Unfair A-levels are the best idea we’ve got

A-level results day is the most terrifying moment in anyone’s education. Poor GCSEs can be overlooked by a school that knows their pupils could do well in the sixth form. Degree classifications at university are so broad that one bad paper may well not matter. But A-Levels are brutal. Students who miss their university offer by just one grade in one subject can find themselves rejected without the right of appeal or the means to resit. Their future changes instantly by the barest of margins. 

But the main problem with A-levels is that it’s not clear what they actually measure. We might like to think that grades reflect ability. They do, but there are far more variables at play. Hard work is one factor. The skill and experience of teachers are also part of the equation, but there is also luck. Students who spread their revision thinly can do well, but those that target their efforts might do very well indeed if they guessed right.

There is also the year they happened to be born. My own A-Level grades (AAB incidentally) were good enough for me in 1986. Off to Newcastle I went to study Astronomy and Astrophysics. My pupils are sometimes aghast: ‘But Dr Hayton, you didn’t even get an A* in physics?’ I’m beginning to show my age when I point out that there were no A* grades back then, and my B is probably worth at least an A-double star these days. There has been no consistency over time. An A* in 2019 measured something very different to an A* in 2020 and 2021 when teacher predictions replaced exam grades.

There’s also a myth that the class of 2023 cohort didn’t face as much disruption as their predecessors. They didn’t sit their GCSEs either – so A-Levels are their first experience of public exams – and they were sent home for the delights of online learning (or not) during two crucial terms in Years 10 and 11. They have an argument for a leg-up. However, for them, 27.2 per cent of A-Level entries were graded A* or A – a big drop from the 36.4 per cent recorded last year. 

But according to the Joint Council for Qualifications, we really ought to be comparing with the statistics from 2019, when only (!!) 25.4 per cent of entries reached that benchmark. So, are pupils doing better or worse? And, if we can answer that question, what exactly are they better or worse at? 

In reality, an A-Level grade measures just one thing – how well the student could answer a specific set of questions on couple of days in the summer. Every year we do this to our children, almost as a rite of passage to adulthood, and every year I wonder what purpose it might possibly serve. Or I used to. Until 2019 I would have suggested that an open and honest end-of-school report might be more meaningful to universities and employers. We might be able to praise all the achievements of our pupils and perhaps point out their shortcomings.

But then came the pandemic. I regret the fact that schools were closed – especially the second closure in the spring of 2021 – and the cancellation of exams in 2020 and 2021. But if those two years proved anything, it was that when teachers had the opportunity to influence the results, the results improved far too much.

So maybe A-Level exams are the least bad option. It’s hard for children, but giving more power to the teachers has increased a sense of unfairness. Beyond university, however, we should maybe pay less attention to the grades that 18-year-olds are staring at today. There is more to life than AAB.

RSPB president clashes with his own charity

When it comes to conservation, it seems that not all at the RSPB are singing from the same hymn sheet. Amir Khan was elected as the charity’s president last October, having found fame as the resident doctor on ITV’s Good Morning Britain. Amid media attention around the ‘Glorious Twelfth,’ Khan took to Twitter this week to slam a study on grouse shooting boosting curlew numbers. Quote-tweeting the research, Khan declared:

I’m the proudest of Yorkshiremen – but this kind of crap is exactly what we don’t need in our beautiful county. Grouse shooting brings millions to the tables of a select few and does nothing for wildlife conservation.

Mr S would have thought that more of these rare ground nesting birds were a reason to cheer. But more embarrassingly for Khan is the fact that his claim that grouse shooting ‘does nothing for wildlife conservation’ completely contradicts the views of the organisation of which he is president. Indeed, the RSPB’s own website says that:

In some upland areas, the control of foxes and crows by gamekeepers managing moorlands for red grouse shooting may be important in maintaining breeding curlew populations and preventing further declines. We are currently undertaking research that seeks to establish the extent to which declines may be related to changes in moorland habitats and land managements, including gamekeeping and predator control.

So much for the charity’s promise to be ‘neutral on the ethics of shooting’. Khan subsequently declared in a response to the Countryside Alliance that:

I made my position on hunting for pleasure clear to them when I took on the role – and have serious concerns of the environmental damage and loss of biodiversity driven grouse moor shooting and the subsequent land management causes

That’s, er, in spite of the RSPB’s own stance on the issue. It’s worth noting that the RSPB themselves carry out their own predator control using guns to protect curlew numbers. Why is it alright for the charity to do so but not gamekeepers?

You would have thought that after the Chris Packham furore, the RSPB might have learned a thing or two about which ‘slebs they choose to represent them…

Michael Parkinson and the lost art of the interview

Two or three years ago, the Tory MP Jonathan Gullis was ridiculed for describing himself as ‘someone who grew up on Dad’s Army and Porridge and loves those traditional programmes of the past’, even though he was born in 1990. The suggestion was that if you weren’t old enough to vote when Tony Blair left office, then it was rather strange to retain a fondness for sitcoms which completed their original runs in the late seventies. This is not right, however. I know from personal experience that if you were raised in a household with traditional media tastes then even an eighties and nineties childhood – before the fragmentation of audiences driven by digital TV and the internet – could leave you with an enduring affection for the classic shows and personalities of a previous era. Morecambe and Wise, Frank Spencer, Fawlty Towers, The Good Life, and so on.  

One such personality, of course, was Sir Michael Parkinson, who has died aged 88. Even when his show was on a long hiatus, Parky seemed to be a constant presence on TV in my childhood.

It almost feels wrong to call Parkinson a chat show, thereby placing it in the same category as its contemporary successors. Looking back at his interviews from the vantage point of 2023, particularly those from the original run from 1971-82, you are immediately struck by a seriousness and sense of calm that is missing from almost any modern television interview show you care to name. The guests are given space and time to formulate their thoughts, and generally express themselves with precision and eloquence. Unlike certain modern interviewers, Parkinson not call attention to himself with giggling innuendoes, nor did he indulge in laboured attempts to elicit intimate revelations. Even the audience maintained a certain decorum; they applauded and laughed occasionally, but there was no whooping and hooting.

Now you might say that Sir Michael was playing on easy mode in that first run. For one thing, his guests were typically not on a promotional tour. He was not bound by the need to focus on their new project, as his modern counterparts so often are, but could simply explore their lives and experiences. It was also true that he had a consistently excellent calibre of interviewee: Bette Davis, Alec Guinness, Peter O’Toole, Muhammad Ali, Fred Astaire, John Betjeman, Yehudi Menuhin. Many of these people had lived remarkable lives, and had been part of extraordinary world events. David Niven, for example, had fought in the second world war. Many had grown to maturity in a world before television and modern communications and so had a noticeable comfort with silence and reflection. Their speech is unhurried and considered; their often-idiosyncratic accents are resonant of long-vanished worlds.

All that said, Parkinson brought his own gifts to the far from straightforward task of interviewing. It maybe helped that his own pre-media career had been varied; a decent amateur cricketer, a print journalist who joined the trade straight from school, and later an army officer. His questions could be a little long-winded or digressive, but he knew when to stop and listen. He knew how to elicit more detail without seeming intrusive, and he had the sensitivity to realise when a line of questioning was not going anywhere. There is a refreshing lack of gimmickry and noise.

Above all, he had a genuine interest in people and their lives – a kind of practical humanism. This shines through not just in Parkinson, but in his stint on Desert Island Discs in the 1980s, and his decade-long presenting gig on Radio 2. You always had the sense of a well-rounded individual with a breadth and depth of interest in the world – he was, for example, a knowledgeable and enthusiastic fan of jazz. There is an old episode of the Test Match Special feature known as ‘The View From The Boundary’, in which the tables are turned and Parkinson is interviewed by that other master of the spoken word, Brian Johnston. Parkinson’s passion for cricket is almost palpable, and he speaks about the game and its legends with an unselfconscious delight that is somehow very moving.   

The death of Parkinson seems emblematic, in a way, of the passing of a whole generation of broadcasters, and the disappearance of a serious and reflective approach to the art of interviewing in mainstream media. Nevertheless, the rise of YouTube and other video platforms seems to have reinvigorated the intelligent longform interview. Perhaps that is where his approach and his spirit will live on.  

Why is Rishi rolling out the red carpet for MBS? 

Why is the government so keen for Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s crown prince and de facto ruler, to visit Britain? Or, as the television comedian and interviewer Mrs Merton might have put it to Rishi Sunak: ‘So, what first attracted you to the stupendously wealthy Saudi leader?’  

Bin Salman’s visit is expected to take place this autumn but as yet there is no firm date. The precise timing will be up to the Saudis, with Britain reduced to playing the part of an anxious host desperate to please.

This would be the first visit by the crown prince (universally referred to as MBS) since the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018. A declassified CIA report concluded that he had authorised the killing, something that he and his government have always denied. At the time, Britain expressed outrage at the murder. Yet here we are, just five years on, apparently delighted to play hosts to MBS and his entourage. Why do it, Rishi?

There are plenty of realpolitik justifications for Britain to hold its nose and sup with the Saudis in London. The desert kingdom is a vital market for British exports. A free trade deal with the wider Gulf bloc is a prize in the offing, with the Saudis carrying an influential say. This could be worth an extra £1.6 billion to the British economy, hardly something to be sniffed at in the current economic circumstances.

There are lucrative prizes on offer for British companies in the services sector too as the desert kingdom seeks to diversify its economy away from oil. And why should Britain not host MBS, given that the Saudis have invested huge sums in sport here through their control of Newcastle United and sponsorship of Formula One?

All this makes sense up to a point – but that doesn’t necessarily make it right. Do principles count for nothing? There’s an argument to be made for dealing with the Saudis at arm’s length, but rolling out the red carpet for an official visit, with all the attendant bells and whistles, is something else altogether.

The visit is guaranteed to spark a storm of protests. Some campaigners will demand that MBS is arrested for human rights violations. This won’t happen, of course, but the pictures of the demonstrations will be beamed round the world.

MBS will be received at Buckingham Palace and King Charles will play a central role. Our royal family has long had close ties to the Saudi royals: Charles has made numerous visits to Saudi Arabia and he has a keen appreciation of Islamic culture and heritage. Even so, the pictures of MBS at the palace will amount to a propaganda coup for the Saudi regime.

Perhaps the crown prince will want to visit St James’ Park to watch his football team play? Unlikely, but why not?

Is there any limit when it comes to rolling out the red carpet for MBS? The Saudis are understandably keen to be seen as big players on the international stage as this helps ‘whitewash’ their human rights record. But should the government be going out of its way to help them in these endeavours?

It is undeniable that MBS, like it or not, is turning out to be the most consequential ruler of the desert kingdom since its foundation. He has quickly succeeded in moving Saudi Arabia away from its traditional subservient relationship with the United States. At the same time he has opened up a new relationship with China, which played a role in the recent reconciliation between Saudi Arabia and Iran.

He is ruthless and unpredictable. Only a few years ago he was hailed as a young and dynamic liberaliser who would open up his country. He has achieved this to some extent, encouraging outside investors and tourism. Women are now allowed to drive. Cinemas and other forms of entertainment, long banned in the Kingdom because they were deemed ‘un-Islamic’, are doing good business.

Yet there is a darker side to his all-powerful rule. Saudi Arabia has never been a free society, but MBS has instituted a climate of fear that is unprecedented. It is dangerous to voice even the mildest criticisms of him or the regime: a post on social media that meets with official disapproval is punishable by arrest followed by a lengthy prison sentence.

MBS’s invitation to London highlights a wider failure of Western politics and diplomacy. Leaders from Biden to Macron, and now Sunak, appear to have no real measure of the man they’re dealing with, beyond chasing access to the huge wealth at his disposal.

History shows that cosying up to the leaders of brutal regimes often yields short term dividends but always comes with a significant price in the long term. Rishi Sunak appears determined to learn this lesson the hard way. 

In praise of Michael Parkinson

Different generations will have different memories of Sir Michael Parkinson, who has died aged 88. If you’re a little older, you’ll remember that Parkinson led a golden age of chat shows when they were about the guests rather than the host. He was a master of the art and, though famous, never came across as a celebrity interviewing other celebrities. And never for the sake of a pre-prepared one-liner to get a cheap laugh.

He would ask a question then sit back and let the interviewee answer, at length if need be. As a result, he got the best out of everyone from Richard Burton to Robert de Niro, David Attenborough to, perhaps most famously of all, Muhammad Ali, who became a regular on his Saturday night BBC show.

Some tributes have talked about him setting a gold standard for the television interview genre yet, noticeably, few now follow his gimmick-free method. Times change and today’s shows, from Graham Norton’s glitzy parade of Hollywood icons to James Corden’s overbearing desire to be friends with the people he interviews, modern equivalents seem geared to producing moments that will do well on social media. There seems little in the way of serious attempts to get to know more about the person behind the celebrity.

Parky spent seven decades as a journalist, TV broadcaster and writer and it was his journalistic acumen that allowed him to get the best out of his guests. It wasn’t always that way. His first ITV shows in 1969 were an attempt to make him the British Ed Sullivan; he would start the show sitting on a stool making topical jokes.

It didn’t work (though Graham Norton still does a similar spiel). Yet the BBC still took him on and gave him a show without the glitz, just straightforward interviewing. And it proved a massive success. It wasn’t the only string to his bow. Parky, the son of a miner, determined not to follow his father’s footsteps, helped launch TV-am, presented the game show Give Us A Clue and advertised Yorkshire Tea and life insurance.

But undoubtedly the peak was that Saturday night programme. Yes, there were awkward moments – he upset a young Helen Mirren with questions which she considered sexist – but returned to his show 31 years later in a much better mood – and Meg Ryan got so angry she told the Yorkshireman to ‘wrap it up’ and later claimed Parky was a ‘nut’ who behaved like a ‘disapproving father’ over a nude scene she had done.

He lost his temper when attacked by Rod Hull’s Emu and perhaps there were a few too many appearances by Billy Connolly. But who else could have got Peter Sellers or Orson Welles to sit down and regale a television audience with anecdotes, insider revelations and to discuss their own personal demons? Guests appeared when they didn’t need to plug a book, film or song. They simply enjoyed being guests.

We met, once, when he was a guest speaker for the annual conference of Napa – the National Association of Press Agencies. There was no fee, he simply stayed loyal to his local paper roots and Napa’s president, Denis Cassidy. The two had met half a century earlier on the Sheffield Star but, more than that, Denis had organised a date for Parky with a girl called Mary, who had become his wife.

Parkinson was a joy that night. He was full of advice for the youngsters in the audience (some of whom probably hadn’t even heard of him) and full of anecdotes for those of us who grew up on his shows.

In an age when the interview has become either a five-second soundbite or an exercise in ‘me, me, me’ for the host, it is worth rewatching Parky’s understated warmth. He had a true artistry, the beauty of which was making it look so simple.

Why the Kremlin sees Britain as the ultimate bogeyman

Perfidious Albion is at it again. The Kremlin’s increasingly unhinged obsession with seeing a British hand behind its various upsets has now manifested itself in a claim that the UK is behind the establishment of a death squad operating in Africa.

The claim, trumpeted across Russia’s state-run media, is that MI6 is behind a ‘punitive saboteur unit consisting of Ukrainian nationalists and neo-Nazis’ being trained for operations in Africa. According to an unnamed ‘military-diplomatic source,’ London requested in July that the Ukrainian government help it recruit this force.

In response, the Ukrainian Security Service and Main Intelligence Directorate worked with MI6 and the SAS to pick at least a hundred veterans ‘with combat experience on the “eastern front”’ to be commanded by a certain ‘Lt. Colonel V. Praschyuk.’ According to the Russians, this 43-year-old action man has been a parliamentarian, a special forces commander, a marine and even a participant in a joint operation by British and Ukrainian intelligence in Zimbabwe of all places.

His unit is apparently meant to shortly head from the Danube port of Izmail to Omdurman in Sudan, where it would begin its mission ‘carrying out acts of sabotage on key infrastructure in Africa and assassinating African leaders who favour co-operation with Russia’. This clearly reflects Moscow’s opportunistic bid to frame itself as the friend of a post-colonial Africa, stepping in where former masters now abandon the continent.

This is all very exciting stuff, and worthy of a blockbuster movie or two. After all, Yevgeny Prigozhin, head of the Wagner mercenary group and on-and-off mutineer, has bankrolled several films glorifying and whitewashing his men’s operations in Africa. However, this report is also deeply implausible.

Whatever antics it may have been involved in, in the past, MI6 and the British government are not really in the death squads and foreign coups business any more. Lest this sound naïve, the reason is not so much morality as practicality. Such operations are risky, prone to be counter-productive and, in the modern information age, pretty much bound to leak. In particular, openly recruiting foreign soldiers for an operation – one that is not being carried out behind multiple cut-out identities to ensure secrecy and deniability – is a particular no-no.

But this is all just tedious pedantry compared with the baroque lushness of the Kremlin’s imagination. In recent days, key Putin ally Nikolai Patrushev has claimed that Kyiv is harvesting the organs of wounded Ukrainian soldiers for export. Meanwhile, the head of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, the not-unintelligent Sergei Naryshkin, has expressed his fears about the ‘biomechanoids’ apparently running rife in Europe.

In particular, the UK often features as the subtle and sinister power behind these threats, making up for in cunning what it may lack – compared with the Americans – in raw muscle. As one nationalist Russian news site put it, ‘London’s policy has not changed over the years, the British continue to love working through proxies, while remaining “clean”.’ Thus, Britain was allegedly behind the actions of imprisoned opposition leader Alexei Navalny, Ukraine’s 2013-14 ‘Revolution of Dignity,’ and even drone attacks on Moscow and Crimea.

It may be reassuring to know someone still thinks of Britain as punching so comprehensively above its weight, but it is also more than a little perplexing. In part, attacking the UK is considered a safer way to attack America, the other half of the favoured formulation of the ‘Anglo-Saxons’ (as if London and Washington were anywhere near as closely in lockstep as that implies). More than that, though, there is a complex historical legacy at work.

Bookends of Europe – of, but not in, the continental mainstream – Russia and Britain have long been keenly aware of the other. English traders were among the early organised mercantile operations in Russia and Peter the Great visited to learn the arts of shipbuilding and naval warfare. Tsars from Ivan the Terrible onwards have pondered the possibilities were Russian land power to be combined with British naval might. At other times, whether in the ‘great game’ of Southern Asia or Crimea, Russia and Britain have been rivals. Added to this, although today’s Russia is not Soviet, our military intervention and intelligence operations in the 1918-22 Civil War still rankle.

Russians are at once warmly Anglophile and deeply Anglophobe, a paradoxical relationship unlike theirs with any other nation. In the circumstances, the fact that we continue to loom so large in their geopolitical imagination is at once a credit to our still-effective intelligence services and also a mixed political blessing.

What we don’t know about the suspected Bulgarian spies

As a British former foreign correspondent in Moscow and Washington, there are few subjects I turn to with more trepidation than spying, and specifically the Russian variety. On the one hand, there is the 007 factor – the glamour, the martinis, and the derring-do – which colours perceptions on both sides. On the other is the awareness that espionage is a slithery, shape-shifting branch of human activity, where the only constant is that little is as it seems.  

This is by way of a preface to the news – emblazoned on the front pages of most UK papers today – that three Bulgarian citizens, long resident in the UK, have been arrested and are accused of spying for Russia. They are scheduled to stand trial at the Old Bailey in January – an unusually speedy timetable, given the endemic delays in the English court system.   

That said, it is worth looking at what we know – or rather what the UK authorities want us to know – and what we do not know. We have been told the names, ages and addresses of the three people arrested – Orlin Roussev, 45, of Great Yarmouth, Bizer Dzhambazov, 41 and Katrin Ivanova, 31, both of Harrow, north-west London – that they are Bulgarian citizens and have lived in the UK for more than ten years. We are told that Roussev was found with false documents for nearly a dozen countries and equipment to forge more. We are told that they masqueraded as journalists, with fake accreditation for two US television channels which they allegedly used to spy on targets in London, Germany and Montenegro.  

This assemblage of facts is entirely plausible, but it also raises some questions. First the plausible side. Those named are said to be Bulgarian citizens. Settling in the UK would have presented no problems after Bulgaria joined the EU; the UK was a favoured destination because, unlike most other EU countries, it allowed entry and the right to work from the start. Bulgaria, with close linguistic and cultural ties to Russia – and part of the Warsaw Pact in Cold War times – would also have been a natural route for Russia to use to infiltrate spies. Russians would be able to ‘pass’ as Bulgarian without too many difficulties, while Bulgarians generally harbour less animosity towards Russia than many other East and Central Europeans.  

The reports so far do not make clear whether the fake documents and equipment for producing them was exclusively for their own use or for sale or distribution to others. But neither is implausible. A few years ago, I visited what is now North Macedonia, and a lot of cab-driver chat there related to the ease with which people who wanted to move to the EU, and particularly the UK, could hop over the border into Bulgaria, and pick up a Bulgarian passport or faked documents that would enable them to apply for one.

There is also time-honoured precedent dating back to Soviet times for Russia to plant so-called sleeper-cells in Western countries, to be activated according to need. The most celebrated case of recent years concerned the group around Anna Chapman in the United States, who returned to Russia as heroes after a spy-swap in 2010 that would not have been out of place during the Cold War.  

There is no reason to think this was an isolated case. Recently, suspected Russian spies were reported to be posing as an Argentinian couple living in Slovenia, while a Russian with a Brazilian passport was also detained in Brazil. But nor is there reason to believe that Russian spying has been particularly ramped up since Vladimir Putin became president, for all that he made his career in the KGB, or that it is something only Russia does. Espionage has been a permanent feature of international relations.

But the latest revelations about a Russian/Bulgarian spy-ring being ‘busted’ also raise other questions. One concerns the charges. As of now, it appears that the three face just one charge under the Identity Documents Act and have yet to enter a plea. It is not clear what relation this has to spying or whether other charges are pending. Another concerns their identity. Are they really Bulgarians, and if they are, do they have ‘settled status’ in the UK post-Brexit. Are they legally here?  

Another relates to timing. The three charged were among five arrested in February, yet it is only now that this detail has been made public. There have been a flurry of media reports on suspect Russian activity lately, including the hack of the Electoral Commission – again, a much delayed admission, which was not officially tied to Russia.

I recall another case from 2017 that may or may not be relevant here. At the centre of this was Andrei Ryjenko, a Russian-UK dual national working for the EBRD in London, who was charged with bribery and money-laundering. The case took an interminable time to come to court, with many stops and starts, and was surrounded with secrecy. An interesting little sideline, however, which seemed to explain some of the delay, was evidence submitted in mitigation on the defendant’s behalf to the effect that UK agents had offered a plea bargain in a vain attempt to ‘turn’ him. Was this just a one-off?  

Then there must be questions about the end purpose, and what happens next. There are times when the detention of a foreign national for spying can be used as diplomatic leverage. There is at least one individual currently held in Russia – the US reporter for the Wall Street Journal, Evan Gershkovich, who could be part of a swap. The UK might also have a view to the opposition figure and dual Russian-UK national, Vladimir Kara-Murza, who was recently given a 25 year sentence for treason, which included condemning the war in Ukraine. With formal channels to negotiate with Russia now mostly closed, it is not unheard of for countries to resort to other means.  

There is no guarantee, however, that much will become clearer even if a trial does take place in January or at any time thereafter. How much of such a case will realistically be heard in open court? It will be the truth, but not necessarily the whole truth that comes out.  

Yes, Bradley Cooper’s fake nose is anti-Semitic

Bradley Cooper is not anti-Semitic. If he was, he’d surely have let it slip by now; as Mel Gibson proved (‘The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world!’), it can be hard to hold such things in. And Cooper certainly wouldn’t be portraying a Jewish composer sensitively and affectionately on screen if he was.

No, his decision to use a rubber nose when playing the role of Leonard Bernstein – to nose up, if you will – was likely not animated by the anti-Semitism of Hitler or Gibson. But it was animated by something and it is useful to consider what it was.

Yesterday, Bernstein’s children rushed to the actor’s defence. ‘It happens to be true that Leonard Bernstein had a nice, big nose,’ wrote Jamie, Alexander and Nina Bernstein in a statement. ‘Bradley chose to use makeup to amplify his resemblance, and we’re perfectly fine with that. We’re also certain that our dad would have been fine with it as well.’

Maybe. But there’s a context here. The siblings were closely involved in the making of the film, so to admit that they had missed the anti-Semitic undertones of a rubber conk would make them look rather foolish. Moreover, as the rest of their effusive statement shows, they are understandably buoyed by the experience of having a lovely film made about their late father. They don’t want anything to go wrong. An anti-Semitism scandal overshadowing the release of the movie means that things are going very wrong indeed.

In his diaries, Victor Klemperer, the German Jewish diarist who predicted the Holocaust, described the Jews as a ‘seismic people’. Thousands of years of persecution has taught them to feel the early tremors of an earthquake, he argued, so that they may move to higher ground. In the Bernstein siblings, it seems, this instinct has become dulled by the giddiness induced by this flattering project. Any Jew can see that nosing up is one of the tremors. A small one, perhaps, and not one that would lead inevitably to the Holocaust. But a tremor. We can feel it.

Why was it necessary to nose up? Did Cooper fear that we’d miss Bernstein’s ethnicity without it? What is a Jewish composer without a prosthetic nose? Maybe some Jews –Ashkenazim, perhaps, possibly those of Iraqi or Egyptian origin, though not necessarily ones from Ethiopia or Morocco – tend to have bigger noses than their gentile compatriots. Jewishness is, after all, a genetic inheritance as well as a culture. But this is not the point. For centuries, Jews have been depicted as money-grubbing, curly-haired, beady-eyed, lascivious, devious, malevolent, bloodsucking, conspiratorial subhumans. The grotesque nose is always part of the picture. Not sometimes. Always.

Cooper’s false nose fell squarely in that tradition. Have a look at the pictures. Bernstein’s nose really wasn’t especially big. It didn’t define his face. Cooper’s prosthetic, applied to his visage with the skill and devotion of a Der Stürmer cartoonist, made him look less like Bernstein than he did before (unless you perceive a Jew nose-first, and the rest of him only later). It made Cooper into a living caricature.

I’m not saying Bradley Cooper hates the Jews. As the Bernstein siblings pointed out, ‘We were touched to the core to witness the depth of his commitment, his loving embrace of our father’s music, and the sheer open-hearted joy he brought to his exploration’. This is not the behaviour of an anti-Semite. But like the rest of us, the actor is a porous being raised in a Christian society. Thousands of years of prejudice and its symbols – from blood libels to bags of gold to big noses – cannot be erased overnight. This isn’t about the nose. It is about the instinct to caricature it.

As the actress Tracy-Ann Oberman has pointed out, Cooper played the deformed Elephant Man in a 2014 stage play. He didn’t use prosthetics on that occasion; he just contorted his mouth, his hand and his gait. But Jews are a subtle and malevolent race. Without overt physical markers, they can live unnoticed among us. Without a yellow star, they need a big nose. They need exaggerated shrugs and oy-veys and beetling brows; they need vampire squids and bags of cash. Otherwise, how will we spot them? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Hath not a Jew a bloody huge conk?

Bradley Cooper is not anti-Semitic. The bigotry is in the air we breathe. It’s in our blood.

Why is the WHO promoting homeopathy?

The World Health Organisation (WHO) is meant to implore us to ignore hearsay and folklore, and to follow the scientific evidence. So why is it now suddenly promoting the likes of herbal medicine, homeopathy and acupuncture? In a series of tweets this week, the WHO has launched a campaign to extol the virtues of what it calls ‘traditional medicine’. ‘Traditional medicine has been at the frontiers of medicine and science, laying the foundation of conventional medical texts’, it asserts. It goes on to claim that ‘around 40 per cent of approved pharmaceutical products in use today derive from natural substances’. After telling us the story of an Olympic long-jumper who swears by yoga and meditative walks (which are not exactly medicines, but forms of relaxation), it then poses the question: ‘which of these have you used: “acupuncture, Ayurveda, herbal medicine, homeopathy, naturopathy, osteopathy, traditional Chinese medicine, unani medicine?”’

Let’s leave aside the untruth that homeopathy and naturopathy are somehow ‘traditional’ – the former was invented by a German physician in 1797 and the latter is a 19th-century idea. That many medicines have their origins in extracts from plants is of course true, but that rather misses the point. Scientific medicine seeks to isolate active ingredients, and understand how they work before synthesising them and using them in a controlled manner. That is a world away from swigging some concoction which your grandmother has sworn by ever since her own grandmother gave it to her for a fever. That some folk medicines might sometimes appear to work – in spite of apparently having no active ingredients – is itself explained by scientific inquiry: there is a proven ‘placebo effect’ that causes people to report an improvement in their symptoms as a result of taking something that they think will make them better.

The WHO should be having nothing to do with promoting any medicine which has not been proven without rigorous trials. So why is it suddenly pushing all kinds of dubious cures? It is hard not to see the latest campaign as part of the fashionable campaign to ‘decolonise’ medicine – which means refusing to see western science as superior to belief systems that have derived from elsewhere in the world. The WHO published a podcast on this subject in May, in which a Canadian medical historian, for example, denounced the concept of ‘tropical’ medicine as a construct by colonial powers to try to promote the false idea that the Third World presented a danger to Europe. I wonder whether she might change her mind if she contracted yellow fever, dengue fever, ebola, trichuriasis, or many of the other diseases which are prevalent in the tropics and still present a threat to people who travel there from Europe.

It might not suit the prejudices of Marxist academics to admit it, but the WHO has achieved a massive amount by unashamedly exporting rigorous scientific inquiry to parts of the world which it had yet to reach. It wasn’t folk medicine that eradicated smallpox; it was western medicine, and the WHO should not be apologising for that. Promoting quackery seems an odd – and potentially disastrous – direction for the organisation to take.

Fish and chips: the fast food that made me

The last meal my parents had before I graced the world with my presence was fish and chips, so I like to think it forms part of my origin story. Growing up on the coast, fish and chips featured in all its forms: bags of chips clutched on windy beach walks; takeaway fish suppers brought home by Dad, steam escaping from cardboard boxes; and the ultimate luxury, a sit-in experience at Colmans, the South Shields king of fish and chip restaurants, accompanied by a slice of bread and butter and a cup of tea. I was built on fish and chips; salt and vinegar course through my blood.

Battered fried fish was brought over to London by Jewish immigrants coming from Spain and Portugal, via the Netherlands, as long ago as the 16th century. It followed the pescado frito method of frying fish in oil, which, as well as being delicious hot, was far more palatable cold than if it had been fried in butter. This meant that it could be cooked for supper at the start of Shabbat, but still be eaten cold the following afternoon, when cooking was prohibited.

It wasn’t until the Victorian explosion of street food, though, that fried fish became the British staple that it is today. During the first world war, the government protected supplies of fish and chips, while during the second, it was one of the few foods not subject to rationing.

Fried fish is fast food and when it first became popular it was cheap too. It’s hot, nutritious, filling and an economical way to feed a family. But that’s a very functional way to look at its long-standing appeal. Deep-frying in batter is actually the perfect way to cook something as delicate as fish: the batter protects the fish, bubbling up to form an edible shock absorber that allows you to cook it hot and fast without destroying it. But even that doesn’t do it justice: it’s the crunch of batter, firm fillets flaking under a fork, golden scraps lurking underneath, and fat chips, crisp on the outside but soft within, with one or two giving themselves up to the sog of the vinegar.

I shied away from homemade fish and chips for a long time, convinced it was one of those dishes that would be vastly inferior made in my kitchen. But a lacklustre range of options where I now live has forced me to have a go – and the result was both far easier and far more delicious than I anticipated.

Fish batter comes together in seconds and cooks in minutes. But good fish and chips live and die by that batter. It needs to cling to the fish while bubbling up into something that is robust but light. The combination of fizz and self-raising flour creates bubbles in the batter, which means that when it hits the hot oil, it inflates like a lifejacket. Sparkling water gives a lighter batter, in colour, taste and texture more like a tempura, but using lager or beer brings something a bit sturdier, with a bit more flavour, and gives you that beautiful amber colour when the batter cooks. It’s perfect for traditional fish and chips.

It’s slightly annoying that Heston Blumenthal developed the triple-cooked chip method and publicised it so well. Because we now know that triple-cooked chips really are the best chips. Thankfully, it’s not quite as arduous as it sounds: once you’ve peeled and chipped the potatoes, they are boiled until tender and left to cool. They’re then fried but at a low temperature (130°C), which will cook all the water out of the potato, so that when you cook them again later at 180°C, they become crisp and golden on the outside, while staying fluffy on the inside. This method also means you can do a lot of the chip prep in advance, and just leave the chips in the fridge until you’re ready for the final fry.

Serve in whatever way makes you most happy: for me, that means more salt and vinegar than I would declare to my GP. For my husband, it means accompanied by fat pickled onions and a wave of curry sauce. There’s no accounting for taste.

Serves 2
Takes 20 mins
Cooks 30 mins

• 750g floury potatoes (e.g. Maris Piper or Russet)
• 2 skinless, boneless haddock fillets
• 200g self-raising flour
• 300ml beer, cold – Pinch of fine salt
• 1 litre vegetable oil

1. Peel and cut potatoes into chips, roughly 1.5cm thick. Sit them in cold water for 5 minutes before draining, then place under running water for another couple of minutes to rinse off as much starch as possible.
2. Bring a pan of salted water to the boil, add the chips, and simmer until the potato is tender, but not quite falling apart. Drain the potatoes gently, spread out in a single layer on kitchen paper, and leave until completely cool.
3. Heat oil in a deep fat fryer or a large, deep pan to 130°C; do not fill more than ⅔ full with oil. When at temperature, cook the cold, dry chips until they are just starting to colour. Lift the chips from the oil with a slotted spoon on to kitchen paper, and leave until completely cold.
4. Heat oil to 185°C and cook chips until golden brown, 8-10 minutes. Lift them out with a slotted spoon and salt immediately; you can keep them warm in the oven while you cook the fish. Keep the oil at this temperature while you make the fish batter.
5. Put the flour and a pinch of salt in a large bowl, and then whisk the beer – straight from the fridge – into the dry ingredients. The batter should be the texture of pouring cream.
6. Pat the fish dry on both sides with kitchen paper. Dip the fish into the batter, and let any excess batter drip back off into the bowl, then lower the battered fillets gently into the hot oil, away from you. Cook for 4-6 minutes, until the batter is crisp and golden.
7. Lift out of the oil, drain on kitchen paper, season generously with salt and vinegar, and serve immediately alongside the chips.

The insane craze for dog ice-cream

During the few hot days we had in June, I came across my first tub of dog ice-cream nestled among the Häagen-Dazs in my local supermarket. Scoop’s vanilla: ‘Tubs that get tails wagging.’ My first thought was that it was a joke, or perhaps for people who identify as dogs. So I looked it up as I stood in the queue, and it was as if a door opened onto our national psychosis. Purina ‘Frosty paws’, Wiggles and Wags ‘Freeze-Fetti’, Frozzys dog ice-cream, Pooch Creamery Vanilla, Wagg’s Sunny Daze blueberry, Higgins dog ice-cream, Dogsters ice-cream-style treats, Jude’s, Smoofl, Ben and Jerry’s… the market for dog ice-cream is limitless and it crosses the socio-economic spectrum.

For the ethical rich, there’s Cool Dog Vegan, retailing at an astonishing £120 for a five-litre tub. What’s a one-off £120 when you pay £4.20 every morning for an oat cortado? Mid-market there’s Billy and Margot’s selection of iced treats: blackberry and apple, coconut cream.

Aldi makes its own dog ice-cream, which it launched last summer with a fleet of ‘dog-livery’ ice-cream vans which loitered in parks around the country. The PR photos show happy, patient dogs forming an orderly queue beside them. Aldi’s bestseller is ‘pea and vanilla’. Aldi thinks the pea is the sort of earthy, grounding ingredient that makes this a sensible doggy choice.

What’s wrong with us? What are people thinking? It’s not the expense so much as the whole idea. Dogs shouldn’t even have ice-cream. ‘Dogs are lactose-intolerant, so we’ve made our dog-friendly ice-cream with reduced-lactose milk,’ boasts Scoop’s. If you have to give dogs ice-cream, I suppose it’s best it doesn’t give them diarrhoea. But why give it at all?

A company called Woof and Brew that models itself on the hipster brewery Brewdog have had a smash hit this summer with their ‘Pawsecco’ freeze pops, ‘Iced treats for those on four feet made with pet house white.’ The listed ingredients are elderflower, linden blossom and ginseng. ‘Is your dog a licker or a cruncher?’ I bet the Woof and Brew comms team were chuffed with that. £5.99. Sold out.

Who’s buying, and why? Who’s sharing the joke? Do you chuckle to yourself as you pour yourself a glass of fizz, say ‘Cheers’ as you chuck a Pawsecco to the pup. Is that it? Or is the product in fact the pun, dogs just waste disposal?

I’m proud of how unreasonably, eccentrically devoted we English are to our dogs. Several members of my own family much prefer dogs to children – and, growing up, I saw their point. I like that wherever you go in the world there’s some half-cracked English ex-pat running a shelter for local strays. Dogs are in our English bones. So how come we have forgotten what they enjoy?

Most dogs eat literally anything. ‘My puppy wolfed it down!’ says a review on the Frozzys website. Your puppy wolfs down horse droppings. A few weeks ago I brought back two tubs of Jude’s dog ice-cream for Hippo, a sweet-natured and beautiful dark brindle Staffie who visits the office from time to time. Hippo ate the contents of both tubs, followed by their cardboard containers and a tennis ball.

If dog ice-cream indicates a crack in our collective mind, the reviews confirm it. ‘My Frenchie loved Scoop’s! Perfect for keeping fur babies hydrated on a hot day.’

‘These fruity tubs are so appealing to our girls. Lovely ingredients, full of flavour (yes, I taste-tested!) And an unbelievable bargain at two for £6.’ ‘These treats let my fur babies know they’re special.’

I feel like an alien in my own country.

I’m afraid the craziness doesn’t end in the frozen foods section. On 1 April, the Bottled Baking Company, which sells dry cake ingredients in attractive bottles, advertised a ‘paw-licking’ carrot cake bottle bake to make with your dog. It was an April Fool’s joke. What does a dog care for the shared experience of baking? But to the company’s amazement the orders came in thick and fast. ‘Made this cake for my gorgeous girl for her second birthday. She loved it. Took it to her day care to share with her friends.’

There’s been quite a bit written about the excessive coddling of dogs, and the consensus is that they have become like children for a generation that claims to be too broke and too climate-conscious to reproduce. I almost buy it. The most popular dog breeds are eerily neotenic, or childlike; pugs, Boston terriers and French bulldogs, with wide-apart bulging eyes, flat faces and smiling mouths. There’s a café in Hoxton called Cuppapug, where you can sit in a pink soft-play ball-pit in a pink room and play with pugs. Some of the pugs wear big pink pants. I took my son for fun, but I don’t think I’ve experience such genuine existential sadness since my early twenties. This isn’t treating dogs with the indulgent care we lavish on kids, it’s using them as props. If you really wanted to indulge your actual dog and give it a cooling treat on a hot day, you’d mash up a cold rat.

It’s National Dog Day on 26 August, did you know, and in advance of the big day the insane dog indulgence industry is cranking up. A restaurant called Los Mochis in Notting Hill is offering ‘a decadent three-course Doggy Menu to celebrate the 26th. The paw-sitively divine menu features Pumpkin Dog Biscuits, followed by Chicken Liver Tacos, before finishing with a Pupcake.’

‘To ensure your furry friend’s meal is as lavish as can be, Los Mochis has partnered with Dogviar, the luxury dog caviar.’ The Telegraph’s restaurant critic reviewed dogviar last summer. Just £50 for one small tin of caviar oil and caviar protein. It tastes like Scampi Fries, he said, and would be terrific paired with a single malt.

In defence of drunken freshers’ weeks

I don’t remember much of freshers’ week at Edinburgh. Friends have helped to fill in the blanks. I vaguely recall a police officer handing out vodka shots to show how easy it was to fail a breathalyser test. A famous DJ had his set in the union cut short because he played the song ‘Blurred Lines’. It had been banned by student politicians.

I have hazy memories, too, of my first interactions with posh English women. One assumed I must be gifted since I’d made it into university from a Scottish state school. Another asked if I was limping because I’d overdone it at the ‘introduction to reeling event’ (I have cerebral palsy). Posh English men were no better. At a party exclusively made up of Old Harrovians, I was laughed at when I got out my Android phone. This was an iPhone-only crowd.

During freshers’ week, I met communists and members of European royal families. It was fun but awkward. I’m not sure I could have done it sober. But things are changing. Several universities have renamed freshers’ week ‘welcome week’ to try to break away from the association with heavy drinking. At King’s College and UCL the freshers’ fair has become the ‘welcome’ fair. Exeter University officials have made similar changes, saying: ‘We’ve decided to rename freshers’ to ensure the language we use is relevant and inclusive to all students.’ Edinburgh has haughtily declared: ‘We do not use “freshers” terminology. All official content and events will be under the banner “welcome week”.’

Aberdeen University has gone even further – it has closed the student bar after it turned over just £2,000 in four months, despite a £200,000 renovation. This was hardly a shock, given that at the same time the union said: ‘We aim to be inclusive so we try not to organise events that promote drinking culture.’ Why would students drink in a place where what they’re doing is frowned upon?

Students on the whole want to drink. A survey carried out last year found that more than 80 per cent regard drinking and getting drunk as part of university culture. More than half considered alcohol crucial to a good night out. So why are universities pushing changes that students don’t want?

Student unions have put on sober events for years. At my freshers’ week, there were plenty of miserable options, from coffee meet-ups to hill climbs and guided tours of the local Ikea. In part, the hand-wringing from universities about exclusionary drinking culture is to do with money. Universities have started to rely heavily on income from international students (£1 in every £5 of university funding), many of whom are from cultures where it is not acceptable to binge drink in the way the British do. Edinburgh, for example, takes 5,000 students from China. When I was on the social committee for the mathematics department, we were explicitly told to hold fewer pub crawls to make Chinese students feel welcome.

The main problem, though, is universities infantilising their students. Welcome week events now often focus on anxiety. Students joining UCL this year can look forward to ‘therapy dogs’ and ‘sunrise’ walks with a ‘wellbeing officer’. At Dundee University, students can attend ‘de-stress’ workouts. Exeter has got rid of its freshers’ fair because of fears that some students find it ‘too overwhelming’. This obsession with wellbeing seems based on the assumption that freshers will arrive damaged by their traumatic teen years, and will be lucky not to finish their next four in a straitjacket. It’s not surprising employers increasingly report that graduates are not emotionally prepared for the workplace.

Freshers’ week will always be awkward. How could a week of events for 18-year-olds who have moved away from home for the first time not be? But it doesn’t mean it will leave the freshers starting their courses with post-traumatic stress. And if drinking makes it even the slightest bit easier (or, God forbid, fun) so be it. It certainly didn’t do me, or anyone who jogged my memory for this piece, any harm.

A Margherita in Tolkien’s Middle-earth: Pizza in the Courtyard at Sarehole Mill reviewed

Sarehole Mill is four miles south of the centre of Birmingham. If this were a fairy tale, and it should be, it would follow that Birmingham swallowed Sarehole a century ago, like a dragon and its prey. I like Birmingham: I like its optimism, its violence and its multiplex, which can match any American Midwest mall in competitive dystopia and idiocy. Birmingham has energy, and that swallowed Sarehole, but unfortunately for Birmingham, there was a writer who cared: John Ronald Reuel Tolkien.Sarehole was his childhood palace, and now, more reluctantly I would imagine, his memorial pizzeria. 

A whimsical restaurant review grappling Tolkien would normally visit the Eastgate Hotel on Merton Street, Oxford, a gloomy inn next to the college where he taught philology while writing The Lord of the Rings. There is something insatiably unhappy about the Eastgate, as if the Boer War were ongoing. Even so, Tolkien liked it, and he ate there when he lived next door at no. 21. But this column is more ambitious, and so it travels to Sarehole: to (J.R.R. Tolkien’s) Pizza in the Courtyard. There are no novelty names here, no Smaug Laketown Hot. This is not the Brontë Balti in Haworth. Tolkien was an Englishman.

Sarehole Mill is 18th-century and red-brick, with a tower and a bright green pond. It sits on the foundations of an older building, which milled from 1542, the year that Henry VIII chopped his young wife Catherine Howard’s head off, if you cannot mark the date. It is now a museum.

The entrance is less Middle-earth than Narnia, though I have always found Narnia more flimsy and less believable than Hobbiton: talking lions are stupid. Even so, one moment you are on a tepid suburban bus route, and suddenly you are in the crucible fire of Tolkien’s imagination, which feels unimaginably peaceful. He lived in a nearby villa between the ages of four and eight with his mother and brother – his father was already dead – and he learned botany and drawing, and he trespassed here.

The pizzeria is a tiny room between the courtyard and the mill pond. It is comfortingly ordinary, as he wished to be, and was, until diabetes took his mother, and the Great War took his friends. You might hope for a replica of the Inn at Bree – well, I did – but this is calmer and more original than a themed restaurant, though it sometimes hosts groups of people dressed as hobbits. I hope they come on the bus. There is a cuttings book that tells that Tolkien contributed to the renovation of the mill: he tended his own memory. He never forgot Sarehole and the tree – a willow – whose death made him cry. If Hobbiton exists – and you must read John Garth’s definitive guide to Tolkien and place if you seek, if you are curious – it is here.

Pizza, then: there are all the common types. I eat a Margherita and my husband has what I persist in calling a Smaug Laketown Hot, though it clearly isn’t, being a pepperoni. Both are much better than they need to be.

This restaurant fulfils two of my favourite criteria: singularity and weirdness. This is my homage. There is something both hopeful and des-pairing about a man who wrote in the nursery of the British state and thought: I will people it with elves and talking trees, and with villains who are nothing like dons, and its hero will be tiny and keen on waistcoats. (Tolkien was 5ft 8½in, tall enough.) This is his memorial pizzeria, and I am glad I came here. I like it, though I fear that he would not.

Real football fans watch non-League football

Oxford City vs Rochdale at Court Place Farm doesn’t have quite the same ring as Chelsea vs Liverpool at Stamford Bridge, but last Saturday’s match was important all the same.

‘The Hoops’, Oxford’s oldest football club, founded in 1882 when Gladstone was prime minister and Old Etonians won the FA Cup, were playing their first ever home game in the fifth tier of English football. Rochdale, whose 102-year membership of the Football League ended in May, were playing their first away game in the Vanarama National League. Seven hundred and eighty-one of us, including a spirited contingent from Lancashire, turned up to see the clash of the two sides and ‘The Dale’ claim a 1-0 victory with a 71st-minute goal. It was a far cry from the heavyweight battle at the Bridge at the weekend, but it was wonderful.

Non-League football has a buzz all of its own which for me, for the most part, beats the big-time Premier League games.

While it’s too much of a stretch to say ‘This is football as it used to be’, non-League matches still have the old ‘people’s game’ feel to them. Something the high-cost Premiership encounters between teams of millionaires lost years ago.

At Oxford City – where it’s £18 at the turnstiles with £13 concessions and £6 for students – you can move easily round the ground. You can get close to the players and the action. In fact you can stand right behind the goal if you want to. Conversations between fellow supporters start up spontaneously. On Saturday I bumped into an old friend who told me he had been to more than 130 grounds and was looking forward to a first-time trip to the Shay, home of FC Halifax Town, next week. I spent much of the second half chatting to a lifelong Hoops fan who had moved to Swansea but was there to watch his nephew, who was one of City’s subs. 

At this level, you actually feel part of the match, which never happens if you’re in an executive box at the Emirates, or even just sitting down at the Etihad. Players shout ‘Man On’ and ‘Time!’ and of course a few choice expletives.

I first went to Oxford City games in the late 1970s with my father. Then, they played close to the city centre at the wonderfully atmospheric White House Ground, their home since 1900. The crowd were always an eclectic mix of town and gown; you could get in for 50p if you were a student. In 1971 they set a record with Alvechurch which will never be broken: their FA Cup tie took six matches and 11 hours to settle. Back then there were no penalty shoot-outs to decide things and you simply kept on playing replays until one side prevailed.

At the start of the 1980s, City made news again when England’s World Cup-winning captain Bobby Moore was appointed manager. He was offered a £14,000 salary, a £5,000 signing-on fee and a Daimler. He didn’t bring success on the pitch – in fact City were relegated – but everyone remembers what a nice man he was.

Given the club’s history, it was especially traumatic when the landlords, Brasenose College, had the brass neck to boot City from the White House in 1988 to make way for housing. The club was homeless and had to rebuild almost from scratch, starting at park football level. After 30 years of slowly climbing the steps of the non-league pyramid, the Hoops (they play in the QPR colours) celebrated promotion to the National League in May. From near extinction to playing in just one division away from the EFL has to be one of football’s most remarkable comebacks. Rochdale, who were in League One only two years ago, came from the opposite direction. On Saturday the difference just about showed.

Packed with former EFL ‘Big Beasts’ such as Chesterfield (FA Cup semi-finalists in 1997), Hartlepool, York, Southend and even one side, Oldham Athletic, who were founder members of the Premier League in 1992, the National League has arguably never been stronger and Oxford City – attracting 700 or so paying spectators as opposed to Oldham’s 7,000 – will probably need another miracle to stay put.

Non-League used to mean amateur and then semi-professional, but today all but four of the 24 teams in ‘Step 1’ as it’s called (City, Dorking Wanderers, Maidenhead and Wealdstone ) are full-time professional. Foreign money too has been attracted. Last season’s champions, Wrexham, were famously bought in 2020 by the Hollywood stars Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney and have not looked back since.

Given the rocketing cost of season tickets higher up the League table, and the quality fare on offer down below, it’s no surprise that increasing numbers of fans are switching to non-League. Attendances in the National League were 18 per cent up last season, with more than three million going to matches. There’s even a dedicated national newspaper, The Non-League Paper, that has been published each Sunday since 1999.

Back in the 1970s, dropping out of the Football League was something of a death sentence. There was no automatic relegation and promotion, and the fate of the teams who finished near the bottom was decided by the other teams in a controversial voting process called ‘re-election’. But now, with the champions of the National League going up automatically, and the play-off places going down to seventh, a large number of teams and their supporters can realistically dream of making it into the EFL. Perhaps ‘The Dale’ will return at the first time of asking. After the match on Saturday, one of their fans was standing by his team’s supporters’ coach. A passing Oxford fan congratulated him on Rochdale’s victory and wished him all the best. ‘I hope you have a good season too,’ was the friendly reply. That’s another thing about non-League. It attracts genuine football people, who just love the sport whatever it brings.

Humza Yousaf is becoming a master at alienating Scottish voters

At last, a target Scotland’s First Minister Humza Yousaf should have no trouble meeting. Waiting lists? The attainment gap? Dualling the A9? Of course not.

Humza Yousaf says his forthcoming government reset can be expected to ‘p**s people off’. When it comes to annoying people the First Minister is a veritable virtuoso. He has certainly irritated many in the SNP with his insistence on perpetuating the controversial alliance with the Scottish Green party.  

Yousaf is quite serious though. Yesterday he told the Holyrood Sources podcast that, as a ‘conviction’ politician, it is his righteous duty to curry unfavour with many voters, first of all by increasing their taxes in the autumn budget. A new intermediate tax band on higher earners is forecast. Scotland is already paying the highest taxes of any region in the UK on most measures. 

The First Minister says that ‘most politicians end up being people pleasers’. But as a leader ‘you can’t sit on the fence, you can’t be mealy-mouthed, you have to pick a side…and frankly that’s going to p**s off some people’. Yousaf clearly knows what side he’s on; unfortunately, Scottish voters are increasingly on the other side, according to recent polls.  

The next target of the alienation strategy is to be motorists. Yousaf condemned both Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer for opposing policies like the Ultra Low Emission Zone in Greater London. Expect more of the same in Scotland. 

Glaswegians, those who can’t afford new cars, are already being pissed off at a rate of 150 drivers a day thanks to Glasgow’s LEZ, infringement of which carries a £60 fine. But Mr Yousaf has made clear that the war on the car is only beginning. We can expect tougher emission controls nationwide, universal 20mph limits, low traffic neighbourhoods and workplace parking levies. Mind you, these measures sometimes piss off the wrong people. 

Proposals to charge workers £500 a year to use office parking places in Edinburgh last year caused outrage amongst many public sector employees like teachers and NHS workers. Scottish Labour’s transport spokesman, Neil Bibby, called the ‘SNP commuter tax’ a ‘shameless assault on worker’s pay packets’. 

This is the problem with the war on the motorist. There are around 3 million vehicles on Scotland’s roads and that’s a lot of votes to lose. Electric car users are some of the most pee’d off since they can’t find anywhere to recharge their expensive Teslas. Poorer motorists can’t afford electric vehicles and flat dwellers can’t use them either. But Humza is adamant that they’ll have to get used to life after internal combustion. Sales of petrol and diesel cars are supposed to be banned in less than seven years time. 

Gas boilers are due to be phased out even earlier. This will also potentially annoy around 2 million householders who are supposed to buy expensive heat pumps – which even the suppliers say won’t work in Scotland.   

Humza Yousaf is militantly unapologetic about these green policies. He insists they are central to his vision. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen a summer,’ he told the podcasters, ‘where every single week you’ve seen, with such visibility, the impact of the climate emergency.’ Drenched Glaswegians suffering a typical Scottish summer could be forgiven for thinking he’s a bit short-sighted. But of course they know what he means: the planet is burning. Something must be done.   

Some prominent authors are saving the world by threatening to boycott the Edinburgh Book Festival sponsored, as it is, by Baillie Gifford. The investment firm has 2 per cent of its funds invested in fossil fuel-related activities, but also has invested in the renewable sector. Right on, says Humza. Everyone should do their bit for the climate emergency.  

Mind you, the Scottish government has just applauded much-increased oil revenues from the North Sea in the latest Government Expenditure and Revenue Scotland (GERS) figures. ‘Scotland’s finance are improving at a faster rate than the UK’s’, cried the wellbeing economy secretary, Neil Gray, noting that oil revenues have increased by £7 billion. This reflects the value of our ‘vibrant energy sector’ he said.   

Festival Luvvies must surely now boycott all cultural events sponsored by the Scottish government after this shameless celebration of Scotland’s planet-destroying fossil fuels. The Edinburgh Festival overall gets more than £11 million from the state. Authors, actors and producers should have nothing more to do with it. Mind you, one suspects few Scots would be pissed off at having to live without their ignorant, self-regarding moralism.  

Even high oil revenues can’t fix Scotland’s deficit

It’s Scotland’s annual Gers shenanigans this week. If you don’t already know, Gers stands for ‘Government Expenditure and Revenue Scotland’. It is an official Scottish government statistics report that provides an estimate of the total amount of government revenue raised in Scotland versus the total amount of public spending benefitting the country. The gap between the two highlights the notional fiscal deficit.

As the best available guide to the fundamentals a newly independent Scotland would start off with, the annual Gers updates create something of a feeding frenzy on the constitutional debate. On the build up to the 2014 referendum, the Nationalists loved the Gers numbers because they showed how Scotland’s deficit was smaller than the UK’s as a whole thanks to healthy North Sea oil and gas tax receipts. Nicola Sturgeon and Alex Salmond based their economic case for secession on the back of assuming multiple billions of pounds in oil and gas tax revenues propping up a Scottish exchequer well into the future.

The outcome was very different. Oil and gas revenues fell off a cliff after 2014, to the point where, by 2016, the year Salmond planned to cut formal ties with the rest of the UK, they had dived into negative territory for the first time. The SNP then changed its tune, both on Gers and the importance of oil and gas. Any future North Sea revenues would be a ‘windfall fiscal bonus’ and not relied upon for fiscal management. Meanwhile the party tried its best to discredit and downplay the Gers numbers, which by now regularly showed Scotland running very large fiscal deficits that would obviously be unsustainable for a newly independent state.

The latest numbers show the impact of a likely temporary boost in oil and gas tax receipts on the back of higher fossil fuel prices and the implementation of the windfall tax on oil companies, alongside a continued large notional deficit reflective of the higher spending Scotland benefits from by being in the UK.

Here is a rundown of the headline numbers:

• Scotland’s revenue in 2022-23 grew by £15 billion to £87.5 billion. ‘This reflects strong growth in North Sea receipts due to high energy prices and the introduction of the Energy Profits Levy, as well as the continuing reversal of the falls in revenue caused by the pandemic,’ states the report.

• Public spending for Scotland increased from £97.4 billion in 2021-22 to £106.6 billion in 2022-23.

• Scotland’s public spending deficit was therefore £19.1 billion last year, down from £24.9 billion the previous year, representing a 9 per cent of GDP deficit for 2022-23, down from 12.8 per cent in 2021-22. For the UK as a whole, the deficit sits at 5.2 per cent of GDP.

• Expenditure per person in Scotland sits at £19,459 compared with £17,243 for the UK, meaning a difference of well over £2,000 extra spending per person.

What do the new numbers mean for the constitutional debate? Scotland still has a large fiscal deficit even with temporarily boosted oil and gas tax income. The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) has projected forward UK and Scottish fiscal balances to 2028 and found that the latter’s notional deficit will fall modestly in coming years, with the UK deficit falling much more substantially.

As the IFS’s David Phillips points out, under the current constitutional arrangements, the deficit is subsumed within wider UK borrowing, and so doesn’t matter much to the reality of the here and now. ‘That would change with independence,’ says Phillips. ‘A deficit on the scale projected would not be sustainable in the long-term.’ Addressing it would require big tax rises, big spending cuts, or a combination of both.

For the Nationalists, the harsh reality of Scotland’s fiscal challenge remains. They aim to stop Scotland’s deficit being subsumed within the UK to instead crystalise it as a Scotland-only liability. If they persist in pushing for secession then they should be ready to detail the tax rises and spending cuts they will implement after separation. The pretence that such measures would not be needed is now patently ludicrous, as reinforced by the latest figures.

We should see a plan that lays out, in realistic if necessarily brutal terms, where the cuts will fall and which parts of society will see their incomes hit as the new state grasps for fiscal credibility. That would at least signal that the Scottish government has accepted what the Gers numbers say.

Oliver Anthony and the snobbery of American conservatives

If there is a right-wing cultural aesthetic in America, it is low-brow resentment. The old liberal-conservative tradition prized truth, beauty and the ‘the best which has been thought and said’. This has been shunted aside by a hair-trigger populism drawn to any cultural expression that scandalises progressive tastes. If people with graduate degrees hate it, today’s conservatives will love it. 

Right-wing populists have a new cultural pin-up in Oliver Anthony, an ex-factory worker and singer-songwriter from Virginia. His track ‘Rich Men North of Richmond’ has garnered 15 million views on YouTube in the space of a week and 1.5 million plays on Spotify in just five days. For each of those five days, it has also held the number one spot on iTunes. 

The song is an ode to blue-collar Americans left to struggle by corrupt, self-serving politicians in Washington DC, which lies 100 miles north-east of Richmond. The anti-DC sentiment has made it an instant red-state anthem, helped along by endorsements from anti-liberal influencers like Matt Walsh and Republican country singer John Rich. Anthony has also attracted praise from Marjorie Taylor Greene, which no doubt brought in the crucial Rothschild space-laser awareness demographic. 

Like Jason Aldean’s recent hit ‘Try That in a Small Town’, ‘North of Richmond’ has very online progressives inhaling through brown paper bags. Progressive media claimed ‘Small Town’ ‘openly calls for violence against Black people’ and sought to link Aldean to a 1927 lynching at the courthouse used as the backdrop for the music video. With Anthony’s record, the charges have ranged from hidden pro-Confederate messages to ‘fatphobia’, and those are among the more coherent critiques. Much of the coverage conveys a visceral but vague distaste for the song, as though journalists know they’re supposed to feel disdain but can’t quite articulate why. 

The ‘why’ is probably that Anthony is such an obvious progressive villain: a Southern hick strumming tunes about the left-behind boonies on a resonator guitar; a red-beard redneck who opened a live performance on Sunday by quoting Psalm 37 (‘the Lord laughs at the wicked for He knows their day is coming’); an angry white man lashing out at social injustices other than racism and transphobia. Anthony cannot conceive of the sheer number of journalists who will have spent the past 72 hours searching every social media profile he’s ever had for the terms ‘Trump’, ‘stolen election’ and racial slurs.

Country music seems set to become the latest symptom of insurrectionist white supremacy for the political hypochondriacs of the American left. But the ick-driven overreaction to ‘North of Richmond’ is especially silly because the song is so very terrible. Here’s a sample:

I wish politicians would look out for miners

And not just minors on an island somewhere.

Lord, we got folks in the street, ain’t got nothin’ to eat

And the obese milkin’ welfare.

Well, God, if you’re 5-foot-3 and you’re 300 pounds

Taxes ought not to pay for your bags of fudge rounds.

Young men are puttin’ themselves six feet in the ground

’Cause all this damn country does is keep on kickin’ them down.

That is dreck. Doggerel. Objectively bad writing. It’s not snobbery to say so. The real snobbery comes from conservative urbanites and suburbanites who condescendingly assume that such lyrics are the best that could be expected from a poor country boy from Virginia. There is a rich tradition of Appalachian country, roots and bluegrass music but ‘North of Richmond’ has no place in it. To pretend otherwise insults that tradition and patronises Anthony. 

‘North of Richmond’ is a squall of hoary nostalgia and pedestrian populism. Anthony regrets ‘livin’ in the new world/ with an old soul’, but old-soulism can so easily become young-fogeyism. Anthony evokes the dispossession of young American men, but he sees the answer not in political or economic change but in a mawkish yearning for a mythic past.

False-memory nostalgia is also at work in Anthony’s ‘Virginia’, which veers between love letter to the Commonwealth and hate letter to those he believes fail to give her her due. ‘Nobody singing songs ‘bout Virginia, but sweet Virginia’s always a-singin’ to me,’ he laments. It’s true: nobody sings songs about Virginia. Unless you count Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, and Joan Baez. Or the Foo Fighters, the Dave Matthews Band, and Tori Amos. Also: Frank Sinatra, Johnny Cash and Jerry Lee Lewis. Anthony’s sepia-tinted glasses need a stronger prescription. 

What is so frustrating about the banality of these songs is that it stands in contrast to others that can be found on YouTube, many seemingly filmed on a cameraphone in the woods of central Virginia, and which are more compelling and better showcase Anthony’s talent. ‘I’ve Got to Get Sober’ is a moody confessional about addiction and its cyclical grip while ‘Rich Man’s Gold’, with its refrain that ‘you weren’t born to just pay bills and die’, is a haunting Southern pastoral. These reflections are delivered in a desperate, devastating rasp, a country voice that keens like a DeWalt sidewinder tearing through mockernut hickory. It is a flinty-elegiac voice of pain and resentment, loss and self-pity. It’s a voice that owes itself a lot better than ‘North of Richmond’. 

While Anthony idealises an earlier Virginia, he is embittered about America (‘this damn country’) and the ‘damn shame’ of ‘what the world’s gotten to/ for people like me and people like you’. In the past two decades or so, the American left and right have switched positions, with the left more likely to speak of the country with sunny, Reaganesque optimism and the right to grieve for America’s corrupted soul. That puts Anthony’s lyrics at odds with earlier iterations of the hayseed laureate. 

In ‘The Fightin’ Side of Me’ (1970), Merle Haggard mithered about ‘squirrely’ hippies who ‘love our milk an’ honey’ but ‘preach about some other way of livin’’. Yet even as he warned, ‘When they’re runnin’ down my country, hoss/ they’re walkin’ on the fightin’ side of me,’ he added a proviso: ‘I don’t mind ‘em switchin’ sides and standin’ up for things they believe in.’ 

Haggard was a political enigma, a boxcar-raised petty criminal who inadvertently became the voice of Nixon’s America, a peacenik-bashing dope-denouncer who stuck up for the Dixie Chicks and defended Willie Nelson’s right to get stoned. His impulses were square but his instincts proletarian. Charlie Daniels went in the opposite direction, from playing Jimmy Carter’s inauguration to jingoistic reactionary, but he remained an American optimist. His 1980 single ‘In America’ reminded a divided country – and warned its foreign foes – that ‘we’ll all stick together/ and you can take that to the bank/ that’s the cowboys and the hippies/ and the rebels and the yanks.’ 

‘North of Richmond’, by contrast, is sour and gloomy, a dirge of the American experience. Anthony seems to have walked out of the pages of JD Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy and is unable to shake the fatalism. The most obvious rejoinder to that fatalism is his abrupt celebrity and the fortune it is likely to bring him, a very American story of the little guy who makes it. But conservatives have grown jaundiced about that story and the country it romanticises. They want to wallow in American decline and dysfunction and they especially want to seethe: at the Democrats, the woke, the universities, the corporations, the media. Nothing about ‘North of Richmond’ appeals to them as much as Rolling Stone’s breezy dismissal of the song. It is not necessary to discern the quality of a piece of music when liking it becomes a political act. 

Conservatives have become imprisoned in the cultural confines of the progressive imagination. Metropolitan journalists dislike a trite country record? It’s a heartlands masterpiece. Liberal critics hyperventilate over a surprise box-office hit? It’s the right-wing Citizen Kane. The New York Times declaims an illiberal influencer? He is the authentic voice of the Republican party. Roger Scruton contended that ‘once we admit the judgement of beauty into our worldview, we admit along with it a distinction between good and bad taste’: his attempt to square discernment and the aesthetic hierarchy with ‘a democratic culture’. Right-populism has no interest in this tension, it simply allies itself to bad taste because it is low-status and thus in rebellion against the good taste of those whose views are high-status. Conservatives have abandoned throne and altar to take their place among the mob. 

Wokeism has pushed the American right into an unthinking anti-wokeism, spurning truth, restraint and virtue for identity, grievance and score-settling. A conservatism that substitutes peevish anti-intellectualism for taste, wisdom and judgement is no conservatism at all.

Can this dating gimmick help me find love?

When it comes to dating, I’ve tried every kind of matchmaking method you could imagine: dating apps, speed-dating, slow-dating and even no-date dating. Consequently, I’ve suffered from date-app fatigue and repetitive disappointment. So I’m the perfect person for a new dating trend: the Pear ring.

For a one-off payment of £19.99 you get three Pear rings – turquoise–coloured ring bands of different sizes – which, when worn in public, signal to other single people that you are open to being approached. The Pear rings aim to end our dependence on dating apps and return the hunt for romance back to real life.

Remember real life? That golden era before swiping, griping and getting ghosted? When people had face-to-face conversations? Ah yes, I remember them well. Across some crowded room eyes would meet and hearts would beat and you’d shoot your best line to the beautiful stranger – and get told to ‘piss off’ as they’re already spoken for.

In theory the Pear ring sounds like a good idea. But the singles I spoke to who are fed up with dating apps are doubtful. Says one: ‘Showing off your single status like that is a bit naff – like wearing a Baby on Board badge.’ My friend Sylvia puts it this way: ‘Why pay good money for a crappy ring that tells people you belong to a club of saddos that nobody wants to belong to? Why not just write LOSER on your forehead before a night out on the town?’

The cynic in me thinks she’s right; the romantic in me hopes she’s wrong. After all, people wear rings to signal that they’re in a relationship – either engaged or married – so why not a ring that lets people know you’re single?

I decided to give it a go. Unable to purchase a Pear ring in time – they have a three-week wait for deliveries – I did a DIY Blue Peter thing and made my own imitation ring with a small piece of painted cardboard. I knew this could end in humiliating rejection or the start of a magical romance, but so what? I was ready to give it my best shot. I would proudly display my fake Pear ring whenever I went out in public.

 But there was only one problem: despite the maker’s claim that the ring is being worn by ‘millions’ of people, I couldn’t find one. I hunted for signs of the Pear ring in my local supermarket, on public transport, my local pub, my local nail bar, my yoga class and on my street.

 The nearest I came to spotting a Pear ring was in the changing room of my local gym. There’s a gay guy there, with whom I’m on a nodding acquaintance. He is always walking around naked. This time I noticed he was wearing a ring – but not on his hand. I knew that the Pear company produced special rings for the LGBTQ community – was this one? ‘By any chance is that a Pear ring – or are you just happy to see me?’ I asked. Judging by his scowl, he didn’t know what I was talking about.

I can see the ring’s appeal – if not its presence. It taps into a widespread nostalgia for the days of pre-dating apps when romantic connections were found in real life. And now real life is being repackaged and marketed like wholewheat bread and organic foods – something authentic and good for you. Real life is full of real people having real encounters. Sounds good?

The fact is, though, the same creeps, pervs and bores you meet via dating apps are the same creeps, pervs and bores you meet in real life. In some ways, wearing a ring could be worse for women because it means anyone can approach them.

According to the Pear website, you pay your fee so that you can join ‘the world’s biggest social experiment’ – that is, this ring-wearing movement to connect the ‘world without filters and apps’. There’s a kind of naive romantic Utopianism at work here – singles of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your dating apps!

But where exactly can ring-buyers connect? Purchasers of the Pear ring are promised various social events. According to the website, they will receive an invitation to PearFest – ‘the world’s biggest singles festival’ – and ‘exclusive events in your city’ – but there are no details as to when and where these will ever take place.

I suspect it’s no coincidence that the makers of the Pear ring wish to remain anonymous. They even concede that they have no proof – anecdotal or otherwise – that anyone has found a partner thanks to the ring. And yet if the website is to be believed, Pear rings are selling like hot cakes. Oh well. It’s back to the apps.

Wine Club: Delicious, great-value wines from Domaine du Grand Mayne

This ridiculous cost of profiteering crisis is taking its toll. All of us – apart from the sleek, smug fat cats – are suffering and tightening our belts, but I’m damned if I’m going to be done out of my vino. And I’m damned if you are too. I mean, what else is there to take our minds off things during these dark days of doom and despondency?  I take my duties as your drinks editor seriously and feel it timely, therefore, to reintroduce you to the wines of Domaine du Grand Mayne, producer of some of the tastiest, best-value wines around.

I know you know this but just to remind you: the Côtes de Duras lies near Bordeaux, between Saint-Emilion and Bergerac, and grows the exact same grape varieties (plus a few more obscure ones) on identical soil in an identical climate. It is one of France’s oldest AOCs (created in 1937) but the region and its wines were celebrated long before that, with the ‘nectar’ of Duras praised by the great Francis I back in the 16th century.

Domaine du Grand Mayne was founded in 1985 and has done more than any other producer to make the wines of Côtes de Duras popular again and to promote the region as a centre of wine tourism. The estate has two glorious, impeccably equipped gîtes to let – La Maison, which sleeps 12, and La Petite Maison, which sleeps two – so if you fancy booking a wine-soaked French holiday go to www.domainegrandmayne.com and say I sent you.

We’ve done several hugely successful offers with DdGM and held a memorable Spectator Winemaker’s Lunch in the boardroom with the then winemaker Mathieu Crosnier a couple of years ago. MC has since moved on to Château Rieussec in Sauternes, and his role as chief winemaker has been filled by the multitalented Coline Sicard.

The 2021 Grand Mayne Sauvignon Blanc (1) is a wonderfully bright, complex blend of Sauvignon Blanc grapes picked at different times from different soils with different aspects. The tiniest addition of Sémillon adds texture and weight. It’s fruity yet dry and vibrantly fresh. £9.48 down from £10.53.

The 2019 Grand Mayne Réserve Sauvignon/Sémillon (2) is fermented in barrel and aged in wood for seven months. It has weight and texture and, despite a bracing citrus sweetness, it finishes perfectly dry. As I have said here before, it’s a Sauvignon for those who don’t like Sauvignon. £14.53 down from £16.14.

The 2021 Grand Mayne Rosé (3) is a charming blend of Cab Sauv, Cab Franc and Merlot with 10 per cent Sauvignon ’n’ Sémillon. It’s ull of peach/strawberry fruit and citrus notes. £9.48 down from £10.53.

The 2019 Grand Mayne Merlot/Cabernet (4) is a juicy, spicy, fruit-laden blend of 80 per cent Merlot, 15 per cent Cab Sauv and 5 per cent Cab Franc aged for 18 months in stainless steel. It’s fresh, inviting and long-lasting in the mouth, with a slight savoury kick to the finish. It’s a great glass of wine at any price. £9.48 down from £10.53.

Finally, the 2019 Grand Mayne Réserve Merlot/Cabernet (5), the estate’s flagship wine blended from 50 per cent Cab Sauv, 40 per cent Merlot and 10 per cent Cab Franc. 2019 was a super vintage with perfect conditions, which allowed the fruit to be picked at just the right time. It’s full, rich and profound with great balance of fruit, spice, acid and tannin and I think you’ll enjoy it as much as you enjoy the price. £14.53 down from £16.14.

These great-value wines are all available in boxes of six. The discounted price and free delivery apply to orders of two boxes or more. The mixed case includes a bottle of each of the wines described above, along with one extra, the excellent 2018 Grand Mayne Merlot/Cabernet.

Go to www.domainegrandmayne.com and put SPECTATOR in the coupon box, clicking on the Union Jack icon in top right-hand corner as well.

The Greens are coming for the Tories

So far, Keir Starmer has been unmoved by complaints from left-wingers that his policies differ little from those of Boris Johnson’s at the last election. After all, if left-wing voters don’t like his low-key approach, where else would they go?

The problem in British politics – as David Cameron found out – is that disgruntled voters do find somewhere else to go. In Cameron’s case, it was to Nigel Farage; in Starmer’s case, it may be to the Greens. Once dismissed as idealistic hippies, the Greens now serve in seven governments across Europe, including Germany, Belgium and Scotland. Even under the UK’s majoritarian system, they’re doing well with 800 council seats – more than Farage ever managed in his prime.

As Starmer edges away from the green agenda, urging Sadiq Khan to stop the Ulez expansion, he is taking a calculated risk: that ‘getting rid of the green crap’ (as Tory strategist Lynton Crosby was said to have urged) will shore up more working–class votes in the north than it will risk urban votes in the south. But it’s not without risks. The Greens came third in the 2021 London mayoral race and have overtaken Labour in representation in Bristol. Environment aside, the party may become a protest-vote depository for young voters who despair at Starmer’s caution.

But the local elections in May confirmed that the Greens are increasingly a threat to the Tories too. Three-quarters of their gains came at the expense of the Conservatives, including notable advances in Lewes and East Hertfordshire. Mid-Suffolk returned a Green local council majority for the first time anywhere in the northern hemisphere. Green candidates won in Tory wards in Reigate, Spelthorne and West Oxfordshire in 2022, following success in Stroud and Tonbridge the year before that. All are represented at Westminster by Tory MPs.

Like the Lib Dems, the Green party can be different things to different voters. Angry and radical in the city, they pose as communitarian and conservationist in the country, focusing on local economies and small businesses for middle-class rural voters. Nimbyish opposition to house-building has been crucial to successes here. Polling by Opinium suggests that half of voters who want to ‘prevent excessive building’ see the Greens as their allies. Hence Green progress in both affluent and deprived areas in the local elections.

Critics jibe that when the Greens do end up running things, they actually have to take a stand – and that stand tends to be on the wackier end of the spectrum. In Scotland (where they back independence), their support for gender self-ID split the independence movement. Their flagship bottle deposit return scheme is widely lampooned as a failure. SNP MSPs are demanding Humza Yousaf review their coalition deal while Robin Harper, the Scottish Greens’ former leader, quit the party this month declaring it had ‘lost the plot’.

Prior to May, the Greens had run only one council in England and Wales – Brighton. Their years in control there were characterised by bin strikes, poor recycling rates and plans to quadruple parking fees. The Greens’ much-vaunted refusal to use a party ‘whipping’ system caused major difficulties, with the council leader on one occasion forced to condemn a strike while his deputy was outside on the picket line with the workers.

This relaxed approach to party discipline can cause problems. Elections for the Green party’s executive this month have already seen one candidate accuse the party of being ‘institutionally racist’. Allegations of transphobia are never far away. Siân Berry had to quit as the party’s co-leader in 2021 after she was unable to veto the appointment of a front-bench spokesman who argued that sex was biological and could not be changed. The Scottish Greens were even more appalled and cut ties with their sister party the following year.

There is a danger too that the Greens’ radicalism will alienate their newfound supporters across swaths of Middle -England. Their current policies include a pledge to spend nearly £100 billion a year on climate change – almost four times the £28 billion detailed in Labour’s now-abandoned ‘Green New Deal’. The monarchy would be abolished. On migration, the Greens would work towards the abolition of the ‘concept of legal nationality’ and a world ‘in which the concept of a “British national” is irrelevant and outdated’.

At the last general election the Green party advocated the sale of cocaine in pharmacies and the transformation of the Ministry of Defence into a ‘Ministry for Security and Peace’. Spending on tanks and troops would be reapportioned for peace promotion and ecological emergencies, and soldiers and sailors charged with ‘defending environments around the world from the effects of climate chaos’. The Welsh Greens meanwhile want more powers ‘up to and including independence’ in order to ‘rid us of the toxic British class system’. At a local level, Green councillors have pushed for meat and dairy to be banned at official events in places like Oxfordshire and Hythe.

For the young radical, the Greens are now the closest thing to Corbynism on the political menu. For the greenbelt guardian of the shires, they’re a way of voicing despair at the Tories without endorsing Starmer. The Green party is going for both camps. One of its two co-leaders, Carla Denyer, is standing in Bristol Central next year, a new seat drawn from Labour constituencies steeped in a left-wing tradition. Adrian Ramsay will meanwhile fight Waveney Valley in deep blue territory, straddling the Norfolk/Suffolk divide.

It remains to be seen if the Greens can successfully fight both constituencies, or will come apart under their two-identity strategy. Alternatively, will the core voters of both Tory and Labour be so exasperated that they’re past caring? General elections that are seen by voters as a Hobson’s choice with little to inspire tend to be the ones where a third party does well. But it is the Greens who are well-placed to emerge as a major beneficiary of this trend.