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Coming soon: Liz Truss’s book

First it was Nadine Dorries, then it was Theresa May. Now Liz Truss has become the latest female Tory MP to announce that they’re writing a book. Britain’s shortest-serving premier has today revealed details of her forthcoming work, titled Ten Years to Save the West. It is set be published next April by Biteback in the UK and Regnery in America, offering the ex-PM the chance to do a Thatcher and speak on both sides of the Atlantic. The book promises to be ‘a timely warning about the perils facing conservatism in the years ahead’. Well, she ought to know…

According to the press release:

In it, Truss will warn that too many of her fellow conservatives have allowed themselves to be captured by the left-wing influences that set the agenda and frame the debate in so many institutions from the media to academia and the corporate world. She will also call for a return to the alliances built by leaders such as Reagan, Thatcher and others in another era when Western values were under siege.

It also promises to be ‘peppered with newsworthy anecdotes from her time in public life – such as her memorable last meeting with Queen Elizabeth II’ and ‘her dismay at the political class’s attempts to betray Brexit’. Will she be naming names in Whitehall and elsewhere?

Alongside the press release, Truss has done a big interview in today’s Mail on Sunday in which she is asked whether Lady Thatcher would have supported Rishi Sunak’s brand of conservatism. ‘There is a long pause’ reports the paper ‘before Ms Truss says: “That’s not really the question I’m trying to answer in this book.”‘ Ouch.

Putin can’t be compromised with

The slow-grinding Ukrainian offensive in the country’s south has forced many to accept that the war against Russia might turn out to be a prolonged conflict. But while military experts debate whether or not Ukraine can win this war, and how such a victory could be achieved, the focus on military hardware and territory has skewed the West’s approach to the war and potential solutions. Russia’s war against Ukraine war is not a territorial conflict: it is an identity war aimed at extermination. It will not and cannot be solved by territorial changes or security compromises. Just listen to Putin and take him seriously. 

This week, the Russian President sent a message that was extraordinary even by the standards of Russia’s unrestrained wartime propaganda. Speaking to a Kremlin advisory group, Putin declared that 1.5 million Jews, a quarter of all Holocaust victims, were killed by Ukrainian ‘nationalists and anti-Semites’ and that even the Nazis ‘didn’t consider it possible to take part in these mass repressions.’ After that meeting, Putin also told Russian propagandist Pavel Zarubin that ‘western handlers’ deliberately installed an ethnic Jew Volodymyr Zelensky as Ukraine’s president to conceal the country’s ‘anti-human nature.’ 

It might be tempting to dismiss these statements as conspiratorial lunacy or historical ignorance of an ageing and desperate dictator. It would be wrong. These are not gaffes but prepared, deliberate statements, a message that signals how Putin sees Ukraine and the war. This message is bleak. Putin is not after territory or security. His goal is to destroy Ukraine as a state – and in his vision, there can be no room for compromise.  

Putin’s obsession with history and Ukraine go hand in hand. His July 2021 article ‘On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians’ outlined the Russian president’s conviction that Russians and Ukrainians are a single people that were divided by the machinations of foreign powers and that Ukraine is an artificial state. Ukraine, for the Kremlin, was an explicitly ‘anti-Russia’ project concocted by the West.  

Putin’s belief in Ukraine being an artificial state has not changed, but the rhetoric is more ominous now. 

If in 2021 and the earlier stages of the war Ukraine was ‘anti-Russia’, it is now ‘anti-human’. This shift is important. De-humanisation and genocide go together. Before now, genocidal rhetoric in Russia was previously restricted to propagandists and second-tier officials such as the former president Dmitry Medvedev. Now it comes from a person who can order a nuclear strike and had already positioned Ukraine outside of the shared obligations and norms of humanity. 

No less ominous are Putin’s claims about the history of the Holocaust. The participation of Ukrainian nationalists and Nazi collaborators in the murder of the Jews in pogroms, as members of Nazi-organised auxiliary police units and as the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), is well documented. Yet blaming all Jewish victims in Ukraine on the Ukrainians and whitewashing the SS not only distorts the history of the Holocaust, but also reinforces the link that already exists in Putin’s mind between Ukrainian nationalism and Nazism, concealed by the Jewish president sock-puppet and his western masters. These perceptions go beyond Putin’s mind. A new Russian high school history textbook presents the idea of Ukraine’s independence as ‘unthinkable’ and ‘civilisation-ending’ and suggests that Cold War-era popular uprisings in communist dictatorships were CIA plots. 

The implications of these beliefs are far-reaching. In Putin’s message there is no place for Nato expansion, security concerns or threats to Russia’s interests as justification for the invasion. Even if such factors did impact Putin’s earlier behaviour, they are no longer relevant. This is now a war of identity, in which no compromises are possible because you cannot compromise with an ‘anti-human’.  

The Ukraine that exists in Putin’s worldview cannot be reformed or made human again; it ought to be destroyed so that ‘even the ashes’ – as Dmitry Medvedev put it – do not remain. It will be impossible for the Kremlin to reach an agreement with those it perceives as worse than Nazis, or their ‘foreign handlers’.  

Those seeking to end this war need to grasp this reality. Freezing the conflict, a ceasefire, territorial compromise, security guarantees or even Nato membership for Ukraine will do little to change perceptions in Russia. And this problem will only get worse as more and more Russians are educated with a distorted history that dehumanises Ukraine and denies its right to exist. The West and Ukraine must realise that the war is not going away even if the shooting stops. 

We cannot change Russian perceptions and beliefs but we can fortify ours. If the goal of Putin’s aggression is denial of Ukraine’s identity and statehood then this is what our focus should be on. Not just weapons but recognition and knowledge of the Ukrainian language, and the country’s distinct culture, traditions, and history, both good and painful. Without making Ukraine’s identity unquestionable and secure, we might help Ukraine win the war, but never have peace. 

Will a French coalition join forces against Le Pen at the next election?

Emmanuel Macron is not happy. He would love to run for a third term as president but the French constitution precludes such a prospect. Last week, he described the rules as ‘bloody disastrous’, a declaration that earned the president a reprimand from Nicolas Sarkozy in a television interview on Wednesday.

The former president has been busily promoting his memoirs in recent weeks, discoursing on all manner of subjects from Putin to mass immigration to the 2027 presidential election. It’s his belief that his former party, the centre-right Republicans, can be resurrected, but only if they ‘take risks’. That means a coalition, similar to the one that swept Giorgia Meloni to power in last year’s Italian elections. 

Maréchal’s ambition is to be the French Meloni, but that is also the dream of Marine Le Pen

‘Without unity, the right has no chance of winning,’ declared Sarkozy. The priority is to ‘find a leader capable of bringing together the friends of Messrs Zemmour, Macron and Ciotti’. If they fail in this task, warned Sarkozy, then they will ‘boost the National Front’. 

It was no accident that Sarkozy referred to Marine Le Pen’s National Rally by their former name. There is no love lost between the pair. In 2015, Le Pen described Sarkozy as her ‘No. 1 political enemy’. She has consistently reminded her supporters over the years that it was Sarkozy who, as president in 2007, betrayed the ‘No’ Referendum result of two years earlier on the European Constitution. 

In misnaming the National Rally, Sarkozy’s intention was to remind his still substantial fan base that Marine Le Pen is the daughter of the far-right Jean-Marie, who founded the party half a century ago. A vote for her, in other words, is not acceptable. 

Sarkozy had no qualms about referencing Eric Zemmour, whose manifesto in last year’s presidential election was more right-wing than Le Pen’s, both culturally and economically. That election was generally regarded as a failure for Zemmour, although in his first political foray he still picked up 7 per cent of the vote (2.4 million ballots), which was nearly a million more than the Republican nominee, the experienced if hopeless Valérie Pécresse. 

Since that debacle, the Republicans have replaced Pécresse with Eric Ciotti, whose views differ little from Zemmour. A coalition, therefore, between the Republicans and Zemmour’s Reconquest party is not out of the question. They attract the same types of voter: the retired, the middle class, the socially conservative and the economically liberal.  

Many of these backed Macron in the last election, not out of any great love for the president, but because they couldn’t stomach the thought of Marine Le Pen in the Elysee. Not so much because they believe she is a fascist but rather that they regard her as economically illiterate. 

Nonetheless, the left-wing newspaper Liberation is sufficiently alarmed by Marine Le Pen that this week it ran a prominent feature warning its readers of the danger of the ‘banalisation’ of the National Rally leader. As evidence of this normalisation of Le Pen, the paper published the results of a survey it had conducted, revealing that 44 per cent of the public believe she has ‘solutions’ for France; this is up 8 per cent from a similar poll in 2021.  

Who is this 44 per cent? According to a book published this week by the celebrated French economist Thomas Piketty (co-authored with Julia Cagé) entitled A History of Political Conflict, the bulk of Le Pen’s supporters are blue-collar workers who live in the provinces. They vote for Le Pen, not because they are racist but because they feel abandoned by Paris; it is in the rural areas where France has been hit hardest by deindustrialisation. 

In the cities, by contrast, where the service industry is much stronger, Le Pen struggles much more to win over the working class. As for Macron, Piketty describes his electoral base as ‘the most bourgeois in history’.  

If a potential right-wing coalition is to be successful it must appeal to both the working-class provincial vote and the bourgeois electorate. Sarkozy recognises this, and so does Reconquest. They have long called for a right-wing union but so far they have been rebuffed by Le Pen and her party, who believe they can triumph on their own. 

They are mistaken. The bourgeois will never back Marine Le Pen in any great number.  

Her niece, however, is another matter. Marion Maréchal, who represented the National Front in parliament between 2012 and 2017, has always been considered far more palatable than her aunt. More charismatic and more confident than Le Pen, the 33-year-old Maréchal threw her support behind Zemmour in last year’s presidential election. 

On Wednesday, Zemmour announced that Maréchal will lead his party at next year’s European elections. The declaration has generated much excitement within the right-leaning print and broadcast media. The news made the front page of Le Figaro – inside Zemmour explained his decision: 

I want her to be supported by the whole of the younger generation, from all the right-wing parties, who rallied round me during the presidential election.

Maréchal’s appeal has always been broader than her aunt’s. She cuts across generations and classes. More socially conservative than Le Pen, and more economically liberal, Maréchal is arguably the only person capable of forming a coalition. And that is her intention. 

‘We have the opportunity to unite right-wing voters around a major civilisational, historic and vital battle, that of defending our identity, our culture and our values’, she said in a television interview on Wednesday evening. 

Maréchal’s ambition is to be the French Meloni, but that is also the dream of Marine Le Pen. The battle of the blondes is likely to be ferocious – after all, pride as well as political careers are at stake.  

‘Chinese spy’ arrested in the Commons

Oh dear. The Sunday Times is tonight reporting that a Westminster parliamentary researcher has been arrested on suspicion of spying for China. The male suspect, who is in his late twenties, is reported to be linked to a number of senior Tory MPs, including several who are privy to classified or highly sensitive information. Among them are Tom Tugendhat, the, er, security minister, and Alicia Kearns, chairman of the influential Foreign Affairs Committee. Oops.

Counterterrorism police are reported to have swooped on the researcher and another man in his thirties on suspicion of espionage-related offences back in March. The researcher is British and held a parliamentary pass, with the Sunday Times quoting one Whitehall source as saying: ‘This is a major escalation by China. We have never seen anything like this before.’ The man in question had previously lived and worked in China, where security officials fear he may have been recruited as a sleeper agent and sent back to Britain to infiltrate Sinosceptic organisations.

Tonight’s news raises major questions about vetting by the intelligence services, the MPs who worked with the researcher in question and the extent of China’s operations within the UK. Kearns has already responded to the story and tweeted: ‘I am aware of the Sunday Times report. I will not be commenting. While I recognise the public interest, we all have a duty to ensure any work of the Authorities is not jeopardised.’ Will that line continue to hold?

Least the last week of parliament before conference recess won’t be quiet…

Tory Treasury minister takes the fight to Labour

To Shoreditch, unlikely terrain for this year’s Tory Reform Group conference. The last such shindig happened in pre-Covid times, with the One Nation Conservatives keen to make up for lost time. Damian Green, Maria Miller and Tom Tugendhat were among a succession of MPs who appeared before the activists, proudly extolling the virtues of the centre ground and common sense conservatism. 

Mr S was in attendance and particularly enjoyed the reaction of the MP who, upon finding out the result of the Met manhunt, delightedly exclaimed ‘We’ve found Khalife? Thank fuck for that!’ Other highlights included Bim Afolami’s remarkably understated observation on the need for party discipline to ensure fiscal restraint ‘Frankly, over the last few years we have been many things but disciplined isn’t one of them.’

But speech of the day went to Victoria Atkins, the Financial Secretary to the Treasury. Long-been regarded as a rising star of the TRG, she delivered a staunch defence of the past 13 years and took the fight to Labour too:

If we need any example of just how badly-run Labour organisations are, we need I’m afraid only to look at what’s happened in Birmingham this week and to see just how bad ideology serves when it comes to running an enormous organisation. And dare I even say it – much as I love our capital city – but Sadiq Khan has turned this city into a city that is at a standstill. Have you tried getting around anywhere by road or tube? It is currently at a standstill, it is grubby, it doesn’t have that pride that we feel about our capital city and this is why of course we’ve got to help our Conservative candidate Susan Hall next year. 

Atkins sought to contrast the ‘wealth’ of experience in the Tory party with what Labour’s team under Rachel Reeves has to offer: 

If you look at Labour, look at the Treasury front bench of Labour, not one of them has any experience of the private sector. So goodness knows, if any of them were ever to get their hands on the levers of power, how would they understand the pressures facing a small business, how would they understand the barriers, those pain points as I’m trying to work through – as the minister responsible for the UK tax system – those pain points for small businesses as they’re scaling up. They do not have that extensive external experience and that is why we can never ever let them get anywhere near Number 10 and Number 11.

She added that while the short term economic picture might look grim, it would be worthwhile in the end:

All of our work in the Treasury at the moment is focused on halving inflation. We are going in the right direction, we may have a little bit of a blip in September, bear with us because it’s predicted by the very clever maths wonks in the Treasury but we are absolutely in the right direction for the end of the year. 

Those TRG colleagues of Atkins in more marginal seats will just be hoping she’s right…

HMP Wandsworth isn’t the only prison in crisis

Daniel Khalife has been on the run for three days. There’s a £20,000 reward for information leading to his capture and police have spent a night disturbing Richmond Park’s deer. As of Saturday morning reported sightings suggest he fled the lorry and has made his way to the Chiswick area.

Rightly, many questions have been asked about HMP Wandsworth’s failures. Why was Khalife allowed to work in a high security risk role in the prison’s kitchens, providing him with easy access to an escape route? Why didn’t Wandsworth’s gate staff check the underside of the delivery lorry with mirrors, as is policy?

No doubt the independent inquiry announced by Alex Chalk, the Secretary of State for Justice, will answer these questions in time. If the police find evidence that prison officers assisted Khalife, they will be charged. Wandsworth’s management, particularly Katie Price, the Governor, will probably find their careers derailed. 

The proposed inquiry would be limited to explaining how Khalife escaped, as well as reviewing the categorisation of all prisoners at Wandsworth and of all remand prisoners charged with terror offences. But this is far too narrow. 

Although Wandsworth is among our worst prisons, it is far from unique. The poor management, shortage of trained officers and general disorder that likely contributed to Khalife’s escape is found across our prison system. Understaffing, neglect, bad management and bad policy have broken the system. Last week Charlie Taylor, HM Chief Inspector of Prisons, issued an ‘Urgent Notification’ about HMP Woodhill, reporting that more than half of prisoners felt unsafe: no surprise when 298 violent incidents had been recorded in the past 12 months. Staff fare little better, as Woodhill has ‘the highest rate of serious assaults against staff in England and Wales’. HMP Bristol also received an urgent notification this summer, describing it as ‘one of the most unsafe prisons in the country’ where even emergency cell bells are ‘often left unanswered’.

The Inspectorate’s most recent annual report makes grim reading. Only two men’s prisons were said to have ‘Good’ safety outcomes. ‘Many prisoners were still locked up for around 22 hours a day’, with limited or no opportunities for study, work or exercise, known as ‘purposeful activity’. This matters because we know that access to purposeful activity reduces violence and self-harm.

Education in prisons is barely worthy of the name. Not a single English prison inspected by Ofsted was considered ‘good’. High quality education and training in prison can offer a route away from a criminal life. Failing to provide that ensures that reoffending will continue to cost us over £18 billion every year. 

The report goes on to say  ‘[m]ajor staff shortfalls…have a devastating effect…’, ‘prisons struggled to recruit and retain staff in important roles…compounded by the absence of staff through sickness…’. Almost 15 per cent of frontline staff, more than 3,200 officers, left in each of the last two years. 

Prisoners are often rewarded for behaving badly while officers are often reduced to pleading for good behaviour rather than enforcing it

Why would they stay? More than 80 per cent say that morale is poor in their prison, with those working in the highest security men’s establishments reporting the worst. Half say they don’t feel safe. 

Understaffing creates a vicious circle. Prisons are short of staff, so fewer officers are attempting to maintain control over prisoners who are increasingly frustrated at the lack of purposeful activity. Violence becomes more common, staff feel less safe and are more likely to leave. The prison then has fewer, and less experienced staff who struggle to maintain order. Rules are inconsistently enforced, and prisoners quickly learn that noisy demands, or quiet rulebreaking, are rewarded. 

I saw the harm of this culture in my time as a prisoner at Wandsworth. Prisoners are often rewarded for behaving badly while officers are often reduced to pleading for good behaviour rather than enforcing it. On Wandsworth’s G Wing in March 2020 I saw a particularly egregious example when a prisoner smoked a spliff on the landing. A young officer said ‘you can’t do that here’, and the prisoner just laughed then walked away into the crowd of other young men.

Daniel Khalife’s escape from Wandsworth is an alarm that the government must heed. The warnings have been raised again and again. By former prisoners like me, by those who have run prisons and by voices from all across the political spectrum. The Chief Inspector of Prisons recognises the problem. The Prison Officers Association warned about low salaries and an ‘excessively violent’ workplace while the Prison Governors Association warned of a ‘staffing crisis’ two years ago. Even the MoJ knows the situation is dangerous, though they don’t like to say so in public. 

Alex Chalk has an opportunity now to order a full independent inquiry into our prison system. This must consider funding, staffing, management, education, work, rules, discipline and prison capacity. Our prisons have been neglected for too long. This is the time to make them work.

Braverman backs Douglas Murray

Stop the presses: common sense has broken out in parliament. On Thursday, Suella Braverman delivered an update on the anti-terror programme Prevent, following a review into its effectiveness by Sir William Shawcross in February. Among Shawcross’s findings was his criticism about Prevent’s work on supposed ‘right-wing extremism’.

An analysis done by Prevent’s ‘Research Information and Communications Unit’ (RICU) in 2019 investigated social media users described as ‘actively patriotic and proud’ – gasp! – with warning signs including those who absorbed information or opinions from ‘pro-Brexit and centre-right commentators’. These included Jacob Rees-Mogg, Melanie Phillips and The Spectator’s own Rod Liddle and Douglas Murray, who wrote about the surreal experience here.

So Mr S was gladdened to hear the Home Secretary tell the House of Commons the following:

I accepted the review’s recommendation for thresholds to be reset to ensure proportionality across all extremist ideologies. RICU, the Research, Information and Communications Unit, which provides analytical and analysis products on behalf of the Home Office, was identified by Sir William as a concern.

In the past, it has failed to draw clear distinctions between mainstream Conservative commentary and the extreme right. People such as my right hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset (Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg) and Douglas Murray express mainstream, insightful and perfectly decent political views. People may disagree with them, but in no way are they extremists, and Prevent must not risk any perception of disparaging them as such again.

From now on, all RICU products which report on extremist trends, and in future themes, will clearly state the purpose of such reporting and be proportionate.

For more ‘mainstream, insightful and perfectly decent political views’, you can find Douglas, Rod and others in The Spectator every week…

Watch: Macron booed at World Cup opening ceremony

You know it’s bad when the rugby fans are booing you. Poor Emmanuel Macron had his big moment upstaged last night as the World Cup kicked off in Paris. Ahead of the first game between the hosts and New Zealand, the embattled President had to delay his welcome speech from a lectern on the pitch, such was the booing, whistling and jeering from around the stadium.

Macron – a self-made man who worships his creator – has suffered a dramatic fall in popularity since his unpopular pension reforms, with a current approval rating of 31 per cent. It wasn’t just in the Stade de France that he was booed: the President’s appearance on screen was also greeted with a similar reaction at special rugby fan zones in Paris and Marseille, according to news reports.

Talk about having Les Blues…

Rishi Sunak will have a tougher time than he thinks in India

Rishi Sunak, the first British leader of Indian descent, has to walk an unenviable political tightrope at this weekend’s G20 Summit in India. It is Sunak’s first visit to the country as prime minister, and Indians have given him the kind of welcome usually reserved for an all-conquering hero returning home. Sunak himself acknowledged that the trip was ‘special’. This mutual fawning aside, Sunak’s Indian roots actually make his task of securing the best trade deal for Britain in talks with India that little bit harder. 

Indians clearly love the idea that Sunak has risen to the top in Britain, treating him as one of their own, even though he was born in Hampshire. The story of his roots is what matters to Indians. Sunak’s parents are both of Indian origin, and came to the UK from east Africa in the 1960s. It also helps that his wife Akshata Murty, who is accompanying him on the trip, is the daughter of one of India’s richest families. Speaking to reporters on his way to Delhi, Sunak joked about being heralded in some quarters as India’s ‘son-in-law’, a reference to his wife’s prominent family. No one should be fooled by all this razzmatazz. Indians can trumpet Sunak’s roots as much as they like but ultimately this trip is about the hard politics of bilateral relations and a potential trade deal.

Sunak has been dealt a difficult hand in this regard. His Indian heritage means he cannot afford even the slightest perception, unfair or otherwise, that he is going easy on India and its leaders because of some sentimental attachment to the land of his forefathers. Such political calculations may well have informed Sunak’s decision not to pay a visit to his in-laws, who are based in India, citing a ‘lack of time’. Given the prominence of the family, as founders of Infosys – one of the country’s biggest software and outsourcing companies – any such visit could be open to being misconstrued. The harsh political reality is that Sunak needs to strike a tough tone in his discussions with India, one that leaves no room for even a scintilla of doubt about his ability to separate the politics from the personal.  

The prime minister is due to hold talks with his Indian counterpart Narendra Modi over the weekend. The discussions are taking place on the sidelines of the G20 summit, where  the main agenda is climate change and the war in Ukraine. According to official figures, the trading relationship between the UK and India was worth £36billion in 2022/23, making India the UK’s 12th largest trading partner. Current projections suggest India could be the world’s third largest economy by 2050, so a trade deal is worth the effort. Both leaders will expect to make progress on some key sticking points during their discussions.

It is naive to think that Modi would offer concessions to Britain simply because of Sunak’s heritage

Sunak has already cautioned that securing an agreement is ‘not a given. This is sensible politics. Trade deals involve complex sets of negotiations, with plenty of back and forth on the details, often taking several years to finalise. It was always unrealistic to expect any agreement to be reached quickly.

India and the UK have made progress in some areas but the problem is that the outstanding issues are those which are most politically sensitive, dealing with visas, tariff reductions, and business services. India wants more the UK to make more visas available to its students and employees of Indian companies. The issue of visas remains a stumbling block for Sunak, who believes the current levels of migration are too high, and is well aware that many in his party would not take kindly to his ceding ground in this area. He is also keen for India to reduce its tariffs, which are among the most protectionist in the world.

The bottom line is that India wants a trade deal that serves its best interests and it is naive to think that Modi, a wily negotiator, would offer concessions to Britain simply because of Sunak’s heritage. Similarly, Sunak, for all his gushing comments about his return to his ancestral homeland, wants only what works best for Britain. If he does eventually secure a trade deal, this will be a political triumph in its own right. A personal victory achieved despite – not because of – his Indian roots.

French healthcare makes the NHS look like Bedlam

French healthcare has its problems but it makes the NHS look like Bedlam.

Recently my GP here thought it would be a good idea for me to visit the radiologist to take a look at my non-performing thyroid gland.

I made the booking online using an app called Doctolib. An appointment was available in a couple of weeks. In the UK you’d be lucky to get one in six weeks.

There are no diversity, equity and inclusion officers. There are no trans flags painted on the sides of hospitals

The privately owned radiography clinic in Clermont Herault is immaculate and spotless. I had a choice of clinics using Doctolib, but my GP recommended this one. I arrived five minutes early for my 10 o’clock appointment.

The clinic is new and the check-in like an airport. I scan my Carte Vitale, the national health identity card, the screen confirms that I’m expected, and I sit in the waiting room for all of two minutes.

A nurse appears, calls my name, and ushers me into a high-tech radiography suite which looks like the control room at SpaceX. Seconds later the radiologist appears. He is 30-something, has shoulder-length hair, knows my name and has my medical history on a screen in front of him.

The exam takes about ten minutes. All done, he directs me to the exit where I pause to pay the bill. €10.90. The results have been sent electronically to my GP.

Seeing my GP here costs – €7.50 with my Carte Vitale (it costs €25 if you don’t have one). As does the levothyroxine I take every day to replace the hormones no longer produced by my feeble thyroid. The drug costs around €5 a month. The blood tests I get every three months at the medical laboratory (also private) cost €12. The treatment has happily been highly effective and I’ve had no anxiety waiting for tests or appointments.

The fees are tokenistic but at least they are a reminder that medical care comes with a cost. Most of this cost is paid by the Secu, through an insurance fund financed by employers. The insurance costs for the unemployed and very poor are paid by the government. (Ironically, as an expatriate never employed in France, my costs are reimbursed to the Secu by the UK Department of Health and Social Care.)

Nothing akin to the NHS exists in France. In a country where the state is normally supreme, medical care is almost entirely delivered privately. There are no diversity, equity and inclusion officers. There are no trans flags painted on the sides of hospitals. No bed blockers. No vast legions of administrators counting paper clips.

GP surgeries answer the telephone almost immediately. You can get an appointment within a day or two, or immediately if it’s urgent.

The excellence of my own experience is not unusual. I have a friend who had her first child in an NHS hospital and her second in France. ‘It was like the difference between flying economy class and business,’ she says. ‘Everything was better. The care. The attitude of the staff. Even the food.’

When a neighbour in my village had a myocardial infarction, a crash team from the local fire station was by his side to stabilise him in ten minutes. A helicopter, staffed by two pilots, a doctor and a nurse, landed on the village football pitch 30 minutes later. He was at the university hospital in Montpellier in less than an hour. My friends and neighbours offer numerous similar anecdotes.

Twelve hour waits in A&E are inconceivable here. Queues of ambulances outside hospitals unknown. Ditto filthy loos, lost medical records, insouciant administrators. There are not, as in the UK, 7.5 million people on hospital waiting lists. All of this French success is achieved entirely by private providers, financed by insurance.

I wouldn’t suggest that the French system is entirely without problems. Some remote parts of the country have a shortage of GPs. The village doctor is disappearing, replaced by more centralised clinics. The elderly who find it hard to get to these are transported there by private ambulances or taxi drivers who have specialised training. Services like visiting nurses, which seem to have vanished in Britain, continue here with hospitalisation à domicile. Trained nurses visit the infirm daily.

There’s room for improvement here. Care homes are not uniformly excellent. Dental care is definitely a problem made worse because, bizarrely, dental hygienists are illegal in France. Legally, only a qualified dentist is allowed to treat teeth. This is literally bonkers.

There’s not a great deal of difference in average life expectancy between the UK and France – 82.4 years in France versus 81.3 in the UK. (The best performance is that of Japan on 84.8). As a percentage of GDP, France spends slightly more than the UK. So it could be argued that an underperforming health care system like the NHS isn’t that significant.

But without a shadow of doubt, those of us who have experienced health care in France and Britain will not hesitate to declare that it’s vastly preferable on this side of the Channel. 

The tragedy of Italy’s dead bear – and the folly of rewilding

A butcher who has killed the most famous wild bear in Italy is now unable to leave his house for fear of being killed himself.

The tragedy calls into question, once again, the wisdom of the ever more fashionable quest by people in cities to rewild the countryside with dangerous animals such as bears and wolves.

There are no two ways about it: these animals wreak havoc.

If those in the city whose closest encounter with a wild animal is a feral pigeon, sewer rat, or urban fox, want such animals back in the countryside then they must accept that those who actually live in the countryside have the right to kill them, if necessary.

But as this tragedy shows, city people will lift heaven and earth to deny country people such a right.

The dead bear was called Amarena (Black Cherry). She was the best known and most prolific of the wild bears that inhabit the mountains of the Abruzzo not far from Rome. There are only about 60 of them. She leaves behind two young cubs who were undoubtedly near her when she died. They remain at large without their mother.

Andrea Leombruni, 56, shot her dead with a single bullet from his rifle just before midnight on 31 August after going to investigate an eruption of terrified clucking and squawking from his flock of chickens in their coop.

Confronted in the dead of night by the enormous animal he opened fire. He discovered later that she had killed and eaten 13 of his chickens.

Let’s not beat about the bush.

Leombruni killed in self-defence, if not in defence of himself then of his chickens.  Yet he is now the target of endless death threats by telephone and above all on social media. So too are members of his family, including his 85-year-old mother.

Even where I live, near Ravenna on the Adriatic coast, wolves have come down from the Appennines which are 40 miles away because they have been a protected species for decades and their numbers have exploded. My wife Carla saw one on the school run. We hear them howl at night and sometimes we find the dismembered carcasses of fallow dear which only they could have killed. Our donkey Peppa senses their presence and is afraid in her stable. As does Rocco, our Hungarian Vizsla, who sleeps in the barn.

Is anyone seriously saying that I cannot use my Heckler and Koch sub-machine gun to wipe out any pack of wolves I come across at night trying to finish off Peppa and Rocco?

Unfortunately they are – as the tragedy of dead mother bear Amarena quite clearly shows.

The house of the ‘assassin’, as they call him, in the mountain village of San Benedetto dei Marsi – a 50 minute drive from the regional capital of L’Aquila – is under 24 hour guard by the carabinieri and friendly neighbours.

Investigating magistrates, of course, have meanwhile placed him under investigation for the ‘unnecessary or cruel killing of an animal’. Bears, like wolves, are also a protected species which will no doubt make things even worse for him.

Virtue-signallers such as Paride Vitale, who makes eco-friendly perfume from the smells of the forest, wrote in the left-wing daily La Stampa: ‘Mr Andrea Leombruni… assassin of Amarena, must pay for her death… Amarena was the symbol of man’s cohabitation with nature.’

Surely the exact opposite is the case: that man and bear should steer well clear of each other?

The eco-activist lobby group Legambiente issued a statement saying: ‘The killer of the bear Amarena has no justification and no excuse, because he chose to shoot a protected animal at risk of extinction to protect some chickens that generally end up in the pot.’

No justification? Not even self-defence?

Shamefully, even the president of the Abruzzo Region, Marco Marsilio, despite being a member of prime minister Giorgia Meloni’s right-wing Brothers of Italy party, has weighed in against poor old Leombruni.

He is ‘un deliquente’ (a criminal), says the regional president, who has committed ‘a very serious act against the entire region’ without ‘any justification’. Marsilio promises that the region will sue him for damages.

Quite why the regional president felt compelled to make such an accusation, given the lack of evidence to support it, remains unclear.

What is crystal clear is that all these people are completely blind to the real problem here which is something else entirely. Bears like Amarena are getting too close to mankind. And it is a recipe for disaster.

They get filmed strolling nonchalantly around town centres, even breaking into  pasticcerie to eat bread and cakes, or in orchards feasting on fruit. The videos go viral and everyone loves them. How sweet! How adorable! But human beings become too tolerant, and the bears too trusting.

Other videos of bears causing mayhem in, yes, chicken coops, and also eating sheep and pets do not have the same appeal.

Amarena was the star of many viral videos from the moment she was filmed bouncing about the flimsy branches of a black cherry tree back in 2016. Hence her name. Indeed, people used to travel to watch her in action.

She became the unofficial mascot of the National Park of the Abruzzo in which she lived. She is thought to have been about nine years old. In 2020, she had four cubs including one who became known as Juan Carrito and even more famous than her as a result of his playful antics. Sadly, he was run over by a car earlier this year and died.

Abruzzo bears such as Amarena are the orso marsicano – which is often called Italy’s native bear. They are a sub-species of the bears in the Italian Alps – the orso bruno europeo – which had become extinct but was reintroduced from eastern Europe in the 1990s. There are now about 100 of those. These ‘communist’ bears up north do often attack people. In April, for instance, a female one – JJ4 as she is called – killed a jogger. She was condemned to death but reprieved and is now awaiting deportation to Romania.

Native bears, down south, are less aggressive.

But they still scare the living day lights out of people. There is at least one video of Amarena in which she terrorises a village.

The only solution is to keep bears away from human habitation. Naturally, those who look after Italy’s national parks where there are bears know this only too well. But keeping bears away from towns and humans has proved impossible. They keep coming back.

On the evening of 26 August, Amarena was filmed, just yards from watching villagers, with her two cubs padding around San Sebastiano dei Marsi, 12 miles from San Benedetto dei Marsi where she would die five days later.

Amarena’s death is tragic. Let’s hope her two cubs who are unable to fend for themselves are captured soon, and looked after until they are old enough to be released back into the wild.

But the tragedy is not the fault of the butcher who killed Amarena. The tragedy is the fault of those who insist we can live cheek by jowl with ferocious wild animals.

Britain’s shrinking army faces an uncertain future

Old soldiers never die, the song goes, they just fade away. Next year, General Sir Patrick Sanders, Chief of the General Staff and the professional head of the British Army, will step down after less than two years in post. He is 57, and will have served for 40 years. But he is not fading away; rather he leaves under a muted storm, having clashed with the Chief of the Defence Staff, Admiral Sir Tony Radakin, and after vainly resisting cuts to the size of the Army. Under current plans, our land forces will shrink to 73,500 by 2025. We have not fielded so few soldiers since 1799.

It is widely believed – and the government has done nothing to deny – that Sanders’ successor has already been chosen. Lieutenant General Sir Roland Walker is currently Deputy Chief of the Defence Staff, with direct responsibility for military operations and for advising the government on military strategy. He is a savvy Whitehall warrior: he had shared a Portakabin with Ben Wallace, the previous defence secretary, when they were young Guards officers in County Tyrone, Northern Ireland in the 1990s, and impressed his old comrade-in-arms as Director Special Forces when Wallace was security minister. Walker has also made a good impression on the Prime Minister.

A US general told Ben Wallace privately that his colleagues no longer considered our Army a top-tier fighting force. That stung

Roly Walker is a popular officer whose presumed appointment has been welcomed by the defence community. He has substantial experience of active service, and cheated death in 2010 when he was commanding the Grenadier Guards in Afghanistan. His Ridgback armoured vehicle was blown up by an improvised explosive device and thrown six feet into the air, its wheels blown off. He and the other five soldiers inside were shaken but unharmed; ‘it’s a pretty unnerving experience’, he commented afterwards. Walker was later awarded the Distinguished Service Order for his leadership.

Sensibly, he has realised that the reduction in size of the Army is a done deal, a political decision above his pay grade, however much, and however correctly, Sanders has criticised it. At 53, he has time to serve a standard three- or four-year term as CGS and will still be in contention to become Chief of the Defence Staff after Radakin or his successor, so he has the opportunity to shape the Army in profound ways.

Lieutenant General Sir Roland Walker, who is currently Deputy Chief of the Defence Staff, is in line to take over as head of the British Army (Credit: Getty images)

There is an enduring criticism, most mordantly expressed recently by Simon Akam, briefly a cavalry subaltern, in his 2021 book The Changing of the Guard, that the army is an organisation riddled with social class distinctions. Half of the officer cadets who attend the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst come from fee-paying schools, and Akam’s own regiment, the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards, did not accept its first state-educated officer until 2003 (it can trace its lineage back to 1678).

Walker is not an obvious antidote to this. He was educated at Harrow and sponsored by the Army to attend the Royal Agricultural College Cirencester, famed for well-bred gilet-wearing heirs to large estates. He is not alone: the last Chief of the General Staff not from a fee-paying school was Lord Harding of Petherton, who retired in 1955. And while Gavin Williamson introduced a Diversity Plan during his time as defence secretary, the preponderance of independent schools is, if anything, growing.

More pertinent still is Walker’s professional background. From 1997 to 2008, he served with the Special Air Service, and was Director Special Forces from 2018 to 2021. The UK Special Forces are very highly regarded, and the creation of the four-battalion Ranger Regiment in 2021 will enhance the Army’s special operations capability, but there are concerns that these glamorous units are growing at the expense of the regular infantry, where any army’s core strength still lies.

Walker will take command when there is an unspoken existential question confronting the Army. What is it for? The Ministry of Defence currently aims to be able to field a war-fighting division of around 10,000 personnel, but, while it retains division-level command and control, it is unlikely that 3rd (UK) Division could be deployed as a stand-alone force in any useful time frame. It is underequipped, new armoured vehicles are delayed and deficient, and it is not even certain that it could overmatch a ‘peer opponent’ (MoD euphemism for Russia). Earlier this year, a US general told Ben Wallace privately that his colleagues no longer considered our Army a top-tier fighting force. That stung.

Experience in irregular warfare runs deep. One Army source told the Times that Walker is ‘a special forces man who believes the army should be converted into small bands of determined men’. There is a radical school of thought that this is the way ahead for our armed forces: we are likely to fight as part of a coalition in the future, so why not be the sharpened tip of the US spear? It plays to our strengths. But it is not a decision we should make by default. The Army cannot get smaller, so do we keep struggling to be a full-spectrum fighting force, or do we specialise, like many small nations do? Roly Walker may have a large part to play in forcing that decision.

SNP to purge rebel backbencher

Dear oh dear. It appears Fergus Ewing has exposed one painful truth too many. The nationalist veteran is expected to have the whip removed within days after the party’s leadership decided that his backbench criticisms have gone unpunished too long.

Ewing — who is rumoured to be the only Spectator subscriber on the SNP benches — will face severe disciplinary action after a series of rebellions, senior party sources revealed to the Times. From voting in favour of a no confidence motion against Green co-leader Lorna Slater to opposing the gender bill to physically tearing up government legislation on Highly Protected Marine Areas (HPMAs), Ewing doesn’t exactly, er, toe the party line. It was thought that Ewing might face punishment after siding with the opposition against Slater but his mother, the SNP trailblazer Winnie Ewing, tragically passed away around that time. While Humza Yousaf sent Nicola Sturgeon flowers after her arrest, Mr S isn’t quite clear whether Ewing received the same special treatment… 

Last night at the Holyrood magazine’s political awards in Edinburgh, after collecting his trophy for MSP of the Year, Ewing dropped hints that he might vote against the government next week when the Tories lead a debate on the much-condemned short-term let licenses. Ewing has already called for the licensing scheme to be halted, criticising a plan that he says ‘could make family trips unaffordable’. The Nats could barely control themselves on hearing yet another attack on their farcical policies and the SNP leadership have insisted that Ewing would face suspension ‘within the next two weeks’. Clearly no one’s ever taught Yousaf how to handle constructive criticism… 

Former SNP MP Angus MacNeil tweeted in support of Ewing’s prize last night, saying it ‘hopefully calms the SNP hothead fraternity from flinging out Fergus too’. He continued: ‘Can’t exactly go to voters asking for more MPs [and] MSPs at elections if you get rid of the ones you already have.’ Smart political thinking? Come on, this is the Scottish National party we’re talking about here, Angus…

Who killed free speech at Harvard?

Harvard, consistently ranked as one of the world’s best universities, has just been rated the worst for free speech in the United States. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (Fire), which compiled the rankings, described the state of free speech at Harvard as ‘abysmal’.

This news is surprising, since in April over fifty Harvard academics formed a Council on Academic Freedom dedicated, in its words, ‘to promoting free enquiry, intellectual diversity and civil discourse’ on campus. The Council’s formation marked a milestone in official recognition of the problem of free speech, mainly for conservative professors. The psychologist Steven Pinker and Lawrence H. Summers, former advisor to President Clinton, are both members. So why does Harvard’s reputation continue to decline?

Having just finished a year at Harvard, I would say there’s a fairly simple explanation. It is misleading to speak of a free speech problem when Harvard doesn’t really need free speech in the first place. The purpose of America’s elite universities, for decades, has been to serve as hitching posts for the elite. Most people are there to climb the ladder and get a well-paid job. Once you understand this, you can see why a university which professes to champion enquiry, tolerance and diversity ends up doing the exact opposite. 

The purpose of America’s elite universities, for decades, has been to serve as hitching posts for the elite

For starters, Harvard’s student body remains stubbornly homogeneous. Ten per cent of graduating seniors identify as conservative, versus 70 per cent liberal. Diversity of race and gender have improved – but these are relatively easy to achieve when affirmative action privileges wealthy black students, and girls outperform boys at high school. 

Diversity of class, though, is harder to achieve. One in four students come from America’s top 10 per cent richest households, about as many as come from America’s bottom 50 per cent.

Put another way, Harvard’s student body is not only elite, but elitist. A few right-wing provocateurs at the Republican Club notwithstanding, the scope for genuine disagreement on political and moral issues is narrow. There is no need for ‘free speech’ when most people on campus share a basic worldview. 

If Harvard’s faculty had the authority to force their students to think differently on contentious issues, things might be different. But the institution would prefer to keep admissions rates and satisfaction levels high than impose anything so threatening as pedagogy on its students. 

A class I took last Autumn, in music composition, ended in bitterness when one student charged our professor with, among other crimes, describing Nina Simone as ‘angry’ (he was showing us her song, Revolution). What surprised me was our poor professor’s resignation: to the petulant and untrue suggestion that he was racist; to the mutiny of his own teaching assistant, who encouraged us to make a formal complaint if we felt sufficiently distressed; and to the remarks that would inevitably be made about him on the Harvard-wide student survey once class was over. 

Students are expected to direct not only what they are taught, and how, but how they are rewarded for it too. Grade inflation is a universal problem, but the ‘Harvard A’ is an inside joke, given how many students seem to get one. Those in charge can do little about it: students simply avoid the classes that are too difficult, punishing professors in turn.

The truth is that when higher education has eroded, year after year, until it is little more than a theatre for entitled elites – a way-stop before lucrative careers in finance, consulting and medicine – there really is no need to defend something so antiquated as ideological diversity. Upstanding faculty members can preach veritas, Harvard’s motto, all they like. But the truth is, Harvard doesn’t really need free speech.

Martin Selmayr in trouble over ‘blood money’ jibe at Austria

Martin Selmayr, the so-called Beast of the Berlaymont, is no stranger to controversy. During his time as head of European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker’s cabinet and as secretary-general of the Commission, Selmayr became something of a bete noire of Brexiteers, having been accused of wanting to ‘punish’ the UK for leaving the EU. Despite, or perhaps because, of this reputation, Selmayr had a habit of floating to the top of EU politics. But now, it seems, Selmayr may have pushed things too far.

Selmayr, who is now head of the European Commission’s office in Vienna, has been rebuked by Brussels for accusing Austria of paying ‘blood money’ to Russia for gas supplies. At a talk at a Vienna art fair on Wednesday, Selmayr said Austria is effectively financing Russia’s war against Ukraine.

‘This surprises me, because blood money is sent to Russia every day with the gas bill,’ he is quoted as saying by ORF, an Austrian news site.

His comments sparked a furious backlash in his host country. Austria’s far-right opposition Freedom Party has called for Selmayr to quit. And Austria’s Foreign Ministry has hauled the ‘Beast’ in for a telling off.

Selmayr’s bosses back in Brussels are also livid.

‘The choice of words by the head of our representation in Austria was not only unnecessary but also inappropriate,’ Balazs Ujvari, the EU Commission’s spokesman, has said. Oh dear. Mr S wonders how Selmayr will manage to dig himself out of this hole.

The Guardian’s shameful Roisin Murphy review

Of all the smug, bitter things the Guardian has published over the years, its review of Róisín Murphy’s new album has got to be one of the worst. Ms Murphy is a musical genius but a wicked woman, the review essentially says. Why? Because she committed the blasphemy of criticising puberty blockers. Switch off her music, ready the stake!

Murphy’s album Hit Parade is released today. It is being adorned with praise. Some are calling it the album of the year. Even the Guardian’s reviewer, through teeth so gritted I’m sure they got chipped, calls it ‘masterful’ and gives it five stars.

That such a perfectly normal and good moral instinct has been rebranded as ‘bigotry’ is all the proof we need that society’s self-styled moral guardians have lost the plot

But it’s a ‘compromised’ record, says the Guardian. It comes with an ‘ugly stain’. You see, it’s a record made by a woman who had the temerity, the sheer audacity, to express a prohibited point of view. Oh Róisín, why couldn’t you be a good girl and just smile and sing?

Murphy’s crime was to write a short post on her private Facebook page questioning the wisdom of giving puberty blockers to gender-confused kids. These drugs are ‘absolutely desolate, big Pharma laughing all the way to the bank’, she said. ‘Little mixed-up kids are vulnerable and need to be protected, that’s just true.’

Where’s the lie? Many experts are concerned about the ‘long-term physical effects and other consequences’ of pumping teens with powerful drugs that block the onset of puberty. Norway, Finland and Sweden have restricted puberty-blocking out of concern for kids’ physical and mental wellbeing.

Murphy merely gave voice to a caring, sensible, rational belief: that kids should be free to go through puberty without shame or interference. And yet she was hounded by the digital mob. She was damned as a transphobe. Her record company reportedly has ceased all promotion for her album. Some venues cancelled her gigs. It’s a story as old as time – the woman who spoke out of turn must be shamed and hidden from view.

And now the Guardian says her new record is ‘a masterful album with an ugly stain’. The ‘sincerity’ of this record has been ‘compromised’ by its maker’s sinful views, apparently. The review even slams Murphy’s apology for the upset that her views caused, on the basis that ‘she didn’t apologise for her original assertion, only the division she had sowed’.

In short, the blasphemer has not fully recanted. She has refused to damn herself and beg for absolution for her wrongthink. And thus she and all her works remain ‘stained’. ‘Though you wash yourself with lye and use much soap, the stain of your guilt is still before me’, says the angry God of the Old Testament. ‘Though you apologised for hurting people’s feelings, the stain of your transphobia is still there’, say the jumped-up gods of cancel culture.

As to the idea that Murphy sowed division – that is pure untruth. It wasn’t the woman who expressed her honestly held beliefs who caused all that fury and friction online – it was the mob who hunted her. It was Murphy’s mostly male persecutors, the people who shamed and sought to silence her, who turned a perfectly normal situation – a woman having an opinion – into bitter censure. Murphy was the victim here, not the instigator. I thought the Guardian was against victim-blaming?

The Guardian review speaks of Hit Parade as if it were morally corrupted art, an ethically compromised record that many will struggle to enjoy. Unless you were one of the ‘tiny, privileged industry contingent’ who heard this record before Murphy opened her big gob about puberty blockers, you may not be able to ‘cultivate a relationship with Hit Parade free from this association’, it says.

This, to be blunt, is insane. Most discussions about separating the art from the artist revolve around long-dead painters who abused young women or composers with fishy far-right views. Here we are talking about a singer who wants to protect children from harm. That such a perfectly normal and good moral instinct has been rebranded as ‘bigotry’ is all the proof we need that society’s self-styled moral guardians have lost every bit of the plot.

In 2006 there was a great documentary about the Dixie Chicks called Shut Up and Sing. It was about the severe backlash these country-music women experienced when they dared to criticise George W Bush’s invasion of Iraq. Who could have guessed that 20 years later it wouldn’t be angry right-wing shock jocks telling outspoken women to ‘shut up and sing’, but the Guardian, the left, the right-on.

An ante-post wager for the Cambridgeshire

My beloved late father, who was responsible for my love of horse racing, made an annual attempt to land the so-called ‘autumn double’: the two big Newmarket’s handicaps run towards the tail-end of the Flat season. For the best part of half a century, I have followed his lead with a fair degree of success in both contests but never landing the double at the same time.

The duo of races involved are the Cambridgeshire, a ‘cavalry charge’ run over a mile and one furlong on Newmarket’s straight course, and the Cesarewitch, run over twice that distance at the same track. Because of their large fields, both races are usually run at a fast pace and so it is essential to have horses that are true stayers over the very different distances of both races.

This year the Club Godolphin Cesarewitch Handicap will take place on Saturday October 14 and it is my favourite big-race handicap of the season. However, many horses entered in the race are now also entered in the Irish equivalent, the Friends Of The Curragh Irish Cesarewitch at the Curragh on Sunday September 24. This is understandable as the Irish race offers a pot of Euros 324,000 to the winner.

This makes ante-post betting on the Newmarket marathon unattractive as connections often wait until the likely going for both races before deciding which race they will target with their horse.

So for now I am going to keep my powder dry for the Newmarket marathon and instead just suggest one bet for the bet365 Cambridgeshire, to be run on Saturday September 30 and worth more than £100,000 to the winner.

I put up OVIEDO each way in a handicap at York a fortnight ago and he ran a big race to finish second to an improving six-year-old gelding, Astro King. Drawn wide and held up that day, while also racing a little keenly, Oviedo made considerable late progress under a largely hands and heels ride.

His last four runs have been over one mile two furlongs or more and so a fast-run race over slightly less on Newmarket’s demanding straight course should be just what the doctor ordered for Ed Bethell’s three-year-old colt. The horse is suited by quick ground and, with an Indian summer widely forecast, he should get it even at the very end of this month.

The horse is highly thought of by his handler and won the Racing TV Zetland Gold Cup at Redcar back in May off a rating of 96. He is now up to a loftier mark of 103 but don’t forget this horse, as a two-year-old, was third to Chaldean in the Group 3 Tattersalls Acomb Stakes at York over an inadequate trip of 7 furlongs.

So he knows how to mix it in the best of company. Back Oviedo 2 points win at 16-1 with Coral or Ladbrokes because the each way ante post terms are poor for a race that would expect to attract its maximum field of 35 runners.

The list of dangers is a long one and those horses include Dual Identity, a hugely impressive winner at Sandown last weekend, and Greek Order, an improving three-year-old colt trained by father and son team, Roger and Harry Charlton. The latter could certainly be the proverbial ‘group horse masquerading as a handicapper’.

This weekend the big race is the Group 1 Betfair Sprint Cup at Haydock (tomorrow, 3.35pm). Run over 6 furlongs and with a first prize of more than £242,000, it has deservedly attracted a big field of 17 top sprinters.

Despite being unbeaten in four runs this season, Julie Camacho’s quirky but talented three-year-old colt, Shaquille, is not a straightforward ride and so it is tempting to take him on. The trouble is I can’t see a solid each way bet in the race and so I am going to leave it as just the one bet for the week.

2023 flat season running total: – 21.82 points.

2022-3 jumps season: + 54.3 points on all tips.

Pending:

2 points win Juan Les Pins at 20-1 for the Virgin Bet Ayr Gold Cup.

2 points win Aleezdancer at 16-1 for the Virgin Bet Ayr Gold Cup.

2 points win Oviedo at 16-1 for the bet365 Cambridgeshire.

There were no settled bets from last week to record. I am no longer listing all the settled bets from the season as the list is now very long. However, all the bets are there online in my past columns if people want to see them.

My gambling record for the seven and a half years: I have made a profit in 14 of the past 15 seasons to recommended bets. To a 1 point level stake over this period, the profit of has been just over 523 points. All bets are either 1 point each way or 2 points win (a ‘point’ is your chosen regular stake).

Could Corbyn thwart Sadiq’s mayoral bid?

Is next year’s London mayoral contest a done deal? When the Tories first started the process of candidate selection, the general sense was that they had little chance of taking the mayoralty from Sadiq Khan. However, as the Labour mayor has faced a voter backlash over his support for Ulez (the ultra low emission zone), the race looks closer than previously thought. What’s more, there is one man who could decide it.

Step forward Jeremy Corbyn. The former Labour leader – who is currently banned from standing as a candidate for the party – could deny Khan a third term as London mayor if he decides to run as an independent candidate. That’s the finding of a Redfield and Wilton poll for Times Radio. The poll found that, as things stand, Khan is on track for a very narrow victory – with 33 per cent support to 32 per cent support for the Tory candidate Susan Hall. However, were Corbyn to throw his hat in, he would apparently come third with 15 per cent of the vote – and hand victory to Hall, as Khan’s share of the vote would drop to 25 per cent.

As I reported in the magazine last month, the fear in Labour has long been that Corbyn would split the vote and let the Tories in. Changes brought in under the Electoral Reform Act 2022 mean that next year’s mayoral election will take place using a first-past-the-post voting system. But the reason for scepticism is that it is still unclear as to whether Corbyn will throw his hat in.

Speaking at the Edinburgh Fringe, Corbyn refused to rule out a mayoral bid when pressed, instead answering: ‘Well let’s have a think about it, shall we?’ But Labour figures still doubt that Corbyn will really go the Ken Livingstone route and join the mayoral race as an independent.

While some of his old advisers have encouraged the idea, running for City Hall is expensive and requires nominations London-wide. Corbyn’s main focus so far is on running as an independent MP in his seat of Islington North. Should he decide to go for the mayoralty, crowdfunding could be an option. Jamie Driscoll, the North of Tyne Mayor, has raised more than £130,000 of his £150,000 target to fund his campaign to run as an independent mayoral candidate in 2024 after leaving Labour. Labour aides will be hoping Corbyn does not take inspiration from Driscoll’s example.

Who’s really to blame for the Wandsworth jailbreak?

There’s fevered speculation about inside jobs or state actors involved in the HMP Wandsworth prison break by terror suspect Daniel Khalife. But as police close in on Richmond park, whether he’s found cowering in a ditch or at a press conference in Tehran, this dramatic escape reveals just how close we are to a full blown crisis across our prison system.

Wandsworth has been failing in plain sight in front of helpless officials at the Ministry of Justice for years. Repeated inspections have revealed squalor, overcrowding and chronic staff retention problems with young, inexperienced officers out of their depth. Writing about another filthy jail recently, Chief Inspector Charlie Taylor, rapidly running out of superlatives for crisis, correctly said that dirty and uncared for jails were a proxy for far more serious problems. At Wandsworth, summed up by recent prison leaver Chris Atkins as ‘chaos run by schoolchildren’, all the ingredients for this week’s catastrophe were there already, without the James Bond flourishes.

It wasn’t always like this. When I ran security at Wandsworth in the mid-90s, we were clearly and confidently in charge. We had high morale and a fully staffed security department able to launch our own intelligence-led search operations. We scrupulously vetted all high-profile prisoner employment applications like kitchen staff who enjoyed status and better pay. The prison was firmly under our control. That meant that we could take risks in other ways that benefitted prisoners, such as allowing Pimlico Opera and hundreds of members of the public in to put on and enjoy a prisoner production of West Side Story. It also meant that front line officers felt safe enough to be out amongst prisoners supporting their rehabilitation and gathering crucial intelligence from prisoner sources and observation. This isn’t perfect hindsight, there were many problems too, including some overtly racist and oppressive staff. But in the main, everyone benefitted because we were the biggest gang in the prison, to put it bluntly. The vast majority of prisoners want to see legitimate authority in the men and women who wear the uniform. Where this isn’t the case, the wheels quickly fall off.  

At HMP Wandsworth, all the ingredients for this week’s catastrophe were there already, without the James Bond flourishes

Wandsworth today seems to have little in common with the place we ran. In the years since the disastrous austerity programme, experience and numbers were stripped out of the service. This has led to free fall in all the important metrics of disorder, assaults and self-harm that mean the difference between jails as hopeful places, or where accidents and embarrassments are waiting to happen.

The series of human and physical security failures that would have to have taken place to allow Khalife to plan and orchestrate his escape, strapped to the bottom of a prison van, might surprise ministers but come as no shock to those of us who have been warning about declining standards and management ineptitude for years.

Prison security is a dynamic process because conditions are constantly evolving. They rely on motivated and alert people carrying out often humdrum tasks right every time. The basis of this is the process of risk assessment. The gatehouse where staff apparently failed to spot a prisoner hanging on to the undercarriage of the van and the kitchen where he was able to evade staff to do so will have had risk assessments that identify escape of prisoners as a primary hazard with high consequence. That would have mandated control measures and safe systems of work to reduce or eliminate the risk. But as Mike Tyson memorably said, no plan survives a punch in the face. So it’s not enough to have these plans if they can’t survive off the page or they are operated by people who are so demoralised or possibly even compromised that a terrorist suspect sails through the front gate.

No doubt one of Justice Secretary Alex Chalk’s independent investigations will be looking at these processes, along with the operation of Wandsworth’s contingency plans. I ran the command suite at HMP Wandsworth where major incidents were managed from. It was permanently staffed and ready for action at a moment’s notice to respond to a major incident. I do wonder what the current arrangements are and what gaps of almost an hour before police were alerted by the prison after Khalife was reported missing tells us about their fitness for the task.

Chalk has also asked for a review of Khalife’s categorisation process. It might surprise readers to know that we have convicted terrorists across all three categories of closed prison in this country. The system is supposed to allocate violent extremists in terms of their capacity and motivation to escape. This means the heavy end terror plotters are in Category A conditions and the enablers, logisticians and tin rattlers are in B or even C conditions. Seven years ago when I reported on extremism in prisons and found the whole system a self deluded mess, I raised concerns about the numbers of terror prisoners in conditions of lowered security where there was virtually no expertise or resource to manage the risk. I’m not in favour of a single terrorist prison but the current system is dangerous: we have ideologically motivated offenders in close proximity to violent and impulsive young men right across a prison estate that is falling apart. That should bother us all.

I was so concerned about the disconnect between the upper echelons of the prison service HQ and the facts on the ground that I recommended to ministers that they should have their own independent advisor on counter terrorism reporting directly to them to ensure they were not being fed partial baloney and they had eyes on the ground. The Times reported that the only reason prison bosses vetoed this appointment was because they thought it would be me. I can’t say whether I would have spotted the rot at Wandsworth but the Justice Secretary would do well to reflect on the need for forensic scrutiny of the well paid bureaucrats responsible for places like Wandsworth failing in plain sight. Other more dangerous and sophisticated terrorists will be watching. And making plans.

BBC disinformation correspondent accused of embellishing her CV 

Oh dear. Could things get any worse for the fledgling BBC Verify, launched to combat the scourge of fake news? The fact-checking service has already faced criticism for failing to spot the BBC’s own blunders – such as the Corporation’s misfired reporting on Nigel Farage and Coutts. Now though it looks like the service’s star reporter could be in a bit of hot water. 

According to the New European, the BBC’s disinformation correspondent Marianna Spring was allegedly caught embellishing her CV when applying for a job in 2018. The paper alleges that five years ago Spring wanted to work as a Moscow stringer for the US-based outlet Coda Story and wrote on her CV:  

‘June 2018: Reported on International News during the World Cup, specifically the perception of Russia, with BBC correspondent Sarah Rainsford.’  

But, according to the NE, this reportedly fell apart when Coda Story checked with Rainsford and found out the pair had only met a couple of times in social situations.  

The New European says it has seen Spring’s emails insisting that she was a ‘brilliant reporter’ but apologising for the blunder:  

‘I’ve only bumped into Sarah whilst she’s working and chatted to her at various points, but nothing more. Everything else on my CV is entirely true…

There’s absolute no excuse at all, and I’m really sorry again… The only explanation at all is my desperation to report out in Moscow, and thinking that it wouldn’t be a big deal, which was totally naive and stupid of me. I’m really sorry again for this awful misjudgment on my part.’

This apparently did not land well with Coda Story’s editor in chief who reportedly replied:  

‘Telling me you are a brilliant reporter who exercises integrity and honesty when you have literally demonstrated the opposite was a terrible idea.’ 

Mr S can forgive youthful indiscretions, but this does appear to be rather awkward for the BBC, which decided to make Spring the star of their disinformation campaign, and the host of the eponymous Marianna in Conspiracyland podcast, which asks ‘What happened to the people who fell down the rabbit hole into a world of conspiracy theories?’ Only this week Spring was subject to a fawning Guardian profile again placing her at the centre of the Beeb’s misinformation efforts.  

Perhaps Verify will have to start investigating its own reporters… 

The BBC declined to comment on this story.