‘I am 35,000 feet above Beirut, and I am smoking a fag’: Spectator writers recall their favourite cigarettes

The next generation will never be allowed to buy cigarettes. So we asked some of our writers for their favourite moment with a fag.

Rory Sutherland

One of the last ever cigarettes I had on a plane, I think. Looking back, it was kind of insane that you could ever smoke on aircraft (I think this was on Emirates, around 1997 – at a time when smoking had been banned on western airlines for quite a few years; the middle-eastern airlines, like the Japanese, were slow to the ban). This was the first time I had ever experienced a working telephone on an aircraft, too. And it also coincided with Kathy Burke playing a role in a series of Harry Enfield sketches on TV as Waynetta Slob. I seem to remember calling back to the office very briefly – the calls cost a fortune – and at some point in the conversation, apropos of nothing at all, saying ‘I am 35,000 feet above Beirut, and I am smoking a fag’.

Incidentally the last cigarette I ever smoked was one I bummed off Nigel Farage. Nigel is a Rothmans man, as you would expect. This was, unintentionally, a good strategy for quitting. Have someone famous give you your last cigarette, so that in the event that you give in to temptation by being offered a cigarette by someone less famous, you know you won’t be able to tell that story again when anyone talks about smoking. I suppose there is the risk that someone more famous offers you a cigarette and you decide to upgrade the story. Perhaps Mick Jagger or Kate Moss might turn up at my flat one evening and start handing out Marlboro Lights. There is that risk. But this contingency is unlikely, I think.

Nigel Farage

The first one every morning!

Freddy Gray

My favourite cigarettes have been after going to confession in church. Smoking is not a real sin, even if it is bad for you. And there’s a liberating feeling in lighting up after fessing up. 

My funniest smoking memory is from one night in school when I went into ‘lowers’ – a popular spot for nefarious activities in the woods – and, as I took my first drag, I told a friend that ‘Marshall is being such a dick at the moment’ – or words to that effect. ‘Am I now Frederic?’ thundered back Mr Marshall, my actually very good housemaster, sitting behind me on a fallen tree in the dark.

Aidan Hartley

While covering a war in Ethiopia 32 years ago I was accompanying guerrilla fighters who captured an ammunition dump, which then began to explode. I guess it had been booby-trapped by retreating forces. The earth split open like a volcano, sending a ball of fire mushrooming into the sky as we scampered away across fields with rockets and bombs raining down on all sides, bursting in plumes of earth and smoke. We took refuge in a dry riverbed with steep sides, while shrapnel bounced around above us. The sky was filled with missiles, moaning and fizzing like Catherine wheels. For the next hour, I chain-smoked my way through a pack of cigarettes. They got me through it all while I prayed that if me and my group of guerrillas survived, I’d finally go to church. After the rebel forces captured Addis Ababa, I did, but not very often. 

Julie Burchill

I started smoking the summer I turned 12 – the summer I first read Dorothy Parker. I was aiming to be a brilliant writer and smoking seemed the surest way to start out. I kept at it until my 40s. When it was banned in the bars and restaurants where I (still) spend half my waking hours, I gave it up overnight.

The ease with which I did this might have something to do with the fact that I never got the hang of inhaling. (The only thing I didn’t inhale during my long, louche life.) But then, I gave up cocaine overnight after 40 years bang on it – and I’ve never missed that either. I think I must have the opposite of an addictive personality.

I know it’s immature, but I still feel thrilled when a new person I like turns out to be a smoker, even though I know it’s bad for the poor creatures. My dad was a chain-smoker and I adored my dad – maybe this is why I’ve always found the smell of smoke on people attractive. So I’m not a smoker, but I’m definitely an ally – and I still carry cigarettes and a lighter in my handbag, just in case a smoking mate gets caught short.

Owen Matthews

It must have been the summer of 2001, in the rear galley of the Aeroflot red-eye from Moscow to New York. One reads in the Mail that party planes still exist, but these anti-fun days I assume they are uncommon and exclusively private.

Back then Aeroflot’s nightly transatlantic service to JFK was a reliably great party at 30,000 feet, open to all and bring your own bottle. The rear 20 rows of the Airbus 320 were the smoking section, location of all the cool kids on the plane. After the meal service the galley at the back would be tactfully abandoned by the stewardesses to a group of self-selecting revellers, all chatting, smoking, flirting away the night. A blind eye was turned to the supposed ban on consumption of duty-free booze. And just like a terrestrial party, one had to squeeze up to allow people to get to the loo, and occasionally neighbours would complain that we should keep down the racket. Among my fellow passengers on that flight were a pair of excited Moscow prostitutes en route to an exclusive gig in the Big Apple, client tactfully unmentioned. But they had recently returned from Iraq, where they had entertained Uday and Qusay Hussein in a villa outside Tikrit. Both the brothers’ performance and their taste in interiors had disappointed. We drank Bacardi with warm cola. If I recall correctly the girls smoked Vogue Slims; I was still on Parliament Lights. 

Mary Wakefield

When I was 11, I bought a pack of Marlboro Reds from a girl in the sixth form and smoked them on the roof of the school gym. I was determined to seem like a seasoned old chain-smoker – a hot look in those days – so I inhaled one down to the filter then whited out and fell off the roof. From that day on, I was sold.

As a teen in the 90s, romance relied on cigarettes. I’d never have dated a boy for instance who pinched a fag between his thumb and index finger. Those were the sort of wankers who wore Palestinian scarves. But if someone noticed you hadn’t a light and leaned over and held a flame under your unlit fag, or if a boy you were talking to (in the old-fashioned sense) took the cigarette from your lips to light his own…

I just can’t imagine that sharing a vape has the same effect.

Tanya Gold 

The cliché of the ideal cigarette is: it is sexual. The famous image is the scene in Now, Voyager, when Paul Henreid lights two cigarettes and gives one to Bette Davis, which indicates she is a woman who has sex. (She also owns hats). My best cigarette was not like this: my lover was not Henreid, but cheap speed. Some drugs belong together: cocaine and champagne. Pork fat and wheat. G-Force and candyfloss. Tobacco loves speed.

Nicotine is not a great drug. The buzz is hot, hollow, earthbound.  I suppose it has to be: you can’t have office smokers having psychotic episodes, or sex. But, taken with speed the night I finished my finals – hell-bound, I guess, in a haunted ballroom – it worked. Perhaps the speed put the nicotine in the bloodstream faster. I don’t know. Maybe Rishi Sunak does. I was cold-eyed, gibbering, and, most importantly, extremely high.  I do not recommend this – what, restaurant? You are a Spectator reader. I recommend medical-grade opiates. 

Nicholas Farrell 

The best cigarette I ever smoked was in the summer of 2022 in Piazza Farnese, Rome, in the bar next to the French Embassy. I had given up cigarettes in 2019 after decades of smoking at least two packs a day had very nearly killed me. A beguiling woman at the next table offered me a cigarette. I accepted. The reason why this was the best cigarette of my life is that I knew, when I stubbed it out, that I was no longer addicted.

In Britain, I always used to smoke Benson and Hedges which came in hard packets that looked like gold ingots. In Italy, I smoked Camel originals in a soft packet. I was quite capable of smoking four packets a day. I got through school without smoking and only started when I worked in France during my year off before university. Smoking killed my mother aged 50 from lung cancer and it nearly killed me. The funny thing is that though I once refused to get on a transatlantic flight because the plane did not have a smoking section, I do not miss it at all. Nor does it bother me when people smoke around me. Booze is quite another matter.

Petronella Wyatt

As an act of chivalry it was without parallel. Back when smoking was still allowed in restaurants, I was dining with my former tutor Earl Russell, a fellow disciple of tobacco whose apple white fingers were seldom without an Egyptian cigarette. The restaurant staff were too distracted to hear my request for an ashtray, and the delicate protuberance at the end of my cigarette was approaching an inch in length. It was then that Russell held out his hand, palm upwards. In that simple gesture, more eloquent than any spoken declaration I have received from a man, was a few hundred years of gallantry and more than a bat squeak of platonic romance. I tapped, and the silver ash descended and dispersed like powder on his skin. The dance of the cigarette has no equal. As Mark Twain once said, if smoking is not allowed in Heaven, I shall not go. 

Toby Young

I smoked between the ages of 14 and 22. My favourite cigarettes were Camel Lights and the first cigarette of the day was always the best, accompanied by a strong cup of coffee. When I went to Harvard as a Fulbright scholar I asked to be housed in the smoking dorm, even though I’d given up by then. I assumed that the girls on the smoking dorm would be more fun, and so it proved to be. I used to dream about smoking for at least 20 years after I gave up. I still miss it today.

Cindy Yu

I’m not really a smoker, but friends know that after the third or fourth drink on particularly jolly nights, I turn into a rapacious hunter/forager for the nearest ciggy (and will make friends and grovel as needed). There’s nothing quite like that first sharp draw to cut through the stupor of alcohol. But for the most part I do it because I think it looks cool. There’s perhaps a part of me, never rebellious enough to go behind the bike shed as a teenager, who wants to make up for lost time.

It does mean that my memories of cigarettes, while happy, tend to be made when I’m already half cut and my footing is not as firm as usual. At a recent work do, the combination of a very strong negroni and a cigarette toppled me right over, and I landed on the gravel of The Spectator’s garden. But instead of finally admitting that I can’t really handle my cigarettes, I blamed the negroni (and the arts editor who mixed it).

Ed West

Without sounding too much like Grandpa Simpson, I still just about remember when you could smoke on planes, although since the last hold-outs were Middle Eastern-based airlines I recall that you couldn’t drink at the same time. I used to live near one of Britain’s last smoking cinemas, and my older cousin used to tell me about the joys of smoking on the top of the bus.

Although there was really nothing better than a cigarette and a pint in a crowded smoky pub, as a nervous flier I used to cherish the first fag after touching down. As time went on I noticed that the smoking areas became less central and less salubrious, until eventually we were put in a little cage in Luton airport, and now the poor smokers have to stand outside of course. But not near the entrance, you scum. 

I’m fatalistic about these good things coming to an end. No one wants to get the Big C and I guess I don’t want my kids to smoke, although there are plenty of other things to be worried about – and now the younger two will never enjoy, as I did, the pleasure of a refreshing Marlboro Light, as we called it back in our day. If they do they’ll have to ask my oldest, who will be one of the youngest people legally able to buy cigarettes in Britain, to go to the shops for them – forever.

Gus Carter

My school friend had just returned from a family holiday and brought with him a brick of Cohiba cigarettes, which he sold off at a fiver a pack. I hate cricket and so had ended up as a ‘wet bob’ by default. One summer afternoon, I took out a single scull from the college boathouse and paddled about a mile down the Thames, pulling up on the riverbank beneath the canopy of a willow tree. Protected from sight, and with the water gurgling past, I opened the gold and black carton, lay back and inhaled. 

Sean Thomas

The best cigarette I ever had was, without question, the first cigarette I had in prison. I was remanded in custody in HMP Wormwood Scrubs, and on my first night in the clink my cellmate handed me a cigarette to calm my nerves. As soon as I inhaled I realised, immediately, why an entire culture surrounds smoking in prisons. There isn’t much to do in jail: smoking is something to do, and the nicotine rush is a form of micro-escape. If Rishi Sunak ever goes to prison he may regret the ban.

Claire Fox

My father, John Fox, died of smoking-related cancer. He was too young at 66. On his death bed some 30 years ago, the family gathered round to share his dying wishes. He said: ‘Claire, promise you will never smoke’ and then paused for effect before continuing ‘… anything stronger than Silk Cut Silver’. My mother yelled out in exasperation: ‘For God’s sake John, I could kill you!’ He noted wryly it was a bit late for that. So, for all these years I have never smoked anything stronger than low tar Silk Cut Silver and I can safely say I have enjoyed every single one. My Dad understood I was a smoker at heart, and I loved him for it. Inevitably, like many at my age, I am now belatedly trying to give up, and have become a demon vaper. But if Rishi goes anywhere near banning disposable vapes, so help me; he can fag right off. Leave my freedom to smoke what I want, to give up when and how I want, alone. It’s called living in a free society.

James Walton

Sad to say, the cigarette I remember most vividly was the first Gitanes I ever had at a café on the Left Bank. Horrible taste (and horrible cliché) of course, but still a big thrill for any self-respecting bookish twentysomething from provincial England.

A smoking experience I much enjoyed sharing was in the mid-1990s when Neil Kinnock had been on a radio quiz show I used to write. I was a fan of his and he was great on the show – so it was a top moment when he bummed a fag from me in the pub afterwards (no going outside back then) with the words ‘Don’t tell Glenys’. Nearly 30 years on, I hope he doesn’t mind that I just have.  

Angus Colwell

Germany doesn’t do most things better, except for cigarettes. A pack is little more than a fiver, and most bars allow smoking inside. Dankeschön. We’d worked up a sweat at work covering Liz Truss’s resignation, and I had a trip to Berlin with friends booked at the end of the week. And someone tried to steal my dog on the morning of the flight, which almost sent me gaga. I landed in Berlin a bit hazy, very late at night, and went straight to a bar in Friedrichshain. I got a drink, and found in the furthest corner – through a smog that was nearly solid – two friends I would probably die for. One supplied a cigarette and the other supplied a lighter. I sat back and did my bit to increase the stink. Heaven.

Jonathan Miller

Players Number 6 behind the bike shed at Bedales. I was 14. My first cigarette was disgusting but also sublime and empowering.  It was strictly forbidden but this made it more alluring.  At our evening assemblies all the pupils shook hands with all the teachers, who would ostentatiously sniff us to detect the whiff of tobacco. But since they all smoked themselves their olfactory sense was blunted. I still sneak the occasional fag at the bottom of the garden but it’s dangerous because Mrs Miller has the nose of a bloodhound. The frisson of rebellion remains.

Labour crushes SNP in ‘seismic’ Rutherglen by-election win

Keir Starmer goes into Labour conference this weekend on a high after his party turned Rutherglen and Hamilton West red in a decisive victory against the SNP. Yesterday’s by-election saw a 20.4 percentage point swing to Labour from the SNP. The Labour candidate, Michael Shanks, won 17,845 votes to the SNP’s 8,399 – a majority of 9,446. In the 2019 general election, the SNP won the seat with a majority of 5,230.

If the Labour swing was repeated at a general election, Sir John Curtice, professor of politics at Strathclyde University, said the party would win 42 seats in Scotland. This would leave the SNP with a mere six. Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar has said the result showed that Scottish Labour ‘could lead the way in delivering a UK Labour government’. In Starmer’s office, a resurgence in Scotland has been viewed as key to winning power. Starmer himself has been quick to call it a ‘seismic result’.

As for the losers, it wasn't just the SNP who had a bad night. The Scottish Conservatives won only 3.9 per cent of the vote, short of the 5 per cent required to keep their £500 deposit.

But what does this all mean for next year’s general election? While I previously predicted that this by-election would be the one that worries ministers most, it's worth pointing out that by-elections often make for problematic predictors of what exactly will happen in a national vote thanks to the fact they tend to have low turnout (on this occasion less than 40 per cent) and they are often used as a protest vote against the governing party. On this occasion, the reason the by-election took place was that a disgraced former SNP MP – Margaret Ferrier faced a recall petition for breaching Covid rules. It means the SNP will try to argue it's a normal mid term result for a party in government.

Had Scottish Labour failed to take the seat, it would have cast serious doubt on polling suggesting they could be the largest party in Scotland after the election. It meant Sarwar was under pressure to deliver. The scale of his party's victory, larger than many had predicted, will now fuel the idea that, after years out in the cold, a serious Scottish Labour recovery is under way – one that could put Keir Starmer in No. 10.

Bed bugs invaded my mind!

It isn’t just the Paris Metro. Even the very best hotels are not immune from bed bugs. I was blissfully unaware of this fact until a trip to New York a few years ago when a nightmare struck. We had booked a really top place, but within days of getting home, we discovered little red bites on our legs. Little did I know that this was just the beginning. 

Bed bugs are little blighters. They can lay dormant and spring to life months after arriving. They lay their eggs in clothes, in drawers, in carpets, on television remotes and, of course, in beds. They can live in walls. When they bite, they inject an anaesthetic so it can take weeks to realise you’ve got a problem, by which time they are well-established and have produced numerous offspring. They infest public transport – which is part of the reason for New York’s plastic-only seating. The advice for upholstered carriages like those on the London Underground or the Paris Metro is to never sit down, always stand. Apparently, they tend to hide in an area with predominantly black or red colours. So, it might be best to hold off from those lovely new rose-coloured bed sheets.  

Just when you think you’ve got rid of them, they turn up again, which is where the anguish kicks in. You never feel safe and after a while, it feels like chasing a malign shadow. There are perfectly rational people who have been reduced to smothering their bodies in Vaseline at night to stop the bites. Others have hired specialist bed bug detector dogs (yes, they exist) to try to hunt down the mites. 

Advice on bug websites recommend a strict routine when staying in hotels. Hang clothes in the wardrobe, don’t pile them on any other surface. Never use the drawers in the room. Check the mattress for tell-tale signs of bug activity and if you spot the marks, immediately tell the hotel and vacate the room. Quarantine your luggage when you get home in sealed-tight plastic bags. Holidays may never be the same again. 

Which brings us back to my encounter with the dreaded bugs. When we realised we might have picked up the bugs we rang a pest controllers. He arrived in an unmarked white van. ‘People don’t like the neighbours knowing they’ve got bug,’ he explained. He fumigated the bedrooms but warned that we needed to start doing some real work ourselves – spraying clothes and curtains. He poked around under the bed and revealed a few tiny red-brown bugs about the size of a small seed. These are the adult bugs, the eggs they lay are white and tend to settle in the bed frame. He told me, ‘When they bite, they feed on your blood for about ten minutes… then they are full.’ The horror! 

The fumigation didn’t work so we called them back and they did it again. All seemed quiet, but a few months later our lodger reported bites on her leg. It was time to call back the exterminator. I pleaded for him to use stronger sprays, but they just had the one treatment available. 

We were becoming paranoid and deeply miserable. In a not entirely rational move, we got rid of all the mattresses in the house and started again. It was starting to cost us a lot of money. We took the curtains to the dry cleaner. We were feeling under siege and at one point discussed moving house. 

It all sounds a bit extreme, but it’s hard to describe how it feels to wake up with bites and not know how to stop them. Each time the biting started it was more cost and a faint sense of embarrassment. Bed bugs aren’t something you can discuss with your friends. What’s more, the whole issue of insect infestation seems oddly old-fashioned. It brings to mind the tales of moth-eaten old houses and large-scale outbreaks of fleas. I associate domestic insects with Victorians. 

Each time the exterminators came, they managed to scare us a bit more with tales of nightly jobs on tube trains and busses. London’s Central Line is apparently a bed bug superhighway. They are everywhere, they kept telling us. 

We felt sure that we had innocently brought them home as unwanted guests from NYC. The timings seemed to make sense and, in retrospect, we felt itchy in the US. There are whole websites dedicated to reporting NYC hotel infestations. It must be a nightmare for the hotels, especially those who respond efficiently to any sighting or biting.  

It isn’t much comfort to know that New York isn’t actually the worst city in the US for bed bugs. Philadelphia narrowly pips it. But both have had major outbreaks over the years (although New York seems to have got on top of the problem). What I know is that paying a lot for a hotel room is not insulation against beg bugs. Even in the UK, you are just as likely to take home bed bugs from an upscale hotel as a humble B&B.  

And there is little comfort on the home front. Since 2016, the UK has begun to be hit by a new type of bed bug. These are resistant to DDT and harder to kill. By 2018, there were reports of an epidemic of these mutant bugs swarming across the country and even turning up on aeroplanes. Bed bugs are on the rise here, possibly due to warmer temperatures. 

As I write this I am starting to itch. Bed bugs get you that way. Eventually, we had an epiphany. My father-in-law in Manchester is a pest controller. We hadn’t wanted to worry him and assumed that all pest controllers were pretty much the same. When we told him what was going on, he let out a long whistle and a few hours later was with us in London. He was pretty scathing about the efforts of our man in the unmarked van. 

He gave the house a proper spray, fumigating everywhere. He encased every mattress in a protective sleeve which wouldn’t let the bugs through, leaving them to die. He checked everything, double-checked, and then returned up North. The bugs stopped – but it was months before we felt they had gone for good. I don’t really know if we brought them back from our holiday. They could have come from anywhere. But these days we check our hotel room very carefully. 

The Beckham documentary is little more than PR

Let me start by saying I didn’t watch Beckham because I am a football fan. What I’m really interested in is the art of spinning gold from thin air, something David Beckham and his family have excelled at. So I zoned out when it came to discussing the intricacies of Beckham and Sir Alex Ferguson’s relationship in the 1990s, or the pain he felt when leaving Manchester United, the only club he ever wanted to play for. 

No, I was after the behind-the-scenes access to all things Brand Beckham. What does he really think of the fact Victoria has only eaten steamed fish and vegetables for over a decade? Why did he refuse to make a cameo in the cinematic masterpiece that was Spice World? What does a man who in the late 1990s and 2000s redefined popular culture think of his son’s £70,000 fish finger sandwich? 

Rio Ferdinand, the former England captain and Beckham’s teammate at Manchester United, tells the filmmakers that if you could bottle up that feeling of scoring a goal on a pitch in front of tens and thousands of people you’d be a millionaire – but the real money maker is Beckham’s charm. It isn’t just his looks – it’s his likeability, his self-deprecation; he’s an everyman, a working-class lad done good. And bottle up that charm he did. Aftershave, Pepsi, whisky, anything Beckham put his name on was sure to become a success. 

The documentary focuses on his back story and his stratospheric ascent from a humble Essex lad to international hero. It included never-before-seen archival footage and showed how after the fallout from the 1998 World Cup, where he was handed a red card for kicking Diego Simeone, he went from national hero to being sent bullets in the post and having an effigy of him being hung outside a pub. Beckham revealed the only place he felt safe was with the Spice Girls who, in the words of Victoria, could ‘wrap him in cotton wool’. 

As ever, the Beckhams have carefully curated what they were willing to share, all under the guise of being candid. Nearly 20 years after the story broke, they finally addressed his alleged affair with his former personal assistant, which Victoria unsurprisingly called ‘the most unhappy I’ve ever been’ and the lowest point of their marriage. But we were spared any details or real revelations. 

As with most Netflix documentaries, Beckham lacks nuance and balance. In its attempt to avoid straightforward hagiography, the doc includes Beckham’s faults which are limited to his OCD, which sees him scrub down the entire kitchen and trim the candle wicks before going to bed. It left out his decision to accept a reported $175 million by Qatar to promote the World Cup, despite the human-rights abuses, a curious decision for someone who has worked so meticulously to keep his PR image squeaky clean. 

The show also ignores those leaked emails in which he demanded Unicef pay for a plane and five star accommodation on a PR trip to the Philippines our how he reportedly thought it was a ‘fucking joke’ he hadn’t been knighted. But Beckham is still somehow charming and self-deprecating and a master of the comeback (see The Resurrection of David Beckham). The British public has repeatedly shown that they are willing to forgive him. 

Beckham said he chose to do the documentary because he wanted to tell his story before someone else did. But in being selective with what he shared and failing to be fully transparent, the Great British press will continue to speculate and fill in the gaps. Perhaps Beckham doesn’t really mind that. He is a man who loves the spotlight.

The worst open mic night of my life

A lonely microphone. A sound system that would have been impressive in the late 1990s. The smell of athlete’s foot and the contents of a Nobby’s Nuts packet. A deranged dog. Three privately educated members of a punk band call ‘SKiN FuK!’ arguing with the bartender. The stale atmosphere of regret and faded dreams mixed in with hope for a brighter tomorrow. It can only be one thing: Tuesday open mic night.

I’ve been to more open mic nights than I’ve had pleasant dreams. They just seem to happen to me. And they can happen anywhere. I’ll be sitting in a knackered pub, minding my business, when the clipboard comes out. The clipboard is usually accompanied by a peppy host in a blue waistcoat or a banana onesie. They smile. They draw me in. But they too are jaded. They’ve also given up; they just don’t know it yet.

I didn’t always hate open mic nights. Actually, I don’t hate them now. But – as is the case with most things – if I stare at it for long enough, it becomes upsetting. I want to take you through the worst night I’ve experienced.

It’s early evening. I’ve finished work. I agreed three weeks ago to watch my friend at an open mic night in Balham. It’s a big deal for him. He’s finally plucked up the courage to publicly perform his 80s-synth-pop acoustic covers. I don’t want to let him down because he’s my friend and he hasn’t had sex in six years. He could do with a win.

This is the only night that I’m not working overtime this week. It’s raining. I live nowhere near Balham. A Fiat Panda does 60mph through a puddle just to drench me in rat piss water. The tube is full of sunken faces and bent bodies. Someone coughs into my ear and for a second I think I can feel their breath on my brain. I arrive on time. Regrettably. My friend is buddying up with the host, Big Dave. I later find out that Big Dave is an electrician in the real-world, but on Tuesday nights he’s one-third of a Muse tribute band.

Big Dave is an imposing figure. He grips the mic as if he were squeezing the life out of a pigeon’s neck and shouts sporadically for no apparent reason. ‘How are we tonight? Are we HAVING a good TIME?’ he begins. The pub is half empty. Someone, the relative of a performer, squeals back. ‘That’s WHAT I LIKE to hear.’ The first act begins. It’s a middle-aged couple. The guy is dressed like an Ozzy Osbourne impersonator who could only find the children’s section in the party shop. The woman has the Gary Busey stare. ‘You already know us,’ says the woman. Either her accent is fake or she was born in the belltower of St Mary-le-Bow. She then dives into the first verse of their hit original piece, ‘Stick it up there’.

My friend is by my side. ‘I got you a Budweiser,’ he says, handing me a plastic cup of flat urine, and I thank him.

‘These guys are really good. They’re here every week,’ he says.

‘That’s cool. Have they got much of a following?’

‘I don’t think so. They’re sort of underground. No social media or any of that bullshit.’ He’s grinning at me. He wants me to approve.

‘That’s pretty cool,’ I say.

‘Sure is.’

When Sonny & Cher of the netherworld finish, Big Dave comes back on. ‘Give it UP FOR Brian and Lily… also known as Doggers by Day!’

‘Is that their name?’ I ask my friend.

‘Yeah. They’re super anti-establishment.’ But before I can pursue a further line of questioning, a new act has been ushered on stage. Two guys who look like they just met at the bus stop talk about grief and loss in semi-rhyming couplets. They describe their genre as diary-jazz-spoken-word. The whole thing sounds like a collection of fridge magnet quotes breathily jumbled together. The audience burst into applause. I can hear someone behind me crying.

After a few more pints, I begin to feel relaxed. The last three acts weren’t half bad. A young woman takes the stage. ‘My name is Lily. I’m a performer, writer, and singer. But most of all, I’m a creative.’ A few murmurs of intrigue ripple around the room. ‘This is a scene I wrote a few weeks ago. It’s from the perspective of a baby being born. It’s about the inner turmoil that comes with living in a world as corrupt as ours.’ She smiles, takes a breath, and then begins to shriek. ‘Waaaaah, waaaaah, waaaaah!’

I wince as she falls to the floor and wriggles around in a tunnelling motion. This goes on for a few minutes before she abruptly stands up, dusts herself off, and then promotes her Instagram. She bows as I confusedly clap. A few more acts go by. Someone sings an acapella version of ‘The Flood’ by Take That. Another person raps about gang culture but I’m sure the closest he’s ever come to the streets is watching Top Boy.

An old man without shoes plays a three-stringed guitar and whistles his way through a cover of ‘All I Want Is You’ by Barry Louis Polisar. A headache changes the forecast of my evening, so I excuse myself and go for a cigarette. The outside table is surrounded: half performers, half sycophantic groupies. One of the groupies tells the slam poet duo that he’s never been so moved. The two guys nod proudly as one of them says, ‘It’s all about honesty and integrity.’ My headache is getting worse.

When I go back inside, I notice that the crowd has thinned. My friend tells me he’s up next, right after the part-time comedian has finished wrestling with a heckler in the front row. ‘I don’t have to be here,’ says the comedian. ‘This is a hobby for me. I have a choice. I have children. I don’t need to do this. Do you want me to carry on or not? I can just go home.’ The audience is silent. ‘Do you want me to carry on?’ he repeats. Instantly, I feel sorry for his children. ‘Yes,’ says someone meekly. ‘Good. Where was I? That’s it… going to the barber,’ he says, checking the Sharpie notes on his wrist.

My friend does his set. He’s good, but I don’t know if that’s because I’m drunk or because he’s my friend or because the calibre of the evening has made the entertainment at a Chesil Beach caravan resort look top-tier. I drink a few more beers to celebrate. My friend tells me he’s going to do it again next week and that Big Dave thinks he can get him a regular slot. I hope this isn’t a permanent invite. People file out of the pub congratulating one another. It dawns on me that I’m one of the few people in attendance who didn’t actually perform.

I check the time. I’ve missed the last tube. Citymapper says it’ll take me over an hour to get home via three buses. I give my friend a hug and tell him I’m proud of him. Big Dave is watching my friend like Colonel Tom Parker watched Elvis. I see a guy from the open mic at the bus stop. He’s holding his guitar. He looks over at me, but I avert my eyes. I don’t want to speak to him. Back at home, having succumbed to the sofa, I wonder if this is what all open mics are like, if this is where talent is found in London. Surely not, I think. Then again, everyone has to start somewhere.

The terrible loss of National Theatre Wales

National Theatre Wales (NTW), the country’s flagship English language company, has warned that it might be forced to close in six months’ time following a cut to its funding. The company has received financial support from the Arts Council of Wales (ACW) for the entirety of its existence but will no longer do so from next spring.

NTW said it was ‘deeply shocked’ and plans to appeal against the cuts. Changing the minds of the arts bureaucrats who control the purse strings could prove a tall order, not least because artistic merit appears to count for little in a world dominated by fashionable but ultimately ill-defined targets such as ‘participation’ and ‘diversity’. 

Simply put, the decision to cut funding to NTW, which employs more than 600 people, makes little rational sense. Wales will lose ‘one of its largest employers of theatre-makers’, according to Lorne Campbell, NTW’s artistic director. He is also right to point out that the cuts jeopardise a growing pipeline of talent – actors, writers and directors – who often go on to occupy important roles elsewhere in the arts sector. According to those who run NTW, through its work the company has helped generate more than £11 million worth of investment in theatre across Wales.

Ironically, many small theatres that continue to receive arts council funding will be left with fewer shows to stage if NTW is forced to close. If it goes, what will replace it? No one really knows. 

The bean counters at the arts council give the impression that they don’t much care for the arguments of those who disagree. Whisper it, but it appears a national English language theatre company in Wales sticks in their throats at a time when one of their priorities is to promote the Welsh language.

This is met with official denials. ACW stated that the decision to cut funding ‘does not reflect any doubts about the potential or need for English-language theatre in Wales’. Really? It is certainly a rather strange way of demonstrating such faith. Just as bizarre are the plans to commission a report into English-language theatre provisions in Wales. Surely it would have made more sense to commission the report before making any decisions on funding. 

So, what’s really going on here? The cuts to NTW have come about after something grandiosely called the 2023 Investment Review, undertaken by the arts council. This outlines the funding decisions for the next three years, and NTW is one of a number of organisations that will no longer receive multi-year funding from 2024-25.

The review offers a glimpse of the priorities and preoccupations of those who occupy the higher echelons of arts funding. In more than 50 pages of waffle and politically correct zealotry there seems to be hardly a thought spared for artistic excellence. Instead those in need of cash must prove themselves worthy by passing the arts council’s ‘six principles’ test: creativity, widening engagement, Welsh language, climate justice, nurturing talent, and transformation.

One suspects that creativity – the only thing that should matter and surely the whole point of any artistic endeavour – is the least important in this list. What, for example, has ‘climate justice’ to do with evaluating artistic excellence?

The decisions on funding apparently incorporate various ‘balancing factors’, including supporting underfunded and unheard voices. It is anyone’s guess how such concepts are evaluated or who is deemed qualified to make such a decision. The review document also promises to bring a greater range of ‘diversity’ to the arts. What on earth does this mean?

Dafydd Rhys, chief executive of the Arts Council of Wales, summed up the mindset of those behind the decisions, claiming the funding review represented a ‘very positive’ shift for the arts. Few independent observers, I think, would agree.

This is simply another attack on core artistic values by the very people nominally charged with supporting the arts. National Theatre of Wales is just the latest arts organisation to be starved of vital financial support in order to be sacrificed on the altar of some ‘greater good’, always defined and policed by people possessed of righteous certainty but little else. 

Humza Yousaf named one of Time’s ten trailblazers

Irony was pronounced dead this morning after Time magazine proclaimed Humza Yousaf as one of its top ten ‘trailblazers’ around the world. According to the august Bible of liberal America, the flailing First Minister of Scotland is one of the ‘next generation leaders’ who will ‘shape our future’. God help them all. In the simpering, sycophantic prose that Mr S has come to expect from the underwhelming over-educated writers who staff such magazines, Yousaf is praised for his age and ethnicity rather than, er, any substantive achievements from 11 years in public office.

The choice of Time cover star is all the more remarkable given that the magazine acknowledges his disastrous record. It notes how under Yousaf ‘the SNP has been plagued by an ongoing police investigation into its finances; internal divisions; and uncertainty over how to achieve its overriding objective: for Scotland to end its centuries-old union.’ It adds that:

On the economy, health care, education, and more, Scotland is faring poorly. Tens of thousands of Scots are languishing on waiting lists to receive treatment from the National Health Service. Scotland’s drug-related deaths, while on the decline, remain the worst in the U.K. and Europe. Its schools are lagging behind the rest of Britain, too. Other issues, such as disruptions to ferry services affecting Scottish island communities, continue to fester.

If the First Minister is ‘shaping our future’, he’s hardly doing so in a constructive way. Indeed Mr S wonders whether the cover is more high art than high politics, in light of the way in which support for independence has fallen flat on Yousaf’s watch. A trailblazer only in the sense of a burning plane hurtling towards earth.

The release of the front page coincides with election day in Rutherglen and Hamilton West, which is likely to be a crucial test for Yousaf’s leadership of the SNP. With the polls pointing to a Labour triumph, Steerpike would encourage the First Minister to grab as many good covers while he still can…

Juncker dismisses ‘corrupt’ Ukraine joining EU in near future

Just days after Ukraine’s President Zelensky declared his intention to start EU membership negotiations by the end of this year, the bloc’s former president Jean-Claude Juncker has poured cold water on the idea, branding it a country ‘corrupt at all levels of society’.

In an interview with the South German regional Augsburger Allgemeine paper, Juncker accused current EU officials of making ‘false promises’ to Ukraine and ‘telling Ukrainians that they can become members immediately’. 

‘Despite its efforts, it is not eligible to join and needs massive internal reform,’ he said. ‘We have had bad experiences with some so-called new members, for example when it comes to the rule of law. This cannot be repeated again.’

Juncker’s comments come in a week when the bloc’s foreign ministers have descended on Kyiv to discuss ‘long-term support’ for Ukraine. Meeting outside the EU’s borders for the first time ever, the location is designed to send a message to Moscow that the bloc’s support for Ukraine has not, in the words of the Kremlin, become ‘fatigued’.

Speaking on Monday after the meeting, Zelensky said, ‘Our key integration goal is to come up with a solution this year to begin membership negotiations, and today I heard once again that this is absolutely possible.’ 

Ukrainian officials insist they are making substantial progress on meeting the seven requirements set out by the EU for joining, including tackling corruption, judicial reform and dismantling the country’s oligarchy. In August, however, the Ukrainian government admitted that only two of the seven conditions had been met. Nevertheless, according to EU sources an agreement to start accession negotiations could be reached as early as December. 

EU Membership has long been coveted by Ukraine and feared by Moscow. Joining the bloc is hugely popular with Ukrainians, particularly in light of the war with Russia. It was Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovich’s decision to drop discussions with the bloc in favour of closer ties with Russia in 2013 which triggered the Maidan revolution, which in turn led to Putin’s annexation of Crimea the following year. Should Zelensky see the country through the EU accession process successfully, this will be a major coup for his administration.

Tomorrow, on the second day of the European Political Community summit in Granada, Spain, the EU heads of state will meet to discuss enlargement. European Council president Charles Michel will expand on his pitch for expansion, suggesting the EU can’t put it off ‘any longer’.

Ukraine’s passage into the EU is unlikely to be smooth – despite the exuberant displays of support from the bloc. Its admission is likely to be met with resistance from several states, notably Hungary, which has opposed the move and which, under its prime minister Victor Orban, has displayed some pro-Kremlin tendencies. The EU is said to be weighing up whether to unfreeze €13 billion (£11.2 billion) in funding to Hungary, held over the country’s non-compliance with rules protecting human rights and the rule of law, as a sweetener to secure its support for Ukraine.

According to modelling done in Brussels, should Ukraine accede to the EU, it would be entitled to as much as €186 billion (£160 billion) over seven years from the bloc’s budget. However, this would require large-scale reform within the EU, to prevent other members such as Estonia and Lithuania turning from ‘net receivers’ of funds from the bloc into ‘net givers’.

Despite the positive noises coming from the EU, there are still many hurdles to Ukraine’s membership. Given the large scale of reform required to accommodate Kyiv within the bloc, even if negotiations do begin in December, full membership is still likely months, if not years, away.

There’s nothing ‘long-term’ about ignoring the housing crisis

There was much to talk about in Rishi Sunak’s conference closing speech. In around an hour on the stage he scrapped HS2, announced a replacement for A-levels, and found the time to ban 14-year-olds from ever buying cigarettes. Yet there was still a huge policy hole in the Prime Minister’s speech – a housing-shaped one.

Outside of the conference hall, you were barely able to move without coming into a conversation about housing. Think tank panels routinely covered it, discussing the rights of renters, the cost of housing and the impact it will have on Tory fortunes. MPs grappled with the tough choices between local Nimbyism and an increasing awareness of the need to build more houses. In one boozy reception, younger Tories and policy workers chanted ‘just get it built’ until the early hours. Yet none of this seemed to reach the PM.

In his 7,500-word speech, there was not a single mention of the housing crisis. No acknowledgment that for every year of this era of Tory government, the country has failed to meet the building targets its leaders set. There was no mention of the reports that we are now apparently 4 million houses short of what we need. There was no sense that this might be driving the desertion of the Conservative party by voters of working age, or of the wider damage a lack of housing might be doing to the economy.

This seems a misstep. The Lib Dem conference was dominated by housing. A well-fought campaign by younger members saw the party reject a suggestion from the leadership to scrap national housing targets. Labour is also expected to spend a lot of time on the issue, with the shadow cabinet increasingly vocal about the need to address the crisis. If this was to be the soft launch of Sunak’s election campaign, he left a significant issue off the table.

Some reticence around housing is perhaps understandable on the Tory side. Sunak’s base, especially those attending conference, is among voters largely cut off from the issue. Older Tory voters usually own their homes, often outright, and have ridden the rising tide of house prices into a comfortable level of wealth. They, and the backbenchers they lobby, are more concerned about blocking developments than encouraging them. Since becoming PM, Sunak has already yielded to their demands to scrap top-down targets.

Yet this omission jars with the Prime Minister’s overall message. This conference, we were told, was about making hard decisions in the long-term national interest. It was a chance to showcase a ‘tough’, calculating Sunak who wasn’t afraid to embrace short-term pain. On housing, however, he failed to do so and certainly refused to push any pain onto the Tories’ Nimby supporters. Rather than embracing a difficult decision, he didn’t even engage with it.

This will hinder the Tories. Across the country, they are struggling with voters of working age. In those demographics, there has been an unprecedented swing against them. The sort that could cost them dozens of seats. So far, the party seems to offer little to tempt them back, especially on housing, where they are feeling the squeeze. Ignoring it completely suggests that the party just aren’t listening – while others are.

Longer term too, he could be hurting the Tories’ chances. If this government ends without making even an attempt to solve the housing crisis, it will be remembered by a generation of voters. The difference will be especially stark if the other parties are making proposals. The historic link between becoming a homeowner and being more likely to vote Conservative could be broken if it’s Labour and the Lib Dems who are seen to enable it.

With a significant polling deficit and time running out until the next election, Sunak will have few set pieces like this conference speech. That he chose to prioritise banning cigarettes over building homes suggests a mindset out of step with the electorate and especially those the party needs to win back. It shows the PM is unwilling to tackle the vested interests and resistance with his own party. It’s both out of touch and weak.

As we push towards the next election, the Sunak campaign will not be able to avoid being drawn on housing. It’s central to the cost-of-living crisis for many voters and has suffused the national consciousness as a major issue. Equally, the opposition are going to want to talk about it a lot. The conference speech was a good opportunity to offer something on this. Instead, it was squandered.

There are many theories about how you win elections. Some say to do it from the centre, others to energise your base. What is clear is that you can’t duck around one of the biggest issues around. Sunak’s speech did just that.

Is Fifa trying to destroy the World Cup?

It’s official, well almost. Fifa has announced the location for the 2030 (centenary) World Cup. And the winner is… all over the place. In an extraordinary departure the tournament will be played in three continents with matches in Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, Spain, Portugal and Morocco. The decision, which will surely be rubber stamped at next year’s congress has been hailed by Fifa as ‘unit[ing] the world in a unique global celebration’ and by Football Supporters Europe (a body officially recognised by Uefa) as ‘Horrendous for supporters’ and ‘The end of the World Cup as we know it.’

It is tempting to speculate if Fifa is on a mission to destroy the world’s most popular and successful sporting tournament. Do its delegates meet in secret plotting how the event can be wrecked, through inappropriate hosting decisions, constant increases in size unjustified by footballing quality or demand, and scheduling seemingly designed to maximally inconvenience clubs and the fans?

The problems with the 2030 plan are so numerous and serious that it is hard to know where to start. The tournament will be a sprawling mess with absolutely no centre, and thus no distinctive national character to give the whole thing a theme or flavour. The vast distances involved will present teams facing transcontinental fixtures with significant problems with fatigue and jet lag. The wretched fans might as well give up now on any realistic prospect of watching their team from start to finish as the cost and logistical challenge will likely prove overwhelming.

So why do it? What’s really going on? Gianni Infantino has rejoiced in playing the opening game of the tournament in Uruguay at ‘the stadium where it all began, Montevideo’s mythical Estádio Centenário’ which is not only illiterate (the stadium is not mythical Gianni, I know, I’ve been there) but almost certainly cynically disingenuous. Could it possibly be that the brief South American overture is less a homage to the 1930 tournament and more a ruse that allows Fifa to accelerate the confederation rotation cycle and offer the 2034 tournament to Asia? The three South American ‘hosts’ (of one game) will be compensated with a guaranteed slot at the 2030 tournament. Well, it beats brown envelopes, I suppose. 

Fifa have already announced that they are fast-tracking preparations for the 2034 tournament and Saudi Arabia have been quick off the mark by indicating they will bid. They will likely face a rival in Australia, and possibly China, but Sheikh Salman bin Ebrahim Al Khalifa, president of the Asian Football Confederation, has said that ‘The entire Asian football family will stand united in support of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s momentous initiative’. Infantino has been spotted out and about with MBS and they are evidently buddies. I could be wrong, but I just have a hunch the Saudis may be in with a decent chance. Football Supporters Europe put it more bluntly, stating that the 2030 shenanigans ‘rolls out the red carpet to a host for 2034 with an appalling human rights record’.

But wildly inappropriate hosting is just one of the ways Fifa is destroying the World Cup. The revenue-gouging bloated incubus 48-team format means the generally reasonably exciting qualification stage will be something between a stroll and a canter for the world’s top teams and a non-event for the fans. There will end up being over 100 games to bore us all into a delirious stupor featuring some God-awful teams that shouldn’t be anywhere near a World Cup.

It also saddles the tournament with an unworkable first round where 32 out of the 48 will advance, meaning one win will probably do it. The format also breaks the seven-game barrier which has endured for the tournament’s entire history. The winners in 2026 and thereafter will need to play eight games, including five knock out matches, which, given football’s propensity for upsets in one off high stakes games, significantly reduces the chances of the best team emerging triumphant. One stubborn stonewalling opponent and a bit of bad luck in the pens and you’re out. Think how close Argentina came to blowing it last year.

What looks likely now is that historic footballing nations with strong traditions and established infrastructure will never again be allowed to host the World Cup alone. Joint ventures, which offer so much more scope for patronage and power plays, are the order of the day, punctuated by one-off tournaments in deeply unappealing petro-states whose rulers are looking to wash their reputations and advance their various agendas.

For the humble fans of international football, today’s announcement with all its justificatory progressive pabulum just twists an already deeply embedded knife. We’ve swallowed our principals, suppressed our nausea, and kept watching as the tournament we loved became a globetrotting Ponzi scheme and gilded pawn in a game of global power politics. But for how much longer? The system can only take so much abuse. Are we approaching the endgame?

Watch: Burley asks if Rishi breached Equality Act

The papers might have welcomed Sunak’s conference speech but others aren’t so accommodating. First, the pro-independence Alba party reported the Prime Minister to the police for contempt of court after making fun of Nicola Sturgeon’s legal woes. And this morning, Sky presenter Kay Burley floated the idea that Sunak could have beached equalities legislation after telling the Tory faithful that ‘a man is a man and a woman is a woman and that’s just common sense.’

Burley told Transport Secretary Mark Harper that: ‘I’ve taken the opportunity to look at the Equality Act 2010 this morning which says that people who are going through a gender reassignment should not be discriminated against and you can be at any stage in the transition process so actually what he said is against the laws.’ There then followed an exchange between Harper and Burley as to the difference between sex and gender: no doubt to the delight of No. 10’s spin doctors, all too aware of how the issue polls.

Given the Tory rows over HS2, probably best to be talking about trans not trains eh?

The Pope has gone full Greta Thunberg

At last, the Pope is being taken seriously when he warns of moral degeneracy – well, sort of. When Popes have tried to preach to us about abortion, promiscuity, materialism, drugs and selfish lifestyles, they have widely been treated as old fools or bigoted moralists who want to stop us having fun and being who we are. 

But how miraculous the transformation among enlightened opinion now Pope Francis has issued on exhortation on climate change, warning us that ‘irresponsible’ western lifestyles are ruining the planet. Christine Figueres, former UN executive secretary on climate says she ‘warmly welcomes’ the Pope’s exhortation. Climate campaigner Bill McKibben says ‘the work of spiritual leaders around the world may be our last chance of getting hold of things.’  

The Pope has gone full Greta. It is faintly odd to read him lecturing us on the rate of glacial melting and the absorption of carbon dioxide by the oceans. I am no great reader of Papal exhortations, but do popes generally go into such detailed scientific detail? I guess he has sought advice on what to write, but at points it goes horribly wrong. ‘Droughts and floods, the dried-up lakes, communities swept away by seaquakes and flooding ultimately have the same origin.’ Is Pope Francis really trying to blame the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami on global warming? 

But it gets even worse when he starts addressing social policy. Apparently, ‘in an attempt to simplify reality, there are those who would place responsibility on the poor, since they have many children, and even attempt to resolve the problem by mutilating women in less developed countries’. Apologies if I have missed it, but is there really anyone advocating female genital mutilation as means of tackling climate change? Such a proposal certainly doesn’t seem to feature prominently in the publications of the UK government’s climate change committee. 

He goes on lazily to assert that ‘what is happening is that millions of people are losing their jobs due to different effects of climate change: rising sea levels, droughts and other phenomena affecting the planet have left many people adrift. Conversely, the transition to renewable forms of energy, properly managed, as well as efforts to adapt to the damage caused by climate change, are capable of generating countless jobs in different sectors.’ It is the usual old guff about ‘green jobs’. Try telling that, for example, to European steel workers as they see their jobs draining away to China and India thanks partly to much cheaper coal-fired power there and the absence of carbon levies.

At the same time, the Pope doesn’t seem to want all that much in the way of technological development – his is the ‘hair shirt’ approach to climate change, with western lifestyles to blame: ‘To suppose that all problems in the future will be able to be solved by new technical interventions is a form of homicidal pragmatism, like pushing a snowball downhill.’ He goes on to praise ‘the actions of groups negatively portrayed as “radicalised”’ – by which he presumably means the likes of Just Stop Oil. 

Climate change has become a bandwagon onto which most world leaders, business people and celebrities now feel compelled to clamber. But in the Pope’s case, it is a bandwagon which seems to have a few worryingly loose nuts and bolts.

Why a gangster’s death in Central Asia matters

Such is the globalisation of the modern underworld, that the fate of a gangster you may never have heard of, in a country of which you may know little, may actually matter to you. I’d suggest this is true of the Kyrgyz godfather Kamchy Kolbayev, who was killed on Wednesday by a bullet in the head, during a police operation to arrest him in the capital, Bishkek.

Kolbaev was widely recognised as the most powerful gangster in the Central Asian nation of Kyrgyzstan. Born in 1974, he took fullest advantage of the political and economic disruption that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s to establish a criminal empire that spanned smuggling drugs (notably heroin from Afghanistan), protection racketeering and money laundering. Although he split his time between Bishkek, Moscow and Dubai – and it may be worth noting just how many gangsters from across the post-Soviet space have businesses or residences in the UAE – he was largely able to operate with impunity at home.

He had been arrested and sentenced to 25 years for attempting to kill a rival gangster in 2000, but six years later, after being transferred out of a high-security prison, he was able to escape. Nonetheless, he was able to remain active and at large until 2012, when he was again arrested and charged with establishing a criminal group, possessing weapons and drugs, using force against a government official and kidnapping. Nonetheless, he only received three years for that litany of crimes, his previous escape was essentially ignored, and he was out again in 2014, having been able to continue to run his criminal enterprise from behind bars.

He was then arrested again in 2020, but in connection with allegations that he had been involved in laundering more than 250 million som (£2.3 million), his family reportedly handed the government 49.6 million som (£461,000) and in 2021, he was duly released on what seems to have been an indefinite and unrestricted bail. A bargain, some might say. Since 2011 Kolbaev had been designated under the USA’s Foreign Narcotics Kingpin Designation Act. And since 2014 the State Department had been offering a reward of up to $5 million for information leading to his arrest. But even that didn’t seem to put much of a crimp on his lifestyle.

It is widely assumed that the secret of Kolbaev’s success was not just his reputation for violence (the final, fatal arrest warrant stemmed in part from the suspicion he was behind the murder of another crime boss, Chingyz Zhumagulov, known as ‘Doo’ or ‘Chingyz the Giant’, who was stabbed to death by a fellow prisoner last year) but also his political connections. From the first, after all, Kolbaev cultivated senior government figures. In 2007, it was the then-Interior Minister who personally intervened to have the arrest warrant for his prison escape waived.

The official line on Kulbayev’s death is that when police tried to serve an arrest warrant, he and his bodyguards shot at them, and he was killed in the ensuing firefight. Some have inevitably questioned whether Kolbaev would really have taken on heavily-armed police special forces in armoured vehicles, and there is the inevitable suspicion that he was marked for death because he knew too much and was potentially embarrassing. He had, for example, been seen last month attending the wedding of the son of the former speaker of parliament, along with ex-president Sooronbai Jeenbekov and the former deputy head of the Customs Service.

Why, though, does any of this matter outside Kyrgyzstan? First of all, it marks a further decline of the traditional Soviet Vorovskoi mir, the ‘Thieves World.’ Largely emerging in the Gulag labour camps, this ruthless subculture, with its own customs and even language, has largely disappeared from Russia. Instead, its last bastions have been in Central Asia and the South Caucasus. Kolbaev had bought into the Vorovskoi mir and in 2006 had been ‘crowned’ as a Vor v zakone (‘thief within the code’) with the support of Vyacheslav ‘Yaponchik’ Ivankov and Aslan ‘Ded Khasan’ Usoyan, two of the most powerful and famous vory of their generation. Ivankov was assassinated in 2009, Usoyan in 2013, and although there are lesser vory still around in Kyrgyzstan, this is really the end of the Vorovskoi mir there, too.

If the vory were the traditionalist Don Corleones of the post-Soviet underworld, their successors, known as avtoritety, ‘authorities’, are criminal entrepreneurs. They are typically flexible businessmen happy to do whatever makes the most money safely. Kyrgyzstan has played a significant role as a transit country along the so-called Northern Route for trafficking Afghan heroin, into and through Russia. With it becoming much harder to move drugs to Europe via Russia, as previous routes via Ukraine are now closed, this trade is shrinking. Kolbaev had been resistant to pressures to develop both new narcotic businesses (with a growing domestic supply of synthetic drugs) and new trafficking routes, and his death is likely to accelerate these processes. Kyrgyz criminals are already working with their Kazakh counterparts to expand routes to the Caspian Sea and then towards Europe via the South Caucasus and Turkey or, if trade on the Black Sea recovers, via Romania and Ukraine. Any temporary dislocations to heroin routes supplying Europe and the UK will be quickly repaired.

Finally, Kolbaev was allegedly opposed to working with Russian criminals to smuggle sanctioned materials and components northwards (albeit not out of any moral or political compunctions, just a concern that this might draw greater attention to his drug operations). His death opens the way to more organised sanctions busting, especially given that there have been plausible suggestions that UKMK, Kyrgyzstan’s notorious State Committee for National Security or political police, are involved in this illegal business. Its head, Kamchybek Tashiev, recently called for tough actions against gangsters – such as Kolbaev.

The rise of more entrepreneurial godfathers, new drug routes to Europe and more active sanctions-busting on behalf of the Kremlin. Given that this is a country which the Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index rates as more corrupt even than Russia, what may seem like a bloody victory for law and order could prove to be the opposite.

There’s nothing conservative about Sunak’s smoking ban

Is Rishi Sunak the least Tory Tory PM ever? He’s fundamentally Californian at heart: witness his terrible policy to ban cigarettes to anyone born from 2009 which was announced to great fanfare at conference. 

Fortunately, I belong to the lucky generation that can still kill itself with tobacco, though I write as a failed smoker. Try as I might, I can’t get the hang of it, and the times I tried left me with little doubt that it’s not good for you. I gave up the effort some time ago. But the thing about being grown up is that you can do things that are legal but not particularly healthy, like drinking to excess or smoking. The premise of the rules on these things is that we are rational enough to take risks on board and make our own minds up. We may wish that everyone should, after Aristotle, go for moderation in all things, but if we don’t, well, silly us. But that’s no longer how a Tory government operates. You thought the nanny state was a lefty thing? Nope. Rishi has not only taken on that mantle (or cape, I suppose, for nannies) but is bragging about it. 

How we laughed when the control freaks in New Zealand decided to implement the phasing out of cigarettes; typical of small-country authoritarianism, we thought. But now it’s coming here – obviously, with the best of intentions – how do Tories square it with their own perception of themselves as the party of personal liberty? 

Rishi likes to posit himself as a boy Thatcher. Well, I have no doubt whatever that Mrs T, even if Denis didn’t enter the equation, wouldn’t have any truck with this approach, which is that the government is going to make you healthy whether you want it or not. 

Already, it’s quite hard to find anywhere to smoke in the open air, as if somehow you could poison the aether by smoking outdoors. And the preposterous rules about plain packaging and keeping cigarettes out of sight behind iron shutters in shops, like some frightful contraband, still seem bizarre. (I mourn the old cigarette packet; home of brilliant design.) The cost is prohibitive; I don’t know how anyone on benefits can actually afford to smoke, though they probably need the relaxant effect more than anyone. It’s become a rich people’s indulgence, though for the really wealthy, it’s probably less shocking to take cocaine. 

The point is: we are already pricing cigarettes out of the reach of the young and badly off. We’re penalising smokers by driving them outside, and then banning them from smoking near buildings: smoking makes you a pariah among the young. Thus, coercion is not actually necessary given that the nudge effect of anti-smoking policies is more like an armlock than a nudge. 

As I say, effectively banning people from smoking to create the Smoke Free Generation is an authoritarian, illiberal thing to do. And I don’t suppose that Labour, illiberal and authoritarian in its own way, would reverse the change. 

That’s what contemporary Conservatism has come to: compulsory clean living. In other words, Rishi isn’t a conservative at all. Personally I had my doubts about him when he put duty on drink in proportion to its strength, thereby making port more expensive than New Zealand white, which, I felt, said it all. He’s not a drinker, obviously. In demeanour as in habits, he’s essentially a Californian banker who’s been forever marked by his time at Goldman Sachs. He’s also, I reckon, perhaps the most two-dimensional PM ever, with no obvious tastes or habits that mark him out as a Tory. Even the craven zealots at Tory conference are finding him hard to love. I’m not a sectarian in party politics, but no wonder the Tories have lost their way. A party that seeks to ban cigarettes would be unrecognisable to Winston Churchill. 

Can post-liberalism save the Conservative party?

‘We – conservatives of left and right, all those who believe in the old way – need to win this battle, to restore the conservative normative as the proper basis for our culture and society, with a restored “covenantal” understanding at the heart of families, neighbourhoods and the nation.’

So the MP Danny Kruger writes in his recently published Covenant, where he also states that ‘To strengthen family life and restore the oikos we need good housing in the right places, jobs that sustain the home, and a decent system of care for children and dependent adults.’

Kruger was recently described in the New Statesman as being ‘at the heart of an influential strain of Tory thinking: post-liberalism’, and indeed one of the problems with defining this wing of the party is with the term ‘post-liberal’. This has been in the ether since Phillip Blond’s Red Tory was cited as an influence on David Cameron (although in reality Red Toryism is almost the exact opposite of Osbornomics). But beyond meaning culturally Right and economically Left, I’m not entirely sure what it means, especially as it seems to have a slightly different definition on either side of the Atlantic.

I’m certainly sympathetic to post-liberalism. I believe that high levels of inequality are a sign of an unhealthy society; government should be aimed at helping the ‘average man’ enjoy a decent living rather than just focusing on aspiration; deindustrialisation had a devastating impact on many British cities and the decline of working-class men’s wages has a particularly negative social influence (the husband:wife income ratio is heavily linked to marriage and divorce rates); the sexual revolution has had a downward effect on happiness and wellbeing, and is at least partly responsible for rising anxiety rates in teens; married parents are on average a huge advantage for children and this should be a social norm; despite what some people claim, prohibition does work in reducing consumption and this should inform policies on gambling, drugs, alcohol and porn. 

National identity is a positive force, and a nation-state is the best means of delivering a safe, egalitarian society with a strong welfare state, Denmark being a good model (a country where adolescents do not seem to have the same anxiety problem as in the English-speaking world, despite having the same technology). Most of all, Christianity plays an important role in the social glue, encouraging prosocial behaviour and suppressing the natural egotism, selfishness and narcissism of the rich (although, to add to my confusion, Denmark is very unreligious).

But I’m not sure that makes me anything other than a conservative, and I’m not entirely convinced by the economic solutions offered by self-identified post-liberals.

A few years ago I contributed to a book on Blue Labour along with various sympathisers including John Milbank, Frank Field, David Goodhart and, of all people, David Lammy (an eclectic bunch, it’s fair to say). I wrote then that the Left won the culture wars, the Right the economic wars, ‘and yet the interest attracted by Blond’s Red Toryism and Maurice Glasman’s socially conservative Blue Labour suggest that many feel the wrong sides won the wrong arguments’. 

Inequality was something that troubled me, not for the progressive reason that it was inherently wrong but that it was unhealthy for a society and not the sort of environment most of us want to live in. I wrote:

This is not just morally dubious, and possibly linked to levels of social disorder, but unsustainable, leading to ever more unfathomable levels of personal debt as people on modest incomes try to keep up with spiralling costs, housing costs aggravated by the desperate need people feel to escape the worst aspects of social collapse. Capitalism, as it currently functions, is not working for enough people, and the ordinary, suburban Tory voters who kept the party in power have never had less in common with the David Camerons of this world.

It is because of housing, especially, that those natural supporters of Right-wing economic liberalism feel disenchanted. While the salaries of the super-rich have grown ever more alien to mere mortals, ordinary middle-class families find themselves unable to live within miles of Westminster, and those in the squeezed middle seem little better off than they were a generation ago. They might have smaller gadgets, but they also have smaller homes. Even former Daily Telegraph editor Charles Moore was left to lament in 2011 that he had lost his faith in Thatcherism. 

He wrote: “A society in which credit is very restricted is one in which new people cannot rise. How many small businesses could start or first homes be bought without a loan? But when loans become the means by which millions finance mere consumption – that is different. And when the banks that look after our money take it away, lose it and then, because of government guarantee, are not punished themselves, something much worse happens. It turns out – as the Left always claims – that a system purporting to advance the many has been perverted in order to enrich the few.”

Moore is one of many conservative thinkers who have suggested that, obsessed with economic liberalism, conservatism had lost its moral bearings. He was writing in response to the closure of the News of the World, a paper that had enjoyed a long and mutually beneficial relationship with the Conservative party. And yet this organ of working-class Toryism published inconsequential rubbish and borderline porn, spreading poison and sleaze, so that, in Moore’s words, “much of what he chose to print on those presses has been a great disappointment to those of us who believe in free markets because they emancipate people. The Right has done itself harm by covering up for so much brutality.”

Individualist conservatism, like capitalism, values freedom, yet it was always dependent on firmly established moral codes, and in particular Christianity, to (gently) enforce behaviour; just as capitalism cannot survive without trust and honesty, so individual freedom cannot last without some internalised moral order. Modern conservatism’s failure is reflected in the popularity of atheistic libertarianism, a philosophy that proposes a moral bubble which they expect nothing but self-interest to fill; instead, as we have seen in recent years, once the church is undermined, the state soon becomes the church.

Part of the Blue Labour attraction is that it offers the possibility of much-need social improvement outside of the state, especially the central state. This is in tune with current thinking. One of the most influential books of recent years, Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone, popularised the concept of social capital, a view that sees relationships, trust and civic virtue as a capital like any other form. Social capital is heavily linked to a society’s ability to reduce inequality and fight poverty. 

So while many people would agree that Britain’s high inequality levels are a bad thing, both morally and practically, the state alone cannot reduce them. Unless there is an increase in Britain’s social capital, in the levels of community involvement, in social trust, in virtuous, selfless behaviour, in short in relationships, inequality will continue to remain high. As Britain has become more individual-obsessed, as institutions such as the family, the church, the nation and, though conservatives are reluctant to include them, trades unions, have become weaker, this reduction in social capital has disproportionately harmed the poor.

So far conservative analysis of social problems has done much to expose the damage wrought by fatherlessness, but fails to acknowledge the converse– that Britain’s economy makes it increasingly difficult for a “working man”, to use such an archaic term, to support a family. Both Left and Right carry a flame of nostalgia for the three decades after the Second World War, and much of that derives from the social stability that came from this historically unique situation.

I wrote that a good ten years ago, although I’m still not sure whether I would qualify as post-liberal, especially as I’m not convinced by the economic solutions. I’d like to be, but that’s a different thing.

I’m not sure how much we can do to revive post-industrial towns that owed their wealth to the industrial revolution, although building proper transport infrastructure would certainly help — every time I take a train in the north of England I’m wowed by how terrible they are, especially compared to the investment we’ve seen in London. I’m also not by nature anti-elitist, as many now are on the post-liberal Right; I just think current elites are susceptible to bad ideas they picked up at university and which social pressure maintains (Rob Henderson’s ‘luxury beliefs’, now being cited by British cabinet ministers). Like many post-liberals, I’m also a massive hypocrite in my lifestyle, which is urban, cosmopolitan and dominated by similarly university-educated people. If I’m honest, I’m much more at home in Hampstead than in Hartlepool, the two areas which often get lumped together for reasons of alliteration.

On healthcare, I’m more Thatcherite than almost any MP is prepared to admit, since I believe the Beveridge model is clearly not as good as the German Bismarck system, and I find the British reverence for the NHS strange. I also think that the state has often been the driver of social decay — the new housing system in the 1970s, by focusing on ‘need’ rather than the old waiting list, accelerated anti-social behaviour in poorer areas. I’d like to see the state invest in affordable housing, but prioritising the working poor, rewarding neighbourliness and ideally helping them to become owners rather than permanent tenants with subsidised loans. As for education, I’d be quite open to more privatisation through school vouchers (how this would work in practice I’m not sure, but I have no ideological objection to it). 

I’m sentimentally Red Tory, in that I dislike overt displays of wealth and want a more egalitarian society, but I’m sceptical of the state’s ability to do a lot of these things (especially when it is controlled by our opponents). I also have a visceral dislike of enforced community, especially when it comes to putting people in uniforms.

I also tend to think, and this is a less fashionable opinion, that economic freedom makes people nicer. Countries with long histories of free market capitalism tend to be more trusting and open, while those with traditions of either peasant or socialist economies produce the opposite social norm, because the latter encourages more zero-sum thinking: compare the Netherlands v Russia. The free market is also better at easing some social tensions, especially racial segregation, than the state. But I also believe that Christianity had a huge impact on trust, and Right-liberals are mistaken to believe that economic liberalisation alone will deliver the society they desire.

I’m not entirely sure that the state can deliver many of the things social conservatives want. Reduced crime is certainly one, and we also have an extremely family-unfriendly tax system, which would surely be reformed under the Kruger regime, but a lot of things are made worse by the state; this is especially true of housing, hampered by things such as the Town and Country Planning Act. Indeed many of the dysfunctional aspects of British life have their origin in the post-war settlement which the Blue Labour movement is particularly fond of. Even things like industrial strategies can end up making us worse off.

There is also the counter to post-liberalism that we’re not individualistic enough; as a society we are hugely over-regulated, right down to our opinions (as Kruger notes). Talk of ‘community’ feels good, but in reality the state is bad at fostering something that better evolves organically. It’s hard to re-create civil society, especially without the role played by the churches.

Yet the banking crisis, the sluggishness of the British economy since then, and the effects of government cuts to local services, have certainly led a lot of people to question the free market. There is also the sense that big business does not have our best interests at heart, exemplified by criticism of water companies.

Kruger is based in Wiltshire, the source of the three rivers which nourish the south of England and home to the oldest remains of ancient civilisation in Britain, and he starts his lament that ‘Today, the Avons and the Kennet, like almost all the rivers of England, are low in volume because we extract so much water for our homes and businesses; they are full of artificial nutrients that choke them with weeds, and they are regularly flooded with raw sewage.’ 

From a practical point of view, because of the great realignment, it makes sense for the Conservative party to lean right on culture and left on economics, in Matt Goodwin’s phrase.

But I’m also wary of trusting ‘the people’: the average voter doesn’t just lean left on economics, they’re virtually communists, with ‘majority support for a (re)nationalisation of energy companies, the railways, water and bus companies’ and ‘majority support for rent controls and various price controls.’

That doesn’t sound ideal to me, but I suspect that for many Tories, what really matters is culture, economics being a secondary consideration, which is why they’re prepared to concede the issue to win the low-hanging fruit of Red Wall voters. And parties tend to go where the voters are.

This article first appeared on Ed West’s Substack, Wrong Side of History.

The western hypocrisy about Pakistan’s migrant crisis

Pakistan has told all unauthorised Afghan migrants that they must leave the country by the end of October. 

The announcement was made on Tuesday, and affects as many 1.7 million men, women and children. The Pakistan government prefers to describe them as ‘illegal’ migrants rather than asylum seekers, and justifies the decision because of an increase in terrorist attacks along the Pakistan-Afghan border. There have been 24 suicide bombings in this region since the start of 2023, and the Pakistan military says more than half of the terrorist attacks were committed by Afghan citizens, most of whom belonged to either the Islamic State or the Pakistan Taliban.

According to the BBC, one of the very few Western media outlets to report the expulsion order, Pakistan’s government eventually wants all Afghan to leave, even those who have official Pakistan residence cards. 

Pakistan’s Interior Minister Sarfraz Bugti has given the Afghans a month to go. 

‘If they do not go,’ he said, ‘then all the law enforcement agencies in the provinces or federal government will be utilised to deport them.’

Bugti also stated that the businesses and homes of ‘illegal aliens will be confiscated, and illegal business operators and their facilitators will be prosecuted.’

The Taliban have criticised the decision. ‘The behaviour of Pakistan towards Afghan refugees is unacceptable,’ said Zabihullah Mujahid, a spokesman for the regime in Kabul. ‘Afghan refugees are not involved in Pakistan’s security problems.’ 

While the Taliban called on Pakistan to respect the human rights of its citizens, the response was muted from the United Nations.  

Volker Türk, the organisation’s High Commissioner for Human Rights – and a vocal critic of the British government’s attempt to tackle illegal immigration – attended a conference on Wednesday in Madrid to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In his speech Turk urged Europe to eradicate racism and do more to champion the rights of migrants and refugees. ‘We know that if there is political will they can be managed and resolved if people and states can overcome disputes and share the work of building a path toward solutions,’ he said. ‘I hope 2023 will be remembered as the turning point that renewed our commitment to solving challenges through human rights.’ 

He made no reference to Pakistan’s expulsion of 1.7 million Afghans, and nor has he, at the time of writing, commented on his Twitter page, an outlet he uses frequently to warn about the perils of climate change. 

In a statement, Amnesty international said it was ’deeply concerning that the situation of Afghan refugees in Pakistan is not receiving due international attention.’ 

One might regard the UN lack of response as astonishing, were it not for the fact, as I wrote recently, the organisation was long ago been captured by the progressive left.  

In his speech in Madrid, Turk deplored the recent ‘despicable incidents’ of Quran burning in Europe; he didn’t appear to mention the Christians in Nigeria who in the last week have been killed or kidnapped. This doesn’t fit his world view, which, like all progressives, is that it’s always the West to blame. 

Imagine if, for example, France announced in the wake of a terrorist attack that it was expelling all Algerians. There would be uproar across the world, and particularly in the UN. So why has the western response to Pakistan’s announcement been one of apathy?  

The decision to expel the 1.7 million migrants and refuges will almost certainly have ramifications for Europe. In 2022 there were 129,000 asylum applications lodged by Afghans in the EU, second only to those from Syria. There are also large numbers of Afghans entering Europe illegally, crossing the Mediterranean into Italy, as noted by Frontex, the EU’s border agency. According to Britain’s Refugee Council, Afghans comprise the largest number of people crossing the Channel in small boats. 

As Pakistan began expelling its Afghan migrants and refugees, the EU finally put the seal on a deal that the Guardian described as a ‘historic agreement on how member states will deal with a sudden increase in the number of people seeking asylum’. The deal has been three years in the making and its aim is to establish an efficient framework to manage a sudden mass influx of migrants and refugees. 

It may not be long before the deal is put to the test as 1.7 million Afghans expelled from Pakistan search for a new home. 

Rishi Sunak reported to the police over Sturgeon joke

Rishi Sunak’s conference speech yesterday, in which he sought to claim the mantle of change, has received a reasonably welcome reception in the papers this morning. The Times front page says this ‘son of a pharmacist’ is casting himself as Thatcher’s heir, while the Telegraph focused on the PM’s ‘huge decisions to change Britain’.

It appears that not everyone enjoyed the speech though, particularly up in Scotland. After the speech, it was reported that Chris McEleny, the general secretary of the pro-independence Alba party led by Alex Salmond, has reported the PM to Police Scotland alleging contempt of court. He did so after Sunak made the following jibe at Nicola Sturgeon:

‘Nicola Sturgeon wanted to go down in the history books as the woman who broke up our country. But it now looks like she may go down for very different reasons.’

McEleny explained: ‘The prime minister is commenting on and making an assumption about a live Police Scotland investigation. In Scotland, contempt applies from arrest, not from charging.

Operation Branchform is investigating serious matters of the utmost importance the Scotland and trust in politics. It is too important a matter to allow interference from the prime minister in this act of contempt when many people await the facts of Police Scotland’s investigation.’

Scottish politics continues to be the gift that keeps on giving…

Women are obsessed with the Romans, too

Infamy! Infamy! That was my response to the TikTok trend about ancient Rome. Women asked their partners how often they thought about the Roman Empire. Many men admitted they thought about it every day; three times a day, said one. One confessed he was obsessed with ‘aqueducts and the fact that they had concrete that could harden’.

The scoundrels who came up with the idea should have asked women. Because they, too, are obsessed with ancient Rome.

Professor Mary Beard told me: ‘I must confess that I probably think about the Roman Empire about 50 times a day… but then it is what I do. But I don’t think about macho men in military kit or orating in togas. Sure, I do think about emperors. But I tend to think more about the women and the slaves and the ordinary. I think women do tend to see a bit beneath the surface.’

That’s the thing about the Roman Empire. It was so huge and impressive and lasted for so long that you can pick and choose which bit of it to daydream over.

The classicist Daisy Dunn says: ‘I think about the Roman Empire embarrassingly often – not just when I’m writing about it. I’ll be at something as English as a picnic when I look at my sandwich and suddenly ask my friends: “Did you know the Romans had sandwiches? And have you seen the paintings of pizza at Pompeii?” The Roman Empire was far from paradise for most women, but the food was good, the poetry exciting, and public architecture was a source of pride, which is often more than can be said today.’

Men probably do think about the Roman Empire more than women. But only because until recently men – disgracefully – were more likely to study classics. At my prep school in the 1980s, the girls weren’t even allowed to learn Greek.

That’s all changed. Katie Walker, a Latin teacher, who studied classics at Westminster School and Cambridge, is just as obsessed with the Roman Empire as male classicists. ‘I’m rarely not thinking about the Roman Empire,’ she says. ‘Today, I’ve had a conversation with my builder about how my cellar has a barrel-vaulted ceiling just like the Roman baths in Estepona; a chat with my GP uncle about the derivation of sacrum as in the sacrum bone; listened to the Gladiator theme tune in the car; and thought about Horace’s Epistle to Maecenas, where he says he’d give back everything to his patron if he needed to in order to be free. I’m thinking about whether to accept a job which pays well but might clip my wings.’

As for whether women think about it as much as men? ‘That’s so 20th century! It’s not a question of gender but whether you understand what the Romans did for us,’ Katie says.

Men are bound to fixate on the more butch aspects of the Romans: the centurions, the gladiators and, oh, those uniforms. Because of my interest in Latin, I think most days about the journey of certain Latin words into English.

Meanwhile, Justin Warshaw KC, a family law barrister, can’t stop thinking about the legal use of Latin. ‘I can’t remember the last day I didn’t think about some aspect of the Graeco-Roman world,’ he says. ‘At work, I might be making an ex parte application, reading inter partes correspondence, looking at old law reports with their references to divorces a mensa et thoro, drafting dum casta clauses in agreements or remembering that decrees nisi were replaced by conditional orders last year. Then suddenly I’ll find myself thinking about the connection between words. Is there a link between sedition, with its Latin root related to seats, and στάσις, meaning a revolution in ancient Greek and bus stop in modern Greek?’

As St Paul wrote in his First Epistle to the Corinthians: ‘When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things.’ The same applies to Roman Empire obsessives and what they think about as they grow up. 

David Horspool, history editor of the Times Literary Supplement, says: ‘I hit peak Romanitas in the days when I read Asterix religiously. I always thought those Romans were crazy. Nowadays, I like to spend just as much time wondering why, for instance, if Alexander the Great was listening to Aristotle, all those lessons on philosophy, nature and good character made him think, “I know, I’ll conquer the world”?’

All Roman Empire obsessives, whether male or female, can at least agree on one thing: the only way forwards is backwards.

An ode to the BlackBerry

The demise of tech plays out first as disorientation, then entertainment. We’ve reached the latter stage with the BlackBerry, the now-defunct Canadian harbinger of global smartphone addiction. A new film out this month charts its spectacular rise and fall: young folk, look up from your iPhones, and learn how in its Noughties heyday, the BlackBerry was beloved by Obama, Beyoncé and Madonna. With its seductively clicky Qwerty keyboard, it came to control 45 per cent of the mobile phone market. Then it plummeted to today’s share, zero.

BlackBerry the movie had a particular poignancy for me, because I hung on to my final BlackBerry phone, the KeyOne, until well past its cultural sell-by date. Last May, in fact. Like my earlier BlackBerries, the KeyOne had grown old and begun to let me down at important moments. I went to the wrong book launch because when I tried to check the venue, it couldn’t open the invitation. Late one night I stood shivering in the street while it repeatedly failed to call an Uber. Friends and strangers marvelled at its quaintness, the tech equivalent of a Penny Farthing. But this was no way to live. 

A friend who had also stuck with their BlackBerry through thick and thin had gone over to the iPhone, and told me how happy he was now: take the plunge, he urged, you won’t look back. In the end, the device took the decision for me. One day, shortly after I had been complaining about it, the BlackBerry disappeared with all my data somewhere between my sister’s car and my flat. I looked everywhere, but I never saw it again.

The film drags us back to the glory days, a souped-up vision of BlackBerry’s early success: lovable, hard-gaming 1990s tech nerds Mike Lazaridis and Doug Fregin conceive of a phone that can do email, and team up with Jim Balsillie, a foul-mouthed, ass–kicking businessman. Together, their company Research In Motion and the ‘CrackBerry’ conquer the world. Nemesis comes in 2007 in the form of Steve Jobs and his touchscreen iPhone. It panics BlackBerry into producing its biggest disaster, the Storm: a horrid, slow-moving hybrid of a touchscreen that simulated a clicky button, in a nod to BlackBerry’s signature keyboard. The slogan was ‘Press and be impressed’. People weren’t. It was glitchy. They returned it in droves. The rot had set in, and both Lazaridis and Balsillie resigned in 2012. The brand kept on, chaotically, until it finally pulled support for its earlier OS devices in January last year.

As the movie tells it, the public abandoned the BlackBerry, jumping towards something that more expertly targets the collective id. But what it leaves out is the significant section of the public that clung stubbornly to the device, through new models and sluggish updates, until at last the riptide of tech dragged it away from them for ever. Google ‘I miss my BlackBerry’ and you’ll uncover hosts of online mourners. ‘I miss the long battery life,’ lamented one, ‘I miss the keyboard.’ The CBC anchorman who recently interviewed the real Jim Balsillie voiced a sense of abandonment. ‘I’m one of those people who tried to hang on to BlackBerry as long as I could,’ he said. ‘I kept buying the new models, but after a while it kinda got disappointing… what went wrong?’ Balsillie – more sunnily philosophical in real life – replied with a gnomic proverb about how the victor in a fight between an alligator and a bear depends on the terrain.

New tech generally only presents itself in terms of gains: faster, easier, smarter, brighter, better. But the human beings shunted from one technology to another frequently experience loss. Take the letter form, for example. My generation was perhaps the last to use letters routinely for long, expressive communications. The thump of an envelope on the doormat signalled a host of other sensory experiences: the thickness and weight; the stamp, which was sometimes interesting; the texture of the paper; the sender’s handwriting; the rogue addition of drawings, coffee stains, kisses, rain, tears. You can still write and send a long letter if you want to, of course, but the cultural river in which a personal letter once swam has shrunk to a creek. The price of a Royal Mail first-class stamp has just jumped yet again, to £1.25, while delivery times are increasingly erratic: fewer people will use the service, which will further exacerbate its failings. In contrast, an email is free and instant. Still, the shift from one form of communication to another has been a trade, not simply a gain.

It has always been thus. With the proliferation of streaming channels, we surrendered the cultural coherence that came from a nation watching the same few programmes. The demise of the cassette recorder meant the disappearance of that heartfelt gift, the personalised mix-tape. The shift away from vinyl records diminished the once-potent art of the album cover. 

Sometimes new tech is objectively worse. The BlackBerry’s keyboard was perfect for firing off long emails without errors; touchscreen keypads, in contrast, are laborious to use and sloppy in outcome. The product might still have a small but loyal market if only it had held steady and married state-of-the-art apps to its distinctive keyboard.

BlackBerry isn’t just a nostalgic tech romp – it’s a warning about how to burn a brand with a misjudged leap forward. Elon Musk should take note: he’s already junked the Twitter bluebird for that weird X, which he now wants to transform into an ‘everything app’ with ‘unlimited interactivity’ and various payment systems. Tech is performing another of its seismic shifts, this time from new tech to mean tech. Where the former yearned to hook us, the latter wants to fleece us as well. 

With new tech, we got things we wanted while sometimes losing other things we liked. Now we’re losing things we liked while getting other things we never wanted. Many of us just want to hang on to the free, no-frills classic Twitter we used to know. It’s really time the dons of tech learned how to make a space for people who want to stay in the slow lane. If they don’t, someone’s going to lose out. I hope it’s them, but I have a nasty feeling it could be us.

Hell is a heat pump

‘So, as Rishi Sunak has announced that we’re now allowed to keep installing new gas boilers till 2035, and they last about 15 years, that means I’ll be able to keep a gas boiler till 2050, so I might even be allowed to die with a gas boiler still going in my house, and may never have to switch to an ugly, expensive air-source heat pump which makes an annoying fridge-like hum in the garden, vibrates through the bedroom wall and keeps the house at a weird, lukewarm temperature all day and night.’

I think many of us were making that kind of calculation last month. Were we tempted by Sunak’s raised offer of a government grant of £7,500 for switching to a heat pump, up from £5,000, to reward us for doing our bit towards net zero? I don’t think so. The grant doesn’t get close to covering the full cost. You don’t even get the grant until the expensive work is completed, and the paperwork is a 12-hour job in itself, requiring a valid EPC certificate with ‘no outstanding recommendations’ for improved cavity-wall, window or roof insulation. So you must also spend a fortune on sealing your house from all possible draughts. Even my most eco-minded friends have not yet installed a heat pump. The government policy for Britain to install 600,000 a year from 2028 has a long way to go. At the moment, the rate is just 70,000 per year. 

I asked my plumber whether I should consider a heat pump for my small Victorian end-of-terrace house, and he shook his head. ‘It would mean sealing all your windows and doubling the size of the radiators. We do install heat pumps, but we need our customers to know the truth. I don’t think they’re the future, to be honest. I think new technology will come along, involving hydrogen with just a bit of gas.’ 

I chatted to a friend in Kent who’s in the middle of heat-pump hell. Hers was installed by a firm in Essex. It worked bearably at first, although it only heated the house to 16 degrees so they had to wear jerseys, and the water was only just hot enough for a bath. But after its first service, ‘it started making the most dreadful noise, as if it was about to explode’. The installer blamed the maker, the maker blamed the installer, there was found to be ‘air in the system’, the refrigerant had leaked out and the pipework hadn’t been properly insulated. With the installer and manufacturer still stuck in a cycle of blame, my friend has been without a functioning heat pump for six months. She is now reliant on her wood-burning stoves, her immersion heater and her oil-powered Aga for back-up. 

Alan in a semi in central England, meanwhile, is being driven mad by the tonal hum from his neighbour’s heat pump mounted on the adjoining wall. ‘The noise emanating through the cupboards and walls into my bedroom, a low hum, can be ruinous,’ he tells me, and he dreads the moment at 6.30 a.m. when the neighbours turn up their system to run their hot water. Alan is nervous about making a noise complaint to Environmental Health because if you do, and you then want to sell your house, the noise complaint must be declared, and this will severely jeopardise the sale. 

Do you get lower electricity bills if you replace your gas boiler with a heat pump? No, says the sceptic Andrew Montford, director of Net Zero Watch, who’s written a paper re-debunking every ‘debunking of heat-pump myths’ in the heat-pump zealot Jan Rosenow’s paper on the subject; a mini-war is taking place online. ‘You get three kw/h of heat for every kw/h of electricity you put in,’ he explains to me, ‘but what you’re not told is that electricity is four times the price of gas, and will go up again because wind farms will steadily make the grid less efficient.’ 

Are they about the same size as an air-conditioning unit? ‘No – mine is much larger,’ says Alex in west London, who has refurbished her house at vast expense, with underfloor heating on all floors, and has hidden the heat pump behind the studio at the far end of her 80ft garden because it’s ‘as large as a chest freezer’, and needs to be out of doors so that the air can circulate. But she is pleased and proud to be doing her bit to save the planet.

Armed with these endorsements of my heat-pump scepticism, I then chatted to two heat-pump zealots and found my scepticism beginning to founder. Well, not at first, when Mark Hewitt, who runs a company installing heat pumps, gave me the full ‘wild fires and floods in Greece’ lecture (‘This is what we have brought upon ourselves by combusting gas’). But then he explained that, actually, you don’t need to enlarge your radiators (‘You might just need to improve your rattly, leaky windows’) and that a heat pump can be small, and quiet, and in fact ‘works beautifully, as beautifully as a fridge’, which is ‘an amazingly stable piece of technology, the most reliable domestic appliance’. That’s true – about fridges.

‘But heat pumps are ugly and I don’t want one in my small garden,’ I plead. ‘Ugly!’ he replies. ‘Cars are ugly. Bins are ugly. But we live with those.’ True enough. Installing a heat pump, he says, is the one big thing I can do in my life to address carbon. ‘But is it true I’ll need to close my bedroom window at night? I like a cold house at night and hate the idea of “keeping the heat pump on a lukewarm setting 24/7”.’ ‘The theory that you have to keep all the windows closed is pure propaganda,’ he said, but admitted heat pumps do work best if they’re kept on all the time.

Christoph Grossbaier, who runs a firm installing heat pumps, tells me they double up as air-conditioning units. He also softens me up with the suggestion of starting out with a ‘hybrid’ model: install a heat pump, but keep your gas boiler so you can top it up. The only problem with doing this is that you forfeit your right to the government grant. 

Even if I were offered a heat pump totally free of charge, I’d still have a dilemma. Is a slightly more annoying and less effective heating system worth the genuine glow of good citizenship it would bring? I’m not sure which way I’d jump. But when this would cost years of savings, for a technology that might soon be superseded, I’m not going to be one of the government’s hoped-for 600,000 installers.