per cent since April.

Will the evident nervousness in the Russian elite over the looming prospect of defeat and the threat represented by the likes of Prigozhin and Strelkov translate into a climbdown by Putin? Don’t bet on it. A desperation–driven escalation by the Kremlin is an equally plausible outcome – including martial law, mass mobilisation and a tactical nuclear strike. Evidence is growing that the Kakhovka dam was deliberately dynamited by the Russians, despite the fact that their own positions were the worse affected by the resultant flooding and that the dam’s demolition cut off the Crimean peninsula from fresh water supplies.

A regime that is capable of such a massively self-defeating act of stupidity and mass destruction is capable of anything. Putin was dangerous enough when he was strong, confident and aggressive. Now, as he retreats into silence and paralysis and those calling for him to escalate grow more strident and more fearless, his career could be entering its most dangerous and unpredictable phase yet.

Why Conservatives must get behind Rishi

The hubbub about Boris Johnson is blocking the view. He is, of course, an easy and undemanding topic of conversation. His behaviour is, of course, unedifying. His unsuitability for office is beyond question. And his capacity to horrify, amuse, disgust or worry us appears limitless. So here we all are again, talking about ‘Boris’. And who am I to complain? I’ve been writing all this for at least a decade, the well of my indignation never runs dry, and – frankly – Johnson has put food on my and many a fellow commentator’s table for almost as long as we can remember. We’d miss him.

Yet, quietly and almost without our noticing, we and perhaps millions of other citizens who take an interest in the world of Westminster and beyond have allowed our attention to slip away from something that has never been more important: politics. Not showbusiness – Johnson is showbusiness – but politics. And, more specifically for Conservative-minded people (and I’m still one), the meaning and purpose of Conservatism in the 21st century.

How is it that a new Tory prime minister who strikes me as one of the more profoundly Conservative of our party leaders since Lord Salisbury (‘Reform? Aren’t things bad enough already?’) can find himself denounced by elements on the right – the right – of this parliamentary Conservative party, as betraying ‘Tory principles’?

What are Tory principles? It is said of common ailments that the more suggested cures one encounters, the less likely there is to be a cure. Likewise, and with the same implication, books on the meaning of Conservatism are legion: eminent historians, academics and political scientists keep trying. But the fact that attempting a comprehensive and internally consistent critique of Conservatism is a mug’s game does not mean (as cynical journalists like to claim) that this is a party that believes only in power, and whatever it takes to get it and keep it.

Nobody who has belonged to and worked for the Tory party for as long as I did can escape the inchoate but strong impression that this is a party with ancient and abiding instincts. Toryism has a nature, and though Tories do not always act in their natures, they tend to. To describe this nature is not so much to outline a political manifesto as to describe a very recognisable human type.

Your typical Conservative prefers the status quo to the unknown. He or she has a strong streak of native caution. He or she, though no slave to tradition, takes it as their starting position that things are as they are for a reason, and if you want to change them, you’ll need to find a better reason. Otherwise, let well enough alone. In the long history of social change, Conservatives have tended to drag their feet, but not to obstruct at all costs nor, once the change is made and embedded, to swim too hard against the tide.

This innate prudence extends particularly to the matter of financial discipline. Tories care about cost, and care about the good housekeeping that keeps costs down. They are not given to economic adventures. They are distrustful of revolutionary ideas for managing a national economy. This includes radical right-wing schemes as well as the usual left-wing ones. I cannot say that your typical Tory is a zealot for the theory of free-market competition – he or she inclines to a quiet life – but their belief in self-reliance, self-help, hard work (and retaining the harvests of hard work) makes them staunch if often untutored devotees of essentially capitalist economics, and sceptics about happy but expensive schemes for public welfare. Individualism, and family ties, do have a firmer hold on the Conservative imagination than any broad concept of ‘society’ – of which Tories are vaguely suspicious. Mrs Thatcher was right about that.

Such, then, is my idea of a Conservative. I certainly do not say Brexit necessarily offended any of these instincts – you could as a Tory believe the costs of EU membership outweighed the benefits. But you would believe that not as an article of faith but as the bottom line of a calculation. The spirit of ‘Brexit come what may’ was deeply unconservative. Nor of course is cutting tax inherently unconservative, but ‘borrow to cut tax’ undoubtedly was. Whatever got into so many Tory MPs during those careless Johnson years (‘Fuck business’), followed by the Truss interlude – that short flare-up of an -ism that should, like all ideological zealotry, be anathema to a true Tory?

And the irony is this. The principal opposition today, heading perhaps for government more by default than acclamation, has instincts too. Labour instincts. Socialist instincts. Instincts it knows (for Keir Starmer is no fool) it must suppress, deny, postpone, play down: because the voters are wary of them. Labour does not have a philosophy for government; it has an internal dialectic between those who want to follow their deep belief in collective action to improve mankind, and those who want to resist it for fear of losing elections. This is a terrible moral foundation for the challenge of government. Voters, even Labour loyalists, know that a Labour government in power in difficult economic times can only plead hardship – ‘the cupboard is bare’ – but has no anchored belief in the stringencies and market economics over which it will have to preside, forever crying ‘we don’t like it either, but needs must’. Only Tony Blair could persuade us that he personally wanted to move Labour on to the centre ground. Starmer can’t.

What better time, then, for a Conservative leadership that doesn’t just think balancing the books, getting debt down, treating tax giveaways with suspicion and keeping a tight rein on state spending are things forced upon us by difficult economic times – but believes they are good in themselves?

Rishi Sunak seems to be such a leader. Perhaps – though I’m not confident – his parliamentary party will now fall in solidly behind him.

Letters: Rod is wrong about J.K. Rowling

The sound of silence

Sir: Charles Moore is right to draw attention to the deafening silence in the press about the present state of South Africa (Notes, 10 June). Not only has the country descended into frightening levels of violence, but the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study 2021 placed it last of all countries tested, in both reading and comprehension. How long will the ANC ruling elite remain an untouchable holy cow for our press? It is South Africans who suffer most from this implicit censorship.

Margaret Vane

By email

Not cheap, not cheerful

Sir: Emily Rhodes notes that ‘books have never been more beautiful’ (‘Cooking the books’, 10 June). While this may be true of their covers, it is certainly not true of what’s between them. I recently bought a Bodley Head hardback for £20 and an £8.99 Black Swan paperback. Both are printed on floppy grey paper closely resembling bog roll. Both are also Penguin Random House imprints and proudly proclaim that the paper has been sourced sustainably. It would seem another instance of the obsession with net zero leading to reduced quality.

John Mounsey

Minchinhampton, Gloucestershire

JK is OK

Sir: Rod Liddle doesn’t seem to understand sexuality (‘On the hallowed terf’, 10 June). There’s no contradiction in J.K. Rowling’s support for a biological definition of both women and lesbians. Lesbians deny nothing about their biology – just insist that it’s normal for a consistent sample of biological women to prefer sex with women. The Kinsey reports of 1948 and 1953 shocked America by showing 37 per cent of men and 13 per cent of women had had some overt homosexual experience. Thank goodness Rod hasn’t read them -– he’d be appalled.

Phillip Hodson

Psychotherapist and sex therapist

Tetbury, Gloucestershire

WHO’s in charge

Sir: Christopher Snowdon makes a thought-provoking case for leaving the World Health Organisation (WHO), aspirational though that may be (‘Mission creep’, 10 June).

Mr Snowdon correctly identifies that the draft Pandemic Preparedness Treaty makes no mention of non-pharmaceutical interventions such as lockdowns, quarantines and travel bans, but he has not spotted the amendments to the International Health Regulations which would endow the WHO with new powers to order precisely those measures. Indeed, the WHO’s own expert review committee has described the amendments as introducing ‘unprecedented obligations’ for member states to follow when the next pandemic strikes.

Ben Kingsley

Strategic Legal Affairs, UsForThem

Cambridgeshire

Much ado about something

Sir: In her review of my Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies, Emma Smith chastises me for questioning the authorship, while also criticising me for not identifying an alternative candidate (Books, 3 June).

Professor Smith seems to have misunderstood the book. It’s a portrait of a fractious, muddled controversy by a journalist surveying the history of the debate. My aim was to report on it, not to solve it. I let the reader grapple with the many gaps, inconsistencies and problems without being told what to think.

Historians recognise that debates about the past are a fundamental feature of historical inquiry. Shakespeare scholars, by contrast, resort to accusations that those with different views are spreading disinformation. The authorship question is a compelling subject that has engaged diverse writers and thinkers. Yet in her defence of orthodoxy, Professor Smith deploys breezy misrepresentations and belittling smears. She concludes by wondering ‘Who cares?’ about the author anyway. This show of indifference has long been the last line of defence for scholars who otherwise seem to care quite a lot. No one has to care, of course, but a scholar who doesn’t has abandoned all pretence to scholarship.

Elizabeth Winkler

Washington DC

Good and Bader

Sir: I’ve just read Douglas Murray’s article in which he quoted Ben Macintyre describing Douglas Bader as ‘a monster… brutally unpleasant to anyone he considered of a lower socioeconomic order’ (‘How to dismantle history’, 10 June).

Soon after the war, I was serving at my regimental depot when a young recruit fell from a platform and lost both legs to an incoming train. Not surprisingly, his spirits were very low and he did not want to live like that. Douglas Bader made several visits to persuade him that it was possible to have a good and productive life with artificial legs – and gave him the determination to live. That does not seem to me to equate with Ben Macintyre’s description.

Christopher Piggins

Salisbury

The rule of 3

Sir: Deborah Ross had never heard of Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges (Cinema, 10 June). Nor had the Today programme interviewer when it discussed the film she reviewed. Listeners to Radio 3 have no such problem. His music is often played there, and he is fully appreciated for his talent without tedious references to diversity. The conclusion is clear. Stop listening to the Today programme and tune in to Radio 3, the remaining jewel in the BBC’s crown.

Prof Robin Jacoby

Hethe, Oxfordshire

Hammers of the gods

Sir: How poignant that Jeremy Clarke’s beloved West Ham should clinch their first European title in 58 years. Your late, great scribe clearly has friends in high places.

Will Holt

Enochdhu, Perthshire

Can I be a woman?

I have a friend who describes me as an ‘uptight boring old straight heterosexual’ – simply because I don’t use porn or prostitutes, don’t swing both ways and have no interest in orgies and dogging, or any desire to be tied up and flogged by some fat dominatrix in a ‘torture den’ in Pimlico.

He is always on the lookout for a new kink or a fresh fetish to try, and one of his latest passions is autogynephilia – that is, experiencing sexual arousal at the thought or image of oneself as a woman. This means he can find a woman sexually attractive only when he thinks not of her but of himself as that woman. He used to call himself a transvestite; now he calls himself an autogynephile.

Autogynephilia (or AGP for short) is a medical term coined by the psychologist Ray Blanchard in 1989. But it has recently become both a fashionable practice and politically controversial. I think its current appeal – at least for my friend, who loves to provoke – is that you can shock heterosexual males and offend the trans-activist community at the same time. The latter believe that the very idea of autogynephilia is intrinsically transphobic.

I confess that it’s hard for us straight males to understand the appeal of AGP. One self-confessed autogynephile has said on YouTube that he couldn’t have sex with a woman ‘unless I imagined myself as that woman’. This sounds like a form of erotic narcissism to me.

Of course I’ve often thought about what it must be like to think, act and experience the world as a woman. Most men, I suspect, have. But getting aroused by thinking of oneself as a woman? I don’t get it.

I said to my friend: ‘Where’s the thrill in that?’

‘Well, why don’t you try it?’ he replied.

My first reaction was ‘No way’, but then I thought ‘Why not?’ I’ll show him that we uptight straights can try new things. As Sir Thomas Beecham allegedly said, you should try everything once except incest and folk dancing.

My friend offered to be my guide to the joys of AGP for one evening. We began with getting in a feminine mood. This involved pink champagne, two episodes of Sex and the City and watching him parade around his living room in a variety of – supposedly – sexy lingerie.

He suggested I slip into something more comfortable, and offered me a silken kimono, lacy underwear, a red bra and a pair of high heels. Like any good heterosexual, I began to perspire with fear – but like any good liberal-minded man I was determined to show no fear, so I got with the programme.

‘Now, don’t those clothes feel so sensual against your body?’ he asked.

Yes, they felt soft and nice.

He then told me to shut my eyes as he caressed my face with a scented silk scarf.

‘How’s that?’ he said.

I had to admit that was something more than nice. A tiny spark of something had been lit. Was it just the power of suggestion or was I – gulp – becoming an autogynephile?

But the spell was broken when he said: ‘Now very slowly, I want you to caress your breasts as if they were a woman’s breasts.’

I awkwardly fumbled my chest area and he asked: ‘Do you feel anything?’

‘Yeah, I feel a right tit.’

He didn’t laugh. But then people with a serious sexual fetish never have a sense of humour about it.

He carried on trying to get me to feel my body as the body of a beautiful sexy woman. I will spare readers the details of his masterclass in ‘getting to know and love your nipples’ and saying ‘hello’ to my imaginary vagina.

Next he sat me down in front of his make-up mirror: ‘Now, what sort of woman would you like to imagine becoming?’

‘Penny Mordaunt please!’ I replied.

On reflection, though, I decided she was too young and chose the more age-appropriate Helen Mirren.

‘Right, let’s get to work,’ he said. ‘Relax and shut your eyes.’

First I could feel a wig being placed over my head and then his make-up brushes doing their magic. Sitting there undergoing my transformation, I felt like a contestant in that old TV show Stars in Their Eyes, where some ordinary person said, ‘Tonight Matthew I’m going to be Cher’ or some other famous singer – before vanishing into cloud of dry ice to reappear transformed into their favourite star.

Eventually my friend said I could open my eyes. I was meant to see myself as Dame Helen Mirren and be thrust into a state of arousal. Alas, I looked more like Dame Edna Everage and was thrust into a mild depression.

But you know how you don’t want to hurt the feelings of the person cutting your hair when you’re horrified by the results and you fake a smile and compliment them on their work? So I said, ‘Amazing. I feel so… so…’

‘Aroused?’

‘Yeah, I’m getting there!’

‘What you need, my friend, is another drink and a spot of porn.’

Of course, my friend was into retro porn – the stuff from the 1970s and 80s. As we watched he kept telling me to imagine that I was the woman on the screen getting serviced by the plumber or the washing-machine man.

He was clearly turned on and I was clearly turned off. Why? Here we were on Saturday night, two old blokes dressed up as women, seeking sexual thrills by pretending we were women. What a strange world, and what a sad life some of us lead. Still, I’m glad I gave it a go and can add autogynephilia to my list of things that are not my cup of tea.

Should crypto be regulated like shares – or more like a casino?

‘Crypto assets are commodities,’ said my neighbour at dinner. No they’re not, I replied, commodities are natural raw materials that have ultimate real-world uses. Crypto is merely a collection of blips in cyberspace to which adherents choose to attribute value. ‘Just like fiat currencies,’ my neighbour shot back. ‘What’s real about them? Aren’t they just an idea in the mind of central bankers?’

And off we went on a ding-dong debate. A pity the US Securities and Exchange Commission chairman Gary Gensler wasn’t there to offer his theory that bitcoin, crypto’s market leader, is big enough to be a commodity but that lesser imitators are ‘securities’ (that is, investments bought with the expectation of profit from the efforts of their founders and promoters) which should be regulated like shares. Today’s crypto arena, says Gensler, is akin to the 1920s stock market, riddled with hucksters and fraudsters. Hence his launch of charges against Binance and Coinbase, the world’s biggest crypto exchanges, for illegal securities trading.

Enthusiasts say Gensler’s actions will merely drive crypto trade to more welcoming regimes such as Hong Kong and Dubai. But let’s hope the City of London, in its current thrust for new revenue streams, doesn’t yield to the crypto lobby. On this I’m firmly with Harriett Baldwin MP, chair of the Treasury select committee, who said recently: ‘With no intrinsic value, huge price volatility and no discernible social good, consumer trading of crypto… more closely resembles gambling than a financial service.’ In short, neither a commodity nor a security, but an evanescent casino chip.

On the rocks

‘Britain’s post-Brexit policy drift alarms world executives,’ says a Bloomberg article. Its sources call the UK ‘an extraordinarily bureaucratic country’ (private equity veteran Guy Hands) with ‘a stifling commercial environment’ (US pharma giant Eli Lilly & Co) and a ‘scandalous neglect’ of science (James Dyson) as well as being ‘the least attractive shopping destination in Europe’ (Burberry chairman Gerry Murphy) after scrapping VAT-free shopping for tourists.

Meanwhile, a survey by BritishAmerican Business and Bain says confidence in Britain’s business environment among US firms operating here has ‘dropped markedly for a third year in a row’, aggravated by ‘anxieties over political stability, economic growth prospects and corporate tax’.

The Department for Business and Trade responds with blah about the ‘largest ever delegation of Asia Pacific investors’ who are ‘set to pour millions into UK tech’. But be honest: the world now sees our economy as a shipwreck, despite bright spots of talent. How will you change that, Prime Minister, in the time that remains to you? And what would you do differently, Sir Keir?

Double-breasted dog

‘A large puppy in a pinstripe suit’ is a vivid if not quite accurate description of Crispin Odey, the hedge-fund prince who is leaving his own firm following allegations of repeated sexual misconduct towards female staff. The phrase was coined by the Financial Times, whose investigative team – fresh from skewering the CBI – were responsible for the startlingly detailed Odey exposé. An objective reader might think him more of a dog than a puppy, while an expert on the social hierarchy of British suiting might say he’s more the plain-grey double-breasted Old Harrovian than the spivvy stripe of the parvenu. In my one encounter, for what it’s worth, I found him physically imposing and (not without justification, given his £800 million bank balance) hugely pleased with himself.

Nevertheless, we should ask whether media hostility to a Tory donor whose fortune was boosted by betting against the pound and the trajectory of UK government bonds (‘the gifts that keep on giving,’ he called them) has played a part in the way his reputation has been destroyed. Impossible to say, but my only other glimpse of him in the flesh may or may not be telling.

I was lunching at Corrigan’s in Mayfair with a foreign diplomat who likes gossip. In came Odey from his nearby office with a female companion who looked many years his junior, heading for what I’d guess was his regular booth. A little later, without turning to look, I whispered, ‘That’s Crispin Odey behind me, by the way…’ ‘Oh really,’ said my host uneasily. ‘Well he’s certainly very friendly with that young lady.’

My AI replacement

I’m in the Dordogne refreshing my work-life balance and discussing that theme with friends and neighbours. A restaurateur tells me he plans to close his popular bistro for the high tourist season because it’s too exhausting for his small équipe and too much hassle, under French rules, to hire extra temp staff. Our jobbing gardener says he loves his job and it keeps him fit but he’s outraged at Macron’s forced rise in the state pension age from 62 to 64. An American visitor argues that manual workers should be happier than older desk workers, who are rapidly being made redundant by artificial intelligence.

‘Not me,’ I retort. ‘Oh yeah?’ she says. ‘So what are you writing about this week?’ Then she feeds my topic list and one of my old columns into ChatGPT and in seconds it produces a block of prose that sounds uncannily like me, particularly good on ‘the high-stakes game of crypto’ but without jokes or restaurant tips. It’s terrifying but, I’m relieved to find, not infallible: it thinks the leader of the free world is called ‘President Harrison’.

Ah well, while waiting to read a stack of Economic Innovator entries from the AI sector, I’ll make an interim award for real-world hard work, good cooking and entrepreneurial vision to chef Fabrice Lemonnier of La Cantine at Daglan, whose pizza annex now also offers ‘Happy Hour’. One way or another, we’re all going to have lots of those to fill.

It’s been a bad week for former political leaders

The week of the three downfalls has been an interesting one. Boris Johnson resigning from parliament, Donald Trump going to court to face serious charges, Nicola Sturgeon arrested as part of a probe into SNP finances. I wouldn’t like to prejudge any of these cases, for I am – secretly – a fair-minded person.

Of course, had Sturgeon not been involved, various leftist writers would now be penning articles claiming a great linkage between these events. Probably about the downfall of ‘populism’. But since Saint Nicola is involved this will not happen. Because as I have noted here before, our age sees all nationalism as poison, except for the Scottish and Irish varieties, which are inexplicably progressive and just.

Imagine we had been discussing at any point in recent decades how Boris Johnson’s political career might end. Most people would have said that it would likely implode amid a blizzard of fibs. Perhaps not one great big Watergate-sized lie. But a set of mini-lies that builds until nobody around him believes him any more because he has lied to everyone and run out of friends.

Johnson is currently railing against the Commons Privileges Committee that censured him, and I have some sympathy with his anger. There is something off in Parliament these days where powerful committees and investigations can be set up by the most second-rate bureaucrats and effectively end the careers of democratically elected politicians. So I don’t blame Boris for having a go at the injustice of the thing.

His problem is that the matters under investigation – parties at Downing Street involving wine and, on at least one occasion, a sponge cake – all seem like things Johnson might be involved in. Although the rule-breaking was hardly on a mobster level, he had instituted insanely draconian lockdown measures on everybody in this country. And knowing him and some of the people around him, it just does ring horribly true that they might have felt that the rules didn’t apply to them. Once they were caught then of course a lie or two would have seemed the best recourse. The Conservative-dominated committee may have been a stitch-up, but its conclusions also sound like the truth.

It is the same with Trump. I don’t know whether he is the sort of man who pushes a woman into a changing room in a Manhattan apartment store and sexually assaults her. That was the last court charge he had to answer. And his claim that Bergdorf Goodman isn’t the place where he pushes himself onto women may or may not be true. But when it comes to the Mar-a-Lago document stash it does simply feel as though, yes, this is something Trump would do. Since some details of the cache of misappropriated documents emerged last weekend the case against him has begun to look rather strong.

Trump himself says that this is yet another witch hunt against him, like the Russia hoax theory that dogged his presidency and was cooked up and pushed by some very shady sources. For all his flaws, it was never remotely proved that he colluded with the Russians. Trump is also right to grouse that other politicians, notably Joe Biden, have taken classified documents when leaving office and have not been prosecuted. It is a fair point.

But the crux of this latest prosecution hinges on an unfair point: that Trump seems precisely the kind of person who, while leaving office ungraciously, might decide to take with him a trove of documents that could somehow be useful post-presidency. I haven’t heard the tape which is alleged to exist of him boasting to an associate about the top secret papers he had in his Florida castle. But can anyone honestly say that this doesn’t sound like him?

It’s pure New York real estate behaviour. You always, everywhere, take everything you can. You use everything you’ve got. You put away little nuggets of information – or sometimes quite large ones – that could benefit you one day. It’s a type of person, and Donald Trump is just such a person.

Which brings me to the lowest-grade end of this accidental triumvirate: Nicola Sturgeon. Again, I do not know (and for legal reasons would not like to say) whether she and her husband misappropriated or otherwise lost £600,000 of SNP funds. But then comes the matter of the luxury camper van, costing over £100,000. Hitherto I had no idea that a camper van could cost such a princely sum.

But I watched with fascination earlier this year when Sturgeon spoke to the press outside her hideous house in Glasgow. Generally I do not like to judge other peoples’ houses in public, and we should keep in mind that nobody has built an attractive house in Scotland for centuries. For despite being a people of considerable artistry, violence and taste, the only thing the Scots seem to pay no attention to in this world is the sightliness of their homes. Their lack of interest in beautiful architecture rises almost to the heroic.

Nicola and her husband raked in hundreds of thousands of pounds a year in salaries. Yet they live in a horrid modern Glasgow redbrick. And so, I am afraid, the following conversation becomes imaginable. ‘Oh Peter, what would you not give to have a luxury motor home of our own which we could drive around this bonnie land. One with a chemical flush. Imagine! Next year in Ullapool.’ The possibility that a modern luxury-living camper van may have been the apex of the Sturgeons’ worldly wishes – the Achilles heel in their financial affairs – seems at least conceivable.

I don’t know if it is. But it feels as if it might be. And for Nicola – like this week’s other falling skittles – that might in political terms be the most insurmountable problem of all.

How many members of the House of Lords are there?

No platformed

What effect have strikes had on rail travel?

– In the first quarter of this year, some 389m journeys were made on the rail network, up on 2022 but only 88% of the number of journeys made in the same period in 2019, before the pandemic

– Ticket revenue was £2.2bn, 70% of the same period in 2019

– LNER (111% of 2019 levels), East Midlands (101%), Hull Trains (122%) and Grand Central (111%) all managed to increase passenger numbers on 2019; all other franchises saw a decline

– Passenger numbers fell the most on the Transpennine service (60%), which was recently relieved of its franchise

Source: Office of Rail and Road 

Crowded house

Boris Johnson’s resignation honours list was published, minus several expected peers. How many members of the House of Lords are there?

– As of September last year, there were 798 members, 755 of whom were entitled to attend proceedings

– 24 were Church of England bishops and 86 are ‘excepted hereditary’ peers

– 645 of them were life peers

– 29% were women compared with 35% in the House of Commons

– The oldest was 97 and the youngest 36, with an average age of 71

– 18 members retired last year

– The Lords has grown in recent years, but is still a long way short of the size it reached in 1999, before the removal of most hereditary peers, when membership peaked at more than 1,300

Source: House of Lords Library

Best laid plans

The planning system is often blamed for a shortage of housing. What happens to planning applications?

– In the first quarter of 2023, 96,000 applications were made (down 13% on the same period last year)

– 87,200 applications were decided in the same period

– 75,000 (86%) were granted

– Applications were most likely to be granted in the north-east (93%) and least likely in the east of England (84%)

– 91% of applications in National Parks were granted

– 89% of applications were decided within 13 weeks, or other period agreed with the applicant

– Only 8,400 applications involved new residential units (although many will have involved more than one unit)

Source: Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities

The search for the next pope is turning ugly

The Portuguese poet José Tolentino Mendonça is a handsome man in his fifties with a shaved head and meticulously trimmed beard. In one photograph he’s wearing an ultramarine blue polo shirt; in another, a lovely beige cashmere sweater that matches his tan. His poems depict emotional pain in cryptic language. In ‘The Last Day of Summer,’ unable to ‘choose attention or choose forgetfulness’, he recalls ‘your impatient and inconceivable eyes/ here with me now/ as I dance alone/ in the empty city’.

But then Mendonça has no choice but to dance alone. He is a cardinal of the Catholic Church – and just possibly the next pope.

Pope Francis has been in office for ten years and he’s spending more and more time in hospital. Last week he was admitted to the Gemelli for emergency abdominal surgery, at which point leaders of the Church’s factions geared up for an imminent conclave to elect a successor. The surgeons spoke out, providing an unusual amount of clinical detail. It was a hernia operation, they said; blood tests revealed no cancer, no heart disease, nothing to stop Francis travelling to Mongolia if he wants to (which he does, bizarrely, though he still hasn’t set foot in his native Argentina as pontiff).

On the other hand, he’s 86, two years older than John Paul II was when he died. Also, papal doctors have been known to dissemble. At any rate, we can be sure that from now until the next conclave, not a day will pass without senior prelates revising their calculations between mouthfuls of saltimbocca. ‘It’s like Wolves in the City,’ says one veteran commentator, referring to Paul Henissart’s book about the last days of French Algeria. ‘Regime change is coming – whether in a conservative or liberal direction we don’t know, but the machinery of the Francis pontificate will be dismantled. Until then, like pieds noirs in Algiers, we sit around in restaurants listening for the next muffled explosion.’

That’s rather melodramatic imagery, but you hear variants of it all the time. It’s ‘drive-by season’ in Rome, we’re told – during which one prominent cardinal after another wakes up to read on social media that some blunder or character weakness, often unspecified, has taken him out of the running for the papacy. (An exception is the former favourite Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Secretary of State, whose mishandling of financial scandals has been so egregious that he’s no longer worth briefing against.)

Ed Condon, editor of the Pillar website, the leading English-language Catholic news source, reported last month that the attacks on big beasts have become so savage that a Brazilian archbishop, Ilson de Jesus Montanari, turned down Francis’s offer of the Prefecture of the Dicastery for Bishops, a job most curial officials would kill for. ‘Sources close to the archbishop said he feared becoming a “tall poppy” in the Vatican field,’ wrote Condon.

And with good reason. Look what happened to Cardinal Luis Tagle, former archbishop of Manila. In 2019, Tagle was brought to Rome to run the Congregation for the Evangelisation of Peoples; he was already head of Caritas, the Church’s largest humanitarian charity. The Pope has demoted him from one post and sacked him from the other. Nobody is sure what he did wrong, but we do know there was a flurry of briefings about his lack of ‘managerial effectiveness’. For the past decade, Tagle – a charismatic crowd-puller in the Philippines – has been known as ‘the Asian Francis’. He still is, but now it’s said with a smirk. Was he really a lousy administrator or did his rivals take him down? Did the rumours influence Francis or did they originate from him?

In the past year, prominent cardinals from across the theological spectrum – liberal, conservative and middle-of-the-road – have all received the drive-by treatment. And, strangely, the attacks originate from Team Francis, the name given to a group of hardcore papal sycophants in the media and their curial patrons.

One of their recent targets was Cardinal Peter Erdo, who as the Archbishop of Esztergom-Budapest helped organise the papal trip to Hungary in April. It was a success, so Erdo must have been puzzled to read snarky attacks on him from papal apparatchiks for travelling to Budapest airport in a limousine, provided for the occasion by the government, while the Pope chose a white Fiat – one of those ostentatiously modest gestures of Francis’s that actually costs a fortune. Erdo is described by the Vatican-watcher John Allen as ‘reserved, buttoned-down… with an almost genetic predisposition for staying out of the spotlight’. The idea that he regularly swanks around in limos is preposterous. He’s a brilliant canon lawyer who could repair the holes in Catholic teaching created by Francis’s mid-flight doctrinal improvisations. That’s why many conservatives are hoping he’ll be elected pope – which would explain the comically ineffective hit job by Team Francis.

But, since the latter are all liberals, why were they equally keen to go after the pro-Francis Tagle? And why have they now turned on the centre-left Cardinal Matteo Zuppi of Bologna, who was briefly their flavour of the month after Tagle’s defenestration? The amiable, rake-thin ‘bicycling cardinal’ is currently the tallest of the remaining poppies, but already he can hear the swish of the scythe.

Zuppi is apparently in high favour with Francis, who sent him as his peace envoy to Ukraine. But the Pope’s approval is always more apparent than reliable, and the briefings against Zuppi have already begun. Papal courtiers are already using the dreaded phrase ‘too big for his boots’.

What lies behind this scorched-earth policy? The next conclave will be more liberal than the one that elected Jorge Mario Bergoglio ten years ago, and the conservatives have only one obvious contender, Erdo, about whom they’re lukewarm. So why do Team Francis keep kneecapping anyone hailed as Francis Mark Two?

The simplest answer is that they’re desperate. Plenty of cardinal-electors are broadly liberal on the subject of women and LGBT people. But they’re damned if they’re going to be bounced into ordaining female deacons or hosting gay blessings by the forthcoming ‘Synod on Synodality’, whose agenda has been hijacked by activists chosen by Team Francis. The electors are also troubled by another of Team Francis’s pet causes: the attempt to snuff out the Latin Mass, which is being supervised with Cromwellian zeal by the Yorkshire-born Arthur Roche, the Vatican’s liturgy chief.

Put simply, the odds are stacked against any prominent liberal candidate who’s invested too heavily in the synod, overstepped the mark on homosexuality or joined the march against traditionalists. That may be why Zuppi claimed – unconvincingly – that he knew nothing about a same-sex blessing in his diocese, and why he took the huge risk of presiding over Old Rite vespers last year. Was that a signal that he wouldn’t be a continuity candidate? Shortly after those vespers the briefings started. But whether they will damage him is another matter, such is the unpopularity of the ‘Bergoglian bunny-boilers’, as one Vatican source calls them.

A bigger problem for him is his relationship with the Sant’Egidio community, an association of liberal Catholic networkers with a reputation for opportunistic arm-twisting. Cardinals who are prepared to overlook – or who even agree with – his evasive stance on gay blessings won’t vote for a candidate who might farm out the Secretariat of State to Sant’Egidio.

So who do the ultra-liberals favour as the next pope? It’s complicated because the shrewder members of Team Francis know that their endorsement is the kiss of death. If they want a pope who is in favour of gay blessings and women’s ordination – causes that Francis has toyed with in a spirit of bloody-mindedness rather than solidarity – then he needs to enter the conclave unobtrusively, with minimum baggage, and then ‘emerge’, rather as Karol Wojtyla did in 1978.

That’s why, from their point of view, the less said about José Mendonça the better. The 57-year-old cardinal is Prefect of the Dicastery for Culture and Education. It’s a sweet job for him, allowing him to reflect on the films of Andrei Tarkovsky and ‘what Bruce Springsteen does with the Bible’. He is urbane, charming and photogenic. His poems, I’m assured by a Portuguese–speaking friend, are beautifully crafted, though you have to wonder about their autobiographical subtext. That’s a subject best avoided; likewise Mendonça’s opinions on homosexuality and abortion, which are the least orthodox of any prefect of a Roman dicastery. Therefore Team Francis will keep a judicious distance, blowing him secret kisses, calculating that if he can avoid alienating electors by growing into a tall poppy then maybe they’ll be rewarded by the sight of him dancing alone on to the balcony of St Peter’s.

The visionary madness of Silvio Berlusconi

Silvio Berlusconi, whose state funeral will take place today in Milan, was the first modern populist. The media tycoon became a politician to take back control of Italy from the establishment on behalf of the people.

The Italians called him Il Cavaliere (The Knight). He created a brand of politics that decades later would become a new driving force in America and Europe and would be called populism.

Italians voted for him in their droves. Like Donald Trump, he was dead rich but loved by the dirt poor. He spoke their language: he loved beautiful football and beautiful women. He hated tax and red tape and fines and the big bad state.

He was a right-wing politician who spoke to Italy’s red wall. No other Italian politician in the history of the Italian Republic, founded after the defeat of fascism in 1945, got as many votes as he did, or was prime minister for as long as him. He was prime minister four times. 

He was also likeable. Unlike Trump, even his most ardent enemies on the left praised his generosity – not just in the material but human sense. He was good fun. 

Berlusconi made his first fortune in property. He entered politics in 1994 to save Italy – as he put it – from the communists because as he said in his first political campaign video: ‘Italy is the country I love’.  

One of his favourite books was In Praise of Folly (1509) by Erasmus, which he used to inspire his new party’s candidates. Later, in the preface to an Italian edition, he would write:

What fascinated me about the work of Erasmus was in particular the central thesis of madness as a vital creative force: the more his inspiration springs from the depths of the irrational the more original is the innovator. Revolutionary intuition always makes itself felt when it manifests itself as void of common sense and truly absurd… True and genuine wisdom is thus not found in rational behaviour, which is necessarily complicit with the normal and thus by definition sterile, but in in far-sighted, visionary ‘madness’.

That insight tells us something about his political career and his understanding of his country. In the late 20th century, Italy had the largest communist party in Europe outside the Soviet Bloc which had never quite won power nationally. But a judicial revolution against endemic political corruption which saw hundreds of politicians put on trial had destroyed all other parties. 

Despite the collapse of Soviet communism, the heirs to the Italian Communist party, financed by Moscow during the Cold War, stood poised to take power in Italy.

To stop them, Berlusconi founded a party, Forza Italia, in January 1994 and won the election in March. Two months later, his football club AC Milan won the Champions League.

From then until his death, Berlusconi was hounded by Italy’s notoriously politicised judges, known as ‘toghe rosse’ (red cloaks). They put him on trial dozens of times. He once said it was 136 times. The Corriere della Sera said this week that it was 80 times. In 2018, he said he had spent €770 million on 105 defence lawyers. Yet he was only ever convicted once – for tax fraud – by a company that he was not in charge of at the time, whereas those who were, were acquitted. 

To us in Britain this seems incomprehensible. Anyone put on trial as Berlusconi was for tax evasion, corruption, bribery, money laundering, mafia collusion, under-age prostitution, surely would not survive as a politician. But Italian judges are not like British judges. They are part of the ‘Magistratura’, a state institution that is separate from the legal profession. They train as judges, not lawyers; they investigate, prosecute and sit in judgement. They are highly politicised.

In addition, the Italian justice system is not only politicised but also sloth-like and incompetent. The punishment in Italy, it is said, is not prison but the years of purgatory awaiting judgement. Italians have little faith in their judiciary and so little faith that the trials it forced Berlusconi to endure were justified. 

During the prime time talkshow Porta a Porta on Monday, the day he died, former left-wing prime minister Matteo Renzi, Barack Obama’s favourite European politician, admitted that Italy’s magistratura had indeed deliberately targetted Berlusconi. He merely confirmed what Italians know.

Trump too, of course, is now the target of what looks like a politically orchestrated judicial attack. Such treatment seems to be the fate of any populist political leader.

Which brings me to Boris. In 2003, when Berlusconi was prime minister and at the height of his prestige, I went with Boris – then editor of The Spectator – to his summer palace in Sardinia to interview him.

Boris wore khaki knee-length shorts and a blazer. He looked like a cross between a 19th Century British colonial explorer and Billy Bunter. All he lacked was a pith helmet. I wore a peppermint green summer suit and Liberty tie. We looked like Laurel and Hardy.

At the end of the three hour interview conducted in Italian by me (Boris did not really speak Italian), the Cav took us in a golf buggy that he drove himself, escorted by machine-gun toting bodyguards, on a tour of his incredible estate among the maquis of myrtle and olive next to the wine dark sea. Every so often he would stop to talk about some noteworthy aspect of it such as the Roman amphitheatre housing his huge collection of cactuses which are placed around the hemispheric rows like members of the public. And each time, he would say: ‘I did this!’

In the interview he told us: the Italian fascist dictator Mussolini did not kill opponents but sent them to the islands which are today much sought-after holiday resorts. This is largely true. Mussolini killed very few opponents compared to nearly all other 20th century dictators. He also said: Italy’s judges are ‘crazy’ because they are ‘anthropologically different’ from normal people. By ‘crazy’ Berlusconi meant that they were left-wing fanatics. Very many Italians would agree. 

But these truths cannot be said in Italy for it is a country where the left may not have taken over the means of production but it has taken over the means of thought. So when published in The Spectator they were front page news in Italy for two weeks. Berlusconi – poor thing – even had to call a press conference to defend himself.

The ‘signori inglesi’ had got him drunk on champagne – he explained – which is why he told us what he had said. It was a lie. He had given us only iced lemon tea. And pistacchio ice cream.

So he is a liar.

Then again, as I told Boris (no stranger to untruths either) at the time: Berlusconi reminds me of Jay Gatsby, the tragic hero of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s great novel about a tycoon whose wealth is ill-gotten but whose dream is beautiful. As the narrator Nick Carraway tells Gatsby at the end of the book: ‘They’re a rotten crowd. You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.’

And Boris agreed.

Berlusconi, like Gatsby, ‘believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter – tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther … And then one fine morning — So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.’

Carla Foster needs compassion, not punishment for her abortion

In May 2020, two months into the pandemic, Carla Foster, a 44-year-old mother-of-three took pills at home to trigger an abortion. The foetus – a girl – was between 32 and 34 weeks old; a viable age for survival outside of the womb. On Monday, the mother was jailed for 28 months (with half of the sentence to be served on licence). 

After the judgment was handed down, abortion campaign groups, women’s rights activists and a host of MPs immediately rushed to share their outrage at the decision. Stella Creasy tweeted that Foster had been jailed for having ‘an abortion without following correct procedures’ and called for a change in the law while Caroline Nokes, the chair of the women and equalities committee, said it made ‘a case for parliament to start looking at this issue in detail’. 

This is a tragic case: a heartbreaking clash between healthcare and law in which a baby died and three other children lost their mother to prison. Mr Justice Pepperall, in his sentencing, ruled that Foster had known about her pregnancy in December 2019 but contacted the British Pregnancy Advisory Service on 6 May the next year. She told the service that she was seven weeks and four days pregnant to obtain abortifacient drugs – for which you must be less than ten weeks pregnant – and they were posted to her home. Evidently, this was a lie. And evidently, she broke the law.

But what purpose will be served by removing Foster from her existing children? Mr Justice Pepperall acknowledged that there are ‘no sentencing guidelines for this offence’ and that the ‘statutory maximum is life imprisonment’. He also said that he accepted that Foster ‘had a very deep emotional attachment to your unborn child and that you are plagued by nightmares and flashbacks to seeing your dead child’s face’. One of her children has special needs and, it was ruled, is reliant on her ‘love and support’.

In the face of these admissions, it is absolutely understandable that many believe the sentence was too harsh, and that she and her children would have been better served by a suspended sentence. And who benefits from a jail sentence? Foster is no danger to society. Indeed, she appears to have been given a custodial sentence because she didn’t originally plead guilty: the judge said that ‘had that been done, the sentence of imprisonment that I am now obliged to pass would in law have been capable of being suspended’. 

When she had her abortion, Foster was living with her ex-partner and was pregnant with another man’s child. She was also looking after three young children – one with special needs – during the pandemic, a time when pressures were high. She was clearly distressed by the thought of ending her pregnancy, with the judge noting that her planning was ‘chaotic and showed how you struggled for some weeks to make a final decision before obtaining abortifacient drugs’. He also conceded that she was ‘in emotional turmoil as you sought to hide the pregnancy’. Perhaps what was needed here was compassion for a woman clearly disturbed by her actions, rather than a jail sentence and another broken family. 

Nazir Afzal, a former chief crown prosecutor, told the Today programme that, ‘Had I been involved, had I been doing this particular case, I would not have prosecuted it’ because he would have factored in the ‘terrible choices’ that people were having to make during the pandemic. (It is worth noting that during the pandemic, abortion services were allowed to continue as usual – but that adjustments were made to allow women to take abortion pills at home to end pregnancies under the ten-week mark. Before Covid, they would have taken the pills at a clinic.)

Abortion law in this country has long been a contentious issue. Foster pleaded guilty under the 1861 Offences Against The Person Act, an archaic law which outlaws abortion in almost all cases. But under the 1967 Abortion Act, women in England, Scotland and Wales can have an abortion while they are up to 24 weeks pregnant – with exceptions where the woman is at risk of death or significant harm or where serious foetal abnormalities are detected. However, the 1967 act hasn’t decriminalised abortion, merely created a legal defence for having one.

Still, this country has some of the most lenient abortion legislation in the world. When abortions are denied, the consequences can be tragic. In 2018, I reported on a case in Ireland where a 34-year-old woman was denied an abortion, even though her baby had been diagnosed with a fatal foetal abnormality at 20 weeks. This was before Ireland voted to make abortion legal for women up to 12 weeks pregnant, and up to 24 weeks in exceptional circumstances.

The baby – a girl the woman had named Alex – had Patau’s Syndrome and had encountered significant problems with her growth, including issues with the development of her hands, heart, liver, and brain. She had a large cleft in the centre of her face, and had not developed a stomach. She would not survive outside the womb. Yet doctors, legally unable to give the woman an abortion, were left with no choice but to leave the woman pregnant until Alex died in utero – and could then be passed naturally. The clear and tangible damage that decision did to the woman I interviewed will stay with me forever.  

With this in mind, it is a mercy that English women are able to access abortions with relative ease. Malta has a complete ban on abortion – in all cases – with doctors who perform one facing up to four years in jail. In Poland, it is only permitted where there is a risk to the woman’s health, or in cases of rape or incest. And abortions up to 12 weeks were, in practice, only really legalised in Northern Ireland in December, when Westminster passed legislation through a broken Stormont which would force the government to commission abortion services.  

Public opinion on abortion in Britain shows that the country is among the most liberal in the world in its views: 85 per cent of people polled last week by YouGov support a woman’s right to an abortion. Almost half of people think the upper limit of 24 weeks is adequate, while only ten per cent think later-stage abortions should be allowed. Mr Justice Pepperall said ‘the vast majority’ of women make the decision to end their pregnancy ‘well before the 24-week limit imposed by law’. He also said that he believed Foster’s case would ‘reinforce the limit of that law’, rather than deterring women from seeking care within the time limit. 

But it’s not necessary to ‘deter’ women from seeking late-stage abortions: it just doesn’t happen. In 2021, 89 per cent of all abortions in England and Wales were performed under ten weeks. Just 1 per cent were over 20 weeks. 

It is almost impossible to feel dispassionate about abortion; the moral, ethical and emotional response from people on all sides of the debate is powerful. But at the heart of this case is a family tragedy, and it is a case marked by its extremity: the circumstances surrounding Foster’s actions were extremely rare. This doesn’t diminish that it was a late-stage abortion, well past the legal limit, but three children have lost their mother. It’s hard to see any benefit from that.

One of the best (if not the jolliest) TV dramas of 2023: BBC1’s Best Interests reviewed

In the opening minutes of Best Interests (Monday and Tuesday), an estranged middle-aged couple made their separate ways to court, pausing outside it to look at each other with a mixture of furious reproach and overwhelming regret. From there we cut to a scene that perhaps overdid the evocation of Happier Times as the same pair laughed endlessly together on a train, before nipping off to the toilet for a spot of giggly conjugal naughtiness. Once they got home and picked up their two daughters from a neighbour, they soon showed what terrific and loving parents they were too – not least to 11-year-old Marnie, whose muscular dystrophy meant she needed especial care.

But then, just as husband Andrew (Michael Sheen) was celebrating the end of a happy day with some Stone Roses and a joint, Marnie suddenly developed an infection and needed the latest of her many trips to hospital. There was, however, one big difference from her previous visits: this time she didn’t get better. Instead, after several weeks of unavailing treatment, her doctor Samantha ominously introduced Marnie’s parents to a palliative-care consultant and recommended that they seriously consider allowing her to die – the alternative being a lot more pain, a lot more brain damage and no realistic chance of recovery.

Even so, mother Nicci (Sharon Horgan) was having none of it. Holding on tight to her mantra about Marnie being a fighter (‘She’s wilful’), she refused to accept the verdict of the doctor, the hospital’s ethics board or the mediator brought in, as Nicci saw it (possibly rightly), to rubber-stamp her daughter’s medically decided fate.

Best Interests is written by Jack Thorne, whose last TV drama was Then Barbara Met Alan: a heartfelt but off-puttingly shrill piece of agitprop about disability rights. Happily, the contrast here couldn’t be greater. Nicci clearly sees herself as a lone fighter against NHS ableism, as well as for her daughter’s life – but the programme itself never allows us so simple or comforting an interpretation. Of course, Nicci’s sense of denial is entirely understandable. Yet could the chair of the ethics board be right to say that ‘It’s impossible for parents to make this decision’? Could Nicci be just condemning her comatose child to more pain?

At times, in fact, Thorne seemed to go so far as to rather bravely suggest that she might not merely be wrong, but even the inadvertent villain of the piece. After all, her irrationality may be pretty understandable too, but that doesn’t make it any less irrational. It also leads her to lash out wildly in all directions – particularly her blameless husband’s. ‘She’s always been a thorough and kind doctor,’ Andrew said of Samantha at one point. ‘And you’ve always fancied her,’ Nicci angrily replied. When he eventually plucked up the courage to wonder if they should maybe spare Marnie more suffering, Nicci accused him of having always wanted his daughter to be dead. (Neither of these assertions, Thorne made clear, was remotely true.)

And yet, as it’s now transpiring, the idea of Nicci purely as someone driven into damaging delusion by grief might also be too simple. Towards the end of Tuesday’s second episode, she consulted a lawyer and learned of several real-life precedents for parents successfully fighting in court for their children to be treated further – and apparently being proved right. Visiting a local mother who went along with the doctors’ advice and allowed her disabled son to die, she discovered a woman full of articulately expressed remorse.

But if this is making Best Interests sound like a gripping Shavian think piece, that would only be half-right – because it also packs a ferocious emotional punch. Indeed, you could see the programme as four separate, beautifully acted and equally powerful tragedies – for Marnie and her inevitably neglected older sister Katie, as well as for her parents: tragedies that are all the more tragic precisely for being so separate.

While Marnie lay in her hospital bed, we got several heartbreaking flashbacks showing how much she once enjoyed her life (and how great the disabled child actress Niamh Moriarty is at playing her). But in their way, the rest of the family are now just as isolated from each other as she is from them. Love, it turns out, is not enough, with none of them able to emerge from their private grief and make proper contact. Not only can they not share one another’s feelings, but they don’t have enough emotional room left over to even acknowledge them.

The final two episodes of Best Interests come next Monday and Tuesday. If the programme manages to hold its nerve – i.e., continue to honour its commitment to the utter intractability of the situation – the result could well be one of the best (although not jolliest) TV dramas of the year.