Chess doesn’t need Rishi Sunak’s cheesy cheerleading

There’s something embarrassing about Rishi Sunak’s plan to revive chess in Britain. The PM is set to announce half-a-million pounds funding for the English Chess Federation. The money could be used to send teams to international tournaments, install chess tables in parks and teach the game to school kids. But Rishi’s cheesy cheerleading for government-sponsored chess is reminding me a lot of a parent buying condoms for their teenager: there’s no better way to take the sexiness out of sex.

Perhaps the PM is trying to take inspiration from eastern Europe. Last October, I went to Budapest to interview the world’s best-ever female chess player, Judit Polgar, and also attended the chess festival she hosts at the Hungarian National Museum in Budapest. There, I met the then-Georgian minister for education, Mikheil Chkhenkeli, who was proud about having just introduced mandatory chess playing for six-year-olds in school, joining only Armenia in making the game compulsory for school children.

Rishi sounds like he is trying to keep up. But Armenia and Georgia are poor countries, formerly in the Soviet Union, and there’s nothing stopping them, at least culturally, from state interference in anything they fancy.

For Rishi, however, it’s an embarrassing bit of fiddling. A game like chess, with boards that cost next to nothing or literally nothing for the majority of players who are on chess.com, or who drop in to one of Britain’s thousands of regional chess clubs, there is absolutely no need for government assistance. It’s just a dirt-cheap way for Rishi to appear to be thinking ‘creatively’ about education. But it really is none of his business who plays chess and when, or where. There’s also no better way to put people off one of the most cerebral, beautiful and accessible games there is than to get Whitehall involved. 

Chess is already an incredibly democratic game. At the Greater London Chess Club, which meets in St George’s on Little Russell Street in Bloomsbury on Tuesdays during the season – a locale in which I passed many a rainy winter’s night this year – the crowd includes the homeless; hoodie-wearing teenagers, and sundry working class chess-heads of all skin colours. This year’s reigning club champion – my mentor – is a security guard who used to be in the army. Yes, there’s also a fair batch of European software programmers and British geneticists.

The government is looking to take credit for something that is already happening. The interest in chess among young people, from children to the dreaded Gen-Z, is already high and growing. Since January 2020, more than 102 million users have signed up to chess.com; a 238 per cent increase.  In schools, teachers have been flummoxed by mass distraction in classrooms as pupils pore over their chess apps, inspired by the rise of chess influencers like Anna Cramling and Anish Giri.

The only real problem is that it’s still mostly boys and men who dominate chess, though that is changing; Netflix’s The Queen’s Gambit nudged up female sign-ups to chess.com by 15 per cent and countries like India are producing many fantastic girl masters, like Shaarvanica (the Madonna of seven-year old chess champs). In Britain, female participation is still woeful: I was the only woman at the club most of the time, even though it was a perfectly welcoming environment. We need more girls in chess fast if we are to stem that tiresome rhetoric about how our brains are just less rigged for logic. I didn’t see anything in Rishi’s trumpet-fanfare about girls, though. 

To be sure, any society in which everyone played chess would be at an advantage. Chess is an astonishingly insightful game. If you can get good at it, you are essentially cultivating a ruthless set of logic skills. Even if you stay terrible at it, like I have, there is much to learn: the extent of one’s cognitive biases, how difficult it is to engage with reality (chess is nothing if not nakedly, relentlessly true), how little one sees of any given situation at any one time. It’s social in a wonderful way: I have found much joy in the open and friendly games, tutelage and encouragement from the most unlikely of people: mostly chess-geek men at the club ranging from 16 to 60. Online, it’s reconnected me with long-lost friends, male and female, in a forum that isn’t all about banal bantz (which tends to fade, in comparison to the addiction of chess). And it is a proper distraction, unlike just scrolling endlessly through Instagram.

Chess for all, yes. Chess for all sponsored by the British government? That would be a blunder. 

Is Scottish Labour embarrassed by Starmer?

They had balloons, handmade posters and a big red van lit up with ‘Michael Shanks: A Fresh Start’ flashing on the side. The Rutherglen and Hamilton West by-election is Labour’s to lose and don’t they know it. Despite the pressure on the modern studies teacher and now-Labour candidate Michael Shanks, the atmosphere at Labour’s by-election launch was relaxed – if the Glaswegian weather miserable. Former SNP MP Margaret Ferrier lost her seat on Tuesday night and constituents will face a second vote in October, a by-election that will bring the SNP and Labour head to head. 

Tuesday’s result was a small win for Labour – literally. The recall petition’s low turnout of 14 per cent is nothing to boast about and suggests that while voters were unhappy with Ferrier’s Covid breaches – and perhaps with the SNP more generally – their apathy extended towards the Labour party too. Shanks has been campaigning with Anas Sarwar and Keir Starmer for months, and while he has come across disillusioned SNP supporters, he accepts the task ahead of him is sizable.

‘The other day I had a woman who showed me her SNP membership card and was not voting SNP,’ he told reporters on Wednesday morning. ‘Now, these people are not immediately saying they’re voting Labour, but they’re open to the conversation. I’ve got 60,000 more [people] to speak to, and that’s what our target will be over the next two months.’ 

While events leading up to the recall petition were hardly ideal for the SNP, Shanks’ selection caused a stir among Labour activists after the names of local choices – particularly councillor Mo Razzaq and trade-unionist Leah Stalker – didn’t appear on the ballot paper. But though it has been suggested that Shanks had been selected as a centre ground candidate who would be less likely to rock the boat with UK Labour, he told reporters on Wednesday that if successful, he would spend his time in parliament campaigning against many of UK Labour’s policy shifts.

On the two-child benefit cap, Shanks said: ‘I’ll campaign within the Labour group to abolish the two-child cap.’ On the bedroom tax, he commented: ‘I don’t think the bedroom tax is a good idea and I will be campaigning against that as a Scottish Labour position.’ And on UK Labour’s stance on gender reforms, he admitted: ‘Personally, I support the medicalisation of that process.’ Shanks’ position highlights more broadly the deepening splits between the Scottish and UK Labour parties which are looking to pose serious problems for the party as the 2024 general election approaches. ‘The two-child benefit cap and bedroom tax comments have gone down like a cup of cold sick with Scottish Labour members,’ one party activist added. But even if Shanks, alongside Scottish Labour, is successful in changing the UK party’s stance on these issues, more u-turns will hardly convince voters Labour has a coherent vision.

The Labour candidate has previous with u-turns though: in 2019, he left Labour, led by Jeremy Corbyn at the time, over Brexit, criticising the party for having a ‘bankrupt approach to our membership of the EU’. On Wednesday morning, however, Shanks’ position was that ‘we’ve left the EU’ and that ‘we need to make Brexit better’ – following Starmer’s lead on this issue, at least. When quizzed on splits within the party, he deflected back to his opponents, saying: ‘The SNP want to make this election all about divisions in Labour because they’ve got nothing to offer themselves.’

Certainly the SNP’s campaign launch was less about its candidate and more about Humza Yousaf, who took the majority of the questions – even cutting off his party’s candidate, Katy Loudon, before she could answer a follow-up from one journalist. Keen not to dwell on Ferrier, or the SNP police probe – Loudon admitted that it was ‘not an ideal situation’ – the nationalist launch was more focused on independence, ‘the surefire way of scrapping, not mitigating, but scrapping cruel policies’.

Both candidates admit there is plenty more campaigning to do – and a lot at stake for their parties. Not only does the by-election present First Minister Humza Yousaf with his first big electoral test, it will indicate whether the picture painted by polling (that predicts Labour is on track to snatch over 20 SNP Westminster seats) really is accurate.

Lizzo and the problem with Fat Activism

Remember when we all loved Lizzo? In 2019 ‘Juice’ (the last great party anthem BP – Before Pandemic) was a thrilling throwback groove, variously described as ‘delightfully outrageous’ and ‘a self-esteem boosting anthem’. Having lived in her car at one point during years of rejection from the music industry – partly for not possessing the usual video-vixen hotness required from young black female singers – it was lovely to see Lizzo suffering from neither modesty nor the #BeKind blight. ‘I just took a DNA test/Turns out I’m 100 per cent that b****’ she crowed in the break-up song ‘Truth Hurts’. 

Which made it a shame that in her single ‘Special’ this year she gave an impersonation of a world-weary piñata:  

‘Woke up this mornin’ to somebody judgin’ me/Found out it in the end that I can only do it for me/You call it sensitive and I call it superpower/You just lack empathy ‘cause you think it gives you power/You’re special/I’m so glad that you’re still with us/Broken, but damn, you’re still perfect/You’re special.’  

Where did it all go wrong? Lizzo hasn’t had it all easy. It was predictable that Kanye West would bring her into his tormented quest to stay relevant, which often involves picking on the new girl in town. His dig was particularly nasty, implying that she was indirectly involved in a covert ‘genocide of the black race’ through the weapon of voluntary obesity. Her retort to him – ‘I’m minding my beautiful fat black business’ – could have come from one of her songs. But there was a great deal of goodwill towards her from anyone not firmly in the paranoid madman camp, partly because she updated the cliche of the jolly fat girl with the good personality into the 21st century, with added sauce on the side. 

But the signs were always there that Lizzo wasn’t the BS-free bombshell she presented as. The presence of a ‘wokescreen’– virtue-signalling in order to obscure less than virtuous behaviour – could have been spied when she came out with right-on word-salads such as her pronouncement on sexual preference:  

‘I personally don’t ascribe to just one thing… that’s why the colours for LQBTQ+ are a rainbow… right now we try to keep it black and white. That’s just not working for me.’  

With a big LGBT following, she considered herself an ‘ally’ while ‘leaning heterosexual.’ So, just a straight woman seeking that pink pound, like Barbra Streisand and Bette Midler before her. But this time – due to the addition of the T to the rainbow of readies – actually selling women out to pander to men in frocks.

In June she announced on Instagram that she would be donating $50,000 to the Marsha P. Johnson Institute, an organisation dedicated to the ‘protection and defence’ of Black transgender people to help:  

‘protect our Black trans family… we know who Marsha P. Johnson is, and we know what Marsha P. Johnson has done for the LGBTQ, emphasis on that T, community… it protects and defends the human rights of Black, transgender people. They do this by organising community, advocating for the people and creating a healing community, developing transformative leadership and promoting collective power in direct response to the nationwide and vastly under-reported epidemic of murders of Black trans women across the United States. The violent and preventable nature of these deaths directly connects to the exclusion of Black trans people from social justice issues, namely racial gender and reproductive justice, as well as gun violence reform.’ 

That’s not just a word-salad – that’s an all you can eat word-salad bar. 

So rather than donate to a charity which supports incarcerated black women, Lizzo gave money to an organisation which presumably supports the right of criminal men to be housed in female jails, where a disproportionate number of prisoners are black women. In some states, such as California, the amount of ‘transwomen’ who force themselves on actual women is so out of control that condoms are routinely handed out to prisoners. As the Women’s Liberation Front put it ‘The new resources are a tacit admission by officials that women should expect to be raped when housed in prison with men, where all sex is considered non-consensual by default within the system.’ It was probably another sign of something shady that she declared the singer Chris Brown – convicted assaulter of Rihanna – to be ‘her favourite person in the whole world.’ But she was given a pass because, well, she’s a singing, twerking, flute-tooting old-fashioned all-round entertainer. And probably because she’s fat. 

In recent years – in an attempt to redress the prejudice against fat people as thick and lazy – the somewhat oxymoronic term Fat Activism has emerged. This isn’t ‘activism’ as in standing on picket lines in the pouring rain helping the wretched of the earth to get a living wage, as we used to understand it. This is being a nepo-baby, sitting on your big fat bum and swearing at naysayers on the internet while a gaggle of similarly chunky girlfriends call you ‘Kween!’ It may be a bad thing that fat people have been looked down upon – but the attempt to reframe fat women in particular as somehow more ‘real’ than thin women was bound to attract a bunch of wrong ‘uns holding grudges. 

Lizzo’s musing over whether she had to be ‘the funny, fat friend, I played that trope in high school, or the friend who is gonna beat your ass ’cause she’s big or the big girl who’s insecure ’cause she’s big…I don’t think I’m the only kind of fat girl there is. I want us to be freed from that box we’ve been put in’ seems less loveable now we know that she is being sued by three of her former dancers, who have accused the singer of sexual harassment, creating a hostile work environment and – irony of ironies – mocking them for being fat.  

A lawyer for the women said, ‘The nature of how Lizzo and her management team treated their performers seems to go against everything Lizzo stands for publicly, while privately she weight-shames her dancers and demeans them in ways that are not only illegal but absolutely demoralising.’  

More dancers, a creative director and a documentary maker – all of whom found it impossible to work with the singer – have added to this chorus of disapproval with words like ‘disrespect,’ ‘arrogant’ and ‘abuse of power’. Lizzo has yet to respond to the allegations.

I’ve been fat and I’ve been thin; I was an ocean-going b**** at both size ten and size 20. However, my principled refusal to demonise my thin sisters led me into an amusing feud with Dawn French some years back when I took exception to her ridiculous statement, ‘There are two types of women in the world: those who like chocolate and complete b******’. But the underlying issue was a serious one. If fat women are gaining their self-respect by putting slender women down, they are not worthy of respect – and if they are told repeatedly how wonderful they are just for being fat, they aren’t going to bother to work on their character. 

Many women were so busy telling Lizzo that she was beautiful ‘inside and out’ – as the ghastly cliche has it – that the alleged ugliness of her character may have been able to hide in plain sight all along. Now her fall from grace has been remarkably thorough. (Who gets accused of sexual, racial and religious harassment all in one go? Well, she did warn us she was special.)  

Simultaneously self-adoring and self-pitying, Fat Activism – ‘body positivity’ if you will – appears to me to be the latest entry to the Victim Olympics, another group who claim to be at once oppressed and powerful. At the risk of stereotyping, I can’t help thinking that this is just a tiny bit greedy. 

America’s female footballers should sing their national anthem

Just four members of the US football team at the Women’s World Cup sang their country’s national anthem before their game against Portugal yesterday. The rest stayed silent and impassive with their hands conspicuously by their side, not over their hearts. This was the third time the US team, or much of it, has made a silent protest at this World Cup in New Zealand. Are they to be condemned for this, or does every player have the right to express their feelings for their country, or lack of, in their own way?

Pre-match protests have become popular in recent years and the US players are not alone in seizing the limelight to make a point. Germany’s players covered their mouths to protest the alleged censorship of criticism of Qatar by Fifa at the last men’s World Cup. And almost every country took the knee in the aftermath of the death of George Floyd in 2022 for various lengths of time, with England keeping it going longer than even the US.

But as for anthems, most players mumble along with varying degrees of enthusiasm, fluency, and artistry. Iran, bravely, stayed silent for one game, against England in the Qatar World Cup in protest against their government’s violent crackdown on internal dissent, but other examples of keeping shtum are hard to find. Occasionally players don’t sing but for non-political reasons, with the Jack Charlton-era Republic of Ireland team famously struggling with their anthem because so few of that notoriously ‘diverse’ team were familiar with it.

The US players’ stance is different in that no obvious reason has been given. It is assumed to be a general protest against social and racial injustice. This would appear to suggest that the players want it to be known that they are representing their country but taking no pride in doing so. It is a little like the position of Christians as regards our place in the sinful earthly realm: we are in this world but not of it. 

The protest may reflect the internal politics of the team and the ongoing influence of veteran star Megan Rapinoe. Rapinoe is a high-profile activist on behalf of sexual minorities, pay equality and BLM. She once described herself as a ‘walking protest against the Trump administration’ and first stood in silence during the national anthems during the 2015 World Cup. In 2019 she said that she would ‘never put my hand over my heart’ and ‘never sing the national anthem again’. At the time when she took the knee in solidarity with Colin Kaepernick over his protest against discrimination in American football she said:

Being a gay American, I know what it means to look at the flag and not have it protect all of your liberties. It was something small that I could do and something that I plan to keep doing in the future and hopefully spark some meaningful conversation around it.

Whether Rapinoe is the instigator or not, what doesn’t convince about this position of the conscientious objectors, is that the players are not conscripts: they were selected (in effect invited) to play for their countries and had the perfectly legitimate option of not doing so if it offended their sensibilities. They benefit greatly from appearing at the World Cup both directly, in financial terms, and through the raised profile and enhanced sponsorship opportunities it affords. Though female footballer’s remuneration may not match the men’s, the players are still having their cake and eat it. The women are likely to receive as much as half-a-million dollars each if they win the tournament.

You would think too that if you were going to stage a protest that potentially offends the hard-working fans, the least that would be expected is some form of explanation, for the players to own their decision and justify it. But the closest we have come so far is from defender Naomi Girma who said: ‘I think when we’re out there, we’re preparing for the game, and that isn’t the focus. So ultimately, every player has a choice.’ ‘That’ presumably means paying respect to the country you are representing and the loyal patriotic fans who have come to support you.

What has been achieved by this bizarre protest? Nothing much, except appearing to divide the squad when it ought to be fully united – which may partly explain the US’s underwhelming performances so far – alienating many of the supporters, and injecting a sourness into what should be an uplifting and positive sporting event. But at least it has helped the cause of gender equality in football. The men and women’s game have many differences and inequalities but thanks to the American activists, it is getting closer in terms of virtue signalling, and becoming equally tiresome in the process.

Supercops: the return of tough policing

In a few weeks’ time, police across the country will receive a new order: ‘Investigate every crime’. It may not sound like a novel concept, but over the past few years forces – including the Metropolitan Police – have largely given up on low-level crime. Austerity was seen as a reason to ignore burglaries, thefts and minor assaults if officers believed there was little chance of identifying a suspect. But now a new theory is about to be put into practice: that investigations will lead not just to more convictions, but to more deterrence.

This change in tack – which will see police chiefs look into all crimes where there is a reasonable lead, such as video footage or a GPS tracker on a stolen phone – isn’t an idea devised in a Westminster thinktank or even a Whitehall department. Instead, it comes from Greater Manchester. It is a model put in place by Steve Watson when he took over as chief constable two years ago. At the time, the force was in special measures. But in just 18 months it was removed from enhanced monitoring after it halved the number of open investigations, shortened response times and improved support for staff. Watson’s tactics were to make more arrests, follow up every burglary and get his officers off Twitter.

Watson is one of a handful of standout chief constables to whom Suella Braverman, the Home Secretary, is paying close attention as the Tories prepare to fight on the issue of crime at the next election. Glance at the figures and the government ought to have a positive story to tell. According to the Office for National Statistics, surveyed crime (excluding fraud and computer misuse) has halved since 2010. Earlier this year, HM Chief Inspector of Constabulary Andy Cooke declared in his annual report that ‘England and Wales are arguably safer than they have ever been’.

So why aren’t the Tories shouting this from the rooftops? ‘It’s not clear people feel it,’ says one government insider. While police-recorded incidents of antisocial behaviour are down from 2012, self-reported experiences are up. There is a sense that some theft has effectively been decriminalised in much of the country. A YouGov poll has found that most people don’t think the police will bother with crimes such as phone snatching or bicycle theft. They have a point. Almost 90 per cent of bike thefts went unsolved last year; just 2 per cent led to charges being brought.

It’s hard to argue that this is a golden age for policing, with six of England and Wales’s 43 forces in special measures (and that’s without mentioning the numerous individual reports of police misconduct). Indeed, much of the innovation has been born out of crisis. This was the case in Humberside when the departing chief constable Lee Freeman created a new initiative that relieved police of attending most mental health call-outs in a bid to free up time so the then failing force could focus on crime. He asked staff what would make a difference quickly. ‘What came out of it was, we are not doing the job that we signed up to do.’ Officers were waiting in A&E with people and losing time on the beat.

‘The public said we weren’t taking action [on crime]. My workforce were saying we can’t do that because we’re sat doing bed watches for people who have got a mental health crisis,’ Freeman explains. ‘We’re not the right people to deal with it. If I slipped and broke my ankle in the street, I wouldn’t end up in a police van.’ This is a dysfunction that even made it into the script of the BBC police drama Blue Lights. A police officer encourages someone to claim he’s mentally ill so she can avoid work and sit with him in hospital instead.

Known as ‘right care, right person’, the Humberside scheme is due to hit the Met next month, before being rolled out across the country in a bid to save a million hours of police time every year.

So changes are now being driven regionally rather than nationally. This bottom-up innovation is precisely what the Tories wanted to effect in 2012 when David Cameron introduced the 41 directly elected police and crime commissioners. Their model was the New York police commissioner, Bill Bratton, whose ‘broken windows’ theory of investigating even comparatively minor offences turned around crime in the city. But 11 years later, few would say Cameron’s commissioners have worked out as planned: it’s hard to point to much innovation that their largely toothless elected officers have introduced.

As home secretary, Theresa May sought to confront the police, telling them in a 2010 speech ‘don’t chase targets, cut crime’. This ended Labour’s police targets regime, ruffling the feathers of chief constables, with one complaining that May knew nothing about policing. ‘It showed how strategically unfocused the police are,’ recalls a senior Tory. ‘They want to play games with big operations rather than focus on burglaries and street crime. They think they are leaders and behave like management consultants.’

Under Boris Johnson’s premiership the focus moved back to police numbers – with a New Labour-style pledge to find 20,000 new officers. Under Sunak and Braverman, protest laws have been tightened. Since the increased public order powers, it takes an average of eight minutes for the police to clear slow-walking protestors such as those from Just Stop Oil.

This is a back-to-basics policing strategy – not that the Tories would use the phrase. The government is trying to learn from chief constables and wants to roll out the lessons nationwide. The officers whose advice is being sought are, according to one government figure, the ones not pandering to ‘the Guardian and the Twitterati’. Braverman is particularly exercised by coppers ‘performatively making political points, taking the knee or opposing gender-critical views on Twitter’. ‘The police should stay out of politics and focus on the basics,’ says a senior government source.

Watson, 55, is seen as the chief supercop. Sometimes referred to as ‘the anti-woke chief constable’, he has quickly amassed fans in the Tory party with his declarations that all staff should shine their shoes, stop virtue-signalling online and focus on doing the job. ‘I am not employed to be a diversity champion,’ he declared after his appointment. ‘I am employed to be the chief constable of Greater Manchester.’ He began his career in Lancashire before going to the Met – a force that few can find much positive to say about – and then overhauled South Yorkshire Police, which was struggling with the fallout from failures in its handling of sexual abuse.

It was a Labour mayor, Andy Burnham, who appointed Watson to Greater Manchester. On arrival, Watson quickly got rid of his predecessor’s ‘Citizens’ Contract’ – reminding the public of their duty to stay safe as his staff were overstretched – on the grounds that it was ‘just complete tosh’. Results have been fast: non-urgent 999 calls have gone down from a wait of more than a day to just over two hours. Watson’s demand for police to attend every burglary – to get to the scene quickly, within the ‘golden hour’ for making a breakthrough – was his trademark reform.

‘I checked with Stephen early on around his theory of policing and I asked “Do you support the broken windows theory?”’ Burnham says, when we speak. ‘Because I always have, it always made sense to me. He said that he did, so immediately we were in the same place.’ At the launch of Watson’s Operation Vulcan, aimed at dismantling organised crime gangs in the Cheetham Hill area, he promised nothing would be neglected, so ‘the person who’s fishing in the Irwell every Tuesday afternoon better have a rod licence’.

Stop and search, which May had regarded as discriminatory, has trebled over the past two years. Does it disproportionately target any group, as critics claim? In a bid to respond to concerns, the tactic is now measured on what percentage of searches yields results: success comes if that figure is stable (and all officers record searches with a body camera).

Burnham is a fan of local policies going national. ‘If you’re going to take policy made up in a room in Whitehall and drop it on everybody, there’s a fair chance it’s not going to work,’ he says. ‘I would give the government credit for their openness in taking some of these ideas.’

In Humberside, Freeman says his mental health reform came in part from a wish to return to traditional policing. ‘It was a desire to get back to basics even before back to basics became a thing – that was our plan in 2017,’ he says. He dismisses criticism that the policy could lead to problems for the mentally ill. ‘What’s really fascinating is reading some of the national headlines and narrative about everybody saying “This is really worrying – the police can’t just slip away”,’ he explains. ‘Well, we’ve been doing this for three years and the only pushback I ever got was initially from the other agencies who suddenly realised that if we’re going to stop doing this, we’re entering into a project with them that is going to give them some deadlines. I was very flexible about those deadlines because I didn’t want to create risk. But I had no pushback from the communities.’

Freeman’s force has gone from failing status five years ago to being rated outstanding by the policing inspectorate. It has the highest arrest rate in the country. Freeman credits the government for providing the ‘political will’ to enable ‘operational practitioners like myself’. He talks of the ‘benefits to the police of starting to do clearly what the government wants us to do and what the public wants us to do, which is get back to preventing crime, reducing crime, detecting crime and increasing trust – which quite frankly has taken a battering.’

Other chief constables that ministers are paying close attention to include Lauren Poultney, Watson’s successor in South Yorkshire. She has retained his spirit of reform, with the force receiving three ‘outstanding’ grades in its most recent inspection for preventing crime, protecting vulnerable people and the good use of resources.

Deterrence theory ultimately rests on three components: certainty (that a punishment will be imposed), celerity (that it will be imposed quickly) and severity (that it will put off others). The last of these is an area where the Tories plan to go further, with at least two bills planned for the King’s Speech on crime and tougher sentences – although questions remain over the number of available prison places to match the drive.

For the strategy to work, the quality of policing is vital. Which is why the Tories’ reputation on crime rests in the hands of these enterprising supercops.

Trump’s indictment and the trouble with the law

The latest charges against Donald Trump will do nothing to deter his many supporters within the Republican party. On the contrary, his indictment by a grand jury set up by special counsel Jack Smith plays into the former president’s narrative of victimhood and makes it even more likely that he will be chosen as a candidate.

And that, curiously, is exactly what many senior Democrats want. To his electoral opponents, Trump seems reliably toxic – millions of Americans will turn out to vote against him. 

Even if he is convicted of the latest four charges – which include conspiracy to defraud the US and conspiracy against the rights of citizens – Trump might not be debarred from office. He has already been impeached over his role in the events of 6 January 2021. This latest indictment – on top of several others Trump faces – seems unlikely to do more to stop him. There’s no constitutional rule that stops him campaigning for the White House from prison.

All this leaves many bewildered at the state of US democracy. How can a country of 330 million not find two more appealing candidates for its highest office than Donald Trump and Joe Biden?

That Trump behaved disgracefully after his defeat in the 2020 presidential election, egging on the movement which resulted in the riots at the Capitol, should go without saying. If he has broken any other laws, whether it be covering up his tax records to conceal hush-money payments or illegally hoarding classified documents, he should be brought to account. However, there is truth in his claims that the justice system is being ‘weaponised’ against him.

It is hard to deny that a good part of the clamour to indict Trump is politically motivated rather than simply a desire to see justice done. The latest charges could hardly be better timed to inflict damage on the Republicans. They increase Trump’s chances of winning the nomination but (his opponents think) make him more unpalatable to independent voters outside the party.

If this is the scheme, it is far from a guaranteed success. On current polling, Trump is still neck and neck with Biden, and the latest charges may not get very far in court.

The recent indictment over the run-up to 6 January – that he engaged in a ‘conspiracy’ to defraud the United States, obstruct Congress and deny the constitutional rights of Americans to vote – will be very hard to prove convincingly. A defeated election candidate has to be allowed to challenge the result, to demand that evidence of malpractice be investigated.

The case against Trump rests on him going rather further than that and actively plotting with rioters to spread lies he knew to be false about a ‘stolen election’. Evidence for that is not yet apparent. Trump’s behaviour was reckless but that doesn’t in itself make him a criminal fraudster.

Lamentably, justice and politics are increasingly intertwined in America. ‘Lawfare’ has become an integral part of the US democratic process, with both sides of the political divide involved. Trump has become the first president or former president to face criminal charges since Ulysses S. Grant was arrested for speeding in a horse-drawn carriage. Special prosecutors and grand juries were deployed against Bill Clinton on multiple lines of inquiry.

Trump did not start the business of questioning the validity of election results. It has become almost a formality that the legitimacy of a president be questioned by his opponents. Some never accepted George W. Bush’s victory after the close result in Florida, and it was a month before Al Gore conceded. There were attempts to undermine Barack Obama with false claims that he had not been born in the United States, and of course Trump himself was the subject of wild accusations that his election victory had been brought about by Vladimir Putin – accusations which large parts of the media accepted with very little persuasion.

We in Britain should not feel smug about what is going on in the US. Our democracy has often looked as if it too could go the same way in recent years. In the Commons it is no longer enough to argue against the merits of your opponent’s policies and ideas. Commons committees, which were set up to inform policymaking, have evolved into de facto inquisitions, with MPs determined to haul in their opponents to be drilled in what looks more like a legalistic rather than political fashion.

The former Labour chair Tom Watson made a career out of promoting criminal conspiracy theories about alleged child sex rings involving Tory politicians. These conspiracy theories eventually collapsed after inflicting much damage on those accused.

No one is above the law. But it is a depressing development when legal processes are used as a political tool. In a well-functioning democracy, politicians make the law, lawyers enforce it, and the two are kept well separated. In the US, and to a lesser extent in Britain, the line between the two is becoming dangerously blurred.

In praise of Barbie

For the last time, on Saturday, I stuck the head of the late Queen, without a barcode, on an envelope and posted it. I have kept the two remaining stamps of my sheet as souvenirs. Stamps survive, of course, under the new King, but they are gradually becoming like cash – marginal and out of date. The letter is no longer a primary means of communication, just as notes and coin are no longer the primary means of purchase. I wonder how these changes will affect our view of monarchy. The head of the monarch, unnamed, has been the daily sight of virtually every citizen since the Penny Black arrived in 1840. The head of a monarch on coins, similarly visible to all, is more than two millennia old. When the Pharisees seek to trap Jesus about the conflict between worldly and spiritual authority in the Roman Empire, he calls for a penny. ‘Whose is this image and superscription?’ he enquires. They answer: ‘Caesar’s.’ Famously, Jesus then says: ‘Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s.’ The very word ‘sovereign’ for our gold coin worth £1 in the 19th century was a reminder that money was Caesar’s. This gave the coin an added magic. How could Jesus make his point so neatly today, what with cards and PINs and crypto? Will children now growing up link their sovereign, their money and their means of communication? Does money have new Caesars and, if so, who are they? It is slightly frightening that there is no unambiguous answer.

It is a curious fact, by the way, that Elizabeth II was our only monarch whose head consistently appeared on our banknotes (from 1960). I imagine that the reason for this is that banknotes started as the inventions of individual banks, promised against actual money (sterling) and so acquired official status only with the passage of time. Perhaps as a vestige of this, Scottish banknotes do not carry the monarch’s head (it is a phenomenon that predates devolution and is therefore not a piece of SNP mischief), or is it just that Scots never wanted to see the words ‘Bank of England’ in their wallets? In any event, it is possible, given the pace of technological change, that cash will disappear altogether and so Charles III will be not only the second monarch to appear on our banknotes, but also the last.

I cannot agree with Toby Young’s view (see his column last week) that Barbie is just ‘a gender studies seminar disguised as a summer blockbuster’. First, the film is funny, which a gender studies seminar (presumably) isn’t. Second, the only character who touches one’s heart is Ken. It turns out that he really does, after his own fashion, love Barbie. Surely gender studies seminars have no time for poignant men.

Last week, 4 Canon Lane, Chichester, was renamed George Bell House. It had been called 4 Canon Lane since 2016. Before that, it had been called George Bell House. This forth-and-back reflects the strange sequence of events. In 2015, the diocese paid compensation to ‘Carol’ for an alleged sexual assault by Bell, when Bishop of Chichester, in the late 1940s or thereabouts. In that year, the present Bishop of Chichester also gave her a formal apology. Bell had died, unaccused, in 1958. The church process by which he was posthumously convicted nearly 60 years later had not included anyone speaking on his behalf. A number of us, one or two of whom had known Bell, started an informal group to clear his name. We were confident that the accusation was false and certain that the process had been wrong. The latter point was conceded by the Church after a fine review by Lord Carlile. The former was not. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, asserted that a ‘significant cloud’ still hung over Bell. He finally retracted this in November 2021. By then, poor Bell had been unpersoned by the diocese – his name, which had been hallowed, effaced. George Bell House, founded to promote his interest in vocation, education and reconciliation, was one example. The re-renaming all but completes the formal restoration of Bell’s reputation. The Chapter of the cathedral, especially the interim Dean, Simon Holland, deserves credit, because this change was resisted in some quarters. The innocent man won in the end. I hope history will record this fully. If, for example, you look online at the ICSA report on child abuse, which made Bell one of its cases, you will not pick up the vital fact that Bell did not abuse anybody. 

Algy Cluff, former proprietor and chairman of this paper, has just completed his quintet of recollections, the last being called, at the suggestion of Tom Stoppard, The Importance of Being Algy. Each book is wonderfully succinct, weighing in at about 140 pages of quite large print. Taken together, though, they make a magnum opus. The series, begun when Algy was already 65 and holed up in the Scottish Highlands in midwinter, is a subtle, unstructured way of capturing a particular era and his uniquely mixed milieu – military, business, art, journalism, aristocracy and the very end of Empire. Of these elements, he tells me, he loved most, ‘without any question’, the army. ‘I loved the good-natured brutality of the NCOs. They would reduce you to rubble but somehow made you laugh rather than cry.’ He wrote all the books with his fountain pen and in capital letters. He had kept only desk diaries, and recommends everyone do the same, because they are excellent prompts to the memory. Is there anything he left out? ‘Yes, I had wanted to put in a chapter called “Myself and MI6”, 100 per cent redacted except for place names like “Lagos”’, but this was frowned on. Now, for the first time in his 83 years, Algy is keeping a diary with a new book in mind. It will be an account of a lithium mine he is opening in conjunction with a government somewhere in Africa.

Portrait of the Week: Trump’s indictment, Costa’s PR fail and Niger’s new leader

Home

Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister, announced the granting of 100 new North Sea oil and gas licences. In Aberdeen he confirmed funding for two new carbon capture projects. Thangam Debbonaire, the shadow leader of the House, said: ‘We are not going to grant any more. It is not OK. The world is on fire.’ Sir Bob Neill, the chairman of the Commons justice committee, called for a change in rules that deduct the cost of board and lodging in jail from compensation of those unjustly imprisoned. He was responding to the case of Andrew Malkinson, 57, cleared after 17 years in prison of a rape he did not commit.

The Infrastructure and Projects Authority gave a red rating to the HS2 railway from London to Birmingham and then to Crewe, indicating ‘successful delivery of the project appears to be unachievable’. A one-day strike by railway workers in the RMT union was followed by a week of overtime bans by train drivers belonging to Aslef. Britain will continue to recognise the EU’s CE (Conformité Européenne) product safety mark and will not insist from the end of 2024 on its own mark. A man on an electric scooter died after colliding with an ambulance in Barnsley. Royal Mail began using drones to take post from Stromness on Orkney to the islands of Graemsay and Hoy.

The electors of Rutherglen and Hamilton West removed by a recall petition their MP Margaret Ferrier, who had been convicted of reckless conduct in catching a train while suffering from Covid; a by-election will be called after parliament sits again next month. Some 47 per cent of parents reported that children’s social and emotional skills had worsened during the first year of the pandemic, according to a survey by the Institute for Fiscal Studies and the UCL Institute of Education. Mortgage approvals rose to 54,700 in June from 51,100 in May. House prices fell 3.8 per cent from their level a year ago, according to Nationwide. Net borrowing as consumer credit rose to £1.7 billion, the highest since 2018. British Gas reported half-year profits of £969 million, compared with £98 million for the same period in 2022. BP profits fell to £2 billion for the second quarter of the year compared with £6.5 billion for the second quarter of 2022. The Costa Coffee chain was criticised for images on its vans of a trans man showing mastectomy scars; ‘At Costa Coffee we celebrate the diversity of our customers,’ a spokesman said. Stuart Broad, having announced his retirement from Test cricket, took the last two Australian wickets in the gripping Ashes series to level it 2-2.

Abroad

Ukrainian drones hit the same skyscraper in Moscow two days running. President Volodymyr Zelensky commented: ‘Gradually, the war is returning to the territory of Russia – to its symbolic centres and military bases, and this is an inevitable, natural and absolutely fair process.’ Russia bombed grain facilities on the Danube. Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the Wagner mercenary group, was photographed in St Petersburg during an Africa-Russia summit shaking hands with Freddy Mapouka, a presidential adviser in the Central African Republic. In a military coup, General Abdourahamane Tchiani declared himself Niger’s new leader in place of President Mohamed Bazoum; France set about evacuating its citizens.

Donald Trump, the former American president, was indicted on four charges of attempting to overturn the presidential election results in 2020; they include conspiracy to defraud the United States. China replaced the commander of its nuclear arsenal and his deputy, who had disappeared several months ago. China will require special licences for the export of gallium and germanium, essential in making semiconductors. China appointed Pan Gongsheng, said not to be a very close ally of President Xi Jinping, as governor of its central bank. Joining China’s Belt and Road initiative in 2019 was an ‘atrocious’ decision, said Italy’s defence minister, Guido Crosetto, and the problem was how to leave it without damaging relations with Beijing. The European Central Bank raised interest rates in the eurozone for the ninth time running, to 3.75 per cent, a level last seen in 2000. Rain reduced temperatures in Phoenix, Arizona, after 31 days over 110˚F. Clashes in the Ein el-Hilweh refugee camp in Lebanon, established in 1948, between Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah movement and Islamist groups, left 11 dead and saw 2,000 flee. A man carried a bomb into a political rally at Khar near Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan, killing at least 45 people; the local Islamic State group said the bombing was part of its ‘war against democracy’.

Can the Tories come up with a tax offer in time?

Last summer, all the Tory party could talk about was tax. It was at the heart of the leadership contest and the dividing line between Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak. The then foreign secretary promised to move fast and bring in deficit-financed tax cuts; the former chancellor said this would end in tears and instead pledged fully funded cuts over six years.

Neither plan saw the light of day. All talk of tax cuts was suspended after Truss’s mini-Budget, when the premise of her borrow-and-spend agenda was tested to destruction. Since then, tax has become a difficult topic to bring up. Even within Tory circles, calls to cut tax are usually met with a pointed question: did you forget what happened last time?

As a result, the Conservative party is heading towards a general election with the tax burden almost at its highest point in post-war history. ‘There was a gaping hole in the Prime Minister’s promises at the start of the year,’ laments a former minister. ‘Sunak promised to tackle inflation, he promised growth. He said nothing about taxes. You could forgive our voters for thinking we’ve forgotten what a burden we’ve put on their shoulders.’

Sunak’s supporters insist that he is a low-tax Tory who knows his party needs a compelling offer going into the next election. ‘All the difficult things we’re doing to get inflation down are so that we can then cut tax,’ says one government insider. ‘The cuts will be sustainable this time,’ they insist. But it is still unclear which taxes would fall and by how much.

‘I want to take an axe to inheritance tax,’ says one Tory MP, ‘but is that an election winner?’ Scrapping the much-loathed ‘death tax’ is an idea that has been discussed a lot over the past month. It was brought to the forefront once again this week, after it was revealed that four times as many people will be dragged into paying inheritance tax as was originally expected last year. Just 5 per cent of UK estates pay the levy, but inheritance tax is still considered one of the ‘most unfair’ taxes by the public. This is, after all, money that has already been taxed. What is the justification for taxing it again?

Another argument for cutting inheritance tax comes from inside the Treasury, which thinks it would be a less inflationary policy than an income tax cut. Inheritance is likely to be used to pay down mortgages or grandchildren’s student debt. An income tax cut (so the theory goes) would restore a small amount of spending power to every worker. But whether the inflation rate would really jump up due to a small sprinkling of tax relief is a disputed point, even within the party.

The real appeal of an inheritance tax cut is, as one MP puts it, that ‘Rachel Reeves won’t copy it’. Sunak’s latest strategy is to try to show the differences between the Tories and Labour. So far, it has amounted to announcements over energy policy but many of the Prime Minister’s colleagues would like to see him do the same with tax.

‘The politics of inheritance tax could be quite significant, if it creates a clear dividing line between us and Labour,’ says a minister. ‘But that doesn’t make it the right tax to cut, when you’ve got Middle England caught up in a current of fiscal drag.’ Millions are being hit by freezes to tax thresholds. Inflation means that two million more people will be pulled into the higher tax bracket over the next five years. Around three million more low-paid workers will end up paying income tax on what little they earn, because the personal allowance has been frozen at £12,570.

When George Osborne was in the Treasury, the coalition government worked to take lower earners out of the income tax bracket altogether. It helped the party win an unexpected majority in 2015. Tax relief for lower earners is seen as an alternative electoral offer to cutting inheritance tax (currently there is little optimism that money can be found for both). This is what the government must weigh up: a policy that generates headlines, such as cutting inheritance tax, versus one that is more widely felt, such as taking a penny off income tax.

The markets are still anxious about Britain borrowing money: the UK now pays more than any other major country to do so. At 4.4 per cent, Britain’s rate is higher than Italy’s. And while predictions about where interest rates will peak have fallen in recent weeks, the base rate is still far higher than some of Sunak’s supporters had hoped it would be by this point. ‘Things look better than they did four weeks ago,’ says one government insider, ‘but not four months ago.’ Immediate tax cuts, then, will need to be financed by restraint on spending.

This is the conversation the Tory party did not want to have last summer. But the Treasury is forcing it now, asking ministers what savings can be found in their departments. Secretaries of state are supposed to be using this month to work out where money can be found for tax cuts next year. Special attention is being paid to the Department for Work and Pensions, which has budgeted for a massive increase in long-term sickness benefits. There are now 4,000 claims a day – twice the pre-pandemic rate. Welfare spending will be a particular focus, not least because there are more than a million job vacancies to be filled. Getting people back into work will have to be the main priority.

Then comes the price tag attached to ending the strikes: some £5 billion in public sector pay raises. Given that welfare and pensions have risen in line with inflation, questions are being asked about how restrained the government can be. ‘Do we have the guts to look at means-testing for pension benefits, or to reduce the pensions triple-lock to a double-lock?’ asks a minister. ‘If we want to cut taxes, at some point we have to talk about the size of the state.’ As chancellor, Rishi Sunak used to say precisely the same. As Prime Minister, he has discovered how hard it is to stop spending money.

My run-in with Nigel Farage

To think I once thought cricket dull. For more than 40 days and 40 nights, I have been gripped by the Ashes. I still couldn’t tell you where short third man ends and deep backward point begins, but I have fallen in love with the rollercoaster ride that Ben Stokes and his team have taken us on. So much so that I covertly watched every ball of the final hour of the final day while on a family outing to Come and Sing: Abba. I could stand the tension no longer when the ninth wicket fell so made my excuses and left to watch the final act outside with a beer in hand. After Stuart Broad secured a victory he and I will never forget, I returned to my seat in the grand concert hall at Snape Maltings and sang ‘The Winner Takes It All’ with added gusto.

Those who’ve followed every wicket on Test Match Special know there is nothing like live radio. Last week produced another reminder of the ear-twitching drama, the glorious unpredictability, the spine-tingling jeopardy which only it can produce. Andrew Malkinson, who spent 17 years in jail for a rape he didn’t commit, joined us in the Today studio on the morning after the Appeal Court’s decision to overturn his conviction. Justin Webb and I had told the audience that Andrew would be with us for the 8.10 a.m. slot normally reserved for political leaders and policymakers. At just before ten to eight my editor – and the unseen chief pilot of the programme – Owenna Griffiths told me in my headphones: ‘There’s no sign of him. The taxi’s waiting outside. His lawyer’s downstairs but he is nowhere to be seen.’ During Thought for the Day we agreed to drop the next item and to chat with our Moscow editor instead. We might need it to fill the looming hole in our running order. Ten past came and the star of the day (of the week… of the year?) was still not with us, although we were told he was on his way. Justin and a correspondent filled the gap while we all waited. There had, Justin initially told the audience, been a taxi problem. It wasn’t true, as he pointed out once Andrew took his seat at the microphone. Andrew had slept in – and who on earth could begrudge him that? Like many listening I expected to hear a wounded, angry and tortured man. Instead, he was gentle, dignified and thoughtful. As Andrew spoke of how he had survived the years of unjust incarceration and how he coped with the knowledge that all but a few people treated him as a sex offender, the editor dropped the next item. Andrew’s therapy dog wandered around the studio sniffing at every chair. Then came the news that left everyone listening open-mouthed. The prison service – the British state – would demand repayment for 17 years of board and lodgings. It was a moment few
listening will forget.

Another moment came when I asked Nigel Farage whether his campaign for banking rights (I refuse to use that appalling word ‘debanking’) was fuelled by a desire to return to frontline politics, despite the fact he’d stood for election seven times and lost seven times. ‘I am sick to death of your condescending tone,’ came the reply. The response to this exchange was entirely predictable. Passionate Leavers heard what they listen to hear every day – evidence that the BBC still hasn’t ‘got over’ Brexit. Ardent Remainers raged that the BBC had once again given Farage the attention he craves. Both groups struggle to tell the difference between a legitimate question and a statement of opinion. As it happens, I think Farage has been one of the most influential politicians in my lifetime.

Farage is also a very accomplished broadcaster and, I suspect, believes he will be more potent (as well as considerably better off) if he campaigns from the studio rather than in parliament. The broadcast regulator Ofcom is now asking the public for their views on the rules that allow him and those who have been elected, like Jacob Rees-Mogg, to present their views in primetime on what is called a news channel. It is a debate that needs to take place. I have yet to meet anyone who wants Britain to have its own version of Fox News, which recently had to pay out more than £600 million for having been shown to knowingly broadcast lies about why Donald Trump lost the last presidential election.

Much has been said about the much-loved and much-missed George Alagiah. Perhaps there was not enough focus on how a boy from Sri Lanka who moved to Ghana could become the best of British broadcasting. That had a lot to do with the character of the man but it was also because he grew up, as so many around the world do, knowing the BBC values he came to embody. It has been a difficult few weeks for his colleagues at Broadcasting House. George’s greatest legacy would be if we remembered those values and why they still matter so much.

‘Do you not speak English?’: Trump ally blasts BBC’s Chris Mason

Poor old BBC political editor Chris Mason got a rude awakening during his interview with Donald Trump’s former aide this morning. Sebastian Gorka blasted Mason for putting ‘words in his mouth’ in a fiery appearance on Radio 4’s Today programme.

Gorka, who served as Trump’s former deputy assistant, defended his former boss who was charged overnight with attempting to overturn the 2020 US election. But when Mason suggested Gorka was ‘talking down’ the US’ reputation as a ‘rich and vibrant democracy’, with no one being above the law, Trump’s ally was not impressed.

‘Why are you putting words in my mouth? I’m talking about the absolute opposite. Do you not speak English? I’m talking about equality before the law. Did you not listen to what I said? President Trump hasn’t committed a crime,’ Gorka said.

‘I want equality before the law. Why don’t you, is it because you work for the BBC? We don’t have the opportunity for a fair trial. You need to do a little bit of homework,’ Gorka added.

Westminster is in recess for the summer, but, rather than enjoying a holiday, Mason seems to have been thrown into the fire pit that is US politics. Maybe it’s time to let the man catch a break…

How much do students drink?

Union booze

Several universities have renamed freshers’ week ‘welcome week’ in an attempt to dissociate it from heavy drinking. How much do students drink?

– A survey last year by the group Students Organising for Sustainability found that 81% regard drinking and getting drunk as part of university culture.

– 53% reported drinking more than once a week.

– 61% said they drink in their rooms or with other students before going out for the night to a pub or club.

– 51% said that they thought getting drunk would ensure they had a good night out.

– 13% said they took illegal drugs.

Round the houses

Councils are to be allowed to charge more council tax for second homes. How many second homes are there in England?

– There are 3.335m properties reported to be used as second homes.

– However, 2.308m of these also serve as someone else’s main home.

– 191,000 second homes are intended to be sold, or to be moved into, in the near future.

– 27,000 have been bought for students, and are being used as their home while at university.

– 809,000 are used as second homes.

Source: English Housing Survey

Pump it up

Do UK motorists get a fair deal on fuel? Price of a litre of petrol in EU countries in June, in pence. Includes taxes:

HIGHEST

Denmark 167.80

Finland 166.20

France 161.50

Greece 161.40

Germany 159.90

LOWEST

Bulgaria 111.10

Malta 115.20

Romania 117.30

Cyprus 118.80

Slovenia 121.60

Source: Dept for Energy Security and Net Zero

Green light

Renewables were reported to have generated a record 47.8% of Britain’s electricity in the first quarter of this year. How did that break down?

Onshore wind 13%

Bioenergy (includes landfill gas) 11.3%

Offshore wind  9.2%

Solar 2.3%

Hydro 2.1%

Source: Dept for Energy Security and Net Zero

The rise of conspiracy history

Readers would doubtless find it hard to believe that the late Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh kidnapped and killed indigenous children while on a state visit to Canada in 1964. Yet this story circulated for years in Canada along with other horror stories of the rape, torture and murder of indigenous children at the hands of depraved priests and nuns. The bodies, it was said, were thrown into furnaces or secretly buried at dead of night. These accusations were linked to boarding schools run by various religious bodies first established in the 19th century and finally closed in the 1990s. A Truth and Reconciliation Commission was set up in 2008, and millions of dollars were given by the government to search for clandestine mass graves. None was found.

Then, in 2021, a single survey of an orchard at Kamloops in British Columbia by a young anthropologist using ground-penetrating radar found ‘disturbances in the ground’, and this was taken as proof of a mass grave of hundreds of children. Soon other communities announced that they too had found forgotten cemeteries, and the media portrayed these as hidden mass graves, implying terrible crimes. Canada descended into a frenzy of allegation and public self-flagellation. Dozens of churches were vandalised or burnt down, and the Trudeau government ordered the national flag to be flown at half-mast for several months. The Pope apologised, as did the Archbishop of Canterbury. China denounced Canada at the UN. But no investigation has been made of the site at Kamloops and no bodies have been found there.

Yet sensationalist stories of abuse and murder have gained credence in official circles, or at least are not publicly contested. Investigation is hampered by a reluctance to hint at scepticism concerning accusations (‘survivors’ truths’) made by members of indigenous communities, who insist that inquiries should be led by indigenous people and their ‘Knowledge Keepers’, not by the police. The highly activist Nationalist Centre for Truth and Reconciliation took control of much of the documentary evidence, which it has been unwilling to show to researchers.

A moderate view would be that these schools were often sites of harshness and neglect, but there is also plenty of evidence of happy children and dedicated teachers. The schools were often asked for by local indigenous communities. There is no proof of children being kidnapped and forced into them. Many were close to their homes and supported by their parents. Even in the recent past, nuanced discussion of the schools was possible. No longer. Those indigenous leaders who formerly praised their own school experiences are silent. The official story focuses solely on horrors.

Nevertheless, several prominent – and in the circumstances, brave – Canadian historians have expressed reasoned doubt. Careful record-keeping means that suggestions of thousands of missing children and unexplained deaths can be disproved. Old cemeteries that have lost their grave markers have been identified, but still no secret mass graves have been found.

Far from there being relief that the most appalling fears appear groundless, a deadening cloak of silence has been thrown over the whole subject. The former executive director of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission is pressing for an ‘anti-colonial approach’ making ‘denialism’ subject to ‘both civil and criminal sanctions’. The justice minister says that he is open to the idea. The deliberate vagueness is doubly intimidating. Would asking for the radar scans at Kamloops be ‘denialism’? Or pointing out that no human remains have been uncovered?

We are used to ‘denial’ of some controversial assertion being proclaimed a moral and intellectual offence. As far as I know, though, only Holocaust denial is a crime in some countries. Note the obvious difference: evidence for the Holocaust is overwhelming and denying it in good faith impossible. The situation in Canada is precisely the opposite: it is not denying but rather sustaining these accusations in the absence of evidence that tests good faith.

But there is a lot of money at stake. Hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation have been handed out to former school children. Ideology too: the schools symbolise a policy of integration – broadly followed until the 1960s – when full citizenship was offered to indigenous peoples, as opposed to the present policy of maintaining them as separate ethnic groups in territorial reservations. Integration is now tantamount to genocide for many liberals, so accusations that schools were literally ‘institutions of genocide’, killing and secretly burying ‘thousands of children’ is too powerful a story to be given up by those pursuing greater land rights, huge reparations and ‘rewriting national history’ to promote separate nationhood.

Britain’s ‘history wars’ are small beer by comparison: a statue toppled here, slogans scrawled there, misleading information given by our great museums. Nevertheless, comparable processes can be seen on both sides of the Atlantic. Allegations of historic British iniquities are given automatic credence as institutions, whether through genuine belief or moral panic, hasten to acquiesce. Objections based on careful interpretation of evidence are almost invariably ignored.

In 2019 Britain had its own burials scandal, when a Channel 4 programme made by David Olusoga and presented by David Lammy MP charged the Imperial War Graves Commission with wholesale racism in its treatment of the bodies of non-white first world war soldiers, practising ‘apartheid in death’. Olusoga added on the BBC that Winston Churchill had ‘deliberately signed off’ on this policy. A presumably panicky Commonwealth War Graves Commission produced a report accepting the claims and deploring the ‘pervasive racism of contemporary imperial attitudes’. A no less panicky Ministry of Defence expressed regret, and Boris Johnson rounded it off by saying he was ‘deeply troubled’ that ‘not all of our war dead were commemorated with equal care and reverence’.

Did any of them feel a duty to protect the reputation of their institutions and of Britain itself, rather than giving a green light to international accusations, including by China, of British racism? Apparently not. But Professor Nigel Biggar at Oxford did examine the evidence, and found that ‘the Imperial War Graves Commission… was committed to the principle of the equal treatment of all the Empire’s fallen troops… whatever the colour of their skin’.

The war graves claim, like the Canadian allegations, was intended to create a scandal on a deeply emotive subject. When many ethnic minority groups are eager to emphasise their participation in Britain’s wars as a buttress to their rightful claim to full national membership, the accusation that the bodies of their dead soldiers were disrespected is particularly hurtful and damaging.

Though ‘denialism’ is not yet illegal, academics such as Biggar who contest orthodoxy are sure to be publicly reviled by gaggles of their colleagues who try to intimidate and silence them. Attempts were made to sabotage his research project on the ethics of empire. Those of us old enough to be untouchable can speak our minds, but younger colleagues often tell us shamefacedly that they are constrained by concern for their careers. They may be ostracised, seeing invitations to speak dry up, research funding applications fail, book contracts get cancelled and the fruits of several years’ work end up destroyed.

The orthodoxy in schools, in museums and on television is always the same: Britain was racist in the past, and so it is racist today. Producing evidence that this is untrue or exaggerated is heresy. So when the independent Commission on Racial and Ethnic Disparities, set up by Kemi Badenoch as equalities minister, reported in 2021 that ‘most of the disparities we examined… often do not have their origins in racism’ it was met with a flood of vitriol from activists. No matter that an earlier report by the EU and a later one by King’s College London reached similar conclusions: that Britain was among the least racist countries in Europe. Here, as in Canada, distortions of the past serve to create a distortion of the present.

The Canadian case shows this in lurid form. Accusations of genocide and child murder, combined with threats of punishment for ‘denialism’, make whole areas of public policy impossible to discuss dispassionately and create a poisonous victimhood culture. The Canadian government is reported to spend as much now on subsidies to its indigenous minority as it does on defence. So huge interests are involved. Is the money properly spent? Is the policy of keeping certain ethnic groups largely dependent on welfare and with limited life choices either effective or ethical? The same questions could be asked in the US and Australia. But in all three countries, rational consideration is blighted by induced guilt about the past.

What is at stake is not only intellectual freedom and unconstrained academic research, though these are certainly important enough. Even more important is the ability to conduct honest public discussion, examine policy and assess the true state of the nation. Those who try to stifle investigation are intent on manipulating our view of the past and creating myths and taboos to control power and policy in the present. Dispassionate historical scholarship can serve political rationality by contesting extreme or groundless claims. But such scholarship is under threat.

Settler societies have the grave problem of dispossessed indigenous minorities which we do not. For that reason, ‘history wars’ in America, Canada and Australia are far more serious and potentially damaging than in Britain. Nevertheless, even here we risk encouraging a new generation to regard its country and its history as sources of shame, guilt and resentment. The real achievements of integration risk being undermined. And Putin can gleefully denounce the West’s ‘colonial crimes’. 

You think British trains are bad? Try German ones

I found Jean-Pierre standing at a half-open window gulping down lungfuls of stale Dutch air as our night train chuntered, unseeing, through an expectoration of towns: Zutphen, Eefde, Gorssell. He was 79 years old, he told me, and returning to Berlin for the first time in 61 years for a meeting with an old friend.

Back in 1962, Jean-Pierre had been a very young Belgian Jesuit employed in smuggling hard currency from West to East Berlin, which he did by stuffing the notes inside a plaster cast which covered his right leg. There was nothing wrong with his leg, of course. His contact in an illegal Christian charity in the East was a man of the same age, called Norbert – and it was this chap he was going to see for the first time in almost six decades.

They had lost touch with one another in the mid-1960s, but Jean-Pierre had embarked upon a kind of demented scouring of social media sites recently and found, to his delight, that his former comrade was alive. His excitement was palpable and touching; he had scarcely believed that such a re-union could be possible. I asked him if Norbert was happy in the new(ish) Germany. He told me that his old friend was a little ambivalent. ‘He said that in the old days we had no money, but we understood what was important in life. For many, that understanding has now gone. But… they are rich.’

By an uncanny coincidence, the carriage in which we were travelling first saw service in 1962. Really. This was part of the much-heralded new European sleeper service from Brussels to Berlin which began running in May this year. The carriage had no electricity, no power points, no buffet car and the toilets were a noisome foretaste of hell. The journey is also extortionately expensive: one berth on this lumbering, filthy behemoth cost the same as all three tickets for my family to sleep blissfully on the modern, spotless, well-equipped night train from Prague to Poprad in Slovakia, with a toilet and shower in every room.

But then trains in western Europe are not faring too well generally, especially German trains. You think we have it bad? According to Network Rail, the proportion of British trains arriving within five minutes of the scheduled arrival time is 92.4 per cent. For Deutsche Bahn, the figure is 65.2 per cent (and that’s for within six minutes). Lars, a businessman visiting his father in Berlin, told me his train from Frankfurt had been delayed by five hours, with no explanation given.

Our train steward was an odious bullet-headed Prussian who made it absolutely clear he couldn’t give a stuff that one coach was out of service and the passengers thus marooned, or that there was no buffet car. Nothing to do with me, he barked, with a Waffenish satisfaction.

Berlin may be the only city in the world whose entire tourist industry is predicated upon repentance. The Wall, the DDR, the Stasi, the Holocaust – Es tut uns sehr leid (We are very sorry). But I wondered, in the excellent DDR museum, how twentysomething Londoners might react looking at the typical compact East Berlin two-bedroom apartment, available for one eighth of a German monthly salary, when they pay half of their wages to share a room with some skank in Leytonstone and have not the remotest prospect of getting anything better.

I first saw Berlin in 1986 when I travelled from London to Moscow in a tour organised by the Communist party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist). Bus to West Berlin, U-bahn to East Berlin, train for three days to Moscow. It was chaotic and led by an idiot. In East Berlin he revealed that he had forgotten to purchase any Ostmarks for the U-bahn tickets: ‘But we are socialists and they are socialists, so we shall just get on without paying and it will be fine.’ A little later, as we were lined up against the wall by angry policemen with guns, the idiot pushed me forward to explain the situation, as I was the only traveller with a smattering of German. It was not my finest moment. In the panic I forgot the German for tour leader was Reiseleiter and announced with great conviction to the most belligerent copper: ‘Ich bin der Gruppenfuhrer!’ Really, really not amused.

In Slovakia we stayed at the beautiful Habs-burg-era Grand Hotel in Stary Smokovec, at the foot of the Tatra mountains. Its heyday was pre-war, before the Germans ransacked it and the commies made it a retreat for Great Socialist Statesmen, such as Leonid Brezhnev, Harold Wilson and Fidel Castro (who played ping pong with the staff). It still has its magnificent grandeur and a room is about a fifth of what you’d pay in Berlin or London.

Eighty-odd miles to the east a country is at war – and the Slovaks are more equivocal about who to support than their Polish and Czech neighbours. About half the country thinks Vladimir Putin was right to invade and blames Nato. Is this a consequence of that complex hierarchy of national hatreds in central Europe, with the Slovaks siding, puzzlingly, with their most vexatious neighbours, Hungary? (A Hungarian diplomat once told me a joke: ‘What do you call a Pole who wishes he was Hungarian? A Slovak.’) They go to the polls next month and way out in front is the Russophile, deeply socially conservative, anti-immigration, Eurosceptic former prime minister Robert Fico. Lovely Slovakia, like most of the rest of Europe, is now tilting steeply to the right.

A Saudi-Israel peace deal would be a game-changer

It emerged this week that the head of the Mossad, David Barnea, slipped quietly over to Washington in July to hold secret talks about the prospect of an Israel-Saudi peace deal.

This was part of a drip-drip of stories suggesting that an agreement may be back on the cards after an Iran-Saudi deal brokered by China complicated things in March.

In another significant development, the respected Saudi newspaper Arab News published an editorial this week selling a possible deal to its readers. This followed a study finding that Saudi Arabia has scrubbed ‘practically all’ antisemitism and Israelophobia from its school textbooks. Apparently, children of the desert kingdom are no longer being taught about the ‘descendants of monkeys and pigs’ in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.

To an international media tinged with Israelophobia – which seems to be relishing the Jewish state’s current domestic political trauma a bit too much – this was a reminder that Israel is far from finished as a beacon of hope in the Middle East, and that western interests are bound up with its fortunes. There may yet be a future in which a people with 3,000-year-old roots in the region are fully accepted, and this would be excellent news for democracies around the world.

Ironically, the Abraham Accords peace deals are the life’s work of Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister that is now piloting his country into the vortex of a chauvinism-fuelled crisis. His strategy of normalising relations with peripheral countries around the world, then Arab states, and finally the Palestinians, was seen as heretical and absurd by the Clinton-Obama era diplomatic orthodoxy, with John Kerry famously responding to the idea with ‘no, no, no, and no’ as Secretary of State in 2016.

Fast forward to today, however, and even as hundreds of thousands take to the streets in protest against the most disturbing political putsch Israel has ever seen, several Arab States – most significantly the UAE – enjoy cordial relations with the Jewish state. Adding Saudi Arabia, the Gulf’s foremost economic and military power, to the list would be a game-changer.

Barnea’s visit was partly able to take place because the political and intelligence-sharing channels between Israel and the United States are largely siloed from one another. Security cooperation continues to flourish even as relations between the heads of state grows increasingly dysfunctional. But it is also testament to the significant strategic advantages that a Saudi-Israel deal would offer. Not just to the partners themselves, not just to the region, not just to the United States, but also to the West.

In a recent interview, Norman Roule, the distinguished CIA veteran who led America’s intelligence operation in Iran, emphasised that the mood both in Washington and in Middle Eastern capitals is strikingly positive. ‘The players appear optimistic and eager to gain the strategic and political benefits that would follow success,’ he said, adding: ‘I am optimistic about this deal, in part because I think it is the right thing to do.’

As with other important diplomatic challenges, he explained, there is a strategic decision to make. The US could either opt for a ‘go big for big’ approach – which aims to take on as many dimensions of the problem as possible at once with a grand solution – and a ‘go less for less’ strategy, which emphasises incremental confidence-building steps. It is a sign of the Biden administration’s commitment to normalisation that it has decided to pursue the former. The risk, of course, is that talks will collapse under the weight of their own ambitions. But if the drive is powerful enough, it may win results that no series of small breakthroughs would achieve.

Saudi Arabia has been solidifying its status as an undisputed regional leader in recent years. In the aftermath of the Arab spring, it has reined in its religious police and given women greater freedom. Mohammed bin Salman, or MBS, has emerged as a modernising figure, with his state-sponsored murder of dissident Jamal Khashoggi fading slowly into the background as greater concerns dominate.

In an Arab League meeting in May, Riyadh flexed its diplomatic credentials by hosting Volodymyr Zelensky. A multilateral conference on the Ukraine conflict involving key western players – though not Russia – is in the pipeline. These are all signs of the kingdom’s growing relevance on the western international stage. And the presence of former pariah Bashar al-Assad at the meeting, though deeply distasteful, showed Riyadh’s capacity to forgive and forget when strategic interests align. As the hinge between the Middle East and the democracies, Israel would be a valuable addition in consolidating a friendly alliance.

One major benefit would be the bolstering of a united front against the scourge of Iran. One British official who holds a security brief recently told me that the theocracy’s operations on our shores was the threat that kept him up at night above all others; if you knew what I knew, it would keep you up at night as well, the official told me. In a certain light, beleaguered by internal unrest and battered by sanctions, Iran is increasingly looking like a wounded animal. But it is closer than ever before to becoming a nuclear state; its meddling throughout the Middle East continues unabated; its Revolutionary Guards pose a serious danger to Britain and democratic countries worldwide; and it never rests in its softer cultural and diplomatic efforts to gain regional dominance, which cloak its deeply malign intentions.

An Israeli-Saudi alliance in the region may allow Washington, and to a lesser extent other western powers, to save money by sharing the security burden more equitably. It would also make it easier to keep the region’s three vital trading routes – the Strait of Hormuz, Bab al-Mandab and the Suez Canal – free from Iranian interference. Supply chains of goods and raw materials, such as the iron, nickel, lithium and copper that the Saudis intend to mine, would be more robust. And we all know first-hand the domestic pain caused by insecure supply chains. A deal would also make the transportation of oil and gas from the region much more secure. For Britain, which does not have the same domestic energy production as the United States, this is vital.

But this is not an entirely rosy picture. In meetings with National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, CIA chiefs and White House officials, the Israeli spymaster apparently tried to establish a framework, or a roadmap, for the peace process. Difficult decisions are yet to come.

Top of the list of challenges are the Palestinians. Riyadh gives millions of dollars to them, only to see it leak out via corrupt channels or go to fund terrorism against Israelis. Saudi officials have increasingly added conditions to the funds, pressuring the Palestinians to clean up their act. At the same time, however, the Saudis are demanding significant Israeli concessions, particularly on settlement expansion, as a condition of a peace deal. Given the hardliners in Netanyahu’s administration, it may be hard for him to persuade them that Saudi normalisation is worth it.

Moreover, the Saudis have made it clear that they require a huge input of US military support to oil the wheels of the negotiation. This would include a Nato-style security agreement, a quicker supply of sophisticated defence systems such as missile defence batteries, and a nuclear programme (with civilian-use-only guarantees attached). To make matters more complicated, F-35s promised for the UAE have not yet materialised, despite that country’s prominent position in the Abraham Accords, which to some extent undermines Riyadh’s confidence.

Such a security investment would be expensive, but not without benefits for the United States. Not only would it re-establish its dominant status in the region (this is the president who withdrew from Afghanistan), it would be a shot in the arm for the American defence industry.

Moreover, a deal would be a benefit to Biden in an election year. ‘With the election calendar in mind, the most propitious time to conclude an agreement is by early 2024,’ Roule said. Other analysts believe this is a longer-term project, requiring significant shepherding and resources from Washington, which is under pressure on Ukraine, China, and on the domestic front – not to mention the political instability in Israel.

Yet by all accounts, the secret meeting in Washington went very well. Perhaps the fact that it is no longer secret demonstrates how many people want the deal to happen. More significantly, the drip-drip of stories that have emerged this week shows how much confidence those people have that it will work.

Wine Club: a super summer sale to beat the alcohol duty increase

Hey you there on your sun lounger! Take a gander at this summer sale, courtesy of our chums at FromVineyardsDirect. These are extremely toothsome bin-ends and overstocks at pre-duty increase prices. I’ve tasted them, rejected the also-rans and beaten FVD down on price as much as I can. There are some cracking mystery cases included too.

First the whites. 2020 Rive Droite, Rive Gauche (1) has often featured in these pages – a creamy, peachy Viognier-based white Côtes du Rhône that never fails to please. £10.95 down from £12.75. The 2022 Racine Picpoul de Pinet (2) is another crowd-pleaser and as decent a Picpoul as you’ll find. Fresh, creamy and lemony, it’s spot on as a lively aperitif. £12.95 down from £14.95.

The 2019 Les Jardiniers (3) is another white Rhône of great style made entirely from Roussanne by Alexander Sichel at the estate in France’s deep south-west founded by his grandfather, the mighty Peter Sichel of Bordeaux fame. £13.95 down from £15.95. The 2021 Domaine de la Motte Beauroy
Chablis 1er Cru (4) is seriously classy Chablis which, while initially austere and reserved, soon develops into something more giving and textured thanks to time in the barrel. £21.95 down from £24.95.

The Negrel family have produced fine Provençal rosé for more than 200 years and the 2022 Nuit Blanche Rosé (5) is a little charmer – pale pink, light, delicate and deeply refreshing. £12.95 down from £14.95.

Onto the reds. The 2021 La Pierre du Diable (6), a Grenache/Syrah blend from Ventoux, is simple fare but full of juicy dark fruit with a savoury twist. An ideal summer house red at £9.45 down from £10.95. The 2021 Rhonéa Séguret ‘Terrasse Pavée’ Côtes du Rhône Villages (7) is one of the wines of the offer, a Grenache/Mourvèdre-based blend with deliciously spicy, mellow dark fruit and a long finish. £10.45 down from £12.45.

The 2021 Racine Pinot Noir (8) from the Pays d’Oc is light, fresh and easygoing. It doesn’t have depth but it does have charm and it slips down easily, especially lightly chilled. £11.95 down from £13.95. The 2009 Ch. Perron (9) is a brilliant Cab Sauv/Merlot/Cab Franc blend from the Guignard brothers in the Graves. From a first-rate vintage, it’s fully mature and, once decanted, shows what great value the so-called petit châteaux of Bordeaux can be. £16.95 down from £18.95.

The 2016 Ch. Marjosse (10) from Pierre Lurton Chx Cheval Blanc and Yquem is another Bordeaux bargain from a 10/10 vintage. Intense and concentrated, it’s also soft, smooth and surprisingly fresh. A testament to impeccable winemaking. £14.95 down from £16.95. The 2015 Ch. Tour Bayard ‘L’Angelot’ (11) is a big, bold red made almost entirely from old vine Malbec in Montagne St-Emilion. Rich and dense, it’s a massive wine with hints of violets, cassis, pepper and spice. £26.95 down from £30.95.

Finally, a glorious example of Châteauneuf-du-Pape: the 2017 Domaine Le Jas des Papes (12). A multi-grape blend based on Grenache, it’s juicy, jammy, fresh and spicy with ripe dark fruit and a touch of liquorice. If you like serious Rhône, you’ll love this. £27.45 down from £29.95.

And so to the mystery cases, which are mainly a mix of Bordeaux (including FVD’s fabled ‘defrocked’ clarets), Burgundy, Rhône with a sprinkling of New World; some with stains/nicks on the labels, some pristine, and incredible value given that each box contains a guaranteed £200 worth of vino for just £149 a dozen. There are red and mixed options and a money back guarantee if you don’t like anything. Delivery, as ever, is free.

Order online today or download an order form.

The increasing irrelevance of Benjamin Netanyahu

The most tedious question in Israeli politics is: ‘Will this be the end of Benjamin Netanyahu?’ It has come up again in recent weeks as Israel has found itself on the brink of chaos over his coalition government’s attempts to pass laws weakening the independence of the judiciary, including the Supreme Court. And while the civilian unrest is unprecedented in the country’s history, anyone who has spent even a moderate amount of time observing Israel in the past decades should know by now that the answer, as long as Netanyahu is still breathing, is ‘no’.

At 73, and after more than 40 years in public life, his lust for power and sense of destiny remain unquenchable. He is still a far more indefatigable and creative campaigner than any of his rivals. In Likud he has a party that has never deposed its leader. And the coalition he has built of far-right and ultra-religious parties does not have anyone else it believes can lead it to election victories.

Not that Netanyahu wins every election. Despite his self-cultivated magician-winner image, his track record is far from perfect. He has led Likud in eleven general elections, won five, lost three and drawn three. It’s his resilience in coming back from defeat and holding on in stalemate that have made him Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, as much as his victories at the ballot box. I was once present when a non-Israeli journalist told him that David Cameron had promised not to serve more than two terms in Downing Street and asked whether he also had plans to retire at some point. The look of sheer incomprehension on Netanyahu’s face was almost comical. Relinquishing power voluntarily is a foreign concept to him. And if he is forced out, he will keep on trying to return.

But the political turmoil of the past seven months, since he returned after what he called a ‘hiatus’ of 18 months in opposition, has prompted a different question – ‘Is Netanyahu still relevant?’

After failing to win a majority in four consecutive elections between 2019 and 2021, Netanyahu made his comeback in late December on the fifth try by imposing complete discipline on the seven parties supporting him. Meanwhile, the parties of the centre-left opposed to him split. As a result, despite winning just under half the votes, Netanyahu’s coalition emerged with a small yet stable majority in the new Knesset.

To win that majority, Netanyahu had to eke out every last available means of support on the furthest margins of the far-right. It was the only way of returning to power, as the centrist parties which in the past have agreed to join his coalitions are not prepared to serve under a prime minister facing corruption charges.

Netanyahu’s strategy worked but it also meant that he has little control over his government. Many of the powerful ministries (as well as some freshly invented ones) went to the coalition partners, as well as billions of shekels in funding for special interests and promises to pass radical policies. Chief among these is the series of laws and amendments weakening the courts, which also has much support within Likud, but runs counter to previous statements by Netanyahu himself extolling the virtues of Israel’s independent Supreme Court.

A newer but equally tedious question being asked in Israel is whether Netanyahu has changed his mind about the courts, or is he being ‘held hostage’ by his coalition? The answer is that it simply doesn’t matter. He’s not in charge of most of his government’s policies anyway.

Nearly everything his ministers have done in the past seven months has been in contradiction to his long-held beliefs. He is a proponent of small government and fiscal caution whose administration has lavished massive benefits on small religious communities, is appointing hundreds of clerical cronies and whose finance minister said in an interview that his economic approach was to do God’s will. He is a risk-averse leader whose national security minister is a pyromaniac who risks setting the region ablaze by regularly visiting Jerusalem’s contested Temple Mount/Al Aqsa compound. He is a social conservative who has in the past avoided tampering with Israel’s main institutions, but whose justice minister is tearing society apart with his plans to eviscerate the judiciary.

Netanyahu can’t discipline or sack his ministers. To do so would almost certainly cost him his majority. In March, he announced he had fired his defence minister, triggering some of the largest protests seen on Israel’s streets. He rescinded the letter.

Last Monday, as the Knesset voted on one of the laws of its ‘legal reform’, the nation was treated to the sight of the defence and justice ministers arguing on the front bench over whether to postpone the vote and try to reach some form of accommodation with the opposition. A silent Netanyahu sat between them. The hardliners won and that weekend, only 40 per cent of Israelis said in a media survey that Netanyahu was in charge of the government; 45 per cent thought the radical ministers were.

One minister close to Netanyahu admitted to me that the Prime Minister ‘didn’t want to have to spend his new term on this’. Yet the constitutional controversy that has caused hundreds of thousands of Israelis to come out on the streets, tech companies to threaten to move their business abroad and thousands of veteran reserve officers to suspend their voluntary service has consumed nearly every moment since he returned to office. And that will continue being the case as the coalition intends to bring more such laws, whether Netanyahu likes it or not.

When asked about his far-right coalition partners in interviews with the US media (he rarely ever speaks to Israeli journalists nowadays) he regularly answers: ‘They joined me. I didn’t join them, and I direct policy.’ That facade is increasingly looking hollow. As Norman Lamont said of John Major’s government, Netanyahu now gives ‘the impression of being in office but not in power’.

Is Nigel Farage really a grifter?

That Coutts dossier on Nigel Farage said in passing: ‘He is considered by many to be a disingenuous grifter.’ I didn’t quite know what grifter here meant. According to the Telegraph, a podcast host at Spotify called the Duke and Duchess of Sussex ‘grifters’. That does not limit the semantic field. It feels to me like a synonym for chancer, which in an 1889 dictionary of slang was defined as ‘one who attempts anything and is incompetent’. 

Stephen Frears’s film The Grifters (1990), not to be recommended to anyone of a nervous disposition, deals with fixing racecourse odds, running confidence tricks, and even faking one’s own death. Get the Grift was the English title given in 2021 to a Brazilian film about confidence tricksters originally called Os Salafrários, a word suggesting scoundrelism.

The OED equates to grift with the American slang to graft, which can mean anything from moll-buzzing (picking women’s pockets) to political corruption. Certainly the noun graft is now an ordinary word for bribery and corruption. But if you asked about a job applicant, ‘Is he a grafter?’ you might be asking whether he was a hard worker. Graft in that sense may derive from a word for digging. A graft is the depth of earth that may be thrown up at once with a spade.

To grave derives from an Old English word meaning ‘to dig’ (as one digs a grave) and also ‘to carve’. In Robert Louis Stevenson’s poem ‘Requiem’, he uses the word grave in both senses: ‘Dig the grave and let me lie’ and ‘This be the verse you grave for me’. Here ‘you grave’ is not short for ‘you engrave’. It is the other way: engrave, borrowed from French in the 13th century, was a lengthening of grave. Biblical injunctions against graven images extend the notion of graving to take in sculpting, perhaps by casting if you are making golden calves. Aaron’s method with the golden earrings is not clear to me. He took the gold and ‘fashioned it with a graving tool, after he had made it a molten calf’. It was a grave error of judgment, but that’s a different story.

‘Thinks of the diner, not the chef’: Claridge’s Restaurant, reviewed

The BBC made a very odd documentary about the renovation of Claridge’s: The Mayfair Hotel Megabuild. They filmed, agog, as the hotel grew eight new storeys – three above, and five below – between 2014 and 2021 while staying open: guests slept and ate, unaware of ‘Narnia doors’ to the building site. (That Narnia is where guests aren’t indicates what Claridge’s employees cannot put into words without spontaneously combusting.) Labourers dug the basement by hand and impersonated the Artful Dodger when management toured. The BBC described the new penthouse at length without mentioning that it is gross, with a grand piano in a glass box on a terrace like a Richard Clayderman-themed nightmare. A roof was assembled off-site and stuck on as for a doll’s house. The spa, which offers a facial treatment where the guest must wear a Darth Vader-style mask, flooded in a rainstorm.

But amid the abyss, something has bloomed: something always does. Claridge’s has a perfect restaurant again: the kind which deserves its own Edwardian tribute fiction. I haven’t eaten here since the self-conscious Fera and its ridiculous faux-rustic tableware: if you can afford these prices, there is no need to impersonate a hobbit so you can live with yourself. I am tired of restaurant in search of pumpkin patch. I wasn’t tempted by its successor either, which was run by the equally self-conscious Daniel Humm, who serves tiny ‘immigrant-inspired’ plates at Eleven Madison Park in New York City. He left when management wouldn’t let him go vegan – he has inflicted vegan on his New York City customers because he can’t steal their private aircraft – and so now we have this.

It indicates its lack of pretension with its name, which is Claridge’s Restaurant. The plainness is soothing, because truth – even truth as small as this – is soothing, particularly in Mayfair. It is a beautiful room and it is opposite, I remind you, the loveliest ladies’ loos in London. They are art deco and faintly shabby: when I stare into the looking-glass, I imagine I see Judy Garland and Princess Margaret staring back. Anything that stands against the Dubai aesthetic must be encouraged.

The room is tall, wide and pale: a room for dining, not for assuming a tinny identity, or speaking your rage in bad homeware. It is a British-style brasserie, which means that it thinks of the diner, not the chef and his relationship with his father: you are not at the mercy of a seething subconscious. I am told that Jeremy King, late of the Wolseley and the most gifted restaurateur of the age, is advising, and I sensed it in the welcome: like all superb restaurants, from snack shack to this, it treats the diner like an unwell baby. Good restaurants are, at heart, hospitals for people who are not ill.

The food is perfect and, for what it is, well priced. We pay £100 a head and gorge ourselves. We eat a glorious tomato salad, plated with obsession; a chicken with lemon stuffing; mashed carrot; mashed potato; a steak au poivre; Sussex strawberries; a dish of mushrooms I will remember always; a dish of English cheese and plum jam. It takes great skill to cook this simply. As a literary critic said of Biggles Defies the Swastika: five stars. No notes.

My favourite story about Claridge’s is that Dwight Eisenhower was stationed here in wartime. He hated it and fled for Teddington, then war. I wonder if he would have stayed for this.

Pavlova: the crumble of summer

Whenever I tell someone that I’m making a pavlova the response is the same: sheer joy. Even the most fervent pudding-denier struggles to resist a slice of pav. It makes sense – fragile, crisp meringue with a tender, mallowy centre, soft waves of cream and some kind of fruit is such a brilliant combination.

You don’t often see pavlovas on restaurant menus. There’s a good reason for that. A little like a trifle, part of the joy of a pavlova is that it arrives at the table looking unruffled: fruit perched perkily on clouds of cream atop a mountain of meringue. Then, as soon as the spoon hits it, it’s a mess. You cannot dish it up in a way that avoids the fundamental chaos of splintering meringue and squirting cream. It must be finished in one sitting.

I went through a phase of piping both my meringue mixture and my cream, but I now think that goes against the spirit of pavlova. Pavlovas aren’t meant to be fussy: their beauty is in their swoops and swirls, the undulation of the meringue and cream, the generous scattering of the topping, fruit juices dribbling down the side. And if it cracks a little in the oven, it really doesn’t matter: you’re going to cover it with cream and nobody cares anyway.

For a long time, I made only the same two pavlovas that my mother did: the first – considered the virtuous option – a mixture of red summer fruits; the second, a cascade of mini marshmallows and a storm of chocolate shavings on top of the cream. It sounds like a pavlova created by a six-year-old, but my sister and I had no hand in it. We wished! Mum would make it for charity lunches and, once made, it would be left in the cool porch, with strict instructions that we were not to go anywhere near it. We would stare at it longingly through the glass doors.

But I’ve come to realise that the pavlova is the crumble of summer. You can turn whatever you have to hand into a glorious, celebratory pav. The first two levels are pretty much non-negotiable: a meringue made with a little cornflour, so that although the outside is crisp, the inside is squishy; a generous layer of cream whipped just enough to hold its own weight. But when it comes to the topping, pavlova is a blank canvas.

Big fat berries and soft stone fruits like peaches and nectarines require little fiddling with – their natural sweetness means that they don’t need cooking or adornment. Dollops of lemon curd, handfuls of raspberries and a scattering of bright green pistachios create a riot of colour and a perfect flavour combination. Passion fruit and milk chocolate are a surprise partnership that, once tried, you’ll go back to time and time again – try passion fruit curd, shavings of milk chocolate, and then spoon a fresh passion fruit over the top for zing. For a tropical vibe, try pineapple roasted with sugar and vanilla, or mango coulis and mango chunks with big flakes of toasted coconut, and a little rum folded through the whipped cream.

And while I call it the crumble of summer, the weather getting a little cooler doesn’t mean you have to give up on pavlovas. I like poached plums, or apricots roasted with bay, with amaretti biscuits crumbled over them – or go the whole hog and make a sticky toffee pavlova with a dark muscovado caramel sauce and chopped dates scattered on top.

Here is my most summery pavlova, with elderflower-marinaded strawberries and a lemon-scented cream. I make it when the sun is high, or when it’s not but I wish it was. A confession: I’m not actually a huge elderflower fan, but some kind of magic happens when it’s paired with strawberries. Its floral base somehow makes the strawberries taste more of themselves, super juicy, and the citrus in the cordial brings a zippy brightness. The lemon in the cream comes from blitzing together sugar and lemon zest to create an aromatic citrus snow which can then be dissolved into the cream before it is whisked.

Serves 8 
Takes 30 minutes 
Cooks 1 hour, 15 minutes

For the pavlova

• 5 egg whites
• 350g caster sugar
• 1 tbsp vinegar
• 1½ tsp cornflour
• 1 tsp lemon juice

For the filling

• 400ml double cream
• 1 lemon
• 3 tbsp sugar
• 400g strawberries
• 2 tbsp elderflower cordial

1. Preheat the oven to 180°C. Wipe the inside of a bowl with the lemon juice on a little piece of kitchen towel to get rid of any grease. Beat the egg whites on low until little bubbles appear, then whack the speed up to high; beat until they reach stiff peaks.
2. Add the sugar bit by bit, beating the mixture back to glossy peaks each time. Add the cornflour and vinegar, and briefly whisk.
3. Draw a large circle, about 9 inches wide, on a piece of greaseproof paper (I draw round a plate). Fix this to a baking tray with a couple of small blobs of meringue to stop it moving around. Spoon your meringue on to the paper in the outline of the circle, and then fill in the rest of the circle. Spoon more blobs in a second layer around the edge, dipping the spoon and lifting it to create spikes.
4. Put the pavlova in the oven and immediately reduce the temperature to 150˚C. Bake for an hour and a quarter. Don’t open the oven during this time. When the time’s up, turn the oven off and crack open the door, but leave the pavlova in there to cool.
5. An hour before serving, hull and quarter the strawberries, put them in a bowl and drizzle and jiggle with elderflower cordial. Set aside.
6. Zest a lemon using a fine grater, and then grind or whizz with the 3 tablespoons of sugar in a pestle or small food processor. Mix the lemony sugar into the cream and then whip the cream until it has soft peaks.
7. Transfer the meringue on to a large serving plate. Spoon the cream over it. Pile the strawberries on top, drizzling any juices over them. Serve.