Parliament needs protecting from foreign infiltration

The suggestion this weekend that an alleged Chinese spy is a British-born parliamentary researcher – leading a policy group aimed at countering the growing threat from Beijing – has sent shockwaves through Westminster and beyond. The individual denies the accusations and says he is ‘completely innocent’ but MPs who know him and many of us who interacted with him are obviously concerned. 

The investigation into the alleged spy is still ongoing, but regardless of the police’s findings Xi Jinping’s regime has long been running a campaign to influence, infiltrate and intimidate people abroad, with the aim of silencing critics and subverting democracy.  These concerns have gained particular prominence in the UK. Last year, MI5 sounded the alarm about the apparent threat from Beijing’s agents in Westminster – when it alleged that a UK-based lawyer Christine Lee was involved in ‘political interference activities’ (Lee strongly denies wrongdoing and is suing the MI5 over the allegations.) Earlier this summer parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee warned that China has penetrated ‘every sector’ of the UK economy in a ‘whole of state’ assault, and that the UK’s response is ‘completely inadequate’.

I myself have been no stranger to Beijing’s bullying and intimidation tactics. Ever since I was denied entry to Hong Kong in 2017 and co-founded Hong Kong Watch later that year, I have received dozens of anonymous, threatening letters sent to my home. Some of my neighbours have also been contacted, urging them to monitor my movements. My mother, who lives in a different part of the country, has received letters asking her to tell her son to ‘shut up’.  

I believe I was removed from the Conservative party candidates list on the direct interference of the Chinese embassy in London in 2017. I had been on the approved parliamentary candidates list for many years, stood as a candidate in Durham in 2005, and had been invited to reapply for the list after the general election in 2017. A week after being denied entry to Hong Kong I was informed by party headquarters that I was no longer on the list. The explanations they gave made little sense to me, and I subsequently learned months later from sources in the party’s headquarters that the  Chinese ambassador Liu Xiaoming placed a call to the party about me in 2017.  

In 2018 I was the target of verbal abuse at the Conservative party conference by a Chinese state TV reporter. And in 2022 I was threatened by the Hong Kong authorities with a prison sentence for violating Hong Kong’s National Security Law through my activities in London. Yet I never imagined I may need to be on my guard talking to British parliamentary staff. 

The government and parliament clearly must act to improve security to counter the threat from foreign influence. The intelligence agencies should be applauded for exposing the allegations against the individuals in this case, and we can only trust now that the law will take its course. But lessons must be learned as well.

There is no magic bullet when it comes to foreign infiltration. Not everyone who advocates for engagement with China or for greater nuance in our China policy is an agent of Beijing. There is room for debate and difference over the question of our relationship with China – there must be in a democracy. Most importantly, we must be careful not to veer into anti-Chinese racism, which would be wrong and would play into Beijing’s narrative that critics of the CCP regime are anti-China. We must also avoid prejudicing or penalising exiled diaspora communities who have fled the CCP. Hong Kongers, Tibetans, Uyghurs and Chinese dissidents must continue to be warmly welcomed in parliament. If the allegations made against this British individual are true, they show that the battle with the CCP is not a matter of race but of values, and that the CCP is prepared to use any means and any person to pursue its interests.  

But there are clear steps we must take. 

Parliamentary staff recruited to work with particularly sensitive committees or groups – where they may have access to classified information or the ability to influence MPs – should be subjected to more stringent background vetting. Due diligence and thorough background checks should be conducted to spot red flags earlier. 

In recent decades, parliamentary security has largely been trained to focus on the terrorism threat, whether from the IRA or radical Islamist jihadists. It is time for security to be reviewed and adapted to be able to spot state-based threats as well, whether they are from China, Russia or elsewhere. 

The relationship between All Party Parliamentary Groups (APPGs) and foreign embassies should also be reviewed. Many APPGs do a good job promoting our relations with countries around the world or advocating for human rights in places where there is repression or conflict. But some – such as the APPG on China – have in the past been too close to the embassies of what we ought now to recognise as hostile states. 

Lastly, the government should work more closely with the China-watching community, listen to human rights advocates, security experts and the diaspora, and provide more funding as well as safeguards for initiatives to counter Beijing’s propaganda.  

In the current system, there is huge pressure on MPs to rely on their own individual judgment when hiring staff. More support from the security authorities in doing due diligence, especially for appointments to key staff positions with access to information and influence that is of value to hostile states, is vital if we are to safeguard our democracy and counter the threats to our freedoms. 

Joe Biden has become a global embarrassment

What time is it? A bit like the emperor Domitian, Joe Biden seems confused about the time. Warned by an omen that his death would come at midday, Domitian daily pestered people around him with that question, relaxing only after the dreaded hour had passed. 

Alas, his caution availed him not. One day in September 96 AD, a treacherous servant lied to Domitian about the time, inducing him to let down his guard. A knife-wielding steward did the rest. 

I am not sure that President Biden is still possessed of a guard he can drop. But if his recent performance in Hanoi is any indication, he does seem to be confused about the time of day.

‘Good evening, everyone. It is evening, isn’t it? This around the world in five days is interesting. Well, one of my staff members said, “Remember the famous song, ‘Good Morning, Vietnam?’ Well, good evening, Vietnam.”’

It was a feeble effort to make a joke, emphasis on ‘feeble.’ The president’s increasingly wary aides took the hint. They had been holding their collective breath as he rambled on. ‘Lying dog-faced pony solider,’ ‘John Wayne,’ ‘my brother,’ ‘climate change,’ ‘worse than nuclear war.’ 

‘We talked about stability,’ Biden slurred, ‘we talked about the Third World, excuse me, the Third World, the uh, uh the southern hemisphere has access to change…’ 

This wasn’t going well. You can’t talk about ‘the Third World’ in polite company anymore. Suddenly, Biden’s mic was cut and the dulcet tones of his press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre intervened: ‘Thank you everybody. This ends the press conference. Thanks everyone.’ Unaware of what happened, Biden maundered on for a few seconds. Then, like Nietzsche’s Last Man, he gazed vacantly about him and blinked. Then he shuffled slowly off stage and disappeared behind the drapery. 

The leader of the free world, ladies and gentlemen! A few days earlier in New Delhi, Biden stumbled over the name of Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman: ‘Mohamet bin Slam, excuse me, Mohammad bin ’Slam.’ Cringe.  

It has long been obvious that Joe Biden is really only ‘Joe Biden,’ an empty, crepuscular pantomime, frail, querulous, gibbering. His performance on the world stage these last few days reinforces the sense that the United States has entered a penultimate, even a posthumous state. Certain rituals are still performed, but the gestures are tired, empty, rote. 

Back in the 1940s, Cyril Connolly warned that it was ‘closing time in the gardens of the West.’ He was premature. But the embarrassing spectacle of Joe Biden at the G20 meetings suggests that the appropriate response is not interrogative but imperative, not ‘What time is it?’ but ‘Turn out the lights.’

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

The perverse greed of Jamie Oliver

I hoped that we would soon see the back of Jamie Oliver, once a ubiquitous presence on television, as his youthful Golden Labrador-ish appeal waned and his mouth increasingly looked like something you’d find on the end of a fishing rod. But regrettably, like many of the cor blimey pretend meritocrats of his era – from David Beckham to Jonathan Ross – he has proved as determined to hold on to his place on the dung heap of fortune as any old landed toff. It seems the ceaselessly acquisitive Oliver clan want some more of whatever pie is being divided. Is the world ready for Buddy, his 12-year-old son, who has just been awarded his own BBC cooking show? 

We’ve been here before when it comes to befuddled nepo babies crashing and burning among the Le Creuset cookware; two years ago the oldest of the Beckham brats had his own, mercifully discontinued, TV show Cookin’ With Brooklyn. The eight-minute show required a crew of 62 to help make a fish-finger sandwich, to the tune of £74,000. Oliver may be hoping that because his son is still a child, he will avoid the brickbats the bemused Brooklyn received. This is a crafty new development in the protection and promotion of nepo babies; Victoria Beckham trademarked her daughter Harper Seven’s name when she was just five while Gordon Ramsay’s daughter Matilda started her BBC TV show – featuring three of her siblings – when she was only 13. 

But though it’s somewhat sickening to see a privileged pre-teen given his own television show by a painfully right-on state broadcasting corporation principally because his father is famous, there’s no way in a million years I could ever garner the same level of contempt for him as I have for his dear old dad, who technically made it on merit. I’ve loathed Jamie Oliver for a long time, and my loathing has grown more nuanced and profound over the years. I used to despise him for claiming that junk food rots young brains while admitting that he had never read a book until the age of 38. I despised him for criticising British youth – ‘I’m embarrassed to look at British kids, I’ve got bulletproof Polish and Lithuanians who work hard,’ he once said, adding that they should be expected to ‘knock out seven 18-hour days in a row’. Those rotten chavs, refusing to work all hours for a few quid, they’ll be wanting toilet breaks next; thank goodness for overworked and underpaid foreign labour.  

These were obviously the words of someone very keen on money. But since those innocent days, Oliver has racked up such an empire of financial self-interest – while masquerading as one of the good guys – I feel that I was only getting started with my contempt back in the 20th century. The Times informed us recently that Oliver and his wife made £7 million in dividends during the collapse of his Italian restaurant chain four years ago. ‘The past few months have been the most disappointing of my life,’ he pouted at the time. Not half as disappointing as it was for his creditors ‘including dozens of small suppliers, who had been left out of pocket, some of them into the hundreds of thousands of pounds. The restaurants collapsed with debts of £83 million, which included £21 million in debts to food producers and councils.’ One of them, Stuart Barden, said of Oliver Snr: ‘I hate the man with a passion… we were £48,000 out of pocket. He shut up shop and left – then cried in the newspapers… We could never recoup that… That he’s paying himself this now is an absolute joke.’  

As with all narcissists, nothing is ever Oliver’s fault. Forever playing the noble victim, he once put criticism down to the fact that ‘part of it is because I’m from Essex, and whether colour or race or religion, there’s always prejudice, right?’ Some in the company blamed his sister’s husband for the failure of Jamie’s Italian – maybe next time hire someone on the basis of their ability, rather than their connection to your family, or would that flout the nepotistic code? – but it was obviously down to the vile food. Oliver defended his brother-in-law and may well have been ignorant of some of the business decisions but he would certainly have approved all the recipes; I’m sure he was thinking that us plebs would be too awed by his celebrity name to notice if he served substandard food at extortionate prices. It’s simply a display of contempt at every level: contempt for his customers, contempt for his creditors, contempt even for cookery. 

But it gets worse. His business defaulted on more than £1.3 million that was owed to local councils; £55,000 to Tower Hamlets, £108,000 to Liverpool, £90,000 to Manchester and £80,000 to Newham. One of the most sickening aspects of Oliver’s rise was the contempt he poured on the impoverished mothers who handed ‘bad’ food to their children after the school lunch menu was decimated in his TV show Jamie’s School Dinners. This is a man who has a reported net worth of £240 million but who allowed his business to wriggle out of a debt of £80,000 to a neighbourhood where half of all children live in poverty and which has seen 13 of its 18 youth centres close over the last decade due to budget cuts. It is greed verging on the surreal.

No wonder a local councillor, Joshua Garfield, felt moved last year to say that: ‘Jamie Oliver has spent his career campaigning admirably on healthy food for children and against food poverty; he knows the value of childhood health and nutrition. In Newham, we fund free school meals for children in the face of devastating funding cuts to local government. Mr Oliver will appreciate how important business rates are to fill the gap left by the government to fund vital public services and tackle food poverty. I hope he’ll see to it personally that these bills are paid.’ 

For a man whose USP was being driven by concern for poor children, this is a grotesque state of affairs; let the malnourished kids go down the dumper – so long as there’s a limitless amount for the golden children of the rich and famous, such as his own. As for the next generation of bright, talented working-class kids who won’t get a break because their parents aren’t rich/famous/already in the racket, why on earth should they keep themselves fit and healthy to live a long life of frustration and thwarted potential? Let them eat all the cake they like. 

Liz Truss is wrong – the ‘global left’ isn’t to blame for her downfall

Liz Truss is back and she’s got a book to plug. ‘It will set out what we must do to counter the disastrous ideas of the global left,’ she told X at the weekend. Now, I think she’s right that there is a smorgasbord of disastrous ideas about in the modern West – net zero, increasing state power and general economic nuttery, and a whole host of barking cultural ideas about biological sex and race. But can these really be laid at the door of the left, and at a hypothetical global left? 

I think these foggy notions come from a different place, and they’ve seeped in to all sides of politics. Yes, some have indeed risen from the sediment of people who think of themselves as left wing, or are routinely described as such. Genderism, for example, has attached itself to the Sky bundle of the progressive opinion suite, despite being based on sex stereotypes from about 1866. 

But we are in a new age, and creaking, ancient 19th-century terms like left and right don’t mean much in the 2020s. We live in a world utterly transformed by technology and abundance, but we are still using old words and old concepts as a frame for almost everything. It’s no wonder we get so confused. 

The disastrous ideas Truss is talking about are surely not a bottom-up movement of the proletariat. The left was – and we must get used to saying was – a project that at its heart was about reshaping society for the benefit of the working class. Today, what passes for the left is often contemptuous of the lower orders, and frequently actively concerned with impoverishing them, or reducing them to the status of helpless clients and victims. 

No matter how inapplicable or disastrously misconceived the old left’s schemes were, they were at least on paper, rational. The new consensus is, I think, emerging from a much barmier place, despite its cloak of sensible centrism. Net zero, for example, is as reasonable as Year Zero. It is utterly cracked, a scheme to spend trillions on something that will make no appreciable difference to anything at all. It works on the same principle as the monorail of The Simpsons – everyone’s going along with it so it must be OK because everyone’s going along with it. It is not centrist. But it comes dressed in shiny shoes and nice ties so we assume it is. 

Is it left wing then? A scheme to immiserate and drastically reduce the movements and opportunities of the poor – really?

The left part of the loony left is long dead, leaving only the loony bit behind. And then we have the enthusiastic movement to move away from biology – to drug tomboy girls and camp little boys. That doesn’t sound very left wing or right wing or centrist to me. It sounds crazy, because it is. 

This malaise is surely a confection of middle-class affluence. We have created a civilisation that is (or was) more stable and prosperous than any previous society. That’s bound to have an effect on us, but we don’t even notice it. So we talk blithely about smashing it up, pulling all the blocks of the Jenga tower out at random while wearing boxing gloves, without appreciating how precarious it is. 

As human beings we have an atavistic and sensible fear of hubris. We mistrust comfort and ease. It’s very hard to accept. We feel we have to be doing something. Or anything. The scary thing is that the barmy western politics of today is not deliberate or planned by a shadowy elite. Rather it is a death drive, born out of mass boredom. 

The case of Truss vs Sunak is instructive as a microcosm of this. It was mooted as ‘Calamity Jane vs safe pair of hands’. As we can now see, the latter means you will be ruined with decorum. Rubble will fall on your child’s head during a bizarre Sex Ed lesson about safe choking, but it will at least all happen very respectably and while following the appropriate guidance. 

Truss needed charisma to sell her revolution against almost insurmountable odds, and the guts necessary to stay firm. Shifting the paradigm back to sanity in a world gone mad will make you look like the crackers one. Whatever her shortcomings, she was hobbled before she even began by her own MPs. 

But those people weren’t left wing; they were, and are, Tories. And Starmer’s Labour? Virtually indistinguishable from them – and not left wing, or right wing, either. Truss did not fight the global left. She fought the loony centre – and the centre won. 

The sad decline of weak beer

For those of us who like kicking back a few pints in the summer sun, Samuel Smith Brewery’s decision to increase the strength of their Alpine Lager from 2.8 to 3.4 per cent has sparked much weeping and gnashing of teeth. Brits may be renowned the world over as lager louts, but there are some of us who actually enjoy the drink itself and want to rejoice in it without getting absolutely wrecked. Drinking for pleasure and refreshment rather than drunkenness is a novel idea for some, but the ‘weak’ Alpine Lager has sat at the apex of the quaffability index.

Lamentable though Sam Smith’s decision is, the situation has been infinitely worse in the past. Before the first world war, the average alcohol by volume of most beer drunk in England was around 6 or 7 per cent. Massive government intervention in wartime changed the nature of English drinking: the volume of production was cut, lower strengths were mandated, and severe limits on opening times reduced afternoon and evening sessions to several hours. (In that blessed age of English liberty before the war, pubs were often open for 19 hours a day from as early as 5 a.m.) In April 1917, state controllers limited beer production to 11.47 million standard barrels per year – less than one-third the level of 1914. The second world war saw similar measures introduced regarding the strength of beer. While the worst restrictions were temporary measures, it wasn’t until 1988 that pubs were allowed to stay open in the afternoon.

In the immediate aftermath of the second world war, the strength of most beers hovered between 3 and 4 per cent, but regional variations existed. Northern pints were generally weaker than southern ones, which inspired Tyneside Labour MP John McWilliam to campaign for percentages to be displayed on draught taps – still, alas, far from a universal practice today.

Pubgoers in those days overwhelmingly preferred ales, but when change came it came quickly. In 1965, lager accounted for only 2 per cent of sales. Within ten years, it was 20 per cent of all beer sold in pubs. By the height of New Labour in the 2000s, lager was the nation’s favourite with a 75 per cent market share. And with lager came strength: upwards of 5 per cent if you were drinking Stella Artois, Heineken, or Foster’s. For those of us preferring something less heavy and more refreshing, there was Beck’s Vier at its eponymous 4 per cent or the similar-strength Carlsberg.

The craft beer revolution of the 2010s has changed the game and put a bit more vim and moxie into the British brewing scene. Lighter, more drinkable session ales and table beers have proliferated from small producers, but not as quickly as many stronger and more niche varieties – strong concoctions often served in 1/3 or 2/3 pint glasses that scream ‘effete metropolitan’. Even the Church has got in on the act, with the Trappist monks of Mount Saint Bernard Abbey in Leicestershire brewing a delicious but knock-’em-dead ale at 7 per cent.

Give me a pint of good, tasty, refreshing light lager any sunny summer day over these mystical creations. If you want to prevent getting wasted you can always drink a mainstream lager and switch every second or third one out to a non-alcoholic lager. These – in the 0 to 0.5 neighbourhood – are increasing in availability but no brewer has yet managed to produce anything tasty in this range. Worse, when you order it bar staff tend to point out it’s alcohol-free just to make sure you’re aware – good service, but somehow emasculating.

The way our beer is taxed is influential. My beloved Alpine Lager had originally been 4.5 per cent but was lightened to 2.8 in 2011 when the coalition government chopped duty in half on all beers brewed at this percentage and below. This year ministers announced the cut rate on duty would be extended up to a strength of 3.4 per cent, which the brewers used to justify their decision to strengthen Alpine.

Sam Smith’s Brewery has sadly failed to realise the strength of Alpine’s weakness. There has been a downward trend of the main lagers, such as Carlsberg which has reached 3.8 (and which has announced they will move down to 3.4 this year as well) and Fosters at 3.7 per cent. But almost nothing exists in the peak quaffable-but-still-tasty range of 2 to 3 per cent. Many of Sam Smith’s loyal customers will mourn the passing of the Alpine decade and hope that some other brewery might take note of the open territory before them.

Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis’s peculiar apology

Not since the then-couple Johnny Depp and Amber Heard released a pained, hostage-style video in 2016 apologising for bringing their dogs into Australia illegally has there been such an awkward public statement by A-list stars. Now is the turn of actors Mila Kunis and Ashton Kutcher over the weekend. In the minute-long video, they half-apologise for their statements of support for their erstwhile That 70s Show co-star Danny Masterson, who has been sentenced to 30 years in prison after being convicted of raping two women.

These eulogies to Masterson’s character – which were supplied to the Los Angeles judge who nevertheless gave him the maximum permissible sentence – saw Kutcher suggest that the rapist was ‘an extraordinarily honest and intentional human being’ who ‘set an extraordinary standard around how you treat other people’. Kunis wrote that she could ‘wholeheartedly vouch for Danny Masterson’s exceptional character’ as well as being able to ‘sense his innate goodness’. For good measure, Kutcher – who has never quite shaken off his unfair reputation for being intellectually limited – declared that Masterson was one of the few people who he would trust to look after his children unsupervised.

The reaction to this show of solidarity was brutal and furious and so a chastened-looking pair of actors delivered a mea culpa as artfully scripted and performed as anything else in their careers. Kutcher stated ‘We are aware of the pain that has been caused by the character letters that we wrote on behalf of Danny Masterson’ before Kunis went on to say that ‘the letters were not written to question the legitimacy of the judicial system or the validity of the jury’s ruling’ and declared ‘we support victims’, before concluding ‘our heart goes out to every single person who has ever been a victim of sexual assault, sexual abuse or rape.’

Unfortunately, the statement has done little to mitigate the anger against them, with one of Masterson’s victims calling the video ‘incredibly insulting and hurtful’, before saying ‘my hope is that they learn radical accountability and the importance of self-education to learn when to keep their privilege in check – especially Ashton, who claims to work with victims of sex crimes.’ It has not helped that a 2002 interview has resurfaced in which the actress laughingly recalled how Masterson bet Kutcher ten dollars that he would not French kiss the then 14-year-old Kunis. To quote someone else who has been on the wrong side of public outrage, that joke isn’t funny anymore.

Given the number of other celebrities who issued statements and character references in support of Masterson, it might seem unfair to pick on Kutcher and Kunis; a couple who, before this incident, were generally regarded as leading members of the Hollywood liberal elite, vociferous in their support for everything from abortion rights to Ukrainian refugees. The sheer wrong-headedness of their apology suggests – accidentally or otherwise – that their mitigation statements were meant only to praise the non-rapist qualities of Masterson. This is an embarrassing, potentially career-threatening scandal for the pair and is likely to continue for some time. It may be strike time for both actors and writers, but Kutcher and Kunis would be well advised to lie low and refrain from offering any other statements in public – and hope that someone can write them considerably more convincing lines before very long. 

Why were Foreign Office staff ‘in tears’ over Brexit?

Simon McDonald, the former Permanent Secretary of the Foreign Office, really needs to engage his brain before opening his mouth — especially when the television cameras are rolling. Lord McDonald of Salford has admitted revealing to his staff as well as ministers that he voted Remain in the 2016 EU referendum. His jaw-dropping confession — effectively a public admission from a former senior mandarin that he breached sacrosanct civil service impartiality rules  — comes in a BBC documentary series on Brexit, Laura Kuenssberg: State of Chaos. Why on earth did he do it? His attempts at an explanation justifying this dereliction of duty reveal much about the sorry state of the civil service. 

This is McDonald’s take on the atmosphere in his department after the country voted to leave the EU: ‘The main feeling in the Foreign Office building was of mourning,’ he said. ‘People were in tears. People were in shock.’

Tears? Is the Foreign Office filled with toddlers of nursery age? Did it really not occur to anyone in those hallowed corridors that Leave might win? What does this tell us about how out of touch civil servants are?

Surely the only sensible response would have been for McDonald, who ran the department for five years until 2020, to tell his colleagues and underlings to grow up and get on with their jobs? Apparently not. He drew a completely different conclusion, apparently:

‘On this occasion, this solitary occasion, I decided to tell my colleagues and therefore let ministers know that I voted to remain in the European Union.’

Does he listen to himself when he speaks? Who knew that civil service impartiality rules could be set aside by McDonald alone, simply because some people in his office were upset? 

Every time McDonald opens his mouth he digs himself into a bigger hole. He explains that his actions in revealing his political leanings were an attempt to maintain credibility within the department, even as his own words take a gun to that very credibility. He was signalling to those who worked for him that ‘their personal feelings were beside the professional point’. His way of achieving this? Putting his his own feelings ahead of his professional duty as their boss and head of department.

Helen McNamara, the former deputy cabinet secretary, offered this withering assessment of McDonald’s actions: ‘I don’t know why that would be a good or helpful thing,’ Well indeed. What can he have been thinking? Was he thinking at all?

It seems likely that McDonald’s admissions will do great — possibly irreparable — damage to the reputation of the civil service in the eyes of the public. Independence and impartiality can no longer be a given if the most senior mandarins, past or present, lose sight of what it means.

McDonald’s television confessions will set off fresh accusations that, all along, the civil service was working against Brexit, and that its corridors and offices are filled with people who treat democracy as an inconvenience, firmly believing that they always know better than voters and the politicians elected to represent them.

Tensions between ministers and civil servants are bound to increase as a result of McDonald’s misguided public musing. There will also be renewed questions and suspicions about his deeper motives in the role he played last year in hastening the downfall of Boris Johnson. It was McDonald’s evidence that critically undermined Downing Street denials that Johnson had been warned about the behaviour of Chris Pincher, the Tory MP embroiled in allegations of drunken groping. 

McDonald really should have resisted the lure of the television cameras instead of giving in to what looks like a need to satisfy an exaggerated sense of his own importance. It is a revealing sign of the times. Gone are the days when senior civil servants, after serving their country with distinction, quietly retired to the House of Lords, occasionally breaking cover to chair some important public inquiry. Instead we have a new breed of mandarin, public officials who want to wear their hearts on their sleeves, with an apparent keenness to play politics without the bother of seeking election. The repercussions will be felt for a long time. Simon McDonald should have kept his self-appointed role as Brexit-therapist-in-chief in the Foreign Office to himself. 

Can Liz Truss rewrite history?

Last week’s anniversary of Liz Truss entering Downing Street could have passed by quietly. But the Trussites had other ideas. Her supporters used the moment to make the case for Trussonomics once again: to say that Truss diagnosed the country’s problems correctly and that she was on track to find solutions – until her many conspirators took her down.

As it turned out, the cheerleading was a warm-up to the big event: yesterday Truss announced the details of her upcoming book – Ten Years to Save the West – which will be published next spring. Speaking to the Mail on Sunday, the former prime minister promised a detailed account of her time in Downing Street, the lessons she learned along the way, and how those lessons can be leveraged into a brighter, more prosperous future for the UK.

I’m sure the first-hand account of those 49 days is going to be fascinating. Yet I fear the core message of the book will be a rehash of what we’ve been hearing from the former prime minister all year. It was only four months after she left office that she was writing for the Sunday Telegraph and speaking to Spectator TV about what she thinks went wrong. And she has now confirmed her book will continue with the same theme: that apart from some ‘communications’ errors, nothing that happened last autumn was her fault. It was a ‘left-wing orthodoxy’ that brought her government toppling down. It’s a point of view that not only lacks accountability, but suggests a full rewrite of last year’s events.

Truss’s latest gripe about her failed premiership – that there ‘wasn’t enough support for Conservative ideas’ – suggests that her short-lived agenda contained lots of Conservative ideas. It didn’t. Rather, her centrepiece policy was a spin on price controls, under which ministers would determine what the public paid for energy per unit. The Energy Price Guarantee was estimated at the time to be potentially the single most expensive handout ever offered up by the British government, which Truss attempted to borrow tens of billions of pounds to fund in last September’s mini-Budget.

Some supporters say such a guarantee was necessary to support households last winter. Yet there were already schemes in place – designed by the previous government – to provide more targeted support to people who really needed it. The decision to bring in a government-set cap on costs was a (gravely miscalculated) political one: team Truss thought by dealing with energy costs in one go, they could then devote their time to other parts of her agenda.

What were the specifics in that agenda? A generous narrative is spouted these days about plans for pension and NHS reform, axing the size of the state and building hundreds of thousands more homes. All radical ideas – none of which were included in the mini-Budget or seriously mentioned until after market conditions took a turn for the worse (if they were even mentioned at all). In fact, the big announcements made by Truss during the leadership campaign (apart from tax cuts) were simply more spending projects, like greenlighting £26 billion for HS3.

‘I agree that taxes are too high and the government is too big,’ she told the Mail on Sunday yesterday. But this second half of the equation was the glaring omission in her agenda last year –  one that wasn’t acknowledged until international markets decided to point out that she was trying to borrow and spend an awful lot of money.

Truss almost certainly had long-term ambition to implement some of those listed reforms (on housing, she has long been a champion for Yimbys), but like her predecessor, she found it easier to make promises and splash cash. And she tried to do so just as market conditions were taking a turn for the worse. The LDI pensions scare was unlucky. It seems no one saw it coming (though her government had either fired or cut out anyone who might have told them about potential liabilities). But she and Kwasi Kwarteng didn’t need the Treasury to tell them what was both obvious and publicly available. They could have got the information off The Spectator’s data hub, had they been looking for it: borrowing costs were rising worldwide and last autumn was not the time for a spending spree.

All this is pushed aside by Truss and her supporters these days, as if they are tiny details that obscure the bigger picture: that she was, and is, correct in her diagnosis that the size of the UK economy needs to grow. GDP does indeed need a boost; there is no excuse for such stagnant growth across the UK. But this is not a unique thesis: it’s a case that’s been consistently made by plenty of economists, commentators and even politicians – and Truss has probably set their agenda back by a decade or so, by pretending her borrow-and-spend agenda was somehow a product of ‘free-market’ economics.

So far Truss’s account of last year’s events has dodged this point. But when she goes to fill a book, can it really be overlooked? The former prime minister has always been very good at bigging up ‘right-wing’ ideas – but it’s time she acknowledged that the ‘left-wing orthodoxy’ she despises is also a neat little summary of the policies she actually tried to implement. Devoting a chapter of her book to this colossal mistake would be a good place to start.

Watch: Speaker’s statement on alleged spy

All eyes in Westminster are on the chamber today, amid talk of MPs potentially using parliamentary procedure to name the alleged Chinese spy. First up after prayers at 2:30 p.m was the Speaker, who had tantalisingly teased the media with talk of ‘a brief statement’ in ‘relation to weekend media reports relating to allegations of spying.’ Was Lindsay about to name names?

Sadly, not. Like a schoolmaster chastising unruly children, the Speaker sternly told MPs that ‘this is an ongoing, sensitive investigation. Members of course understand that public discussion will be wholly inappropriate.’ Boo! Hoyle did though seek to assure MPs that the Commons follows the same vetting arrangements as the government before adding that the small number of MPs who needed to know about this were briefed on it. Was it Steerpike’s imagination or did the Speaker fix his beady eye at this point on the IDS Tory awkward squad? Perish the thought…

The Speaker insisted that MPs do not discuss the identity of those involved, speculate about the case, or comment on the details, so as to avoid the risk of prejudicing prosecutions. Unsurprisingly, Hoyle also took a pop at the ‘unhelpful’ media reporting of the story before, er, not taking any questions afterwards. His remarks were made less than an hour before Oliver Dowden, the Deputy Prime Minister, is dueup to make a separate statement on the same matter. Quite how MPs are going to get through it without discussing details of the case isn’t exactly clear…

Good luck Olive. Or should that be 祝你好运 ?

Was Luis Rubiales’ resignation really necessary?

Luis Rubiales, the embattled Spanish football chief, has bowed to the seemingly inevitable and resigned from both his positions as president of the Spanish football federation and UEFA vice president. He made the announcement during an interview with Piers Morgan on TalkTV and then confirmed his decision in a subsequent statement for the press.

Rubiales had been suspended for 90 days by Fifa following the now infamous kiss with Spanish captain Jenni Hermoso (which he says was consensual and she says wasn’t) at the medal ceremony after his country’s triumph in the Women’s World Cup final last month. ‘I cannot continue my work,’ he told Morgan, adding that ‘insisting on waiting and holding on is not going to contribute to anything positive, neither to the federation nor to Spanish football.’

There was no hint of contrition in Rubiales’ announcement – at least in the portion of the interview which has been released (it will be broadcast tomorrow in full). Nor, it must be said, was there anger, just the weary resignation, as it were, of a man who tried to defend himself but found the forces ranged against him to be insuperable. 

Those forces included: the entirety of the Spanish squad (who said they would refuse to play while he remained president), the wider women’s football community (the Lionesses released a statement of support) and the Spanish men’s team which expressed their ‘solidarity’. Added to this were the Spanish government (the acting deputy prime minister Yolanda Diaz called for him to resign) and the vast majority of the press. All lined up to condemn Rubiales, with some going as far as to characterize him as emblematic of wider societal, patriarchal oppression. 

Rubiales’ supporters, or at least those prepared to speak up for him publicly, were few and far between. His federation did initially stand by him, but their support soon melted away. There was his redoubtable mother, Angeles Bejar, who even went on hunger strike for him. There was Danny Cunning, the kit man at Scottish club Hamilton Academical where Rubiales played four games in 2009, who called the Spaniard, in Glaswegian parlance, ‘brand new’ (a decent person) and revealed he had given him a £500 tip when he left.

And then there was Woody Allen, who understands a bit about sex scandals, media pile ons and cancel culture. The veteran director was asked about the matter at the Venice film festival and said:

It was only a kiss, and it was a friend. What’s wrong with that?…It was clearly in front of everyone, and she was not in danger…He should ask for forgiveness and assure (her) that he will not do it again. And with that they should both move on. 

Rubiales never stood a chance.

But Rubiales’ troubles are far from over. Hermoso has filed a criminal complaint against him for sexual assault. If prosecuted and convicted he could face between one and four years in prison. Rubiales is also under scrutiny by the Spanish government, as the Administrative Sports Court (TAD) has initiated its own investigation. He will be spending the immediate and perhaps foreseeable future in consultation with his lawyers. Even if he doesn’t go to jail, it looks highly unlikely he will ever work in football again. He may struggle to find any kind of employment.

At the risk of being condemned forever as a chauvinistic pig I’m going to come out and say that this is wildly disproportionate, if not a little mad. No one would dispute that Rubiales behaved inappropriately, boorishly, at the World Cup final. He was clearly out of control: his grabbing his crotch while standing next to the Queen and her daughter indicated a man for whom the occasion had awakened his inner cavemen. And his claim that the kiss was consensual seems dubious when considering the footage. He behaved badly. A quick and fulsome apology was certainly in order.

But, but, but…was what he did really so egregious? It was a kiss, spontaneous and brief and for which an apology was offered. And it was a kiss that Hermoso and her teammates appeared to be laughing and joking about on the bus on the way out of the stadium. Does Rubiales deserve to lose his livelihood and his reputation and have his life and those of his family blighted for losing his head in a few moments of euphoric over exuberance? 

Maybe. But if you really think so, and haven’t just aligned yourself with the fashionable and seemingly majority opinion on the matter, then we are going to need a whole new set of rules to govern interactions between the sexes in the workplace, including the sporting arena. That could mean separating the sexes entirely or requiring written consent for any form of physical contact beyond a handshake. Oh, and whatever those new rules and punishments are, we are going to have to be mindful of gender equality and apply them in both directions.

That should solve the problem, but what a miserable, joyless, and silly world that would be.

The Birmingham attack shows why Bully XLs must be banned

Three people including an 11-year-old girl have been mauled by an American Bully XL dog in Birmingham. The video showing the attack, which took place on Saturday is horrific: the child is bitten as she lays helplessly on the ground. The dog then turns on two men who intervene, dragging one to the ground before going for his head and neck. It was a miracle no one was killed.

For too long, the government – which has the power to ban these violent and horrible dogs – has sat on its hands. Now, though, it might finally be waking up to the threat. Suella Braverman is seeking ‘urgent advice’ on banning the Bully XL. The Home Secretary’s intervention comes amid mounting public concern about these dogs that have been causing carnage across the country. Since 2021 there have been at least 11 deaths caused by XLs, as well as countless attacks. The Met Police are seizing record numbers of dogs, some of which are being bred by ‘backyard’ breeders. A recent YouGov poll revealed that 57 per cent of people are now in favour of a ban, and only 17 per cent against.

Yet despite Braverman’s call for action, there is no certainty that any ban will actually be implemented. Leading dog welfare charities, including the RSPCA and Dogs Trust, the Kennel Club and the British Veterinary Association, oppose breed specific legislation. Sam Gaines, spokesperson for the RSPCA, has said: ‘There is no specific research to demonstrate that selection for fighting results in dogs that are more aggressive towards people than other dogs.’

This sentiment, of course, is little comfort to those who have been mauled by an Bully XL. Jack Lis, a ten-year-old boy, was killed in Wales in 2021 by a Bully XL. The image of that dog, named Beast, which weighed 96.5lbs (43.7kg), is terrifying. How can organisations like the RSPCA continue to bury their heads in the sand about the threat posed by such creatures?

The Tories are also guilty of not acting quickly. Environment Minister Lord Benyon announced last month that the government had ‘no plans’ to add the Bully XL to the banned list but was ensuring the existing powers and legal framework for dog control were being properly applied. 

Again, this sounds good, but the Bully XL is different from ordinary dogs, both physically and mentally. Selective breeding over centuries, first for bull and bear baiting, then for dog fighting, created the ultimate canine killer, one that can even see its own species as prey. When an XL grabs hold of a small dog, it thrashes it about in its jaws like a ragdoll, often breaking its neck or causing extreme internal damage. 

When Bully XLs attack people, they go for limbs or the throat – as the dog in Birmingham did – and once they’ve got a grip on someone it’s almost impossible to get them to release their powerful jaws. This is why, when the Bully attacks, the result can so easily be fatal.

Even XLs that are under control pose a risk: if you have the misfortune of walking past one on the street, all too often you see that they are straining on their leads. Even for a strong man, they are clearly difficult to control. When they go into attack mode, people get pulled over and dragged along the ground. Once they smell blood, it can be very hard – even impossible – for an owner to regain control. A child doesn’t stand a chance.

Organisations like the RSPCA continue to stick to their guns. But a fightback against the ‘blame the deed, not the breed’ viewpoint has been gathering momentum. The Campaign for Evidence-Based Regulation of Dangerous Dogs (CEBRDD) has joined forces with Protect Our Pets, which supports those who have lost pets to killer dogs, and Bully Watch UK. Both are calling for the XL to be banned.

Pitbull-types have been banned in Britain for three decades and as a result we have seen very low fatalities. However, the introduction of the American Bully XL has seen deaths skyrocket. The government must act now and ban the American Bully XL before more children – and more dogs – face attacks, maulings and death.

Bully Watch – which is made up of dog lovers – describes itself as an anonymous group of professionals who are devoting their time to providing an alternative viewpoint. ‘We started digging behind the science and data of dangerous dog attacks and found it differed widely with the narrative being pushed by some animal welfare organisations,’ a spokesman for the group told me.

‘We’re finding cases where these dogs were looked after and still killed another pet dog or bit someone or turned on their owners.’

Defenders of Bully XLs sometimes claim that no type of dog is any more dangerous than another,  pointing to academic ‘research’ that proves this is so. They appear to believe genes play no part in a dog’s behaviour and their answer to the ‘dog bite’ problem is more education and training. This position is untenable.

Jack Lis was so badly mauled by an XL he could only be identified by his shoe. A dog capable of such savagery is far too dangerous to be kept as a pet. The truth about these dogs can no longer be denied. Let’s hope the Home Secretary isn’t all words and no action. These dogs, and their crosses, need to be banned.

Boris’s Brexit blunder on customs unions revealed

Oh dear. When it came to getting Brexit done, Boris Johnson was, it seems, winging it more than he might have wanted to let on. 

Speaking on the BBC’s Politics Live show today, Labour MP Barry Gardiner has revealed that when the former prime minister was still foreign secretary he didn’t know what a customs union was – pretty vital knowledge for, er, negotiating Britain’s departure from the EU.

Saying he could disclose the conversation now Boris was no longer an MP, Gardiner said that sometime between 2016 and 2018, Johnson stopped him in a corridor in parliament. Doing a decent imitation of Boris’s bumbling way of speaking – if Mr Steerpike may say so – Gardiner said the former PM asked him: ‘Tell me, tell me. What is all this stuff about a customs union?’ 

When Gardiner claims to have asked Boris what he meant by his question, Boris apparently then asked, ‘Well what is a customs union?’

Damningly, Gardiner finished off his anecdote by referencing the chaotic Northern Irish backstop Johnson was responsible for negotiating. ‘He did not know, as the foreign secretary, what a customs union was, and that explains why we got into the problems that we then got into with Northern Ireland.’ Ouch!

Accused parliamentary researcher denies spying for China

A former House of Commons researcher has this morning denied claims that he ever spied for China. The man in question said that he is ‘completely innocent’ and a victim of ‘misreporting’, saying in a statement released by his lawyers that ‘to do what has been claimed against me in extravagant news reporting would be against everything I stand for.’ The British national, who boasted links to top Tories including Tom Tugendhat and Alicia Kearns, added that ‘I have spent my career to date trying to educate others about the challenge and threats presented by the Chinese Communist party’.

Today’s Times is the only newspaper to name the man in question, with others holding off from publication for fear of jeopardising an ongoing police investigation. But amid talk of MPs potentially naming the man under parliamentary privilege, a statement is now expected by the Speaker on the subject at 2:30 p.m. Lindsay Hoyle’s eagerly-anticipated remarks will be followed by a security update by Oliver Dowden an hour later in his capacity as Minister for the Cabinet Office. The statements come amid calls to tighten the process by which parliamentary staff receive a security pass. Neil Coyle, a Labour member of the Foreign Affairs Committee, has told the BBC that staff working for him and other MPs involved in sensitive subjects should receive extra vetting.

Could a return to its ‘nasty party’ roots save the Tories?

Next year’s general election could either be a 1992 or a 1997, commentators have speculated: a slender Tory win or a Labour landslide.

Last weekend David Blunkett suggested it is more likely to be a 1964 – the narrowest of Labour wins leading to a much bigger majority in another election called a couple of years later.

I’m afraid things are shaping up more grimly than that. The most likely outcome may be a 1974, a year which saw the replacement of a failed regime that had lost its nerve with another that proved to have no answers to a profound national malaise.

Few would dispute that Britain is in the doldrums once again – maybe not quite as broke and broken as in the mid-1970s but not far off. The overall situation is, to put it in the celebrated prose style of Sir Gavin Williamson, ‘very shit’.

Living standards are stuck where they were 15 years ago; public services and infrastructure are visibly crumbling; public sector productivity is going backwards in the era of ‘working from home’; there is an acute housing crisis that saps ambition from young adults; everyday policing barely exists; shared public spaces have become uncivil and threatening as a consequence; cohesion-sapping rates of immigration are exacerbating this social recession; the percentage of working-age people languishing on incapacity benefits has quadrupled since 1980 and higher rate taxation kicks in at such a low earnings threshold that it is a wonder anyone at all applies for promotion.

Other newly-restored relics from the seventies include destabilising rates of inflation and politically-motivated trade union militancy.

In such circumstances, the electorate is surely entitled to expect political leaders who will level with it about the causes of these ills and set out a radical plan of action to eradicate them. No such luck. Both Rishi Sunak and Sir Keir Starmer are incrementalists in an era crying out for fundamental change.

The modest scale of the ambitions Sunak has set for himself was tellingly revealed in Prime Minister’s Questions this week when – comically, tragically – he cited his small boats policy as an example of success because crossings are down on last year. That we are headed for easily the second worst annual figures ever recorded some eight months after he promised to ‘stop the boats’ seemed to escape his data nerd brain. 

Steady-as-she-goes economics – and my, she goes slowly – is also a part of the Sunak mix. His pledge to sit around and watch the Bank of England try to get inflation down to five point something per cent by Christmas encompasses about as much dynamism as watching paint dry.

Fence-sitting Starmer for his part possibly even out-dulls Sunak with the under-powered nature of his proposals. Any policy suggestions that prompt even the slightest flurry of disquiet among target voters are swiftly dumped as he seeks to get to Downing Street on the back of just not being the Tories.

A low turnout election seems guaranteed but really, what mandate and what majority will he have to turn him into a premier capable of enacting beneficial reform? As Charles Moore puts it in this week’s magazine: ‘The Tories now deserve to lose, but… Labour does not deserve to win.’

That takes us back to February 1974 and then to October of the same year when a minority Wilson administration crawled to a majority of three at a second election. Epoch-making stuff it very much wasn’t as Labour went on to be overwhelmed by all the same problems that had got the better of Edward Heath.

Five more years at least of failure and marking time seem likely to lie ahead before the crises of the modern era become so acute that tackling them can no longer be postponed. Only the kind of regime that Theresa May would regard as ‘nasty’ will be capable of shaking the country out of this torpor. I cannot be alone in yearning for a leader who will just identify the vested interests needing to be tamed and then smash them to smithereens. 

Perhaps we should just write the next election off as neither of the incumbent leaders has got what it takes. It’s the election after next that should excite us. Because that one is going to be a 1979.

Don’t fine drivers for doing 31mph in a 30mph zone

Drivers could soon be prosecuted for travelling 1 mph over the speed limit, at least if some MPs get their way. The all-party parliamentary group on walking and cycling (APPGWC) also proposes stiffer penalties for drivers of heavy cars like SUVs involved in accidents, and an invariable requirement for a fresh driving test for anyone disqualified. However well they may go down among a certain class of activist, it’s not difficult to see that these are all fairly terrible ideas. 

First, speed limits. Current informal guidance from police chiefs, pretty widely observed in England (though not in Scotland) is ’10 per cent plus 2′: in other words, ignore speeds up to 35 mph in a 30 mph zone, 57 in a 50 mph zone, and so on. This must go, the APPGWC say. Why? Half of motorists sometimes speed; prosecuting them represents nothing more than the ‘foundation of road justice’; and any leniency ‘fosters a belief that traffic law does not need to be taken seriously’. Besides, because technology now makes it easier to catch miscreants we should embrace it. 

Quite apart from the sheer bossiness involved in treating British people going about their ordinary business like wayward schoolboys who must be made to do exactly as they are told and stop slacking, this is distinctly problematic. Take a technical excess of 1 or 2 mph on a fast and fairly empty road – a place where, incidentally, cyclists and pedestrians are likely to be pretty few and far between, and indeed in some cases are prohibited. This is normally harmless and often difficult to avoid: indeed, encouraging drivers to be constantly checking the clock rather than the road may well create more peril than it averts. And that is before we even start on the effect on the police. Telling them in the name of ‘road justice’, whatever that means, to book people regularly for technical but harmless speeding will waste their time, prevent them investigating more crimes that do matter, and further sour relations between them and the public whose help they need.

The idea that SUV drivers causing accidents might be treated more harshly by criminal courts than others (as lorry drivers already are) is equally preposterous. The reason given is that SUVs are heavier ordinary cars: but whatever some MPs may think, there is an obvious difference in kind between a large van or truck and a Range Rover. There is also the point that if weight is involved, electric and hybrid cars are sometimes a good deal heavier than ordinary ones, as also are loaded vans. Unless drivers of the latter are also to be penalised, this begins to look less like a technical application of the principles of kinetic energy and more like a condescending sideswipe at people who drive SUVs.

Demanding that disqualified drivers retake a test (something, incidentally, that in some cases courts can already order) might sound sensible, but not for long. True, some drivers may need it – for example, those disqualified through showing repeated inability to react to hazards. But they are a minority. Someone off the road for driving home after one too many at a wedding, or following multiple instances of speeding, doesn’t have a driving skill problem. The driving test no doubt examines many things, but these do not as far as we know include the ability to refuse a glass of prosecco, or the knowledge that one shouldn’t behave like Peter Simple’s J. Bonington Jagworth on one’s way to the golf club.

And there is a practical point. Test appointments are difficult enough to come by already. To clog the system up still further by mandating extra unnecessary ones is frankly bonkers, even if it might increase job opportunities for test administrators.

Did the members of the group not see these points? Possibly. But there is almost certainly more to it than that. Whisper it quietly, but the members of the APPGWC (many of whom are anti-Tory), while no doubt interested generally in the rights of walkers and cyclists, are one suspects also keen on the opportunity to virtue-signal by establishing their bien-pensant and environmentally correct credentials. Apart from what seems like a thinly-veiled attack on the SUV-driving classes, the proposals on speed limits and driving tests for the disqualified have many of the hallmarks of an agenda of making it more difficult to drive generally, and a patrician contempt for ordinary people who prefer the convenience of their cars to the vagaries of public transport.

That we often get foolish and partisan proposals like this from all-party parliamentary groups, and for that matter select committees, should not surprise us. APPGs, being open to all parliamentarians, are a natural home for earnest lawmakers with bees in their bonnet. Much the same goes for the supposedly more staid and formal select committees: when it comes to picking their members, those with known strong views are more likely to be chosen to serve, if only at times to keep them occupied and out of the way. 

Meanwhile, we must always remember that, however seriously some papers take them, reports from such bodies are frequently little more than the dressed-up musings of mild but self-important eccentrics with an agenda. As voters we must also insist that, when push comes to shove, what matters is the view of our representatives in parliament as a whole, and not those of the well-meaning pressure-groups that attach themselves to it. Let’s hope these proposals don’t see the light of day.

There’s not much we can do about China spying

A parliamentary researcher has just been arrested on suspicion of espionage. A man in his late twenties, with reported links to the security minister and the chair of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, is accused of spying for China and may have had access to sensitive secret documents. A second suspect has been collared in Oxfordshire. It’s said to be the worst Westminster security breach in years: ‘We haven’t seen anything like this before.’

I’m sure you were as surprised as I was to find out that the Chinese are spying on us. Gobsmacked. Flabbergasted. Probably nearly as surprised as the Prime Minister. And to hear his spokesman tell it, Rishi Sunak wasn’t just surprised but jolly cross about it too.

So cross, in fact, that he tore up his plan for the G20, which had involved no meeting with the Chinese prime minister, to confront the fellow directly, mano a mano. We’re told that he ‘conveyed his significant concerns about Chinese interference in the UK’s parliamentary democracy’. Nothing like conveying significant concerns to put an aggressor back in his box, is there? I wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out that he’d conveyed these concerns in no uncertain terms.

What exactly do you suppose was said? What could have been said? No retaliation that we know of has been offered. No threats that we know of can have been made. The most we can hope for will have been words to the effect of: ‘Look here, Mr Li, it really isn’t on to go about spying on us like this, so I’m going to need you to pinkie-promise there’ll be no more of these shenanigans or… well, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. Really, I’m jolly cross. Make no mistake about that.’

I half suspect that the main purpose of asking for the meeting will have been so that the UK press could be briefed that a stern ticking-off was being issued. Damage limitation. 

It would have been much easier from Mr Sunak’s point of view, knowing that China’s influence and espionage operations are all over our economy and public life whether we like it or not, if they hadn’t caught the mole: it only embarrasses him by underlining how little we can do about it. In July the Commons Intelligence and Security Committee warned us that China targets the UK ‘prolifically and aggressively’, that they had ‘successfully penetrated every area of the UK economy’, and that our government had neither the ‘resources, expertise or knowledge’ to do anything about it.

It makes you long, a little, for the good old days of the Cold War, when everyone knew the drill. We spied on the Soviet Union, they spied on us. Every now and again, the odd one was caught and the ritual dance cranked up: they expelled a few from your embassy there, you expelled a few from their embassy here. Face was saved, and honour satisfied, and business as usual recommenced.

Well, I say ‘business as usual’, but business is most of what makes the difference. The USSR had plenty of hard power but we weren’t tied to its economic apron-strings in the way we increasingly are to China. As it happened, back then the USSR needed the West (since foreign exports were the only thing keeping its economy afloat) rather more than the West needed them.

But China is in no such position of dependence – if their trade with the UK froze it’s the UK (especially now we’re out of Europe) that would suffer. Their espionage programme is even bound up with their economic might: stealing Western intellectual property, notoriously, has been a contributor to the Chinese miracle. And thanks to the Belt and Road initiative, Chinese money has bought it political sway all over the world, which is laundered back into economic advantage.

So-called China hawks would like us to take a cooler approach, but Rishi has already ruled that out on grounds of pragmatism: ‘I don’t think it’s kind of smart or sophisticated foreign policy to reduce our relationship with China – which after all is a country with one and a half billion people, the second biggest economy, and member of the UN security council.’

Fair enough. Perhaps being not so subtly spied on is just the price of getting by. Everyone wants China’s cash, and nobody wants, for that matter, to risk encouraging it in any more sympathy for Vladimir Putin’s war on the West. So when we catch them with their fingers in the file marked ‘Top Secret’, we just have to suck it down.

There is a moment in the matchless 80s comedy Planes, Trains and Automobiles in which the mild-mannered Steve Martin character, driven to distraction by the latest in a long series of transport-related cock-ups, finally loses his rag with an unhelpful car hire guy. Does his moment of assertiveness, his mouse-that-roared access of bravery, pay off? It does not. The guy puts him on his back with a straight punch to the nose, and the following scene finds Martin and Candy rolling down the highway with the latter remarking: ‘I’ve never seen a guy picked up by his testicles before.’

This has always struck me as what some call a teachable moment. Bullies aren’t always cowards. Standing up for yourself doesn’t always pay the dividends that a sense of natural justice would lead us to hope. And I’m rather afraid that in this version of the story, Rishi knows that he’s Steve Martin, Li Qiang is car hire guy, and the rest of the world is John Candy.

Watch: Sir Humphrey admits ‘I told colleagues I voted Remain’

Vindication, at last. For seven years, we have been told that the civil service is a bastion of impartiality, that the Foreign Office was utterly without agenda and that anyone who dared question this was a dangerous, Trumpite populist. But now Lord McDonald – the very model of a modern major mandarin – has given the game away. 

In an interview with Laura Kuenssberg, McDonald – who served as Permanent Secretary of the Foreign Office from 2015 to 2020 – spoke about the aftermath of the Brexit referendum. Under the civil service code, officials are of course expected to uphold the fundamental principle of impartiality. But that didn’t stop McDonald from blithely going ahead and trumpeting how he voted. He told Kuenssberg that  ‘on this solitary occasion I decided to tell my colleagues and therefore let ministers know that I voted to remain in the European Union’. Asked why he took this unprecedented step, he said ‘I felt they would assume that in any case. So I decided to embrace it.’ Why not eh?

McDonald also admitted that there was a sense of ‘mourning’ on the morning after the referendum result with Foreign Office staff left in tears. Quelle surprise…

Confessions of a sperm donor

I first became aware of the London Sperm Bank after seeing an advert on Instagram. ‘Help someone achieve their dream of a family. Become a sper­m donor and get compensated up to £420 a month’. Why not get paid to do something that I was going to do anyway in my spare time? In the past, I’ve donated blood and have looked into giving bone marrow, so sperm donation just seemed like another form of biological socialism: from each according to his ability, to each according to her need. But I also felt I might be hedging an existential bet. If the name of the game is to multiply, then donating my DNA seemed like a rational genetic insurance policy.

The staff at the bank are all very professional and polite. But you are, fundamentally, masturbating on command in a central London basement. The deal was I’d turn up once a week for anywhere between six months to a year and it soon became a regular part of my weekly routine. Hop on a tube, walk into the clinic, grab the little plastic cup and off again I’d go.

The sperm bank has tried to encourage us donors to meet up for the occasional pub trip. I can’t quite bring myself to go. The only thing we have in common is our knowledge of those little windowless cubicles with their sinks and wall-mounted TVs.

Part of the gig is the so-called ‘pen sketch’, designed to give prospective parents a sense of who I am – or, really, a sense of who they might be giving birth to. The sketch is completely anonymous – a short history describing my family, my childhood, education, hobbies, personal achievements, and professional success. It’s hard to avoid writing something that sounds like an advert: ‘look at me, what a healthy, well-adjusted, and successful person I am. Who wouldn’t want a kid like me?’ A half-page summary is a difficult place to explain alcoholic parents and occasional bouts of anxiety and depression. I doubt it sells the product, either.

Only those with a sperm count in the top 5 per cent are asked to donate. It’s an arbitrary result based mainly on genetics, but I still felt a sense of pride in my medically-confirmed virility. With global sperm counts plummeting, I also felt a strange sense of duty. My donation will, apparently, be frozen for up to 55 years, which made the other part of the process particularly difficult: writing a letter to my future children.

At first, writing a ‘message of goodwill’ on no more than a page of A4 seemed like easy homework. Yet the longer it lingered near the bottom of my to-do list, the more I felt a kind of dread. I was being asked to offer my limited wisdom to an unknown number of as-yet-unborn children. Imagine if cryogenic sperm freezers had existed in 1945 and I’d been around to give a donation. How useful would my wartime advice be for a child born at the turn of the millennium?

A couple of weeks ago, I found myself on a plane locking eyes with a baby. There’s a small chance that, in a few years, I could see a baby in the street and it would be half me, half stranger. It might have my eyes, look a bit like me, even think like me. Would either of us realise? Would I be able to soothe my child if the parents couldn’t? I stopped staring at the baby.

The trouble with supermarket self checkouts

Finishing my latest mini-shop at my closest mini-supermarket, I witnessed something I hadn’t seen before. A couple who had used the self-checkouts were stopped at the exit by a staff member who asked to see inside their (store-branded) plastic bag. The customers obliged without demur and a half-smile sent them on their way. But it could have been different. Recent reports suggest strongly that aggression towards staff at supermarkets is on the rise. 

Whatever the reason for the check, I have to confess – as an observer – to a tiny frisson of satisfaction. This was partly that someone was checking; I have seen people quite brazenly leave past the machines without paying, which means higher prices all round, does it not? But it was mainly because I had spotted that one of four potentially staffed tills was actually staffed – and staffed, what’s more, by someone who accepted that it was part of his job to check out my shopping, rather than reload the lottery machine or fish out cigarette packets from behind the till. 

Of such are small victories made – because I have to confess that I am one of those dinosaurs who still hates and resists self-checkouts, even after all this time. I particularly resent them now, because I’m walking with a stick after an accident and there is nowhere to prop it up by a self-checkout till, so at some point it inevitably falls on the floor with a clatter, threatening to trip up other shoppers and forcing me into a precarious act of retrieval. 

But it is not just this. It’s the noise; it’s the robotic accusations about ‘unfamiliar objects in the bagging area’ that have – rightly – become a source of ridicule. It’s that there is often no clue as to where to put what, so you get told off by the machine; then it won’t let you pack stuff into your bag as you scan so you get told off again.  

And it all takes so long. An experienced till operator can get through most people’s shopping in minutes; for those amateurs among us, the process takes many times longer and is punctuated with annoying glitches. A bottle of wine prompts an instruction to ‘call for assistance’. ‘Loose items’, so called, are a particular bugbear. I recently tried to track down a cheese scone, only to find it hidden under ‘bakery (sweet)’. Another branch of the same store had informed me halfway through my check-out that it didn’t weigh things. So I had to put everything back in my basket and start again on a different machine (with a helpful minder, this time). 

None of this improves my mood, as, I suspect, it probably doesn’t improve yours. With the result that supermarkets, from being heroes of the hour during the pandemic, are starting to get on our nerves again. Understandably, they are fighting back. 

Tesco is in the process of introducing bodycams for staff to use in the event of aggro from customers; other stores already have them or are following suit. This is in addition to CCTV. Exit checks are increasingly becoming part of the supermarket experience at the small neighbourhood stores like mine, which have already proliferated in recent years at bigger outlets. A growing number are also installing exit gates and requiring shoppers to show their receipt as they leave. On occasion, the receipt will be matched to the contents of their bag. 

Much of this is explained as part of new effort to combat what is presented as the growing scourge of shoplifting, which in turn is blamed partly on police lack of interest and rather more on the cost of living crisis. But maybe we need to go back a bit further than the cost of living crisis and ask whether something else might be, if not entirely to blame for an upsurge in stealing – which is what shoplifting is – then at least a contributing factor in the losses that the supermarkets may now be trying to stem. 

And here I would return to the self-checkouts. Stagnant productivity has long been a negative feature of the UK economy and I would certainly be among those who blame the widespread availability of cheap labour for discouraging investment in automation. Supermarket self-checkouts might look like a welcome exception: fewer staff, lower costs, lower prices on the shelves, and, naturally, higher productivity. 

But has it worked out like that? Do supermarket self-checkouts make the case for automation in the consumer sector or could this be the wrong sort of automation? All the measures currently being introduced, from exit gates and bag checks to personal bodycams, require staff and time and cost money. 

There are other questions, too. Leave aside police policy, have little-monitored self-checkouts made it easier for people just to walk out with their shopping? Do customers get so cross with the machines that they think it is justified payback to put prawns or asparagus in their bag, having scanned them as potatoes? Yes, I know they shouldn’t, but do they? And what of the reality that supermarkets have reduced their wage bill essentially by making customers staff the tills for free? If you have just a few items, it may be quicker. For a family-sized shop, it really isn’t. 

The only truly efficient, buyer-friendly, self-checkouts I have come across are at the Japanese store, Uniqlo, where you put your basket into a scanner and it reads the tickets. Unless supermarkets can do that, they might look at the losses from theft and deception, as well as the bills they are now running up for additional security, and ask whether the sums really add up. Might it not be simpler and cheaper, as well as better for customer relations and curbing crime, just to start staffing the majority of their tills again, as, indeed, they have mostly never stopped doing elsewhere in Europe?

A beginner’s guide to buying a guitar

Thinking of adding another six strings to your bow? You wouldn’t be alone – lockdown inspired plenty of people to learn the guitar. The trend may have lessened as people return to the office, but it has still meant UK and European sales for the guitar maker Fender are £5 million higher than before Covid. The company say that almost half of its guitars are sold to people playing the instrument for the first time. Should you follow their example?

The short answer is ‘yes’. The same instinct that gets you holding a tennis racket in front of the mirror means that when you progress to the real thing, the one you want is a Fender Stratocaster. Buddy Holly played one, which was why Eric Clapton wanted one. And after Eric Clapton played one, every guitarist since has wanted one. It’s simultaneously the Model T Ford and Rolls Royce of electric guitars.

But an American-made Strat will cost you at least £1,500 and that’s silly money for a beginner. (Ironically for a company that was boosted by the pandemic, Fender’s US factory is in the Californian city of Corona.) The firm also makes Strats in Japan, though even they cost about £1,200. To get down to three figures, you need their Mexican-made range (£700 or so, and still perfectly good guitars). There’s also the option of a Squier, which are made by Fender but don’t bear their name. Good enough for George Harrison, though – you can read ‘Squier Stratocaster’ on the headstock (at the right-hand end of the instrument) below. One of those will cost you about £350.

Harrison is playing with the aforementioned Eric Clapton in that clip, and as it happens Clapton is using a Gibson Les Paul. That’s been the Strat’s main competitor throughout rock history – it has a ballsier sound but isn’t as contoured as the Strat, so doesn’t sit as well on your lap or against your body. But it’s still a thing of beauty, as Nigel Tufnell confirms in This is Spinal Tap.

If you don’t want to commit to Fender prices straightaway, most music shops will sell you a serviceable beginner’s guitar for not much more than £100. Or you could do the full Brian May and make your own instrument, the now-legendary ‘Red Special’. The 16-year-old May and his father took the wood for its body from a table, while its neck was cut from a discarded fireplace that was in such bad condition May had to fill its wormholes with matchsticks. The tremolo arm, meanwhile, is part of a bicycle saddlebag frame, covered with the plastic tip from a knitting needle. (The arm bends the note, as shown below, just after two minutes in.)

The good news whichever electric guitar you go for is that they’re actually easier to play than acoustics – the strings sit nearer the neck, so require less force to press them down. (Your fingertips will hurt for the first few days, but they’ll soon toughen up.) It’s this ease that allows you to play notes without even plucking the string – simply touching the string to the fretboard, or pulling your finger away, will create a sound. This is a huge part of rock guitar playing – though if you want to surprise an expert, point out to them that in AC/DC’s Thunderstruck, where you’d assume Angus Young is using such techniques, he actually plucks each and every note with his plectrum. Quite a feat – watch his right hand here.

There’s more good news when it comes to buying an amplifier (not that you need one to start learning). The amp everyone dreams of is a Marshall and these days the company make a 10-watt version for just £75. It has a headphone socket if you want to keep that Hendrix sound to yourself (coincidentally Marshall was Jimi’s middle name), but is more than loud enough to annoy the neighbours. Should you need convincing of Marshall’s ongoing appeal, Den Dennis and Vim Fuego of Bad News can convince you.

Yet another bonus for anyone learning guitar these days is that there are a billion YouTube videos teaching you everything from the basics to the trickiest million-notes-a-second stuff. Some of us had to learn in the pre-internet era, ruining stylus after stylus as we tried to copy our Stevie Ray Vaughan vinyl records. He was another Strat fan, by the way – he called his favourite one his ‘first wife’.

A final word of warning – don’t try to learn any Rolling Stones riffs. Keith Richards (one of the few rock gods to prefer Fender’s earlier guitar the Telecaster) uses an unusual tuning and the riffs simply won’t sound right if you play them on a standard guitar. In fact, look closely and you’ll see that on some songs Keef uses only five strings – the bottom one (i.e. the one nearest his chin) is missing. He’s literally one string short of a guitar.