Trump’s indictment shows his luck is running out

Donald Trump has chalked up a lot of firsts. First president to be a chum of Russian president Vladimir Putin. First president to threaten withdrawal from Nato. Now add a new one: first former president to be indicted on seven federal counts, which is a polite way of saying that a serial prevaricator has been busted for hoarding top government secrets.

Not surprisingly, Trump is fundraising off the indictment and trumpeting a fresh hoax. ‘I have been indicated, seemingly over the Boxes Hoax,’ Trump declared on his social media site Truth Social. ‘I AM AN INNOCENT MAN!’

Few figures have more practice at trumpeting their innocence than Trump who has been the Houdini of defendants over the decades. But his luck is no longer holding. Cracks are appearing in the facade of invincibility that Trump likes to cultivate. In May a New York jury awarded E. Jean Carroll $5 million. Further indictments loom in Georgia and Washington, DC.

Leading Republicans will denounce the indictments while quietly hoping they succeed in removing Trump from contention for the presidency. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who has been neutered by a Maga faction resentful over his debt ceiling deal with President Joe Biden, was quick to enter the lists on behalf of Trump. ‘I, and every American who believes in the rule of law, stand with President Trump against this grave injustice,’ he declared.

But former New Jersey governor Chris Christie may well continue to break ranks with the Republican bootlickers and further assail Trump for endangering American national security.
Then there is Special Counsel Jack Smith who shrewdly decided to charge Trump in Miami rather than Washington. Trump won’t be able to bray about a tainted Washington, DC jury pool. Moreover, as a former prosecutor of national security cases told me, ‘The reason to bring this case in Miami rather than DC is that the acts of retaining the documents and showing them to others took place in Florida, so an indictment in DC could not have included those. Miami is a tougher jury pool for the government but Jack Smith obviously thought it was worth it.’

For all the bluster that being indicted is a good thing for Trump, he clearly wanted to avoid it, sending his lawyers to meet with the Justice Department to try and persuade it to retreat. They failed. Now Trump faces protracted litigation that holds the threat of a prison sentence.

The conventional wisdom is that the indictment will mark a uniquely contentious time in American history. But the trial might turn out to be a fairly dry affair, a recitation of Trump’s various crimes and follies. Trump will be counting on his ability to rouse his followers but many Americans may simply greet his indictment with a yawn.

After all, Wall Street is officially in a bull market. Unemployment is low. Inflation is coming down. What’s not to like?

For Biden, a strong economy will be key to his reelection. But it’s also possible the current kerfuffle over Trump and his legal woes will bury the shenanigans of Hunter Biden. While Republicans will vainly protest that he’s the real malefactor, Trump’s own narcissistic bellyaching about his predicament will alone obliterate most other news coverage, obscuring not only Hunter but also Joe. Watch for Biden to run another stealth campaign for the presidency, only from the White House this time. The more Trump bleats about his innocence, the more Biden will benefit.

This article first appeared in The Spectator’s World edition.

Prince Harry the Tyrannical

It is often said that Prince Harry is a ‘New Royal’. Emotionally literate, racially aware, eco-friendly (except when he’s flying in a private jet to hang at Elton John’s swanky pad in the south of France) – he’s nothing like the stiff royals of old. He’s the metrosexual prince. He even occasionally partakes of a cheeky Nando’s, as he revealed in his book Spare.

I’m not buying it. Here’s my question: if he’s such a modern prince, a valiant escapee from the prison of aristocratic prejudice, why is he always throwing his monarchical weight around? Why is he so quick to wag a blue-blooded finger at the government, the press, even us, the plebs? Why does he come off as more entitled – entitled to hold forth on the democratically elected government of the day, no less – than even his father, the King?

New Royal my foot. When I see Harry in action – whether he’s fuming against the tabloids or chastising the Tory administration – I get a chilling vision of what it must have been like when we Brits lived under monarchs who had real power. When we had to suffer the arrogant decrees of people whose high standing derived entirely from their father’s sperm.

Harry embodies that pre-modern imperious style far more than any other Windsor. He’s Harry the Tyrannical, the only senior member of The Firm right now who is deploying his princeliness to political ends. Was the Civil War for nought?

For me, the most disturbing thing in the phone-hacking trial so far was Harry’s denunciation of the government. Forget the alleged behaviour of the Daily Mirror, the Sunday Mirror and the People, all of which are accused by Harry of hacking his gadgets to get stories. It was the prince’s own old-world scolding of Rishi and Co that rattled me most.

He used his witness statement at the High Court to say that both the press and the government are at ‘rock bottom’. Britain is being ‘judged globally’ by the parlous state of the current administration, he said. ‘Democracy fails’, he decreed, when the government and the papers ‘get into bed’ in order to maintain ‘the status quo’.

First, if Harry thinks we are going to take lectures on democracy from someone whose public clout is wholly a product of the medieval ideology of the royal bloodline, he must be off his rocker.

Second, what does he think he is playing at? The Guardian coyly says Harry ‘broke with royal protocol’ with his government-bashing. Let’s put it more plainly: it is completely unacceptable for a prince to make such haughty, meddling statements.

Harry is no normal citizen. He is the son of the King. He is fifth in line to the throne. It is an offence against this nation’s great historical struggle to temper the power of monarchs and expand the power of the people for a prince now to exploit his inherited highness to damn our chosen representatives. 

The King must act. It strikes me that Harry has two choices: he either remains an HRH and keeps his drab, Guardianista political views to himself, or he lowers himself to the level of the rest of us, becomes a simple citizen, and says what he wants.

Then there’s his tabloidphobia. This, too, echoes the despotic tendencies of royals of old who loathed the low-rent press and its rousing of the rabble.

We can all agree that it is not good to hack a person’s phone, though it remains to be seen how much merit there is to Harry’s claim that this was done to him on an ‘industrial scale’ by the Mirror Group papers. But there is something deeply unsettling in Harry’s one-man crusade to ‘change the media’, as he has described it.

Isn’t that what the old Star Chamber aspired to do? Change the media – tame it, make it less radical – in the name of the monarch? Isn’t it what George III tried to do when he issued a warrant for the arrest of that hero of press freedom, John Wilkes, after he dared to criticise the king in his roguish paper, the North Briton? Isn’t it what the royals sought to do in their persecution of Daniel Isaac Eaton, the great 18th-century radical journalist, who was prosecuted eight times between 1793 and 1812, primarily for publishing ‘seditious libels’ against monarchy?

The fight for freedom of the press in this country was precisely a fight for the right to mock kings and princes. So every Brit who values this freedom should recoil when a prince now asks ‘Who on earth is policing [the newspapers]?’, as Harry asked this week. Who polices the press? Not you, sonny. 

There is a whiff of snobbery to Harry’s loathing of the low press. Read Spare and you’ll see it. The ‘truly scary part’ of the tabloid phenomenon is that ‘some readers actually believed their rubbish’, he says. Oiks have stories ‘drip-fed to them, day by day, and they come to believe [them] without even being aware’, he writes. We’re so dumb, you see. And therefore, cleverer, better, Windsor-blooded Harry feels he has a ‘moral duty’, as the Guardian puts it, to ‘change the media’.

Where is the pushback against Harry’s monarchical antics? The bourgeois left is itself so anti-tabloid that it is cheering this spoilt prince’s war on the redtops rather than warning about what can happen when royals use their unearned influence to bristle at the press, the people, the government. ‘Prince Harry ROASTS the British press’, yelps Guardian columnist Owen Jones. Imagine if Owen had been around 250 years ago. ‘King George just TOTALLY OWNED John Wilkes’, he might say.

Harry, stop. Your anger at the press does not give you the right to try to muzzle it. Press freedom matters more than your feelings.

Why religious art is as relevant as ever

In the heart of Shoreditch, a handful of arts students have strayed from their typical east London mould. Those who study at the Prince’s Foundation School of Traditional Arts are taught, through research and the practice of traditional arts and crafts, to ‘experience the beauty of the order of nature – a spiritual, sacred beauty, connecting the whole of creation.’

The School’s ethos is centred around the philosophical vision of its president, the King. Charles is known to have some woolly ideas about aesthetics and spirituality and alternative medicine, articulated in his 2010 book Harmony: A New Way of Looking at Our World. He exalts sacred geometry – the spiritual associations of shapes and proportions – as the fruit of a classical tradition of wisdom which reflects the natural world and is therefore unchanging. Paraphrasing Plato, geometry ‘is true for all peoples at all times.’

The creator of traditional art derives inspiration from ‘the highest sources’ and creates artworks ‘which we can all recognise as part of our world heritage,’ the School claims in its ethos – in other words, all cultures share an inherent sense of capital-B Beauty. The skills taught by the School, ranging from Byzantine iconography to biomorphic arabesques, are rooted in principles which it describes as ‘common to all traditional cultures,’ the most important principle being geometry.

While I’m not entirely sold on the School’s claim that geometry is a discipline ‘that can lead to self-development,’ I do think there is value in appealing to the head, the hands and especially the heart when teaching art. Whether the student is the one holding the brush or merely an observer of someone else’s brushstrokes, presence with art is essential – particularly when it can give us a better understanding of cultures and religious practices separate from our own. 

The School is a sort of soft extension of the legacy of William Morris, one of the leading figures of the arts and crafts movement in Britain who trained apprentices in Gothic methods. While he is mostly known for his chintzy wallpapers, he married his aesthetic vision – inspired as much by the symmetry of the natural world as by religious art, such as Islamic geometry and English medieval manuscripts and stained glass – with a political one which vocally criticised the carnage of capitalism and industrialisation. 

A few weeks ago, I spent my Friday evening at the Tate Britain for an event called ‘Love and Heartbreak,’ where the museum stayed open late with a schedule of workshops, talks, performances and DJ sets. The event was loosely inspired by the newly opened exhibition on the Rossetti family and the Pre-Raphaelites. Counted among the Rossettis’ contemporaries was William Morris, whose wife Jane became the muse, and perhaps lover, of Dante Gabriel Rossetti – one of the many Pre-Raphaelites romances, real or painted, which inspired the night’s theme.

I took the elevator to the museum’s upper level where the event was taking place. The DJ’s bass was so loud that when the metal doors took a little too long to open, I was concerned the industrial vibrations were a sign to slam the emergency help button. Visitors congregated in the ‘Art for the Crowd’ room where a bar had been set up. Somewhat disoriented by the dim red lighting, pulsing music and swaying bodies, I couldn’t tell if the gallery smelled like stale beer or weed or a combination of both. 

‘To grab the attention of these crowds, artists choose literary and modern-life subjects that reflect ideas dominating their time,’ the Tate writes of the artworks from the period 1815-1905 which are compiled in this room. ‘They often overlook, caricature or romanticise the experiences of many people.’ It was somewhat ironic that the museum, clearly unsatisfied with the artists who had overlooked their subjects, was willing to replicate that neglect by using these paintings as what was essentially a backdrop for Instagram posts and BeReals.

In his documentary Ways of Seeing, the art critic John Berger lamented the ‘false mystery and false religiosity’ that we endow valuable artworks with, which ‘is in fact a substitute for what paintings lost when the camera made them reproducible.’ Like Morris, he was critical of the way technology was degrading our relationship with the material. When a work of art can be replicated by the touch of a finger, we find ways to make the art valuable separately from its image, for example by verifying that it is a genuine, say, da Vinci or Rembrandt. Row upon row of people will stretch their arms to snap photos of the Mona Lisa or The Night Watch to say we have seen them – this becomes more important than the art itself. In a world where photographs of copies of art are more familiar to us than their originals, where AI blurs the line between man-made and machine-made, where the explosion of the art market has shifted value from the art itself to its provenance and monetary value, genuine mystery becomes elusive. 

Not every graduate of the Prince’s Foundation School will leave convinced of some objective or divinely-decreed notion of Beauty, but the purpose of encouraging a spiritual connection with art is not to extend an ideology. It is meant to enrich students – many of whom make their way to the cutting edge of contemporary art – with the fullest possible sense of art’s mystery. 

When art fails to move us, we risk losing a significant source of genuine cultural understanding. We risk overlooking and caricaturising the crowd, or being cut off from the past. We can’t all submerge ourselves in the discipline of sacred geometry on our quest for self-betterment, but the practice can still teach us something about how to be present – mind, body and soul – with art. 

Forget Florence – try Lucca

Better located, conveniently compact and free from busloads of tourists, the city of Lucca is emerging out of the shadow of Florence. Tourists and holiday home buyers are discovering that the northern Tuscan province is an excellent alternative to Chiantishire. 

Within an hour of both Pisa and Florence airports, it’s the perfect weekend getaway, but it’s also a great base from which to explore the fashionable beach towns of the Tuscan coast or Cinque Terra. 

Lucca is above all famed for its walls. Not just the impressively intact 4.2 km long Renaissance one that encircles the city, but the chunks of Roman-medieval ramparts. Allow around an hour to stroll around the tree-lined mura the width of a road, admiring the elegant villas built by silk traders and its ancient towers and campaniles backed by the Apuan Alps.

Lit up at night, the walls are equally impressive, and you can glimpse the oak trees sprouting out of the ‘tower of the trees’, the red-brick 45-metre Romanesque-Gothic square Guinigi Tower, a status symbol for a wealthy family of the 1300s. 

Amongst the many tempting piazzas large and small for a coffee or aperitivo is Piazza San Michele, a vast square with its Romanesque cathedral where operatic composer Giacomo Puccini once sang in the choir – it’s one of the city’s reported 100 churches. Don’t leave the square without trying the local speciality of bucccellato di Lucca, a raisin bread with anise, at Fabbrica Taddeucci on the square, though Caffeteria Turandot is the place to go for all-day sun and people-watching.

You can admire the house where Puccini was born, a bronze statue of the city’s most famous resident at Corte San Lorenzo and listen to a recital very evening at the Church of San Giovanni. 

Puccini’s Citadel Square feeds into Via Fillungo, the old city’s main axis and shopping street, full of artisanal brands, enoteca and book shops – don’t expect a lot of big-name brands though you’ll find Bottega Veneta and MaxMara.

You’ll also find the finest artisanal ice-cream at Gelateria Veneta – the pistachio di Bronte or Sicilian pistachio – is the bestseller, but seasonal fresh fruits are feted: try the fig. A bigger branch is on Via Vittorio Veneto.

If your visit falls upon the third Sunday of the month, Il Mercato Antiquario Lucchese, Lucca’s antiques market takes over the streets around Piazza San Martino. Whenever you visit don’t miss the circular Piazza dell’Anfiteatro, once a Roman amphitheatre and now a ring of cafes.

For a glass of the sangiovese red wines for which the region is famed for head to the vaulted cantina Enoteca Vanni then follow in the footsteps of Ezra Pound and Princess Margaret with dinner at Buca di Sant’Antonio, one-time brothel, hostelry and oldest restaurant in the city. 

Fiercely traditional classics include homemade pasta with rabbit sauce or the Lucchiese specialty, Garmuglia di primavera, a spring vegetable soup with minced veal (both €15). Zuppa alla Frantoiana, a bean soup is another local speciality in this province of 11 Michelin starred restaurants. 

It’s an easy stroll come home if you stay at Palazzo Dipinto, a chic four-star boutique hotel with modern comforts located on a piazza of the same name.

For day two you could visit one of the city’s elegant villas and gardens. Villa Bottini, a beautiful Renaissance property with a belvedere loggia and frescoed interior, built by the city’s most prominent family, the Buonvisis, in the sixteenth century. Once owned by Elisa Bonaparte, Napoleon’s sister, hosts concerts, fashion shows and open-air cinema in its elegant grounds. 

The Lucca Summer Festival is the highlight of a summer of many events, attracting over 50,000 people every evening: next month Simply Red, Bob Dylan, Blur and Robbie Williams will be in Lucca. In the winter, the big event is the Comics and Games convention – beware every AirBnB will be booked up in early November. 

You might also take a trip to the coast half an hour away – either Forte de Marmi, the glitzy go-to beach resort for the jetset with designer shopping and VIP ‘bagno’ clubs. You don’t have to be a Serie A footballer or a Russian oligarch to go to Gilda, but private cabins and gazebos require a reservation during summer weekends. Or for something a bit more low-key, next-door Pietrasanta, an arty medieval town with art galleries.

Prefer a vineyard? There’s a great chef at Fattoria Sardi, famed for its Rosé wines, whilst Tenuta di Valgiano is a leading vineyard of the region with 40 acres of biodynamic vines overlooking Lucca. For a private tour of the area’s wineries, try Andrea at Tuscan Drivers, a certified sommelier – he also picks out the award-winning Podere Concori. Combine with or a day trip to Pisa (for the leaning tower or its cathedral) or a dip into the wilder, deep-forested Garfagnana and see the bunkers and trenches of the second world war’s Gothic Line. There’s much more to Lucca than first meets the eye.

Can supermarkets take on the takeaways?

Walking into the Sedlescombe Sainsbury’s superstore recently I passed a girl in tracksuits carrying a stack of steaming pizza boxes. ‘I didn’t know Sainsbury’s does takeaway pizza,’ I said to my husband. ‘Anniversary dinner?’ (two days away). Why not? 

Sainsbury’s has been toying with made-to-order takeaway food for a few years, while shutting down their butchers, fishmongers and delis. It is opting for fast food in place of skilled, knowledgeable customer service. And it really shows. 

Testing its products wasn’t quite as easy as I’d anticipated. I can’t attest to all Sainsbury’s but the level of disorganisation and incompetence at the Sedlescombe branch on the A21 astounds me. I tried on three different occasions to purchase a hot pizza from their takeaway counter, which is presumably built for convenience and fast service. The first time I went, the pizza counter was closed (although it was 11 a.m., fair enough). I decided to wait an hour until it opened, taking my children off to read Peppa Pig books in the back aisle. I did some shopping while the kids lay on the floor in their winter jackets reading books to each other. Then my son started repeatedly asking for juice, so off we went to the café in search of his heart’s desire. 

The café had severe food supply and staff shortage issues. The soda machine looked like it was wrapped in police tape and bore a sign that said, ‘SORRY WE HAVE RUN OUT’, and the drinks fridge was almost entirely empty. Nothing for my increasingly restless children. Can we just buy a smoothie from the juice aisle and drink it in the café? No. Only drinks purchased in the café can be consumed in the café, even though there are no kids’ drinks for sale in the café. I bought two hot chocolates at the café instead. My son didn’t drink it because he wanted juice.

After killing an hour waiting, I trundled two hyper toddlers into the trolley and returned to the pizza counter. The woman behind the counter seemed to be avoiding me. ‘Any chance for a fresh pizza?’ I asked her. ‘No, sorry. We don’t have the ingredients. My colleague is supposed to bring them but he won’t be here until 1. Can you wait an hour?’ We left to make cheese toasties at home. 

I had to plan my whole week around a third visit to the Sainsbury’s pizza counter, and it’s a thirty-minute drive from my house. I returned this week with my son and ordered a large cheese because that’s all they had, and was told it would take ten minutes to cook. I did some shopping and returned after 12 minutes. The man behind the counter looked sheepish –‘Sorry the oven wasn’t turned on,’ he said, as if it was the oven’s fault. ‘It’s gonna be another ten minutes.’ I returned ten minutes later. Still not ready. I decided to wait and let my polite but brooding presence be felt. Finally after close to thirty minutes, my undercooked cheese pizza emerged. The man put it in a large box and handed it to me. ‘Can you cut it for me please?’ I ask. ‘Oh sorry!’ Then he remembers to ring it up and out the price tag on it. But I can’t pay for it there, I have to pay for it in the shop queue. ‘Can I eat this in the café?’ I asked, not optimistic about the answer. He looked as though no one had ever asked him this before. ‘You’d have to purchase something in the café first.’ I didn’t relish a repeat of the last café visit, so instead I shuffled off to the Peppa Pig book aisle. My son sat on the floor and read while I secretly sampled some pizza, trying to ensure no one caught me doing it.

It was better than bake-at-home pizzas, and astoundingly cheap at £5 for a large, but it was really not worth the effort. I’m shopping at Tesco from now on. 

Sunak and Biden’s White House love-in

Rishi Sunak and Joe Biden’s White House press conference started late, presumably to make a point that the two had just found so much to talk about in their bilateral. Like a date that had gone really well.

When the pair eventually appeared before journalists, they spent most of their opening statements banging on about how much they had in common and how they agreed on everything. Biden described the ‘depth and breadth of our relationship’, ‘our common values’ and said ‘there’s no issue of importance – none – that our nations are not leading together on’. Sunak claimed that ‘not for decades has the relationship between our two nations been so important’, and that the only thing that had changed was ‘the challenges that we face’. 

Despite all this love, actually there was no free trade agreement. Instead the pair announced an ‘Atlantic Declaration’, with the two countries promising to work more closely on economic, technological, commercial and trade relations. Asked why there was not an agreement, Sunak claimed this was the best answer to the question of what the countries could do to work together to achieve the best for their citizens and that ‘the economic relationship between our two countries has never been stronger… the relationship is strong, it’s booming’. He told the press conference that ‘the challenges that we face are much more economic in nature… the only way we are going to meet those challenges is to work together’ and that the agreement would support tens of thousands of small businesses in the UK by removing red tape’. 

On artificial intelligence, Biden said ‘we are looking to Great Britain to lead that effort this Fall’, which will have pleased Sunak no end, given the PM was having to argue his case to his own journalists that this country was big enough to lead the way on AI governance. But when it came to the next Nato Secretary-General, Biden only said ‘maybe’ to whether it was time for a British figure and that ‘they have a very qualified candidate’ (Ben Wallace, whose name he clearly couldn’t recall). 

So Sunak got his important conference. He got an agreement that will allow the US and UK ‘even more closely together on all the big economic issues of our times’ and he got a lovey-dovey chatter with Joe Biden about how well the pair got on. A successful trip which the PM will see as promising even more down the line.

Five of the worst Ian Blackford moments

It’s the end of an era. Ian Blackford has this week announced he will be standing down as an MP at the next election. Not quite making it to a decade in the Commons, the MP for Ross, Skye and Lochaber released a 659-word article about his resignation that, er, didn’t quite manage to explain the reasons for his resignation. No matter. Mr S can list a number of reasons why Blackford might have been particularly keen to leave his role…

The Patrick Grady fiasco

Cast your mind back to last year when Blackford ordered his MPs to lend their support to a sex pest in their own party. Back when he was Westminster leader of the SNP group, Blackford told SNP MPs to give Patrick Grady their ‘absolute full support’ – only 15 minutes after their then Chief Whip had been suspended from parliament for inappropriately touching a colleague 17 years his junior at a social event.

Charges of duplicity were levelled at Blackford when it emerged that he had emailed Grady’s victim two days later with assurances he would take a ‘zero tolerance approach to inappropriate behaviour’. Nothing like a hypocrite, eh?

The smearing of Charles Kennedy

Let’s rewind the clock back to May 2015 when Blackford was first elected to parliament, unseating former Lib Dem leader Charles Kennedy in the process. Less than a month later Kennedy was dead after a long battle with alcoholism. Blackford was accused of instigating a particularly loathsome campaign against Kennedy which boasted the slogan of ‘Where’s Charlie?’

This led to the convenor of the SNP’s Skye branch, one certain Brian Smith, musing online whether Kennedy had ‘a “problem” that stops you going to Westminster?’ In fact, Kennedy was grieving his parents, trying to support his family and also fighting a terrible disease. But the Cybernats had no sympathy, prompting endless pile ons. One of Kennedy’s staffers ended up having to spend virtually all their time deleting social media abuse. Nationalists? Graceless? Never…

Blackford’s democracy hypocrisy

Blackford spent much of his time in parliament unsuccessfully trying to overturn the results of successive referenda on Scexit and Brexit. After Nicola Sturgeon announced her plans to hold a second vote on Scottish independence in late 2022, Blackford took to the Commons floor to round on the Tories for their lack of enthusiasm about the prospect. The SNP MP accused them of fearing democracy during a particularly heated PMQs session. 

Not missing a trick, former Brexit party MEP Martin Daubney hit back on Twitter:

‘“Why is the UK government scared of democracy?” Says Ian Blackford MP who tried – and failed, for four years – to cancel Brexit, the biggest democratic vote in British parliamentary history.’

Ouch.

Blackford’s ousting 

After growing unhappy with Blackford’s leadership, SNP backbenchers started plotting his demise. In March 2022, a first unsuccessful coup was staged by Alyn Smith and Stewart McDonald – though all three politicians deny this ever happened. Then in November a second attempt came, this time from a younger member of the group, MP for Aberdeen South, Stephen Flynn. Though the challenge was again defeated, it was clear all was not well at the heart of the Westminster group. Mr S understands MPs were privately briefing they would be happy with ‘anyone but Blackford’. 

Before a third attempt was mounted, Blackford realised the game was up. Resigning in December, just a week before the group’s AGM, the SNP veteran stated the time was right for ‘fresh leadership’. Talk about finally accepting a result…

The SNP civil war

It’s hardly surprising that the new Westminster leader and his predecessor didn’t see eye to eye after Stephen Flynn ousted Blackford from his role. But the infighting didn’t stay behind closed doors for long. The SNP’s auditor fiasco earlier this year triggered a full-blown fallout that spread across the airwaves. Flynn told the BBC that his party was struggling to  find new accountants, claiming that he had not been made aware of his party’s lack of accountants until February 2023, two whole months after he took over.

Blackford came out swinging. He retorted to the BBC that his deputy Kirsten Oswald had passed a ‘full and detailed briefing’ of events to his successor. He even went so far as to say that Flynn had assured him new auditors were in place. Questioned about it at a think tank event, Flynn couldn’t quite give a straight answer on the whole affair. Dirty laundry aired, Flynn and Blackford decided the best way to diffuse the situation would be a staged photo shoot on the banks of the Thames. ‘Cringe’ doesn’t quite cut it.

Enjoy a quiet retirement Ian. In the immortal words of Clement Attlee ‘a period of silence on your part would be welcome’…

Ten movies to watch as the Mirror Group phone hacking trial continues

With its inbuilt suspense, twists and turns – not to mention its many opportunities for scenery-chewing – the courtroom drama has long been a staple of cinema.

Although plots tend to concentrate on capital cases, there are a fair few where reputational damage, corporate malfeasance, freedom of speech, education, religion, sexuality, race, military justice, politics and discrimination drive the proceedings.

Here are some of my favourites:

Inherit the Wind (1960)

I am more interested in the ‘Rock of Ages’ than I am in the age of rocks.

Frederic March as Creationist Matthew Harrison Brady

Drawing on the real-life 1925 Scopes ‘Monkey’ Trial in the US, Stanley Kramer’s Inherit the Wind pits Creationism against Reason when a teacher is arrested for teaching evolution.

Sparks fly as the frenemies (Fredric March as Matthew Harrison Brady and Spencer Tracy as defence lawyer Henry Drummond) clash in front of a jury composed of Southern fundamentalist Christians and a judge (M*A*S*H’s Harry Morgan) keen to avoid political embarrassment.

Some of the best – and most humorous – lines go to Gene Kelly, who plays cynical newspaperman E. K. Hornbeck, including:

Darwin was wrong! Man’s still an ape. His creed still a totem pole. When he first achieved the upright position, he took a look at the stars… thought they were something to eat. When he couldn’t reach them, he thought they were groceries belonging to a bigger creature… that’s how Jehovah was born.

Inherit the Wind has proved catnip for actors of a certain age to show their chops, hence TV remakes with Melvyn Douglas/Ed Begley (1965), Jason Robards/Kirk Douglas (1988) and Jack Lemmon/George C. Scott (1999).

The Trial of the Chicago 7 (2020)

A Few Good Men writer Aaron Sorkin returns to the courtroom for his retelling of the trial of the Chicago 7 – the anti-Vietnam War protestors charged with conspiring to incite a riot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention.   

The Verdict (1982)

Paul Newman arguably gives his greatest performance as Boston lawyer Frank Galvin, a washed-up, alcoholic, ambulance-chasing lawyer, in The Verdict, directed by Sidney Lumet, with a screenplay by David Mamet.

Galvin passes up a $200,000 out-of-court settlement in a case of medical malpractice at a prestigious Catholic hospital in favour of redeeming himself and exposing the institution’s failings. However, he fails to tell the family of the victim – a woman left comatose after being mistakenly given general anaesthesia during childbirth – that he is refusing the offer. 

With the odds stacked against him and a formidable opponent in James Mason’s defence lawyer Ed Concannon – nicknamed ‘The Prince of Darkness’ – can Galvin demonstrate his mettle and win the case?

A Man for All Seasons (1966)

Fred Zinnemann’s multi-Oscar-winning adaptation of Robert Bolt’s hit play gives us Paul Scofield as Sir Thomas More, who refuses to renounce Catholicism when Henry VIII assumes supreme religious authority in England to divorce Catherine of Aragon.

I’m afraid my sympathy with More’s pious smugness soon runs out, wonderful though Scofield is. (More was, in fact, something of a self-righteous bigot, who wasn’t above persecuting the ‘heretical’ Protestant faith with extreme measures whenever he had the chance.) 

But count me in with avuncular realist the Duke of Norfolk (Nigel Davenport) and even turncoat Richard Rich (John Hurt) who, fed up with More’s irritating pieties, sold him out for the position of Attorney General for Wales.

A Man for All Seasons was unnecessarily remade for TV in 1998 with Chuck Heston as More.

The People vs Larry Flynt (1996)

Hustler owner Larry Flynt (1942-2021) appeared to spend much of his adult life as either a defendant or litigant in court, usually concerning freedom of speech issues or obscenity laws. In 1978, Flynt was shot, paralysed below the waist and left wheelchair bound for the rest of his life.

Miloš Forman’s biopic airbrushes out some of the more unsavoury aspects of Flynt’s life, aided by the presence of the amiable Woody Harrelson in the starring role. Courtney Love plays Flynt’s troubled fourth wife Althea Leasure, while Ed Norton is the pornographer’s steadfast lawyer Alan Isaacman.

Marshall (2017)

The late Chadwick Boseman (Black Panther) plays future US Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall in a dramatised version of one of his first cases as a defence lawyer, in which black chauffeur Joseph Spell is accused of raping his white employer, Eleanor Strubing. Marshall must face entrenched prejudice, legal obstruction, and a not-altogether-truthful client in his search for the truth. A strong cast is rounded out by Josh Gad, Kate Hudson, Dan Stevens, James Cromwell and Sterling K. Brown.

Judgment at Nuremberg (1961)

And Ernst Janning, worse than any of them because he knew what they were, and he went along with them. Ernst Janning: Who made his life excrement, because he walked with them.

Burt Lancaster as Judge Ernst Janning

Stanley Kramer may be regarded by some critics as the po-faced purveyor of message movies, but Judgment at Nurembergshows how, with a decent cast and script, the viewer can forget his sometimes-sledgehammer moralising. 

This 1961 movie follows the fictional trial of eminent German jurists who fell in willingly with Nazi laws on race, eugenics, forcible euthanasia and other ethical abominations.

Not exactly a barrel of laughs then, but a cast that includes Spencer Tracy, Burt Lancaster, Richard Widmark, Maximilian Schell, Marlene Dietrich, Montgomery Clift and Judy Garland give it their all.

Fracture (2007)

Director Gregory Hoblit, who scored a hit with 1996’s legal thriller Primal Fear, provides an entertaining diversion that centres around the battle of wits between accused wife-killer Ted Crawford (Anthony Hopkins) and cocky state prosecutor Willy Beachum (Ryan Gosling).

There’s more than an echo of Hannibal Lector in Hopkins’s performance, although his accent is at times as big a mystery as the plot. It all adds to the fun, at least for this viewer.

Anatomy of a Murder (1959)

Written by Michigan Supreme Court Justice John D. Voelker, Otto Preminger’s movie boasts the best screen role for everyman Jimmy Stewart as deceptively folksy small-town attorney Paul Biegler. 

Hot-tempered Lt. Frederick Manion (Ben Gazzara) is accused of murdering Barney Quill, claiming that the barkeeper raped his wife Laura (Lee Remick). Biegler decides to use the defence of ‘irresistible impulse’ – a kind of temporary insanity – for Mannion, who plays along with the notion to secure his acquittal, outwitting legal eagle city prosecutor Claude Dancer (George C. Scott).

The picture plays like a black comedy, but there are some serious points made along the way. It’s an excellent picture, boosted by a great Duke Ellington score. Ellington appears as jazzman Pie-Eye in a club scene, Stewart (who could play) joining him to tinkle the ivories for a number.

Paths of Glory (1957)

Stanley Kubrick’s anti-war polemic is a bleak picture of so-called military justice in the French army during the first world war. Kirk Douglas is Colonel Dax, the commanding officer of a regiment of French soldiers who refuse to continue a suicidal attack against the German enemy, after which he tries to defend them when they face court-martial for cowardice and an inevitable sentence of death by firing squad.

France comes under attack again

What kind of man walks into a park on a summer’s day and randomly stabs and slashes at toddlers? That is the question France is asking itself today after the latest in a long line of bloody atrocities.

The scene of this morning’s attack was in Annecy in south-eastern France, a popular holiday resort. An eye-witness said that a man ‘started shouting and went straight to the pushchairs and stabbed the children repeatedly.’

At least three children were stabbed, along with a young woman believed to be a mother. The numbers of victims would have been higher had the police not arrived in just four minutes. As they entered the park, recalled another witness, the assailant ‘ran straight up to an old man who was with his wife and stabbed him’. 

The man was shot and arrested by police and is now being questioned. According to reports he is a 31-year-old Syrian who last November applied for asylum in France but has since been granted refugee status in Sweden. He is reportedly married to a Swede, is father to a three-year-old and is a Christian. 

One or two media outlets shied away from revealing the man’s nationality in the reports of the attack, but once the outrage has subsided this will be the second question that France must confront. 

It is one that Emmanuel Macron has continually ducked since he became president in 2017. In the years since, although France has avoided any mass casualty attacks like those inflicted on the country in 2015 and 2016 by Islamic extremists, there have been a spate of grisly crimes in the Republic; in many cases, the perpetrator was a foreigner – and often they had exploited France’s weak border control.  

Among the most notorious was the murder of three Christians at a Nice church in 2020 by a Tunisian migrant, the machete attack on two journalists by a Pakistani the same year, the fatal stabbing of three young men by a Sudanese refugee in Angers last year, and the rape and murder in November of a 12-year-old Parisian girl, allegedly by an Algerian woman who had outstayed her visa.

The centre-right Republicans and Marine Le Pen’s National Rally were both accused by the government and the left of exploiting Lola’s death for political gain. They angrily refuted the charge, stating that they drew so much attention to the appalling crime because they want to ensure that no other French youngsters lose their lives because of political and judicial incompetence.  

This morning Eric Ciotti, the leader of the Republicans, expressed his anger that the suspect ‘has the same profile that we often find in these types of attack’. Jordan Bardella, president of the National Rally tweeted that: ‘Barbarity struck this morning in Annecy, in a knife attack on young children, perpetrated by what is believed to be a Syrian migrant asylum seeker.’

Immigration and asylum have dominated much of the political and media debate in recent weeks; as in Britain, there is a belief among the majority of the population in France that the government has lost control of its borders and, worse, that they aren’t really bothered by the fact.  

After the death of Lola, the government promised that a tough new immigration bill would be tabled in March; but it wasn’t, amid reports that the left wing of Macron’s party finds the idea of tighter border controls unpalatable. The bill still hasn’t seen the light of day. Perhaps it will now. 

Is AI all it’s cracked up to be?

So is Artificial intelligence (AI) to be a new engine of growth for the UK economy? That is Rishi Sunak’s hope. Ideally, he might have been using his trip to Washington to announce a trade deal between the UK and the US. Of course, that’s not going to happen: Joe Biden has made it clear that he doesn’t regard trade deals – with anyone – as a priority, not least because the crowning achievement of his administration so far, the Inflation Reduction Act, is a huge protectionist device dressed up as a fiscal and environmental measure. The Prime Minister then seems to have decided that securing something on AI is the next best thing. Sunak will not leave the US empty-handed: it has been announced this morning that Britain will host a summit on AI safety in the autumn – the first step, so Sunak hopes, to Britain becoming the home of a new organisation dedicating to regulating AI globally.

But does AI really promise the riches that many claim it will be? In recent months, the government has been touting a figure that AI is already worth £3.7 billion to the UK economy. Hopes for AI were bolstered a couple of weeks ago when shares in Nvidia – which makes chips for AI systems – jumped in response to a boost in orders. The company’s shares are up nearly threefold since their nadir last September.

Given that the world seems to pass from one bubble to another nowadays, AI seems to be the obvious next big thing. It is certainly consuming vast column inches, and it should come as no surprise if paper fortunes are made – and lost – over coming years. It is very easy for enthusiasm to run ahead of the reality. That doesn’t necessarily mean, however, that the underlying presumption behind the bubble was wrong. The Dotcom bubble did indeed herald a new age of the internet – just not quite at the speed which investors hope, and not involving all the players which they were backing. 

But will AI really transform our lives and the economy in the way that the internet did? A warning about over-enthusiasm was sounded by the publication last December of a survey by McKinsey, involving 1,800 corporations around the world, each of which were asked to what extent they had invested in AI, and what were the results. The survey was remarkably downbeat. There was a big surge in businesses adopting AI in at least one of their business units between 2017, when 20 per cent of businesses said they had done so, to 2019, when 58 per cent of businesses had done so. But since then, enthusiasm seems to have waned; in 2022, it had fallen back to 50 per cent.

Why the limited enthusiasm? Because AI simply isn’t saving many businesses money. Across all activities, only 32 per cent of businesses said costs had decreased as a result of the adoption of AI and 63 per cent said their costs had increased. The most promising application was in supply chain management, but even then scarcely half of businesses said AI was saving them money. McKinsey concluded:

‘After a period of initial exuberance, we appear to have reached a plateau…We might be seeing the reality sinking in at some organisations of the level of organisational change it takes to successfully embed this technology’.     

On the positive side, McKinsey did also point out that it had identified a period of waning enthusiasm during the adoption of other technologies – and it didn’t prevent those technologies going on to enjoy widespread adoption. But while many people are worrying whether AI will steal our jobs or even finish off mankind, it is perfectly logical to wonder whether AI is all it is cracked up to be, or if Rishi Sunak’s enthusiasm for investing AI is a case of hype ruling over reality.   

Will Britons be injecting their way out of obesity?

Is it right that the government is going to let more people use weight-loss jabs on the NHS? Anti-obesity jabs, such as Ozempic, are one of the hottest talking points right now. How fat we are has long been one of those problems that people think can be solved by ‘one quick trick’.

But these solutions are often a complete and improbable overhaul of our entire society. People can’t eat the highly palatable, highly calorific, highly processed foods that are so easy and cheap to access. This week’s announcement is a trendy one: around £40 million to expand access to the ‘game-changer’ injections such as Semaglutide (or Ozempic). There’s also some new weight management services that are going to help patients trim in the long-term. 

Health Secretary Steve Barclay has been emphasising that the main reason for the pilot is to improve the health of people struggling to control their weight. But he also said it could have a knock-on effect on the government’s efforts to get people back into the workplace and off sickness benefits. What is most interesting about this new scheme is that it represents a move towards preventive medicine: something the NHS was founded to deliver but which has always struggled to realise.

Preventive medicine is in vogue at the moment: Labour has made a lot of noise recently about shifting resources from acute, hospital settings and into the community so that illnesses are treated or even prevented earlier. Obesity wasn’t an issue when the NHS was founded, but it has become a serious concern now, both in terms of the cost to the health service and because of people taking time off work with musculoskeletal problems and mental health issues.

The history of the NHS’s approach to preventive healthcare has not been particularly stellar: it took ages for ministers and officials to take seriously the warnings and then definitive evidence about smoking causing cancer, and still longer to set up a proper stop smoking programme. The health service is also not structured in a way that prioritises patients being seen at an early stage in what health management boffins might call their ‘journey’, hence the calls from Wes Streeting and others to change the balance.

The mentality of the Treasury never helps with this: bean-counters have always been suspicious of campaigners or other ministers coming to them with wizard plans to save the exchequer billions of pounds – but just in a decade’s time and after significant upfront investment. Often they are right to be suspicious because it is easy to overpromise, but as often that reluctance stems from the very short-term nature of the political cycle, which does not reward these kinds of long-term policies anyway. 

This is one of the reasons, by the way, that the government has cut funding for ‘active travel’ schemes. These are infrastructure projects to encourage people to travel under their own steam rather than in a car: so cycle lanes, better pedestrian and wheelchair access, and so on. This is something that isn’t the responsibility of the NHS but which does have a knock-on impact on the obesity crisis because these schemes should help people move more.

The National Audit Office this week published a highly critical report of the money the Department for Transport has spent on active travel, saying this funding was being used by local councils for ‘some poor value investments’. That money, around £2.3 billion between 2016 and 2021, included interventions which ‘were largely cosmetic and did not provide a safe space for cycling’. This kind of thing is the sort of ‘overhaul of society’ policy that is actually within the power of ministers to influence, unlike a radical change to diets, but it also involves long-term planning and spending that isn’t going to deliver dramatic results like an injection will.

Johnson’s honours list spells more trouble for Sunak

Another day, another episode in the ongoing Johnson-Sunak psychodrama. Following clashes over the Stormont brake and the Covid inquiry, Rishi Sunak is now prepared to wave through his predecessor’s honours list – nine months after his resignation. The ongoing delay in the publication of the list has been a source of tension between the pair. But the Times reports today that Sunak has accepted the precedent that outgoing prime ministers should be entitled to make appointments. The list is expected to be published and approved before the summer parliamentary recess.

The names on Johnson’s list have been subject to endless gossip in Westminster, with the number of appointees slashed from almost 100 to around 50: in line with the numbers submitted by Theresa May and David Cameron. Michael Gove – who is tipped for a knighthood – is one of those expected to miss out in the cull. Four MPs, though, are expected to be in line for peerages: Nigel Adams, Alister Jack, Nadine Dorries and Alok Sharma. There has been some controversy over whether sitting MPs could ‘defer’ their peerages until after the next election rather than taking them up immediately. 

Adams and Jack are expected to wait until the end of this parliament to collect them but Dorries and Sharma will stand down to take their seats in the upper house in the coming weeks. This will trigger by-elections in their respective constituencies of Mid-Bedfordshire and Reading West. The former is a safe Tory seat with a 24,664 majority while the latter is a marginal with a majority of 4,117. Labour’s 16-point poll lead and the experience of the Tiverton and North Shropshire by-elections suggest that the Tories could lose both seats. This, coupled with worse-than-expected losses for the Conservatives in last month’s local elections, will be a worry for the party. 

Sunak will not welcome this prospect. He nevertheless is keen to draw a line under the saga and will hope this ends the acrimony between the former prime minister and him. After Johnson’s nominees are published, it will be Liz Truss’s turn. That is expected to be a much shorter list of honours – in recognition of her brief tenure in Downing Street. Some might wonder whether Sunak ought not to block his predecessors’ lists. But he will be all too aware that if he overturns this precedent then there will be nothing to stop Keir Starmer doing the same thing if and when he succeeds Sunak in No. 10.

The lessons of equal marriage we need to relearn

The way in which some activists campaign for their cause makes it difficult to believe they really want the rest of us to change what we do or how we think. Trans-right campaigners who seek to silence the likes of the academic Kathleen Stock and stop debate don’t help in enhancing mutual respect and collective understanding. Likewise, attempts to remove Baroness Falkner from her job as head of the Equality and Human Rights Commission don’t help in achieving an equality legal framework that is fair and respectful of all – which is what most reasonable people want. Indeed, it’s hard to understand why many commercial companies and public services have taken sides of hotly contested political campaigns which – as things stand – are unlikely to make significant change that everyone can support.

If we really want to improve our public discourse that might lead to better things, we don’t have to go far back in time to see there is a different way. 

It’s ten years this week since the House of Lords started its scrutiny of Same Sex Marriage and – contrary to expectations – voted by a huge majority in favour of the Bill proceeding. Making it possible for gay couples to marry was historic; it secured the recognition and equality many had fought years to achieve. How it happened with widespread public acceptance offers important lessons we clearly need to relearn. 

Support for equal marriage started with the introduction of civil partnerships in 2005. They were a big breakthrough, but not just because they afforded the same legal status as marriage. Critically, they helped make the case for opening-up marriage. Civil partnerships showed that gay couples seek the same kind of stability and security as straight couples from a formal union that involves a public declaration of commitment. Why would we want to perpetuate a division between gay and straight couples and undermine our most important social institution, when the evidence showed how marriage could unite us for the greater good of society?  

Not everyone agreed that equal marriage would be a good thing. Many were, and some remain, legitimately concerned about a threat to religious doctrines and the freedom of faith (and importantly, it’s perfectly legal for them to say so). Some gay men and women feared they would pay the price for the government unnecessarily ‘rocking the boat’. Some – gay and straight – were suspicious of David Cameron’s motives for proposing the change and thought that equal marriage was a ruse to ‘detoxify’ the Conservative brand. Many of the most strident gay rights campaigners didn’t help their cause, asking why bother trying to persuade ‘bigots’, and not minding much if marriage was consigned to the wrong side of history in the process. 

The legal parity of civil partnerships led some to ask: what’s the point in changing marriage law? But the government’s answer was clear: it would make a big difference to people’s lives and future-proof the institution of marriage. In short, all of us would gain.

Before the legislation arrived in the House of Lords, uncertainty was very evident amongst peers. In response, what the ministerial team I led didn’t do, as well as what we did, played a large part in the legislation’s success. We reassured rather than demonised those who were against or unsure whether to support what, at the time, was radical. We worked hard to demonstrate that all the legitimate concerns of those opposed to the Bill on religious grounds had been taken seriously and addressed in the legislation. And we amended the Bill further to provide the clarification and comfort some sought, when it cost us nothing to do so. 

Once the Bill passed into law and public acceptance grew swiftly, the lesson from what had been achieved was clear. Successful social change is only possible if it’s beneficial to everyone. The immediate gains might be enjoyed or celebrated only by some when it involves righting a wrong – and that too will be accepted and understood – if what has changed for some was not at others’ unfair expense. The ultimate goal has to be a stronger and more cohesive society.  That’s why – if the way we make change happen is done well and everyone feels respected in the pursuit of progress – the result should bring us closer together, not push us further apart. 

Instead of using all that we learned to champion mutual respect, we’ve allowed legitimate limits that exist in law to protect sex-based differences to be defined as barriers to equal progress.

Equality in law that accommodates difference is not easy to achieve. Where we got to ten years ago is remarkable and it may well be as far as we ever get. But even if there is scope in the future for us to go further, there will be no shortcut; and it won’t be possible without adopting the kind of approach taken to passing equal marriage law. Which is why – whatever the future may hold – it’s still vital that we don’t give up on all that we learned through succeeding back then. 

Equal marriage didn’t happen because of our differences or what divides us, it was one of the best things we’ve ever done to celebrate and uphold all that we share.  

Will the royal silence over Prince Harry’s trial hold?

It’s fair to say that, after an unimpressive first day on the witness stand in his case against the Mirror Group Newspapers (MGN), Prince Harry rallied somewhat yesterday. This may well have been because he now had the measure of his interrogator, Andrew Green KC, and was able to respond with greater detail and fluency. It may also have helped that he was subsequently cross-examined by his own barrister, David Sherborne.

Nonetheless, the Duke’s state of mind can most clearly be discerned by one of his final statements in the witness box. Sherborne asked him how the experience of being so publicly interrogated had been. With commendable understatement, Harry replied ‘It’s a lot.’

‘A lot’ must be rather how the rest of the royal family are feeling. Harry is the first member of ‘the Firm’ to be cross-examined in the High Court for 132 years. With this trial, he has resumed his accustomed position on the front page of the nation’s newspapers, even – or perhaps especially – the ones that he has initiated legal action against.

Yet if ardent royalists, committed republicans or those in between were expecting any kind of public statement or reaction from the monarchy about Harry’s antics, they would be disappointed. The royal family’s social media feed has a wide variety of stories about its members’ activities. There is the King attending a Handel concert series at Wigmore Hall, the Prince of Wales joining sportsmen at Maidenhead Rugby Club, and the Duke of Edinburgh visiting a primary school in Brixton. But when it comes to the rather less PR-friendly antics of the man who remains fifth in line to the throne, despite everything, there is nothing but omertà.

Since Harry and Meghan staged their quasi-abdication at the beginning of 2020, the royal family has not known what the best way to deal with the troublesome prince is. Initially there were statements of love and support. But these gave way, after the notorious Oprah Winfrey interview with the Duke and Duchess, to the rather steelier and more pointed comment that ‘recollections may vary’ – it still remains the most memorable and pithy statement about any of Harry’s activities.

This year has seen the publication of Spare, the King’s coronation – with Harry, to his credit, behaving impeccably – and now this high-profile, precedent-setting legal case. Throughout, the attitude of the royal family seems to be to make no comment, and hope that the situation resolves itself without giving it additional publicity.

This may or may not prove to be a wise course of action. King Charles’s new operation is, so far, a remarkably leak-free one. Helpful though it might be to have courtiers feeding supportive stories to the newspapers about what he thinks about his estranged son’s behaviour, these have been conspicuously absent, which has allowed speculation to fill the place of evidence. (One can only imagine a few veteran journalists quietly wishing that they could hack phones at points like this, and thereby obtain the real, unvarnished truth of what the royal family are privately saying about Harry.)

Yet in the absence of any public statements, it seems clear that the King and his family are hoping that, eventually, Harry will return to Montecito, resume his life as an expatriate celebrity, and cease to be an object of fascination in his home country.

On paper, this seems both wise and conciliatory, and opens the door to an eventual rapprochement, whether public or private. But with the endless events that have taken place over the past few years, only the most optimistic (or deluded) would bet against there being a few more plot twists left to come. It has been, indeed, a lot.

West Ham’s rivals should applaud their Europa Conference League victory

Only the most churlish football fan – and there is a lot of them around these days – would deny West Ham supporters their moment in the sun after last night’s impressive triumph in the bizarrely named Europa Conference League, their first trophy for 43 years.

As a Spurs fan growing up in in the West Ham stronghold of Ilford, and having attended the same secondary school as Trevor Brooking, former Hammers manager John Lyall and the infant school that later produced Paul Ince, it was hard to avoid the Claret and Blue hordes.

For a while in the 60s, when both clubs were at their peak, Bobby Moore lived nearby, in the same road as Terry Venables as it happens. As kids, we would bump into him in Gants Hill.

This was a period when West Ham won the FA Cup, the European Cup Winners Cup and, yawn, the World Cup. It even persuaded my younger brother to support them despite coming from a diehard Spurs family.

At school, a majority of the boys were West Ham supporters. It was hard to escape and, if truth be told, a lot of us developed a soft spot for the Upton Park mob who played attractive, free flowing football and developed teams packed with homegrown talent. It was a ‘proper’ local team for the East End where most of our families had moved from.

They also had a remarkable record of holding on to managers with just five of them over a period of around 80 years of the last century.

Of course in the heady, violent days of the 70s and 80s there was the occasional friction between the two sets of fans at games. Straying into the Chicken Run and North Bank at the Boleyn Ground, the West Ham ground before they moved to the soulless Olympic stadium, was a bit like going to Compton wearing the wrong gang colours.

But away from that, and when supporters largely came from areas close to the clubs they followed, every Spurs fan had friends – even siblings or parents – who supported West Ham (and even Arsenal) and vice versa.

It was uplifting to see West Ham beat Arsenal in the FA Cup final of 1980, with a goal by ex-Ilford County boy Trevor Brooking, while Spurs fans could then celebrate winning the trophy in the following two years. Happy days.

Recent years have seen a largely manufactured rivalry between the two clubs that has led to the taunt from North London that matches between us are ‘your cup final’, on the basis that while Spurs were competing for higher things, these games were the most important in any season for West Ham.

Not any longer. Last night was West Ham’s cup final and they won it, an achievement Spurs have not been able to boast about for nigh on two decades. Hopefully, it will stop all this nonsense about ‘your cup final’ when our two sides meet.

The reaction from Spurs fans on social media has been less about congratulating the cockney upstarts and more about using the occasion to bemoan our own lack of trophies under the stewardship of Daniel Levy. These supporters point out how, unlike Tottenham, West Ham won by fielding a strong side in what ‘big’ clubs denigrate as a minor trophy, one in which we played a second string XI without success.

It is a lesson which, no doubt, will be heeded by the new generation of clubs competing in Europe such as Brighton and Aston Villa. These sides are not backed by the blood money of sportswashing owners, have genuine local support and are happy to be there rather than looking down their noses at these competitions or the lame old ‘we’re concentrating on the league’ as an excuse for fielding a weakened team.

And so, taking a deep breath and putting aside childish rivalry, well done West Ham. And to the legions of their supporters who I call my friends, lap it up. Take it from a frustrated Spurs fan, it may be a further 43 years before you win another trophy.

India’s war on Charles Darwin is a step too far

What is it that India’s rulers find so objectionable about Charles Darwin and his evolutionary theory that they’ve banned his work from some school classrooms? Firstly, Darwin is not a Hindu and in India’s ruling circles that appears sufficient to cast doubt on his merits as a scientist.

Secondly, his cause is not helped by the fact that he is an English scientist. This makes him part of a wider western scientific conspiracy that belittles what the Indian authorities see as the historic scientific triumphs of ancient India. These paranoid fantasies are the reason why Indian children under 16 will no longer be taught about evolution or even who Darwin was.

It is not just evolutionary theory, though, that is being binned: the periodic table of elements – one of the great intellectual achievements of chemistry – will no longer be taught either. Michael Faraday’s vital contribution to the understanding of electricity and magnetism has also been excised from the school syllabus, along with other topics such as sources of energy and climate-related subjects. In the humanities, chapters on democracy have been removed. 

The curriculum changes were confirmed in a ‘list of rationalised content’ published by India’s national council of educational research and training, the body that oversees the school curriculum. The move was explained as part of a plan to streamline teaching to help ease pressures on students and teachers in the wake of the pandemic.

This is barely credible: more than 4,500 teachers, scientists and others have signed a petition demanding the changes be scrapped. They are right to raise the alarm but it will make little difference, unfortunately.

The targeting of Darwin reveals much about the attitudes of the country’s ruling elite towards science. It is a world view summed up perfectly in 2018 by Satya Pal Singh, then India’s minister for human resource development, who rubbished Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection as ‘scientifically wrong’ and called for it to be removed from school and college curricula. No one ‘ever saw an ape turning into a man’, he said in remarks widely quoted. He may no longer be in post but what he wanted has come about anyway.

The war on rational thinking and scientific fact has been gathering pace under India’s leader Narendra Modi, in power since 2014. Modi and his ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) are keen on the endless glorification of ancient India, and in particular the idea that all knowledge already exists in Hindu scriptures.

This narrow and distorted interpretation of history is part and parcel of the faith-based communal identity and ideology of Hindutva promulgated by Modi and his acolytes. Ancient myths are treated as facts and they supersede the claims to truth of upstart ‘Western’ science.

Modi once proclaimed that the elephant-headed Hindu god Ganesh was proof of ancient India’s knowledge of plastic surgery. In 2015, a paper was presented at the prestigious Indian Science Congress claiming that an Indian sage had given detailed guidelines on making aircraft 7,000 years ago. Some Hindu nationalists claim that ancient India had nuclear weapons.

Research institutes across the country, often reliant on government funding, are encouraged to move away from traditional science to pursue pseudoscientific topics such as the medical benefits of cow urine. One BJP MP, Pragya Singh Thakur, declared in 2019 that a mixture of cow’s urine and other cow products had ‘cured’ her cancer. 

It is not just science that is in the sights of these powerful enemies of reason. Since Modi came to power nine years ago, school textbooks on history have been targeted, with chapters on India’s centuries of history under Muslim Mughal rule removed. 

The obsession of India’s rulers with the past doesn’t sit well with their repeated claims of building a ‘new India’ that will take its rightful place as a dominant power on the international stage. It will damage India’s economy and in particular the growing tech sector which is worth almost £200 billion: where will companies find scientifically literate Indians to fill these jobs?

It is also a disastrous backward step for a country that once proudly proclaimed itself a secular democracy. ‘To develop the scientific temper, humanism and the spirit of inquiry and reform’, is the duty of every citizen, according to India’s constitution.

For most of its 75 years since gaining independence, India did indeed value modern science and learning – a claim that it can no longer make. That’s a real tragedy. 

Sunak’s D-Day blunder

It’s Rishi Sunak’s final day in Washington. Having ducked an invitation to throw the first pitch at a baseball game last night, he will today sit down for a formal ‘bilat’ with Joe Biden at the White House, host a joint press conference and hobnob with business bigwigs at a roundtable. What larks! But while Mr S applauds Sunak’s transatlantic travels, is there a danger perhaps that our California-lovin’ PM is getting a little too Americentric?

The Tory leader yesterday shared a post to mark the anniversary of D-Day when, in his words, ‘British and American soldiers were landing on the beaches of Normandy.’ He tweeted images of himself laying a remembrance wreath along with emojis of the British and American flags. But where exactly was the Canadian one? Some 14,000 Canadians landed or parachuted into the invasion area on D-Day, with the Canadian War Museum recording more than 1,000 casualties including 359 deaths.

These men were key to taking the ‘Juno’ stretch of the Normandy coast – as dozens of Canadians on Twitter have been quick to point out. Kevin Vuong, a Toronto MP, noted that ‘Not only was it our troops that advanced the furthest inland of any of the Allied forces, many Canadians also made the ultimate sacrifice during the Dieppe Raid that led to successful D-Day tactics.’

Something to remember next time there’s talk of the great ‘friendship’ between Britain and Canada…

Yoghurt pot cake: the perfect sugary blank canvas

I’m pretty easygoing when it comes to most aspects of cooking. I don’t think there’s much to be gained from being dogmatic or dictatorial. It’s just supper, at the end of the day. There are, as they say, many ways to skin a rabbit. And cooking is supposed to be about joy; it’s not an exam.

But the exception is measuring ingredients for baking. Oh boy, do I get on my high horse about this. I can be very boring indeed about the need to measure accurately. The American system of cups and tablespoons drives me mad. Cups are inexact and inaccurate, they rely on scooping and sweeping, they don’t account for the varying density of dry ingredients. Scales, I will declaim – with only the slightest impetus – are inexpensive and an essential piece of kitchen equipment. You simply cannot bake properly without them! You need weight not volume, for goodness’ sake! Baking might not be rocket science, but it is science.

My mind, however, has been changed by a single yoghurt pot. Well, a yoghurt pot and its associated cake. A yoghurt pot cake is a simple cake, in appearance, flavour and conception. It relies on measuring each ingredient by the number of yoghurt pots needed: 1 pot of yoghurt, 2 pots of sugar, 3 of flour etc. This means that the exact size of the yoghurt pot doesn’t matter because, once it is emptied and washed out, the ratio of the other ingredients remains the same. It’s a pleasingly efficient system and one that, despite the aforementioned variabilities of measuring, always seems to work perfectly. How do I reconcile this with my vehement rejection of volume measuring in baking? I don’t. I contain multitudes.

Seriously, though, this is an incredibly forgiving cake, and a lovely one too. The use of yoghurt and oil keeps the crumb fantastically tender, and the sugar makes the crust crisp. This kind of cake is probably best known as the Italian ciambella, or as the French ‘Gâteaux de Mamie’ – granny’s cake – a nod to the fact it is often baked together by grandmothers and grandchildren, because it is so easy to make. But it’s one of those cakes that pops up all over the place, is continually reinvented and rediscovered, thanks to its ease and ingenuity. It’s often called the ‘seven pot cake’ or – my favourite – the more lyrical and somehow mysterious, ‘cake of the seven pots’.

Traditionally, the flavouring is just the zest of a lemon and a little vanilla, or a handful of chocolate chips. But the simplicity of the cake means that it is something of a blank canvas, endlessly customisable – scattering a clutch of fruit through the batter is very popular, or using light brown sugar in place of caster for a caramelly note. I love to replace the zested lemon with an orange and add a splash of orange blossom water. But I think, actually, the two classic versions are the best: the combination of the gentle perfume of lemon zest and the sweet hum of vanilla is subtle but elegant. And the chocolate chips – especially if you ignore my instructions to let the cake cool completely and catch them still warm and a little melty – turn the cake into something perfect for children. The Italians often serve this cake for breakfast (which I love – cake for breakfast always feels a little transgressive), while the French serve it as le goûter, an afternoon snack.

I always have an enormous tub of yoghurt in my fridge, which means that, while I’m never far away from a yoghurt cake, the pot measuring scheme doesn’t always work for me (unless I want to make a cake as big as my kitchen table). So, although it may seem against the spirit of the whole thing, I’m giving weight measurements alongside pot quantities. This cake works in a ring mould, which is how the Italians tend to make it, but it can also be baked in a large loaf tin, or a nine-inch round tin. Just adjust the baking times accordingly.

Serves 8
Takes 10 mins
Bakes 45-60 mins

• 150g/1 individual pot natural yoghurt
• 200g/2 pots caster sugar
• 3 large eggs
• 250g/3 pots plain flour
• 100g vegetable oil
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 1 tsp vanilla paste
• ½ tsp salt
• 1 lemon, zested, or 100g/1 pot chocolate chips
• Icing sugar, for dusting

1. Line the base and sides of a 9in round cake tin or a 2lb loaf tin, or grease and flour a 9in ring tin. Preheat the oven to 170°C.
2. If you’re using a pot of yoghurt, empty the yoghurt into a bowl, and wash out and dry the pot.
3. Whisk together the sugar, eggs and lemon zest (if using), until pale, thick and increased in volume.
4. Place the oil, flour, baking powder, vanilla paste, and salt in a bowl with the yoghurt, and stir together until incorporated. Fold through the egg and sugar mixture, followed by the chocolate chips (if using).
5. Spoon into your prepared tin and bake for 35-40 minutes for a round tin or a ring tin, or an hour for a loaf tin. The cake should be golden and risen, and should spring back when pressed gently with a finger. Allow to cool for 10 minutes before removing it from the tin and leaving to cool completely, before dusting with icing sugar if you wish.

The beauty of passport stamps

As a travel writer, I can get blasé about many aspects of travel: the free five-handed massage, the private plunge-pool out the back, those odd bits of overchilled orangey cheddar in an average Biz Class lounge.

But one slightly childish thing that always pleases me is stamps in my passport. They should be emotionally meaningless: they are, after all, tiny and potentially annoying examples of frontier bureaucracy, ways and means by which a nation keeps tabs on you.

And yet the other day I was going through the airport at Ibiza and getting my Spanish exit stamp – a Brexit benefit or drawback depending on how you feel – and the nice passport lady flicked through my passport, seeking a rare empty page, and said: ‘Wow, you have a lot of stamps.’ Like a five-year-old, I practically glowed with pride.

Because I do have a lot of stamps. And sometimes I simply like to look at them. I take out my passport and browse these small colourful paper tattoos of red tape, these laughter lines of a travelling lifetime, with as much pleasure as I might look at photos of Bhutan or Belize.

Right now my passport is so full of stamps it is in danger of filling up. However, there is a fair chance that this won’t happen – not because I have any intention of ceasing my travels, but because most countries (including and especially those of the EU) are moving on from the archaic era of physical stamps. In future our comings and goings will be monitored digitally – and speedily.

This will, of course, be great for shortening airport queues, and useful for Brits and border police trying to tot up whether they’ve exceeded their allotted 90 days per 180 in the EU: the computer will say yea or nay, and presumably give warnings.

But it also means we will kiss goodbye to the romance of the exotic stamp, that reminder of the time we crossed from, say, Chile to Bolivia via the Andes and the salt plains, that hour we traversed the emotionally tricky no man’s land from Eilat in Israel to Sinai, Egypt. Or that first time we landed in the USA and got one of the simplest stamps of all. The frontier dude smiles as he kerchunks his imprint and says: ‘Welcome to America.’ 

In my decades of travel, I have acquired some seriously – to my mind – exotic and wonderful stamps: Armenia, Madagascar, Greenland, Laos, Ethiopia, Easter Island, Vatican City, Oman. Some of the smallest countries demand entire pages of your passport – looking at you, Cambodia. Others make barely a dent, like France or Thailand, which is useful as I go there a lot.

Then there are the special stamps to truly esoteric destinations. My personal favourite is probably the one I got going into the quasi-independent ecclesiastical republic of Mount Athos in northern Greece. Not only was it fabulously rare, because they only let in a few dozen men (and no women) per week. It was also lavishly beautiful: the double-headed eagle of Byzantium, returned to life and impressed on my passport pages.

It was certainly more cheerful than the stamp I once got from the British embassy in Bangkok, which paid to have me repatriated from Thailand after I really mis-behaved. That stamp said ‘Impound Passport on Arrival in London’. And so they did.

Yet I miss that stamp too.

Cooking the books: the rise of fake libraries

There is a growing fashion for fake books. Not fake as in written by a series of AI prompts, but fake as in things – cleverly painted empty boxes, or a façade of spines glued to a wall – designed to mislead the casual onlooker into thinking that they are books.

A recent New York Times article highlighted the trend. It featured various interior designers offering spurious arguments in favour of fakes over real books: they can be a practical solution for hard-to-reach shelves; a smart example of upcycling unwanted volumes destined for landfill; useful and humorous storage boxes. Neat, quirky design solutions are, however, the least of it. This fashion signals a profound shift in our attitude to books. Rather than perceiving them as holders of information, stores of stories, we are increasingly perceiving them as just things – albeit pretty things.

Books have never been more beautiful. Even the paperback, first conceived as a cheap option for the masses, has become seductive, with eye-popping covers featuring expert designs and shiny colours. Jamie Keenan, a veteran book designer whose clients include Penguin, Knopf and Vintage, explains: ‘It’s easier now to get special colours, or metallics for covers, to get them dye cut or embossed. Everything’s much more sophisticated than it was 20 years ago.’

The current commitment to producing beautiful books came about in part as a reaction to eBooks. When those took off in 2006-07, the sudden ease of consuming books electronically, divorcing their content from their materiality and transforming them into weightless, instantly downloadable and low-cost items, spurred publishers to work hard to make physical editions more appealing. As Keenan says: ‘There’s far more understanding of what a cover can do in terms of selling the book.’

These covers are at their most dazzling when they flash before our eyes in the scroll of social media. Bookstagram (with 90.1 million posts) and BookTok (138.4 billion views) have had a pronounced impact on sales. It’s become unusual to enter a bookshop and not see a BookTok table, piled high with bestsellers that owe their success to social media. James Daunt, Waterstones managing director and Barnes & Noble CEO, recalls: ‘When BookTok first kicked off, it was very obvious that bookshops – as a place of performance, effectively providing a backdrop – could be a place for it, and that was really exciting.’ Daunt is known for prioritising attractive displays in his shops, and is happy that ‘social media has now been harnessed to amplify that. It’s nothing but good, a very positive thing’.

I am all for anything that increases the popularity of books, but a closer look at our treatment of them on social media has made me think more carefully about what exactly is going on. Of course there are exceptions, but for the most part, Bookstagram and BookTok are platforms to share highly styled scenes featuring a book, rather than a nuanced or meaningful engagement with its characters and ideas. Daunt enthuses over the ‘fun young people are having with books’, but this fun tends to revolve around a book’s appearance, not its content.

A sample scroll through Bookstagram reveals the following recent topics: ‘Covers with flowers’, ‘Can you spot a favourite type of edge in my shelfie?’ and ‘Minimalist Monday’. If a post does engage with content, it is certainly brief. On BookTok, for instance, you might get a short video (most are under 30 seconds) of someone tearing their hair out, with the text, ‘Me when the enemies become lovers’, or a bullet point flashing up beside a book noting, ‘Serious page-turner’. Hashtag stats confirm the predilection for style over substance. On Instagram, #politicsbooks and #economicsbooks have a mere 1,000-plus posts, whereas #bluebookstack has 14,000, and #rainbowbooks 90,000. On TikTok, #bookreview has 875 million views, but #bookshelf 2.7 billion.

This focus on appearance suits social media influencers well. As even the most amateur aspiring influencer knows, the more you post, the more engagement you get. Instagram authorities, such as the social media scheduler Later, suggest posting three to ten times a week, and TikTok recommends one to four videos a day. It is impossible to read enough books to meet this demand, so focusing on how a book looks is a neat cheat.

This shift in focus has an alarming impact when taken beyond social media. If we fall into the habit of prioritising how our books look, we might well begin to arrange them by physical feature, rather than topic or author. If we arrange our shelves by, say, colour gradient, we might easily look to buy a blue book rather than a great novel. Daunt jokes that he doesn’t mind, ‘so long as it’s a good blue book’. However with the increasing focus on the book’s outside, it’s only a small step to remove the inside altogether. It is a terrible irony that we have worked so hard creating beautiful covetable objects to save books from death by Kindle only for our success to signal their demise in a different way.

But what does it matter if books as holders of words – and worlds – become increasingly redundant? We are deep in the digital age and if our books are becoming empty, then our screens are full of stories told in arresting, attention-grabbing ways. Personally, I treasure the experience of reading a book over engaging with a screen, but most people feel otherwise. A 2021 American survey showed the average reading time was just 16.2 minutes per day as opposed to 168 minutes spent watching television. Why not consume your drama in eight episodes rather than between paper covers? Who needs a history tome when there’s a documentary? Or a manual when there’s a YouTube video? Why shouldn’t we put fake books on our shelves if we get our stories elsewhere? The National Literacy Trust recently noted the ‘striking’ similarity between what children get from reading and what they get from playing video games, including ‘immersion in a story’ and ‘empathy’.

Perhaps books were only ever going to have a temporary role as our holders of stories. Before they arrived, we used to come together to share tales, and enjoyed the effects of gesture and voice in our lost culture of oral storytelling. Maybe we’ve missed this in the solitary experience of reading books, and that’s what we’re endeavouring to rediscover via screens. Are BookTokkers the bards of the 21st century?

Even so, those who, like me, still rail against this trend for style over substance must resolve to be a little nosier. The fact is that fake books can convince only if nobody tries to read them.