What the BBC gets wrong about Israel

If you get your news on the Middle East from the BBC, every so often Israel appears to go mad and begins lustily bombing Palestinian civilians. No rhyme or reason. Jerusalem is simply pummelling Gaza for the hell of it. 

This impression is often created by the BBC’s approach to reporting on Israel and terrorism. The story invariably begins when Israel responds to attacks, with those original attacks deemed insufficiently newsworthy until then or reported as a retaliation to some provocation. Then, once Israel engages, the inciting incidents are quietly smuggled into the coverage but framed as just another round in the cycle of violence. Thus self-defence is cast as aggression, and aggression as tit-for-tat.  

Here’s how the BBC World Service introduced an item this morning: 

‘To the Middle East now, where Palestinian officials say that two young men have been killed during an overnight Israeli army raid near Jenin in the occupied West Bank. It came hours after Israel carried out air strikes on Gaza, targeting militant commanders. Fifteen people were killed, including ten civilians. Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned Palestinian militants that any retaliation would be met with a crushing response.’ 

Two ‘young men’ killed by Israeli soldiers. Gazan civilians killed by air strikes. The Israelis demanding there be no retaliation. If this was your first encounter with these events, you would probably come away from it with a less than sympathetic view of Israel’s actions.  

Fortunately for Israel, and unfortunately for the BBC, Israeli journalist Lahav Harkov was on the line waiting to be interviewed on the situation. Harkov, who writes for the Jerusalem Post, was asked if the timing of Israel’s operations was significant. She responded: 

‘It’s significant because of details that you left out in your introduction. For example, the two Palestinian men shot in Jenin overnight were shooting at IDF soldiers and the IDF soldiers shot them back… The operation in Gaza came after Palestinian Islamic Jihad shot 102 rockets towards Israeli civilian centres. Then Israel took a week or so to prepare its operation and use its intelligence and then, yes, retaliated. But retaliated in a way that was commensurate with international law because they shot at civilians and Israel shot at the terrorists who were leading this organisation and this operation to shoot at civilians.’ 

In a 40-second burst, Harkov provided listeners with facts, context, chronology and background. This is what used to be known as ‘journalism’. It may have been less than a minute but Harkov should bill the BBC for a full reporting shift.  

Astonishingly, the presenter decided to have another go. ‘If the operation was to target the Islamic Jihad,’ she enquired, and ‘we have ten civilians dead’, did this ‘show us where the thought process of Mr Netanyahu and the coalition government and the leadership is at the moment’?  

Harkov knocked this one out of the park, too: 

‘Every civilian life lost is tragic. But, for a terrorist group that does not have its own separate military bases and hides out amongst civilians, that is not such a high number. When you look at photographs of the operation, you see that a specific apartment in an entire building is what was blown up. It’s not that they were taking down the whole building, hundreds of people, to get one person. It was a pinpoint operation.’ 

Harkov’s responses were a pinpoint operation too, a precision strike against the BBC’s singular and faulty approach to reporting on Israel. In response, the BBC say: ‘Throughout Newsday’s three-hour programme, we reported on the developments in the Middle East between Israel and the Islamic Jihad leaders impartially and provided differing perspectives on the recent conflict. More broadly, the BBC has covered this story accurately and responsibly with detail on the recent history across our coverage.’ 

The Corporation may well think that is correct. The BBC’s approach is certainly not the result of a conspiracy, as some Israelis and their sympathisers around the world assume. Yes, the BBC has its ideologues in news and current affairs and it seems to apply lower corporate and journalistic standards in its coverage of Israel. This is, after all, the organisation that hired someone who declared ‘Hitler was right’ as the ‘Palestine specialist’ at BBC Monitoring. But the BBC’s bias against Israel reflects institutional culture, the political attitudes of the sort of people who work in news and current affairs, and patterns and assumptions so long embedded that even veteran BBC staff would struggle to account adequately for the uniquely malign frame the Corporation applies to Israel. That may not be much comfort but cultures, groupthink and frames can all be changed. 

Change is sorely needed. Israel makes its share of mistakes. Sometimes it can be its own worst enemy. But the BBC’s flawed journalism makes a country trying to defend itself in a complex environment with very few options look like a bloodthirsty aggressor. The BBC should not give Israel a free ride. It should be rigorous, curious, sceptical and challenging, but at present it is sloppy, partial, hostile and distorting. Until it changes, the Corporation’s coverage of Israel and the Palestinians will only continue to discredit itself.  

Daniel Penny and the problem with have-a-go heroes

I have always liked the phrase ‘have-a-go hero’. It sums up a certain type of person who can emerge from nowhere and coat their name with honour. One thinks, for instance, of John Smeaton, the baggage handler who was having a fag outside Glasgow airport in 2007 when two jihadis tried to blow the place up.

After a couple of explosions, Smeaton, Alex McIlveen and others ran to find out what was up and, finding one of the terrorists on fire, proceeded to kick the guy in the nuts. Indeed, so hard did McIlveen kick the guy that he himself tore a tendon. But Smeaton, McIlveen and others rightly became folk heroes. Smeaton memorably warned off any future terrorists by telling an interviewer ‘Glasgow doesn’t accept this. This is Glasgow. We’ll set about ye’. There was even a song to laud him. Locals sang it as our forebears sang around the campfires of old.

But for every have-a-go hero whose name can be carved with pride, one thinks of other cases where the situation went another way. One that sticks in my mind is Richard Whelan, whose name also came to prominence in 2007. Whelan was on a London bus with his girlfriend when a 22-year-old started harassing passengers. Specifically the hoodlum began throwing chips at people, including Whelan’s girlfriend. Whelan intervened to ask the man to stop and was promptly knifed to death. His killer was convicted and sent to Broadmoor in 2007.

I mention these contrasting cases, because both kinds are doubtless on the minds of anyone wondering whether to ‘have a go’. Since few of us know precisely how we will react in such a situation, many of our actions will be determined by what mentally comes to the fore when we survey a risky situation. Will we have the instinct to pile on in, or the urge to duck and look away?

New Yorkers are asking themselves this question again, thanks to a complicated case which has occurred on the city’s subway. The subway is notoriously sketchy – a strange thing in itself. Some of the most beautiful subway systems in the world exist in the most unfree countries – Russia and North Korea, to name just two. Meanwhile the most dynamic city in the freest country in the world has an utterly dystopian transport system. You can see across multiple tracks. Everything is dark, noisy and threatening. And that is before you even factor in the homeless who use the subway as a shelter, the insane people whom the city authorities refuse to incarcerate or the criminals who use it as a place to mug and steal.

Most New Yorkers have a story of being accosted on the subway. All are only one bad interaction away from never riding it again. Yet the police, on the advice of the left-wing district attorney and others, do next to nothing to protect the residents. As a result, when someone starts screaming in their carriage, most New Yorkers stare at their phones and hope it will go away.

Not the 24-year-old ex-marine Daniel Penny, who was on the subway last week when a homeless schizophrenic man called Jordan Neely started screaming at passengers. What happened next will be litigated in court, but Penny felt the need to subdue Neely, which he did along with other passengers. Unfortunately he subdued Neely too much and the chokehold ended up killing him.

Had this case involved two white people or two black people it would have received little comment. But Neely was black and Penny is white. The fact that one of the other passengers who subdued Neely was also black has escaped the notice of the left-wing members of Congress and others who lost no time in calling the incident a ‘lynching’ or ‘execution’. Nightly protests have taken place, with crowds of people being whipped up to call for ‘justice’, otherwise they will ‘burn it down’: ‘it’ meaning ‘New York’.

What we do know is that Neely was screaming, among other things, that he wanted to die, and that he tore off his coat and threw it to the floor just before Penny intervened. At Penny’s trial, a jury will have to determine whether he had a legitimate concern that an attack on him and his fellow passengers was imminent. Whether he is convicted of any crime or not, it is likely that the young veteran’s life will be ruined.

Of course, the left are arguing that Neely was killed simply for being black or homeless, and they did their usual trick of attempting to sanctify him by claiming that this gentle man liked nothing more harmful than impersonating Michael Jackson. But video has since emerged of Neely doing his Michael Jackson impersonation for money on New York’s streets while screaming insanely at passers-by, calling them ‘faggots’ and trying to fight them.

More seriously for the ‘harmless victim of racism’ lobby, it turns out that Neely had been arrested 42 times over the past decade alone and an outstanding warrant for his arrest at the time of his death. Among much else, he had previously tried to abduct a seven-year-old girl and had recently been sentenced for punching an elderly woman in the face and severely injuring her.

Since many crimes have been downgraded to misdemeanours and bail reforms have made police stations into a kind of turnstile, none of this should be surprising. Even less persuasive are calls to address New York’s mental health problems, given that left-wing officials routinely insist that ‘institutionalising’ severely mentally ill people robs them of agency – as though a schizophrenic homeless drug addict like Neely was enjoying a life of much agency.

The bigger problem is what the public as a whole take from all this. Few enough people in New York intervene already when a crazy turns up in their train car. As they survey what happens to Daniel Penny, I predict that even fewer New Yorkers will ‘have a go’ and fewer still will desire to be heroes.

2601: Men of note – solution

The unclued are classical composers.

First prize Mike Carter, Kirkby Overblow, Harrogate

Runners-up Glyn Watkins, Portishead, Bristol; Lewis Osborne, Newton Mearns, Glasgow

Portrait of the week: Coronation protests, new powers for pharmacists and Labour gains ground

Home

The day after the coronation, 20,000 attended a concert in Windsor Castle, including the King and Queen. ‘As my grandmother said when she was crowned, coronations are a declaration of our hopes for the future,’ said the Prince of Wales in a speech to the crowd. ‘And I know she’s up there, fondly keeping an eye on us. She would be a proud mother.’ His brother, the Duke of Sussex, had witnessed the coronation from the third row, and left for his family in America immediately after. On television, 20.4 million had seen the King crowned. The Metropolitan Police arrested 64 people, 13 to ‘prevent a breach of the peace’, charging four, two of them for the possession of Class A drugs. The Met said a review found no proof for police suspicions that six protestors arrested were planning to use ‘lock-on’ devices prohibited under the new Public Order Act. But the King and Queen’s carriage had passed yellow placards outside Horse Guards in Whitehall declaring ‘Not my king’.

The government devised a new cadre of barefoot doctors who would be allowed to start practising without a degree; pharmacists in chemists’ shops would also be able to prescribe drugs for earache, sore throats, sinusitis, impetigo, shingles, infected insect bites and some urinary tract infections. It also hatched a plan to make consultations with GPs easier to book, earmarking £240 million for practices to replace old telephones, as though that were the problem. Lawyers in Scotland boycotted a pilot scheme for rape trials with no juries. A barge, the Bibby Stockholm, was towed from Genoa to Falmouth, bound for Portland, Dorset, where the government plans to accommodate 506 asylum seekers in the vessel’s 222 bedrooms.

In the local elections, Labour increased its councillors in the contested councils by 536 to 2,674, bringing 71 councils under its control, an increase of 22; the Conservatives lost 1,061 councillors, leaving 2,296, with councils in its control reduced to 33, a decrease of 48. The Lib Dems gained 1,628 councillors, an increase of 407. Ukip lost all its 25 seats in contested councils but the Yorkshire party increased its councillors by one, to three. In Leicester, torn by intra-party and religious divisions, Labour went from 53 seats (of 54) to 31 seats, with 17 won by Conservatives. An opinion poll three days after the elections gave Labour 41 per cent, the Tories 29 per cent and the Lib Dems 16 per cent. Police shot dead two dogs and tasered a man beside the Limehouse Cut in Poplar, east London.

Abroad

‘A real war has again been unleashed against our Motherland,’ President Vladimir Putin of Russia said in a Victory Day speech. ‘We will protect the inhabitants of the Donbas and we will protect our country.’ The Moscow parade involved 10,000 troops but only one tank. Russia launched attacks on Ukrainian cities with missiles and Iranian-made Shahed kamikaze drones. Kyiv saw the fifth such attack in ten days. Ukraine’s Red Cross said its food-aid supplies warehouse was destroyed.

Donald Trump, the former US president, was ordered by a New York jury to pay $5 million in damages to E. Jean Carroll, a magazine writer, for sexual battery and defamation; he was found not to have raped her. Janet Yellen, the US Treasury Secretary, warned that a failure by Congress to raise the amount that America could borrow would bring a ‘constitutional crisis’ and an economic and financial catastrophe. Mauricio Garcia, 33, was shot dead by police after shooting dead eight people, including three children, at a Dallas shopping mall.

Imran Khan, the former prime minister of Pakistan, was arrested by paramilitary police outside the high court in Islamabad, where he was to appear on charges of corruption. At least 15 Palestinians, including three commanders of Islamic Jihad, were killed in Israeli air strikes on the Gaza Strip. As 700,000 fled their homes and thousands sought to leave Sudan, where fighting continued in Khartoum and Darfur, talks began in Jeddah, with American encouragement, between the factions of General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, the army leader, and Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, commonly known as Hemedti, the leader of the Rapid Support Forces. Dozens were killed in the Indian state of Manipur in clashes involving the Meitei, who follow their own religion and Hinduism, and the Kuki, largely Christians with a minority believing themselves descendants of the Jewish tribe of Manasseh. Lillian Ip, aged 48, survived five days stranded in the Australian bush on some sweets and a bottle of wine.  CSH

2604: Snap

The unclued lights (one hyphened and one pair) are of a kind.

        Across

   4    Swollen state of tailless bird’s head (9)

10    Evil mix of love and malice (10)

14    Cox for Hereford, perhaps? (5)

16    Henry and John’s outcry (6)

22    Cow strays from foaming watercourse, maybe marked with X (8)

23    False topaz from urban area by river without divided youth hostel (7)

24    Nostradamus, say, translated Erse (4)

25    Like a couple dating, wasting time (4)

27    Insubstantial tune arranged round America (7)

34    Moans at this bridge (5)

35    Keeps quiet, it seems, having approval to act (3-2)

37    Lots of wives hurry to M&S (6)

38    In reality, tiny abstainer has a liking for chocolate (5,5)

40    Chronicler’s reported looks (5)

        Down

   1    Improvised links removed from shirts? (3,3,4)

   2    Instant reminiscences of Disney animation (5)

   3    About time, ancient stories are often thus (6)

   5    Illiterate and without post? (10)

   6    Notes about lake-beings, once (7)

   7    Welshman and Scotsman clash over nymph (5)

   8    Comatose, yet wonderstruck (9)

   9    Scout round eastern salmon river (4)

13    Vintage model – it crashed (3-4)

15    Carnivore hunting yak and elephant noticed antelope at first (6)

17    Political idealist disturbed skier and totty (10)

18    Source of metal and stones, we’re told, yielding extinct bison (7)

19    Takes stock again of Spooner’s female 24s (10)

20    Curate’s parish with active air about it (9)

21    Gracie’s areas of interest (6)

26    Man’s address includes New York Cathedral (7)

28    Gunman’s past claim spoken of as far as one can see? (7)

31    Forerunner of the oboe has developed with Munroe, for starters (5)

34    One’s body image? (4)

Download a printable version here

A first prize of £30 and two runners-up prizes of £20 for the first correct solutions opened on  29 May. Please scan or photograph entries and email them (including the crossword number in the subject field) to crosswords@spectator.co.uk, or post to: Crossword 2604, The Spectator, 22 Old Queen Street, London SW1H 9HP. Please allow six weeks for prize delivery. The dictionary prize is not available at present.

In defence of rats

I n the ranks of unloved animals, rats are  surely king – so reviled that other pest species are often referred to as variations of the rat archetype: pigeons are ‘rats with wings’, grey squirrels are ‘tree rats’. There was also a recent flurry of stories about Britain facing an ‘invasion’ of ‘300 million monstrous super-rats capable of gnawing on steel and chewing through concrete’.

Yet how reliable were these stories? The 300 million figure is from Steven Belmain, a Greenwich University professor, who was simply giving his estimate of the rat population. (Probably an underestimate, he says, but there has never been a proper survey.) Nor is there any evidence that our rats are changing in size or nature. It’s been known for some time that they’re increasingly resistant to poison, but the bigger problem for the pest control industry is that poison may be banned anyway, due to concerns about it spreading into our water and food chains.

Such hysteria is the latest instalment in a long history of rat-bashing that owes much to the creature’s ubiquity. The UK’s most common species is the brown rat, Rattus norvegicus, which first came here from China, most likely as a stowaway on ships. (The Latin name is a misapprehension – when the species was formally recorded by the 18th-century English naturalist John Berkenhout, there were no brown rats in Norway.) Around the time of the Normans it was joined by its smaller cousin, the black or ‘ship’ rat, Rattus rattus, but this is now something of a rarity. Since its migration, the brown rat has flourished, colonising cities in particular, where it lives in our sewers, under our floorboards  and sometimes in our cavity walls.

It is because of this proximity that rats are so hated. But we shouldn’t ignore the vast sacrifices they have made in the history of human flourishing. Rats are one of the most common animal subjects for scientific testing. Most of the world’s lab rats are descendants of a single individual: the ‘Wistar rat’, a docile albino strain bred at the Wistar institute in Pennsylvania in 1906. Other, more unfortunate offspring include the ‘spontaneously hypertensive rat’ (bred to have high blood pressure), the ‘BioBreeding rat’ (which spontaneously develops Type 1 diabetes) and the ‘Royal College of Surgeons rat’ (which suffers from retinal degeneration).

Rats have also occasionally been used as a food source. Rat pie was a popular dish in Victorian Britain, and a recipe for ‘grilled rats, Bordeaux style’ required the use of ‘alcoholic rats, found in wine cellars’. During rationing in the second world war, British biologists developed a recipe for ‘creamed lab rat’. What it tasted like goes unrecorded.

Despite this utility, rats have always been reviled. The myths surrounding them are alarming, but often unfounded. Recent studies have shown it was humans rather than rats – or even their fleas – who were the principal vectors of the black death. Though they carry some unpleasant diseases (Weil’s, in particular), so do many other wild animals.

We don’t really hate rats because they are vermin, or carry disease or damage property. We hate them because they remind us too much of ourselves.

Spectator Competition Winners: haiku book reviews

In Competition No. 3298, you were invited to provide a book review in three haiku. When I saw that the unofficial poet laureate of Twitter Brian Bilston had tweeted some haiku book reviews, I thought I’d challenge you to do something along the same lines.

The traditional Japanese haiku is a snapshot of a moment in time rendered in 17 syllables in three unrhymed lines of five, seven and five syllables (though these rules have not always been slavishly observed by western poets). Or, as the incomparable Stanley J. Sharpless put it:

This is a haiku.
Five syllables, then seven.
Then five more. Got it?

Some entries incorporated references to the natural world, which is a hallmark of the haiku. And there was a streak of subversive humour too. The winners take £20. First up is Alex Steelsmith, who reviews haiku-master Basho’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North.

As the May wind blows,
Scattered blossoms of haiku
Emerge amid prose.

Gusts meander through
Petals opened to release
Floral scent and hue.

The blooms never cease;
Blown away, one cannot close
Basho’s masterpiece.

Alex Steelsmith

It’s bucket-list-lit.
One to read before you die.
Get you in the mood.

Samuel Beckett, eh?
Life and soul of the party,
Him and Thomas à

Spoiler alert, guys:
Godot never pitches up.
Nothing happens. Twice.

David Silverman

doting father’s tales
of son’s stuffed menagerie
enchant all ages

childhood’s toys outgrown
boy and bear live on to play
poohsticks forever

all anthropomorphs
will pledge lifelong devotion
others may throw up

Martin Parker

Penguin have published
this guide to country pursuits
at three and sixpence.

Advice is given
on cover, partridge sexing
and vermin control.

Hide it from your wife,
your servants, and, above all,
from your gamekeeper.

Nick MacKinnon

‘In the beginning’
begins this uneven read.
Sometimes tedious

(with endless ‘begats’)
often misogynistic
(women as ‘helpmates’)

there is nonetheless
a flavour of the divine.
Five Stars of David!

Robert Schechter

Here, Chandler’s PI
Bonds with a charming burnout,
Taking a big risk

Murder, suicide,
Shady ladies and a quack
Dissolve their affair

Heartbroken again,
Hardboiled but so soft-centred,
That’s Philip Marlowe.

Basil Ransome-Davies

You know how it ends.
Cromwell, still in present tense,
waits for his own dark.

We miss Anne Boleyn,
but other dead press closer
and meanwhile Henry

spins history. But
eight hundred pages, ouch! Think:
how’s your stamina?

D.A. Prince

One-legged captain
On post-trauma revenge tour
Hunts something unseen.

The sea in this book
Yields wealth and deals death. Also,
It’s a metaphor.

The prose is brawny,
Briny, brainy, a dunking
In maritime noir.

Chris O’Carroll

No. 3301: Cut it out

You are invited to delete one letter in the title of a well-known novel (please specify) and provide an extract from the new work. Please email entries of up to 150 words to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 24 May.

Why the economic war against Russia has failed

There was much mirth in the West this week when Vladimir Putin’s Victory Day parade through Red Square included just one tank, itself a relic from a museum. The inference was that Russia has lost so much military kit in Ukraine that it is a shadow of the military superpower the Soviet Union used to be.

Russia has certainly borne heavy losses (although any country conducting a foreign war would presumably have its military hardware on active duty rather than on ceremonial parade). But we should avoid being smug. The truth is that the war is not going well for the West either – at least in one respect.

When Putin sent tanks into Ukraine on 24 February last year, western countries rapidly adopted a two-pronged strategy. One prong was that they would not engage in direct military conflict, but would support Ukraine with weapons and other military equipment. Some countries were quicker than others, but this part of the strategy has been a remarkable success. Ukraine has managed to resist Russian forces, and to push them back from many areas, even if the outcome is still far from certain.

The other prong, though, has turned out to be blunt: the plan to wage economic war with Moscow, unleashing financial shock and awe on a scale never seen before. Russia was to be cut off almost entirely, with sanctions and boycotts on all imports and exports save for humanitarian ones such as medicines. Putin’s Russia, went the theory, would be impoverished into surrender.

Few people in the West are aware of how badly this aspect of the war is going. Europe has itself paid a high price to effect a partial boycott of Russian oil and gas. UK fossil fuel imports from Russia totalled £4.5 billion in 2021; in the year to January 2023 that was – officially – down to £1.3 billion. In 2020 the EU sourced 39 per cent of its gas and 23 per cent of its oil from Russia; in the third quarter of last year this was down to 15 per cent and 14 per cent respectively.

But these figures do not explain the scale of the failure to damage the Russian economy. It soon became clear that while the West was keen on an economic war, the rest of the world was not. As its oil and gas exports to Europe fell, Russia quickly upped its exports to China and India – both of which preferred to buy oil at a discount than to make a stand against the invasion of Ukraine. Worse, some of the Russian oil exported to India appears to have been siphoned back to Europe, with a rise in the number of ships taking refined oil from India through the Suez Canal.

There seems to be some siphoning in the other direction, too. An investigation by the German newspaper Bild has uncovered a disturbing growth in exports to countries bordering Russia. The importing of German motor vehicles to Kazakhstan, for example, rose by 507 per cent between 2021 and 2022 and to Armenia by 761 per cent. Exports of chemical products to Armenia increased by 110 per cent and to Kazakhstan by 129 per cent. Sales of electrical and computer equipment to Armenia are up 343 per cent. What happens to these goods once they reach these former Soviet republics is not easy to establish, but one likely explanation is that they end up in Russia as diverted trade flows. And even if such commodities are not formally being re-exported, many Russian citizens retain visa-free access to those countries and are able to take goods across the border.

The West has had a policy of trying to target wealthy Russians in particular with economic sanctions. But ironically they are the people who can most easily access western goods through diverted trade. It is they who have dual passports; they who can afford to travel abroad in order to shop for their luxury goods. Short of a wholesale global boycott against Russia, it is very hard to prevent western-made goods reaching the hands of wealthy Russians.

The West embarked on its sanctions war with an exaggerated sense of its own influence around the world. As we have discovered, non-western countries lack the will to impose sanctions on either Russia or on Russian oligarchs. The results of the miscalculation are there for all to see. In April last year, the IMF forecast that the Russian economy would contract by 8.5 per cent in 2022 and by a further 2.3 per cent this year. As it turned out, GDP fell by just 2.1 per cent last year, and this year the IMF is forecasting a small rise of 0.7 per cent. And that is all in spite of the war in Ukraine going much more badly than many imagined it would in February of last year. The Russian economy has not been destroyed; it has merely been reconfigured, reorientated to look eastwards and southwards rather than westwards.

It was not necessarily wrong to declare economic war on Russia. The country has suffered harm from western sanctions, even if nothing like on the scale that we imagined we could inflict. But if the West is thinking that in future it can fight wars purely by economic means, without bombs or bullets, it is badly mistaken.

Western military equipment has allowed Ukraine to mount a David vs Goliath battle which it may yet win – and certainly to avoid annexation by Putin. As for economic sanctions, however, we will have to think again.

Which countries have scored ‘nul points’ the most times?

Machine learning

Who came up with the phrase ‘artificial intelligence’?

– The term was coined by US computer scientist John McCarthy in 1955, arising from a summer school held at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. The blurb for the project declared: ‘the study is to proceed on the basis of the conjecture that every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it.’ However, McCarthy seems to have had a slightly loose concept of what constitutes AI. He once had a debate with a colleague in which he asserted that even a thermostat could be said to have ‘belief’ on the grounds that it believed a room should be set at a particular temperature.

Royal welcome

Has becoming King enhanced Charles III’s reputation? Percentage of Britons saying that Prince Charles/King Charles III is doing a ‘good’ job:

July 2019           34         May 2022         32

Jan 2020           39         Sep 2022            63

June 2020         37         Jan 2023            58

Dec 2020          32         Mar 2023          60

May 2021         31         Apr 2023            59

Nov 2021          34

Source: YouGov

Big fat zero

Which countries have scored the dreaded (or perhaps cherished) ‘nul points’ in the Eurovision Song Contest the most times?

Austria, Switzerland, Norway                   4

Finland, Germany, Spain                           3

Belgium, Netherlands, Portugal,
Turkey, UK                                                   2

Iceland, Italy, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Monaco, Sweden, Yugoslavia 1

It was far easier to score nul points in the early days when fewer countries entered. Half of the nil scores were recorded prior to 1970 (scoring began in 1957, a year after the contest itself). Since the scoring system changed in 2016, only Britain has achieved the feat of a zero score, in 2021.

Building back better?

Under which prime ministers were most, or fewest, homes built? Average number of housing ‘starts’ in the UK in the years they were in Downing Street:

Margaret Thatcher                          215,422

John Major                                       183,323

Tony Blair                                        204,744

Gordon Brown                                154,120

David Cameron                               152,043

Theresa May                                    198,390

Boris Johnson                                  187,973

No. 751

Moehring-Kaikamdzozov, Elekes Memorial, Zamardi 1978. White avoided perpetual check and won the game. Which move did he play? Email answers to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 15 May. There is a prize of £20 for the first correct answer out of a hat. Please include a postal address and allow six weeks for prize delivery.

Last week’s solution 1 Ne4!, e.g. 1…Rxf3 2 Nxf3# or 1…Nf5 2 Qh1#, or 1…Ne2 2 Qf6#, or 1…Nxe4 2 Qf4#

Last week’s winner John Payne, Cheadle Hulme, Cheshire

The power of Penny Mordaunt

The police have said sorry for arresting anti-monarchy protestors under the wrong legal rubric on Coronation Day, but is that really a lead news story, as it was on Tuesday’s Today programme? If the police had failed to contain the mini-mob and a couple of them had, as they intended, obstructed the processional route, there would have been a huge and justified outcry. Coverage like that of Today makes no allowance for the fact that these protestors are not ordinary citizens. Protest is their full-time job, as is making a monkey of the law. Every week, I receive notice in my inbox of protests by this coalition of organisations which explicitly promises trouble. As I write, I am looking at one which says, ‘Animal Rising Declares Intention To Disrupt The Derby Festival’. Why is an intention to disrupt a legitimate right? The smaller print of the Animal Rising announcement also attacks the new Public Order Act and its measures against ‘locking down’ (at issue in the Coronation Day case). It adds: ‘Animal Rising claims that this new legislation will not deter people from taking action and that it represents the actions of a government not fit for purpose… The need to address the climate and nature emergencies to create a better world for everyone is more important.’ Which is quite close to saying that a very small mob should rule.

Meanwhile, the Online Safety Bill trundles through the Lords. It is immensely complicated, sometimes genuinely incomprehensible, but the core problem is simple to state. The spirit of this law is that of a character in The Simpsons. Helen Lovejoy, the interfering and judgmental wife of Reverend Lovejoy, pastor of the Western Branch of American Reform Presbylutheranism First Church in Springfield, always cries out in any situation: ‘Won’t somebody please think of the children?’ In order to protect children from a harm it cannot precisely identify, the current Bill threatens to destroy the value of encryption services such as WhatsApp by, in effect, decrypting them. Its child safety duties also require platforms to treat users as children by default, until they establish that their service is not likely to be accessed by children. Only once this verification is complete may platforms grant access to content that may be harmful to children. Google or Wikipedia, for example, would have to withhold any information that could be psychologically harmful to children until the user’s age was verified. Ofcom could fine such websites 10 per cent of global revenue if it deemed they had got this indefinable matter wrong. This move against freedom is a whale compared with which the Public Order Bill is a minnow, yet only a brave handful of legislators is paying attention.

After Penny Mordaunt’s magnificent performance with the Jewelled Sword last Saturday, it seems clear that she is the only conceivable challenger for the Tory leadership before the next general election. There is something about a handsome woman on the warpath which excites the fealty of traditional Tory supporters, particularly men. Under the power of this atavism, Conservative backbenchers backed Margaret Thatcher against Ted Heath for the leadership in 1975. A similar phenomenon was observable when Joanna Lumley uttered the warcry ‘Ayo Gorkhali!’ on the steps of parliament. MPs rushed to introduce the legislation she championed to improve Gurkhas’ rights. Though well-meant, the new rules made Gurkha families less a proud warrior race and more another component of the British welfare queue. Yes, yes, one wants to say to all those true blues, it is thrilling to think of Penny wielding her 7lb weapon, but remember that Boadicea, despite her spear, sharp chariot wheels and embonpoint, still lost to the Romans. (By the way, Penny did not have to bear the full weight of the sword: it rested in a pouch suspended from her collar.)

Thinking of swords, why did the pages not have them? In 1953, they had little silver swords, and breeches and stockings too.

Everyone rightly admires the Princess Royal’s performance at the coronation. She too had a martial appearance, although, in her case, unarmed. As Colonel of the Blues and Royals and Gold-Stick-in-waiting, she rode in the procession back from the Abbey. The best bit was the way she rode – chatting gaily to the officer beside her, alert yet easy in her element, as riders talk when they move between coverts on the hunting field.

An American friend, Dr Augustus Howard, sends me his reflections on the coronation: ‘The ceremony certainly sidelined the old aristocrats – what Blair began by removing most of them from the Lords was completed with their effective exclusion on Saturday. But it was these aristocrats, after all, who originally forced the monarch to subject himself to law in the form of Magna Carta… And in exchange for the monarch’s concessions, the nobles pledged their fealty. In an ironic twist that the “modernisers” surely did not consider, “democratising” the fealty oath only serves to expand the theoretical scope of the monarch’s power – now everyone is taking this oath… pledging direct and unmediated fealty to the Crown.’ I found this very perceptive, the citizen of a great republic seeing things more clearly than we over here.

Willie Landels, the former editor of Harper’s & Queen, has died. He was the sort of exotic creature not now allowed, in our timorous corporate world, to edit anything. When I became editor of this paper in 1984, I took Willie out to lunch to get his advice. He passed no comment whatever on the paper’s content. Once he had finished eating, he picked up the copy we had with us, and weighed it in his hands. Then he inspected the spine. ‘Charles,’ he said, ‘these staples: don’t you think they should be gold?’ I am sorry that I, and all my five successors, have failed to implement this good advice.

Picking up the pieces

Seconds before resigning the decisive game of the world championship, Ian Nepomniachtchi’s hand, trembling with emotion, involuntarily toppled the captured pieces at the side of the board. It was a crushing disappointment to lose a match in which he had taken the lead on three separate occasions, and come agonisingly close to an almost unassailable lead in game 12 (of 14).

Days after the match ended, ‘Nepo’ posted a splendidly ambiguous tweet: ‘Although blind chance sometimes decides the fate of a particular game, it can hardly prevent you from becoming the strongest chess player’ – followed by an emoji of a man in the lotus position. I still can’t decide what he meant. Was it a bullish assertion about the future? ‘That tiebreak game was an unlucky break, but I’ll be back.’ Or a statement of humility? ‘We played 18 games and I missed so many chances – I wasn’t up to it this time’. He so often evinces both brash confidence and searing self-criticism that it could be either, or both.

Speculating on whether these sporting moments are determined by chance or by destiny is part of the joy of being a spectator. One can, of course, flatter oneself either way – some fancy the dice spinning before their very eyes, while others bask in the unveiling of a historical truth. It is amusing to recall the twists of fate which made Ding’s path to the title match even possible. Almost inactive during the pandemic, he failed to qualify for the 2022 Madrid Candidates event, but a place opened up after the Russian Sergey Karjakin lost his spot after spouting political bile. Though Ding was the highest-rated player available, he hadn’t played enough games to be eligible, so crammed 28 into one month to pass. Nepomniachtchi was the clear winner of the Candidates, and Ding’s second place (he beat and overtook Nakamura in the final round) only assumed any significance after Magnus Carlsen’s abdication.

Ding was philosophical in victory, noting how narrow was the margin, but how divergent were the consequences for his life. His lowest moment came after the eighth game (below), in which he passed up a golden opportunity to level the score. He was contemplating retirement if he lost the match, but after winning he expressed his intention to build a strong team and become more professional in his approach: at several moments he had looked far less ready than Nepo for the rigours of world championship matchplay. But Ding paid tribute to his second in Astana, Richard Rapport, whom he credited with infusing creativity into his opening play. Ding was particularly ambitious at the start of game 8, and in the position below his powerful d7 pawn gives him a large advantage.

Ding Liren-Ian Nepomniachtchi

Fide World Championship, Game 8, Astana

Nepomniachtchi is in dire straits, so his last move 31…Qh8-h4 was a calculated risk. Black appears to threaten perpetual check, starting with Qh4-e4+. Ding mistakenly trusted this, spending just a couple of minutes over 32 Kd1. In fact 32 Qxd8! Qe4+ 33 Re2 Qb1+ 34 Kd2 Qb2+ 35 Kd3 Qb1+ 36 Rc2 and now 36…Qxf1+ 37 Kd2! plans to escape via d2-c1-b2, or 37…Nd6 38 Qf6+ Kh7 39 Qf4 wins comfortably. Alternatively, 36…Qd1+ 37 Ke4! Qxc2+ 38 Bd3 Qxf2 39 Qf6+ Kh7 40 Qxf7+ Kh8 41 d8=Q mate. These calculations are challenging, but well within Ding’s capabilities. Qxg5 33 Kc2 Qe7 34 Bg2 e5 35 Be4 Nh6 36 Qxa7 Ng4 37 Bf3 The final mistake. 37 Bc6 would maintain the pressure. Nxf2 38 Rxf2 e4 39 Re2 f5 40 Qxb6 Rxd7 41Qb8 Qd6 42 Qxd6 Rxd6 43 Bxe4 fxe4 44 Rxe4 Kf6 45 Re8 Draw agreed

Tories beware: the Lib Dems are back

Every prime minister has at least one guilty pleasure; Rishi Sunak has several. Colleagues tease him for his taste in music (Michael Bublé), television (Emily in Paris) and literature (Jilly Cooper CBE). One of his favourite novels is Cooper’s first ‘bonkbuster’ Riders, a tale about the great and good – and a Tory minister for sport – frolicking in the fictional Cotswolds county of Rutshire. Infidelity, duplicity and intrigue, all playing out in Conservative heartlands.

Sunak’s problem is that these days places like Rutshire might no longer be Tory safe seats. Formerly true-blue parts of the country may be set to turn yellow. In the local elections, the Liberal Democrats surpassed expectations, winning control in Home Counties councils including Theresa May’s territory of Windsor and Maidenhead, and denying the Tories control of Hertsmere, where Deputy Prime Minister Oliver Dowden is the MP. Over in the Cotswolds, the election of one Lib Dem councillor – Chris Twells – came as a shock even to the candidate: he was already a councillor in Salford and had been listed as a ‘paper candidate’160 miles away, on the grounds his party had no chance of success.

It was these Lib Dem victories – along with gains by independents and the Greens – which meant that the Tories outperformed the worst-case scenario of 1,000 council seat losses set out by the party chairman Greg Hands. (‘What was Greg thinking?’ asks one former cabinet minister of the failure to manage expectations.) The Tory losses allowed Labour to take back the title of the largest party in local government for the first time since 2002.

Labour made most of its gains in the Red Wall, yet the most troubling results for the Conservatives relate to the Blue Wall. ‘Our worst losses were to Liberal Democrats and Greens in the south,’ says a minister. Some Tories look on the bright side and say the rise in support for the Lib Dems and Greens shows that the public are unenthused by Keir Starmer. The national vote-share swing suggests that while Labour had a decent night, the party would fall short of a majority if the results were repeated in a general election. Government aides are taking comfort, too, from the fact that there is little sign of a threat to the right of them – Richard Tice’s Reform party fielded 480 candidates, of whom just six won, while Ukip faced a wipeout.

More pessimistic Conservatives see an effective anti-Tory tactical vote emerging. ‘It’s a real problem,’ says a former cabinet minister. The hope is that tactical voting could prove trickier in a general election when it is clearer if a party is running a paper candidate.

Inside Liberal Democrat headquarters, aides are trying not to get too carried away. Historically, the party tends to do better in local elections. It also soared in the European elections of May 2019 – but then went on to make two significant errors for the December general election. First, the party expanded its list of target seats, thereby spreading thin valuable resources for campaigning. Second, the then leader Jo Swinson declared – ambitiously – that she could be the next prime minister. It didn’t end well. Her party lost seats, including her own.

New measures are in place to try to avoid such mistakes. Activists on the ground have a fast-track channel to the centre to send feedback if a message lands badly on the doorstep (the 2019 election pledge to revoke Article 50 misfired, for example). The plan is to keep campaigning on three key areas: cost of living, river pollution and the state of the NHS. Constituencies such as May’s seat of Maidenhead – a Tory majority of 18,846 – are viewed as surmountable in a couple of elections’ time.

In the meantime, the Lib Dems have high hopes for the new seat of South Cotswolds, created by the boundary changes. They aim to oust Dominic Raab in Esher and Walton, Jeremy Hunt in South West Surrey and – on a very good night – even fancy liberating Michael Gove back into the private sector by taking Surrey Heath, where they now run the council. ‘He could be the new Michael Portillo,’ says one hopeful Liberal Democrat.

It’s Tory MPs in seats where the Lib Dems are a threat who tend to be most worried about new housing being built. Fear of the Lib Dems was also instrumental in getting Sunak to ditch mandatory housing targets. Gove has spoken of the need for housing to be aesthetically pleasing. He is now trying hard to cook up an offer for renters – who are seen as key to the party’s appeal in the south-east – in the coming King’s Speech, along with a crackdown on leaseholds: an issue with resonance in the Blue Wall. A new Opinium poll for Commonhold Now finds 60 per cent of Conservative 2019 voters support abolishing leaseholds. It is unlikely the government will move to abolish leasehold ahead of the election but Gove may stop new ones being sold, as well as capping ground rents. This is a knotty issue, but one of increasing importance as homeowners find themselves trapped in a system that gives them little say.

Since the Lib Dems’ successes last week, Starmer has been repeatedly asked whether he would rule out a coalition with them – or with the SNP. He rejects any deal with the latter, but won’t rule out the former. This raises the question of what the Lib Dems would demand as the price of coalition. Press regulation? (Ed Davey’s deputy, Daisy Cooper, worked for Hacked Off.) Would Starmer move to a proportional representation voting system if that was the demand?

Neither the Lib Dems nor Labour want to get dragged into questions about coalition, for fear of complacency and of diluting their own party messages. Starmer says he’s going for a majority. Davey rules out a deal with the Tories, but stays silent on the subject of Labour. The bookmakers still say a Labour majority is overwhelmingly likely – an 88 per cent chance – but it’s been quite a few years since the betting markets called anything right in British politics. The extent of the Lib Dem comeback in leafy Tory territory may well decide the fate of both parties.

Trump’s second act: he can still win, in spite of everything

Everyone knows F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous line from the end of his unfinished novel The Last Tycoon: ‘There are no second acts in American lives.’ But Fitzgerald wasn’t talking about second chances. He meant that, unlike in a traditional play – where Act I presents a problem, Act II reveals the complications and Act III resolves it all – Americans want to skip Act II and go straight to the resolution.

The more I think about it, the more I think the Joe Biden presidency is Act II – and Donald Trump is not the last tycoon. He’s Act III. He’s the next president.

Democratic strategists think otherwise. First, they believe that Biden will always beat Trump, even if they somehow face each other in every presidential election from now until hell freezes over. Second, they believe that Trump’s sea of legal troubles will ultimately drown him as a candidate. Both these views betray a failure of imagination.

Yes, it’s true: Trump is the first former president to face criminal charges, after a grand jury voted to indict him on 30 March over hush-money payments made to the porn star Stormy Daniels. That case is just one of an estimated 17 lawsuits and investigations the 45th president currently confronts. On Tuesday, in a civil case, a Manhattan jury found him liable for sexually abusing and defaming (though not raping) the journalist E. Jean Carroll, awarding her $5 million in damages. Carroll could not recall if the alleged assault happened in 1995 or 1996.

Yet the campaign of lawfare against Trump has already started to backfire. This should not surprise us. Consider eight recent cases around the world when a leading presidential candidate or likely prime minister was indicted. Some – Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi and Malaysia’s Anwar Ibrahim – engineered political comebacks after being barred from politics following a conviction or imprisonment. Others – South Africa’s Jacob Zuma and Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu – saw continued political success despite ongoing criminal cases against them. (The law caught up with Zuma only after he’d left power.) France stands out as the exception: the indictments of three presidential frontrunners – Dominique Strauss-Kahn, former prime minister François Fillon and ex-president Nicolas Sarkozy – all ended their presidential campaigns.

Having just visited Brazil, I can say with some conviction that the case of Lula is the closest analogy, not least because the US and Brazil seem to be converging in terms of their political cultures.

If Lula can come back from one-and-a-half years in jail to win, Trump may have little to worry about, as there isn’t the slightest chance of his being locked up between now and election day next year. Indeed, the perception that Democratic operatives are using the legal system for political ends will likely help him win votes. It’s a much better story than his earlier claim that the 2020 election was stolen, which now bores almost everyone except Trump himself.

It may seem paradoxical that the Democrats are harassing Trump in the courts if they want to run against him. But it makes sense: the prospect of him performing the perp walk attracts media coverage, and media coverage is the free publicity on which Trump has always thrived. Every column inch or minute of airtime his legal battles earn him is an inch or a minute less for his Republican rivals for the nomination.

If it were a two-man contest, there would be a good deal more uncertainty around the outcome. Florida governor Ron DeSantis has not even declared his intention to run for the Republican nomination. Even so, he has been fundraising more successfully than Trump, not least because the donor class so clearly prefers youth and administrative competence. In head-to-head polling, DeSantis still looks to be in contention.

But this will not be a two-man contest. Former United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley is in. So, probably, is Trump’s former vice president, Mike Pence. Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina and former New Jersey governor Chris Christie sound interested too – as does Glenn Youngkin, the governor of Virginia, who will say merely that he won’t run ‘this year’. And let’s not forget the techno-libertarian livewire Vivek Ramaswamy. Only the former secretary of state Mike Pompeo has definitely dropped out.

When voters are polled about this crowded field, Trump is the clear frontrunner, leading DeSantis by an average margin of nearly 30 points, 52.1 per cent to 22.9. This is compared with a lead of just 13 points back in January. The one other candidate with support above 5 per cent is Pence.

It’s obligatory to say at this point that it is very early days and a lot can happen in the next 18 months, and that is true. A year and a half before November 2020, not many people foresaw a global pandemic.

Since 1972, the candidate who led in early polling won his or her party’s nomination in little more than half of competitive presidential primaries. This, however, is the Republicans we are talking about, not the Democrats. Early frontrunners have won Republican primaries in six out of eight competitive races since 1972, when the modern system of primaries was introduced. The two exceptions were John McCain in 2008 and Trump himself in 2016.

The Republican primary process favours candidates with early leads because most states award delegates on a ‘winner takes all’ or ‘winner takes most’ basis. In Democratic primaries, by contrast, delegates are generally assigned proportionally according to the results, and the early frontrunner has won in just four of 11 contests.

If Trump maintains his current average polling numbers through the first half of 2023 but doesn’t become the Republicans’ choice for president, he would be the highest-polling candidate ever to fail to secure the nomination. He would join Ted Kennedy, Ed Muskie, Rudy Giuliani, Hillary Clinton (in her 2008 bid) and Scott Walker in the Failed Frontrunners club. Conversely, if Ron DeSantis beats Trump to the nomination, it would be a bigger upset than Barack Obama’s victory over Hillary Clinton in 2008. In short, unless the Republican party has somehow morphed into the Democratic party, the GOP nomination is now Trump’s to lose.

And that brings us to the Democrats’ assumption that Trump can’t beat Biden, which depends heavily on Trump’s underperformance not only in 2020, but also in the midterm elections of 2018 and 2022, when candidates he backed fared poorly. The readiness of Team Biden to declare their man’s intention to seek re-election sooner rather than later tells me they are too confident.

Face it: Biden isn’t that popular as world leaders go. In their respective countries, Narendra Modi (India), Andrés Manuel López Obrador (Mexico), Anthony Albanese (Australia), Lula (Brazil), and Giorgia Meloni (Italy) are all better liked. If you look at Biden’s job approval, using the RealClearPolitics average, he is now slightly more unpopular (a net approval of minus 11.6 per cent) than Trump was at this stage in his presidency (minus 10.7 per cent).

Trump is also not that unpopular. Indeed, he is less so than at this point eight years ago. In July 2015, Trump’s net unfavourable number was minus 39.3 per cent. Today, it’s minus 16 per cent. Then, just 23 per cent of voters had a positive view of him. Now it’s 39 per cent. The RealClear figure for Joe Biden is 41 per cent, and his net unfavourable is minus 12 per cent.

And that’s the state of play at the moment. But what if there’s a recession between now and next year? It’s not a certainty. There is more than one smart economist who still believes there could be a ‘soft landing’, despite all the recent worries sparked by US (and Swiss) bank failures. In an interview with CNBC, Apollo Global Management’s chief executive, Mark Rowan, even used the phrase ‘non-recession recession’, which we must hope doesn’t catch on.

On the other hand, former treasury secretary Larry Summers has had a pretty good run ever since he called the Biden administration’s inflationary fiscal mistake back in February 2021, and he said last week that there’s a 70 per cent probability of a recession within the next year. He is not alone.

I’m with the bears. What we have witnessed over the past two years is an epic monetary policy failure. In June 2021, the members of the Federal Open Market Committee thought that the target federal funds rate this year would lie between zero and 1.75 per cent. By March of this year, they had to revise those figures up to between 4.75 and 6 per cent. Having been asleep at the wheel in 2021, they have cranked up short-term rates to try to bring inflation back down to 2 per cent. But they are still a long way from achieving that.

As central bankers love to intone, monetary policy acts with long and variable lags. The current lag is taking longer than people appreciate. Recessions resemble slow chain reactions. The signal from the policy interest rate to the wider economy goes through multiple channels, but the most important is the volume of bank credit.

In the 12 months through March, total bank credit in the US economy declined in real terms. That rarely occurs. Since 1960, it has happened only during, or in the immediate aftermath of, a recession. This is the indicator to watch, along with the surveys of borrowers and lenders.

The deceptive indicators are those that track consumer behaviour and the labour market, which still look strong. In the latest GDP print, consumption was still growing. But non-residential investment
contracted. The present game of chicken over the debt ceiling makes a recession more likely. As in 2011, the showdown will probably be resolved at the last moment, within 24 hours of the ‘X-date’ after which the Treasury must either slash public spending or default on some part of the federal debt. But the 2011 debt-ceiling crisis took place during the sluggish recovery from the 2008 financial crisis, when inflation and interest rates were close to the zero lower bound. The risk of a bond market accident is much higher today.

What this suggests to me is that Joe Biden is in serious danger of following Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush into the bin marked ‘one-term presidents’. Why? For the simple reason that no president since Calvin Coolidge a century ago has secured re-election if a recession has occurred in the two years before the nation votes. It does not need to be as severe as the Great Depression that destroyed Herbert Hoover’s presidency. A plain vanilla recession will suffice.

In the wake of the 1976 Republican convention, Ford was trailing his rival, Carter, by 33 points in the Gallup poll. His campaign did an extraordinary job of closing the gap, so that the result was tantalisingly close. But over the GOP, as the New York Times put it in its immediate post-election report, ‘hung the shadow of Richard M. Nixon and a dangerously shaky economy’.

In 1980, it was Carter’s turn to lose, in part because of ‘last-minute rejections of [his] handling of the economy’, in part because of the Iran hostage crisis. ‘Inflation and unemployment had been a constant drag on Mr Carter throughout the race,’ reported the New York Times. ‘The issue got new prominence when Mr Reagan stressed it as he closed his argument in the debate in Cleveland by saying, “Ask yourself, are you better off than you were four years ago?”’

And in 1992, Bill Clinton ran on ‘The economy, stupid’, one of three points on a sign that his chief strategist James Carville hung in the campaign headquarters in Little Rock, Arkansas. (The others were ‘Change vs more of the same’ and ‘Don’t forget health care’.)

If you think the economy isn’t going to be the issue in the 2024 election, I’ve got a Whip Inflation Now badge to sell you. Look at the Gallup poll on ‘satisfaction with the way things are going in the US’. That’s currently at the 1980 level, half what it was four years ago, before the pandemic. Gallup’s economic confidence index is deeply in negative territory, the opposite of where it was under Trump. And this is before any recession.

One can never rule out surprises in American politics. Perhaps Peggy Noonan is right that Robert F. Kennedy Jr, who is running for the Democratic nomination, can mount a real challenge to Biden. He has the magic name, after all, even if he is an anti-vaccine crank. Perhaps the West Virginia senator Joe Manchin was hinting at a presidential run when he issued a statement last week that declared: ‘Make no mistake, I will win any race I enter.’ But the lesson of history is clear – the Republican frontrunner usually wins the nomination, and a post-recession incumbent usually loses the presidential election.

All of which raises the question of what it would mean to have Trump back in the White House in January 2025. Obviously, the air would be filled with the sound of liberal and progressive heads exploding – not to mention the gnashing of teeth and rending of garments of the Never-Trump Republicans. But, as in 2016, investors would quietly turn more bullish at the prospect of the return to power of policy-makers such as Kevin Hassett and Chris Liddell, assuming they were willing to serve again. Re-forming the band that brought you ‘deregulate and cut taxes on investment’ – which delivered such good economic results – would give US stocks a boost they may badly need by then.

Meanwhile, Trump’s re-election would alter the course of US foreign policy in significant ways. Though there have been some continuities in policy from his presidency to Biden’s – notably the continuation of tariffs on China, despite their negligible efficacy – Trump 2.0 would more than likely deviate in significant ways from Biden’s national security strategy.

This would be especially the case if, as seems probable, Trump avoided encumbering himself with military men consciously seeking to exert a restraining influence. Trump favours a trade war with China, not a cold war. He is not strongly committed to the defence of Taiwan. He would almost certainly seek to impose a compromise peace on Ukraine, as he regards the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky with something less than respect, and has a notorious inclination to do business with Vladimir Putin. And Trump would ditch the failed Middle East policy of seeking to revive the defunct nuclear deal with Iran and antagonising Saudi Arabia.

Perhaps all this is a delusion. After all, another lesson of history is that only one previous president has secured a second non-consecutive term: Grover Cleveland in 1892. As Jim Carville understood, ‘change’ generally beats ‘more of the same’ in America. But don’t let anyone quote F. Scott Fitzgerald at you. A second Trump act is not just possible. It’s fast becoming my base case.  

Sunak and Starmer’s pointless battle of soundbites at PMQs

We learned very little from Prime Minister’s Questions today. Both Keir Starmer and Rishi Sunak used attack lines from previous weeks – ones that they will probably repeat until the next general election – and didn’t stray into any new areas.

The Leader of the Opposition wanted to mock the Tory performance in last week’s local elections. Meanwhile, Sunak wanted to exploit Labour nerves that, despite Starmer’s party doing well last week, it didn’t seem to be out of a newfound enthusiasm for Labour among voters.

Starmer told the chamber that the Prime Minister would have to give another update on employment numbers ‘now he’s cost 1,000 Tory councillors their jobs’. In reply, Sunak quoted Tony Blair saying, ‘the right honourable gentleman can be as cocky as he likes about the local elections: come the general election, policy counts. The problem for him is he doesn’t have any!’ 

Starmer had a particularly savage, and effective, comeback. He argued that ‘the Prime Minister has only had to fight for two things in his life. Last year, he lost a Tory beauty contest to the member for Southwest Norfolk, who then lost to a lettuce. Last week, when he finally came into contact with voters, he lost everywhere.’

Sunak decided, for reasons best known to him, to reproduce and indeed develop his weird ice cream insult for Starmer. He said that, after a long list of promises the Labour leader had already broken, ‘he’s not just a softy, he’s the flaky too!’

They kept going in this pointless, soundbite-focused vein. Sunak claimed Rachel Reeves had recently discovered that she needed to be able to say where the money was going to come from, and Starmer referred to Theresa May as ‘one of his more electorally successful predecessors’.

Disruptive protesters, non-dom tax status and the oil and gas company profits: they were all there, as they are every single week. At one point, Starmer appeared to have his notes from a previous session jumbled in. He talked, once again, about ‘a Prime Minister who boasts he’s never had a working class friend’ and who was ‘smiling his way through the cost-of-living crisis, gloating about success while waiting lists grow’.

However far away the next election is, it’s going to be a very long and boring road if PMQs carries on like this.

How ‘hour’ ticked into our language

‘Why is there water all over the bathroom floor?’ asked my husband, without doing anything about it. It was my fault. During a bank holiday soak, I heard the Radio 4 book serialisation of Hands of Time by Rebecca Struthers say that ‘the origin of the modern word hour’ is the Egyptian god Horus. I rocketed up a few inches, like a surprised killer whale, then flopped back down, displacing a few cubic inches of water each side.

It’s funny how ordinary words attract erroneous stories. Hour does not, of course, come from Horus. Few English words come from ancient Egyptian; pharaoh and oasis are exceptions. Hour derives from Norman French houre, from Latin hora, itself from Greek hōra, going back to an Indo-European root signifying ‘season’, giving us year and the Germans Jahr. We started using hour after the Norman conquest, the Old English being tid, ‘tide’. The sea’s tide was a later development of the same word; ‘time and tide wait for no man’ originally used tide in the sense ‘time’, not ‘sea-tide’.

Anyway, why should anyone think hour came from Horus? The falcon-headed god had one eye the sun and the other the moon, but that does not get us there. Neither the Egyptians nor pre-modern etymologists suggested Horus related to hora. Good old Isidore of Seville in his 7th-century Etymologies makes a stab at the origin of hora, ‘hour’, being the same as that of ora ‘boundary’, though it isn’t. Sir Thomas Browne, 1,000 years later, never mentions Horus that I can find. That does not stop internet language chat sites. One advocate of the hour-Horus connection spoils it by then explaining the origin of a religious minister: ‘Min was the common name of the moon, in fact it is where we derive the word moon. And Ster, is really star. So when we refer to someone as a Minister, we are really saying Moon-Star.’ Another speculates on the Turkish for ‘cock’: ‘I was wondering if Turkish horoz, Azeri khoruz, Kazakh qoraz, Kyrgyz koroz, Uyghur khoraz, and Uzbek khoroz could be related to Horus.’ They shouldn’t be wondering, but one can’t stop people trying.

Much of the Covid consensus has been proved to be tripe

Three years ago this week marked my first misgivings about the government’s Covid lockdown. Sure, I was late to that particular party – my wife, for example, had been carping viciously for the previous two months. But my rational assessment of lockdown was perhaps tilted by the gentle, bucolic magic of the thing itself.

I think I have never enjoyed a more pleasant time. The weather was beautiful, and out in the Kent countryside, where I then lived, one could enjoy it to its full. Wildlife was less shy than usual, perhaps a consequence of the state-imposed quietude. Occasionally city dwellers would infest our country lanes and I had great pleasure in yelling at them to return to their filthy tenements, taking their vile diseases with them.

There was a pleasure, too, in the Ballardian scenes at the local supermarket, as the chavs wheeled out their thousands of loo rolls and sacks of pasta. And at the local farm shop, a couple of assistants wore plastic bags over their shoes because of a theory then prevalent that the virus was heavy, fell to the floor with a kind of awkward clunking sound and then got picked up inadvertently by the nearest pair of Nikes. It was, I would concede, a time of government-enforced mass idiocy and I enjoyed it immensely.

A very large amount of what we were told by Chris Whitty, often via that glistening receptacle of wisdom Matt Hancock, was quite quickly proven to be false. Masks, for instance, were never of use for most people, as several studies have confirmed. It was almost impossible to pick up the virus from a surface, such as a shop counter, so the hand gel was also pointless. And we now know (as some suspected at the time) that lockdown may have had a seriously deleterious effect upon our immune systems. But to have articulated any of these things at the time was to get yourself into trouble. So they remained unsayable within polite company and thus got pushed to the fringe, where they grew the comedy heads and tails of a conspiracy theory. Even so, the doubters were right and the mainstream media, especially the BBC, were quite wrong.

Another thing Hancock got wrong, incidentally, was to suggest that smoking tobacco increased the danger from the disease. A couple of weeks after he uttered this nonsense, French doctors were using nicotine patches on Covid sufferers and a whole bunch of reports came out indicating that smokers were far less likely to catch the disease. Never got much play in the media, that one.

Fast-forward three years, and I see that GB News has just been clobbered by Ofcom for allowing the kind of post-feminist feminist writer Naomi Wolf to say that the rollout of Covid vaccines was equivalent to, er, mass murder. Part of Ofcom’s adjudication reads: ‘It is important to stress that in line with the right to freedom of expression broadcasters are free to transmit programmes that include controversial and challenging views, including about Covid-19 vaccines or conspiracy theories. However, alongside this editorial freedom, the Broadcasting Code imposes a clear requirement that if such content has the potential to be harmful, the broadcaster must ensure that its audience is adequately protected.’

This is cant, I think, if a very fashionable form of cant. You can say what you like on air, boys and girls, but not if it has ‘the potential to be harmful’. And who decides what is ‘harmful’, and how can the audience be protected, other than by telling them that Naomi Wolf is wrong?

This kind of dissembling, of course, infests the Online Safety Bill: you can say what you want so long as it isn’t ‘harmful’. Surely it is enough for the audience to understand that the views being stated are from a woman with not even the remotest scintilla of scientific training. In other words, it is her opinion and she is no expert. Most human beings are able to grasp that, I’d suggest – and we should not adjudicate on the basis that six or seven cretins are incapable of discerning between opinion and fact.

Likewise with the former Conservative MP Andrew Bridgen, who quoted an unnamed doctor’s claim that the vaccine rollout was ‘the biggest crime against humanity since the Holocaust’. Yes, it’s only Bridgen: ergo we will not take his word for it. Both Bridgen and Wolf conjured up, to support their suppositions, that controversial Austrian politician Adolf Hitler – Bridgen in his stupid use of the word ‘Holocaust’ and Wolf in likening the rollout to what would happened in ‘pre-Nazi Germany’ (which I assume was a slip of the tongue and she didn’t really mean to blame the Weimar Republic).

We should be wary of persecuting these people, though. Their claims become more and more wild because entirely legitimate concerns are ignored or stamped down upon by institutions such as Ofcom and Conservative Central Office. We now know that there are many unpleasant side effects to the various Covid vaccines, including myocarditis and pericarditis, Guillain-Barré syndrome, anaphylaxis, thromboembolic effects and blood clots. More, I daresay, will be discovered later.

I am sure it is the case that, as most of the experts aver, these side effects are very, very, rare – five to 16 cases per million when it comes to blood clots, for example. And that, as a corollary, the world was made safer as a consequence of the rollout. Perhaps: but that is the world, not the individual.

More to the point is the necessity of challenging consensus wherever it exists. An awful lot of what was once the Covid consensus has been proved to be tripe. We should not silence those who would challenge the rest of it. 

Dear Mary: How do I stop my date bringing her flatmate out with us?

Q. As I live just over an hour away from London I usually choose to take a late train home after parties, but train fever often overshadows my enjoyment of the gatherings. This is partly because even a glance at my watch will look rude and spoil the vibe. Do you think a braille watch I could discreetly touch would be the answer?

– L.G., Fosbury, Wilts

A. Braille watches usually come with one raised bobble on the hour and another raised bobble on the minute. Hence they are easy to ‘read’ by touching. However there would be palaver involved with groping up the sleeve, and you might find beady-eyed fellow guests driving you up conversational cul-de-sacs when they spot it. Perhaps better to keep your mobile somewhere on your body. Set it on airplane mode but alarmed to throb silently when it’s time for you to leave.

Q. I have been on a few dates with a very attractive American girl who is sharing a flat with her best friend from home while they do an art course in London. The one I like is very kind and always assumes it will be fine for her flatmate to come along too, whatever we are doing, on the grounds that she doesn’t know anyone else in London and would otherwise spend the evening alone. I would get one of my friends involved to make it a foursome but the flatmate is not of the same calibre as my date. Any advice, Mary?

– Name and address withheld

A. You have clarified to me privately that the girl in question finds you attractive too, so it is not the case that she’s bringing the flatmate as a type of chaperone to pre-empt your lunging. It’s likely that the pressure to include the flatmate is coming from the flatmate and difficult to resist when two are living together. Next time you plan a date, suggest that the three of you meet first for a drink or art exhibition (the V&A stays open till 10 p.m. on Fridays), adding ‘and then you and I can go on to a late dinner together afterwards?’. The flatmate could have no grounds for complaint.

Q. I had a terrible experience at the Vermeer exhibition in Amsterdam. It was packed to the gunnels, mainly with grey-haired people taking selfies in front of the paintings, and I couldn’t get a proper look. What should I have done, Mary?

– A.C.G., London W8

A. The Vermeer ends on 4 June and is completely sold out, but you can now view it in peace in some Odeons and Picturehouses and other cinemas including the Parade in Marlborough. The way to view future oversubscribed exhibitions is to buy a ticket for the earliest entry of the day, then run straight to the last artwork and work backwards against the tide.

Sorry Harry, I’m the real media intrusion victim

What an emotional wringer the royal family has put us through in the past two years, from the sadness of Prince Philip’s death to the joyful Platinum Jubilee, then Queen Elizabeth II’s own extraordinarily moving funeral, and now the coronation of her son. I’ve felt so privileged to have been at Buckingham Palace for the last three events, anchoring Fox News coverage in America. After we came off air on Saturday, I mused with my two US co-presenters about what may be the next major royal occasion: a wedding, a funeral, a silver jubilee (Charles would have to live as long as his grandmother for that to happen)? Or God forbid, will the British monarchy itself be terminally contaminated by the increasingly pungent whiff of republicanism sweeping the Commonwealth? We could be in for an even more turbulent ride than the one we’ve just been on.

On coronation eve, I was lunching in a private room at the River Café with Rupert Murdoch and some of his top executives when my phone buzzed with a message: ‘Keep the noise down, we’re upstairs.’ It was Emily Maitlis, who is the person you least want eavesdropping when you’re proffering scandalous royal gossip to your boss. She later explained she was taping a podcast with Ruthie Rogers (the restaurant’s legendary owner) when a loud voice kept booming out from below: ‘We suddenly went, “That’s Piers! Unmistakable. Coarse and loud.”’ Fortunately, they couldn’t pick up what I was actually bellowing – or their podcast would break the internet.

I was interested to see Prince Harry skulk into Westminster Abbey flanked by Princesses Eugenie and Beatrice, virtually the only royals still talking to the treacherous toad. A fortnight ago, I had a pub meal in Notting Hill with a group including the singer James Blunt and both princesses, whom I’ve known for donkey’s years. I exchanged a warm goodbye hug outside with Beatrice, oblivious to a lurking paparazzo. The resulting photos, featuring my commoner arms draped around her regal shoulders, my eyes clamped shut in Lynch-Bages-fuelled bliss, could have seemed a tad incriminating had my wife Celia fortunately not also been in shot. My consternation was thus replaced by amusement at how unamused Harry would be when he saw them. But he should realise I was subjected to the same kind of privacy invasion he now specialises in with his family-trashing interviews, books and Netflix series. I’m the real media intrusion victim!

Barry Humphries, a favourite of the King, would have been at the coronation were it not for his recent death. Last time I saw the Dame Edna genius, I asked if he’d toned down his act because of the insane woke cancel-culture world we’re now forced to inhabit. ‘No!’ he roared. ‘Les Patterson is the last offensive man standing! I can get away with anything so long as it comes out of his mouth, or Edna’s.’ Barry’s legacy should be that all comedians continue to fearlessly offend the permanently over-offended.

Speaking of wokery, the Sun invited me to pen my 20-point manifesto for abolishing this societal scourge after a reader suggested Rishi Sunak make me his anti-woke minister. My measures included a ban on trans athletes in women’s sport, and instant deportation for anyone who defaces a Churchill statue. After it was published, the Prime Minister texted me such a complimentary message that I think he might offer me the job. I’m ready to serve.

I’ve acquired some unique celebrity souvenirs on my travels, including a ukulele signed by Warren Buffett after he played ‘My Way’ during our interview, Simon Cowell’s doodles of cars while filming Britain’s Got Talent and Donald Trump’s personalised Air Force One M&M chocolates. But the best is a watercolour of a rhinoceros painted by Queen Camilla. I bought it at a charity auction when I was Daily Mirror editor and stuck it up in my office. ‘Charles and I used to see it behind your head when you did interviews,’ she told me years later, ‘and we were always completely horrified!’ Now whenever we meet, Camilla’s opening line is invariably ‘Hello Piers, how’s my rhino?’ which tends to raise a few eyebrows. The rhino perfectly epitomises her own character: thick skin, strong protective streak and a ferocious instinct for survival despite being a long-time endangered species.

Of course, for Arsenal fans the real coronation will come if we win the Premier League. Many have written us off, but as Mandela said: ‘Everything seems impossible until it’s done.’ Charles and Camilla’s hard-won journey to the ultimate trophies is our inspiration.

Wine Club: the best of Burgundy from Honest Grapes and Albert Bichot

I happily did my bit for Blighty during the coronation and drank nothing but English wine, beer and spirits the whole weekend. If I was guilty of slightly over-egging the pudding it was only through an excessive bout of patriotism and I can report with pride that even my much-needed hangover cure – The Original Pick-Me-Up from D. R. Harris & Co – was English made.

Once off the naughty step and given reluctant permission by Mrs Ray to resume active service, I moved straight from the vinous delights of Kent and Sussex to those of Burgundy, courtesy of Honest Grapes and Albert Bichot. Founded in Beaune in 1831, Albert Bichot is the leading buyer at the Hospices de Beaune auction and one of the region’s largest producers, with more than 150 different wines on its list. Most are organic and all are made with the love, care and attention to detail that befits a thriving family-owned firm. I think you will enjoy the following bottles.

The 2022 Albert Bichot Bourgogne Aligoté (1) is a very tasty example of an oft-maligned grape, once notorious for making lean, mean, teeth-strippingly acidic wines only made palatable by the addition of a hefty slug of crème de cassis. This canny ploy was dreamt up by one Félix Kir, Catholic priest, Resistance fighter, long-time mayor of Dijon, wine lover and all-round good egg, and it’s after him the resultant drink is named. No need to adulterate this Aligoté, though, because as well as being bone dry, it’s light, fresh and invigorating and makes a great standalone aperitif. £15.80 down from £16.80.

The 2022 Albert Bichot Mâcon-Villages (2) is more typical fare, being 100 per cent Chardonnay. Fermented partly in stainless steel (for freshness) and partly in old oak (for texture), the blend is aged in barrel for eight months. The delicious result is a lightly honeyed, apple/melon-fresh wine with a long dry finish. It’s not as cheap as it once was but, with Burgundy prices having recently gone through the roof, remains decent value. £17.60 down from £18.60.

The 2021 Albert Bichot Petit-Chablis (3) tastes exactly how it should. Made from grapes harvested in vineyards in the north and north-west of Chablis, it’s fermented and aged on its lees in stainless steel and – full of crunchy apple and zingy citrus – is fresh, lively and bone dry with just the faintest hint of honey. It’s textbook Petit-Chablis. £20.10 down from £21.10.

The 2021 Horizon de Bichot Pinot Noir (4), a Vin de France produced from various vineyards in Limoux in the Languedoc, is simple fare but thoroughly enjoyable nonetheless. 100 per cent Pinot Noir, it’s bright, fresh, easygoing with notes of cherry and raspberry and just a hint of spice. Bottled under screwcap, it’s a great picnic wine and doesn’t mind being chilled. £15.20 down from £16.20.

The 2020 Albert Bichot Bourgogne Passetoutgrain (5) is a style/type of wine I’ve long enjoyed, a quirk of Burgundy whereby Pinot Noir is blended with Gamay to give an undemanding, early-drinking vin de soif. The Pinot gives style and elegance and the Gamay gives freshness and juicy fruit. The result – as here, in the hands of the 2017 International Wine Challenge Red Winemaker of the Year – is extremely affable. Crammed with succulent bramble fruit and few tannins, it just begs to be knocked back. £17.80 down from £18.80.

Finally, the 2020 Albert Bichot Bourgogne Hautes-Côtes de Beaune (6) which is much more serious and grown-up. There’s plenty of black and red fruit on nose and palate, a fine acidity and a gratifying touch of earthiness and savouriness on the finish. A quality red Burgundy for the Sunday roast. £24.50 down from £25.50.

The mixed case has two bottles of each wine and delivery, as ever, is free.

Order online today, or download an order form.